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

The Western World discovered that the Negro could be used as an artistic representation during the first decades of the twentieth century, though cast in the stereotypical mold of the primitive. (1) This image was not new, but it became paramount in the American consciousness during the 1920s, a period that F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled as the Jazz Age. (2) The reasons why this was so are manifold. In the first place, from the historical point of view, "commercialism and standardization that followed industrialism led to increasing nostalgia for the simple, forceful and unmechanized existence that the Negro came to represent" (Singh 32). The African American represented, according to Robert Bone, "the unspoiled child of nature, the noble savage--carefree, spontaneous and sexually uninhibited" (59). American writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, and Waldo Frank, "in revolt abroad and at home against the sterility and philistinism of industrial America, led the search for new American values and modes of expression" (Bell 93). In the second place, European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse found inspiration to revolutionize Western art in African artistic manifestations--sculptures and ritual masks of the city states and kingdoms of West Africa. Finally, this appeal of primitivism found also promotion through the popularization of psychoanalytic theory, "especially Freud's concept of the libidinal self, and the European theories of African and Afro-American culture as evidence of the simplicity and beauty of preindustrial, precivilized culture" (Bell 93-94).

George M. Fredrickson explains how romantic racialism did not disappear from the white consciousness in the twentieth century. (3) In the 1920s a revised form of romantic racialism became something of a national fad, resulting in part, curiously enough, from patronizing white encouragement of the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance. "The New Negro," as perceived by many whites, was simply the old romantic conception of "the Negro" covered with a patina of the cultural primitivism and exoticism fashionable in the 1920s. In 1918 Robert Park, the distinguished sociologist who would come to be recognized as the foremost white student of race relations in the period between the World Wars, set the tone for subsequent "appreciations" of black cultural achievements when he wrote that "the Negro" unquestionably had a temperament which differed from that of whites. The Anglo-Saxon was basically "a pioneer and a frontiersman," while the Negro was primarily "an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady among the races." This assessment of blackness is the reason that would-be Negrophiles of the 1920s were not content to allow African Americans to express their collective artistic temperament and love of life through jazz and the literature of the Harlem school: these whites took to writing novels and plays of their own to emphasize that blacks were basically exotic primitives, out of place in white society because of their natural spontaneity, emotionalism, and sensuality (327). (4)

Consequently, "this Negro fad of the 1920s in the United States led to an unprecedented artistic activity that focused on the depiction of the Negro in fiction, drama, poetry, painting and sculpture" (Singh 32), as African Americans became "for white bohemian and avant-garde artists a symbol of freedom from restraint, a source of energy and sensuality" (Cooley 52), as well as a new vision for "white America's salvation" (Bell 94). (5) Works such as Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo" (1917), Waldo Frank's Holiday (1922), or Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926) ironically helped light white readers' way to black texts. As Bone manifests, "they created a sympathetic audience for the serious treatment of Negro subjects" (60). In fact, when Alain Locke included in The New Negro "A Select List of Plays of Negro Life," the vast majority of names referred to 19th and 20th century white playwrights (432-33). (6) In these works, Bell finds "the nation's vision of the black American and his alleged primitivism. An oversimplification of the resiliency and vitality of black character and culture, literary primitivism exalted instinct over intellect, simple forms of social organization over more complex forms, and nature over art." To dodge the problems of modern industrialized America, many whites "turned to home-grown varieties of the noble-savage for salvation" (Bell 94). (7)

Thus it is no wonder that at the beginning of the twentieth century the black experience was exploited by white playwrights as a source of exoticism, naivete, lyricism, and melodrama. (8) Writers such as Ridgley Torrence, Marc Connelly, Paul Green and Eugene O'Neill, among others, mined blackness for what they understood as "the extraordinary richness" of blacks' daily life (Bigsby 237). In 1917 Torrence's Three Plays for a Negro Theatre was acclaimed by James Weldon Johnson, one of the launchers of the Harlem Renaissance, for the playwright's "intimate knowledge" and "deep insight and sympathy" of Negro life (Isaacs qtd. in Bigsby 237).

But it was Eugene O'Neill who was widely applauded, both by white and black critics, for having marked a new step in the treatment of the African American on the American stage with his The Emperor Jones. The play brought the Provincetown Players their first real recognition from Broadway audiences and managers. It also thrust them into national prominence when it opened on Broadway with special matinees at the Selwyn Theatre on December 27, 1920. Its popularity led to a regular run at the Princess Theatre, where it arrived on January 29, 1921. The engagement lasted for 204 performances, a spectacularly long run for those days, and then the production began a road tour that was to continue for two years (Gelb 235, 236). Besides its avant-garde staging techniques, The Emperor Jones was also notable as the first American play to cast black actors.

Contemporary reviews by white critics attest to the success of the play. In the New York Tribune Heywood Broun wrote that The Emperor Jones "seems to us just about the most interesting play which has yet come from the most promising playwright in America" (Gelb 235). In 1927, the theatre historian Anthony Hobson Quinn opined that O'Neill had "created a moving and enthralling drama which is largely carried on by the utterances of one character" (178). The black intelligentsia also hailed the play triumphantly. In 1921 W. E. B. Du Bois's "Negro Art" admonished African Americans to accept artistic presentations of the truth of Negro life, but also stated that they were secure enough in their accomplishments and "to lend the whole stern human truth about ourselves to the transforming hand and seeing eye of the Artist, white and black." Du Bois stressed "Sheldon, Torrence and O'Neill [as] our great benefactors--forerunners of artists who will yet arise in Ethiopia of the Outstretched Arm" (qtd. in Turner 13). Montgomery Gregory--director of the Howard Players from 1919 to 1914--in "The Drama of Negro Life" praised O'Neill as the author "who more than any other person has dignified and popularized Negro drama" and who gave "testimony of the possibilities of the future development" of it (qtd. in Locke 153). The Emperor Jones would remain in history as "a beacon-light of inspiration," since it marked "the breakwater plunge of Negro drama in the main stream of American drama" (Gregory 157). (9)

Yet not all opinions heralded by African American critics extolled O'Neill's theatrical skills or his suspicious use of Negro stereotypes to render black experience. Alongside Gregory's approbation in Locke's The New Negro ran William S. Braithwaite's observation that the stereotype of the black American linked to a racial heritage of atavism still survived at the time. Moreover, this "preoccupation, almost obsession" of "this same theme and doubtful formula of hereditary cultural reversion" in The Emperor Jones suggested that, "in spite of all good intentions, the true presental of the real tragedy of Negro life is a task still left for Negro writers to perform" (35). On 17 May 1921 Caswell Crews of The Negro World censured the acclaim of O'Neill's drama thusly: "To be sure it is pronounced a great play by the critics, but they are white, and will pronounce anything good that has white supremacy as its theme." William Bridges, editor of the Challenge and a regular contributor to the Negro World called the play "a travesty of the African race." Opportunity reported that the audience wondered how the university could "stoop ... to allow a performance of a play in which the leading character was a crapshooter and escaped convict" (qtd. in Krasner 486). Many black publications, then, criticized the type of African American representation in O'Neill's play.

