The Emperor Jones Analysis

The complete analysis of American drama, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neil.

1. Name : AYESHA KHAN ROLL NON 24 CLASS : BS-ENGLISH – 6 SUBJECT : GREEK AND ELIZABETH DRAMA SUBMITTED TO: PROF. MAHWISH MARIA

2. EUGENE O’NEILL Eugene Gladstone O'Neill  was born on October 16, 1888 and died on November 27, 1953. He was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays.

3.  His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. Eugene O'Neill is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fam. O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family’s tragic relationships—his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O’Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three. O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O’Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage.

4. THE EMPEROR JONES DRAMA INTRODUCTION

5. The Emperor Jones, drama in eight scenes by Eugene O’Neill, produced in 1920 and published in 1921. The Emperor Jones was the playwright’s first foray into Expressionist writing. Originally called The Silver Bullet, the play is highly effective as pure theater through its use of such elements as pulsing drums, gunshots, and the dramatic jungle setting.  It tells the story of a black American man named Brutus Jones who, after killing another black man in a dice game, escapes jail and goes to a small Caribbean island.  The play has been revived and adapted many times. The Wooster Group staged a production in 2007 with Kate Valk, a white female actress, playing the title role in blackface, a theatrical device that O'Neill had not desired. In 1933, the play was turned into an opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, starring Lawrence Tibbett, who wore blackface.

6. LITERARY ELEMENTS

7. Genre Drama Setting and Context An unnamed island in the West Indies Narrator and Point of View No narrator. Much of the play shows the psychic perspective of Brutus Jones, but not the whole play. Tone and Mood Expressionistic, Haunting, Scary, Dramatic, Epic

8. Protagonist and Antagonist Protagonist: Brutus Jones. Antagonist: Lem Major Conflict The major conflict is that Brutus Jones, the autocrat of a small island community, must escape the revolution taking place on his island by navigating a dark forest in the middle of the night, contending with hallucinations and doubts along the way. Climax The climax occurs when Jones gets killed. Foreshadowing The scarlet throne that we see at the beginning foreshadows the bloody consequences of Jones' rule.

9. Allusions Allusions to colonialism, native customs, spiritual practices. Imagery The image of the forest is an evocative one that is often poetically expressed by Eugene O'Neill. Paradox Jones tells the natives that he can only be killed by a silver bullet as a way of making sure no one kills him, but the revolutionaries create a number of silver bullets themselves. Parallelism The first and the last scenes are the only scenes with multiple characters in it. The play is essentially bookended by realist scenes. Personification Jones' formless fears are personified, and his various traumatic memories are personified through staged hallucinations.

10. THEMES

11. Conscience, Trauma, and the Past Brutus Jones is confident that he will be able to navigate the forests of the island without a hitch, but once he enters the forest, he is visited by hallucinations and manifestations of his own compromised conscience. At first, he hears the laughter of his "Formless Fears," an emotional state that has taken on a physical form in the forest. As he progresses further into the darkness, he encounters visions of his traumatic past, of the men he killed, and then of the American slave trade. A major theme in the play is the ways that the past visits us in our solitude, and the forms that manifestations of trauma and the past can take.

12. SLAVERY At first, Jones' hallucinations seem to have to do only with his personal sins, but as he gets deeper and deeper into the forest, he encounters a broader historical memory that extends beyond simply his personal experience. After witnessing his own traumatic misdeeds in the form of hallucinations—his murder of two men—Jones hallucinates that he is getting auctioned off into slavery, that he is trapped on a slave ship, and then that he is back in the Congo. His hallucinatory journey is a journey backward in the more collectively held history of slavery, exposing its horrors and subjecting him to its dehumanizing effects. The legacy of American slavery and its horrors is thus a central theme in the play, shown as a kind of original sin from which no one can escape.

13. AUTOCRACY When we first meet Brutus Jones, he has assumed the role of emperor on a small unnamed island in the West Indies. He sits on a scarlet throne and has ultimate authority over his subjects, whom he looks down upon and regularly calls the n word. In the wake of his mistreatment in America, Jones becomes a hegemonic monster himself, an autocrat who extracts what he needs from a vulnerable community without remorse and claims power for himself avariciously.

