Scene I     Scene II     Scene III     Scene IV     Scene V     Scene VI     Scene VII     Scene VIII

EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism in drama was a movement that began in Germany in 1910 and flourished until around 1924. The term is generally supposed to have been suggested by some paintings which Auguste Hervé exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris under the title of ‘Expressionismes’, probably because he wished to indicate that they were conceived in reaction to the currently popular Impressionist art.

        One of the main concerns of the Expressionist dramatist was man’s inner struggle to achieve his spiritual transformation into ‘der neue Mensch’. Visionary or dream-like scenes frequently presented this process against a background of actuality which was often distorted to the point of grotesqueness. The language of the expressionist drama is frequently eminently untheatrical, consisting as it does of long, lyric monologues so intensely subjective in feeling as to seem almost incomprehensible.  Often the expressionist dramatist uses an elliptical, telegram-like style in which syntax is compressed, often a staccato, machine-gun style abounding in stichomythic phrases, but always there is the identifying characteristic of intense feeling.

        The primacy of language over plot and action in the expressionist drama has had the further effect of removing all psychological verisimilitude from the plays. Only the author-hero is psychologically delineated. The other figures are usually puppet-like emanations of the protagonist’s self-centered mind.  Consequently, we find that the subsidiary characters in the expressionist drama are always types, virtually impersonal and frequently grotesque. 

        Expressionism is similar to naturalism in that both had a common concern with social reform, and it is related to neo-romanticism in that both valued language above plot and character. Several of Strindberg’s later dramas, most notably A Dream Play, are completely expressionist in technique and in philosophy. By and large it may be said that although American playwrights have used expressionism, they have used it only as an auxiliary technique.  

(From The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama, ed. John Gassner and Edward Quinn)

On The Emperor Jones (1921) 

     In order to explore the fundamental themes of human life itself—the endless conflicts of good and evil, of light and darkness, of civilization and savagery, O’Neill experimented with expressionistic techniques in some of his early plays.  In The Emperor Jones, published in 1921, O’Neill makes special use of symbolic scenes and sound effects to portray certain psychological states of mind and the emotional intensity of his protagonist: Brutus Jones.

A Psychological Journey

The Emperor Jones is arranged in eight scenes dramatizing the psychological journey by which of an island in the West Indies to a man acknowledging his guilt, attempting to do away with the evil in himself, and finally accepting his humanity.  Central to the process of this journey are Jones’ feelings of isolation and his quest for belonging.  As Emperor, Jones has control over the island; he is feared by both the natives and his white helper Smithers.  He also has amassed a fortune by imposing heavy taxes on the natives and carrying on large-scale graft.  With power and money Jones has a strong sense of security.  Besides that, he ahs plans to ensure his safety if his empire crumbles.  He belongs.  When rebellion is brewing, Jones starts to make his escape to the coast where a gunboat is anchored by traveling through the forest.  From the time Jones enters the forest, loses his way, and begins to fear to the time he fired his silver bullet at the green eyes of the crocodile, Jones experiences the depths of isolation that force him to recognize his identity as a man.

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SCENE I

In Scene I, taking place in the audience chamber of the palace during mid afternoon, Jones’ basic nature is established from his appearance and his dialogue with Smithers.  Jones is tall and powerfully built.  Distinctive to his Negroid face are “an underlying strength of will” and “hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself” (9).  His eyes are cunning and dishonest.  Jones appears in all his gaudy costume; he wears a heavily decorated uniform, “sprayed with brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs,” bright red pants and shiny boots “with bass spurs” (9).  When he talks to the Smithers, he appears like an arrogant and flamboyant Emperor, contemptuous of the servility and superstitiousness of his own race.  Jones is very proud of his intelligence in combining an appeal to superstition with white man’s cunning to gain control over the natives in two years.  Jones tells Smithers his conviction that”[f] or de big stealing’ day makes your Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks,” a lesson learned “in ten years on de Pullman ca’s listenin’ to de white quality talk” (12).  He also reveals to Smithers how he seized the chance to control the isle; once a native tried to shoot him but the gun missed fire, whereupon Jones announced that he was protected by a charm and that only silver bullets could harm him.  Thus by stealthy trickery and conniving, he has deluded the natives into thinking of him as a god and has established himself as emperor of the isle.  Aside from his shrewdness and arrogance, Jones is a greedy and reckless materialist.  In his hubris, he has behaved like a beast and devil, determined to oppress and exploit the natives to get as much money out of them as he can and then make his get-away.  When Smithers tells him that the natives are about to revolt, he still believes that he can get away by his planned escape route through the Great Forest.