White critics on the history of American drama have tended to deflate the play from its racial representation and instead impute its importance to its universal implications. At the same time they ignore its racial component and generally prefer to read the play as symbolic of the collective human experience of alienation. In 1927 Arthur H. Quinn cited The Emperor Jones as "a drama of human fear; the emotion of terror is a binding force that fuses the scenes into an unforgettable picture of a human soul fighting against his own evil deeds" (181). In 1958 Doris V. Falk manifested that Brutus Jones emerges as unforgettably himself: "a gigantic figure brought low by the very forces which exalted him; universal, but not Man individual, but not Eugene O'Neill" (71). As in O'Neill's greatest tragedies, here the protagonist "is brought to his knees by fate, unredeemed by any revelation except that recognition of his own responsibility which follows as a logical consequence of the action" (197). (10) In 1964 Robert F. Whitman observed that this is not a play about "fear; panic is simply the 'acid test' which reduces Jones to his essential nature as Man" (143). Moreover, Jones's race is not important, since "it is simply that in the Negro, man's journey from savagery to 'civilization' has been tremendously foreshortened." European critics have touted similar interpretations. Rudolf Haas--known as "an affective interpreter of the American literary scene to German audiences," according to Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck--maintains that O'Neill "presents the human being hunted in an uncertain world. The whole situation is so universalized that it would be a mistake to see in The Emperor Jones a reflection of the race problem" (145). Yet, in 1967 John H. Raleigh is one of the few to recognize that beyond art, The Emperor Jones "is not only an exciting piece of theatricality, it is also an impressive monument in the history of enlightened attempts by enlightened white Americans to lend a helping hand in the Negroes' fearsome struggle." For him, O'Neill parallels the Melville of Billy Budd in evoking "the beauty and the power of the noble black man," and in both works we glimpse "a magnificent African of the unadulterated blood of Ham" (107-08, 252).

This tendency of white American literary criticism to interpret images of African Americans as archetypal seems to have been prevalent during the '50s and '60s. As Seymour L. Gross explains, Locke--as early as 1948--commented that blacks in fiction were beginning to acquire the status of "a symbol of social misunderstanding" and would emerge "as the great tragedy of our time, both nationally and internationally" (qtd. in Gross 25). How persuasive this archetypal view of "the Negro" had become by the '60s is perhaps best shown by the large number of critics who emphasized how the figure of the African American in the works of canonical writers, including Faulkner and O'Neill is made, by symbolic extension and in Robert Penn Warren's words, "to transcend his suffering qua Negro to emerge to us not as Negro but as man" (qtd. in Gross 26) Yet this critical approach seems to be hiding more than it shows. To transform the image of the African American into a "mask of humanity" (Gross 26)--and one that altogether erases black women--evinces what Toni Morrison calls "a strategy of escape from knowledge." Even more, as she underscores, this "act of defending the Eurocentric Western posture in literature as not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' " may result in "lobotomizing that literature, and in diminishing both the art and the artist" ("Unspeakable Things" 12, 13). Hence, the questions I want to address in this paper rephrase questions that Morrison has asked, how far is The Emperor Jones sabotaged by the critical proclamations of its universality? How much of a coincidence is it that the originator of American drama fathered a play about a black man? How do the dramatic devices in the play coalesce to draw an image of the Afro-American? What sort of image is it?

O'Neill's biographers have traced the origin of The Emperor Jones to different sources. Arthur and Barbara Gelb write that the idea of the play came from the playwright's memory of several stories told to him by different black and white acquaintances as well as from his experience while prospecting for gold in Honduras. (11) From here he wrote home letters complaining about "fleas that infest the native huts and eat you alive at night" and "an acute bilious attack caused by the rotten food" (Sheaffer 152). The play was immersed in controversy from its opening day. When The Emperor Jones was first produced, no black person had ever played a major role in the American theater in a non-musical production. The Provincetown Players decided that only a black man should play the role of Brutus Jones. They chose Charles Gilpin, who like the title character had once been a Pullman porter and who was one of the most superb actors at the time, arguably the black community's very best actor. The play was such an instantaneous success that it was moved from the Players' theater in the Village to Broadway, "where on December 27, 1920, for the first time in American history, a serious play by a serious playwright about a 'human' Negro, intelligent, and resolute, was played by a Negro before a white audience on Broadway" (Raleigh 108).

As the run of The Emperor Jones continued through 1921, Gilpin and O'Neill began to have serious problems. The friction emanated from Gilpin's increasing qualms about the racist content of the play: it led him "to show himself less and less willing to 'play the game' " (Gelb 238). White literary critics have traditionally emphasized one aspect of Gilpin's behavior--the fact that the strain to fight back racial prejudice led him to drink heavily and manipulate the text of the play. Specifically, as Arthur and Barbara Gelb represent the quarrel:

   O'Neill complained that Gilpin, who
   had grown suddenly finicky about
   using the word "nigger" (called for by
   the script), was rewriting the role.
   Aware that Gilpin was substituting
   "black baby" and other terms he considered
   more genteel, O'Neill was also
   annoyed by the fact that Gilpin was
   doing too much drinking to give an
   effective performance. He went backstage
   one night and warned his star:
   "If I ever catch you rewriting my lines
   again, you black bastard, I'm going to
   beat you up." (238)

As a result of his quarrel with O'Neill, Gilpin was not asked to play the role character in the English production, or to appear in the New York revival in 1925. (12) Drama historian David Krasner reconstructs the theatrical career of Charles Gilpin to suggest the black actor's attitude towards O'Neill's play. Krasner unearths John H. Raleigh's 1965 assessment of Gilpin as resentful of "the play's atavism whereby the terrors of the jungle night reduce the proud Jones to a cringing, crawling African savage, just before his end" (qtd. in Krasner 109). Krasner also highlights Caswell Crews's The Negro World speculation on May 17, 1921, "that if Mr. Gilpin is an intelligent and loyal Negro his heart must ache and rebel within him as he is forced to belie his race" (qtd. in Krasner 486). Moreover, these feelings attributed to Gilpin might well have been feelings shared among African American intellectuals, who were generally disapproving of The Emperor Jones. Numerous black publications rejected it, and several Harlem ones condemned it. Krasner reveals Gilpin's anxious attempt to defend the play and the lead role:

      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).