14. Gullibility and Spirituality One of the main ways that Jones is able to ascend the throne and achieve power on the island is by exploiting the gullibility and spiritual beliefs of the islanders. An American, Jones is irreverent towards their customs and beliefs, seeing them as backward and inferior to modern logic. When an assassin is unable to kill him with a gun, Jones tells the subjects that he can only be killed by silver bullets, a lie that exploits their belief in magic and in his invincibility. Jones' irreverence towards the islanders' gullibility ultimately ends up hurting him, however, as he succumbs to some kind of magical and self-defeating forces in the jungle, and is killed by a number of silver bullets that the islanders have made from melting down coins. What Jones sees as gullibility and foolishness ends up mobilizing the islanders and even the island itself, leading to Jones' ruin.

15. RACISM A major theme in the play is racism. Jones is a black American man who has come to the West Indies only to turn the racism he has faced in a white community against the black islanders over whom he rules. He uses the n word, thinks of his subjects as inferior, and employs other strategies typical to racist belief systems, in spite of being of the same race as the people over whom he rules. Additionally, the character of Smithers represents the racist white man, a manipulative and slippery character.

16. FALL FROM POWER The play's plot follows the trajectory of a ruler falling from power when his subjects turn against him. Jones starts the play on the brink of a revolution against him. He has assumed power without any credentials and now his subjects are revolting against him. As he tries to escape through the forest, he becomes more and more disoriented, his royal clothes become ragged, and he loses his mind, until the final scene when he gets shot by  Lem's soldiers.

17. Greed And Pride In many ways, Jones is a tragic hero, even if he is not particularly heroic. He is a man who is able to escape an unpleasant home country and acquire power abroad. However, his tragic flaw is his extreme greed and sense of pride, which ends up undermining him in the end. He sees nothing wrong with his actions and feels remorseless about having assumed the role of emperor and stolen large sums of money from the islanders, which he keeps in a foreign bank account. As he escapes, he begins to doubt himself, but never fully confronts his own sense of remorse, opting instead to muster a sense of pridefulness. It is his greed and his pride that cause him to lose his mind and fall prey to his pursuers. He never truly repents for his misdeeds, which ends up costing him his life.

18. CHARACTERS

19. Brutus Jones The titular emperor of an unidentified West Indies island spent ten years working as a train porter in the United States before a game of dice spiraled wildly out of control. He killed a man named Jeff over a dispute during a game of craps. After getting thrown in jail, Brutus then killed a prison guard and escaped America as a stowaway on a ship bound for the Indies. Once on the island, he recognized how impressive he was to the natives and exploited their gullibility to become ruler. The play picks up at the exact moment that Jones' subjects begin to grow tired of him and start staging a revolt. Jones is depicted as greedy and prideful, without thinking of the ethical implications of his misdeeds. His misdeeds begin to catch up with him, however, when he enters the dark forest, and is attended by haunting hallucinations about his sordid past. He ends up becoming his own worst enemy, panicking in the face of his own conscience and making his way back to the very place where he entered the forest, where the revolutionaries are waiting to kill him.

20. Smithers Ostensibly a friend of Jones, but a profoundly racist white Cockney trader who looks upon Jones with thinly veiled malice. Smithers is the one to warn Jones of the revolution, and can hardly believe it when the natives manage to make silver bullets with which to kill their emperor. Smithers is a crooked and evil character, who seems to always side with whoever has power.

21. Lem Lem was the leader before Jones' arrival, and is the leader of the insurrection which finally kills the ill-fated emperor. Lem already tried to assassinate Jones by shooting him, but failed. In the wake of the accident, Jones convinces his subjects that he possesses magical powers and can be brought down only by a silver bullet. Following this logic, Lem stages a revolution and melts down a bunch of coins in order to make the silver bullets that end up killing Jones.

22. Old Native Woman The old woman is in and out of the story by the end of the first scene, but plays a significant role in the narrative. The play opens with Smithers arriving to an empty palace. When he finds the old woma,n she tells him that a rebellion is underway and Jones is in danger. The Witch-Doctor The witch-doctor is merely a figment of the emperor’s fevered imagination, appearing in a weird hallucinatory sequence near the end of the story. He is an image of Africa, a spiritual shaman who wants to make Jones into a human sacrifice to a god-like crocodile lying in wait in a nearby river.

