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Alexander Booth

TCS III, ID: 425784

Prof. McGinley

16 November, 2015

Transcending Nihilism in The Hairy Ape

In a world only recently industrialized after being torn asunder by World War One,

Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, written and set in 1921, acts as a desperate plea to awaken an

American society from its nihilistic slumber. O’Neill in fact once wrote that “Americans strive,

get ahead, perhaps succeed, and then ‘die’” (Diggins, 209). This pessimistic view of society,

particularly in O’Neill’s plays, originated from the impact of his family. Coming from a

theatrically inclined household, it can be argued that “the first and most lasting influence on

O’Neill as a developing dramatist was his father” whose melodramatic influence permeated its

way into O’Neill’s early works, especially while as a patient at the Gaylord Sanitarium

(Richards, xiii). Here, O’Neill also read many authors including “three writers who most directly

affected the dramatists of Young Germany, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Wedekind, who were

among the most powerful influences on a youthful O’Neill” (Engel, 85). After his release

however, O’Neill began writing in earnest, influenced by both sensationalism, and eventually a

type of expressionism shaped by “Nietzsche’s epoch making work on The Birth of Tragedy”

(Engel, 85). In fact, O’Neill’s shift in his writing to tragic drama from melodrama was perhaps a

defiant expression of his own exclamation of “Life is tragedy, hurrah!” into the face of his father

(Diggins, 211). The Hairy Ape, written more than half a decade earlier than O’Neill’s classic

tragic dramas, provides a seemingly ideal example for expressionism, or the movement where

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the world is presented from a solely subjective point of view and sometimes radically distorted

for emotional effect.

Yank, a charismatic leader, respected by the men for his sheer strength, dominates in a

stokehold, working in an almost cage-like environment to make a luxury cruise liner operate at

full efficiency. He is at home here until a spoiled young woman coming from a world of soft

soaps and power catches sight of him and calls him an ugly beast. This interaction throws Yank,

who no longer feels that he belongs in the stokehold. The last half of the play follows Yank

around New York City, bending jail bars but unable to garner attention from a Manhattan

socialite or lure a socialist group of industrialized workers into his radical schemes. Eventually,

Yank walks into the arms of the gorilla at the zoo who crushes the remaining life from his bones.

To establish an expressionistic emotional effect as well as emphasize Yank’s descent into

nihilism, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape distorts its world with an industrialized motif. For example,

the men in the ship, when speaking in unison, have “a brazen metallic quality, as if their throats

were phonograph horns” (O’Neill, 360). The phonograph, a recent invention for the time,

allowed scratchy and tinny, sometimes even harsh, sounding music to be played back to an

audience. Since every man utters a response similar to a phonograph except for Yank, the

comparison acts as an isolation factor, as, like when a dog howls after hearing the roar of a

vacuum, an animal does not mesh well with a machine. Also, when the socialites march down

Fifth Avenue in scene five, they are described as “a procession of gaudy marionettes, yet with

something of the relentless horror of Frankenstein in their detached, mechanical unawareness”

(O’Neill, 381). Marionettes are again another machine, manipulated by a master with no control

on their own. Against the stark animalistic tendencies of Yank, the metaphor continues to

sequester Yank from not only the proletariat, but also the bourgeois. As he alone stands apart

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from the grating voices of the sailors as well as the mechanized socialites, the audience, and

eventually Yank himself, sees how pointless his life really becomes. There will always be

another machine to do his job better than he ever could. Eventually, his own coveted position on

the boat will be replaced. Yank becomes a nihilist as, I believe, an expression of O’Neill’s own

pessimistic view towards this mechanized society in the 1920’s. In fact, by expanding Edwin

Engel’s brilliant analysis, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill, on O’Neill’s more obviously

stylized Greek tragedies, Lazarus Laughed and Mourning Becomes Electra, to one of O’Neill’s

recognized earlier expressionistic plays, I argue that O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, guided by

Nietzsche’s interpretation of drama from his The Birth of Tragedy, uses elements and structures

taken from ancient Greek tragedies to make O’Neill’s industrialized society aware of their own

current nihilistic paradigm. By using the tragic fall of Yank to force a catharsis upon his

audience, O’Neill tries to incur a change in society to transcend the nihilism of his fundamentally

meaningless worldview.