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).

The Emperor Jones is initially an "original account of a disintegrating private and public world." Partaking of the Expressionist methods, the dramatic strategy in the play is based on "the deconstruction of character," "the dismantling of social forms," and "the unhinging of language" (Bigsby 54). Brutus Jones is an African American who, after escaping from the United States where he has committed two murders, takes refuge "on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines" (O'Neill 173). (16) Having exploited the natives' superstitions about reality and religion, Jones leaps to the status of emperor: "it didn't take long from dat time to git dese fool, woods niggers right where I wanted dem. (With pride) From stow-away to Emperor in two years! Dat's goin' some!" (177). At the time the play opens, a rebellion against him is under way--the blacks have been "up to some devilment" (174)--and he is forced to fly from his palace into the tropical forest to a place where he has hidden the money he has accumulated from the taxes he has imposed on his subjects. So far he has protected himself from being murdered by affirming that he is only vulnerable to silver bullets. His flight into the jungle is accompanied by the rhythmic sound of drums, the tempo of which increases as Jones's retreat ends. In the forest his self-confidence collapses as he journeys inward as well as back to a racialized past. His emperor's clothes become tattered as he fires his revolver at ghostly memories from his past materializing before him. Finally, he is killed by a silver bullet prepared by the natives.

In O'Neill, Expressionism lost interest in verisimilitude. Art became antirealist and its finality, among others, was to express a hidden reality that positivism had excluded from its aesthetic canon and had subordinated to the reproduction of a specific reality. Expressionism tries to uncover the truth hidden by surface reality. Formal distortion of that reality is used by artists of the genre to exteriorize the metaphysical vision of human existence. (17) Accordingly, the hero in Expressionist drama symbolizes the fate of a humanity that relies on the masculine, essentialist norm as universal. He is a man accepted by the author and with whom the audience can easily identify. In O'Neill's play, the problem starts with the very title of the work as it becomes an oxymoron. To join the majestic term of "Emperor" with the common surname of "Jones" expresses a startling paradox. It can be argued that "Jones" embodies the essence of the universality of human experience, thus projecting the protagonist's personal and collective unconscious. Yet the mirage of the Jungian archetypal "primordial thoughts" (Bigsby 56) is rapidly dispelled when we learn that Jones is a black man escaped from America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, O'Neill's choice of the name of "Brutus" lends itself to different understandings. Firstly, it is reminiscent of Shakespeare's Brutus in Julius Caesar. Norman Sanders in his "Introduction" to the Shakespearean play explains that Brutus is nearly as tragic as the titular hero of the drama. At the time Shakespeare was writing, Brutus's action in making the conspiracy a reality had already had two opposite interpretations: "at one extreme, we have the medieval Brutus condemned to suffer at the centre of Dante's Inferno as a man guilty of criminal assassination and personal betrayal; and at the other, 'the noblest Roman of them all,' Plutarch's 'angel,' the one just man, gentle and altruistic, among the wicked and envious conspirators." And as in the case of Caesar, the play supports both views (16). Secondly, taking its etymological meaning into account, the name "Brutus" evinces his rooting to a savage, beastlike, nonhuman, irrational existence ("not possessing capacity to reason," according to the Oxford Dictionary). O'Neill's Brutus displays very little nobility. His nature is one-sided and lacks those qualities that make the Shakespearean Brutus a humanly attractive character. Far from sporting what Sanders qualifies as an "irreproachable personal integrity," Brutus Jones shows only an egoism that drives him to impose his will on others. Nowhere in O'Neill's text can we find traces of Antony's memorable and final testimony in his spoken epitaph for Brutus at the end of Julius Caesar:

   His life was gentle, and the elements
   So mixed in him, that Nature might
      stand up
   And say to all the world, "This was a
      man!" (V. 5.73-5)

On the contrary, pungent despise for the savage yields an ironic epitaph: "Well, they did for yer right enough, Jonesey, me lad! Dead as a 'erring! (mockingly)," concludes Lem. "Where's yer 'igh an' mighty airs now, yer bloomin' Majesty?" (204).

This impression is further enhanced by the hero's description in a long stage direction. O'Neill's stage directions must be valued as the playwright, like Bernard Shaw, set great store by them and by the published version of his plays. Over his career and especially in his late plays, they became more detailed, elaborate, and novelistic. In fact, Raleigh argues that O'Neill "as a writer is best considered first as a creator of stage directions and then, and more important, as a creator of dialogue," since in writing stage directions "he was consistently effective, from first to last" (210). For this critic, the playwright had no difficulty, throughout his career, in describing either his settings "with great accuracy and vividness; not only what they looked like but what symbolic value or feeling was to be attached to them," or his characters in stage directions which are "acute, detailed, and psychologically convincing" (211). Stage directions in The Emperor Jones show O'Neill's predilection for explanatory and dense introductions. But not just so. Jeffrey Elliott Sands underscores the importance of stage directions not for readers, but as "body of instructions designed to guide the recalcitrant--or merely dense--actor in the 'proper' interpretation and presentation of the character" (192). Stage directions set "the emotional expression," "the level of emotion intensity in the scene" (195, 196). The first idea we glean from Brutus Jones is his description in the stage direction that introduces his first entrance into the stage.

