Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“The Hairy Ape”

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.40.1.2019.0010

2161-4318

Eugene O’Neill,

Yank is a great, powerful, hulking brute of a man, boss of the stokehold on the liner on which he works; a hard-drinking, hard fighting animal, good-natured except when crossed, popular and respected for his great strength by his fellows. He fights for the pure love of fighting. He is proud of his calling, his ability to do double his share of the gruelling work. He has nothing but scorn for all other classes of society, particularly the first class passengers who represent the other end of the scale. He despises their physical weakness, he believes that it is he and his kind who make the ship … and the world move … He feels in a queer way that he is akin to steel, the steel of the engines, of the furnaces he feeds. The other people of the world are just baggage. In his own expression, he ‘belongs’. And he has never yet had a single thought to disturb this self-confident pride. In fact he never thinks at all. There has been no cause for his ever thinking seriously about anything.Mildred Douglas, daughter of the President of Nazareth Steel, David Douglas, sails for England on Yank's ship. She represents the opposite extreme of society. An only child, her mother having died when she was born, she has been the idol of her father who has never remarried. He has spoiled her to the limit. Every slightest whim of hers has been gratified since she was a baby. The result is she has developed into a delicate, highly-neurotic, bored and cruel and self-centered young woman without an interest in life except to find some thrill that will give her apathetic mind and body into some feeling of being alive. It is in pursuit of a thrill that she is making this trip, for she has lately been going in for social service work in American cities, visiting the slums for the sense of danger it gives her, for the morbid satisfaction she gets out of witnessing scenes of human degradation and misery, and now she is bound for a tour of the slums of London and Paris and the European capitals. But Mildred is not ‘all bad’. She is simply driven on by a hidden feeling of her own uselessness and lifelessness. She longs to be able to feel some genuine emotion about something. She desires some real contact with living forces. She wants to ‘belong’.On the ship, she is received with the deference due to the only daughter of the man who owns the line. In the first hours out, she lies in a deck chair, bored and irritated by the obsequious attentions she is shown, longing for something to occupy her mind.Down below in the fireman's forecastle, Yank and his mates are finishing up a debauch begun on shore. They are all still drunk. The socialist, Long, tries to make a speech converting them to socialism. Yank pushes him down. For him socialism is weakness. It doesn't ‘belong’ for strong men. And when the former sailing-ship sailor Paddy makes them a speech on the rotten life on a steamer compared to the old work on clippers in the sun and fresh air, Yank is equally scornful. That's old stuff. It's dead and past. The present is fire and steel and steam. Old timer like Paddy simply don't belong. They're dead and they don't know it. Then Yank boasts. He's steel. He's part of the liner - the main part; He makes it go. He feeds it. If it wasn't for him all the engines all over the world would stop—the world would stop. He “belongs”. He beats his chest like a gorilla in his pride and challenges any man to fight out who doesn't agree with him. But they all do. He rouses them all to a frenzy of self-pride. They pound the steel walls with their fists. They “belong” with Yank. Then the bell sounds. It is their watch on in the stokehole. They file out.Up on deck, Mildred, boredly watching the smoke from the funnels, has a sudden whim. She wants to see what makes the ship go. The second Engineer is delegated to take her on a tour of the engine room and the stokehole. She is dressed in white and, in spite of his protest, refuses to change. He takes her to the engine room but she is bored there. Then they go to the stokehole. The men, led by Yank, are hurling coal in the furnaces. All but Yank are “played out”. He taunts them, glorying in his supreme strength. From above, an Engineer calls out for them to get back on the job, curses them for stopping work. Yank is infuriated. Throwing back his head and brandishing his shovel, he curses back at the Engineer in a perfect torrent of water-front invectives. Mildred is now standing directly behind him. She stares at him, repelled, horrified, yet awed and fascinated by this half-naked force raging out his passion. For a while they stare fascinatedly into each other's eyes. He sees the horror and fear and amazement in hers. She sees the brutal, elemental, physical passion in his. She shrinks away with a cry, hiding her eyes with her hands. Then she faints. The Engineer carries her out. For a moment, Yank stares after her, bewildered. His mates begin to laugh and jeer. Feeling he has been insulted, he hurls his shovel furiously against the iron door that has closed after her.Mildred is put to bed in her cabin. Doctors, nurses attend her. She sends them all away. She wants to be alone with the vision of those eyes staring into hers. She forgets fright. She is excited, thrilled. For the remainder of the voyage she is full of nervous energy, she watches the smoke from the funnels, she listens by the ventilators as if to hear what is going on in the bowels of the ship, she has to fight off a temptation to ask to be taken below again.Back in the forecastle, Yank sits apart and broods in the attitude of