Eulogy of the Ape: Paradigms of Alterity and Identity in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape

Written in 1921 and first produced in 1922, The Hairy Ape puts a glaring spotlight on O'Neill's early artistic achievements while at the same time foreshadowing themes and attitudes that will become crucial in the playwright's subsequent writing. A major theme that stands out in The Hairy Ape before becoming a leitmotiv of O'Neill's whole corpus is the polarity between the Other and the Same as it unfolds through recurring patterns of alterity and identity. Building upon visual art theory, myth criticism, color symbolism and mythical references, I will explore O'Neill's treatment of Otherness and Sameness by focusing on the correlatives the playwright employs to construct them onstage as a sequence of masked or painted faces as opposed to the petrified immobility of Rodin's The Thinker. While the frontal position of the masked and painted faces arguably stands as a figure of self-identity, the profile of Rodin's statue provides a complementary correlative of alterity. Irreconcilable and mutually exclusive, these opposing terms are nevertheless linked by a powerful figure of in-betweenness, the imagery connected to the simian figure. Appearing in the play as a pattern of liminality, the ape operates as a major engine of the theatrical action and sole agent of a possible change that, as we know, is bound to remain unfulfilled. My larger intention is, thus, to address The Hairy Ape in terms of the symbolical figures that populate it. Their interaction creates a markedly visual narrative in the form of a moral parable whose protagonists are masks, puppets, a statue, and a simian figure, an attitude of O'Neill's that I call nonverbal mythopoesis.

The function of frontality and profile as signifiers of, respectively, identity and Otherness has been studied with reference to the visual arts. In A Short History of the Shadow Victor Stoichita, a scholar of aesthetics, stresses the idea that in Western cultures "frontality—and the mirror—constitutes the symbolic form of the relationship between the Self and the Same, whereas the profile—and the shadow—constitutes the symbolic form of the relationship between the self and the other." In the last chapter of his book, Stoichita juxtaposes Victor Obsatz's photograph of Marcel Duchamp (1953) and Andy Warhol's The Shadow (1981), both of which portray a face that is simultaneously seen in full face and in profile. According to Stoichita, the aim of Obsatz's composite picture is to represent "the schize [schizoid quality] of the way the face was represented in the West." Similarly, through his double self-portrait, "Warhol is unmasking (dévisager, to stare/unmask) himself," and "[i]n the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself. In so doing, he 'un-makes' himself." Stoichita observes how both works raise the issue of self-identity by showing a face that, being in full-front and in profile at the same time, is both itself and its Other.¹

Stoichita's views on frontality and profile as paradigms of identity and alterity are particularly appropriate when it comes to analyzing The Hairy Ape in terms of the "symbolic forms" that stand out as recurring elements in the play, which the experimental structure of O'Neill's early work explicitly emphasizes. The first form I will try to parse is the use of color symbolism, which O'Neill deploys while emphasizing the mask-like quality of Yank's and the stokers' blackened faces in contrast to the candid stiffness displayed by Mildred and the "procession of gaudy marionettes" in scene 5.²

Clearly addressed as opposites in the play, the stokers' smudge and the aristocrats' artificial whiteness alternate meaningfully in the play, as the very

Fig. 1.

Two scenes from The Hairy Ape produced by the Kamerny Theatre (1926, Moscow). (Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)

structure of the first scenes show. In the "cramped space in the bowels of a ship," Yank and his simian comrades breathe and swallow blackness in the form of coal dust. Long complains that the capitalists "dragged us down 'til we're on'y wage slaves in the bowels of a bloody ship, sweatin', burnin' up, eatin' coal dust." Paddy, the "wizened" and "monkey-like" Irishman also curses "the bloody engines pounding and throbbing and shaking . . . choking our lungs wid coal dust . . . feeding our lives along wid the coal . . . caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!" In contrast, Yank, the alpha male in the group, is proud of being able to "breathe and swallow coal dust," as well as of being "de ting in coal dat makes it boin."³

