The Hairy Ape by Eugene O Neill Dr

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O` Neill Dr. Nripendra Singh

The Hairy Ape tells the story of the fall of Yank, a proud and powerful stoker working aboard a steamship. Though respected by his fellow workers, a chance encounter with a millionaire's daughter disdains him as an "ape" leads to a vain quest for vengeance and the breakdown of his personality, leading eventually to a confrontation with a real gorilla who kills him. O'Neill based the play in part on a real man, an Irish sailor named Driscoll, whom he roomed with in New York. O'Neill had been terribly impressed by the gruff older man's confident and manly view of life and was duly shocked to hear later that Driscoll had committed suicide by jumping from a ship. The playwright's finding in the drama of the demise of a manual laborer an essential story of humanity in modern society.

Scene 1 The play opens in the firemen's forecastle inside a transatlantic liner leaving New York City. We are introduced to Yank who stands out as the leader of the men, a man who believes he is not just fueling the ship in his job, but the world. Long has socialist views that Yank finds cowardly, while elder fireman Paddy dreams of days gone by when the sailing ships used the wind to power them across vast seas.

Scene 2 In this Mildred Douglas, the daughter of the steel tycoon who owns Nazareth Steel is sitting with her Aunt sunbathing on the deck of the same transatlantic liner. Mildred and her Aunt argue over Mildred's desire to do social work, which has led her to demand the Captain allow her to visit the stokehole on the ship accompanied by the Second Engineer. Mildred uses her family name to get what she wants from the Captain and demands that the Second Engineer let her wear her white dress into the dirty depths of the ship's bowels as she will throw it into the sea after her tour and wear one of the other 50 dresses she has on board just like it.

Scene 3 Mildred and the Second and Fourth Engineers have descended into the stokehole where Yank and the other men are stoking the furnace that feeds the ship's motion. All of the men take notice of and are stunned by the sight of Mildred, except for Yank meanwhile has been savagely cursing the engineers whom he has his back turned to; when he turns around, he is shocked to see Mildred, as is Mildred by him.

Scene 4 Yank is found in the firemen's forecastle going over and over what has just happened in the stokehole. The men believe he is in love, but Yank says he is in “hate” with Mildred for what she has just made him to feel. He attempts to charge toward Mildred to get revenge, but all of the men pile on him to stop him.

Scene 5 Three weeks later, Yank and Long are found on Fifth Avenue in New York after the liner has returned to the States. The men argue about how to go after and attack the upper class, and Yank is still set on getting Mildred back. Churchgoers begin to come out onto the street and Yank begins to forcefully try to speak to them. Long leaves, and Yank punches a gentleman in the face. He is then arrested.

Scene 6 The night of the following day, Yank is in prison on Blackwell Island. Yank compares the prison to a zoo. One of the other prisoners tells Yank about the International Workers of the World (IWW) after hearing how Yank got into jail, and tells Yank he should join if he wants to get his revenge. Yank becomes enraged once again about Mildred and her father the steel magnate and begins to bend the bars to his cell in an attempt to escape, but the guards hose him.

Scene 7 After being released from prison, Yank visits the IWW office to become a member. When he mentions his plans to blow up the steel factory, the group suspects him of being a government agent and throws him out onto the street. Yank now feels abandoned by all groups. A policeman shows up and tells Yank to move on or he'll crack him over the head.

Scene 8 The next night, Yank is at the Zoo. He sympathizes with a caged gorilla as he believes they are the same. Yank releases the gorilla from behind its bars and approaches the animal to shake its hand. The gorilla then attacks Yank, crushing his ribs. The gorilla tosses Yank into its cage where Yank dies behind bars.

Symbols used in the play Ape Caged in Zoo As the title of the play makes clear, the central symbol of the drama of Yank's life is that of the powerful and frightening ape who is nevertheless made into an impotent object of curiosity because of his imprisonment. As Yank tells the gorilla in the final scene, he feels caged by more than actual bars; it is his total alienation from society and his inability to realize his individualism in a meaningful way that makes him a prisoner, outsider, and eccentric curiosity in whichever situation he finds himself.

Mildred's White Dress The white dress that Mildred wears into the stokehole may represent to her a certain daring, but as her boast to the second engineer that she has plenty of the same makes apparent, it is more so a sign of her upper-class disdain for the workers and feeling of distance from them. The visual force of this whiteness combined with the terrified look in her eyes constitutes the shock that Yank feels seeing them, a kind of insult that hits home. Allegory Membership in the I. W. W. (allegory) After hearing about the radical labor activism of the I. W. W. while he is in prison, Yank goes to join them in Scene Seven. To his great chagrin, he learns that what he had hoped to be a “gang” he could belong to is in fact just as standardized and socialized a group as any other he has found before. Yank's conflict and ultimate (literal) ejection from the group allegorizes his being thrown out from any society, working-class association included.

