Social classes in Eugene O’neill’s The Hairy Ape: Viewed from Marxist theory

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, the problem of social classes really exists in human life. It is shown with the bourgeois’ exploitation toward the proletariat class. The bourgeois can cause good effect for their production. While proletariat will get hard work with minimal wages. This problem is very vital to solve for the sake of opening the people’s eyes the exploitation of bourgeois. Its form may be different one another, but the substance of their action is quite similar.

In this analysis, the researcher give clear description of what researcher has done in this design, source data, data collection, and data analysis. In collecting data, the researcher takes the data from drama The Hairy Ape, find the social classes in the drama, then find the theory of Marxist that is suitable for the objective of the study. And the last, the researcher highlight the data in drama and match the suitable theories.

The researcher concludes the content of drama portrayed the social condition of working class is oppressed. Mildred Douglas and her aunt act as the upper class (bourgeoisie) earn money by expensing lower class (proletariat) Yank, Paddy, and Long. Their condition is very pain because they were forced to work long hours in stokehole with minimum wage while the productions or incomes are enjoyed by bourgeois. It is a system of exploitation of labor that the owner of capital is considered as oppressors and the oppressed workers.

For those who are interested in doing the same research or in studying sociological criticism especially Marxist criticism appeals such as class system, economy, the researcher suggest the next researcher can take the object “The Hairy Ape”, and analyzed from economic side because, beside this drama is seen in terms of social, it can be seen in terms of economic. The researcher hopes that this research could give a new perspective about the theory of Marxist in literary works. And other researchers could broader and enrich their research with other perspectives that is dealing with Marxist Literary Criticism.