Quest for Identity in The Hairy Ape

Pages:11-12
J.N. Sharma1 and Meena Rani2 (G.B. Degree College Rohtak, Haryana1 and Department of English, C.M.J. University, Shilong2)

The Hairy Ape is a sequel to O’Neill’s expressionism which he had ventured earlier in The Emperor Jones. The dramatist has wedded various mythical and symbolic elements to the texture of the play. Eugene O’Neill tried to capture the sad plight of a modern man caught between the promise of the ever evolving material world and his haunting past as a semi-conscious ape in the play The Hairy Ape. The play subtitled as “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes turned out to be one of the most compelling and pathetic tales of modern man’s alienation from society, nature and his own self. O’Neill saw no salvation for modern man, a senseless brute who continues fruitlessly to be brutalised by machinery and industry. If man is essentially still an ape he has also become a machine and, in self-delusion, thinks that the elemental primitive force which he has retained and converted into steel can be an adequate end in itself. He enjoys a false sense of belonging to something, of being a part of steel and of machinery, where as actually he is their slave. In those instances where he is not enslaved, he has lost his vitality an become completely enervated a waste product inheritating the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.