‘I wants to awaken yer bloody clarss consciousness’: Gothic Marxism in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

Abstract

American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape stages the vast distance between classes, or what Karl Marx terms alienation, as a Gothic narrative, where two wildly different characters – Yank, a rough, violent stokerman in the bowels of an ocean steamer, and Mildred, a bored, anemic society girl from the top decks – confront and interpret each other as lifeless, inhuman monsters, both destructive and incomprehensible. By situating the characters in their social and material contexts, this new Gothic reading takes into account the text’s central concern of class conflict while acknowledging the limits of a purely Marxist interpretation. Instead, this reading maintains the tension between its overlapping ideas about the divisions wrought by class, labor, and economic systems, and the failures of modern rationality to address or even describe the resulting horrors stemming from laborers’ alienation from their labor, themselves, and other humans.