The Emperor Jones Analysis

NAME : AYESHA KHAN
ROLL NON 24
CLASS : BS-ENGLISH – 6
SUBJECT : GREEK AND ELIZABETH DRAMA
SUBMITTED TO: PROF. MAHWISH MARIA

EUGENE O’NEILL
• Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born on October 16,
1888 and died on November 27, 1953.
• He was an American playwright and Nobel
laureate in literature.
• O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches
in American English vernacular and involve characters
on the fringes of society.
• Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of
tragedy and personal pessimism.
• After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where
he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to
devote himself full-time to writing plays.

• His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on
Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S.
occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's
presidential election.
• Eugene O'Neill is a member of the American Theater Hall of
Fam.
• O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point
of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his
family’s tragic relationships—his mother and father, who loved
and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and
corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and
O’Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at
all three.
• O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to
work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in
a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his
third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O’Neill died as broken and
tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage.

• The Emperor Jones, drama in eight scenes by Eugene O’Neill,
produced in 1920 and published in 1921.
• The Emperor Jones was the playwright’s first foray
into Expressionist writing.
• Originally calledThe Silver Bullet, the play is highly effective as
pure theater through its use of such elements as pulsing drums,
gunshots, and the dramatic jungle setting.
• It tells the story of a black American man named Brutus
Jones who, after killing another black man in a dice game,
escapes jail and goes to a small Caribbean island.
• The play has been revived and adapted many times.The
Wooster Group staged a production in 2007 with KateValk, a
white female actress, playing the title role in blackface, a
theatrical device that O'Neill had not desired. In 1933, the play
was turned into an opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan
Opera, starring LawrenceTibbett, who wore blackface.

• Genre
Drama
• Setting and Context
An unnamed island in theWest Indies
• Narrator and Point ofView
No narrator. Much of the play shows the psychic
perspective of Brutus Jones, but not the whole play.
• Tone and Mood
Expressionistic, Haunting, Scary, Dramatic, Epic

• Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Brutus Jones. Antagonist: Lem
• Major Conflict
The major conflict is that Brutus Jones, the autocrat
of a small island community, must escape the revolution
taking place on his island by navigating a dark forest in the
middle of the night, contending with hallucinations and
doubts along the way.
• Climax
The climax occurs when Jones gets killed.
• Foreshadowing
The scarlet throne that we see at the beginning
foreshadows the bloody consequences of Jones' rule.

• Allusions
Allusions to colonialism, native customs, spiritual practices.
• Imagery
The image of the forest is an evocative one that is often
poetically expressed by Eugene O'Neill.
• Paradox
Jones tells the natives that he can only be killed by a silver bullet
as a way of making sure no one kills him, but the revolutionaries create
a number of silver bullets themselves.
• Parallelism
The first and the last scenes are the only scenes with multiple
characters in it.The play is essentially bookended by realist scenes.
• Personification
Jones' formless fears are personified, and his various traumatic
memories are personified through staged hallucinations.

Conscience, Trauma, and the Past
• Brutus Jones is confident that he will be able to
navigate the forests of the island without a hitch, but
once he enters the forest, he is visited by
hallucinations and manifestations of his own
compromised conscience. At first, he hears the
laughter of his "Formless Fears," an emotional state
that has taken on a physical form in the forest. As he
progresses further into the darkness, he encounters
visions of his traumatic past, of the men he killed,
and then of the American slave trade. A major theme
in the play is the ways that the past visits us in our
solitude, and the forms that manifestations of
trauma and the past can take.

• At first, Jones' hallucinations seem to have to do only
with his personal sins, but as he gets deeper and deeper
into the forest, he encounters a broader historical
memory that extends beyond simply his personal
experience. After witnessing his own traumatic
misdeeds in the form of hallucinations—his murder of
two men—Jones hallucinates that he is getting
auctioned off into slavery, that he is trapped on a slave
ship, and then that he is back in the Congo. His
hallucinatory journey is a journey backward in the more
collectively held history of slavery, exposing its horrors
and subjecting him to its dehumanizing effects.The
legacy of American slavery and its horrors is thus a
central theme in the play, shown as a kind of original sin
from which no one can escape.