Rodin's thinker. He sees her eyes. What did they mean? He feels horribly insulted in his pride without understanding why. The others wonder what's the matter. Paddy jokes at him. The others laugh. Paddy says the girl looked at him as if he was a Hairy Ape escaped from the Zoo. Yank starts. This stings him. For a moment he is about to attack Paddy. Then he makes a mad boast. If she comes again to the stokehole, he'll fling her into the furnace. And he'll go right up on deck now and tell her what he thinks of her. He'll slap her right across those eyes he still feels staring at him. He rushes for the door but they all pile on him and after a terrible struggle pin him down. They know he'll be shot if he tries it. And when they let him up he sits apart again, brooding vengeance, hating her, unable to understand why, trying to think.The ship reaches Southampton. Yank sneaks ashore, conceals himself near the gangplank, then rushes forward toward Mildred as she comes down. He shouts insults at her, but he is overcome by numbers before he can get near her. She stands in the middle of the gangplank watching him, terrified again but more thrilled and fascinated by the impact of his tremendous physical life and energy.Yank drowns his sorrow in the pubs. He fights. He is wicked now. On the ship in the next few trips, he is avoided. His mates grow to hate and fear him. He bullies them viciously, he sets a pace in the stokehole that breaks their hearts and their backs. And in the forecastle he broods, his hatred and longing for revenge growing. Long, the socialist, talks to him, seeing a promising convert. He tells him of the class war, etc. Yank listens bewilderedly. He only understands that he wants revenge against those eyes he now sees before him all the time. Those eyes call him a Hairy Ape; he has persuaded himself now that Mildred really called him that.Meanwhile, Mildred goes to London. Many titled suitors crowd around her. She flings herself into the social games, into wild parties, anything to forget her obsession about Yank. But the eyes haunt her. Everything else seems weak and futile. When she visits Whitechapel, she gets no thrill out of the horrors. She is disgusted. It all seems so sick and degraded compared to the vitality in Yank. She suddenly gives it all up. She will go back to America at once. She insists on sailing on the same vessel. On board she becomes excited again, she wants to go below but her father has learned of the previous incident and, fearful for her health, has cabled orders not to permit her to go below again. He feels she is carrying her social service whim to the extreme when she visits stokeholes.Down below, Yank listens to Long's harangues absentmindedly, and tries to think it out helplessly.At the end of the voyage, it is Mildred who on one pretext or another finds out when the stokers leave the ship, and manages to be there, concealed behind freight. She sees Yank come down alone, fierce and silent, glowering defiance at his mates who give him a wide berth, Long following at his heels. And again she is excited and fascinated and disturbed.In a bar, Yank and Long drink. Yank asks Long to take him to Fifth Avenue, where he has never been, where her kind live. Maybe there he'll get a chance to fight back. Long promises to go there with him the next Sunday, and they go. The swells are just coming from church. Yank stares into a furriers window and sees a piece of monkey fur displayed. This infuriates him. He starts to insult the men in high hats and spats. He is in greasy dungarees. They pass without looking at him or hearing him. They make him feel he is of another kind, in another world, not a man like them. He tries to boast to them. He points to the steel framework of buildings going up. STEEL … That's him; he “belongs”, and they don't. But they won't answer him or notice him. He is raging and desperate but he can't attack men who won't fight back. Just at this moment Mildred passes by in her aluminum roadster. He runs down the Avenue after her car, threatening her. Tauntingly, she slows down so that he can almost catch her. Policemen converge on him from all sides. After a terrible battle in which he knocks down four of the police, he is clubbed unconscious. Mildred stops her car and comes to look down fascinatedly at Yank. She turns scornfully on the cops. She has watched the fight excitedly with intense admiration for Yank's struggle. She gives her card to the policemen. A patrol wagon comes and Yank is carried off.In his cell that night, with one cell-mate, he broods, his head bloody and bandaged. His cell mate has a newspaper. Yank sees Mildred's picture featured in it, recognizes her. He cannot read. He finds out her name from the cell-mate and that she is the daughter of the King of Steel. This finishes Yank. He suddenly realizes all his proud boast of being Steel is all wrong. Now it is the daughter of the Steel King who has put him in a steel cage. Even steel is against him. For a moment he is beaten. Then her eyes come before him again, and he recovers his courage. If he has to fight alone against the whole world, why, he can do it. He belongs. He bends the bars of his cell in a frenzy of pride and beats a tattoo on his chest with his hands like a gorilla. The prison guards have to drag out the firehose and almost drown him to silence him.In the morning, to his surprise, the judge to whom Mildred has written a request to let him off, dismisses him with a warning. He has found out from his cell-mate of the night before, where the Douglas steel works are, and he goes to the train yards, where he meets a hobo, and the hobo tells him how to ride the roof of an express to Douglas, Pa. The car on top of which he clings is