Tragedy was perhaps one of the most influential aspects on Greek theatre and culture as

an entirety. One of the three main types of ancient Greek theatre, tragedy trumps comedy and the

epic as “action of a superior kind” according to Aristotle (Aristotle, 23). Because of its ability to

evoke a tragic effect or cathartic and emotional release, the ancient Greeks celebrated tragedians

and established festivals revolving around theatrical performances, the most famous of which

was Dionysia. Perhaps due to this veneration, Aristotle wrote down the elements and structure

that defines a good tragedy into a manifesto used for millennia called Poetics. For instance,

Aristotle penned that “tragedy as a whole has six elements on the basis of which it is evaluated,

namely the story, the moral elements, the style, the ideas, the staging, and the music” (Aristotle,

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24). However, not all of these elements are necessary to produce a tragic effect in a

contemporary production.

For O’Neill, an influential analysis of Greek tragedy that detailed how a contemporary

production could result in a catharsis was the controversial essay The Birth of Tragedy by

Friedrich Nietzsche. Although entire papers could and have been written about this piece, a brief

summary here before my points will suffice. Nietzsche argues that there exists a dichotomy in

the history of the tragic form between Apollonian and the Dionysian also known as the “opposed

artistic worlds of dream and intoxication” (Nietzsche, 19). Apollonian art becomes structured,

beautiful, and ordered while art under Dionysian influence becomes imageless, chimerical, and

disorderly. The only blend of the two exist in Greek tragedy during the catharsis where

“simultaneously artist of dream and intoxication, such as we have to imagine him as he stands

alone to one side of the infatuated choruses before sinking to his knees in Dionysian drunkenness

and mystical self-abandonment and as, through the effect of the Apollonian dream, his own state,

that is, his unity with the innermost ground of the world, is revealed to him in an allegorical

dream-image” (Nietzsche, 24). In his analysis of Nietzsche’s influence on O’Neill, in particular

on his tragedies Lazarus Laughed and Mourning Becomes Electra, Edwin Engel noted that

Nietzsche “insisted the tragic effect must be explained on aesthetic, rather than moral grounds”

and this aesthetic stems from the blend of Apollonian and its antithetical Dionysian dogmas

(Engel, 79). Precisely this combination of artistic duality allowed the Greeks to find self-

affirmation in the catharsis celebrated in the performance of tragedies. They partook witness to

the full spectrum of the human condition in a successful blend of Apollonian and Dionysian art,

allowing them to transcend a nihilistic outlook.

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The motive behind reaching this tragic effect, Nietzsche asserted, was that the successful

blend of the Apollonian and Dionysian allowed the Greeks to eclipse a nihilistic worldview. He

described the “ethical substratum of pessimistic tragedy as the justification of human evil and

even of human guilt as the suffering caused by it” (Nietzsche 57). By staring into the abyss of the

worst human condition and affirming it in catharsis, the Greeks used pessimistic tragedy to

provide meaning to their own life. They discovered that they are indeed infinitely more than

those individuals depicted on stage encompassed by “the misfortune [of tragedy] in the essence

of things” (Nietzsche, 57). The Greeks did in fact rise above all of their own pessimistic

tendencies merely by finding self-affirmation in the celebration of tragedy.

To replicate a similar transcendence of nihilism in his own society, O’Neill recognized

that only three Aristotelian elements are necessary for a catharsis in modern audiences and

consequently depicted the plot, character, and chorus of The Hairy Ape akin to Grecian tragedy.

Aristotle, in regards to plot, wrote that a story bears complexity if “the change of fortune

involves a reversal, a discovery, or both” where a “reversal is a change of direction in the course

of events… taking place in accordance with probability or necessity” and a “discovery, as the

term implies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge” (Aristotle, 30). Most Greek tragedies

united both the reversal and the discovery into the same instant in the play, usually near the end

of the plot arc. In slight contrast, O’Neill separated the two to establish a more complex character

in Yank as his exposure to the reversal motivates his action up until the discovery. In The Hairy