23. SUMMARY

24. SCENE 1 SCENE 1

25. The main room of an emperor’s palace, with porticos in the background that reveal tropical views of a small, unidentified Caribbean island. A native black woman furtively enters from the right. She carries a bundle bound to a stick and moves toward the main door with the clear intention of escape. Smithers materializes from under the portico. Smithers is a cockney, or British working-class, confidence man with a treacherous, ferret like appearance; he is wearing the stereotypical garb of the adventurer colonialist—white riding suit, puttees, white cork helmet, a revolver, and an ammunition belt strapped to his waist. At first, the native woman does not see him, but when she does she makes a break for the door. Smithers lunges to intercept her and holds her fast by the shoulders. He interrogates the terrified woman and discovers that while the title character,

26. Brutus Jones—formerly a Pullman porter of 10 years, but now the island’s emperor—was sleeping, the natives have escaped to the hills and are plotting a rebellion, led by Jones’s political enemy, Lem. Smithers receives this information with “immense, mean satisfaction” (1:1,032): “Serve ’I’m right! Putin’ on airs, the stinkin’ nigger! . . . I only ’ opes I’m there when they takes ’I’m out to shoot ’I’m” (1:1,033). No matter his views, Smithers profits from Jones’s reign, and he whistles shrilly to alert him. The woman runs off the moment his back is turned. Brutus Jones enters, enraged by the disturbance. In the stage directions, O’Neill describes Jones’s appearance as “ 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 ”

27. Smithers hints around that the palace is unusually quiet, enjoying the rare moment when he knows something Jones, clearly his superior, does not. The repartee between the two thieves includes a good deal of exposition revealing details about them both. Before his arrival on the island, Jones served time for stabbing a man who had used loaded dice against him in a crap game and was imprisoned for the murder. He escaped prison by killing another man, his chain gang’s prison guard. Now a fugitive on the run, Jones fled to the Caribbean. Smithers, in contrast, has lived on the island eight years longer than Jones but had accomplished nothing. Prior to the play’s action, Jones gained his emperorship by convincing the native islanders he was supernatural. His one political rival, the island native Lem, had hired an assassin to kill him, but the assassin’s gun misfired, and after Jones shot the killer dead, he declared to the bewildered crowd—whom Jones significantly considers, as white colonialists might, “low-flung, bush niggers”—that only a silver bullet could kill him. In order to substantiate the bluff, Jones had a silver bullet crafted for him, proclaiming to the natives that “I’m de on’y man in de world big enuff to git me”

28. “Oh Lawd ,” he laughs, showing his acceptance of an alien white religion followed by subtle slave imagery, “from dat time on I has dem all eatin ’ out of my hand. I cracks de whip and dey jumps through” (1:1,036). His motivation for tricking the natives has already been made clear: “De fuss and glory part of it, dat’s only to turn de heads o’ de low-flung, bush niggers dat’s here. Dey wants de big circus show for deir money. I gives it to ‘ em an’ I gits de money. ( with a   grin ) De long green, dat’s me every time!” (1:1,035). Smithers chides Jones, who professes religious convictions, for never having converted the island natives to the Baptist Church; he then informs Jones what the old native woman has told him—that a rebellion led by Lem is brewing in the hills above the palace. The faraway sound of a tom-tom softly fills the air; its rhythm matches that of the normal human pulse, 72 beats a minute; in the stage directions, O’Neill instructs that the tom-tom beat should continue “ at a gradually accelerating rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play ” (1:1,041). Jones hears the tom-tom, and when Smithers explains it is part of a native war ritual to bolster their courage against a common enemy, Jones knows his game is up. “So long, white man,” he tells Smithers and, self-assured that he will survive the insurgency, flees into the island’s jungle forest (1:1,043). Prepared ahead of time for his inevitable ousting, Jones has memorized the island’s labyrinthine jungle paths, stored caches of food along the way, and made plans to evade the rebel band by escaping to Martinique on a French gunboat.

29. SCENE 2 SCENE 2

30. The edge of the “Great Forest.” Now on the run, Jones is exhausted from the journey but relaxed and self-congratulatory. However, his sinecure as emperor has ill-trained him for the grueling trek through the jungle. Jones foreshadows what lies ahead by bolstering his resolve with the words, “Cheer up, nigger, de worst is yet to come” (1:1,044; remarkably, these are the same words [excluding the racial epithet] Mark Twain once wrote to his wife in response to her fears of impending bankruptcy, though apparently O’Neill got the line from his friend Terry Carlin). Jones comes to realize his surroundings are unfamiliar and fails to locate the store of food he purposefully hid under a white stone, as the one stone has inexplicably proliferated into many.

