The Hairy Ape

Hello everyone, This blog is a part of my thinking activity. In this blog I will discuss about Eugene O'Neill's short story "The Hairy Ape"

Introduction

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 who 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 some years later that Driscoll had committed suicide by jumping from a ship. The play at once represents a personal attempt to come to terms with this suicide and the playwright's finding in the drama of the demise of a manual laborer an essential story of humanity in modern society.

Plot Summary

Scene 1

The play opens in a ship’s forecastle, the quarters for the crew located in the forward part of the boat. The firemen of the large ocean-going ship are all happily drinking, although there is discernible tension, indicating that the men are capable of violence at a moment’s notice. One of the firemen, Yank, declares that beer is sissy and that he only drinks the “hard stuff.” Paddy sings a song about whiskey. Yank yells at them, insisting that they are “dead.” He says he wants quiet because he’s trying to think. Someone sings a sentimental song about home and Yank launches into a verbal attack of home, of emotional connections, and of women.

Long claims they are all really living in hell and blames their miserable conditions on the people in first-class, “the damned Capitalist class.” Yank doesn’t have the time or attention span for Long’s talk of politics. He calls Long yellow and declares that all of the workers are better men than the people in first-class. “Dem boids don’t amount to nothing.” He gets the group riled up, drowning out Long’s speech. Paddy reminisces about the old days, before boats had engines, when man and the sea and the ship became one. Yank says he’s crazy, dead even. It takes a real man to work in hell he claims. Yank sees his energy as what drives the ship. “I’m steel,” he says, ridiculing the idea that they are slaves. He dismisses Paddy as an outcast, a leftover from a previous age.

Scene 2

On the promenade deck, young Mildred Douglas reclines in a deck chair with her aunt. They engage in small talk and little arguments. Her aunt chides Mildred about her forays into social service and attempts to help the poor. Mildred says she wants “to touch life somewhere,” although she has enjoyed the benefits of the wealth produced by her family’s steel business.

The aunt points out that Mildred is really quite artificial and that her efforts in helping the poor are actually thinly veiled attempts at some kind of social credibility. Mildred, however, is intent on visiting the stokehole of the ship, to mingle with the common workers and experience their lifestyle. She has received permission from the ship’s captain by claiming she had a letter from her father, the chairman of the ship line, who requested that she inspect the vessel. The second engineer escorting her to the stokehole questions her white dress, since she might rub up against dirt or oil; Mildred replies she will throw it out when she comes back up because she has plenty of dresses.

Scene 3

In the stokehole, the men are bare-chested, sweaty, and dirty as they shovel coal into the massive furnace that propels the ship’s engines. The heat appears to be oppressive, close to unbearable. Paddy is exhausted. Yank ridicules him and brags about his own ability to face the furnace without tiring. He rallies the men as they put their energy into stoking the furnace.

“He ain’t got no noive (nerve)” Yank says of Paddy, and the men respond to his encouragement as he calls on them to feed the baby (the furnace). At the height of their brute physical activity, Mildred enters in her lily-white dress. The whistle sounds, signaling the end of the work shift. The men notice Mildred and are shocked by her incongruous presence. Yank is oblivious to her and continues to work, shaking his shovel at the whistle.

Mildred observes Yank’s animal-like force and is appalled by it. Suddenly Yank sees her, sending a venomous, hateful glare at her. She swoons with fear, nearly fainting into her escort’s arms. She asks to be taken away, labeling Yank a filthy beast. He is enraged at the insult and throws his shovel at the door through which she has exited.

Scene 4

Yank, unlike the other fireman, has not washed himself after their shift. The men are off-duty and entertaining themselves, while Yank sits, his face covered in coal soot, trying to figure out the previous events in the furnace room. The other men tease him, suggesting he’s fallen in love with the stokehole’s strange visitor. No, he counters, the feeling he has for Mildred is hate.

Long complains that the engineers put them on exhibition, like they were monkeys. He mentions that Mildred is the daughter of a steel magnate. Paddy suggests her visit was like a visit to the zoo, where they were pointed out as baboons. Paddy says it was love at first sight when she saw Yank, like she had seen a great hairy ape escaped from the zoo. He makes fun of how Yank threw the shovel at her exit.