Ape, O’Neill incorporated the reversal as the main turning point of the play. In scene three, Yank

resides in the bowels of the ship shoveling coal and feeling content. In fact he yells, “But we

belong see! We gotter feed de baby! Come on!” as motivation for the other workers to keep the

ship running at full speed (O’Neill, 372). He establishes himself as the leader over his domain in

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the stokehold. The reversal occurs when Mildred appears “like a white apparition in the full light

from the open furnace doors… As she looks into his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she

utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him… ‘Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!’…

Yank feels himself insulted in some unknown fashion in the very heart of his pride…” (O’Neill,

373). This scene epitomizes the reversal because as stated above, the bowels of the ship are

established as Yank’s domain. Yank feels comfortable there, up until Mildred sights him and

reverses his very emotions. The sight of the ship only forces Yank to remember that sense of

estrangement and consequently the rest of the play occurs away from the cruise liner as Yank

attempts to find his place in this world. The discovery occurs at the end of the play when Yank

obtains the knowledge that he belongs nowhere and will die alone and unneeded in a

fundamentally meaningless world. After searching among the bourgeois on Fifth Avenue, the

proletariat in prison, the socialist Industrial Workers of the World, and finally among the apes in

the zoo, Yanks expires crushed in the arms of the gorilla resembling himself, the titular Hairy

Ape (O’Neill). Due to the combination of reversal and discovery in the plot, The Hairy Ape

evokes both fear and pity even from only being read, leading to a potent tragic effect.

To successfully replicate the tragic effect caused by plot in the best of Grecian tragedies,

O’Neill expanded on the reversal and discovery by immersing both Apollonian and Dionysian

art, as defined by Nietzsche, into the plot of The Hairy Ape. Apollonian influences can be seen in

scene two with Mildred and her Aunt. Their life is structured and beautiful; the Aunt is even

described as being “dressed pretentiously as if afraid her face alone would never indicate her

position in left” (O’Neill, 366). In fact, all of Manhattan gleams with decadence. In scene five,

Fifth Avenue glows with

“a general atmosphere of clean, well-tidied, wide street; a flood of mellow, tempered sunshine; gently, genteel breezes. In the rear, the show windows of two shops, a jewelry establishment on

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the corner, a furrier’s next to it. Here the adornments of extreme wealth are tantalizingly displayed. The jeweler’s window is gaudy with glittering diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, etc., fashioned in ornate tiaras, crowns, necklaces, collars, etc. From each piece hangs an enormous tag from which a dollar sign and numerals in intermittent electric lights wink out the incredible” (O’Neill, 378).

Cleanliness and order dominate, and as such, illuminate the stark Apollonian influence. In

contrast, Dionysian representations seep throughout the play most notably as Yank and the

seamen obviously portray the epitomic Dionysian figure. Their wild, beast-like mantra portrays

the wild and disorder of the Dionysian dogma. This can be seen in their description at the

beginning of the play. The men are crowding the room with a “confused, inchoate uproar

swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning, the bewildered, furious baffled defiance of a beast in a

cage… all are hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows

above their small, fierce, resentful eyes” (O’Neill, 358). Their description recalls ape-like

creatures and their actions accentuate the metaphor. The first line of the show starts with the men

boozing and fighting like animals and Yank’s initial line even says “Where d’yuh get dat beer

stuff? Beer, hell! Beer’s for goils- and Dutchmen. Me for somep’n wit a kick to it! Gimme a

drink one of youse guys” (O’Neill, 359). This dependence on alcohol only exemplifies the

unstructured and intoxicated Dionysian art. Because of the successful dichotomy of Apollonian

and Dionysian artistry O’Neill crafted into The Hairy Ape, O’Neill manages to mimic the effects

of the highest form of art in Grecian tragedy and successfully invokes a sentiment of self-

affirmation for his audience as they bear witness to the catharsis invoked by the plot.

Character, as discussed by Aristotle, is the second major component of Greek tragedy

O’Neill utilizes in The Hairy Ape to establish a catharsis in his audience. In his Poetics, Aristotle

described the four characteristics of a moral character. The first and foremost is “that the

character should be good… the second is appropriateness… the third is plausibility which is

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something differed from making the character good and appropriate in the manner described.

