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The Hairy Ape is mainly a one-character drama, truly a character study of Robert Smith, better known in the play as Yank.
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
Yank is the leader of the stokers who feed the furnaces in a repetitive and grotesque manner. He represents the unthinking, voiceless working class. Yank, the hero of the play, is seen sitting in the foreground. He looks “broader, fiercer, more truculent (violent), more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest”. The stokers “respect his superior strength - the ungrudging respect of fear”. This inferno of simian (ape-like) creatures is dominated by the mighty Yank.
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.
AS A LEADER
Yank’s fellow stokers regard him as their most highly developed individual. Yank expresses a force of indomitable conviction, the lord of the forecastle, untroubled by doubt or drink. He would snub those in a tone of contemptuous authority for disturbing the peace of the stokehole. Without his shovel, nothing moves in it.
GUIDING SPIRIT OF THE SHIP
To Yank, the modem coal-driven and steel-reinforced era have given men like him more power, and he does not even consider what may have been sacrificed for that power. Yank, whose identity is completely tied up in being the most powerful of the stokers who provide the power for the ocean liner. He fancies himself as the prime mover, the elemental power of modernity superior even to the wealth of the capitalists who might seem to be the ship’s driving. Unlike Paddy and Long, Yank feels himself indispensable for the ship for he makes it move: “And I’m steel-steel steel! I’m de muscles in steel, de punch behind it!”
YANK’S FUTILE EFFORTS TO BELONG
Yank’s demoralizing confrontation with Mildred destroys him psychologically, leading him to question both himself and society. His steadfast conviction about his identity and sense of belonging is shattered, not by the hard blows of the ruling class but by a glance leveled by a weak, frivolous woman. This is the greatest blow to Yank’s belief as well as to his concept of belongingness. Humiliated by Mildred, Yank is seated in the firemen’s forecastle on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin’s “The Thinker”. He has stopped eating and refused to wash himself. He begins to think that he, who is so proud of his strength, suffers humiliation at the hands of a woman who is, physically so weak and faint, should have, in turn, appreciated his masculinity. His bodily strength which has claimed superiority although has been identified with the bodily strength of an animal. The body, which has been his only source of pride, becomes a prison for him. After that terrible encounter, he no longer feels that he ‘belongs.’ Yank would square with her for calling him a hairy ape. He tells Long: “Tink I’m goin’ to let her get away wit dat stuff’. His subsequent efforts to impinge his identity on the Church-goers finally landed him in jail. Yank’s urge for belongingness, his search for identity, carries him to the office of I.W.W an organization which fights for the cause of workers. Unfortunately, there also he fails to find an answer to his problem of belongingness. Ironically, Yank’s final desperate effort to belong to his look-alike gorilla ends in his destruction.
STRANGE PROLETARIAN FIGURE
Yank is a rare character for O’Neill. Whereas many of his figures are driven by the will to power and possessiveness, Yank seeks neither, and until he is inflicted with an insult that goes to the core of his being, he is at one with himself and his occupation. But once he is thrown into utter disorientation, the object of desire is to wreak revenge on the society he hates. He is a strange proletarian figure, one who can cope with a life of exploitation but collapses into a question mark at the first touch of humiliation.
ANTI-ROMANTIC
Yank shows no fascination for the life of romance. Nothing troubles him; he never thinks of God or fate, of home or society. He has no place in his heart for the romantic past of Paddy, nor has any idea to consider the sense of beauty. His only pride is that he ‘belongs’. He calls all women as “tarts” and cannot be relied upon.
He dismisses Paddy’s condemnation of life on sailing ships as “dead” and “a dope dream”.
A SYMBOLIC CHARACTER
All the characters in The Hairy Ape are symbolic but not lifeless. Yank is not so much an actual character as a symbol for the oppressed working class in general. Yank emerges as a symbol during the course of The Hairy. Ape. He hardly remains a man because he has lost most of his human qualities. “Yank is”, observes B. H. Clark, “supernatural, more or less an abstraction, an idea”.
The hero and the heroine remain symbols. Yank both looks and acts like a “hairy ape”, while Mildred is described as an “incongruous artificial figure”. Yank is always smudged with symbolic “black” who shows his social inferior status, while Mildred is “dressed all in white” which is symbolic of her superior social ranking.
YANK VERSUS SOCIETY
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 modem Machine Age. It is a deliberate humiliation and dehumanization of the underprivileged section of the American society.
YANK’S CONCEPT OF HOME
Unlike his fellow stokers, Yank considers ship as his home. It is his “meat” without which he cannot survive. He tells them, ‘Dis is home’ and none awaits them at home. For Yank, girls are like ‘tarts’ i.e. prostitutes who are undependable and saleable. He has no desire to go back home because none waits for him. Being mobile, he himself does not wait for anyone: “I don’t wait for no one. I keep on de move”. Personally, Yank has no desire to return to his parental home which he had left as a kid in acute poverty and frustration.
CRITIC OF CAPITALISM
Yank is a vehement critic of capitalism in ‘The Hairy Ape’. It is anti-poor and exploits the workers for serving its commercial interests only. Yank calls the capitalists ‘baggage’ and lifeless who can never belong. He calls the church-goers “Bums! Pigs! Tarts! Bitches!” when they refused even to look at him. A female member of the church-goers calls Yank “Monkey fur” which forces him to address her as a “white-faced tart”. Furious, Yank threatens to “hairy ape” her for this indecent remark.
NO FAITH IN LAW
Yank has no faith in-laws which are anti-workers. He tells Long to hell with “law and governments” which are pro-capitalists. He equally ridicules the contention of Long that “we are born free and equal in the sight of God”. He also rejects the idea of Long that votes can bring about any qualitative change in the proletarians (workers): “Votes is a joke, see votes for women”. Unlike Long, Yank wants to change the unequal conditions of society by violent means (dynamite) and not by legitimate peaceful means. He discloses his mission of joining I. W. W. to the Secretary to blow up the factory, the works, where Mildred’s father makes the steel.
ATTITUDE TOWARDS RELIGION
Yank occasionally used to attend the church as a kid. He was forced by his old man and woman to attend the Sunday church services who never attended themselves.
CONCLUSION
Yank is the leader of the stokers who feed the furnaces in a repetitive and grotesque manner. He represents the unthinking, voiceless working class. Yank expresses a force of indomitable conviction, the lord of the forecastle. Yank feels himself indispensable for the ship for he makes it move. Yank shows no fascination for the life of romance His only pride is that he ‘belongs’. Yank is not so much an actual character as a symbol for the oppressed working class in general. Yank is brutalized by an impersonal and mechanical social order. Unlike his fellow stokers, Yank considers ship as his home. Yank is a vehement critic of capitalism in ‘The Hairy Ape’. Yank has no faith in laws which are anti-worker.