In the Service of Man: Women and Male Racial Mobility in The Emperor Jones

On November 1, 1920 in a tiny playhouse on Macdougal Street, the Provincetown Players wowed audiences with Eugene O'Neill's newest play, The Emperor Jones. The company's reputation for innovation and controversy was outdone by this latest performance. In the first week of the production, critics from major newspapers, who generally gave second billing to off-Broadway shows, clamored along with hundreds of other patrons to have a peek at the Emperor: "They are turning away dozens. People squat on their coats on the hard and not immaculate floors, or sit cheerfully on radiators, or stand patiently for two hours while the tragedy of fear of a Negro porter and ex-convict, turned primitive man again, unfolds itself before the fascinated imagination" (Castellun 1).

The Emperor Jones's level of success is legendary. In the first week alone more than one thousand subscrip tions were sold and the uniqueness of the production cat apulted it to Broadway. The play also transformed Eugene O'Neill, largely an unknown, into the Great American playwright, or as Heywood Broun of the New York Tribune wrote:

"Perhaps we ought to be a little more courageous and say right out the best of American playwrights, but somehow or other a superlative carries the implication of a certain static quality. We never see a play by O'Neill without feeling that something of the sort will be done better within a season or so, and that O'Neill will doit" (1).

Touring continuously during the 1920s, The Emperor Jones enjoyed numerous revivals in various New York theatres. In 1933, the same year the film version premiered, Louis Gruenberg transformed the play into an opera for the Metropolitan Opera. Additionally, there have been a seemingly incalculable number of productions of the play over the last eighty years. The Emperor Jones was also twice adapted for the radio, first in 1971 and then in 1990 with James Earl Jones playing the title role.1 Most recently, in 1999, the Library of Congress announced that it would allocate grant funds received from the Pew Charitable Trust for the restoration of "the renowned 1933 film starring Paul Robeson" (Library). The play now pervades critical race theory syllabi in U.S. universities.2 Because the play has been explicitly and tacitly deemed a significant object of U.S. cultural history and a narrative meriting preservation, analysis of The Emperor Jones must be ethical, focusing on the reasons for the "distance between what is and what ought to be" (de Certeau 199, emphasis added).

Nevertheless, in its early inceptions, the play was not embraced by all of its audiences. In an anecdote frequently cited by contemporary critics, Langsten Hughes recounted a Harlem audience's distaste for the play in their shouts: '"Why don't you come on out o' that jungle - back to Harlem where you belong?'" (Pfister 130). Likewise, Charles Gilpin, the African American actor who created the role of the Emperor, was recurrently forced to defend what some considered a negative characterization of African Americans (Krasner 189-205).

The Emperor Jones also received mixed responses from prominent African American cultural leaders in the 1920s. Occasionally, these critics were even ambivalent within a single criticism. W.E.B, Du Bois, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer all commented on the play, but as theatre scholar Susan Curtis notes, most concerned themselves with praise of Gilpin rather than with plot analysis or even explication (217). The reasons for these guarded analyses remain debatable, but they do indicate the difficulty faced by African Americans in negotiating desired visibility, stereotypes, and representation.3

Since the play's premiere, the narrative has been embroiled in a debate regarding the representation of race on the U.S. stage and in film. However, critical analysis has almost exclusively focused on the implications of racially marked portraits on the play's male bodies.4 Absenting gender issues from the discussion has served to efface racism's symbiotic relationship with sexism, heterosexism, and the analogies of inferiority that sustain oppression.5 While The Emperor Jones transposes Stereotypie "black" and "white" male roles in order to expose race as a social construct, or rather to purport that any man can be white or black, it simultaneously maintains the racially marked, gendered roles of female characters based on skin color - Darwinian derived theories of biological determinism. Thus, it creates a vision of racially marked boundary deconstruction as an exclusively masculine possibility. Moreover, in this play, racial mobility is inextricably bound to, in Luce Irigaray's terms, the circulation of women as both material and reproductive capital (170). Examining the female characters in the play as a mechanism for male racial mobility exposes "whiteness" as a gendered concept - that is, masculine.

In what follows, I offer a sketch, which draws on concepts from feminist anthropology, of the ways in which race relations and capitalism in the United States serve to construct categories of woman. From this perspective, I will examine the racially marked, gendered representations of women in The Emperor Jones as constitutive of male racial mobility. Finally, I will investigate the material consequences of blackface and black self-representation in the original production of The Emperor Jones as potentially further inscribing race and gender value on the female body. Thus, I complicate the debate surrounding race representation in popular culture through recognition of gender and sexuality as constituting elements of race.