• When we first meet Brutus Jones, he has assumed
the role of emperor on a small unnamed island in
the West Indies. He sits on a scarlet throne and
has ultimate authority over his subjects, whom he
looks down upon and regularly calls the n word. In
the wake of his mistreatment in America, Jones
becomes a hegemonic monster himself, an
autocrat who extracts what he needs from a
vulnerable community without remorse and
claims power for himself avariciously.

Gullibility and Spirituality
• One of the main ways that Jones is able to ascend the throne and
achieve power on the island is by exploiting the gullibility and
spiritual beliefs of the islanders. An American, Jones is irreverent
towards their customs and beliefs, seeing them as backward and
inferior to modern logic.When an assassin is unable to kill him
with a gun, Jones tells the subjects that he can only be killed by
silver bullets, a lie that exploits their belief in magic and in his
invincibility. Jones' irreverence towards the islanders' gullibility
ultimately ends up hurting him, however, as he succumbs to some
kind of magical and self-defeating forces in the jungle, and is killed
by a number of silver bullets that the islanders have made from
melting down coins. What Jones sees as gullibility and foolishness
ends up mobilizing the islanders and even the island itself, leading
to Jones' ruin.

• A major theme in the play is
racism. Jones is a black American
man who has come to theWest
Indies only to turn the racism he
has faced in a white community
against the black islanders over
whom he rules. He uses the n
word, thinks of his subjects as
inferior, and employs other
strategies typical to racist belief
systems, in spite of being of the
same race as the people over
whom he rules. Additionally, the
character of Smithers represents
the racist white man, a
manipulative and slippery
character.

• The play's plot follows the
trajectory of a ruler falling
from power when his
subjects turn against him.
Jones starts the play on the
brink of a revolution against
him. He has assumed power
without any credentials and
now his subjects are
revolting against him. As he
tries to escape through the
forest, he becomes more
and more disoriented, his
royal clothes become
ragged, and he loses his
mind, until the final scene
when he gets shot by Lem's
soldiers.

• In many ways, Jones is a tragic hero, even if he is not
particularly heroic. He is a man who is able to escape an
unpleasant home country and acquire power abroad.
However, his tragic flaw is his extreme greed and sense of
pride, which ends up undermining him in the end. He sees
nothing wrong with his actions and feels remorseless about
having assumed the role of emperor and stolen large sums of
money from the islanders, which he keeps in a foreign bank
account.As he escapes, he begins to doubt himself, but never
fully confronts his own sense of remorse, opting instead to
muster a sense of pridefulness. It is his greed and his pride
that cause him to lose his mind and fall prey to his pursuers.
He never truly repents for his misdeeds, which ends up
costing him his life.

Brutus Jones
• The titular emperor of an unidentified West Indies island spent ten
years working as a train porter in the United States before a game of
dice spiraled wildly out of control. He killed a man named Jeff over a
dispute during a game of craps. After getting thrown in jail, Brutus
then killed a prison guard and escaped America as a stowaway on a
ship bound for the Indies. Once on the island, he recognized how
impressive he was to the natives and exploited their gullibility to
become ruler.The play picks up at the exact moment that Jones'
subjects begin to grow tired of him and start staging a revolt. Jones is
depicted as greedy and prideful, without thinking of the ethical
implications of his misdeeds. His misdeeds begin to catch up with him,
however, when he enters the dark forest, and is attended by haunting
hallucinations about his sordid past. He ends up becoming his own
worst enemy, panicking in the face of his own conscience and making
his way back to the very place where he entered the forest, where the
revolutionaries are waiting to kill him.

Smithers
• Ostensibly a friend of Jones, but a profoundly racist
white Cockney trader who looks upon Jones with
thinly veiled malice. Smithers is the one to warn
Jones of the revolution, and can hardly believe it
when the natives manage to make silver bullets
with which to kill their emperor. Smithers is a
crooked and evil character, who seems to always
side with whoever has power.

