Life of Yank in The Hairy Ape

Robert Smith, known as Yank, is the chief coal stoker on a ship bound for Europe. A Neanderthal type with a strong back and hairy, powerful arms, Yank is a man of apparent personal confidence who sees himself as doing the real work of the world, in contrast with the ineffectual, wealthy tourists who travel above deck in first class (Egri, 25).

He is an honest laborer, proud of his vitality and usefulness in the world of industry, sure that he “belongs” in a way the idle rich never could. His pride is crushed, however, when Mildred Douglas, an empty-headed society social worker, sees him at work in the hold and calls him a beast. Thwarted in his attempts at revenge on her for this insult, he goes to his death in the cage of the Central Park Zoo ape that he has come to see as his brother.

The major theme O'Neill explores in the play is the question of the place of human beings in the universe. In the increasingly dehumanized society of the modern world, the individual no longer is in harmony with nature, the forces that Paddy speaks poetically about in the first scene, the days when “a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one.” (Egri, 26)

Does the individual then belong in the mechanistic, industrial society that has been created? O'Neill seems also to reject this idea. Yank's animal nature, dramatized through his strength and physical appearance, is contrasted with the fragility of the would-be social worker, Mildred. Representing an affluent but insensitive society, Mildred makes a pitiful effort to reach out to those of a lower class, but her ancestral line has rendered her ...