The Modern Tragic Animal in the Zoo: A Zoocritical Reading of The Hairy Ape

Abstract

In The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill depicts the shortcomings of an industrialized society: class distinctions are made stark as we witness the upper class occupying a financially superior and luxurious position above the exploited proletariat. Deviating from previous anthropocentric readings of O’Neill’s text that fail to notice the play’s non-human concerns, this article posits a zoocritical analysis that is interested in the play’s use of the zoo animal as a metaphor that informs our understanding of the proletariat as their freedoms are restricted and are violently exploited. The explicit references that liken the working class to wild animals and apes in zoos are suggestive of the common points at which the struggles of animals and the working class intersect. Like animals tasked only to please humans and whose life is restricted to zoos, the workers, serving the interests of the upper class, spend their days mostly shovelling coal into the engine of a transatlantic liner and feel a sense of isolation as they rarely make contact with others outside the ship. Yank, the protagonist, when imprisoned, falls into a fit of fury that reminds us of how zoos are like prisons and vice versa. O’Neill implicitly suggests kinship to animals that have been oppressed and tortured for the sake of human interests.