Lem
Lem was the leader before Jones' arrival, and is the
leader of the insurrection which finally kills the ill-
fated emperor. Lem already tried to assassinate
Jones by shooting him, but failed. In the wake of the
accident, Jones convinces his subjects that he
possesses magical powers and can be brought
down only by a silver bullet. Following this logic,
Lem stages a revolution and melts down a bunch of
coins in order to make the silver bullets that end up
killing Jones.

• Old Native Woman
The old woman is in and out of the story by the end of
the first scene, but plays a significant role in the
narrative.The play opens with Smithers arriving to an
empty palace. When he finds the old woma,n she tells
him that a rebellion is underway and Jones is in
danger.
• TheWitch-Doctor
The witch-doctor is merely a figment of the
emperor’s fevered imagination, appearing in a weird
hallucinatory sequence near the end of the story. He
is an image ofAfrica, a spiritual shaman who wants to
make Jones into a human sacrifice to a god-like
crocodile lying in wait in a nearby river.

• The main room of an emperor’s palace, with porticos in the
background that reveal tropical views of a small,
unidentified Caribbean island. A native black woman
furtively enters from the right. She carries a bundle bound
to a stick and moves toward the main door with the clear
intention of escape. Smithers materializes from under the
portico. Smithers is a cockney, or British working-class,
confidence man with a treacherous, ferret like appearance;
he is wearing the stereotypical garb of the adventurer
colonialist—white riding suit, puttees, white cork helmet, a
revolver, and an ammunition belt strapped to his waist. At
first, the native woman does not see him, but when she
does she makes a break for the door. Smithers lunges to
intercept her and holds her fast by the shoulders. He
interrogates the terrified woman and discovers that while
the title character,

• Brutus Jones—formerly a Pullman porter of 10 years, but
now the island’s emperor—was sleeping, the natives have
escaped to the hills and are plotting a rebellion, led by
Jones’s political enemy, Lem. Smithers receives this
information with “immense, mean satisfaction” (1:1,032):
“Serve ’I’m right! Putin’ on airs, the stinkin’ nigger! . . . I only
’opes I’m there when they takes ’I’m out to shoot ’I’m”
(1:1,033). No matter his views, Smithers profits from Jones’s
reign, and he whistles shrilly to alert him.The woman runs
off the moment his back is turned.
• Brutus Jones enters, enraged by the disturbance. In the
stage directions, O’Neill describes Jones’s appearance as
“typically Negroid, yet there is something decidedly distinctive
about his face—an underlying strength of will, a hardy, self-
reliant confidence in himself that inspires respect. His eyes are
alive with a keen, cunning intelligence”

• Smithers hints around that the palace is unusually quiet, enjoying
the rare moment when he knows something Jones, clearly his
superior, does not.The repartee between the two thieves includes a
good deal of exposition revealing details about them both. Before
his arrival on the island, Jones served time for stabbing a man who
had used loaded dice against him in a crap game and was imprisoned
for the murder. He escaped prison by killing another man, his chain
gang’s prison guard. Now a fugitive on the run, Jones fled to the
Caribbean. Smithers, in contrast, has lived on the island eight years
longer than Jones but had accomplished nothing. Prior to the play’s
action, Jones gained his emperorship by convincing the native
islanders he was supernatural. His one political rival, the island
native Lem, had hired an assassin to kill him, but the assassin’s gun
misfired, and after Jones shot the killer dead, he declared to the
bewildered crowd—whom Jones significantly considers, as white
colonialists might, “low-flung, bush niggers”—that only a silver
bullet could kill him. In order to substantiate the bluff, Jones had a
silver bullet crafted for him, proclaiming to the natives that “I’m de
on’y man in de world big enuff to git me”