the Douglas private car, and Mildred is inside with her father and a nobleman, one of those she has seen in England whom her father hopes she will marry. She is bored by him, then she begins to act excited and nervous, she seems to feel the presence of Yank on the roof of the car. His eyes are before her and he, on his part, feels a bit of the same rage he feels when he sees her.In the outskirts of Douglas, he lets himself off. He then goes to the Douglas Steel Works and asks for a job. He is taken on at once to work with the blast furnaces. At night he stands alone, he shakes his fist at the blazing skyline of the works, he challenges it to battle, he pounds his chest like a gorilla. And all the while he is haunted by her eyes, he sees them everywhere…. staring at him from the steel around him.And his eyes haunt her. In her father's palace of white marble on a hill in sight of the works, she broods. She is shaken by a neurotic desire for him, she is full of contempt for her lovers and suitors, she insults them, she becomes as violent against society as Yank. Her father is worried. She gets a passion for throwing things into the fire. Asks money from her father and burns it, laughing at him. From the hilltop at night, she watches with fascinated eyes the flare of the blast furnaces.In the meantime, Yank starts his clumsy plotting. He goes to a construction camp, makes enquiries about dynamite. The watchman thinks him a fool and tells him that one stick would blow a building up. Yank breaks in that night and steals some, brings it down to the works, digs a mine under the wall and sets it off. It blows only a section of wall down. He has counted on this explosion as his great getting even with the girl and with steel. Immediately a horde of workmen come and the wall is built up again. Yank watches and wanders off, baffled. He goes up the hill to sit and think; the hill where her house is. He wanders into the grounds and shakes his fist up at the sky.Mildred leaves a big party inside to come to look down at the blast furnace. There she sees him, defying the world, pounding his chest. Fascinated she comes closer. Suddenly he turns and sees her. They look into each others eyes again. He approaches her, as she waits. Then he springs furiously, and, throwing her over his shoulder, rushes down the hill to the furnaces. He runs through the streets. A crowd begins to pursue him. He reaches the works and, with her body over his shoulder, climbs the ladder to the brim of one of the flaming, egg-shaped funnels spouting fire.She is no longer frightened. She is excited, alive for once. A great crowd of half-naked workers gather below. Yank beats his chest like a gorilla, defying them all. Then he raises her body above his head as if he were going to fling her into the furnace, but with a twist, she reaches down, her hands grip his face, he looks up into her eyes, full now of desire for him, and he is petrified. He weakens, his arms let her come down. Her arms go about his neck and she kisses him. For one moment he returns this kiss. The blazing furnace mouth is behind them, the sparks are flying around them, the crowd below begins to dance in a queer kind of frenzy at this amazing sight.Then Yank pushes her away, staring at her frightenedly. He is stunned. He totters weakly. He would fall off if she didn't pull him back. Then she helps him down to the ground. Once there, full of passion and fire now, she orders the crowd, who have recognized her … away as if they were slaves. Cringing and awed they move off into a wider circle of faces with blackbrimmed eyes, staring at the two, reflecting the light, a background of eyes.Then she turns to Yank. Half-naked in her evening clothes, she opens her arms at him enticingly. But now he is awed, frightened, terribly confused and weak and afraid. She has conquered him. He shrinks from her, cringing, when she holds out a hand for him. He cowers to the ground, almost on all fours. At first, she is disappointed, enraged at being refused. Then she sees his condition. She laughs disdainfully and pats his head as if he were a dog. Then she yawns again with boredom. Then a hard sneer settles on her lips and, slapping him across the eyes, she calls him a poor Hairy Ape. She turns and walks off. The eyes in the background follow her.Yank stands for a while in a daze, then stumbles away. He wanders until dawn, with her eyes full of triumph before him, like a man in a trance. He bumps into trees, into walls; he falls over stones, he goes through street and fields and roads until dawn. He stands on a hill in the dawn, bewildered, beaten figure. He does not beat his chest.Mildred has returned to the party. The guests had begun to look for her. She refuses to tell them where she has been. She is the bored girl of before. But she whispers in her father's ear. Delighted he tells the guests of his daughter's acceptance of the nobleman. Going to the nobleman, she kisses him. Then she throws back her head and laughs her sardonic scorn of herself and the world, beating her bare chest in imitation of Yank.Yank stumbles to the gate of the Zoo, as the sun is sinking. He forces his way in mechanically. He goes into the monkey house. He stands before the gorilla's cage. He talks to him. The gorilla comes forward and listens. Yank's confidence returns. He feels he has found a brother, an ally. His defiance and self-confidence return. He beats his chest again. Excitedly, the gorilla does the same. Finally Yank lets him out of the cage. He offers to shake hands, but the gorilla springs upon him and crushes him, then shambles off menacingly. Dying, Yank sees again the eyes of the girl fixed on him with triumphant contempt. He covers his own eyes and dies.