Emperor Jones Review
Eugene O’Neill, in full Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, (born October 16, 1888, New York, U.S. — died November 27, 1953, Boston, Massachusetts), was an American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. He wrote a play that is inspired by an event in Haitian history, the play shows the decline of a former Pullman porter, Brutus Jones, who has escaped from prison to an unnamed Caribbean island.
The story is a reflection of a downfall, flashbacks, and struggle. A runaway emperor from the natives who have planned a revolution against him is how it all starts. Emperor Jones regards the natives as illiterate savages who can not outsmart him because he conned them into believing he is some magical creature that cannot be killed unless it was a silver bullet which was thanks to a lucky roll of dice. It seems to have escaped the emperor’s mind that he was on the natives’ island and that they are more familiar with the forest than he will ever be.
The emperor did not even take into consideration that what he regarded as language and illiteracy can be superficial to the natives who had their own knowledge and language. The natives’ language and culture were manifested in their revolution, and if I may rephrase their hunt. There was some sort of subtle magic with the drums, the land, and the hallucinations.
Some people may argue that the emperor was simply poisoned, but through the language used in the story: “uncanny compulsion- hallucinations” and how the drums follow the happenings and scattered haunting of the ghosts, I’d say the emperor fell prey to the natives’ connection to the land and nature. That connection seemed like superstitions and sorcery to the invader. It was not only a story of racism because if so, why would Emperor Jones be black in the first place?
Politics, history, psychology, and Race are major factors to consider when reading such a story. The flashbacks tell us of all the horrors that the emperor had gone through and in a way made him who he is. The hunt was about bringing the emperor to justice and making him redeem his wrongdoings even though in the reader’s mind such doings can hardly, be considered wrong, given the circumstances.
The hallucinations we are presented with are of the emperor killing a man over a game of craps, killing a prison guard to escape jail, at a slave auction, a slave ship, and a witch doctor with a hungry crocodile. The emperor is running and running to escape with no way out as he runs in circles. We learn how he was humiliated and treated as a slave and when he begs his fellows to give him a shovel to kill the person humiliating them, they all look down broken and he raises his hands to kill with a shovel, only to realise his hands are empty. A reader cannot blame him for his contempt, but it is questionable what emperor Jones had gone through makes of him.