In scene 2 the airy promenade deck replaces the suffocating and narrow spaces of the firemen's forecastle. Mildred and her aunt are displayed as two "incongruous, artificial figures," the former of whom is "all dressed in white."⁴ There is nothing of the innocence and purity traditionally associated with whiteness in Mildred's hue. On the contrary, Mildred's candor has more to do with "the whiteness of the whale" as Melville describes it in chapter 42 of Moby Dick, where the frightening and uncanny quality of whiteness is set against the cliché whereby white is the color of beauty, nobility, and virtue.⁵ Moreover, Mildred's whiteness foreshadows the uncanny whiteness of the Mannons' house in Mourning Becomes Electra. There, in Christine's view, the family mansion looks "like a sepulcher. The 'whited' one of the Bible—pagan temple front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness!"⁶ Similarly, in The Hairy Ape, O'Neill makes sure the audience will not miss the significance of Mildred's outstanding candor. Pressed by the Second Engineer to visit the stokehole in more appropriate attire, Mildred engages in a dialectical combat that ends with her final decision to wear "that very dress and nothing else." While the stokers' blackness and the aristocrats' whiteness visually stand out in the play from its beginning, it is only after his encounter with Mildred that Yank becomes aware of his color, along with the symbolic implications that it carries. Up to that point, the play's structure arguably echoes in an ironic way the biblical myth of Eden, with Yank being unaware of his blackness as Adam and Eve are unaware of being naked. It is only after seeing himself in the mirror of the eyes of his "dead white" opposite that Yank deliberately reaffirms his blackness by deciding not to remove the coal dust that "sticks like black make-up" on his face and body. Thus, in scene 4, "[h]e stands out in contrast to [the stokers], a blackened, brooding figure. He is seated forward on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin's 'The Thinker.'" The symbolism of Yank's makeup can now be discerned by his comrades, who assume the function of a Greek chorus.

VOICES—It'll stick to you.It'll get under your skin.Give yer the bleedin' itch, that's wot.It makes spots on you—like a leopard.Like a piebald nigger, you mean.Better wash up, Yank.You sleep better. Wash up, Yank.Wash up! Wash up!

Again, in scene 5, Yank stands apart both from his comrade Long and from the upper-class crowd on Fifth Avenue by appearing scruffy and unshaven, "as around his fierce, resentful eyes . . . the black smudge of coal dust still sticks like make-up."⁷

Both Yank's and the stokers' blackened faces and the puppet-like whiteness of Mildred and the aristocrats display the immobility and unnatural color that are typical of the mask. This anticipates the obsession with masks and mask-like characters that will inform most of O'Neill's

Fig. 2.

Louis Wolheim as Yank and the "gaudy marionettes" of Fifth Avenue in scene 5. Production by the Provincetown Players, Provincetown Playhouse, New York, 1922.

(© Vandamm theatrical photographs. Courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts / Billy Rose Theatre Division.)

subsequent writing. Aesthetics and history intertwine here, inasmuch as in the script of The Hairy Ape there is no explicit mention of masks. Still, the "procession of gaudy marionettes" in act 5 was masked in the original 1922 production of the play by the Provincetown Players.⁸

In "The Hairy Ape's Humanist Hell: Theatricality and Evolution in O'Neill's 'Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life," Erika Rundle reminds us: "The costume designer for the original production, Blanche Hays, first suggested using masks for the Fifth Avenue scene, an idea 'O'Neill took up . . . with enthusiasm.'"⁹ Given the influence that masks would exert upon O'Neill's work, I regard Blanche Hays's suggestion to use masks in The Hairy Ape as the ultimate and foremost legacy of the Provincetown Players upon O'Neill, which also makes The Hairy Ape a cornerstone of the playwright's whole corpus. Moreover, the mask-like quality that characterizes both the stokers' and the aristocrats' appearance configures both groups as opposed but complementary paradigms of frontality in Stoichita's sense, because the mask is a quintessential figure of frontality. To show a mask in profile would mean to show the device that keeps it fast on the face and, by so doing, to unmask it somehow.

As two opposing but complementary figures of frontality, Yank and Mildred (and the categories they represent as "their most highly developed individual[s]") can be seen as opposed paradigms of self-identity. Scene 5 effectively shows the two groups' inability not only to understand but to see one another, with Yank bumping time and again into people in a crowd who "seem neither to hear nor to see him." Complementary and still mutually exclusive, both categories lead lives of self-contentment—let us not forget that even Yank seems to be happy about his condition at the beginning of the play—their only retribution being the Eternal Return. Disguised in the paraphernalia of their respective classes, the characters in The Hairy Ape, including Yank, are actors compelled to play one and the same role forever. Hence the recurring imagery of imprisonment. Mildred compares herself to a captive leopard made conspicuous by its spots; Yank dreams of being "in a cage at de Zoo."¹⁰ Gilded or not, the cage is there, and they know it. The price of "belonging," namely of conforming to a pattern of self-identity that is inevitably self-referential, is the necessity to be forever the same.