The fourth item is consistency. Even if the character portrayed is inconsistent, he should be

consistently inconsistent” (Aristotle, 35). Yank fits all of these criteria. In the opening of the

play, for example, he unifies the workers around him with a rallying speech, “‘Who makes dis

old tub run? Ain’t it us guys? Well den, we belong, don’t we? We belong and dey don’t. Dat’s

all.’ [A loud chorus of approval]” (O’Neill, 362). The men respect Yank, and once the audience

views this adoration, they cannot help but see Yank as good. The character of Yank portrays

appropriateness as his rallying speech and consequent actions seem right for a low-class ship

hand who exudes dominance over those surrounding him. This dominance also lends Yank

plausibility. At the beginning of the play, Yank “seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more

powerful, more sure of himself than the rest… he represents a sense of self-expressionism, their

most highly developed individual” (O’Neill, 358). Even if this description is still mildly

extravagant, Yank resides within the realm of plausibility and consistently matches his

description. For example, his strength makes an appearance again in scene three when he

“shovels seemingly without effort” and then yet another time in scene six when, to try and

escape jail, “he seizes one bar with his bare hands and, putting his two feet up against the others

so that his position is parallel to the floor like a monkey’s, he gives a great wrench backwards.

The bar bends like licorice under his tremendous strength” (O’Neill, 371, 387). Because Yank’s

character agrees with Aristotle’s description of a moral character, O’Neill allows the audience to

bond with him and feel the necessary pain and fear along with him that forms the root of the

eventual catharsis.

Aristotle’s description of a moral character, however, does not completely express

everything a character needs to encourage a tragic effect. Each character requires a moral

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structure to shape their decisions. In contrast to the well-defined cultural framework motivating

Grecian characters, to achieve a tragic effect in his diverse American society, O’Neill used a

malleable, and sometimes even complete lack of, moral compass as the backdrop to Yank’s fall.

John Diggins, in his work Eugene O’Neill’s America notes that “In his attempt to make America

appreciate the meaning of tragedy, O’Neill set out on an uphill struggle against an American

culture that settled for the practical and useful… America itself needed to be reminded that the

true human spirit struggles against life to stand above it” (Diggins, 211). However, there are

some problems in directly combining the moral motivations of characters struggling spiritually in

Greek tragedies into American drama. As seen above, O’Neill successfully incorporated tragic

plot and the Aristotelian moral character into The Hairy Ape. Unfortunately, as Doris Falk

notices in Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension, “Greek characters acted within a known

framework of value and order. We have neither, and the search for these has been the most

consistent theme in modern literature” (Falk, 138). Ancient Greeks structured their lives around

their religious beliefs which thus provided a concrete framework of moral values. No such

unified structure existed for O’Neill, who instead decided to use mental struggles to show the

battle for a moral compass. However, “the imitation on the stage of a mental process is after all

not exactly the same as the imitation of an action. Mental processes become action only when

they are dramatized- literally acted out” (Falk, 139). Consequently, O’Neill had Yank literally

act out his mental process by having him brood in the form of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ throughout the

play. Yank mimics “the attitude of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’” three times, all in retaliation to things

Yank does not understand (O’Neill). At the beginning of scene four, Yank does not understand

his encounter with Mildred. At the beginning of scene six, Yank contemplates why he currently

resides in jail and why the Manhattan socialites did not acknowledge him. Finally, at the end of

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scene seven, Yank has been betrayed by the I.W.W. and does not know here to turn next. By

having Yank literally act out his thinking, O’Neill showed that Yank does not have a fixed moral

framework with answers to all encounters in his life. Instead, it is this lack of a framework that

guides Yank similar to the fixed structure guiding the character of Grecian tragedies.

An analysis of Greek tragedy would not be complete without an assessment on the chorus

due in part to the fact that the chorus depicted an optimal ancillary to the tragic character. Indeed,

Nietzsche discovered that the original tragedy consisted of only chorus and thus probed its

structure deeply in The Birth of Tragedy. In Nietzsche’s time, it was commonly believed that the

chorus represented the ideal spectator. However, Nietzsche argued that “the true spectator,

whoever he might be, must always remain aware of the fact that he has before him a work of art

and not an empirical reality” and thus since the Greek tragic chorus acknowledges characters and

actions as real action onstage, they cannot be a true spectator (Nietzsche, 43). Instead, Nietzsche

claimed that the chorus recognizes the main player as its god and “watches how the god suffers

and glorifies himself, and therefore itself refrain from action. But in this attitude of complete

service to god, the chorus is the highest, indeed Dionysian expression of nature” (Nietzsche, 51).