Hidden Experiences of His Soul: Personal and Racial experiences

Yet during the next six scenes he only wanders in a circle.  It is night and he loses his way in the darkness of the forest, but more so it is a psychological night and the darkness is within his own mind.  With each scene he sinks further and further into the hidden experiences of his soul, projecting them outwards as hallucinations.  They are his individual experiences as well as the racial experiences of his collective unconscious.  In other words, Jones is dealing with hidden, subconscious elements in the man’s nature.  Following O’Neill’s significant reference to Jones’ outfit as his “make up” (9), Jones rids himself of one piece after another through the dramatic progression of the action until, at the end, he is practically naked, returned to his primitive state, “unmasked.”  As Doris Falk observes:

The progress of Jones is progress in self understanding; it is the stripping off of the masks of self, layer by layer, just s bit by his “emperor’s” uniform is ripped from his destiny—himself—in nakedness. (67)

        With Jones’ decision to escape at the end of Scene I, the beating of the tom-tom begins.  The sound strikes the first note of fear in Jones; he “starts at the sound.  A strange look of apprehension creeps into his face for a moment as he listens” (20).  And as the continuous drumbeat grows increasingly faster and louder, his fear mounts.

Sound of the Drum

What is more significant, the sound of the tom-tom may be seen as an outer expression for the inner sound of Jones’ throbbing heart:

It 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.  (Scene I, 20)

As Jones progressively plunges himself deeper into the forest and deeper into the night, his mounting fear is intensified by the beat of the natives’ tom-tom.  The sound of the drum can be regarded as the externalization of his internal, emotional states and his psychological experience under the pressure of guilt-ridden fear and desolate isolation.  At each level of his regression he fires one of the six bullets in his revolver at the hallucinatory figures.  After each shot from Jones’ revolver, the drumbeat grows even louder at an accelerating rate, for as Jones realizes that by firing he has exposed himself to his pursuers, he feels them as being nearer and his fear mounts.  When Jones is shot down by the natives and his heart finally ceases to beat at the end of the play, “the beating of the tom-tom abruptly ceases” (49). 

     In the forest scenes Joes is confronted with two hostile forces: the natives that hunt him and the visions that haunt him.  Deprived of horses, he enters the forest on foot and soon loses his direction, although he had thought he knew the forest very well: “Trees an’ bring me light” (21).  Encompassed by loneliness and dread, the emperor begins to meet one apparition after another from his past, each representing an aspect of himself or emanation of his terrified soul, each of which is to be dispelled only by his firing one of his six precious bullets, finally including his “rabbit’s foot” (14), the silver bullet.

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SCENE II 

Still self-confident as he enters the forest in Scene II, Jones intends to follow an escape route he had once marked out in anticipation of his day of reckoning.  But when Jones, dog-tired and hungry, cannot find the white stone where he buried the food, he starts to be anxious.  As he scratches a match to look for the right place, “the rate of the beat of the far-off tom-tom increases perceptibly” (27-28), and he is frightened that he will be discovered.  At this moment his fear is visualized; the first vision out of his mind is that of the Little Formless Fears which exist in all human beings:

They are black, shapeless, only their glittering little eyes can be seen.  If they have any describable form at all it is that of a grubworm about the size of a creeping child.  They move noiselessly, but with deliberate, painful effort, striving to raise themselves on end, failing and sinking prone again.  (Scene II, 28)

These little “black, shapeless” Fears, creeping “out from the deeper blackness of the forest” (28), representing Jones’ fears from the darkest recesses of his soul.  When he feels that he has lost his way and his supplies, he is seized with “mournful foreboding” (28) and a loss of security.  Jones’ “self-reliant confidence in himself” (9) is shattered.  When those Little Formless Fears “squirm upward toward him in twisted attitudes” (29), Jones fires his first bullet.  After the Fears have disappeared, Jones plunges “boldly into the Forest” (29) with temporary “renewed confidence” (29).

