The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill: A fight between Nature and Modern Society.

By Jean Carlos Silva

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, is a long one-act play contains eight scenes, was written in 1921 and performed in March of 1922. Its background lies in O’Neill’s own sojourn at sea, and its burly central figure Yank, is patterned after Robert Driscoll, a stoker acquaintance of O’Neill who was similarly proud of his physical strength. Driscoll’s suicide at sea prompted O’Neill to imagine the factors that might have led to it. The conflict between the individual and society is repeated in Yank’s Fifth Avenue confrontation with the unfeeling, churchgoing marionettes, who infuriates him with their materialistic delight in the monkey-fur coat and their blindness to his existence.

In the Play, The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, there are two characters that play an important role in the play. They are Paddy and Long. Long and Paddy are firemen aboard the Ocean Liner. They both have thick accents, but express their thoughts with complexity through their dialogue as seen in the play. With their characteristics, one sees two different sides of how the Industrial Revolution had an impact on the lives of those working at that time. 

Although Paddy only appears in The Hairy Ape in two scenes, he is an important element of the play. Paddy is an old Irish man who likes to drink heavily, and he is known for his spouting about on subjects such as philosophy and stories of the past especially when he’s intoxicated. Of the men on the ship Paddy could be considered the oldest of the men because he has been doing labor jobs longer than most of the firemen as he says when he describes his life on the Clipper Ships (pg1122).

Paddy’s extensive monologue in Scene One details how shipping used to be aboard Clipper Ships (pg1122). Without Paddy's presence the audience would not have as much perspective about the revolution brought by machines. Paddy had experienced life on the sea that was free, where he was empowered and valued. Paddy, unliked many of the men such as Long, it knows what it is like to not do slave labor. Paddy's experiences let him have real opinions unlike the rest of the firemen with him. This is why he complains about his life as a fireman and how it’s a prison compared to the freedom brought by the Clipper Ships (pg1122-23).

On the other hand, Long is younger than Paddy as discussed earlier. In the play, Long complains of his life being hell. He says that the ship is their home. He complains that their life was forced on them. The play explores the place of human beings in the universe. In an increasingly dehumanized modern society, the individual no longer is in harmony with nature. Paddy speaks poetically about in the first scene the days when “a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one.” The Hairy Ape draws a stark contrast between idyllic past and the alienated present, asking if modern individual can find a home in mechanistic, industrial society. O’Neill seems to reject this possibility. Yank’s animal nature, dramatized through his strength and physical appearance, it is contrasted with the fragility of the would-be social worker, Mildred. Representing an affluent but insensitive society, Mildred makes a pitiful effort to reach out those of a lower class, but her ancestry has rendered her weak and lethargic, and she is unable even to stay conscious in Yank’s presence.

There are three main symbols in Eugene O'Neill's play "The Hairy Ape." One symbol which is predominant is the figure of the ape itself. Not only is the word ape used in the title (which is a clue to its relevancy), apes are everywhere (or referred to many times) throughout the play. Yank acts like an ape and is constantly compared to an ape. Another symbol in the play is Rodin's statue "The Thinker." This symbol is important because Yank constantly worries about thinking. He desires the ability to have the ability to think in the way that the statue does (or how he thinks the statue thinks). Yank uses the pose of "The Thinker" to show his struggle with thinking and his obsession with the practice of thinking.

The last symbol in the play is the use of steel. Steel can be considered in two very different ways. First, steel is strong and powerful. It is when he is placed in challenging situations where he imagines his strength being like steel. Contrastingly, steel is also an image of oppression. Cages are made out of steel, and the bars of a steel prison are inescapable. Both Yank's cage and the cage of the apes are made out of steel.

Considered one of America’s greatest twentieth century dramatists by scholars and critics alike, Eugene O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes, as well as the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. The son of actor James O’Neill, he was educated at private schools and briefly at Princeton; after six months of illness in a tuberculosis sanatorium, he enrolled in George Pierce Baker’s playwriting course at Harvard University, an experience that solidified O’Neill’s determination to be a playwright.