This static condition continues until the impossible is made possible, when Yank and Mildred, the two opposite and irreconcilable selves, meet face to face in scene 3. Far from seeing one another, they each see the Other instead. This unnatural moment of merging between opposite and yet specular images generates Rodin's The Thinker, which is the chief figure of alterity in the play. To be sure the audience will not miss the importance of the moment, O'Neill deploys an array of mythical and symbolic imagery. Mildred gets ready to go down into the stokehole in her white dress. The Second Engineer remarks she will find it hot enough where they are going. She ironically replies, "Do you mean hell?" Biblical and mythological references overlap in the firemen's forecastle, too. There, the heat, the boilers, and the atmosphere so laden with coal dust that the single electric bulb overhead "sheds just enough light . . . to pile up masses of shadows everywhere" evoke scenes from Dante's Inferno; likewise, the dirty ladders and "dark alleyways" through which Mildred works her way down to the "cramped space in the bowels of a ship" recall the mytheme of the descent to the underworld as we have it not only in The Divine Comedy, but also in The Odyssey (Book XI) and The Aeneid (Book VI).¹¹

Fig. 3.

(Top left) Chris Sullivan as Yank in the 2009 production of The Hairy Ape by the Goodman Theatre, Chicago (photo by Eric Y. Exit); (Top right) Caravaggio, "Medusa" (1598). Florence, Uffizi. (Bottom left) Mildred in the 1926 production of The Hairy Ape by the Kamerny Theatre (detail). (Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.) (Bottom right) Arnold Böcklin, "Medusa" (1878).

At the end of the tunnel, Medusa's mask awaits both the characters and the audience of The Hairy Ape. As the mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant reminds us in "Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other," Medusa's head hung at the entrance to the kingdom of Hades. The function of the Gorgoneion, or Gorgo's mask, was precisely to keep apart the two worlds that must not come together:

In order to cross the threshold, one would have had to confront the face of terror, and, beneath its gaze, to have been transformed oneself into the image of Gorgo, into what which, in fact, the dead already are.

According to Vernant, Medusa's mask is also a quintessential figure of frontality:

In contrast to the figurative conventions determining Greek pictorial space, in the archaic period, the Gorgon is always, without exception, represented in full face. Whether mask or full figure, the Gorgon is at all times turned frontally toward the spectator who gazes back at her.¹²

In Vernant's interpretation, the face of Gorgo is the Other and the Same in one. It is the meeting with death, namely with one's own post-mortem double,

Fig. 4.

(Left) Caravaggio, Medusa (1598), Florence, Uffizi. The Gorgoneion is here portrayed in full face, as in Vernant's definition. (Right) Caravaggio, Narcissus (1597-99), by the same painter, in profile. (Rome, Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica.)

whose view turns into stone, that is, kills. As Philippe Dubois maintains, opposite to Medusa is Narcissus, who is also turned into stone when he sees his image in the mirror and fails to recognize himself.¹³ Both myths address the relationship of the Greek world with Sameness and Otherness, according to contemporary scholarship.¹⁴ As Medusa's stare unveils the Self behind the Other, Narcissus discovers the Other within the Self, which prevents him from self-recognition.

This very duality is to be observed in The Hairy Ape, too. Mildred and Yank cross stares, but what they actually see is "the terrifying horror of what which is absolutely other"—Gorgo's face:¹⁵

[Yank] sees Mildred, like a white apparition in the full light from the open furnace doors. He glares into her eyes, turned to stone. As for her, during his speech she has listened, paralyzed with horror, terror, her whole personality crushed, beaten in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless. As she looks at his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him, putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of his face, to protect her own.¹⁶