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SCENE III

In Scene III the pervasive beating of the tom-tom is “a trifle louder and quicker than in the previous scene” (30) and Jones enters with “ heavy, plodding footsteps” which indicate his weariness.  He has lost his Panama hat.  His face is scratched.  His “brilliant uniform shows several large rents” (31).  Thus his pompous emperor’s veneer is disintegrating; his feeling of belonging to power and money is evanescent and his safety is in question.  During this scene Jones relives the murder of Jeff, a memory which comes form his criminal past.  Jeff, the Negro Jones had killed “in an argument wid razors ovah a crap game” (16), is “middle-aged, thin, brown in color, is dressed in a Pullman porter’s uniform” (30).  According to Törnqvist:

Jeff is an image of Jones himself as a Pullman porter, affected by the “white quality talk,” a gambler loading his dice to cheat others.  Jeff’s color is important: neither black nor white, it is a blend of the two, a true representation of Jones’ in between position.  Jones has tried to believe “dat black is white,” but this has only resulted in making him a confused hybrid, excluded from both races, a lonely ‘brown’ man in a world that is either black or white. (235)

In order to dispel the ghost of Jeff which h stems from his fear and guilt, Jones fires his second bullet to kill Jeff again.  In a sense this shot also means to murder the “white” evil within himself.  Though a Negro himself, Jones has utilized the cunning knowledge learned from “de white quality’s” society to exploit his own race through luck and deception.  The evil in himself has made him greedy after power and wealth.  Jones has behaved like Jeff, a cheating gambler, and now in killing Jeff he unconsciously rejects his “white” mask.

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SCENE IV

As Jones advances in physical action, he regresses deeper into his own soul.  In Scene IV Jones’ Emperor uniform is “ragged and torn;” he “tears off his coat and flings it away form him, revealing himself stripped to the waist” (33).  He even unstraps his spurs and flings them away “disgustedly.”  His “gradual disrobing, which he feels will facilitate his flight through the forest, indicates his regression to a primitive state” (Frenz 32).  After his disrobing Jones is confronted with the hallucination of the Negro convicts and the white Prison Guard.  The stripes on Jones’ pants now link him with the Negroes in their “striped convict suits” (35).  He re-experiences the slavery when he was in prison after he had killed Jeff and the murdering of the Prison Guard.  When Jones “bellows with baffled, terrified rage” (36) at the Prison Guard that “I kills you, you white debil, if ti’s de last thing I evah does,” Jones’ “white” evil is destroyed.  Since he had been an oppressor before he entered the forest, Jones’ revolt against the white guard indicates that he rejects the “white devil” in himself.  In firing his third bullet Jones dispels the vision.  As Jones leaps away in mad flight, “the throbbing of the tom-tom,…increased in volume of sound and rapidity of beat” (37).

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SCENE V 

Scene V carries a significant transition in Jones’ religious belief, if he has any.  Before he entered the forest, he had said to Smithers that he “was member in good standin’ o’de Baptist church,” but actually he had laid “Jesus on de shelf for de time bein’” (22) while he exploited the black natives to satisfy his mean desire.  In his arrogance and sense of superiority, Jones regards himself as a god, taking it for granted that he can extract as much money as he wants by convincing the ignorant natives that he can never be killed by anything except silver bullets.  Through his psychological journey in the darkness of the forest, Jones comes to accept his limitation as a human being, seeing himself not a god, when engulfed by complete isolation and panic.  At the very beginning of Scene V Jones makes this confession:

Oh Lawd, Lawd!  Oh Lawd, Lawd! (Suddenly he throws himself on his knees and raises his clasped hands to the sky—in a voice of agonized pleading) Lawd Jesus, heah my prayer!  I’se a po’ sinner, a po’ sinner!  I knows I one wrong,… When I cotches Jeff cheatin’ …I kills him dead!  Lawd, I done wrong!  When dat guard hits me wid de wrong!  And down heah whar dese fool bush niggers raises me up to the seat o’ de mighty, I steals all I could grab.  Lawd, I done wrong!  I knows it!  I’se sorry!  Forgive me, Lawd!  (38)

When he appears in this scene, “his pants are in tatters, his shoes cut and misshapen, flapping about his feet” (38).  In giving up his patent-leather shoes, part of his Emperor outfit, Jones says to himself: “Emperor, you’se gittin’ mighty low” (39)!  Without any of the power or wealth which he used to have, nor any food to eat, Jones encounters hunger, weariness, fear and isolation.  The more he tries to get away from fear and desolate solitude, the deeper he plunges into the forest.  Thus he explores subconsciously his inmost self by regressing further and further into his hidden experiences until he finds his identity as a human being.