31. The first of a series of nightmares manifests itself as a jumble of “Little Formless Fears.” O’Neill describes the ghostly creatures as “ black, shapeless, only their glittering eyes can be seen. If they have any describable form at all it is that of a grub-worm about the size of a creeping child ” (1,045–46). They laugh at him with a sound “ like a rustling of leaves ,” and Jones, startled, fires a shot into the trees. Their ethereal laughter ends, and Jones, “with renewed confidence . . . plunges boldly into the forest”

32. SCENE 3 SCENE 3

33. Deep in the thick canopy of the Great Forest. Moonlight offers Jones some visibility. His Panama hat is now gone, and his uniform is torn. He comes across a triangular clearing; an eerie clicking noise comes from the brush. The native rebels’ unrelenting tom-tom continues to beat, only now a little louder and more rapidly. He has lost track of time and is growing tired, but he remains sanguine: “Never min’. It’s all part o’ de game. Dis night come to an end like everything else” (1:1,047). He whistles cheerfully but stops himself abruptly, fearful he might expose his location. In the moonlit triangle, the spectral form of the negro gambler Jeff, the man he had murdered for cheating, gradually comes into view.

34. Jeff is wearing a Pullman porter’s uniform and is found shooting craps on the jungle floor, “ casting them out with the regular, rigid, mechanical movements of an automaton ” (1:1,047). At first, Jones truly believes Jeff is alive, and he voices sincere delight that his victim survived the stabbing. But Jeff offers no response. Jones panics, firing into the bizarre apparition, which instantaneously disappears. The tom-tom beats louder and faster, and Jones, fearing the rebel band is closing in, runs headlong into the underbrush

35. SCENE 4 SCENE 4

36. Along a dirt road in the forest. Jones’s uniform is now severely damaged. A road stretches from right front to left rear. Under the moonlight, the road appears “ ghastly and unreal ” (1:1,049). The heat is overwhelming, and Jones tears off his coat, revealing his bare torso, and takes off his spurs. As each item is symbolically discarded, so too is his identity as emperor. Continuing his monologue, Jones calms his fear of the “ ha’nts ,” or ghosts, by recalling his parson’s instruction to him that ghosts do not exist, that they are the purview of “ ign’rent black niggers” (1:1,049); apparently, then, Jones has a predisposition to have such visions. He convinces himself that Jeff was just a figment of his overdeveloped imagination, that his fatigue and hunger are making him see things.

37. A prison chain gang enters from stage right. They are shackled, wear the striped black and white uniforms of convicts, and carry picks and shovels. A white man in a prison guard uniform carrying a Winchester rifle and a whip follows close behind. At the silent crack of his whip, the prisoners begin working on the road. “ Their movements, like those of Jeff in the preceding scene, are those of automatons,— rigid, slow, and mechanical ” (1:1,050). The prison guard cracks his whip again, this time at Jones, who obediently joins the gang in the subservient mindset of an institutionalized being. While Jones is at work, the guard lashes him on the back, causing him to wince. When the guard turns his back, Jones murderously raises his shovel high above the man’s head. But the shovel unaccountably disappears, and Jones instead shoots the guard in the back, thus killing his life’s two murder victims again and wasting a third bullet. The tom-tom continues beating, louder and faster.

38. SCENE 5 SCENE 5

39. Another clearing, though this time its shape is circular. Importantly, this scene marks Jones’s psychological shift from his personal guilt feelings to the racial ancestry he had treacherously denied by enslaving his African kinsmen on the island. His clothes are in their last stages of utter disrepair. He sits on a stump with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth praying in anguish, asking Jesus to absolve him of his sins and cease his tormenting visions. Jones then turns his attention on his patent leather shoes, which are destroyed.

40. From all sides, a group of Southern planters, “ young belles and dandies ,” and an auctioneer at a slave auction appear. Again, like Jeff and the members of the chain gang, “ There is something stiff, rigid, unreal, marionettish about their movements ” (1:1,053). The auctioneer silently orders Jones to mount the auction block to allow the planters a clear view of his body. The auctioneer gestures to Jones’s terrific build and well-behaved demeanor. In a fear-driven rage, Jones shoots the auctioneer twice. The stage drops into darkness, and all we hear are Jones’s screams as he flees again into the woods and the beat of the tom-tom, faster and louder. He now has only his silver bullet left to protect him from further paranormal apparitions.

41. SCENE 6 SCENE 6

42. Another clearing, which is enclosed by creeping vines and arched tree trunks that give the impression of the hold of an old sailing ship. Jones’s imagination has sent him further back in history to a slave ship loaded with captured Africans. The moon no longer illuminates the jungle floor, and Jones enters left on his hands and knees, groaning over his lost ammunition, the darkness of the forest, and his state of complete exhaustion. The stage gradually lightens to reveal two rows of captured slaves, who rock back and forth, simulating the movement of a ship on the open sea.

