“The Hairy Ape” – Eugene O'Neill

About Author: 

  

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. O'Neil:  Was a dramatist on life & philosophy and he Was an isolated person. All of O’Neill’s plays are written from a personal point of view and reflect on the tragedy of the human condition. His plays deal especially with the American history and social movements.

The Hairy Ape:

The Hairy Ape is Expressionist drama 1922 by Eugene O'Neill and  Written when monopolies ruled and worker rights movements were in their developing stage. Still relevent even though was written in the early 1920s. The play questioned class differences and social dominance in American society. The Hairy Ape it is Existentialism, and Marxism play that is talk about the struggle in high class and working class, also searching for the identity.

 Themes:

 

1) oppression of the industrial working class
2) capitalist persecution of the working man
3) industrialization causing humans to regress

This play Follows Yank, a fireman on a transatlantic ocean liner, on his search for a sense of belonging in a world run by the upper class. The story of a 'Yank', who works as a fire stoker, trying to find where he belongs in society. It's an exploration of society and how it treats those they see as uncivilized. They're often seem as the 'apes' of humanity even though they are the same nationalities that are seen as pentacles of human development.

Yank is the protagonist of the play who is portrayed as a British and laborer who searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich like Nazareth Steel. The play is divided into eight scenes and there are many laborers like Yank in the play with some high class characters like Mildred Douglas, her Aunt, the secretary at I.W.W, A Gentle man, Second engineer, etc. Yank’s fellow workers are Paddy, Long and other firemen. Yank mocks a fellow fireman when the fireman stands up to make a speech about how they are in a hell created by the upper class.

He leaves the ship and wanders into Manhattan, only to find he does not belong anywhere—neither with the socialites on Fifth Avenue, nor with the labor organizers on the waterfront. Finally he is reduced to seeking a kindred being with the gorilla in the zoo and dies in the animal's embrace. So, Mildred calls Yank a beast, and he spends the rest of the play trying to reassemble his shattered sense of self.