Vol. 30 | March 2022 | “The mind is its own place”: A Psychological Interpretation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones | Rishav Paul

 Abstract

The development of the practice of psychoanalysis and the proliferation of psychology as a study of the mind sparked an introspective approach towards art in the first few decades of the twentieth century and had a major impact on the Modernist movement. Artists strove to create a subjective psychological reality as opposed to the objective material reality of the naturalist movement. The plays of Eugene O’Neill, who was himself greatly inspired by the expressionistic theatre of August Strindberg, is an apt example of the primacy given to the exploration of the unconscious. In The Emperor Jones, we see Eugene O’Neill depict a character who gradually loses touch with the capitalist society which has exploited him for a long time, and from which he in turn attempted to reap materialistic rewards, to stumble blindly towards the idea of a grand shared consciousness. This paper is an attempt to illustrate and explore the construction of such a character by acknowledging the existence of an unconscious mythopoeia, while appreciating O’Neill’s unique artistic credo.

Keywords: Modernism, expressionist, memory, ego, superego, id, Jungian archetypes.

“Make it new,”[1] was Ezra Pound’s totemic invocation to his fellow artists as he wrote his essays on Modernism, and though by the time his eponymous collection of essays had been published in 1934, the modernist movement in English Literature had largely crested the wave of its popularity, and writers were more concerned with the alarming rise of Fascism across Europe, Pound’s pithy exhortation ironically[2] remained relevant even as postmodernism came along to assault the very meaning of meaning itself and to destroy everything that the Modernist movement had built. Making it new was precisely what each artist worth their salt was trying to do, right from the dying decades of the nineteenth century onwards. Dissatisfied with the claustrophobic restraints imposed by Victorian society, artists in every genre, using every medium waged a war on the traditional constructs of form and content. Gone were the West End productions of well-made plays popularized by Eugene Scribe[3], featuring intense action and misunderstandings wrought by information that was revealed only to the audience but not to some of the other characters, ending in a contrived dénouement that the audience did not just expect, but heartily welcomed. Gone were the traditional Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and the Bronte sisters, wherein the poor peasants and factory workers remained so, and the women were like mere ornaments to improve or support the men, even when they were the protagonists of their stories. Novelists like Thomas Hardy began to portray “the ache of modernism” (Hardy 140) in his freethinking female characters like Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead, while the Polish born Joseph Conrad and the Indian born Rudyard Kipling looked towards the East and towards Africa for their source material. Henrik Ibsen’s plays heralded a new dawn in the practice of playwriting—the realistic, headstrong individuals he portrayed in his plays, especially the women characters, even inspired George Bernard Shaw to write a detailed essay expounding the values Ibsen represented. The Quintessence of Ibsenism was published in 1891, in response to a call for papers by the Fabian Society, of which Shaw was an active member. Shaw used this essay to extol the virtues of the lone Realist, who saw the world through a cynical lens, and was most often sceptical of established traditions and conventions. Shavian drama itself, from that point onwards, would often feature realists, who would, in opposition to the romantic worldview of idealists, recognize the problems in late nineteenth century society and consciously attempt to break away from such orthodox values.[4] The dramatic genre also featured many other innovators, with Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic movement a deliberate attempt to break free from the shackles of Victorian rigidity in the didactic purposes of art. Wilde’s ‘Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, The Importance of Being Earnest (1985) was an open mockery of Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 assertion that ‘life is earnest’.[5] No one experimented more with the dramatic form, perhaps, than August Strindberg, whose slow descent into a coherent insanity was quite breathtakingly chronicled not only in his autobiographical novel Inferno (1897), but also in his gradual rejection of the matter-of-fact realism of Ibsen’s ‘problem plays’ in order to adopt a dream-like Naturalism in plays like Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902) and Ghost Sonata (1908). Strindberg’s radical re-imagining of the theatrical space had a huge impact not only on 20th century drama, but on all forms of art, with Martin Esslin writing more than fifty years later: 