43. From his prostrate position, Jones sees the ghastly scene, and he throws himself back down with his head in the dirt to hide from this terrifying group of apparitions (1:1,055). The slaves moan in unison, reaching a crescendo, seemingly directed by the sound of the tom-tom coming ever nearer, then settling down to a low murmur, then back up again repeatedly. Jones’s voice involuntarily joins the others in this song of sorrow and pain. Again, the light fades into darkness, and Jones plunges wildly into the jungle 

44. SCENE 7 SCENE 7

45. At the foot of a tree on the banks of a great river; an altar made from boulders lies near the base of the tree. Scene 7 takes Jones fully back to Africa, where a witch doctor sings and dances about a stone altar. The witch doctor’s ritualistic pantomime fully indicts Jones for his crimes, and Jones instinctively ascertains that “ the forces of evil demand a sacrifice. They must be appeased. . . . Jones seems to sense the meaning of this. It is he who must offer himself for sacrifice. He beats his forehead abjectly to the ground, moaning hysterically ” (1:1,058). In a peculiar bit of stage direction, O’Neill sends the witch doctor to the river’s edge to call from its depths an African god in the form of a crocodile, whose enormous head emerges from the river bank; evidently the river is the Congo, since O’Neill specifically calls him a “ Congo witch-doctor ” in the stage directions 

46. The witch doctor then taps Jones with his wand and points to the river. The crocodile lifts himself onto the riverbank, and Jones wriggles toward him. Jones penitently accepts the sinful nature of the crimes he committed on the island, as while he moves in the direction of the crocodile, he cries out for Jesus’ mercy for “ dis po ’ sinner” (1:1,058). In his final lines, Jones prays to “ Lawd Jesus” to save him, starkly contrasting the white god of the enslavers with the pagan god of his African ancestry (1:1,059). Jesus does rescue him, for the time being, as he is snapped out of a horror-stricken reverie by his own pious rant and remembers the silver bullet is still left. He fires at the crocodile, which drops back into the water. The witch doctor jumps behind the tree, and Jones “ lies with his face to the ground, his arms outstretched, whimpering with fear” while the tom-tom beats fill the air with a “baffled but revengeful power ”

47. SCENE 8 SCENE 8

48. Dawn the following morning, again at the edge of the Great Forest, the same as scene 2. Smithers appears among a group of native rebel soldiers, led by Jones’s political nemesis, Lem. The opportunistic Smithers has now joined the rebels, and he and Lem dispute Jones’s fate. Smithers, with sustained respect for Jones’s abilities, refuses to believe the group of islanders could catch him—“Aw! Garn! ’E’s a better man than the lot o’ you put together. I ’ ates the sight o’ ’ im but I’ll say that for ’ im .”

49. Lem insists in the stereotypical dialect of a “savage,” “We cotch him” (1:1,060). Rifle shots are heard in the jungle. Lem informs Smithers that he armed his men with silver bullets to overcome Jones’s magic. The rebel soldiers come through the forest carrying Jones’s dead body. The mythic nature of Jones’s demise in itself inspires admiration, even from his enemies. “Silver bullets!” Smithers exclaims with an ironic smirk in the final line of the play, “ Gawd blimey, but yer died in the ’eighth o’ style, any’ow !”

50. The Emperor Jones as a Statement on American Imperialism in Haiti

51. any have interpreted Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones as an exploration of the legacy of slavery and racism in America, and it is undeniable that these themes feature prominently in the narrative core of the play. Additionally, scholars have claimed that the play has a broader political symbology , in that it tells the story of autocracy and colonialism gone astray, and serves to expose the hypocrisies and indignities of U.S. imperialism in Haiti in the beginning of the 20th century.

52. O'Neill himself stated that the play's central character was based on the catastrophic rule of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the fifth president in five years in Haiti, who ruled for several months in 1915 and was an ally to American imperial forces. Sam's rule represented for O'Neill the moral and literal failure of American imperialism, and O'Neill's play was aligned with the views of his literary peers, who had sharp critiques of imperialism and a desire to expose its contradictions

53. Critic Mary A. Renda devotes an entire chapter of her book Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940, to an analysis of O'Neill's influence on American perception of Haiti. She regards The Emperor Jones as a complicated relic of the era, writing, "A complex and contradictory text, The Emperor Jones conveyed a radical critique of imperialism as economic exploitation even as it participated in the discourses of civilization and exotic primitivism that sustained the occupation in Haiti...O'Neill's play provides a window onto U.S. America's renewed fascination with Haiti in the 1920s." In her mind, the play is complicated in that it seeks to articulate a critique of capitalism and imperialism, but remains ultimately ambivalent, more concerned with the rendering of black bodies and the dramatization of black lives than in the clear articulation of injustice.