Yank seems to like the label “Hairy Ape” and imagines that his encounter with Mildred resulted in violence to her. Long says he would have been punished for such an act, but Yank continues this fantasy, feeding his anger over the disparity in his and Mildred’s social standing. As Yank shows signs of losing his temper and control, the others pile on him and hold him down. Paddy advises them to give Yank time to cool down before letting him up.

Scene 5

It is some time after the ship’s return to port, and Yank and Long walk down Fifth Avenue in New York, talking. Long is once again offering his political rhetoric about the working class while Yank, oblivious to his companion’s words, speaks of his growing obsession with teaching the upper class—specifically Mildred—a lesson about human worth. At the same time Yank complains that he doesn’t fit in or belong anywhere. They see the jewelry and the furs in the windows of the store and are infuriated at the prices, which are far beyond the means of common men such as themselves. Yank sees a group of wealthy people coming out of a church where they have been making relatively insignificant contributions to the needy. Yank verbally attacks this group saying they don’t belong and bragging about his physical prowess, how people like him are the ones who make things work. He challenges them to a fight. Before he can commit any physical violence, however, Yank is restrained by police, who arrest him.

Scene 6

Yank is in jail, angry at being caged like an animal in the zoo. The other prisoners mock him. They ask him what crime he committed, suggesting a domestic argument. Yank explains the root of his anger—Mildred’s visit to the stokehole—and his subsequent attack on the rich people. During his rant, he mentions Mildred’s last name. The prisoners inform him that her father is president of the Steel Trust. One inmate suggests that Yank join a group of labor activists, the Wobblies, whose efforts are aimed at exacting revenge upon upper class denizens such as Mildred and her father. The inmate gives Yank information about the union. Yank gets very excited that a tangible solution to his problems has presented itself. He talks about the steel bars that are restraining him, imagining himself as a fire that will burn through them. His fervor becomes so intense that he bends the bars and has to be subdued by the guards.

Scene 7

Yank shows up at the Wobblies (the nickname for the International Workers of the World) local union office. He asks to join but has to stop and think when they ask him his real name. The union members are happy to find a fireman from the shipping line who is willing to join their cause. They express an interest in organizing the line’s other workers. They want to know why Yank is joining. They ask whether he wants to change the inequality of the world with “legitimate direct action—or with dynamite.” He responds that dynamite is the answer and indicates his desire to blow up the Douglas Steel Trust and its president. Quickly sensing that Yank is mentally unstable and dangerous, the union rejects his application. Out on the street, Yank becomes agitated, repeating his belief that there is no place where he truly belongs. A pair of policemen chastise him, believing him to be a drunk.

Scene 8

Yank visits the monkey house at the zoo. He talks to the animals about his experiences in the city. One gorilla responds by pounding on his chest, and Yank decides that they are members of the same club, the Hairy Apes. He wonders how the animals feel, having people look at them in a cage and make fun of them. Pondering the similarities in his and the animals’ situations, Yank is so moved that he pries the cage door open. As the gorilla exits, Yank tries to exchange a secret handshake with his newfound friend. The gorilla grabs him in a crushing hug. Yank drops to the ground and, as he dies, realizes that he doesn’t even belong with the hairy apes. The monkeys jump and chatter about the stage.

Characters

Mildred Douglas

Mildred is a vision in white, appropriate for the upper class promenade deck which she inhabits. She is young and idealistic and at the same time oddly aware that her idealism is without real impact or significance. She has a history of social activism and empathy for the lower class in spite of the wealth accumulated by her steel tycoon grandfather and father, whose millions were made by the sweat of workers such as Yank. There is a hint of guilt in her inquiry into the state of the workers, but her interest lacks, as her aunt has criticized, vitality. She shrinks back from the brutal sight of the stokehole and Yank, the quintessential fireman.

Guard

His role is to keep the prisoners in line. He is faced with Yank, a very strong and surprisingly out of control prisoner.

Long

Criticized by Yank for his Socialist leanings, Long still has much in common with Yank. He also sees the dehumanization that is occurring and ties it to the importance of the machine. He agrees with Yank when he sees the people in first class, who represent the ruling class, as being the people who have enslaved the workers by putting them in front of the brutal furnace. While Yank goes off to glory in his position with the furnace, Long proposes socialist solutions to the problem of dehumanization and enslavement. His propositions are rejected by Yank.

