In the following passage from Scene 1, O'Neill uses simile to describe the aural quality of the working men's voices, likening them to "phonograph horns": loud and blaring, coarse and overbearing.
[The chorused word has a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a general uproar of hard, barking laughter]
This simile is generally a means of dehumanizing the men and grouping them together in a mass, reflecting common concerns (in the 1920s and earlier) about population and the growth of the working class relative to the "intellectual" class. Many people—eugenic scientists in particular—feared that large groups of "coarse" working-class people would reproduce with one another and "dirty" the breeding pool with their "inferior genetics."
O'Neill repeats the simile from the above passage several times in Scene 4, using its repetition to emphasize the group-think mentality of a large crowd of working men:
[The word has a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a chorus of hard, barking laughter]
If anything, the repeated use of this simile further hints at the "sameness" and dull uniformity of the life working-class people are forced to live as laborers in a capitalist society—a society that depends on hard, monotonous work.
In the following passage, Paddy responds to Yank's sentiments regarding the ship and its relationship to his working class comrades. Notably, Paddy's view on the situation is very different from Yank's, and far less optimistic for the future. Using allusion and simile, Paddy contrasts his ideal view of the world with Yank's more modern, progressive understanding:
PADDY: Oh, to be back in the fine days of my youth, ochone! Oh, there was fine beautiful ships them days—clippers wid tall masts touching the sky—fine strong men in them—men that was sons of the sea as if ’twas the mother that bore them.
This simile connects humanity back to nature as its home or origin point, contrasting the view of Yank, who believes that the ship is the natural "home" of these working-class men. In keeping with the theme of romanticizing the past, Paddy's statement that men will be born from the sea is likely meant to allude to Greek and Roman mythology. In these myths, the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite/Venus (depending on the tradition), was born from the ocean and rose out of the waves on a shell.
Paddy, like Yank, engages in a form of romanticized imagination—but while Yank looks to the future for his salvation, Paddy draws on the myths and legends of the past for comfort.
Through the use of simile in the following Scene 1 passages, O'Neill highlights a particular modernist brand of nostalgia that sought to "return" to natural spaces as global industry expanded:
PADDY: Sun warming the blood of you, and wind over the miles of shiny green ocean like strong drink to your lungs.
In the above excerpt, Paddy specifically romanticizes natural phenomena, comparing the "shiny green ocean" to a refreshing drink. Later in his monologue, Paddy further extends the connections between ships, man, and nature, implying that the older way of doing things was better and more spiritually sound:
PADDY: ’Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ’Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one.
At the onset of industrialization—or even the formation of large cities in Europe—many Western novelists and poets imagined themselves retreating to the countryside as a form of mental and spiritual self-healing, characterizing urban and industrialized spaces as places of spiritual death. This romanticism of nature, while apparently benign, would eventually lead to a demonization of urban spaces and those who live in them—typically low-income or working-class people and people of color.
In the following excerpt from the beginning of Scene 2, the audience is introduced to Mildred and her aunt, both of whom are wealthy. O'Neill romanticizes neither woman, and he doesn't romanticize their upper-class lifestyle, either. On the contrary, he directs a pair of brutal similes against them, generating an image of contrast between their supposed superior position and the reality of their behavior:
In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending.
Mildred's aunt is a "gray lump of dough touched up with rouge," while Mildred herself, despite her youth, appears to completely lack vitality. O'Neill implies that this lack of vitality was out of Mildred's control and simply a condition of her wealth and family. Ironically, one might assume that through eugenic logic, Mildred would appear healthy and full of vitality, given that she is from wealthy, successful "stock"—but this is not so! Her lack of distinguishing characteristics to justify her "superiority" is as resounding a statement against eugenic science as one could make indirectly.
In the following passage from Scene 1, O'Neill uses simile to describe the aural quality of the working men's voices, likening them to "phonograph horns": loud and blaring, coarse and overbearing.
[The chorused word has a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a general uproar of hard, barking laughter]
This simile is generally a means of dehumanizing the men and grouping them together in a mass, reflecting common concerns (in the 1920s and earlier) about population and the growth of the working class relative to the "intellectual" class. Many people—eugenic scientists in particular—feared that large groups of "coarse" working-class people would reproduce with one another and "dirty" the breeding pool with their "inferior genetics."
O'Neill repeats the simile from the above passage several times in Scene 4, using its repetition to emphasize the group-think mentality of a large crowd of working men:
[The word has a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a chorus of hard, barking laughter]
If anything, the repeated use of this simile further hints at the "sameness" and dull uniformity of the life working-class people are forced to live as laborers in a capitalist society—a society that depends on hard, monotonous work.
