O'Neill's Stereotypes When I Was Term Paper

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We see some repentance on his part ("Lawd Jesus, heah my prayer! I'se a po' sinner, a po' sinner! I knows I done wrong, I knows it!" p. 285), but not much else in the way of growth or progress in his character. We know from the stereotype that if Jones escaped, he would go back to being the same old Jones. We know from the beginning how the play has to end because we know how the character is going to react to everything that happens. The play would be considerably more interesting if Jones were a real flesh-and-blood person whose unique character could develop during the action. We see his past come back to haunt him, but the events which we are allowed to see are only the violent events. One wonders, who was his mother? Did he have a wife? When he was a member of the church, did he truly love God? Did he try to be good? Did he have children? We see the slave block which could help us to feel sympathetic, but it is an experience common to all slaves. The fact that slavery happened fifty or more years before Jones' life began, implies that his anger toward whites is something he's born with like an instinct and reinforces the stereotype. We don't see anything that would help us to understand Jones as an individual human being with a unique identity.

Similar problems occur in The Hairy Ape, which explores the effects of industrialization and the evils of capitalism. The alienated characters are not much more than spokespersons for their social positions. Hank, for example, portrays the worker who is so incapable of thinking that he doesn't know he is being exploited.

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Paddy speaks for the "good old days," when there was beauty and harmony in seafaring. Long offers a socialist perspective and sees problems as the fault of government. Mildred is the stereotype of the rich man's offspring, who has grown up surrounded by so much wealth she is spiritually empty and searching for meaning in "good works." However, her weakness (part of the stereotype) is exposed when she practically faints at the first sight of the dehumanized, mechanized, world where working men are treated as animals and kept in their place.

The problem is that they are one-dimensional characters. We can see them struggling against the unnatural industrial surroundings in which they must live. But we don't see anything about them other than where they fit in the hierarchy of the American workforce, just as we saw only that Jones was primitive, trying to be civilized, and confronting his "native" beginnings. That's the trouble with accepting stereotypes. Except for reading about them and seeing them in the movies, my grandmother never knew a black person. A dimension of her experience which might have added richness and meaning was shut away from her because of her beliefs. Stereotypes don't allow us to see people as human beings we can like or dislike on an individual basis. They often prevent us from experiencing the richness of diversity. In The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, they are not empowering because there is no hope. The characters cannot escape from their social positions, or their stereotypical images, and we never really find out who they are in relation to anything else......

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