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INTRODUCTION
O’Neill possesses a rare tragic sense and his vision of life is extremely tragic. The Hairy Ape is chiefly known for its tragic beauty and sublimity. As a dramatist, O’Neill has displayed a very intimate and first hand grasp of the causes that make the modern life so tragic and unbearable. He has imparted an element of truth to drama. O’Neill’s clear-cut fascination for tragedy is shown in his deliberate neglect of melodrama, farce and comedy.
SOURCES OF TRAGEDY
MECHANIZATION OF MODERN LIFE
It is the excessive mechanization of modern life that often causes tragedy in O’Neill’s plays. It generates a sense of loneliness and insecurity and destabilizes the life of the poor workers. In The Hairy Ape, Yank is brutalized by an impersonal and mechanical social order. It is the society which frustrates the efforts of Yank to belong and made his life unbearable and worthless. The play is an open denunciation of the whole structure of the modern Machine Age. It is a protest against willful humiliation and dehumanization of the underprivileged section of the American society. Yank, who challenges the supremacy of the capitalist class, has to sacrifice his life for his rude behavior in the Fifth Avenue.
FAILURE TO BELONG
In The Hairy Ape, Yank desires an ideal brotherhood of man which finally ends in his destruction and death. All his illusions of belongingness in this hostile capitalist world are badly shattered in the end of the play. All his attempts to destroy society end in his destruction. He discovers in the end that he can never belong. He realizes that it is sin to be born in this world in which the petty workers like him are treated like hairy apes and denied any individuality or self-respect.
ILLUSION VS REALITY
The conflict between reality and illusion can also cause tragedy in a drama. The sufferings of O’Neill’s tragic heroes may be attributed to their failure to discriminate between the world of dream and world of reality. His characters have to face destruction and death because they refuse to give up romantic dreams. For them, dream is attractive and vital but reality is repulsive and unbearable. O’Neill’s heroes are the willing victims of romantic illusions and his plays dramatize the tragic defeat of the romantic ideal in actual life. They finally go down fighting and suffer defeat.
In The Hany Ape Yank’s illusion of belongingness is shattered at various stages in his quest for identity. He is finally crushed by the gorilla when he tries to belong to it in the end of the play.
CONSCIOUS-UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT
The struggle between the conscious and the unconscious can also create tragic tensions in his plays. O’Neill’s dramas are rightly called “the dramas of soul”. He often explores the hidden mind i.e. the unconscious which is the store-house of all the social values. For O’Neill, the primal urges relate the mind to the external problems. The dramatist is in favor of giving top priority to the exploration of the unconscious mind. In The Hairy Ape. Yank’s mind is all split up as a result of the inner struggle which threatens his very existence.
TRAGIC HERO
Yank, in The Hairy Ape, is just a poor worker having no place in any social setup. Yet Yank is exalted by the very intensity of his excessive obsessions. There is nothing mean or petty about him but there is the transfiguring nobility of tragedy in as near the Greek sense as possible.
STRUGGLE
Characters face a life-and-death struggle in a tragedy but they never accept defeat or give up fighting. Defiant courage is the keynote of them all. A never-failing spirit of defiance is die chief quality of O’Neill’s tragic heroes. They are unable to dominate forces which they do not understand or master, but they continue to rebel against the world in which they born and brought up. They may be crushed or defeated, but they never plead for forgiveness. Yank, in The Hairy Ape, spares no efforts to avenge his humiliation suffered at the hands of Mildred Douglas and shows a rare defiant courage although he is killed by the gorilla in his effort to belong. He has displayed rare guts to challenge single-handedly not only Mildred but also the rich community to which she belongs.
SUFFERINGS
O’Neill’s tragic hero possesses spiritual nobility or nearly comes to possess it at the time of his undoing. There is the courageous affirmation of life in the face of individual defeat and his efforts become ennobled and his defeats become victories in the march of eternity. O’Neill’s protagonist clings to his position tenaciously. “He is”, says Egil Tornqvist, “therefore only seemingly defeated: spiritually he is triumphant”. Yank, in The Hairy Ape, finally nearly realizes his cherished sense of belongingness and gains spiritual nobility in the end of the play. Thus, he emerges a victor in the spiritual scale through his prolonged intense sufferings.
HORRIBLE SHIP-LIFE
“Ship” symbolizes a miniature form of the external world. The life on the ship is constantly marked by restlessness and uncertainties. In The Hairy Ape, the life on the ship points to the short and precarious existence of man on earth. Ship is “steel frame-work of a cage” and sailors look like animals caged in it. The sailors work under inhuman conditions and are denied every type of freedom. The life on the ship is like life in hell where there is perpetual darkness. The horrors and tortures of this place may be noticed in this heart-rending picture of the life of sailors: “The ceiling crushes down upon the men’s heads. They cannot stand upright. This accentuates the natural stooping posture which shoveling coal and the resultant over-development of back and shoulder muscles have given them”.
CONCLUSION
O’Neill possesses a rare tragic sense and his vision of life is characteristically tragic. O’Neill’s tragedies have been universally praised for their tragic intensity and sublimity. The main sources of tragedy are man’s sense of alienation from himself; society, Nature and God. The sense of loneliness plays havoc with man’s desire to communicate with others to survive in this hostile world. The mad pursuit of the philosophy of materialism destabilizes man’s life in the modern times. In The Hairy Ape, Yank is brutalized by an impersonal and mechanical social order. It is the society which remains hostile to Yank and has made his life unbearable and worthless. The play is an open denunciation of the whole structure of the modern Machine Age. The conflict between reality and illusion produces tragic tensions in man’s life on earth. The struggle between the conscious and the unconscious also creates tragic tensions in his The Hairy Ape. Yank is exalted by the very intensity of his excessive obsessions. He emerges a victor in the spiritual scale through his prolonged intense sufferings.