"Vital contact": Eugene O'Neill and the working class

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Patrick J. Chura

The first assault on Yank's cohesiveness comes from Long, the socialist activist who attempts to induce Yank to embrace class consciousness by blanketing his experience in the vocabulary of the class war. Calling the stokers "Comrades" (125) who have been made "wage slaves" by "the damned Capitalist clarss," Long offers socialist terminology as a way of superficially reordering Yank's relation to his environment. But Yank rejects Long's theorization of labor as "Salvation Army-Socialist bull" that he has heard before. His response emphasizes two points. First, Long's view involves a loss of masculinity because it responds verbally rather than physically to material conditions: "Talk is cheap," Long is told, and "the job" that "takes a man" is what "belongs." Under Yank's direction, Long is called cowardly and reminded that "we don't need no one cryin' over us.... Makin' speeches" (128). Second, Long's socialism involves an unwelcome recognition of the inherent powerlessness of the laboring class--a cancellation of Yank's fantasy of cohesiveness: "Slaves, hell! We run de whole woiks" (129). Yank's contempt for Long's outlook therefore stems from its implicit denial of his superior relation to the higher-ups on the social scale. Revealingly, Long fails to influence Yank because his "talk" is insufficient to induce Yank to contemplate an interconnected relation between the upper and lower classes: "What's dem slobs in the foist cabin got to do wit us?" (125).

Later in scene 1, the Irishman Paddy attempts to awaken Yank to another essential feature of modern working-class life--alienation from contact with a natural environment as a result of technological progress. Paddy nostalgically describes the now-numbered days of sailing vessels, when "men belonged to ships ... a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of the ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one" (126). Yank's response is to claim an identity that he admits is "new stuff" but apparently no less spiritually satisfying because he feels himself a part of the engines. Not needing the wind and the sun to which Paddy refers, Yank resolves to "eat up the coal dust" and dismisses Paddy as he does Long: "I belong and he don't" (128). Thus Yank's state of being in scene 1 allows him both to function in a manufactured security and to be a "man" to himself--an insular position, but one tenable enough to withstand assaults from within his own class.

Scene 2 introduces and describes Mildred Douglas, a "bored" dogooder who has been playing at social work, experiencing the "morbid thrills of social service" (131) on New York's Lower East Side, and who is attempting to use her influence as the daughter of a steel magnate to arrange a tour of the ship's stokehole in order to "see how the other half lives." Mildred is now on her way to England on a journey her aunt refers to as a "slumming international." Like Yank, she is outwardly arrogant about the position--a credentialed worker for social reform--that she has achieved within her own milieu, but her "superiority" (130) is "discontented" and "disdainful" even toward her formidable aunt.