But the first to put on the stage a dream world in the spirit of modern psychological thinking was August Strindberg. The three parts of To Damascus (1898-1901), A Dream Play (1901), and The Ghost Sonata (1907) are masterly transcriptions of dreams and obsessions, and direct sources of the Theatre of the Absurd. In these plays the shift from the objective reality of the world of outside, surface appearance to the subjective reality of inner states of consciousness—a shift that marks the watershed between the traditional and the modern, the representational and the Expressionist projection of mental realities… (Esslin 304)

Eugene O’Neill, the Aeschylus of the great triumvirate of twentieth century American drama, was also greatly influenced by Strindberg’s Expressionist drama, calling him “the most modern of moderns” (O’Neill, Strindberg and our Theater 108). And while it is common knowledge that O’Neill was a devoted student of Strindberg’s methods, it is important to remind ourselves here that until his 1912 near death experience with tuberculosis, when he had to spend a number of months in a sanatorium to recover, O’Neill had no intention of being a playwright, particularly disgusted as he was with his absentee, alcoholic father’s repetitive performances of Edmond Dantes in theatrical adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The experiences he had leading up to and while in recovery are what form the basis of his famous work, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941), and on leaving the sanatorium, he decided to join Harvard University in 1914 in order to attend a course instructed by Professor George Baker. Of course, the First World War intervened to hinder his artistic development, but what might have O’Neill read while in recovery? Did he familiarize himself with the art, music and paintings of the times? Did he study the advancements in the natural sciences that mankind had made?

Science and philosophical thought made a giant leap forward in the second half of the 19th century, and it had a huge impact on the type of literature that was produced. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, and by the mid-1870s most of the naturalist scientific establishment had accepted the theory of natural selection as fact. Darwin, in his collaborative study with Alfred Russell Wallace, theorized that the branching pattern of evolution was a result of a random, natural selection of certain attributes, which were perfected by the struggle to survive and achieved the same results as artificially controlled selective breeding in animals. Darwin revolutionized our understanding of the human condition by claiming that humans too were subject to the same principles of natural selection, rejecting the notion that humans were superior to animals, and that we were all creations of a higher, superior power in its own image. Another seminal text which influenced socio-political thought for decades to come, and still continues to do so, is Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Its first volume, written by Marx himself, was published in 1867, but it was his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels who had to complete the other two volumes using notes that Marx had left behind. Marx’s assertions regarding the exploitation of the working class by a ruling minority, and his scathing indictment of a society which had reduced all inter-personal relationships into a collection of commercial transactions struck a chord with ordinary working-class Europeans and Americans, and by the end of the century, the world witnessed its first elected communist government in the Colony of Queensland, Australia, where the Australian Labour Party formed a government for a week in 1899. Nations all over the globe bore witness to socialist uprisings, with the soldiers of the Paris National Guard even establishing a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in 1871, when the Paris Commune governed the city for two months. The most influential change in the natural sciences arguably happened in the field of psychology, as the emergence of the practice of psychoanalysis revolutionized the way human beings understood the inner workings of the mind. How major a role the psyche played in regulating our conscious and unconscious behaviour was described by Sigmund Freud in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, where he postulated that dreams were just basically a form of wish-fulfilment, a way for the unconscious mind to show us our deepest, unfulfilled desires. His tripartite division of the mind into the conscious, the pre-conscious and the unconscious, was also paralleled by Carl Gustav Jung’s later theory about the mind being divided into the conscious, the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. Jung, despite being an early collaborator to Freud while he developed his theories of psychoanalysis, deviated considerably from his ideas regarding libido, and in his 1912 work Psychology of the Unconscious, completely broke away from Freud’s opinion to state that libido was not restricted to a psychosexual desire, but “a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise.” (Jung, Collected Works Vol. 5 par. 194)  Jung’s decision to publicly oppose accepted Freudian theory about the nature of the causality of human libido made him a social pariah, and he began to work on the occult and Eastern mysticism, using his exploration of Hindu Vedic scriptures to formulate a hypothesis regarding archetypes, which he defined as primeval symbols and images derived from the collective unconscious, something which he believed was common to all humanity. While Sigmund Freud, over the course of several books, postulated that the human psyche could be divided into the instinctual, impulsive id, the critical, morally superior superego and the realistic mediator between the two, the ego; Jung further expounded his theory of archetypes drawing from Plato, Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer—he called the archetype “the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness” (Jung, Synchronicity 140). Different archetypes were developed, with Jung himself contributing four: the persona, which is the mask we show to the world; the shadow which represents one’s dark side, the one which a person tries not to acknowledge; the anima, the unconscious feminine side of a man, and the animus, the unconscious masculine side of a woman; and finally the self, the sign of a healthy psyche, which is obtained only as a product of individuation, and represents the unification of the conscious and the unconscious. The popularity of psychoanalysis exploded towards the end of the nineteenth century, and by the time Eugene O’Neill started writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex, though scandalous, had made him a well-known figure, and Jung’s theories were being looked upon with more and more interest. Jung’s conception of libido as a “kind of neutral energy, which is responsible for the formation of such symbols as light, fire, sun, and the like…” (Jung, Symbols of Transformation par. 200) completely changed how artists looked at themselves, converting mankind from the stolid, materialistic product of rapid Industrialisation into a fluid, dynamic mass of identities, each of us a product of some ancestral, primal body of complexes vying for supremacy in the collective unconscious.

