Tragic Effect In The Hairy Ape

Abstract

The Hairy Ape HAS BEEN WIDELY PRAISED and widely reprinted. Most reviewers and critics have agreed that it has unusual power and unusual ability to project its sense of tragedy. But critics have disagreed on where that sense of tragedy comes from and, in consequence, on basic matters of interpretation. Early critics saw its power in its brutal naturalism, for a long time hardly noticing the expressionistic techniques—and disregarding O'Neill's explicit instructions that the treatment of the scenes "should by no means be naturalistic." More recently commentators have recognized some of the complex ways in which this comparatively direct and simple play works. I like much of Doris V. Falk's analysis in psychoanalytic and existential terms. She seems especially germane when she suggests that Yank in his "belonging" "has abdicated his manhood, has ceased to be an 'existent' and becomes a passive, vegetative being at the mercy of forces outside himself and beyond his control." However we interpret "belonging," we miss O'Neill's play if we interpret it as good. Yet as late as 1947 Joseph Wood Krutch, perhaps the most sensitive and appreciative of O'Neill's critics, was able to describe Yank as "a man who, however brutalized, remains a man until he loses his sense of 'belonging,' and thereby inevitably becomes an animal." The truth, I am convinced, is almost diametrically opposite this. I would describe Yank as a man who, by glorying in his merely belonging, contributes to his own brutalization, who remains a brute until he gets jarred out of that sense of belonging and then inevitably moves toward becoming a man, in the process inevitably destroying himself.