Emperor Jones and the Loss of Identity and Unhomely

‘Emperor Jones’ is a play written by Eugene O’Neil during the 1920s, that received great critical acclaim. The plot is a literary analyst’s dream, for it is an experimental play by O’Neil that delves and makes use of expressionism, Jungian psychoanalysis and the themes of race and identity. 

In her critical essay “Reconsidering Race, Language and Identity in The Emperor Jones” Michele Mendelssohn studies how the themes of race, identity and language are expressed through the journey of the protagonist. Mendelssohn analyses the play using Frantz Fanon’s racially embedded psychoanalytic theory to look at the themes and the shadows they cast. Jones tries to show his distance from the black community and his affiliation to a supposedly superior white race through his language, thought, religion and appearance. His thoughts are mostly reflected in his interactions with Smithers. In her essay Mendelssohn looks at the effect of colonization of not just the material world but of intellect as well. Jones’ conflict arises from his being both the ‘colonized and the colonizer’. His effort to internalize the language of the whites shows his intellectual colonization which he believes puts him above the others and the rite of passage to rule over the natives. His knowledge of the native language, he believes, is only so that he can communicate and exploit them to his benefit. He suns away the jungle and only makes use of it for the thrill of adventure, for hunting. The dark jungle almost comes to represent the black community, one he does not want to have any association with;"the colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle”.  He considers any association to the black community a pretense. Though Jones seems to be clear about his believes, it is clear that he is caught between two cultures. Mendelssohn also brings to notice how Jones compares the attempts to capture him made by the whites and the natives as Smithers warns him of it. This also brings out how Jones does not seem to belong anywhere, neither with the colonizers or the colonized.

Jones also tries to associate himself with the whites through his religion and appearance. His appearance is an amalgamation of stark black physical features while his clothes and grandeur reflected white superiority. He was also a Baptist, an English religion out of place in the native land. The author identifies the dress Jones wore as a uniform. The foreign nature of which is brought out as he advances through the jungle and gradually tears away his grand clothes one after another as he strips away at his unconscious as he faces “literal and metaphorical darkness”.

Jones has lost a sense of self doing everything to disassociate himself from the black community, to escape his past but not finding acceptance in a race whose values he tried so hard to follow. He only draws his identity from how he views the natives as inferior and the whites as what he aspires to be, but in the having no identity of his own. He ends up being ‘unhomed’, as he loses his roots and belonging anywhere. He places himself neither as an African nor an American. Thus, Emperor Jones is a story of a man who has lost his sense of identity in his quest for power. He is a man, who seems to be running away from the colonizers and the colonized, finding himself neither to be an American or African nor finding a middle ground. He is an homeless man with a lost sense of identity and Michele Mendelssohn's essay brings out these aspects clearly.