This is not to say, however, that Eugene O’Neill suddenly emerged from his recuperative period reborn as an expert playwright, or that he did not have any theatrical influences growing up. He was born to James O’Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan on 16th October 1888, quite fittingly in a hotel on Broadway in New York City. His father was an extremely popular matinee idol who made his living performing the roles of action heroes, accompanied across the country by his wife. Young Eugene was thus shipped off to a Catholic boarding school, St. Aloysius Academy for Boys by the time he was 8 years old, with his father too fond of the bottle and his mother addicted to pain-relieving drugs resulting from complications which arose during her youngest son Eugene’s birth. The knowledge that he was indirectly responsible for his mother’s addiction scarred him for life, and “knowledge of his mother's condition also helped to turn O'Neill away from his religion” (Berlin 27). After witnessing his mother attempting to jump into the river Thames near their summer house in New London, fifteen year-old O’Neill reasoned that “surely, his mother's Catholicism, her devotion to the Virgin Mary, should have saved her from so desperate a plight” (Berlin 28), and he never stepped foot inside a church again, apart from the occasions of his parents’ funeral. After attending Princeton University for a year, from which he was forced to drop out after numerous ‘conduct-code violations’[6], O’Neill took to the sea, travelling to the Honduras on a gold-prospecting expedition, but not before he got involved with Kathleen Jenkins, who he left pregnant. The sea remained his primary love for the next few years, and Eugene remained absent for the birth of his first son Eugene Jr. in 1910, a son who the father would see not even see till he was twelve years old. His “trip to Honduras gave Eugene a taste for adventure” (Black 8) and his experiences there formed the basis for the 1920 play The Emperor Jones. In November 1912, O’Neill was admitted to the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Connecticut, and while there “he had the time and the desire to evaluate his life” (Berlin 32). Within a year, he had written a whole host of plays, among which Bound East for Cardiff was the first to be performed on stage in the Greenwich Village theatrical scene in 1916. O’Neill wrote a letter to Professor George Baker, imploring him to transform him from “a mediocre journeyman playwright” (O’Neill, Letter to Baker p. 20) into an artist. Thereafter, his dramatic output increased drastically, and he became involved with the anti-commercial theatrical group The Provincetown Players led by the Communist Labour Party of America founder John Reed, and his wife Louise Bryant, with whom Eugene O’Neill even had a romantic relationship. The Provincetown Players continued to perform many of O’Neill’s early plays including Beyond the Horizon, which won O’Neill his first Pulitzer Prize and was his first commercial and critical success, The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie which was the recipient of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The decade of the 1920s was a particularly torturous one for O’Neill personally, as he lost his father, his mother and then his brother all in the space of forty months, but it did not diminish his creative output, though it did lead to a worsening of his relationship with his second wife Agnes Boulton. The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924) and The Great God Brown (1926) were resounding successes, while Strange Interlude (1928) won him his third Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A huge part of his success was his willingness to seek psychiatric help for his alcohol abuse, which helped him come to the self-realization that he would have either to give up the bottle or like his elder brother, give up his life. His psychoanalysis sessions probably helped him deal with the losses of his family members within a short duration of time, and he was able to “create characters like Eben Cabot in Desire Under the Elms and Nina Leeds of Strange Interlude, who are overwhelmed by their losses but have so little insight that they can neither go back nor move ahead.” (Black 11-12) But his slow process of dealing with personal loss and determination to avoid making the same mistakes that his parents and elder brother had made estranged him from his wife and the two children from his second marriage, as a result of which, by the time he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, he was already divorced from Boulton and married to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, who tried her best to provide O’Neill with a sheltered existence. This relative period of harmony and his worsening health is perhaps what contributed to a decrease in his productivity, but the last years of the decade saw the publication of the celebrated plays The Iceman Cometh (1940) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941), the latter of which was a semi-autobiographical account of his spiritual and artistic awakening. The years of the Second World War saw another spike in O’Neill’s profligacy, though these plays were not performed before his death. Eugene O’Neill passed away in November 1953, with his famous last words bringing his life full circle: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room” (Sheaffer 673), and reminding us readers that all the fame, glory and financial stability that he had attained could not make up for his lost adolescence and could not bring back the dead family members who he so dearly loved. 

