“Roaring Twenties” and Its Impact on the Americans’ Identity Crisis: A Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

Abstract

The term ‘Roaring Twenties’ refers to the age in which the American people challenged the cultural norms and traditional standards and headed boisterously towards freewheeling lifestyle and unrestrained culture of entertainment (new styles of dancing, music, dressing triggered by new artistic productions and technological advances). However, O’Neill is not an escapist in the romantic sense of the word; rather an existentialist and a reformer who deals with the issues of daily life in a very realistic and censorious manner. Thereby identity crisis and belonging are the pressing issues that have precipitated by the ‘roaring twenties’ and resulted in challenging and perplexing the entire American nation. Accordingly, O’Neill depicts in his play how the American man in the ‘Age of Wonderful Nonsense’ was ostracized and rejected not only by his fellow men but also by nature and all the surroundings. Thereby, this paper will depict how O’Neill (as a social reformer) dramatized the issue of identity crisis that emanated due to the occurrence of cultural, social, economic and traditional alterations. Therefore, the main contention of this paper is to delineate how the ‘Roaring Twenties’ or the Age of Intolerance exacerbated the identity crisis of the Americans in the 1920s as depicted in O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape (1922).