   JONES enters from the right. He is a
   tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded
   Negro of middle age. His features are
   typically negroid, yet there is something
   decidedly distinctive about his
   face--an underlying strength of will, a
   hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself
   that inspires respect. His eyes are
   alive with a keen, cunning intelligence.
   In manner he is shrewd, suspicious,
   evasive. He wears a light blue uniform
   coat, sprayed with brass buttons, heavy
   gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold
   braid on the collar, cuffs, etc. His pants
   are bright red with a light blue stripe
   down the side. Patent leather laced
   boots with brass spurs, and a belt with
   a long-barreled, pearl-handed revolver
   in a holster complete his make up. Yet
   there is something not altogether ridiculous
   about his grandeur. He has a way
   of carrying it off. (175, my emphasis)

The quality of emotional expression of the play would then depend upon the actors' interpretation of the stage direction; consequently, it is arguable that readers' too could vary one to another. O'Neill's dependence on his own road signs to "ensure that actors carried out--or at least understood--his intentions" gives evidence of the idea that stage directions are indispensable to his "conception of emotional expression" and that "to ignore them is to ignore much of his meaning" (Sands 203). According to Cooley, the words "yet" and "not altogether ridiculous" reveal O'Neill's fundamental attitude toward Jones. I would also add "sprayed." Firstly, O'Neill attributes to him some positive qualities, among which O'Neill clearly does not include either Jones's black identity nor his "typically Negroid" features. Black racial features are utterly despised and ridiculed in the characterization of the protagonists of the play. The old native woman is addressed by Smithers as "yer black cow" (175), and Lem, the native chief, is "a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type," "dressed only in a loin cloth" (202). Secondly, Jones's attire displays both archetypical tokens of rapidly and fraudulently acquired power and the clownish eagerness for ostentation connoted in the term "sprayed." Even when O'Neill describes Jones as having "strength of will," "a hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself that inspires respect," and "eyes alive with a keen, cunning intelligence," his condescending attitude is manifestly underscored in "not altogether," yet certainly "ridiculous." (18)

When Jones realizes that the natives have conspired to rebel against him, he abandons his palace and rushes into the jungle. Expressionist stagecraft and decor, both in the theater and the cinema, set out to convey the subjective mental state of the protagonist. (19) Likewise, Jones plunged into the depth of the great forest obviously symbolizes the black man's immersion into his psyche. This penetration into the primitive landscape is made contingent to two main ideas--the use of cosmic rhythms and of a regressive temporal perspective. Firstly, O'Neill's use of cosmic rhythms is represented, according to Raleigh, in the day-night cycle which stands for the playwright's obsession with the antinomies of human existence (17). The Emperor Jones "follows the day-night cycle quite explicitly, beginning in the afternoon (confidence), night (terror, disintegration, retrogression), dawn (retribution)" (17). And secondly, his employment of a temporal perspective that goes from the present into the past makes of the play a retrospective exposition rather than a narrative (195). Yet, in both impulses--the cosmic and the temporal--the thrust is towards the circular, not towards the timeless, as Raleigh has it (195). The force of dawn in Scene Eight concludes in death. What at the beginning may give the impression of a display of the polarities of existence turns out to be an awkward fumbling since the end is too obviously anticipated by the extreme characterization of the protagonist. In fact, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet and dramatist, was one of the first non-American critics who in his "Dramaturgical Reflections" (1922) already highlighted this interpretation: "The close of ... The Emperor Jones seems to me to be too direct, too simple, too expected: it is a little disappointing to a European with his complex background, to see the arrow strike the target toward which he has watched it speeding all the while" (9).

Moreover, the obsession with the retrieval of memory and consequently of the African American past grounds the play to a frustrated attempt towards intemporality and universality. O'Neill's Expressionist techniques are apparently aimed at suggesting "a sense of man's being cut off from the vital fountainhead of nature and her purposes, and the destructive inner conflicts which that purposelessness creates" (Whitman 150). Yet this alienation does not seem to be the point. The play's experimental dramatic devices--the hunting forest and the tribal drumbeat--instead of serving to underscore Jones's inner struggle, function as an inept chorus unable to reveal Jones's disassociation or antagonism. This "chorus" anchors, fixes him to racially stereotyped inner conflicts arguably occasioned by his arrogant mimicry of white mores.

The action is dominated by the increasing rhythm of the native drums. In Scene One the "faint, steady thump of a tom-tom, low and vibrating" (O'Neill 184) arrives from the distant hills when Jones boastfully manifests, after Smithers tells him that the blacks on the island have rebelled against him, that his silver bullet will bring him luck. The drumbeat "starts at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat--72 to the minute--and continues at a gradually accelerating rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play" (184). Expressionism attempted to revolutionize the prevalent contemporary social and moral values. Expressionists judged humanity as a forgery of itself, and aimed at transforming and improving the existent order. One of the ways to achieve this improvement was to revalue the conception of the primitive. They believed that human beings, as a result of industrialization, had lost their power of the humane, their natural spontaneity and pure instinct. To save the spirit of this seriously affected humanity Expressionists propose to return to the original world in which the primary forms of this humanity appear in their pristine nature. Hence, the connection with the land, the taste for anything which escapes from the civilized world become ways to return to an essential humankind. However, the sounds of the primitive drumbeat--as an Expressionist device--are not only "a tangible projection of Jones's rising panic" (Whitman 148), but most important the reflection of his accelerating process of a traumatic self-revelation and destruction--"the bleedin' ceremony 'as started," warns Smithers, and adds that "I've 'eard it before and I knows" (184). (20) Thus Brutus Jones becomes the sacrificial victim in a primitive ritual of revenge and death stripped bare of its absolute originality, of its expression of force and life in the very simplest form and remains a barbarous exorcism provoked by revenge. In fact, Quinn is right when he asserts that "this device, not unknown to the theatre, has probably never elsewhere been used so effectively. It is a unifying force and it accentuates the needed mood in both character and audience, for it goes back to the primitive expression of emotion, the accentuated rhythm of the earliest race" (179).