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SCENE V 

In Scene V the hallucination emerges from his collective unconscious.  Jones finds himself in a slave market and a slave auctioneer is about to sell him on the block. Jones is identified with the Negro slaves and has to suffer the pain he has let his black people suffer during his inhumane “white” regime.  He fires his fourth and fifth bullets to kill the spruce, authoritative auctioneer and the planter who can be regarded as the reflections of Jones’ own sins and his evil self.  By this time Jones comes closer to his own race by experiencing the horror his ancestors had gone through in a slave market.

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SCENE VI

Jones’ pants have been so torn away that what is let of them is no better than a breech cloth when he, naked and exhausted, crawls into the cleared space in the forest in Scene VI.  The space enclosed is “like the dark, noisome hold of some ancient vessel.  The moonlight is almost completely shut out and only a vague, wan light filters through” (42).  In this dark scene Jones lies down to rest, flinging himself full length, panting with exhaustion, and is surrounded by a group of Negro slaves—his ancestors—who are “naked save for loin cloths” (43).  Their voices, beginning in a low, melancholy murmur, rise to a long, tremulous wail of despair which Jones first tries to shut form his ears, but

…his voice, as if under some uncanny compulsion, starts with the others. As their chorus lifts he rises to a sitting posture similar to the others, swaying back and forth.  His voice reaches the highest pitch of sorrow, of desolation.  (43)

Jones now returns to his fundamental self and belongs to his own people.  Out of instinct he can identify himself with his ancestors.

     Yet Jones’ journey does not end here.  He is not seen as a Negro only, but as Man (Whitman 149).  He must acknowledge the evil he has done and accept his humanity.  Thus the final forest scene with the Congo Witch Doctor as the dominant power plays an important role.

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SCENE VII 

     When Jones enters Scene VII, “as if in obedience to some obscure impulse, he sinks into a kneeling, devotional posture before the altar” (45).  As he finds that he seems to have been in this place before, he is much horrified.  By this time he has almost totally lost control of himself and is now the victim of the strange force of terrors which have been working against him all through the night.  Jones’ recognition of the place suggests that he has indeed regressed through time until he has become identified with his ancestry.  The appearance of the Congo Witch Doctor resonates with Jones’ appearance in the opening scene: he is stained all over “a bright red” and wears “glass beads and bone ornaments…about his neck, ears, wrists, and ankles” (46) just as Jones’ had won a gaudy outfit of red pants and many decorations.  This similarity shows that Jones, a self-appointed Emperor and god over the natives, has also taken upon himself the offices of the Witch Doctor in sacrificing his own race. 

     When the Witch Doctor begins a wild dance and chant, the beating of the tom-tom grows to a “fierce, exultant boom whose throbs seem to fill the air with vibrating rhythm” (47).  Jones by this time has become completely hypnotized and joins instinctively:

The whole spirit and meaning of the dance has entered into him, has become his spirit.  Finally the theme of the pantomime halts on a howl of despair, and is taken up again in a note of savage hope.  There is a salvation.  The forces of evil demand sacrifice….Jones seems to sense the meaning of this.  It is he who must offer himself or sacrifice.  (Scene VII, 47-48)

Jones, stripped of his veneer of civilization, reverts to the primitive condition of his Congo forebears.  He seems to achieve a temporary sense of belonging.  But then the Witch Doctor calls to “some god” in the depth of the river, which demands a sacrifice from him:

A huge head of a crocodile appears over the bank and its eyes, glittering greenly, fasten upon Jones.  He stares into them fascinatedly.  . . .  Jones squirms on his belly nearer and nearer, moaning continually. . . .  The crocodile heaves more of his enormous hulk onto the land. . . .  He fired at the green eyes in front of him.  (48)

As an embodiment of “the forces of evil,” the huge crocodile demands that Jones must offer himself in sacrifice.  “Evil has been his god, and he has sacrificed all other values to it; how it demands his life” (Falk 69).