• “Oh Lawd,” he laughs, showing his acceptance of an alien white religion
followed by subtle slave imagery, “from dat time on I has dem all eatin’ out
of my hand. I cracks de whip and dey jumps through” (1:1,036). His
motivation for tricking the natives has already been made clear: “De fuss
and glory part of it, dat’s only to turn de heads o’ de low-flung, bush niggers
dat’s here. Dey wants de big circus show for deir money. I gives it to ‘em an’ I
gits de money. (with a grin) De long green, dat’s me every time!” (1:1,035).
• Smithers chides Jones, who professes religious convictions, for never having
converted the island natives to the Baptist Church; he then informs Jones
what the old native woman has told him—that a rebellion led by Lem is
brewing in the hills above the palace.The faraway sound of a tom-tom softly
fills the air; its rhythm matches that of the normal human pulse, 72 beats a
minute; in the stage directions, O’Neill instructs that the tom-tom beat
should continue “at a gradually accelerating rate from this point
uninterruptedly to the very end of the play” (1:1,041). Jones hears the tom-
tom, and when Smithers explains it is part of a native war ritual to bolster
their courage against a common enemy, Jones knows his game is up. “So
long, white man,” he tells Smithers and, self-assured that he will survive the
insurgency, flees into the island’s jungle forest (1:1,043). Prepared ahead of
time for his inevitable ousting, Jones has memorized the island’s
labyrinthine jungle paths, stored caches of food along the way, and made
plans to evade the rebel band by escaping to Martinique on a French
gunboat.

• The edge of the “Great Forest.” Now on the run, Jones is
exhausted from the journey but relaxed and self-
congratulatory. However, his sinecure as emperor has ill-
trained him for the grueling trek through the jungle. Jones
foreshadows what lies ahead by bolstering his resolve with the
words, “Cheer up, nigger, de worst is yet to come” (1:1,044;
remarkably, these are the same words [excluding the racial
epithet] MarkTwain once wrote to his wife in response to her
fears of impending bankruptcy, though apparently O’Neill got
the line from his friendTerry Carlin). Jones comes to realize his
surroundings are unfamiliar and fails to locate the store of
food he purposefully hid under a white stone, as the one stone
has inexplicably proliferated into many.

• The first of a series of nightmares manifests itself as a
jumble of “Little Formless Fears.” O’Neill describes
the ghostly creatures as “black, shapeless, only their
glittering eyes can be seen. If they have any describable
form at all it is that of a grub-worm about the size of a
creeping child” (1,045–46).They laugh at him with a
sound “like a rustling of leaves,” and Jones, startled,
fires a shot into the trees.Their ethereal laughter
ends, and Jones, “with renewed confidence . . .
plunges boldly into the forest”

• Deep in the thick canopy of the Great Forest. Moonlight
offers Jones some visibility. His Panama hat is now gone,
and his uniform is torn. He comes across a triangular
clearing; an eerie clicking noise comes from the brush.The
native rebels’ unrelenting tom-tom continues to beat, only
now a little louder and more rapidly. He has lost track of
time and is growing tired, but he remains sanguine: “Never
min’. It’s all part o’ de game. Dis night come to an end like
everything else” (1:1,047). He whistles cheerfully but stops
himself abruptly, fearful he might expose his location. In
the moonlit triangle, the spectral form of the negro
gambler Jeff, the man he had murdered for cheating,
gradually comes into view.

• Jeff is wearing a Pullman porter’s uniform and is found
shooting craps on the jungle floor, “casting them out with
the regular, rigid, mechanical movements of an automaton”
(1:1,047). At first, Jones truly believes Jeff is alive, and he
voices sincere delight that his victim survived the stabbing.
But Jeff offers no response. Jones panics, firing into the
bizarre apparition, which instantaneously disappears.The
tom-tom beats louder and faster, and Jones, fearing the
rebel band is closing in, runs headlong into the underbrush

• Along a dirt road in the forest. Jones’s uniform is now
severely damaged. A road stretches from right front to left
rear. Under the moonlight, the road appears “ghastly and
unreal” (1:1,049).The heat is overwhelming, and Jones tears
off his coat, revealing his bare torso, and takes off his spurs.
As each item is symbolically discarded, so too is his identity
as emperor. Continuing his monologue, Jones calms his fear
of the “ha’nts,” or ghosts, by recalling his parson’s
instruction to him that ghosts do not exist, that they are the
purview of “ign’rent black niggers” (1:1,049); apparently,
then, Jones has a predisposition to have such visions. He
convinces himself that Jeff was just a figment of his
overdeveloped imagination, that his fatigue and hunger are
making him see things.