Brutus Jones stumbles through the jungle to the rhythm of the tom-tom while his personality disintegrates. His doomed journey is mockingly reminiscent of the typological flight of the African slave in antebellum America. (21) O'Neill made clear that he felt that the writer could not write about the present but only about a past that was far enough back in time to be seen with some degree of wholeness and coherence. (22) The forest--"a wall of darkness dividing the world" (187)--is not just "a place where something happens to Jones; it is part of what happens to him, a primeval, elemental force which literally and figuratively strips him of the superficies of civilization" (Whitman 148). As part and parcel of the Expressionist dramatic strategy, it is used to peel off Jones's layers of acceptable characterization and make him acknowledge his only heritage. Each scene illustrates key events in Jones's personal, racialized, and atavistic past. These scenes of retrieval of the past are presented as Jones's dreams or hallucinations, half-light phantasmagoric visions. According to Brustein, O'Neill--as an experimental artist-adapted Strindberg's Expressionist dream techniques, but "Strindberg's formal experiments grow out of his material, while O'Neill's seem grafted onto his, and thus give the impression of being gratuitous and excessive" (327). (23)

Another element basic to Expressionism was color. Expressionism developed in the visual arts. Line and color were given independence from nature and manipulated freely to express emotional response. Consequently, color has symbolic meanings to shock the viewer; they are linked to the subjectivity of the artist and the expression of his inner life. Van Gogh's words describing his use of red and green to portray the terrible human passions are well-known together with the spectral resonance of colors in Edvard Munch's paintings. O'Neill also makes significant use of color in The Emperor Jones, but not colors for shock effect. Toshio Kimura's essay "O'Neill's 'White Sepulchre'" (1955) explains the dramatist's use of the color white in The Emperor Jones. White is everywhere in the imperial palace as the introductory stage direction makes clear: "The audience chamber in the palace of the Emperor--a spacious, high-ceilinged room with bare, whitewashed walls. The floor is of white tiles. In the rear, to the left of center, a wide archway giving out on a portico with white pillars" (173, my emphasis). Kimura rightly asserts that the color is "meant to represent Jones['s] belief in the superiority of the white man; black himself, Jones attempts to intimidate his black subjects with the whiteness that actually intimidates him" for, "though black-skinned, he is fully white in his ways" (94). The forest into which he flees is described in the first stage direction of Scene Two as "a wall of darkness dividing the world" (187). There, he searches for a white stone that marks the place where food has been buried: "White stone, white stone, where is you?" (188). But he is shocked to stumble against not one but many of such stones: "But how come all dese white stones? And whar's dat tin box o' grub I hid all wrapped up in oil-cloth?" (189). Hence, whereas the whiteness he had earlier wanted to appropriate fails him now and reveals his "authentic nature" as both a political and racial usurper, the blackness of the jungle engulfs him in a mortal embrace. "He dies a wretched death at the hands of the waiting natives whose 'black' reality cannot, ultimately, be deceived by Jones's bankrupt white facade" (Kimura 95). Jones's journey from the whiteness that wraps him up in his palace into the darkness of his psyche becomes an act of cathartic unmasking. Thus the contrast between his white civilized exterior and black savage interior is far from a typically Expressionist search for spirituality through primitive regression. White and black do not achieve new chromatic harmonies in expressing a state of spiritual crisis but the expected dismantling of a crude banal fake and, as such, the conclusion is predictable from the first scene.

Scene Two anticipates the action of the following parts by showing Jones on the edge of the forest and by the first of his hallucinations--the apparitions of little formless fears. In Scene Three Jones confronts the first of his haunting memories from his corrupted past--the ghost of the black Pullman porter he killed. In Scene Four his spiritual disintegration is clearly paralleled by the tearing of his Emperor's clothes--"His uniform is ragged and torn" (192). Little by little this journey into the heart of darkness acquires the proportions of a reversion to Jones's natural instincts-fear, cowardice, moral passivity. He starts mirroring what he has previously denigrated--"Is you civilized, or is you like dese ign'rent black niggers heah?" (193).

What becomes more obvious as the action advances is that the confrontation in The Emperor Jones is not between white versus black, but rather between varnished whitened black versus savage black, and that the outcome will inevitably revert to a discussion of degrees of black brutality. Accordingly, if in the previous scene Jones has been shown as a murderer of blacks, now he is presented as an emasculated victim prevented from reacting towards his white victimizer. In Scene Five "his pants are in tatters, his shoes cut and misshapen, flapping about his feet" (195), he looks wildly and moans miserably while he plunges into a farther stage of his racial history--the antebellum South of slavery. His route to death takes here the proportions of a grotesque pilgrim's progress through several valleys of self-confrontation. Jones finds himself at the auction block together with other fellow slaves. Thus the man who at the beginning of the play discards his individual historical past--"No use'n you rakin' up ole times. What I was den is one thing. What I is now's another" (177)--is forced to acknowledge it together with the history of his race.

In Scene Six Jones, left with a breech cloth, moves back further into his tracing of racial identity and is presented on his way from Africa in a slave ship. Scene Seven represents his arrival back at his ultimate origin, the savagery of the Dark Continent. According to Falk, this last scene is meant to convey a sense of "physical and spiritual birth" (68). Yet Jones remains dispossessed of the last layers of civilization and is forced to come back to the clearing where he entered the forest, symbolizing rather his embracing of his authentic origins--the obscure, primitive world he has repeatedly shunned. As Richard A. Long puts it, "Brutus Jones is reduced from a swaggering bravo to a simpering hulk in twenty-four hours by atavistic superstition induced by the beating of drums in the forest" (44). Black civilization passes then through brutality and superstition, through the primogenial rites of deadly exorcism carried out by the Congo witch doctor. Brutus Jones dies because he has been unable to recognize and, consequently, reconcile both his communal and personal past with their present manifestations. Every time Jones shot a figure of his hallucinations, he killed a part of himself and therefore, by shooting the crocodile with the silver bullet reserved for himself, he performs a ritual of self-immolation as demanded by his rejection of his true image and history.

