Dehumanization and Alienation in O'Neill's The Hairy Ape

Introduction: Yank's Sense of Belonging

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill focuses on Yank Smith, a leader among the stokers laboring within the heaving furnaces of an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. Throughout the play, Yank's sense of "belonging" within the new industrial order — the proud conviction he draws from his work — degenerates after he receives a message of social scorn and discovers how insignificant his manual labor is in the world's eyes. His work becomes meaningless, and he turns into a deplorable creature (the "hairy ape" of the title) who dies after being crushed, literally, by a gorilla's hands toward the end of the play (Oldman, 2006).

At the beginning of the first scene, Yank believes he has a solid unity with industrial civilization. The stage directions depict him as follows: "Yank is sitting at the forefront. He looks broader, more truculent, fiercer and more powerful. He also looks like he believes in himself more than others have in themselves. People respect Yank's superior strength — they respect him out of fear. He also presents himself as the most greatly developed person among them" (O'Neill, 1964). As the laborers wander around the ocean liner's stokehole in the hour following its departure from New York, Yank's leadership among the workers is highlighted. When he asks for a drink, "several bottles are eagerly offered" (188).

O'Neill illustrates Yank's deep involvement in his workplace by establishing that the furnace's realm functions as a permanent home: "(D)is is home" (191), Yank declares. The stokehole — more than the childhood home from which he fled due to physical abuse — signifies Yank's symbolic structure and establishes his entry point into culture. "Yank rules over his surrounding; he belongs" (193). He sees himself as an essential element of the ship's mechanization:

"I'm de ting in coal dat makes it boin; I'm steam and oil for de engines; I'm de ting in noise dat makes yuh hear it; I'm smoke and express trains and steamers and factory whistles… And I'm what makes iron into steel! Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I'm steel — I'm de muscles in steel, de punch behind it." (198)

Flaunting his prowess, Yank motivates the laborers into action, commanding them easily throughout the play. Witnessing this fervent soliloquy, the workers are "roused into a pitch of frenzied self-glorification" (198).

Although the play entertains a sense of possibility, O'Neill nonetheless chooses to reveal the revolutionary potential of the stokers through Yank. Yank's awareness of his status in society — his sudden, rapid internalization of hegemony — ensures his complete self-consciousness as well as his unavoidable downfall. Even though O'Neill maintains that "man's very 'lostness,' and his need for belonging, is the core of his humanity" (Falk, 1982), one could argue that his work embraces a "lostness" that carries a non-existential, cultural contingency.

Class Contrast and the World of Mildred Douglas

The tension arising from the play's restrained political content is pervasive. The second scene transports us to a conspicuously different world, removed entirely from the stokehole. Two days later, we are on the ship's promenade deck, where Mildred Douglas — daughter of the president of Nazareth Steel and chairman of the board of the shipping line — reclines in a deck chair alongside her aunt (Oldman, 2006). Having completed social service work in the East End of New York, Mildred is now traveling to London to visit the underprivileged, in order to build her "slumming international" (Martine, 1984). This sharply contrasts with Yank's belief that first-class passengers "don't amount to nothin. Dey're just baggage" (193).

Mildred confesses to her aunt that her many attempts to help the poor are undermined by her own limitations:

"I'm afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity. All that was burnt out in our stock before I was born… I'm a waste product in the Bessemer process — like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it… (I'm) damned in more ways than one." (203–4)

Unable to satisfy her aunt — who believes Mildred ought to openly embrace her intrinsic fraudulence rather than invest in futile acts of selflessness — O'Neill demonstrates that the "haves" are "incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious" (201). Mildred is "an expression not of life('s) energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending" (201–2). O'Neill's depiction here aligns with Marx's portrayal of laborers as "the living" and capitalists as "dead labour." In the transition from scene one to scene two, O'Neill emphasizes the titanic configuration of proletarian political culture in contrast to the diminished rank of bourgeois politics (Oldman, 2006).

Bibliography

Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International. New York: Routledge, Inc.

Falk, D. (1982). Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays. New York: Gordian Press.

Martine, J. (1984). Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.

Oldman, E. (2006). Yank's Consciousness of Alienation in O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. Laconics.

O'Neill, E. (1964). The Emperor Jones / Anna Christie / The Hairy Ape. New York: Random House, Inc., p. 186.

Ranald, M. (2008). Character Analysis. Study Companion. Retrieved from: http://eoneill.com/companion/ape/characters.htm