     In retributive justice Jones is going to be swallowed up by the terrifying crocodile—a symbol of his own greed and the evil of the self.  In regarding himself as a god Jones has behaved like a greedy devil in sacrificing his own people to get money.  He is a victim of the worst in himself and in the world.  The silver bullet stands for the values of materialism that corrupt and lead to death.  Jones’ purpose in having himself made up as emperor was to exploit his subjects, and he made the silver bullet to protect himself by cheating them into thinking that he had a charm.  The silver bullet is the image of Brutus Jones.  By firing his last bullet—the silver bullet—to kill the crocodile, Jones kills himself psychologically.  As Doris Falk observes: “the evil represented by the crocodile is the evil of the self, …in killing it Jones has killed himself—at least, that distorted image of the self which was his life motivation” (69).

After firing at the crocodile and the witch doctor, Jones falls to the ground and lies there, “his arms outstretched, whimpering with fear as the throb of the tom-tom fills the silence about him with a somber pulsation, a baffled but revengeful power” (49).  With the firing of the silver bullet, Jones casts out the worst of a rapacious self and asserts the best of the self by acts against the “revengeful power” imaged in the crocodile god.  It is the power of undirected instincts which alienate him as a human being.

Only when he disposes of his silver bullet can he fully reject his evil self.  Well knowing that silver cannot be found on the island, he has made the natives believe that only a silver bullet—the one he owns himself—can kill him:

I has de silver bullet moulded and I tells ‘em when de time comes I kills myself wid it.  I tells ‘em dat’s ‘cause I’m de on’y man in de world big enuff to git me.  (Scene I, 14)

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SCENE VIII

In Scene VIII Jones is killed by a silver bullet, made from coins (money) by the natives—an appropriate symbol of the destruction of self by its own pride and greed.  Jones’ inner death occurs when he fires his own silver bullet at the crocodile god and his physical death is at the hands of the natives, but both silver bullets can symbolize his greed and the evil in himself.

     O’Neill presents on stage a life more colorful and terrible than the American theater had ever thought of representing.  He uses the theater as a medium for the expression of his attitude toward life in terms of human character.  Owing to the fact that O’Neill himself is concerned with psychological issues of human beings, he probes into human nature and the utmost needs of the human psyche.  In this play O’Neill does not demonstrate that the American black is only a short step from his African ancestors; he suggests something more universal—that an apprehensive primitive being lurks just below the surface of us all.  Brutus Jones typifies all men in search for the meaning for being, humanity under the pressure of isolation and fear.  The play “dramatizes a ‘long day’s journey into night,’ which advances in physical action, as it regresses in psychological action, until it ends symbolically in an illumination of the heart of darkness within the soul of man.  The difference is that the primitive ‘emperor’ never fully comprehends his own tragedy, and can never transcend it” (Carpenter 93).  Jones’ struggle to escape from his fate is doomed to be tragic when the littleness of man succumbs to the vastness of the universe.  But man will not give up the struggle and his everlasting desire for belonging will drive him to quest throughout his life as Jones does throughout the play.

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Works Cited

20^th Century American Drama: The Emperor Jones, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible, A Delicate Balance.   Taipei: Bookman,

Carpenter, Frederic I.  Eugene O’Neill.  Rev. ed.  Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Falk, Doris V.  Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretative Study of the Plays.  New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958.

Frenz, Horst.  Eugene O’Neill.  Trans. Helen Sebba.  New York: Ungar, 1971.

Törnqvist, Egil.  A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Supernaturalistic Technique.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Whitman, Robert F.  “O’Neill’s Search for a ‘Language of the Theatre’.”  O’Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays.  Ed. John Gassner.  Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

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Glossary

hamartia:

A Greek word variously translated as “tragic flaw” or “error” or “shortcoming” or  “weakness.”  In many plays it is a flaw or even a vice such as hybris (also hubris)—a word that in classical Greek meant bullying, or even assault and battery, but that in discussions of tragedy means overweening pride, arrogance, excessive confidence.  But in other plays, it is merely a misstep, such as a choice that turns out badly.  Indeed, the tragic hero may be undone by his virtue—his courage, for example, when others are merely prudent but cowardly.

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