The Hairy Ape Background

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Written by Timothy Sexton

Eugene ONeil had a life before he became Americas first great playwright. A life lived on the
sea. And it was during that time spent aboard ship that word arrived concerning the fate of one
his fellow crewmembers from a previous voyage. That shipmate was named Driscoll and his fate
was death by his own hand. Like other members of the crew aboard ship for that particular
voyage, ONeill spent more than a little of the lazy hours between furiously busy work episodes
mulling over the exact nature of things behind Driscolls suicide. Charged by the nature of his
attraction to progressive social theories and politics, ONeill finally landed upon what he felt was
an explication for the mans decision to end things that was at least as reasonable as any other
theories being floated around: Driscoll had become hopelessly lodged within that craw of
modern society which impacted those stuck within by a desperate feeling of not being able to fit.
Driscoll had left humanity on his own terms, in other words, because of the recognition that he
simply did not belong.

This philosophical explanation informed by a progressive social and political morality swirled
around inside ONeills head well after he had put the specifics of Driscolls suicide out of his
mind. What began eating at the playwrights imagination was this possibility that everybody at
one time or another struggled with this sense of failing to belong and how the only way to attain
that sense and become comfortable both inside ones own body and outside it among society
could be traced back to the ancient Greek imperative to know thyself. Only by recognizing the
truths about oneself and accepting those truths could one come to such a state of knowledge and
this knowledge, in turn, would lead directly to the satisfaction of feeling that one belonged.

And so was formed the philosophical foundation of a dramatic exercise in Expressionism

through which ONeill would explore this Darwinian idea of the fundamental nature of man. In
this way, The Hairy Ape can be better appreciated for its decided rejection of realism and
naturalism as ONeill attempts to impose almost a classical sense of ancient Greek drama upon
the modern story of an apish sailor struggling to rise to his level of self-knowledge for the
attainment of a sense of belonging. But theres also a modern twist that the Greek tragedians did
not have to deal with and that almost literally throws a monkey wrench into the mariners
struggle.
ONeills sailor is more than just a hirsute example of the uneducated brute thinking he can get
through life on the basis of his physical strength alone. He is also a man of the Industrial
Revolution and here is where the ONeills politics plug into the conception of the drama as a
modernist update of classic Greek tragedy. The titular character in The Hairy Ape struggling
toward the next stage of Darwinian evolution must face obstacles beyond coming to grips with
the truths about himself he may not be prepared to face. He must also come to grips with how
society had rigged achieving a sense of belonging against him. In the end, the fictional
doppelganger of the real-life Driscoll is not just a hairy apeman, but also a mechanical man
trapped within the cogs of class distinction and in O'Neill's original vision, his journey into New
York City becomes a highly theatrical Expressionist trip into a hellish self-revelation.