Mildred’s Aunt

The aunt is accompanying Mildred on the ship and obviously has little sympathy with her niece’s charitable tendencies. This lack of sympathy exhibits itself in banter between the two women when the aunt criticizes her niece for being insincere, suggesting that artificiality is a much more natural pose for Mildred.

Paddy

Paddy is a worker on the ship and the voice of the past. He spends his time in reverie, remembering the pleasure he derived from sailing in the old days, when he could feel the wind and the waves; he longs for the simplicity of a time gone by. He has only reluctantly gone on to the new mechanized form of water travel. He is old and tired and wants time to reflect, to sit with his pipe. Paddy acts as a counterpoint to Yank’s brute strength and calls to mind an earlier day before industrialized society wrought dehumanized creatures such as Yank and inhuman working conditions such as those found on the ship.

Second Engineer

The Second Engineer takes Mildred to the stokehole, while cautioning her about the dirt she may encounter. He suggests that she change her outfit.

Robert Smith

The Secretary greets Yank with open arms but then is suspicious about his reasons for joining the union. He baits him with questions that Yank is too stupid to circumvent and then throws the brute out, suspecting that he is a plant from the police or the secret service.

Yank

Yank is a foot soldier in the industrial revolution, a fireman (one who tends the massive furnaces that power the ship) who boasts that he loves the hellish heat of the stokehole in which he works. He is a caricature of masculinity, the ultimate macho man—he disdains anything soft or “sissy” and makes fun of anyone he sees as being less than his ideal of a strong man. It is his physical strength that sustains him, the only thing on which he can depend, his only source of pride.

Yank starts the play feeling superior to others because of his physical prowess though he slowly comes to realize that this strength makes him seem like an animal. When he is first introduced to the idea of being a hairy ape he likes it, but he soon finds that the label causes him trouble. He eventually strives to rise above that role, struggling to understand the world and his place in it. For all his efforts at higher thinking, however, he’s not successful at figuring it out; his resulting confusion often sends him into uncontrollable rages. Unable to clearly see himself, Yank projects his own doubts and faults on others. When he says others don’t belong in society, he is really announcing his own alienation. He only begins to realize his true state as he dies.

Themes

Class Conflict

Yank is the epitome of the lower class, the working poor. He has the brawn but not the brain. He and his peers put their shoulders to the wheel and make the great capitalist machine run; they provide the sweat and muscle that will push America to the forefront of the industrial age. The system exploits these efforts, reaping great profits for those who own the machines but offering little reward for those who operate them.

Although Yank initially envisions himself above the first-class passengers on the ship—reassuring himself with the knowledge that without people like him the ship would not run—he comes to realize that the rich are getting richer from his efforts while his own rewards remain paltry. It is Mildred’s father who owns the steel works and the ship line. And it is people like Mildred who can afford the furs and diamonds on Fifth Avenue. They are living the good life by exploiting the workers.

It is this realization that he is only a cog in the machine and not the center of the industrial universe that plants the first seeds of Yank’s disillusion. Before Mildred’s appearance in the stokehole, Yank had not been directly exposed to the upper class. While his perception of himself was one of elevated status, he is confronted with the fact that the true mark of high status—money—is in the hands of

Human Regression by Industrialization

The resounding theme of The Hairy Ape is the effect of industrialization and technological progress on the worker. Industrialization has reduced the human worker into a machine. The men are programmed to do one task, are turned on and off by whistles, and are not required to think independently. Today, the job of the coal stoker is actually done by a machine. Workers are thus forced into jobs that require nothing but grunt work and physical labor, which has, in turn, caused a general deterioration of the worker into a Neanderthal or Ape- like state. This is made clear by O'Neill's stage direction, which indicates that the Firemen actually look like Neanderthals and one of the oldest workers, Paddy, as "extremely monkey-like." The longer the Firemen work, the further back they fall on the human evolutionary path—thus Paddy, one of the oldest, is especially "monkey-like." As a whole, the play is a close investigation of this regressive pattern through the character Yank—the play marks his regression from a Neanderthal on the ship to an actual ape at the zoo.