Emperor Jones was the last play O’Neill wrote in 1920, motivated by the anguish and sense of loss that he felt in the months of bereavement immediately after his father’s death on 10th August. It was an election year in the United States, and the nearby island nation of Haiti was under U.S. occupation after a series of violent uprisings which had resulted in the gory assassination of the President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Informed by the contemporary socio-political events of his time, and hearkening back to the years he had spent hacking through the tropical jungles of Honduras prospecting for gold, O’Neill created a play about a black man who has unilaterally proclaimed himself the ruler of a fictional Caribbean island nation. The ‘Emperor Jones’ of the title is Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter who has become the ruler of the people on an unknown Caribbean island through a set of fortuitous circumstances. The native islanders, who are derogatorily called ‘low-flung bush niggers’ by the African American man himself, led by a character called Lem, have already tried to kill him once, but the gun used to shoot at him misfired, allowing Jones to create a myth about himself: that he can only be killed by silver bullets. They eventually succeed in killing Jones by crafting a silver bullet, though not before he goes on eerily macabre run through the jungle towards his ill-gotten wealth, in the process coming across several hallucinatory episodes, both from his individual past, and from a past which would be familiar to every African-American. The only other character of significance is a Cockney trader named Smithers, whose grudging respect for Jones’ hustle is only exceeded by the contempt he feels for both Jones and the islanders alike. The play opens at the throne room of the palace that Jones occupies, with the portico to the rear left opening out onto grand scenery of “distant hills, their summits crowned with thick groves of palm trees” (O’Neill 7). Smithers catches a native Negro woman in the act of escape, and he cannot hide his glee at the realization that Jones will finally get what’s coming to him. “Serve ’im right! Puttin’ on airs, the stinkin’ nigger! … I only ’opes I’m there when they takes ’im out to shoot ’im” (O’Neill 10) However, Jones soon emerges from within the palace itself, and the witty thrust and parry that he engages in with Smithers is sometimes warm and accommodating, and sometimes menacingly threatening.