Irony "Sure ting! Dat's me. What about it? " (Situational Irony) When Paddy asks Yank rhetorically whether he would like to be bound to the ship's furnace like a part of the machine, Yank (in a tone the stage directions specify as “contemptuous”) accepts the seemingly unappealing idea. Instead of seeing Paddy's notion as an imprisonment, Yank sees it as an increase of his own power. The Astonishment Caused by Paddy's Speech (Situational Irony) Even though the coal stokers have been haranguing drunkenly and countering arguments with the blunt threat of force, when Paddy, a more senior worker among them, moans an elegy to the lost days of sailing and a more humane kind of working life, they do not continue in the same vein as before. Surprised at their own reactions, they listen with a certain quiet reverence uncommon to them.

Bells Sound the Work Shift (Situational Irony) Even though Yank and the other stokers have been contemptuously boasting about their strength and independence, as soon as the eight bells sound (mechanically) to summon them to their shift at the stokehole, everyone suddenly loses their raucous confidence and files down to work like machines. "How the black smoke swirls back against the sky! Is it not beautiful? " (Verbal Irony) Mildred's first line in Scene Two, said with an “affected dreaminess, ” seems deliberately calculated to annoy her aunt, whom she knows disapproves of her interest in such unwomanly things as industry and the workings of the ship's stokehole. The affectedness of her speech shows that Mildred is striking a deliberately ironic pose.

Themes of the play Class Conflict As the socialist stoker, Long tells his fellow workers in a brief soapbox speech, and Yank personally when the two visit Madison Avenue in New York, that he believes they should realize the terrible state of their living and working conditions. According to Long, who is portrayed by O'Neill as a one-dimensional, ideology-defined character, everything that is wrong in the lives of the workers is the fault of the capitalist class, whom they should therefore overthrow. Yank—and one senses O'Neill himself—is averse by disposition to any view that accepts that there are forces outside of oneself that one cannot overcome by blunt force"I mean blow up de factory, de woiks, where he makes de steel. Dat's what I'm after—to blow up de steel, knock all de steel in de woild up to de moon. Dat'll fix tings" (82). As the Wobblies who throw him out on to the street after hearing this know, this sort of thinking is almost a parody of the socialist work they do. Suspicion Against Ideologies One of the defining facets of Yank's individualism is that he does not believe in anything except his own strength. Yank can only see them as weak and cowardly. After Long's socialist speech, Yank reacts with great sarcasm and contempt: "De Bible, huh? De Cap'tlist class, huh? Aw nix on dat Salvation Army-Socialist bull. Git a soapbox! Hire a hall! Come and be saved, huh? Jerk us to Jesus, huh? Aw g'wan! I've listened to lots of guys like you, see. Yuh're all wrong. Wanter know what I t'ink? Yuh ain't no good for no one. Yuh're de bunk. Yuh ain't got no noive, get me? Yuh're yellow, dat's what. Yellow,

Mechanization and Dehumanization At the end of his long elegy to the past age of sailing, Paddy levels a challenge to the machine-loving Yank, posing against the latter's modernist faith in the empowering potential of the machine a romantic respect for a kind of essential humanity. Yank contemptuously rejects Paddy's ideas at first, but then throughout the rest of the play he comes to realize that machine civilization in fact deprives him of his power and furthermore of his humanity. Yank is only able to see the truth of the importance Paddy places on basic humanity when he has already lost it himself; by that point Yank thinks despairing that he has had none to begin with. Male Camaraderie Although Yank is a dogged individualist and a man confident in the powers of his own body, O'Neill makes it clear to us that not only is he dependent on machines, which eventually emasculate him, but also the affirmation of his fellow working men, who eventually abandon him. Yank himself only realizes this too late, when he is thrown out of the IWW meeting; in a sense, he has taken masculinity to so extreme an extent that he alienates those men whom he used to impress and stand before as a model.

Alienation of Labor Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 famously described how labor/work means something entirely different for workers in modern capitalistic society in contrast to premodern workers. On the steamship, even though Yank and the other stokers may feel a great sense of confidence in their own physical strength, they do not own the furnaces they feed, let alone the entire transatlantic liner. Thus, they are dependent upon the business owners in order to be able to have work at all. Moreover, the product of their work does not really go to the end of sustaining themselves; the ship takes its passengers across the Atlantic, but the stokers must stay, as opposed to a farmer who plants to feed his family. Historical Change The character of Paddy serves as both a kind of father figure and a foil to Yank. Having worked on sail ships in an age before steamships, in which sailors felt themselves both much more actively involved in the mechanics and processes of the ship and closer to the nature they traversed, Paddy is more aware than the younger man of the changes wrought upon the sailing experience by the introduction of modern mechanization. He tries to impress this higher perspective of historical difference upon Yank, but the latter is too absorbed in the ecstasy of present strength to realize, until it is too late, the old man's lesson: the machine invigorates, but it also dominates and cages.

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