Reflections on O'Neill's Plays

Robeson, Paul. "Reflections on O'Neill's Plays." Ed. David L. Lewis. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 58-60. Print.

I must say, I wish I had read this little segment before reading the excerpts from the play itself. Robeson puts O’Neill into perspective, as well as explains parts of the play that came off in an entirely different way when I originally read them. Firstly, it is good to hear that O’Neill wasn’t a racist, but rather a liberal man who befriended blacks for who they were. The second thing I was wrong about is the meaning behind the primitive, “unintellectual” portrayal of Jones during the final scenes of the play. What I took to be a caricature of an uneducated black man was actually the final stages of a mind defeating itself. I’m not sure what that says about me, and it seems worth investigating. That I immediately assumed the man to be a caricature may, in part, be due to the fact that his portrayal paralleled that of an uneducated black person (complete with the “slave” dialect and beliefs), at least to my reasoning. Perhaps O’Neill did this on purpose in an attempt to show what was, at the time, an obvious illustration of “primitiveness” in an attempt to make people open their eyes to racist stereotypes. However, I’m not so sure this is the case.

And what if the play had centered on a white man with a similar dilemma (i.e. his conscience destroying his mind)? Would the depiction have been that of a stereotypical uneducated white man? What would that have been to O’Neill – a redneck? I really don’t know, and I kind of wish O’Neill had provided some answers. Perhaps, if he was smart enough, O’Neill turned Jones into a stereotype at the end of his play to elicit the same questions I have now. If that is the case, then my hat goes off to him. It certainly gives reason for the controversy surrounding its performance (as noted by Robeson). Another possibility is one far removed from the racial meanderings; perhaps the point was that all men are, once defeated, primitive and afraid. A sort of transcendence of racial profiling, if you will, meaning that the character of Jones was black only by chance. Given the hype surrounding the play and the fact that it appears in a compilation of literature taken from the Harlem Renaissance, my gut instinct tells me I’m thinking too hard about this. It is still an interesting line of thought, however, and one I may read the play to gain answers to.