In this way, the chorus acts as an ideal subsidiary to the main characters of the play, able to

emphasize the tragedy and eventual catharsis without aggregating any empathy themselves. It is

interesting to note that the Dionysian chorus along with the Apollonian dream-like and ordered

set, provide another blended dichotomy thus creating an ideal environment to provide catharsis.

O’Neill therefore, integrates the chorus into The Hairy Ape in each scene that includes

Yank in order to accentuate the tragic fall of his character in his every location. In scenes one,

three, and four, the other seamen act as a chorus on the cruise liner. They all view Yank as the

“god” and only emphasize his actions. In the script, they almost all remain nameless, only

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speaking under the pseudonyms “Voices” and “All”. The only action they perform themselves is

tackling Yank to the ground at the end of scene four to prevent him from killing Mildred.

However, this action can be viewed as emphasizing Yank’s animalistic rage and strength as he

struggles uselessly beneath the men. In scene five on Fifth Avenue, the chorus becomes the

nameless Manhattan socialites. Again under the name “Voices”, the socialites emphasize Yank’s

actions by ignoring every single one of them. They disregard him by “passing on without a

glance” and as such, Yank’s actions get increasingly outrageous and accrete even more attention

from the audience. In scene six, similarly, the chorus morphs into the faceless inmates who

unsurprisingly are known as “Voices” and primarily extenuate Yank’s rising beastly struggle

with the bourgeois and physical altercation with the bars in the cage. In scene seven, the chorus

transforms into the nameless background I.W.W members who depict Yank’s final animal rage

as he offers to bomb the bourgeois before being thrown out and stopping “bewildered by the

confusion in his brain, pathetically impotent”. The audience looking on at this point would not be

surprised to see Yank head towards the zoo as he has finally deteriorated to his primal instincts.

Finally, the chorus at the zoo is represented by the background primates. They serve to enhance

the action between the gorilla and Yank and in fact emphasize that even while Yank lies dying,

he cannot communicate to them and they do not care about him. He still has not found a home.

Thus, Yank’s demise becomes emphasized and catharsis reached. The chorus provides the entity

needed to accentuate the action and encourage the empathy and evolvement of emotions needed

to achieve the tragic effect (O’Neill).

By using elements founded on Greek tragedy and modernized structures influenced by

Nietzsche’s writings, O’Neill successfully replicates the tragic effect in American drama,

particularly The Hairy Ape. To O’Neill, tragedy “reflected primarily the desperation of desire

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unaware of which forces are driving it to self-destruction” where this struggle requires, in

O’Neill’s own words, “the martyr who is necessary tragic but to me is exhilarating!” (Diggins,

211). With his martyr depicted as Yank, O’Neill wrote The Hairy Ape under his description of

tragedy to alert Americans to their nihilistic lifestyle by depicting the environment as one

expressionistically plausible for his time. The tragic effect inspired by the Greeks manages to be

reproduced as O’Neill hoped for his audience to finally transcend the nihilism suffocating

society, mimicking the transcendence of the Greeks. It is then interesting to consider why this

play is still deemed expressionistic instead of being included amongst O’Neill’s other tragedies.

Indeed, this leads to the question, do most expressionistic plays incorporate themes taken from

Nietzschean and Aristotelian tragedies? Perhaps what is currently defined as expressionistic in

the theatre only exists as a misnomer for a contemporary form of tragedy. For, as O’Neill once

said himself in admiration, “The Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever” (Diggins, 210).

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Works Cited

Aristotle, and Anthony Kenny. Poetics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Diggins, John P. Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2007. Print.

Engel, Edwin A. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1953. Print.

Falk, Doris V. Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays. New York: Gordian P., 1982. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Douglas Smith. The Birth of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

O'Neill, Eugene, and Jeffrey H. Richards. Early Plays. New York, NY: Penguin, 2001. Print.