Discuss The Hairy Ape as a Social Satire.

The Hairy Ape as a Social Satire

 
Literature of all types during the last sixty years has dealt with social problems. Social protest has been the moving spirit in literature since the days of Zola. In The Hairy Ape O'Neill reveals himself in sympathy with this tradition, with the one difference that he is not dealing with the condemnation of a particular political order. His problem is the deeper one of the psychological implications of the machine age. His predecessors might have shown how Yank lost his job and finally through starvation was led to crime to support himself and family, or some similar theme. But it should be remembered that Yank's problem was not loss of work. He could have had all the work he wanted. Furthermore, O'Neill does not appeal to the emotions by having Yank lose a sweetheart, mother, or children. Yank is alone as far as any family connections are concerned. It is not work that Yank is seeking. What Yank wants is to know that he "belongs." He wants to find out what it is that has happened to the world which separates him from the realization that what he is doing is a necessary and a fitting part of the life of the world.

 

In pursuit of the answer to this problem he receives blows and insults--no insult greater than that which is expressed in the typical speech of the senator who attributes to the workers all the sins of which he and his class are guilty. The real danger to modern civilization is the stupidity and timidity of the ruling classes. Therein lies the real drama of this play. It is not that Yank as an individual moves the audience very deeply. He is neither charming nor likable, nor capable of arousing deep emotion as a person. Had O'Neill meant this play to be the tragedy of Yank, he would have made him a more likeable character. But Yank is more than an individual. He is a symbol of the deep protest that rises like a wave against the whole structure of modern civilization. He is man crying out against a system which has not only exploited man's body but his spirit as well. The play is not a protest against low wages and unemployment as is the case in the traditional social drama, Hauptmann's The Weavers, for example, but it is a condemnation of the whole structure of machine civilization, a civilization which succeeds only when it destroys the psychological well-being of those who make it possible. It is this which gives the play universality and enlists the sympathy and understanding of the audience. It is a play which might be called by any of the many titles of books that describe the disintegration of modern civilization; it is a part of the Decline of the West.

Because of its deep psychological and philosophical implication The Hairy Ape cannot be classed with a type of social drama which solves a problem and points a way out. The sickness of the machine age is not wholly a problem of relating production and consumption. It goes much deeper than that. The whole concept of life, of man's relation to the world, of his place in it is involved. Yank was not concerned about distribution --vitally important as that is--he wanted to be a creative part of the social structure, and no man working in the stoke-hole of a liner, or making the two hundred and fifty-sixth part of a shoe in regulation eight-hour shifts can ever "belong" in the same sense that man belonged as a creative worker in the eighteenth century. Yank is a protest against the mordant success of the machine age.

O'Neill makes this clear as Yank moves from one defeat to another striving vainly to find some answer to his problem. In prison he heard of the I. W. W.s and thought to find among them an answer. They threw him into the street, just as the Communists of today would deny him a place. The Communists would not accept Yank, because Yank is an individualist not a party man. What he wants is to be a creative worker proud of what he as an individual has created.

Yank's speech after he has been thrown from the I. W. W.'s headquarters is an explicit summary of the whole situation. O'Neill shows that wages, distribution, shorter hours and all the rest of it is no solution. Yank in the pose of "The Thinker" reviews the whole situation, ending by admitting that his greatest crime was that of being born. Yank speaks, referring first to the men who threw him out into the street.