“Ain’T Nothin’ Dere But De Trees!”

Abstract

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones occupies a curious position in the playwright’s extensive catalog. Both wildly popular as well as theatrically sophisticated, it provided the Provincetown Players their first and only runaway commercial hit in its initial run, beginning in November of 1920. O’Neill himself ranked it among his best work,¹ and its adaptation to film and opera, both in 1933, speaks to its commercial and narrative appeal to audiences and artists. Since its debut, O’Neill scholars have also approached the text in significant and intriguing ways, noting its debt to continental expressionism,² its use of Jungian archetypes and Freudian psychology,³ and its appropriation and portrayal of race.⁴ Yet in addition to its complex philosophical and cultural underpinnings, The Emperor Jones is also profoundly theatrical and thrilling, a play that exults in the Aristotelian sense of spectacle. Fear and terror drive the story, forcing the audience to join Brutus Jones on his journey through his personal and collective past. This essay will look specifically at how O’Neill uses fear and terror in The Emperor Jones, focusing on the ghost characters and the medium of the forest, the supernatural place that links Brutus Jones’s external and interior realities. O’Neill’s use of ghosts and the haunted forest reveals both his debt to the European theatrical tradition of ghost plays, which originated in ancient Athens, as well as his use of the forest as the locus of fear and anxiety found in the early American literary tradition of the Puritans. Through ghosts and the forest, O’Neill manages to create a hybrid place in the play. Though set in the West Indies, a location neither American, nor European, nor African, the setting of The Emperor Jones somehow evokes and integrates all three.

This thing [the ghost] that looks at us, that concerns us, comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy.

— Jacques Derrida

I ain’t ’fraid of no ghosts!

— Ray Parker Jr.