The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill

First produced: 1920; first published, 1921

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Expressionism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: West Indies

Principal characters

• Brutus Jones, the emperor
• Henry Smithers, a Cockney trader
• Lem, a native

The Story:

Henry Smithers, a Cockney adventurer, learns from a woman that the followers of Brutus Jones, the self-styled emperor of a West Indian island, are about to desert their ruler. With Smithers’s help, Jones, a former Pullman porter and escaped convict, duped the natives into believing that he is a magician. The superstitious natives make him emperor of the island. Smithers discloses to the emperor the disaffection of his subjects, who are taxed and cheated by the pair beyond human endurance. Jones judges that he has six more months of power before the natives catch on to his skullduggery. He had a silver bullet cast as a good luck charm; it will be a useful tool if he is ever caught by his subjects.

At Smithers’s suggestion, Jones rings a bell for his attendants; no one appears. Jones resigns his position as emperor on the spot and makes immediate plans to escape through the jungle to the coast. Drums begin to beat in the hills. The former emperor gives the palace to Smithers, takes up his white Panama hat, and walks boldly out the front door.

At the edge of the jungle, Jones searches unsuccessfully for the canned food he cached for such an emergency. The drums continue to beat, louder and more insistent. Night falls, and formless fears come out of the jungle to beset Jones. The moon rises. Jones comes into a clearing and there in the moonlight sees Jeff, a Pullman porter he killed in a razor duel. Jeff is throwing dice. When the kneeling figure refuses to answer him, Jones shoots at him. The phantom disappears. Drums still thud in the distance. Jones, now sick with fright, plunges into the inky jungle.

After a while, he comes upon a road and pauses to rest. A chain gang comes out of the forest. The guard of the gang motions to Jones to take his place in the gang and to get to work. When the guard whips him, Jones lifts his shovel to strike him, but he discovers that he has no shovel. In his rage of fear and frustration, he fires his revolver at the guard. The road, the guard, and the chain gang disappear; the jungle closes in. The louder beat of the tom-toms drives Jones on in frantic circles.

Now in tatters, the terrified Jones repents of the murders he committed and of the way he has cheated the islanders. He comes next upon a slave auction attended by white people dressed in the style of the 1850’s. An auctioneer puts Jones on the auction block. Frightened, Jones shatters this apparition by firing one shot at the auctioneer and another at a planter. He dashes into the forest, mad with fear. The drums continue to beat.

At three o’clock, Jones comes to a part of the jungle that strangely resembles the hold of a slave ship. He finds himself one of a cargo of slaves who are swaying slowly with the motion of the ship. Jones and the other slaves moan with sorrow at being taken away from their homeland. With only the silver bullet left in his revolver, Jones saves it and dashes on again into the dark of the night.

Next he comes upon an altarlike arrangement of boulders near a great river. He sinks to his knees as if to worship. A Congo witch doctor appears from behind a large tree and begins a primitive dance. Jones is hypnotized by the ritual. The witch doctor indicates to Jones in pantomime that the former emperor must offer himself as a sacrifice in order to overcome the forces of evil. A great green-eyed crocodile emerges from the river; Jones fires the silver bullet at the monster, and the witch doctor disappears behind a tree, leaving Jones lying on the ground completely overcome by fear.

At dawn Lem, the leader of the rebels, comes with Smithers and a group of natives to the edge of the jungle, where Jones entered on the previous night. Lem was delayed in pursuing Jones because of the necessity of manufacturing silver bullets, which, Lem believes, are the only means of taking Jones’s life. Several of Lem’s men enter the jungle. They soon find the prostrate Jones, who was running in circles throughout the night. One of them shoots Jones through the chest with a silver bullet. Jones’s body is brought back to Lem, who thinks that the silver bullet is what killed Jones. Smithers, however, looking at Jones’s fear-contorted face, knows differently.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’ Neill. Updated ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. Includes critical essays analyzing individual plays, as well as more general discussions about O’Neill’s life and work.

Bloom, Steven F. Student Companion to Eugene O’ Neill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Includes a brief biographical sketch, a discussion of O’Neill’s literary heritage, and a chapter providing critical analysis of The Emperor Jones.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Bogard’s study of O’Neill’s plays revolves around his assertion that O’Neill’s experiments with theatrical devices were part of his attempt to create theater from his quest for identity. The section on The Emperor Jones compares the play to Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867).

Falk, Doris V. Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. A study of O’Neill’s plays with emphasis on the psychoanalytic theories of depth psychology, noting the influence of Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious on The Emperor Jones.

Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. This study for general readers features analyses of fifty plays, supplemented with information from O’Neill’s notebooks. The section on The Emperor Jones discusses O’Neill’s use of expressionism, noting similarities to August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902). Floyd considers this a “landmark drama” for the American stage, with its first use of an African American actor in a leading role in New York theater.

Frenz, Horst. Eugene O’Neill. Translated by Helen Sebba. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971. Provides an assessment of the man whose experiments transformed American drama. In his analysis of The Emperor Jones as one of O’Neill’s expressionist experiments, Frenz compares the play to Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight (1916).

Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Collection of essays about O’Neill’s life and works, including discussions of the theater in his time; notable stage productions of his work; his depiction of female, African, and Irish American characters; and analyses of his plays written in his early, middle, and late periods.

Martine, James J., ed. Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Two essays in this collection are of interest to students of The Emperor Jones: Frank R. Cunningham’s “Romantic Elements in Early O’Neill” views Jones as one of O’Neill’s failed romantics, and Lisa M. Swerdt’s “Blueprint for the Future” examines the play as a seminal work, introducing themes that O’Neill would develop more fully in later plays.

Törnqvist, Egil. Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Demonstrates how O’Neill was a controlling personality in the texts and performances of his plays. Describes his working conditions and the multiple audiences for his works. Examines the titles, settings in time and place, names and addresses, language, and allusions to other works in his dramas.