It is undeniably true that The Emperor Jones had a tremendous impact on the Harlem Renaissance and on the image of the black man it projected. According to Long this was so because first of all, "the black is clearly the protagonist; the role is virtually a monologue. The performance requires a tour de force of the actor, serving to indicate the high caliber of black dramatic talent. Secondly Brutus Jones is a highly complex character capable of considerable introspection, and this seemed to be an improvement on the black-as-buffoon. Finally, though he sustains a morally appropriate defeat, it is at the hands of other blacks whom he has attempted to subjugate in a colonialist manner" (44). However, the play presents more than serious flaws. Its progress dodges any indictment on white colonialism and free materialistic exploitation. (24) It is rather the justified failure of the trajectory of "the black man who would be King," or paraphrasing Smithers's appellation at the beginning of the play, a "stinkin' nigget puttin' on airs," who is incapable of transcending the limits of his racial and historical inheritance. Brutus reverts to "where he belongs" and dies not because of the natives' "silly spells," as Smithers scornfully names them (203), but rather because his identity is rooted in the model of white exploiters. Thus O'Neill inscribes Jones's final self-recognition as a face-to-face confrontation with his original ancestry of savagery and superstition that he has vainly tried to ignore. As Zander Brietzke states, "the inevitable collapse of confidence into despair that is hinted at in the initial scenes and that steadily erodes in the succeeding scenes" indicates the limitations of The Emperor Jones and the play exhausts itself "in one act" (46). Brutus Jones perishes alienated from misconstrued history, both black and white. He does not embody any universal archetype as Falk has it, but rather the specific example of the African American at the beginning of the twentieth century. Likewise, John Cooley explains that O'Neill's most significant black portrait is "an example of the way in which old racial cliches and myths were perpetuated, even in highly regarded literature" (53). Brutus Jones ends up being "more clown than hero, ultimately a laughable pretender to be pitied and dismissed" (56). If the New Negro had offered any hope of transcending stereotypes, O'Neill quickly dismantled it. Jones stands for the Old Negro of the Plantation literature unredeemed and undisguised through the patina of apparent civilization.

Yet it seems difficult to understand Jones without his racial marks. The significance of the play does not lie, as Falk manifests, "in the character of Jones, conveyed through a gradual breaking down of his conscious ego and the revelation of his personal and collective unconscious" (67), but in the ultimate confrontation of African Americans with their "destiny." The Emperor Jones is not a dramatization of Jung's fundamental premise--the existence and power of the collective unconscious (Falk 66)--even though O'Neill thought it was. Langston Hughes reveals the disconnect between O'Neill and black folk when he reconstructs a Harlem audience's reaction to the play in his autobiography The Big Sea:

      Somewhat later, I recall a sincere
   but unfortunate attempt on Jules
   Bledsoe's part to bring "Art" to
   Harlem. He appeared in Eugene
   O'Neill's The Emperor Jones at the old
   Lincoln Theater on 135th Street, a theater
   that had, for all its noble name,
   been devoted largely to ribald, but
   highly entertaining, vaudeville of the
   "Butterbeans and Susie" type. The
   audience didn't know what to make of
   The Emperor Jones on a stage where
   "Shake That Thing" was formerly the
   rage. And when the Emperor started
   running naked through the forest,
   hearing the Little Frightened Fears,
   naturally they howled with laughter.

      "Them ain't no ghosts, fool!" the
   spectators cried from the orchestra.
   "Why don't you come on out o' that
   jungle--back to Harlem where you
   belong?"

      In the manner of Stokowski hearing
   a cough at the Academy of Music,
   Jules Bledsoe stopped dead in his
   tracks, advanced to the footlights, and
   proceeded to lecture his audience on
   manners in the theater. But the audience
   wanted none of The Emperor Jones.
   And their manners had been all right
   at the other shows at the Lincoln,
   where they took part in the performances
   at will. So when Brutus continued
   his flight, the audience again
   howled with laughter. And that was
   the end of The Emperor Jones on 135th
   Street. (Hughes 258-59, qtd. in Cooley
   60)

Abiodun Jeyifous explains that reaction of this Harlem audience taking into account that "within conventional (Western) criticism this response would be written off as a reflection of the axiom that art or drama can only happen at a certain level (social class) of appreciation. But to the black theatre artists and critics this was indicative of their precise contention that art and theatre are merely agglomerations of culturally matrixed conventions and usages" (331). For Cooley, the reaction obeys to Harlemites' knowledge that "the jungle had no connection with their lives" and their recognition of the stereotypes O'Neill was employing (60). In fact, the Harlem Renaissance writers, as Sidney H. Bremer explains, were developing a vision of an urban home that was at once "an organic place, a birthright community, and a cultural aspiration," and thus Harlem became "their primary, symbolic home" (48). Hence, the vision of Harlem as home brought "the transcent power of the pastoral to bear on city life" (50), not some remote tropical exotic jungle. "But who wanted the Emperor Jones running through the jungles? Not Harlem," concluded also Hughes (259).

The Emperor Jones is only a partially expressionistic one-act tragedy, or as Ronald H. Wainscott defines it "a semi-expressionistic play" (167), since it ultimately abandons the key point that defines Expressionist drama: universality, or to put in Kurt Pinthus's words, "the expression of a soul swollen with tragedy" (qtd. in Carlson 348), and therein reveals its prejudices. O'Neill's borrowing of expressionistic devices that rely on the masculine, essentialist norm as universal, far from clothing the play with implications that transcend the merely racial, anchors it firmly to the depiction of a stereotyped African American experience. Hence, The Emperor Jones does rise to the level of insinuating that savagery can reside in the hearts of all human beings, but it shows that it is confined to the heart of black America. (25) The play becomes then another example of the simplified and mystified robes characteristic of the Western treatment of marginal peoples and cultures. Sterling A. Brown in his "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors" explains that during the first decades of the twentieth century "to authors searching 'for life in the raw,' Negro life and character seemed to beg for exploitation. There was the Negro's savage inheritance, as they conceived it: hot jungle nights, the tom-tom calling to esoteric orgies. There were the frankness and violence to be found in any underprivileged group, or on any frontier" (197). O'Neill's searching "for life in the raw" seized upon stereotypes.

Richard Wright in White Man, Listen! (1967) declared that "Negro life is life lifted to the heights of pain and pathos, drama and tragedy. The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small.... The Negro is America's metaphor" (qtd. in Gross 25). Whether The Emperor Jones was America's metaphor remains controversial. In fact, black critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., discusses how white critics' accounts of modern literature as "shockingly personal" can involve African American students, since for him it is difficult "to find intimacy either in the moderns' hostility to civilization or in their fawning reliance on an array of images and assumptions bequeathed by a civilization that, in its prototypical form, is exclusively Western, preeminently bourgeois, and optically white." He exemplifies that alienation from the "intimacy and reverence" that white literature allegedly implies with his reading of The Emperor Jones. "If only O'Neill had bracketed the psycho-surreal final trappings of his Emperor's world and given us the stunning account of colonialism that remains implicit in his quip at the close of his list of dramatis personae," he declares, he might have felt at least some of that "intimacy and reverence" (6-7).

