The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'neill Brief Biographical Details About the Author Eugene O'neill Was Born on October 16, 1888

The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill

Brief biographical details about the author

Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888. His father James O’Neill was a successful actor who for many years had toured the country with his wife Ella. The irregularity of such an upbringing disrupted Eugene’s education. Eugene O’Neill attended a number of Roman Catholic schools and studied at Princeton University for a short period.

In 1909, he married Kathleen Jenkins but the marriage was unsuccessful. The dissolution oof marriage he went on a voyage to Buenos Aires. There he remained occupying himself with various prosaic pursuits, until he took another ship to South Africa.

O’Neill next appeared briefly in Argentina, quite destitute, and took a British tramp steamer bound for New York. He remained in New York, living an anarchistic existence along that city’s water front. After one last trip on the American Line bound for Southampton, he decided to settle down. He took a small part in one of his father’s productions, the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo, then contributed for a time to a humorous column in the New London Telegraph, Connecticut.

O’Neill began to consider drama seriously and was particularly interested in ancient Greek drama and in the then revolutionary plays of the Swede, August Strindberg. He tried his hand at some short plays of his own and then enrolled in a writer’s workshop course at Harvard University in 1914-15. There he met the founders of the Provincetown Playhouse In Greenwich Village, New York. He began acting in this theatre in Massachusetts as well as contributing plays.

Bound East for Cardiff, his first sea play which reflected the grim mood of his youthful adventures. In 1919 he reached Broadway theatre with his first full-length tragedy, Beyond the Horizon, and a romantic drama Gold, which was produced by John D.Williams. A first version of Anna Christie, called Chris Christopherson, reflected his waterfront life and was presented by George C.Tyler in 1920. Tyler, in the following year, brought out The Straw. In 1921, Arthur Hopkins revived the re-titled Anna Cristie.

Discovered and praised by the famous theatre critic George Jean Nathan, O’Neill won three Pulitzer Prizes, in 1920, 1922 and 1928. He enjoyed the friendship of such celebrated theatre people like Robert Edmond Jone, Kenneth MacGowan and Philip Moeller. Despite the failure of The First Man (1922) and Welded(1924), O’Neill was uncompromising and his fame grew in America. Desire Under the Elms, a psychological father-son study of conflict, and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, a naturalistic picture of the slums, appeared in the same year in 1924 and bore witness to the variety of O’Neill’s talent. Desire was banned in several American cities, became a Cause Celebre, and added to the playwright’s reputation. In 1920 he had written Emperor Jones, an expressionistic Tour de Force and added to his style a zest 2 for symbolism with The Hairy Ape in 1922. In 1925, he wrote a romantic play about the search for eternal youth with The Fountain, a digression from his usual thematic concerns.

O’Neill with plays like The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Dynamo, Days Without End Marco Millions and Strange Interlude, reveals his own problems and quests in such matters as death and its defiance, faith and its reconciliation with intelligence, and sexual awakenings. After Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), his need for relaxation found an expression in his comedy of adolescence in a small town, Ah, Wilderness!

In 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize but was too ill to attend the ceremonies in Stockholm. He was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. The Iceman Cometh in 1939 marked his return to his darker side which he continued in Long Day’s Journey Into Night(1940) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Most of the years between 1934 and 1947 were spent in semi-seclusion in Georgia and in California. He was also engaged in a series of eleven plays under the collective title of A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

The tragedy of his family was revealed in Long Day’s Journey: his father a miser, mother a dope addict, his brother Jamie- alcoholic James O’Neill died in 1920, Ella in 1924 and brother Jamie in 1923. Eugene O’Neill had married Agnes Boulton in 1918. It was also a failure. Agnes was left with another child of Eugene’s –Oona O’Neill who was later to marry Charlie Chaplin against her father’s will.

He married Carlotta Monterey an actress and divorcee for the third time. Though it was a marriage of compromise, Agnes Carlotta was wife, mistress, secretary, travelling companion, friend and nurse to O’Neill. She consoled him in his distress over the fate of his son Shane, who had been arrested in 1948 for possession of heroin and stood by when his first son, Eugene Jr committed suicide. She also prevented his suicide attempt during fits of depression. He spent his last days with Carlotta until his death in November 1953.

Brief Introduction and summary of the play The Emperor Jones.

The Emperor Jones was one of the first expressionistic plays in America. O’Neill used there pantomime as well as delirium. Everything in this play is visual or visualised, whether the fantasies or the monologue of the hero who goes through all kinds of nightmares after he has escaped into the jungle.

The Negro dictator Emperor Jones reflects his mental breakdown in the rhythm of the tom- toms, symbolising at the same time his fear and superstition. He has fled his oppressed people, but rapidly destroys himself. As a tyrant, he becomes his own oppressor. O’Neill treats the dynamics of society through inner conflicts. It is this very need of expressing himself in the theatre through actual characters and situations, rather than by metaphysical or sociological statements, that makes his drama the more intense.