Soon, however, it emerges that Jones too has a gun and he too has had a silver bullet crafted as an insurance policy to kill himself if push came to shove, and upon hearing the steady beating of the tom-toms which suddenly start to beat at the rate of 72 beats per minute—identical to the human pulse—Jones resigns from the post of Emperor on the spot, and boasting to Smithers about the arrangements he already has in place to make his escape, Jones exits the palace sauntering out through the front portico. The following scenes show Jones at different stages of his unsuccessful run through the forest, encountering in every succeeding scene a series of hallucinations, each of which scares him into shooting a bullet or two at them. First it is The Formless Fears, which are described as ‘grub-worms the size of a creeping child” (O”Neill 32), then comes the black colleague named Jeff whom he had killed over suspicions of cheating at a game of craps, followed by the white prison guard who Jones had killed in a fit of rage after he had whipped Jones. The next scene shows a slave auction, and while this is not Jones’ memory, he nevertheless shoots the auctioneer and the planter who buys him. The final scene of Jones’ dream sequences features an African tribal ceremony, where Jones is confronted by a witch doctor who offers Jones up as a sacrifice to some primeval deity, a crocodile god emerging from the river. Unable to reconcile these images with his belief in the Christian God, he shoots the crocodile instinctively, using the last remaining silver bullet in his gun. The concluding scene of the play shows a confident Lem assuring Smithers that they will catch and kill Jones saying, “Lead bullet no kill him. He got um strong charm. I took um money, make um silver bullet, make um strong charm, too” (O’Neill 53) even as Smithers continues to abuse both the natives he does business with, and the enigmatic Emperor. In the final piece of action, a few rifle shots ring out offstage accompanied by a few joyous cries and Jones’ dead body is immediately brought out from the forest by a group of natives. 

While a preliminary reading of the play is enough to explore the post-colonial angle in the plot, where the African-American character takes on the role of the exploitative colonizer, a deeper understanding of the psychology behind the construction of the play may be gleaned by re-reading the supernatural reveries that Jones experiences while on the run for his life. In the first scene, Jones is unwaveringly confident, cocky even, in his ability to dupe the natives who he considers inferior to himself on account of the fact that he has spent time among white men, and has even killed one of them. In a reversal of the racial power structure prevalent even in post-Civil War America, Jones conforms to the Jungian archetype of the ruler who wants total control over his subjects, as he is portrayed as a more powerful figure than the Irish con man Smithers. “Talk polite, white man! Talk polite, you heah me! I’m boss heah now, is you forgettin'?” (O”Neill 12) says Jones to Smithers, and the playwright is quick to confirm this power dynamic in the stage directions as well. 

The Cockney seems about to challenge this last statement with the facts, but something in the other’s eyes holds and cows him. (12)

However, as the scene progresses further, and Jones realizes that his time as the island’s overlord is up, he grows a bit apprehensive, and his demeanour changes. Hearing the steady beat of a tom-tom in the distance, Jones “starts at the sound; a strange look of apprehension creeps into his face for a moment as he listens” (O’Neill 25). The devout Christian that he is, Jones is quick to dismiss Smithers’ claims that the native tribes were gathering up their courage using a war dance and “'oldin' their 'eathen religious service—makin' no end of devil spells and charms to 'elp 'em against your silver bullet” (O’Neill 25). However, deep down he is uneasy, as his superego chastens him, and his psyche takes his brash overconfidence to the next level, employing defence mechanisms to put up a brave front. Deep down, Jones’ fight or flight instinct has been activated, and his ego, ever the opportunistic realist, knows that it is time for him to flee. Smithers chastises him for not having the tenacity to convert the islanders to Christianity, and Jones once again allows the archetype of the Persona within him to take over, asserting that the Baptist Church did not pay him to convert non-believers to their cause: 

“I pretends to! Sho' I pretends! Dat's part o' my game from de fust. If I finds out dem niggers believes dat black is white, den I yells it out louder 'n deir loudest. It don't git me nothin' to do missionary work!” (O’Neill 27)