Yet, this story of "a fugitive Negro ruler lost in the jungle, in the grip of hallucinations and rising panic" (Sheaffer 151) may have served a therapeutic effect on O'Neill. As Jean Baudrillard argues about the simulation of the other, O'Neill's fathering of The Emperor Jones allowed him not to repeat himself for ever through a hackneyed version of cultural primitivism and dramatic reductionism. In 1911 H. G. Wells had written an enlightening short story titled "In the Country of the Blind" where he showed that the preposterous one-eyed man is not the king among the blind but rather their victim. The Emperor Jones stands as O'Neill's black version of Wells's story as he evinced that among "woods niggers," the African American far from being their emperor could only find his right place by becoming just one of them.

Works Cited

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Bridges, William. "Review of The Emperor Jones." Negro World 26 Mar. 1921.

Brown, Sterling A. "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors." Journal of Negro Education II (Jan. 1933): 180-201.

--. "The American Race Problem as Reflected in American Literature." Journal of Negro Education VIII (July 1939): 275-90.

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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Echoes of the Jazz Age." 1931. The Crack-Up: With Other Uncollected Pieces, Note Books and Unpublished Letters. Ed. E. Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1964. 13-22.

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Notes

(1.) Sterling A. Brown in his "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors" lists "the exotic primitive" as one of the most prevalent of these stereotypes. According to Brown, it "grew up with America's post-war revolt against Puritanism and Babbitry. Literary critics urged a return to spontaneity, to unrestrained emotions: American literature had been too long conventional, drab, without music and color. Human nature had been viewed with too great a reticence. Sex, which the Victorians had considered unmentionable, was pronounced by the school of Freud to have an overwhelming importance in motivating our conduct. So the pendulum swung from the extreme of Victorian prudishness to that of modern expressiveness" (197).

(2.) In his article "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931), Fitzgerald provides some characteristics of the 1920s: "The Jazz Age ... had no interest in politics at all. It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.... We were the most powerful nation.... Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? ... Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of the generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight.... The word jazz in its progress towards respectability has meant first sex, then dancing then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of the big cities behind the lines of war.... In any case, the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money" (14, 16).

(3.) The mid-19th-century discussion of racialist thinking revolved around the assumption that race was real and the races fundamentally different. "The biological school saw the Negro as a pathetically inept creature who was a slave to his emotions, incapable of progressive development and self-government because he lacked the white man's enterprise and intellect" (Frederickson 101). Yet "those who ascribed to the priority of feeling over intellect sanctioned both by romanticism and evangelical religion could come up with a strikingly different concept of Negro 'differences.' Whereas scientists and other 'practical men' saw only weakness, others discovered redeeming virtues and evidences of black superiority" (Frederickson 101). George Fredrickson calls "this comparatively benign view of black 'peculiarities'" romantic racialism, a doctrine widely espoused by Northern humanitarians who were more or less antislavery during the antebellum period. Although romantic racialists acknowledged that blacks were different from whites and probably always would be, they projected an image of the Negro as "a child" and rejected slavery because it took unfair advantage of the Negro's innocence and good nature (102).

(4.) "What was new about the image of blacks conveyed in the novels of white writers like DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, and Carl Van Vechten was not the stereotype itself but the lack of moralism in the treatment of what would previously have been defined as black immorality or even animality; for these novelists incorporated sexuality into the romantic stereotype without appearing to condemn it. The cultural revolt against 'Puritanism' and 'repression' in the 1920s could lead some whites to believe that they were being complimentary to blacks when they described them as naturally naive and primitive creatures who characteristically gave free rein to all their passions. Thus in 1925 the New York critic Heywood Broun could describe Heyward's Porgy, a novel of primitive low life and sexual passion among blacks of Charleston, as demonstrating that Negro life was 'more colorful and spirited and vital than that of the white community.' 'If the two cultures do not readily mix, as many maintain,' he continued, 'it may well be that it is the Nordic who lags.' The new spokesmen for black superiority, however, tended to overlook some of the real injustices suffered by blacks, and they sometimes implicitly or explicitly justified white-imposed segregation on the grounds that the vast temperamental differences between the races meant in fact that they should not 'mix'" (qtd. in Fredrickson 328).

(5.) According to David Levering Lewis, "from older writers like Lincoln Steffens and Van Wyck Brooks to young ones like Waldo Frank and Matthew Josephson, there existed a common conviction that Western civilization had been badly maimed by an omnivorous industrialism. The writer Harold Stearns and his fellow revoltes of Greenwich Village loudly advertised their loathing for 'the people who actually run things' in America.... From such convictions the rediscovery of the Afro-American followed logically and psychologically, for if the factory was dehumanizing, the campus and the office stultifying, and the great corporations predaceous, the Afro-American--excluded from factory, campus, office, and corporation--was the perfect symbol of cultural innocence and regeneration" (91).

(6.) Other white-authored dramas written and acclaimed at the time were Abraham's Bosom, by Paul Green; the opera Porgy and Bess, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward; The Green Pastures, by Marc Connelly; as well as O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings (1923).

(7.) For an enlightening study of the complex relationship among African, African American, and Euro-American cultures throughout these years, see Lemke; she explains that black and white cultures are "mutually constitutive" and that "there is no modernism without primitivism" (144).

(8.) African American social and political realities significantly differed from these fantastical representations. See Bell for a vivid description of the early 20th-century "'Red Summer'" (93).

(9.) O'Neill's portraits of blacks also appear in Thirst (1914), a collection of five one-act plays, The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), The Dreamy Kid (1919), and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924).

