Marxism in The Hairy Ape

In the play, “The Hairy Ape,” Eugene O’Neill presents a sharp division among social classes, which he illustrates by presenting strong contrasts between the world of the ship workers (proletariat) and that of the cruise-goer (bourgeoisie). In Gundrisse, Karl Marx wrote of the necessity to fully understand the significance and impact of the class delineations, he posited that “classes, again are but an empty word unless we know what are the elements on which they are based, such as wage-labor, capital, etc.” (Grundisse, 650). All of the characters representative of wage earners are depicted as base and dirty and struggling with their identity in the shifting modernity of the world in which they find themselves. Initially the character of Yank glories in his role in society, though uneducated and unsophisticated, he realizes that the cruise goers (bourgeoisie) require his labor to continue their pleasure or artificially created world. He takes pride in his role in society and identifies with the material – steel – which gives him both his identity and his value, saying “ I’m de ting in gold dat makes it money! And I’m what makes iron into steel!....And I’m steel-steel-steel! I’m muscles in steel, de punch behind it! (Hairy, 1183) In this passage Yank is giving voice to Marx’s notion that the “the productive activity of the worker, the creative power whereby the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but gives to the accumulated labor a greater value than it previously possessed” (Wage, 663). O’Neill creates a dark and grimy world below the decks of the cruise ship which is portrayed as a prison where the workers are confined not by bars but by the steel that they make . Their workplace is likened to a prison or a cage (confining spaces generally made of steel) from which the workers are unable to escape.
Yank’s character is transformed by an encounter with a representative of the bourgeoise, Mildred Douglas. She represents the artificial, clean and smooth running world above the ship deck, which Yank’s labor benefits on two levels. Mildred literally profits from Yank’s labor while on the ship, but the reader also learns that the ship belongs to the company which Mildred’s family owns - and therefore she (by extension) owns Yank’s labor.
The position of the cruise goers is highly contrasted with against that of the laborer. A key figure representative of the bourgeoisie is Mildred Douglas. She expresses a need to tour the workings of the ship, and it is during Scene III that she (dressed in a clean white dress) descends to the ship’s bulks and encounters Yank and the barbarity of his conditions and role that her style of living necessitates. Her repulsion of the image of the laborer nearly causes her faint and she is quickly removed from the hellish stokehole. She is horrified by his animal like face, her reaction is shocking to hurtful to him and he lashes out at her angrily. As she is being taken away she likens him to a filthy beast. The final scene of the play reveals Yank at the zoo in front of the gorilla exhibit. He feels akin to these creatures who are brutish and wild and are confined because of the very characteristics which are essential to their identity. Yank concludes that he is truly like them, beast like -a “hairy ape” - who must be caged. Yank’s ideology of being bound by the characteristics of your identity is an ideology which “only need to be ‘interpreted’ to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology=illusion/allusion)” (Althusser, 693).
According to Marxist philosophy, Yank’s belief referenced early in the play, that “we run de whole woiks. All de rich guys dat tink dey’re somep’n, dey ain’t nothing!” would be viewed as partially true. Marx believed in the notion that there was a reciprocal relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeois, in which the worker produced for the benefit of the owner, but the owner gave the wage earner identity and value through their work. Marx would also argue that the worker would not be able to produce anything without the raw materials provided to him by the owner. The owner owned all of the laborers hourly production, the resources used in production and therefore was the sole beneficiary of the finished product. But Yank’s character grasped a fundamental Marxist ideal that the bourgeois class is only able to exisist because of the labor base which provides its wealth. Yank is correct in his belief that without the production and symbiosis of the relationship between the two classes, both fail.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 693-702

O’Neill, Eugene. “The Hairy Ape.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. D. Ed. Lauter, Paul. Boston: Houghton, 2006. 1177-1208.

Marx, Karl. “Grundisse.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 650-652.

Marx, Karl. “Wage Labor and Capital” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 659-664