Freud’s concept of the ego (which he later divided into the ego and the ‘ego-ideal’ or the superego) and the id, as explained in the ground-breaking research paper titled The Ego and the Id (1923), starts off with the presupposition that the mind may be divided into conscious and unconscious thoughts. In a famous analogy first used in this essay, Freud further likened the ego to the human rider of a racehorse, who “has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” (Freud 15), but often is overwhelmed by the primal strength of the id, and on failing to comply with the reality principle, is forced to yield to it. Brutus Jones’ flight from his palace, similar to the Haitian President Guillame Sam’s ultimately unsuccessful asylum at the French embassy, is a perfect example of his id taking over, and even at this early stage the reader can somewhat anticipate, if not correctly surmise, his ultimate fate. The next scene is prophetic, as the first obstacles that Jones comes across in his purported attempt to flee are named the Little Formless Fears. Jones’s confidence is somewhat deflated after failing to find the provisions that he had stacked away for a rainy day, but he decides to press on nonetheless, as the insistent drumbeat of the tom-tom continues to pursue and harangue his conscience. But he is soon confronted by some nameless creatures, no larger than human babies, crawling out of the forest undergrowth towards him, in what is a clear approximation of his superego chastising him. The next figure he comes across is Jeff, the fellow porter he had killed after he had caught him cheating. The macabre scene, brightly lit by the garish moonlight, as the rest of the scenes are from this point onwards, is brilliantly punctuated by the queer, clicking sound of the dice being rolled, and Jones is forced to confront his guilt, a guilt which remains silent and does not even berate him. The next scene features a Jones who, already having lost his colourful hat, now discards the coat and his spurs, a symbol of his superior position: “Damn dis heah coat! Like a straitjacket!” (O’Neill 37) rails the desperately out-of-breath man. Suddenly a vision of a gang of convicts hard at work while being whipped swims across his eyes, and he calls out to the Christian saviour to protect him. “Lawd Jesus!” he exclaims, to no avail, as he is whipped, just as he had been in prison, even though he once again takes up an imaginary shovel to begin working in an apparent acceptance of his subservience. Jones material weapon once again saves him, but his personal unconscious is slowly breaking down. Normand Berlin writes:

On the archetypal level, Jones's journey through his night mirrors that of all men. Beneath the veneer of civilization, under the ‘robes and furred gowns’ which ‘hide all’ (as King Lear, another self-stripper, would express it), lurk the primal urges, the Dionysian claims, the heart of darkness. (Berlin 60)

By the time he reaches the next clearing in this forest of personal horrors, he is extremely dishevelled, his pants torn beyond recognition. This is the scene where an imaginary crowd of gaily dressed, well-to-do planters attend a slave auction, and an imagined auctioneer sells him off to a planter, before they are both shot by Jones’ gun. The figures are memories of a collective suffering, and even O’Neil asserts in his stage directions that the figures are puppets, like Jones himself is at the hands of his inherited unconscious, and that “There is something stiffs rigid, unreal, marionettish about their movements” (O’Neill 43). The African-American man, who “has the collective unconscious of the black man” (Mendelssohn 25) in his psyche, has, by this stage in the play, lost both the status and the mental state of an Emperor, and he starts calling himself a nigger, because while on the run “he becomes a mere ‘nigger’ and reverts to the language of the oppressor” (Mendelssohn 24). The penultimate of the play’s expressionist scenes is the only one which does not witness the discharge of a bullet at an imagined oppressor. Jones simply watches dumbstruck as two rows of dark-skinned African men occupy two rows behind him, rocking back and forth to a subconscious rhythm of the slave ship on the rolling sea which somehow perfectly matches that of the tom-tom the audience can hear in the distance. Like Jones now, they are “naked save for the loin-cloth” (O’Neill 46). The final scene in Jones’ journey of Jungian self-discovery is the culmination of “a process of casting off their bondage to the material mode, to awaken and find their true selves” (Stockenstrom 107). He finds himself at “The foot of a gigantic tree by the edge of a great river,” (O’Neill 47), and though awake and conscious, “his eyes have an obsessed glare, he moves with a strange deliberation like a sleep-walker or one in a trance” (O’Neill 47). He kneels before a rough stone altar and “as if in obedience to some obscure impulse” (O’Neill 48) he utters: 

“What - what is I doin '? What is - dis place? Seems like - seems like I know dat tree - an' dem stones - an' de river. I remember – seems like I ben heah befo'. (Tremblingly) Oh, Gorry, I'se skeered in dis place! I'se skeered! Oh, Lawd, pertect dis sinner!” (48) 