All elements of the encounter with Medusa are on display here—the petrified Yank, with Mildred trying to screen her eyes from the frightening view, both locked in a fixed gaze. As the production photograph makes clear, the scene is meant to be experienced by the audience in profile. Yank and Mildred, the two champions of self-identity, meet each other in full face. The audience sees them in profile, as Other. Out of this double take, the figure of Rodin's The Thinker is generated. Unapproachable, narcissistic, remote, and self-absorbed as it is, Rodin's figure appears as an embodiment of alterity in the play. Engendered by the view of the dead double (for Yank) and of the primeval beast (for Mildred) and portrayed as a statue, The Thinker stands as the necessary consequence of the encounter with Medusa. Hereafter, The Thinker will appear over and over in the play, once or twice in every scene. Travis Bogard maintains that the recurring reference to Rodin's statue does not improve the quality of the play.¹⁷ I argue that the image of the marble statue stands as a suitable symbol of Yank's failed (r)evolution. Five times out of six, it is Yank who "sits in the exact attitude of Rodin's 'The Thinker.'"¹⁸ It soon becomes clear that the main issue portrayed in the play is the impossibility of achieving mediation between the two irreconcilable worlds. It is, therefore, appropriate that Yank's endeavor to reach out to the Other—hence, his profile, in Stoichita's sense—will assume the form of an enigmatic marble statue, the least suitable form when it comes to signifying dynamism and potential change.

I have argued that The Hairy Ape can be regarded as a moral parable addressing Sameness and Otherness, whose protagonists are Yank's and Mildred's opposing self-identities—hence frontality—together with their

Fig. 5.

Carlotta Monterey as Mildred and Louis Wolheim as Yank in the Provincetown Players' 1922 production of The Hairy Ape at Plymouth Theatre

(© Abbe Studio, New York. Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)

complementary model of alterity—the marble statue. With such self-referential and mutually exclusive protagonists, the story that ensues necessarily configures as an unresolved and static narrative. All the more crucial to the economy of the play, therefore, becomes the presence of a transversal figure of in-betweenness: the ape. Situated halfway between the stoker's bestiality and Mildred's sophistication, the ape provides the missing trait d'union between two dimensions that are otherwise irreconcilable. A paragon of liminality, the simian figure clearly recalls evolutionism and anthropology. Both Rundle and Fintan O'Toole point this out while emphasizing the connection that exists between The Hairy Ape and the lively discussion about Darwinism in O'Neill's time. O'Toole goes even further and addresses the deep and subtle prejudice that associated bestiality, Irishness, and blackness in turn-of-the-century American fiction and media. O'Toole's analysis focuses, indeed, on those O'Neill plays that "explore the psychosis of an internalized racist stereotype: the fear that to be black and to be Irish is to be subhuman." To this end, O'Toole addresses "the so-called scientific racism" that was extremely popular in O'Neill's time. He recalls how even an overrefined Irishman like Oscar Wilde, visiting America in 1882, could be portrayed as "Mr Wild of Borneo" in the Washington Post, and how the climax of a popular New York play, The Irishman in London by William Macready, came with a character's remark that "the African and the Irishman were made for one another." O'Toole draws a connection between O'Neill's Irishness and his fear of regressing to bestiality, that is, of being figuratively "stripped naked" of the artifices of civilization.¹⁹

The argument is clearly pertinent to The Hairy Ape, too. Here, the stokers, who are portrayed and see themselves as the outcasts of the society, are made distinctive by their outstanding blackness, with the coal dirt making them look like "a piebald nigger."²⁰ Allusions to animals and beastly behavior are a leitmotiv in the play, all culminating in the ubiquitous image of the ape. And yet, in the economy of The Hairy Ape, the evolutionist connections that the simian figure brings along can also be viewed, from a much less diminishing standpoint, as the only element of mobility in a structure that is presented as purposely static. A model of liminality, in all senses, the ape comes to embody the psychopomp, a mythical figure of passage who appears in different cultures with the function of mediator between irreconcilable worlds, typically the dimension of the living and the land of the dead. Jungian psychology also appropriated the idea of the psychopomp as a "guide, which brings us into relation with the contents of the objective psyche."²¹ As a mediator between irreconcilable worlds or between rational and unendorsable psychic contents, the psychopomp stands as a powerful figure of in-betweenness, which in the case of The Hairy Ape also turns it into a primary engine of the theatrical action. The simian image, moreover, escapes the logic of frontality versus profile, or rather, it overcomes it. Due to its psychopompic nature, the ape can freely cross the imaginary borders that keep apart the opposing dimensions in the play: in the stokehole, in the prison scene (as a dream), in the Fifth Avenue scene (as an item in a shop window), as well as in the epilogue.