Summary

A Negro Pullman porter has found refuge in a tropical island after the murder of a man in the United States. The natives, whom he has managed to rule in the most despotic manner, are planning to kill him, their Emperor, but imagine that this can only be accomplished with a silver bullet. Jones, when the natives revolt, flees through the forest.

He is stopped and trapped there by his own fears and superstitions, expressed in the combination of an internal monologue the manifestations of his various ghosts, and the drumbeat of his people.

His majestic uniform is torn to pieces. He has wasted his ammunition on the apparitions, and fires his last bullet, the silver one, at an imaginary monster. He is finally killed by the natives who have managed to manufacture a number of silver bullets.

The play is composed of eight scenes.

Scene-I

In the First scene, the action takes place in an island in the West Indies not colonised by the Whites. The scene takes place in the audience chamber in the palace of the Emperor. It is late afternoon in the chamber, and Henry Smithers, a Cockney trader of about forty, surprises an old negro woman left alone after the departure of the other servants. Jones is supposed to be asleep after he has eaten.

Jones appears in his turn and evokes the recent past with Smithers: his escape, his promotion, his ruling the island. There has already been an attempt on his life, but the would-be assassin missed him and Jones had himself credited his escape to the legend of the silver bullet.

The Emperor discovers that his court and servants have deserted him. He becomes frightened, and on the advice of Smithers, decides to run away through the forest.

As Smithers tells him, a ceremony has begun to work up the natives’ courage before they start after their oppressor, Jones.

Scene-II

Jones has taken off into the forest. He is now at the end of the plain where the great forest begins. There is four page monologue, in which the Black Little Formless Fears appear to him for the first time. He chases them with a few shots from his revolver.

Scene-III

In the forest. The moon has just risen. Jone’s delirium increases. He sees the ghost of Jeff, the man he killed, and fires on him. 4

Scene-IV

Jones continues to run through the forest. A small gang of Negroes enter. They are dressed in striped convict clothes and are followed by a white man in a uniform of a prison guard. The tom-tom beats. Jones shoots again. The walls of the forest close in from both sides, the road and the figures of the gang are blotted out in an enshrouding darkness.

Scene –V

In a large circular clearing, enclosed by the dense ranks of gigantic trunks of old trees. In the centre is a big dead stump worn by time into a curious resemblance to an auction block.

Jones faces, in this clearing, a crowd of white planters in Southern costumes of the period of the ‘Fifties of the last century. There are other curious spectator, chiefly young belles and dandies who have come to the slave-market for diversion. There is also one spruce, authoritative individual – the Auctioneer. Jones is seized by despair. The ghosts disappear as he fires at them.

Scene-VI

Another cleared space in the forest. Jones’ trousers have been so torn away that what is left of them is no better than a breech of cloth. He is panting with exhaustion.

The Negroes approach. At the same time, a low melancholy murmur rises among them, increasing gradually by rhythmic degrees which seem to be directed and controlled by the throb of the tom-tom in the distance. This rises to a long tremulous wail of despair that reaches a certain pitch, unbearably acute, then falls by slow gradations of tone back to silence. Then it is taken up again. There is no word spoken in this scene.

Scene-VII

The foot of a gigantic tree by the edge of a great river. From behind the trunk, as if he had sprung out of it, the figure of a Congo witch-doctor appears. He starts a pantomime with an incantation to allay the fierceness of some implacable deity demanding sacrifice. Jones has become completely hypnotized. He joins in. The witch doctor indicates that it is he who must offer himself for sacrifice. A huge head of crocodile appears over the river bank. Its eyes fasten on Jones who squirms toward it and fires his last bullet.

Scene-VIII

Dawn. The native chief, Lem, enters, followed by a small squad of his soldiers. Each one carries a rifle. Smithers accompanies them. The reports of the rifles sound from the forest, followed a second later by savage, exultant yells. Lem has ordered his men to kill. They have discovered Jones’ trick of the silver bullets, got some money and fashioned their own bullets, “make um strong charm, too.” 5

The soldiers carry Jones’s limp body. Smithers leans over his shoulder—in a tone of frightened awe. He then mocks Jones’ corpse, as well as Jones’ legend of silver bullets. “Gawd blimey, but yer died in the ‘eighth o’style, any’ow!”

Essay/Discussion Questions

Discuss the aptness and suitability of the title The Emperor Jones

Write a critical appreciation of the blending of realism and expressionism in the play

Justify The Emperor Jones as a tragedy of Pride

Explain O’Neill’s use of Personal Unconscious and ‘Collective Unconcious’ in the play The Emperor Jones.

Discuss different symbols in the play and their effectiveness

Comment on O’Neills’ masterly manipulation of sound effects in the play The Emperor Jones

Write a note on Dramatic Monologue and its use in the play.

Write an essay on Dynamic synthesis of symbol and dramatic action in The Emperor Jones

Illustrate the spiritual regression and disintegration of a terror stricken soul as depicted in The Emperor Jones.

Bring out the eternal conflict of good and evil depicted in The Emperor Jones.