• A prison chain gang enters from stage right.They are
shackled, wear the striped black and white uniforms of
convicts, and carry picks and shovels. A white man in a
prison guard uniform carrying aWinchester rifle and a whip
follows close behind. At the silent crack of his whip, the
prisoners begin working on the road. “Their movements, like
those of Jeff in the preceding scene, are those of
automatons,— rigid, slow, and mechanical” (1:1,050).The
prison guard cracks his whip again, this time at Jones, who
obediently joins the gang in the subservient mindset of an
institutionalized being. While Jones is at work, the guard
lashes him on the back, causing him to wince. When the
guard turns his back, Jones murderously raises his shovel
high above the man’s head. But the shovel unaccountably
disappears, and Jones instead shoots the guard in the back,
thus killing his life’s two murder victims again and wasting
a third bullet.The tom-tom continues beating, louder and
faster.

• Another clearing, though this time its shape is circular.
Importantly, this scene marks Jones’s psychological
shift from his personal guilt feelings to the racial
ancestry he had treacherously denied by enslaving his
African kinsmen on the island. His clothes are in their
last stages of utter disrepair. He sits on a stump with
his head in his hands, rocking back and forth praying
in anguish, asking Jesus to absolve him of his sins and
cease his tormenting visions. Jones then turns his
attention on his patent leather shoes, which are
destroyed.

• From all sides, a group of Southern planters, “young belles
and dandies,” and an auctioneer at a slave auction appear.
Again, like Jeff and the members of the chain gang, “There is
something stiff, rigid, unreal, marionettish about their
movements” (1:1,053).The auctioneer silently orders Jones
to mount the auction block to allow the planters a clear view
of his body.The auctioneer gestures to Jones’s terrific build
and well-behaved demeanor. In a fear-driven rage, Jones
shoots the auctioneer twice.The stage drops into darkness,
and all we hear are Jones’s screams as he flees again into the
woods and the beat of the tom-tom, faster and louder. He
now has only his silver bullet left to protect him from further
paranormal apparitions.

• Another clearing, which is enclosed by creeping vines
and arched tree trunks that give the impression of the
hold of an old sailing ship. Jones’s imagination has
sent him further back in history to a slave ship loaded
with captured Africans.The moon no longer
illuminates the jungle floor, and Jones enters left on
his hands and knees, groaning over his lost
ammunition, the darkness of the forest, and his state
of complete exhaustion.The stage gradually lightens
to reveal two rows of captured slaves, who rock back
and forth, simulating the movement of a ship on the
open sea.

• From his prostrate position, Jones sees the ghastly
scene, and he throws himself back down with his
head in the dirt to hide from this terrifying group of
apparitions (1:1,055).The slaves moan in unison,
reaching a crescendo, seemingly directed by the
sound of the tom-tom coming ever nearer, then
settling down to a low murmur, then back up again
repeatedly. Jones’s voice involuntarily joins the
others in this song of sorrow and pain. Again, the
light fades into darkness, and Jones plunges wildly
into the jungle

• At the foot of a tree on the banks of a great river; an altar
made from boulders lies near the base of the tree. Scene 7
takes Jones fully back to Africa, where a witch doctor sings
and dances about a stone altar.The witch doctor’s
ritualistic pantomime fully indicts Jones for his crimes, and
Jones instinctively ascertains that “the forces of evil
demand a sacrifice.They must be appeased. . . .Jones seems
to sense the meaning of this. It is he who must offer himself
for sacrifice. He beats his forehead abjectly to the ground,
moaning hysterically” (1:1,058). In a peculiar bit of stage
direction, O’Neill sends the witch doctor to the river’s edge
to call from its depths an African god in the form of a
crocodile, whose enormous head emerges from the river
bank; evidently the river is the Congo, since O’Neill
specifically calls him a “Congo witch-doctor” in the stage
directions

