A ghost in the expressionist jungle of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Carme Manuel

      It is the educated black that criticizes
   me most harshly. They ask why I
   should take the role of a thief, murderer,
   and ignoramus. Of course, Brutus
   Jones isn't much of a criminal--that is,
   his crimes are treated ill a friendly way
   and the audience takes them lightly[...].
   But I tell my friends who protest
   against Brutus Jones that stage characters
   are mere stage characters. You
   take them as you find them.

      I ask them to consider that the worthy
   presentation of a character by a
   negro actor is a credit to our race, even
   though the character itself is unworthy.
   The better educated negroes
   understand this and are extremely
   sympathetic toward my work. (qtd. in
   Krasner 486)

In this light, the issues of Gilpin's drinking and his persistent efforts to edit the play himself seem not whimsy or petulance but tension and suffering, results of his encounters with what Louis Sheaffer distinguishes as two different O'Neills. Sheaffer argues that the early part of the playwright's life consisted of "the scornful youth who wrote to his parents that 'the natives are the lowest, laziest, most ignorant bunch of brainless bipeds that ever polluted a land,' " and the later part of a grown man who "distilled his experience for a drama of poetic fantasy and nightmarish beauty" to become "the empathizing artist who stripped Brutus Jones of his veneer of civilization to reveal the primitive soul, fearful and superstitious, that lurks in us all" (152). A black-white polarity infuses other of O'Neill's later plays, including The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings (Raleigh 210). (13) His manipulation of the African American experience stands, on the one hand, as evidence of the growing white interest in using black life for artistic expression, and on the other hand, of his attempts to conflate avant-garde theatrical techniques with what Toni Morrison calls the presence of "the Africanist other" (Playing in the Dark 16). Yet to judge The Emperor Jones as merely a successful offspring of the "Negro" fad of the 1920s is to underrate both O'Neill's dramatic skill and the play's power as black representation, even if the latter is controversial. The Emperor Jones grows out of O'Neill's experiments with Expressionism. The results included muddled avant-garde theatrical staging techniques and insensitive and maladroit portraits of African Americans (Cooley 55). (14)

If Sheaffer reads two stages in the playwright's life, Robert Brustein divides O'Neill's career into two distinct stages, which differ not only in his changing position in the official culture, but also in changes in style, subject matter, form and posture. The first stage, beginning with the S. S. Glencairn plays (1913-1916) and ending with Days Without End (1932-1933) is of historical rather than artistic interest. These plays--and though Brustein does not mention The Emperor Jones, it should be included here--illustrate O'Neill's early links to the theatre of revolt. The second stage, preceded by a transitional play, Ah Wilderness! (1932), contains A Touch of the Poet (1935-1942) and the unfinished More Stately Mansions (1935-1941), both from the cycle, The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Long Day's Journey into Night (1939-1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). A Long Day's and The Iceman are especial examples of the highly personal revolt that O'Neill pulled out of his own suffering. These two stages show his "development from a self-conscious imitative pseudo-artist into a genuine tragic dramatist with a uniquely probing vision" (Brustein 324).