And yet, as we know, the mediation of the ape is bound to remain unsuccessful, which also determines the tragic quality of the play. The Hairy Ape comes to an end; Yank acknowledges that his intermediate condition is bound to fall back into its initial state of inarticulacy:

I belong wit 'em—but I don't, see? Dey don't belong wit me, dat's what. Get me? Tinkin' is hard. [. . .] I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nothin' dat's comin', on'y what's now—and dat don't belong. [. . .] I kin make a bluff at talkin' and tinkin'—a'most git away wit it—a'most!—and dat's where de joker comes in. [He laughs.] I ain't on oith and I ain't in heaven, get me? I'm in de middle tryin' to separate 'em, takin' all de woist punches from bot' of 'em. Maybe dat's what dey call hell, huh?²²

As the comparison between the two irreconcilable worlds par excellence, heaven and hell, is resumed in Yank's final speech, the spectator gets a glimpse of O'Neill's unshakeable distrust of man's capacity to change, let alone to evolve. In the late masterpieces characters are prisoners of a past they can escape only through pipe dreams. In The Hairy Ape, too, O'Neill presents his audience with a scenario of isolation in which interactions, situations, and social practices are all about building up walls rather than bridges.

In conclusion, The Hairy Ape deals with social issues through visual correlatives, patterns of alterity and identity, and mythical echoes that go far beyond the textual level of this work. In this way, O'Neill vents his tragic sense of life by addressing a subtextual dimension that reflects on the symbols he deploys. On the one hand, the use of color symbolism and of masks opens up to models of Sameness and Otherness whose interaction deepens and expands the understanding of the play; on the other hand, the presence of an intermediate or psychopompic figure, the ape, provides an element of transition among otherwise irreconcilable dimensions, these being Yank's and Mildred's conflicting self-identities as opposed to an equally static figure of alterity, the marble statue. In this sense, the simian figure and its visual personification in the play, the gorilla in scene 8, arguably represent Yank's attempt to get out of the cage of self-identity by reaching out to the Other. In his attempt to develop from "belonging" to a pattern of self-identity he shares with the stokers ("We belong and dey don't. Dat's all") to "belonging" to a wider notion of being human, Yank finds himself in a vulnerable in-between condition ("I belong wit 'em—but I don't, see?"). There he begins to identify with the ape, in the double meaning of subhuman, or rather, not-yet-human figure and of psychopompic force. Petrified by the gaze of the Other and rejected by the world ("Dey don't belong wit me, dat's what"), Yank will not be able to complete his evolution from "filthy beast" through apeman to man.²³ Stuck halfway between identity and Otherness, he ends up trapped in another cage, that of in-betweenness. Unwelcome to the world as a disturbing and unresolved figure, he is marginalized both by his former comrades and by the respectable Fifth Avenue marionettes, and eventually forced to leave the scene, in all senses.

O'Neill conveys the gist of his moral parable mainly on the subtextual level. This combination of mythopoetic attitude and nonverbal communication is one of O'Neill's key contributions to theatrical vocabulary. Conceived at an early stage of O'Neill's career, this bent for magnifying the meaning of the written text through a rich network of visual, symbolical, and mythical references would become a trademark of the playwright's best writing. In addition, the interest in nonverbal forms of expression applied to the theatre links O'Neill's aesthetics to Antonin Artaud's wish for new theatrical forms that would "put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text."²⁴ Elaborating Artaud's ideas, Jacques Derrida also regards nonverbal communication as a possible solution to what he sees as "the erasure of the stage" in Occidental culture. Enticed by the power of the written means, the theater is at constant risk of obliterating its potential as a performing art:

For a stage which does nothing but illustrate a discourse is no longer entirely a stage. Its relation to speech is its malady, and "we repeat that the epoch is sick." To reconstitute the stage, finally to put on stage and to overthrow the tyranny of the text is thus one and the same gesture. "The triumph of pure mise en scène."²⁵

In the frame of this ongoing discourse on the scope and forms of theatrical practice, O'Neill's nonverbal mythopoesis can also be regarded as the playwright's personal contribution to the search for a valid alternative to the "erasure of the stage" in Artaud's and Derrida's sense.