ea that workers feel powerful when, in fact, they are trapped in dark stokeholes like caged animals.
Satire on the Upper Class: In Scene Two, Mildred Douglas and her Aunt sit on the deck. They wear white clothes. They enjoy the sun while workers burn coal and smoke. Mildred says she wants to know how the working class lives. But this is false sympathy. She faints when she sees Yank and calls him,
“The filthy beast!”
O’Neill satirizes the rich who pretend to care for the poor but actually despise them. The Aunt represents arrogance. She warns Mildred not to go below deck. This scene laughs at upper-class “charity.”
Satire on Class Division: Scene Five takes place on Fifth Avenue, New York. The street is clean, rich, and proud. O’Neill sets satire here by showing the gap between classes. Long speaks of socialism. But Yank only wants revenge. He blocks people from the church. He insults them. They are shocked but silent. Yank finally hits a gentleman. Soon, the police arrest him. The satire here is on both sides. The rich ignore the workers. The workers answer only with anger, not with sense. O’Neill shows society as a stage of class hatred without a solution.
Satire on Political and Social Movements: In Scene Six, Yank is in Blackwell’s Island prison. He hears about the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World). He thinks it will give him a place. In Scene Seven, he goes to their office. At first, they welcome him. But when he talks of blowing up the Steel Trust, they suspect him. They think he is a spy. They throw him out. O’Neill satirizes even the workers’ movements. They do not trust their own class. They fear spies more than they fight for justice. A policeman also behaves like this,
“Yank—Say, where do I go from here?
Policeman— Go to hell.”
This satire shows modern politics as weak and divided.
Satire on Modern Civilization and Animal Instinct: The final scene in the Zoo is the strongest satire. Yank tries to find friendship with a gorilla. But the gorilla kills him. He says,
“Christ, where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?”
O’Neill’s satire here is bitter. Modern society throws men down to the level of beasts. Yank, the strong stoker, cannot live as a man. He dies like an ape in a cage. The satire is that modern “civilization” is not human at all. It creates machines, classes, prisons, but no real place for man.
“The Hairy Ape” is a powerful social satire. Through Yank’s journey from the stokehole to Fifth Avenue, from prison to the Zoo, O’Neill attacks false pride, rich hypocrisy, class division, weak politics, and inhuman civilization. The play is not a comedy but bitter laughter. It shows how society itself makes man a stranger. Yank becomes a victim, but society becomes the real target of satire.
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