The Emperor Jones Study Guide

Eugene O'Neill was born in a hotel in New York City to Irish immigrants. Both of his parents toured with a theatre company and as such, O'Neill attended a Catholic boarding school. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was addicted to morphine, a family situation that influenced his later theatrical works. As a young man, he began working on ships and became involved with unions and labor movements in the US. He became ill with tuberculosis in his early twenties, after which he decided to dedicate himself to writing full-time. His first play, Beyond the Horizon, opened in 1920, and The Emperor Jones premiered later that year. Jones was his first big hit and it expressed commentary on O'Neill's thoughts on the United States' occupation of Haiti. O'Neill was married three times and had three children. In 1943, after suffering for most of his life from depression and alcoholism, O'Neill's hands began to tremble and he was mostly unable to write for the last ten years of his life. He died in a hotel room in Boston. Though he asked his third wife to wait 25 years to publish Long Day's Journey into Night (which O'Neill wrote in 1941-42), she published the play in 1956 and it won a Tony Award for Best Play.

The Emperor Jones is a commentary on the United States' occupation of Haiti, and the play comments in broader terms on American imperialism around the globe. In 1915, amid rising global tensions prior to World War I, the US invaded Haiti as a show of strength and influence to intimidate Germany. There were a number of influential Germans living in Haiti at that time and because they married Haitians, they were able to circumvent Haitian laws forbidding foreigners from purchasing Haitian land. The 1915 Haitian-American Convention was a treaty that granted the US economic oversight over Haiti for a ten-year period. During that period, the US overhauled Haiti completely. It invested in infrastructure, established National Guards, and reinstituted impressed labor of Haitians to reach these goals, while also putting policies in place to redirect a major percentage of Haiti's economy to repay loans to the US and France. When Germany lost the war in 1918, the US maintained occupancy of Haiti even as President Woodrow Wilson spoke hypocritically about the need for countries to govern themselves. In this way, the character of Jones comes to represent America's knowledge that it was indeed exploiting Haiti, while the natives' victory over Jones suggests a hope that American imperialism would be overthrown.

Eugene O'Neill's plays all tend to feature characters who, like Jones, work exceptionally hard to keep up hope and reach their goals—but in the end, most of them end in despair and tragedy. O'Neill's most famous tragic play is his 1956 play Long Day's Journey into Night, which deals with a family's intense dysfunction and addiction problems. Much of his work uses elements of realism, drama techniques developed to best convey the social or psychological problems of real life on stage. This style of theatre is most commonly associated with playwrights such as Anton Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard, 1903) and Henrik Ibsen (A Doll's House, 1879). It's also worth noting that The Emperor Jones was first performed during the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of artistic and intellectual work by black artists that took place initially in Harlem, New York. Despite the fact that O'Neill was white, The Emperor Jones was immensely popular among people of color because it featured a black actor in a leading role in a white theatre company. Because of this, Jones can be grouped with other work that came out of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Spunk" (though she's better known for her later works, namely Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Langston Hughes' poetry collection The Weary Blues.