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

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

By the time O'Neill begins to write, as Raleigh explains, the theatre of revolt is an established movement in every country except the United States, where the theatre has not gone beyond the commercialism of 19th-century playwrights. The drama of the continent constitutes an untapped mine of material, and O'Neill, recognizing its potentialities, becomes the first dramatist to exploit it with the aid of the Provincetown Players. During this first period, especially with The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, O'Neill breaks away from Ibsen's influence and from what he regarded as the limitations of the straight, naturalistic dramatic form, with symbolic settings and other non-naturalistic devices, since he was attempting, among other things, to create depth and complexity of human character. This kind of practice reached its climax with the various experiments with masks, asides, and soliloquies that dominated his work in the middle and late '20s and early '30s, especially in The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, and Days Without End (203). Thus, O'Neill's work "tends to be Expressionist in its symbolic structure and messianic in its artistic stance" (Brustein 325). Brustein judges the playwright's early work as "clearly the offshoot of a very intellectualistic mind, attuned more to literature than to life. Aligning himself with the more radical of the rebel dramatists, he is soon impersonating their postures, imitating their doctrines, and copying their techniques." And, in these early plays, the European influence can be traced to the Expressionist playwright August Strindberg (326). When The Emperor Jones premiered, Quinn saw O'Neill's departure from traditional emaciated American drama: for him, The Emperor Jones "marks a progress in O'Neill's art. In it he discarded any attempt at arrangement into acts, and dealt with the theme progressively in eight scenes. He also defied the old theatrical rule against monologue and created a moving and enthralling drama which is largely carried on by the utterances of one character" (178).

In The Emperor Jones O'Neill's experimentation of new techniques draws its inspiration from Expressionism. (15) This artistic style is characterized by extreme subjectivity, violent emotion, and the stretching of any given medium to its expressive limits. It flourished in Central Europe from about 1900 to 1935, to turn against the objective representation of nature and society express subjective or inner "reality." Particularly in Germany, where it peaked during World War I (1914-1918), Expressionism rejected the established authority of the army, the schools, the patriarchal family, and the emperor to side with outsiders: the poor, the oppressed, prostitutes, madmen, and tormented youth. The movement gave an exalted role to artistic creators, expecting them to lead the way to the establishment of a new order and most of all to the evolution of a new human experience.

The theater of Expressionism began in Berlin in 1918 with the production of Ernst Toller's Die Wandlung, subtitled A Man's Wrestling. Like many later Expressionist dramas, it focused on a leading character who acts as the dramatist-poet's alter ego and progresses through stations to an enlightenment in which he leads his people to fulfillment in revolution. The dramatic stress is on language, often profoundly lyrical at the expense of plot and psychologically drawn characters. Works by August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind were frequently revived in Germany during the 1920s, influencing the development of this drama. Moreover, Expressionist drama attempts to exteriorize inner psychic states in the human being. Expressionists argue for the necessity to reinstitute spectacularity by returning to the origins of drama and borrowing their expressive resources. One of these is the use of masks with their implied psychic penetration and emotional power. Another is the use of the choir. However, what Expressionists repudiate from classical drama is the concept of Aristotelian mimesis and the rigidity of its classical unities. Expressionist drama searches for a retrieval of human beings to redeem them from the dehumanized state in which industrialism and materialism have plunged them. Another trait common to Expressionist authors is the profound emotional and visual content of their artistic works, which invariably appeal to human spiritual values. The leading character (or author-hero) in an Expressionist play often pours out his or her soul in long monologues, usually couched in an elliptical language that is not so much framed to carry statements as to emit what is called the Expressionist Schrei (scream).