(10.) Falk groups The Emperor Jones together with Gold, Diff'rent (1920) and The First Man (1921) in the chapter, "The Extremists." For this critic, "these plays are dominated by personalities who, like the searchers, are aliens from self; but they are not bewildered. They know, or think they know, exactly who they are and what they want. Fulfillment requires them to betray and destroy other human beings, but always in the spirit of a suffering Abraham forced to sacrifice a beloved son, for whom no ram appears. Too late, or never, the destroyer learns that the voice demanding slaughter was not God's or Fate's, but that of sheer hallucination.... The voice came from behind a hollow mask--his own false ego-image. In his ignorance or fear of the nothingness behind the mask, he is desperately propelled toward integration with the mask itself. At all costs he must become the grandiose, chimerical self-image. His monomania ignores the opposites of life and of self and hurtles him on toward madness or death" (61-62).

(11.) For the Gelbs, the way O'Neill told about the different sources of inspiration for the play, "again, is evidence of a blending of the personal past (not only his experience in the jungles of Honduras, but the memory of Adam Scott, the Negro deacon-cum-bartender in New London, supplemented by the personality of O'Neill's Greenwich Village friend Joe Smith, one of whose phrases--'Dey's some tings I ain't got to be tole. I kin see 'em in folks' eyes'--appeared intact in the play), the external present (a casual story told in a bar, fortified by purposeful reading), and the intuitive daring which could translate the pulselike, Congo drumbeat into a theatrical device that would fuse all these elements into a statement of artistic truth" (229-30).

(12.) See Chapter 29 in Gelb 227-39 for further details on Gilpin's involvement with the play.

(13.) According to Raleigh, O'Neill's obsession with blacks is manifested in his use of Negro dialect. "Negro" vernacular was one of the "principal racial or cultural dialects that O'Neill employed throughout his career." For Raleigh, the dialect of Brutus Jones involves "running sentences together, speaking in fragments, slurring pronunciation, mixing up parts of speech, mispronouncing both vowels and consonants, mixing up tenses, and suppressing the last letter, or letters, of words" (221).

(14.) Cooley argues that O'Neill "created a role that helped to establish the careers of Charles Gilpin, and Paul Robeson, yet approached his black portraits with insensitivity and maladroitness, perpetuating pejorative images of black life" (55).

(15.) I draw this brief outline of Expressionist drama from Jerez Farran, Modern, and Wentzlaff-Eggebert.

(16.) Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.

(17.) This new concept of reality does not exist outside of the artist's conscience. Thus Karl Krass, editor of Die Fackle, declares that "the truth of the genius that distorts is higher than the truth of anatomy ... because in the presence of art reality is only an optical illusion" (qtd. in Jerez 22).

(18.) Cooley compares O'Neill's portrait of Jones with Roi Otteley's description of Marcus Garvey, the black leader who in 1920s Harlem assembled the largest black mass organization in US history. Garvey envisaged plans for the recolonization of Africa, and the high point of his movement was the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World held in New York City in August 1920. The attention paid to Garvey in US newspapers supports the suggestion that O'Neill was aware of this historical figure and of his prominence among African Americans.

(19.) The most famous Expressionist film is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), in which a madman relates to a madwoman his understanding of how he came to be in the asylum. The misshapen streets and buildings of the set are projections of his own insane universe, and even the other characters have been abstracted through makeup and dress into visual symbols. Burton L. Cooper discusses O'Neill's interest in adapting some of his plays for film and explains how in the early 1920s the playwright considered making a film of The Emperor Jones, which was doomed to failure as he and Robert Edmond Jones could not raise any interest in it. Cooper argues that the inspiration for this project must be traced back to O'Neill's viewing of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the artistic possibilities that he thought could be transferred from this film to his own work (73-74).

(20.) "Over all, O'Neill's dialogue has both a monolithic aspect and a developmental aspect. The monolithic aspect is given, once more, by his key concept, 'rhythm,' which in this context means simply verbal repetition and which remained a fundamental device throughout his plays.... These repetitions vary in range from the repeated use of a sound that may have no meaning in itself, such as the tom-tom beat of The Emperor Jones or the whistle in Bound East for Cardiff, but that acquires a portentous meaning because of its repeated use in a certain context (doom in both these plays), to the repetitious insistence on some idea or concept, always expressed in the same world of phrase, which is an explicit statement of the central idea of the play, as, for example 'death' in Mourning" (Raleigh 213).

(21.) Zander Brietzke also points at "the discrepancy between the flamboyance of the costume, the flippancy with which Jones regards his predicament, and the ominous portents of the distant tom-toms" which "undercuts any confidence regarding the success of Jones's escape" (46).

(22.) With the first production of his first major memory play, The Iceman Cometh, in 1946, O'Neill said, "I do not think that you can write anything of value or understanding about the present. You can only write about life if it is far enough in the past. The present is too much mixed up with superficial values; you can't know which thing is important and which is not. The past which I have chosen is one I knew" (Raleigh 36).

(23.) Strindberg's dream plays attempt "to evoke the forces behind life, which are essentially nonverbal and nonconceptual." But O'Neill uses Expressionistic devices "to communicate ideas which he is either too inarticulate or too undisciplined to express through speech and action. And his masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like are really substitutes for dramatic writing (most of these conventions are borrowed from the novel), provoked not by a new vision but rather by a need to disguise the banality of the original material." Thus, "instead of opening up uncharted territory, O'Neill's devices invariably fog up already familiar ground" (Brustein 333).

(24.) Bigsby, on the one hand, suggests initially that "the play is clearly a comment on imperialism" and immediately afterwards, on the other hand, goes back on his own words to assert that, in spite of "its observations on the mercenary motives and coercive methods of government, its identification of that government's method of enforcing its power through the manipulation of opinion and through capitali[z]ing on prejudice, its suggestion that government is in effect a criminal enterprise," the play "is not primarily a satire." For this critic, following the approach of the vast majority of O'Neill's researchers, The Emperor Jones's basic concern is with "exposing the unconscious, dramati[z]ing the imagination, tapping the anarchic truths, the discontinuities of the mind" (55).

(25.) Cf. the reaction of the first European critics and audiences. The German novelist and publisher, Erik Reger, even though he titled his article on O'Neill "The Georg Kaiser of America" (1929), fails to identify The Emperor Jones as anything but the description of "the panic of a half-civilized black in flight through the jungle" (31). See also Frenz and Tuck xiv-xv and Terras 92-93.

Carme Manuel is Assistant Professor of English at the Universitat de Valencia, Spain, where she teaches American literature.