Jones’ exhortations to the Christian God to save his soul have no effect whatsoever. Perhaps, like Faust, his crimes have rendered him irredeemable. Or perhaps his creator—the playwright, not the God Christians worship—has no intentions of a happy ending for his character. Either way, Jones begins to dance with the witch-doctor, in harmony with the ever-present beat of the tom-toms. He seems completely hypnotized, as if “the whole spirit and meaning of the dance has entered into him, has become his spirit” (O’Neill 49). When a pagan deity in the form of a crocodile emerges to devour him, only then does Jones’ trance break, and he uses his silver bullet, both literal and symbolic. It only provides a temporary reprieve, though. In the final scene of the play, the dénouement, we find out that Jones hadn’t gotten very far; he’d simply been running around in circles: “If 'e lost 'is bloody way in these stinkin' woods 'e'd likely turn in a circle without 'is knowin' it” (O’Neill 53) proclaims Smithers, and the Emperor Jones soon meets his end. 

Tribal lore is always sacred and dangerous. All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves. What is true of primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally hidden, and they set forth the secrets of the soul in glorious images. (Jung, Archetypes 7)

Jung’s sources for his theory on the collective unconscious were, for the most part, the similarities in the mythopoeia that he discovered among the ancient religions of the world. To him, mankind only constructed those mythical tales in order to return to an imagined past of a global commune, as they were unable to reconcile the materialism of the world in front of their eyes with the world of their unconscious, the world of their dreams. Jung calls his concept of the archetype “an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos” (Jung, Archetypes 4), a representation of the ideal world of forms. It is no wonder that the reverse journey of the Black experience as typified by the character of Brutus Jones is kicked off when he faces the ‘Formless Fears’. The processes of nature and the laws of physics, which formed the basis of our earliest myths, are just “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche” (Jung, Archetypes 6) Jones, an educated, Christian black man who has lived his entire life mingling amongst white people and has never seen Africa, is able to recognize the pagan, rough stone altar because like in Strindbergian drama, Eugene O’Neill believed that “the material mode of existence with its inherent illusions and claims to ‘reality’ must be deconstructed” (Stockenstrom 107). Jones’ nocturnal journey, visually and aurally striking, is simultaneously physical and psychological, individual and universal. He discards the accoutrements of the physical as he ventures further and further into his psyche, into the repressed memories of his race, his culture. In Emperor Jones, Eugene O’Neill portrays “the condition of that one black man, of all black men, and of all men” (Berlin 59).

Endnotes:

[1] The phrase “Make it new” occurs in Ezra Pound’s Canto LIII (265) and is the title of his essays published in 1934.

[2] It is ironic that Pound’s phrase became the war-cry for most modernist artists inspired by ideals of democracy and socialism, because Pound himself was a Fascist and a huge fan of Benito Mussolini.

[3] In 1638, the the Académie Français tabulated a system by which dramatists were required to achieve verisimilitude, or “the appearance of a plausible truth” and the monarchy enforced the standards of French neoclassicism by licensing and subsidising only a limited number of approved theatre companies which conformed to these rules. Scribe broke away from this tradition.

[4] Bluntschli in Arms and the Man and Henry Higgins from Pygmalion are widely studied examples of realists in Shavian drama.

[5] Carlyle himself borrowed the term from Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth century German playwright and philosopher.

[6] An apocryphal story chronicles that the window through which O’Neill had hurled a bottle of alcohol while at Princeton belonged to Professor Woodrow Wilson, who would later go on to be President of the United States.

Works Cited

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Black, Stephen A. “Celebrant of Loss: Eugene O’Neill 1888–1953.” The Cambridge Companion to 
Eugene O’Neill, edited by Michael Manheim, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 4–18.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Doubleday, 1969.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id and Other Works. Edited by James Strachey, Standard Edition, 
vol. XIX, Hogarth Press, 1962.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Oxford World Classics, 1983.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Second Edition, vol. 9.1, Princeton 
University Press (Bollingen Series XX), 1968.

---. Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia. Second 
Edition, vol. 5, Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series XX), 1967.

---. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Second Edition, London, Routledge 
Publications, 1985.

Mendelssohn, Michelle. “Reconsidering Race, Language and Identity in ‘The Emperor Jones’.” 
The Eugene O’Neill Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 1999, pp. 19–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29784652.

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---. “Letter to George Pierce Baker.” O’Neill and His Plays, edited by Oscar Cargill et al., 2nd 
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