• The witch doctor then taps Jones with his wand and points to
the river.The crocodile lifts himself onto the riverbank, and
Jones wriggles toward him. Jones penitently accepts the
sinful nature of the crimes he committed on the island, as
while he moves in the direction of the crocodile, he cries out
for Jesus’ mercy for “dis po’ sinner” (1:1,058). In his final lines,
Jones prays to “Lawd Jesus” to save him, starkly contrasting
the white god of the enslavers with the pagan god of his
African ancestry (1:1,059). Jesus does rescue him, for the
time being, as he is snapped out of a horror-stricken reverie
by his own pious rant and remembers the silver bullet is still
left. He fires at the crocodile, which drops back into the
water.The witch doctor jumps behind the tree, and Jones
“lies with his face to the ground, his arms outstretched,
whimpering with fear” while the tom-tom beats fill the air with
a “baffled but revengeful power”

• Dawn the following morning, again at the edge of the
Great Forest, the same as scene 2. Smithers appears
among a group of native rebel soldiers, led by Jones’s
political nemesis, Lem.The opportunistic Smithers has
now joined the rebels, and he and Lem dispute Jones’s
fate. Smithers, with sustained respect for Jones’s abilities,
refuses to believe the group of islanders could catch him—
“Aw! Garn! ’E’s a better man than the lot o’ you put
together. I ’ates the sight o’ ’im but I’ll say that for ’im.”

• Lem insists in the stereotypical dialect of a
“savage,” “We cotch him” (1:1,060). Rifle shots are
heard in the jungle. Lem informs Smithers that he
armed his men with silver bullets to overcome
Jones’s magic.The rebel soldiers come through the
forest carrying Jones’s dead body.The mythic
nature of Jones’s demise in itself inspires
admiration, even from his enemies. “Silver bullets!”
Smithers exclaims with an ironic smirk in the final
line of the play, “Gawd blimey, but yer died in the
’eighth o’ style, any’ow!”

• any have interpreted Eugene O'Neill'sThe Emperor
Jones as an exploration of the legacy of slavery and
racism in America, and it is undeniable that these
themes feature prominently in the narrative core of
the play. Additionally, scholars have claimed that
the play has a broader political symbology, in that
it tells the story of autocracy and colonialism gone
astray, and serves to expose the hypocrisies and
indignities of U.S. imperialism in Haiti in the
beginning of the 20th century.

• O'Neill himself stated that the play's central
character was based on the catastrophic rule of
JeanVilbrun Guillaume Sam, the fifth president in
five years in Haiti, who ruled for several months in
1915 and was an ally to American imperial forces.
Sam's rule represented for O'Neill the moral and
literal failure of American imperialism, and O'Neill's
play was aligned with the views of his literary
peers, who had sharp critiques of imperialism and a
desire to expose its contradictions

• Critic Mary A. Renda devotes an entire chapter of her
bookTaking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of
U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940, to an analysis of O'Neill's
influence onAmerican perception of Haiti. She
regardsThe Emperor Jones as a complicated relic of the
era, writing, "A complex and contradictory text,The
Emperor Jones conveyed a radical critique of imperialism
as economic exploitation even as it participated in the
discourses of civilization and exotic primitivism that
sustained the occupation in Haiti...O'Neill's play provides
a window onto U.S. America's renewed fascination with
Haiti in the 1920s." In her mind, the play is complicated in
that it seeks to articulate a critique of capitalism and
imperialism, but remains ultimately ambivalent, more
concerned with the rendering of black bodies and the
dramatization of black lives than in the clear articulation
of injustice.

The Emperor Jones Analysis

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The Emperor Jones Analysis