Displaying the Human’s Struggle Against Oppression: An Examination of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape”
Ismael Hasan Alsanafi
Ismael Hasan Obaid Alsanafi, Department of Theatre, College of Fine Arts. University of Al-Qadisiyah. Diwaniyah. Iraq.
Manuscript received on 15 April 2022 | Revised Manuscript received on 27 April 2022 | Manuscript Accepted on 15 June 2022 | Manuscript published on 30 June 2022 | PP: 14-21 | Volume-1 Issue-4, June 2022. | Retrieval Number: 100.1/ijssl.D1016061422 | DOI: 10.54105/ijssl.D1016.061422
Open Access | Ethics and Policies | Cite | Mendeley | Indexing and Abstracting
© The Authors. Published by Lattice Science Publication (LSP). This is an open-access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: To assert the predominant fact, which insist the core function of drama as being the tool of informing stories and writing process as the creation of those stories. Eugene O’Neill firmly determined to devote his writing to be a mirror to reflect his experiences and the society he belonged to. Within socio-economic circumstances, Eugene O’Neill has depicted the culture of the injustice community of the 1920s in America. His characters were routinely qualified of creating human’s experiences and statuses onstage. Moreover, O’Neill’s plotline was motivated by the power of contemporary people to depict their agony, oppression, and misery. So as to achieve this end, Eugene O’Neill wrote “The Hairy Ape”, as dehumanizing impactsof industrialization to describe the oppression of the protagonist; Yank, who was impacted by the social background of oppressing American capitalist system in a so-called modern community. Harmoniously, as many of O’Neill’s literary plays focused, the selected drama for this study concentrated on the struggle of life, identity, and relation in modern America. This research aims to organize and arrange the beginnings of a description for the complicated idea of human oppression in dramatic products. The concept of ‘oppression’ has so used, so frequently, and so large today, that clarifying it meant discovering an illustration of more elaborated than any dictionary. The study adopted deductive perceptive to figure out many concepts of human oppression, but eventually utilized sociocultural oppression as the center for this research. Accordingly, social oppression presents agony or harm which were imposed on a plays’ character by their society or peers. The present paper has concluded that after analyzing in-depth to look at all characterizations of oppression and comprehending all Yank’s surrounded circumstancing, Yank as a victim and his principal oppressor were the his social class (his employment system and his educational experience) as well as the people surrounded him. Finally, the study has figured out a distinguished intellectual responsibility in the character of Yank.
Keywords: Industrialization, Expressionism, Oppression, Yank, Realism.
Scope of the Article: Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape