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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
Bi-Monthly Refereed and Indexed Open Access eJournal
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 The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 8, Issue-VIII, July 2017 ISSN: 0976-8165

Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

Ayan Mondal
Assistant Professor of English (UG&PG)
Bankura Christian College,
Bankura, West Bengal

Article History: Submitted-02/06/2017, Revised-10/07/2017, Accepted-17/07/2017, Published-31/07/2017.

Abstract:
In her seminal book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, Toni Morrison, among other concerns , strongly puts forward her
argument against a coherent and unified “Americanness” that the White
Americans claim to have shaped the American literary culture. Morrison is far
from accepting such homogenized universal category called “American” and on
the contrary maintains, that White Eurocentric attributes have always been
“photographic negatives” of their constructed and fabricated “black”
counterparts. Thus, “blackness” was a crucial factor that came to define “white”
American identity. Morrison’s perspective therefore is to turn the gaze in order
to make “whiteness” visible.
The present paper proposes to re- read Eugene O’Neill’s one Act play
Thirst from the perspective of “Whiteness Studies” taking cue from some of the
theoretical formulations of Toni Morrison and who has been a central figure in
pioneering “whiteness studies” as an academic discipline. The paper would
thereby try to underscore, how, under the veneer of “universality”, in so far as the
theme of the play is concerned, the hegemonic racist bias lies hidden, and how, a
reading of the play “against the grain” leads us to the “textual unconscious”.

Key words: “photographic negative”, “whiteness studies”, “textual unconscious”.

Explorations of Eugene O’Neill’s engagement with racism are not new in the critical parlance.
In fact, O’Neill remains one of the most influential white writers who could comprehensively deal with
“blackness” as a social, racial and ideological category and could accept the compelling and severe
challenge of representing black characters in creative works of considerable literary merit worthily
making room in the critical domain of Melville, Mark Twain, Conrad and Faulkner. He was the first
mainstream American playwright to delineate black characters in dramatic roles and also to faithfully
employ black actors in those roles. The path, however was not easy for him, as he could not uncritically
succumb to the racial myths and stereotypes dominant then. Having created six plays to depict sixteen
black characters over a twenty-six year period, O-Neill’s “Negro” had to “evolve”. Drawing attention to

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 Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

this gradual metamorphosis in treatment of the idea of “blackness”, Peter J Gillet in his article “O’ Neill
and the Racial Myths’’ points out:
For in the period spanned for his five so called ‘negro plays’, from 1914 to 1924,
anthropology and psychology tended to give weight to some of the myths in his work;
moreover the last two of these five, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chilun Got Wings,
coincided with the early days of the “Harlem Renaissance’’ in which black writers
themselves often treated the black man as a primitive. Despite this and herein, I believe,
lies the interest of his treatment of the black American in these five plays and in The
Iceman Cometh (1946) O’Neill met the various difficulties of presenting black characters
with ever greater assurance, awareness and success. As we move from Thirst through The
Iceman we can watch America’s most influential playwright more and more
understanding blackness as part of the black man’s humanity, and in the process
sloughing off the influence of the traditional American racial myths. (111)

Gillet’s analysis of O’Neill’s treatment of blackness, however, is limited in the sense that it
overlooks how the “black” in almost majority of the plays of O’Neill serves as a parasitic agent
to bolster and underscore “whiteness” and even when blackness comes to be understood as part
of the black man’s “humanity”, white remains the unmarked and invisible human “norm” and
universal standard. The present paper seeks to explore the “textual unconscious” of O’Neill’s
play Thirst from the critical imperatives of a recent theoretical field of enquiry “Whiteness
Studies”.

“Whiteness Studies” as a new emerging discipline that made inroads in the fields of
culture-studies, history, anthropology, social sciences, literature and even popular culture came
to flourish in the United States in the 1990s and gradually moved beyond its frontiers, with the
call of critics and academicians to scrutinize, analyze and comprehend the meanings and
ramifications embedded in the category called ‘white’. The obvious reason behind such
discerning attention on ‘white’ and ‘whiteness’ was to posit a counter discursive threat to the
attempts of critics in analyzing the ‘marginal’, studying the ‘black’ from racial perspectives, only
to leave out discussions on the ‘centre’, as if, it never existed. The inherent and latent politics
was always to camouflage the characteristics that define ‘whiteness’, and also to keep
‘whiteness’ outside the precincts and parameters of race and racial theorizations. The
consequence was an inalienable association and proximity of ‘race’ with ‘black’ and ‘blackness’
giving way to ‘whiteness’ assuming the status of the ‘neutral’ ‘norm’. The aim of whiteness
critics was to interrogate this ‘neutrality’ and ‘normativity’ and to challenge the very ‘centrality’
of white by naming, marking and rendering visible, the hitherto unnamed, unmarked and
invisible category.

The impetus that spurred ‘Whiteness Studies’ as the new ground for interdisciplinary
research was generated by Toni Morrison’s insightful study of ‘literary whiteness’,

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The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 8, Issue-VIII, July 2017 ISSN: 0976-8165

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), a condensed and
pithy summation of her “Tanner Lectures on Human Values”, “Unspeakable Things
Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature”, delivered by Morrison
at the University of Michigan on October 7, 1988. In the field of history, ‘whiteness’
acquired considerable attention and proliferation, particularly in the US. Peter Kolchin in
his article “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America”, categorically
mentions the actual point of concurrence of history and whiteness studies as disciplines.
Kolchin states about the historians:
…their focus has been on the construction of whiteness - how diverse
groups in the United States came to identify, and be identified by others,
as white – and what that has meant for the social order. Starting from the
now widely shared premise that race is a ideological or social contract
rather than a biological fact, they have at least partially shifted attention
from how Americans have looked at whites, and to whiteness as a central
component of American’s racial ideology. In doing so they have already
had a substantial impact in historians whose work does not fall fully
within the rubric of whiteness studies but who have borrowed some of the
field’s insights, concerns and language.(Kolchin 155)

Among the leading whiteness historians, David R. Roedigar in The Wages of Whiteness,
which Angela Woollacott believes to be ‘founded on his passionate commitment to
radical politics and activism, specifically to the possibility of workers uniting across
racial barriers’ (Woollacott18) portrays how white laborers in the antebellum United
States came to understand themselves by a projection of their Other – the slaves and the
blacks which raised them hierarchically at a superior stratum and enabled their employers
to ideologically take them into confidence. Roedigar’s study further influenced Noel
Ignatiev who in his book How the Irish Became White (1995) explores the conditions that
necessitated the Irishmen to ‘become’ white, gradually as they were initially projected by
the Americans as a race occupying the curious intermediate position, if not the ‘black’
completely. In fact, Irishmen belonging to the poorer class gradually became greater
adversaries to the existing negro population and always gave favourable consent on the
question of continuing slavery than any other segment of the U S population; only to
assert their own ‘whiteness’ and find an identity of their own. Matthew Frye Jacobson in
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,
however, differs from Roedigar’s deterministic approach towards ‘race’ and projects ‘the
full complexity of whiteness in its vicissitudes’ (Jacobson 14) outlining stages of
chronological progression in racial categorization. Peter Kolchin also includes Grace
Elizabeth Hale’s book Making Whiteness as the one that pronounces the “American
Studies” approach and ‘delineates the emergence of a Southern “culture of segregation”
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. The idea of ‘collective whiteness’

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Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

that the southern constructed in order to abate the post Civil War problems is a subject of
exploration of Hale. Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, again
emphasizes the ways by which ‘whiteness’ was constructed not as means to perpetrate
social control, and how the myth of racial superiority was enforced in America. David
Roedigar reviewed Allen’s book as ‘a monumental study of the birth of racism in the
American South which makes truly new and convincing points about one of the most
critical problems in U. S history’ in “Times Literary Supplement”.

The concept of ‘whiteness’ has proliferated in the research avenues of anthropologists as

well. John Hartigan Jr in “Establishing the fact of Whiteness” makes a detailed review of
various ethnographic and anthropological studies as regards whiteness and concludes
with a call for considering the very heterogeneity in the discourse of whiteness. Hartigan
writes:
If whiteness stands, definitionally, as equivalent with homogenizing
process in the workplace, at home, in neighbourhoods, and in public
debates, then we should additionally have a means of designating the
heterogeneous aspects of white racial identity that are not effortlessly
processed into whiteness, that through ruptures of class decorums or other
forms of social etiquette, undermine the unmarked status of some white.
Lest whiteness and blackness become static version of the marxist
superstructure / base paradigm –discrete, separate entities rather than
constantly entangled registers – ethnographers must devise means to
analyse how whites, as racial subjects are embroiled in predicaments
where the meanings of race are unclean and shifting, subjects of
discourses or local idioms that are fashioned in fast-changing
sites.(Hartigan Jr 502)

In the well-researched articles, Hartigan refers to a range of critics and academicians

engaged in the study of ‘whiteness’- Harrison, Frankenberg, George Lipsitz, Daniel Legel
, David Roedigar among others. In another perceptive article, that narrates Hartigan’s
fieldwork on the “white” in Detroit, he came to identify how whites articulated their
notions about ‘race’ in general and the significance of being white, in particular. The
passage from his article ““White devils” Talk Back: What Antiracists Can Learn from
Whites in Detroit” is worth quoting:
Rather than simply reiterating my finding, this essay pursues two
objectives in relation to my fieldwork in Detroit. The first is to discuss
epistemological and methodological issues raised by applying an
ethnographic perspective to the subject of whiteness; the second is to
relate particular insights I garnered from observing white Detroiters
grappling with the significance of race in their daily lives, within then

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neighborhoods and the city at large. These two discussions derived from
recognition that racial identities are locally constituted following place-
specific dynamics that are informed by class position. (139)

In a study of whiteness from the legal and statutory standpoint, White by Law: Legal
Construction of Race, Ian Haney Lopez argues for the centrality of law itself in the
construction of race. Haney Lopez examines past cases in the United States that have
shaped the contemporary notions of race, law and whiteness including two heard by the
United States Supreme Court. He argues how the judgments and verdicts decided and
articulated who was white enough to become American and the contrary.

Richard Dyer, who is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick, in his
path breaking book White conflates some of the basic propositions and theorization of
“Critical White Studies” to some Hollywood reels and himself, significantly adds to the
body of discourses on Whiteness”. Chapter I of his book entitled “The Matter of
Whiteness”, as Dyer himself argues, deals with the ‘political’ and methodological issues
and some key concepts unpinning the analysis of the rest of the book’ (Dyer xix). It
explores how Christianity, race and imperialism renders visible the very ‘white person’.
He considers his own crucial positionality of being ‘white’ and states with almost an
objective acumens:
As long as race is something only applied to non-white people are not
racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people
are raced, we are just people. (Dyer 1)

Dyer also refers to this synonymyty of being ‘people’ or ‘just people’ with ‘whites’ and
consideration of the colored as ‘less than being ‘just’ people (pun in the word just is quite
discernable) as ‘endemic’ to the very white culture. Dyer also stresses the relation of
‘whiteness’ with its other-‘blackness’, in and through which it comes to be defined and
articulated:
As others have found, it often seems that the only way to see the
structures, tropes and perpetual habits of whiteness, to see past the illusion
of infinite variety, to recognise white qua white, is when non-white people
are also represented. My initial stab at the topic of whiteness approached it
with three films which were centrally about white-black interactions, and
my account above of how I may have got into thinking about the topic at
all emphasizes the role of non-white people in my life. (Dyer 13)

What all the above approaches to the study of Whiteness more or less infer are -first, the
invisibility and the constructed nature of whiteness, second, the normativity and the
tendency of the “white” to remain neutral in respect of race, third, the place specific

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Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

attributes of whiteness, and fourth, its interdependence on its Other to manifest itself
internally.

The intensive theorization of ‘whiteness’ in literature, however, was first made by Toni
Morrison’s path breaking critical work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, which happens to be a supreme manifesto bearing the meanings and
ramifications of American whiteness vis-à-vis American canonical literature. Morrison’s
idea in Playing in the Dark came by way of her summation of her views expressed in
Tarner Lectures on Human Values delivered at the University of Michigan on October,
1998, entitled, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature”. Morrison in Unspeakable Things Unspoken (hereafter abbreviated
as UTU) problematizes the very notion of the concept of ‘race’ stating that the exclusion
of any discussions of ‘race’ in contemporary times is a political ploy of the whites to
claim neutrality, as no voice in any discipline- academic, theological, historical or natural
scene - paid heed to the insistence of the Afro-Americans that race is not a distinguishing
factor in any human relationship. Morrison attempts in her lecture, to ‘address the ways
in which presence of Afro-American literature and the awareness of its culture both
resuscitate the study of literature in the United States and raise that study’s standards’
(“UTU” 126-27). She contextualizes the routes, debates on ‘canon’ have taken in
Western literary criticism and by way of her argument refers to Milan Kundera’s strictly
Eurocentric notion of canon as reflected in his The Art of the Novel. Kundera’s assertion
was to that, novel being Europe’s creation ought to be judged in the contextual canvas of
the history of European novel. Clearly enough, Kundera excludes American writes from
the transcendent ‘idea of the novel’, an exclusion, that Morrison parallels with those of
the Afro-American from the ‘transcendent idea of the American canon’. Morrison refers
to Michael Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization and
taking cue from his ideas regarding the ‘process’ of ‘fabrication’ of Ancient Greece and
‘motive’ behind it goes on to theorize on the appraisal of Afro-American presence in
American literature. She reckons the wakefulness of scholars and academicians as
regards three principle areas- first, re exploration of the American canon, particularly the
founding nineteenth century work for unveiling the presence of the Afro-American who
have shaped the choices, structure form and even the language of those literary pieces.
Second, a development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for positing and
accommodating Afro - American literature and third, a reexamination of contemporary
and / or non- canonical literature for this presence. Morrison herself asserts, ‘I am always
amazed by the resonances the structural gearshifts, and the uses to which Afro –
American narratives, persona and idiom are put in contemporary “white” literature’
(UTU 136, emphasis mine). In other words, Morrison’s search (a search that she argues
will come out of an extensive research) is for the ‘ghost in the machine’; she argues that

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things which are invisible ‘are not necessarily “not there”; that a void may be empty but
not be a vacuum’. Morrison observes in “UTU”:
Looking at the scope of American literature, I can’t help thinking
that the question should never have been “Why am I, an Afro-American,
absent from it?” It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The
spectacularly interesting question is “What intellectual feats had to be
performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething
with my presence and what effect has that performance had on the work?”
What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion?
(136)

As to why and how American writers chose ‘romance’ as a generic form to ventilate their
aesthetic output, ten years after Tocqueville’s prediction in 1940, “Finding no stuff for
the ideal in what is real and true, poets ‘would flee to imaginary regions’, Morrison
wonders that where in romances is the shadow of the presence from which the text tries
to escape. She calls for an exploration of the textual strategies and the novelistic
inventions that serve to expunge the ‘shadow’. In U T U, Morrison, herself tries to read
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick ‘against the grain’ and concludes that among the several
meanings of this complex, profound, heaving and disorderly text, the ‘unspeakable’ one
has remained the ‘hidden course’, the ‘truth in the face of falsehood’. Morrison
underscores the fact that canonical American Literature is begging for such attention
from critics and researchers. In the third section of her lecture, Morrison deals with the
ways in which works by Afro-Americans can respond to the ‘presence’, (just as non
black works do) and she chooses some of her own fictional works in this regard. But the
crux of Morrison’s argument in this article is as follows:
It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or
“inevitably” “white”. In fact it is studiously so. In fact these absences of
vital presences in Young American literature may be the insistent fruit of
the scholarship rather than the text. Perhaps some of these writers,
although under current house arrest, have much more to say than has been
realized. Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or
escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible,
accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by
never questioning the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise the
writer, diminish the text, and render the buck of the literature aesthetically
and historically incoherent – an exorbitant price for cultural (white male)
purity, and I believe, a spendthrift one. The reexamination of founding
literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal
those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power,
deeper and other significances. (UTU 140)

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Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison pronounces
more empathetically her notions about African- Americanism in the United States, which
she believes, has been central to the understanding of the American canon. The particular
and distinctive ‘Americanness’ from where the characteristics of the national literature
are believed to emanate, Morrison argues, is shaped by the ‘four hundred year old
presence of, first Africans and then African American’. Morrison in the chapter entitled
“Black Matters”, means by ‘Africanism’ both the notions of Africa as it existed in the
USA and the Africa that was fabricated by the Eurocentric learning.

She added that the Africanism had overshadowed the literary imagination of the
American white writers to an extent that one can discerningly discern ‘through a close
look at literary “blackness”, the nature – even the cause - of literary “whiteness”:
What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the
construction of what is loosely described as “American”? If such an
enquiry ever comes to maturity, it may provide access to a deeper reading
of American literature – a reading not completely available now, at least, I
suspect, because of the studied indifference of most’ literary criticism to
these matters. (Playing in the Dark, hereafter abbreviated as PITD 9)

Morrison clearly distinguishes between her perceptions of the American canon from the
dual perspectives of a ‘reader’ and a ‘writer’. Whereas the former invites her to consider
that ‘black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American
writers’ and that blacks have a marginal impact on ‘the lives of the characters of the work
as well as the creative imagination of the author’, the latter in turn led her to arrive at a
point where:
I began to see how the literature I revered, the literature I loathed, behaved
in its encounter with racial ideology. American literature could not help
being shaped by that encounter…. (PITD 16)

In the second chapter of the book entitled “Romancing the Shadow”, Morrison theorizes
on the factors that were instrumental in the generic development of American ‘romance’.
He historically traces the reason behind the immigration of people from the Old World –
of poverty, incarceration – of oppression, domination and religious persecution – and the
new one with promises of freedom, liberation, individualism and opportunities. Morrison
quite cogently sums up:
The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression, a yearning for God’s
law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption, the
glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger and debt. (PITD 35)

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Gradually, in and through the succeeding centuries the literature produced by Young
America became replete with fears, mysteries and doubts much to the astonishment of
people, since the world of disorder, chaos and confusion that they wanted to fly from
became reflected in their ‘body of literature’. Morrison herself answers that this reflection
is a kind of ‘exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture’.
‘Freedom’ might be their most coveted experience, but what hovered in their
consciousness was a lack of it. Their fear of solitude, boundaries, aggression and lack of
‘civilization’ was channelized through the romances they wrote, and, Morrison argues,
that the fodder for all these … was provided by an already existing Afro – American
population. Morrison quite aptly pronounces in PITD:
Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that
construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not
-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by the skin colour, the
projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for imagination.
What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to
rationalized external exploitation was an American Africanism –a
fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely
American. (38, emphasis mine)

Morrison, almost in a didactic vein calls for investigation of researchers regarding certain
issues –first, the way in which a contemplation of the ‘dark –abiding signing Africanist ’
presence enable white writers like Poe, Twain, Melville and Hawthorne to think about
themselves. Second, how white writers self -consciously manipulate an Africanist idiom
to establish their otherness and this way did either of estrangement of their dialogues,
spelling words to the point of unintelligibility, reinforcing class distinctions etc. Third,
how an Africanist narrative is manipulated as a means of establishing humanity,
civilization, reason and other universal codes of behaviour. Such criticism will show
how through that narrative, history is constructed by the whites at the cost of history-
lessness and context-lessness for blacks.

O’Neill’s Thirst, as Margaret Loftus Ranald puts in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene
O’Neill :
…portrays a raft as a microcosm, with its three unnamed shipwreck survivors of Dancer,
Gentleman and West Indian Mulatto Sailor. While introducing the theme of woman as
whore, along with inter-racial and class conflict, it also portrays the behavior of
individuals pushed to their emotional and physical limits, even to proposed cannibalism,
after the Dancer dances herself to death( Ranald 52-53).

As far as the main thematic thrust of the play is concerned, the play masterfully exposes the
gradual moral degeneration and degradation of man, the unveiling of the façade of civilization,

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Problematizing “Whiteness Studies”: A Re-reading of O’ Neill’s Thirst

the gradual onset of madness and the frenzied and almost bestial display of savagery and
barbarism when man lives on the edge and death stares him at the face. The thematic fabric
includes apart from thirst for water, the instinctual thirst for communication and companionship,
thirst for life and survival. In fine it may be inferred that the theme is an universal one addressing
general human attributes in dramatizing and sketching out the behavioral patterns of mankind
under the worst of calamities- scorching sun, the threats of the devouring sharks whose fins are
sometimes visible and the pitiless and merciless ambience of the boundless sea with the searing
desperation of thirst. O’Neill, therefore was to address a theme that is universal- man’s deepest
urge for camaraderie and survival being one of the most instinctual paraphernalia of human
nature. The interest of the present paper is not to study this general praxeology and to study the
characters through universalist parameters that homogenize differences but to have a sharp focus
on the interracial politics manifest in this play by using “Whiteness Studies” as a theoretical tool.
The paper therefore attempts to shift the critical gaze from the margin to the centre and to show
how the fabricated blackness in the ideational level unmistakable articulates and vivifies
“whiteness” in the text.

While the Sailor in O’Neill’s play continuously goes on “crooning” the Negro monotonous song
the Gentleman and the Dancer are always engaged in pointing out the mystery and enigma
associated with the Sailor:
GENTLEMAN: He is strange- that sailor. I do not know what to think of him.
DANCER: It is a strange song he sings.
GENTLEMAN: He doesen’t seem to want to speak to us.
DANCER: I have noticed that, too. When I asked him about that song he did not want to
answer at all. (O’Neill 14)

Even all attempts at rationalizing the strangeness of the Sailor fail because it is the Sailor’s
otherness that help them establish their own “sameness”. In other words the blackness of the
Sailor and the attributes that define his blackness are constantly highlighted in order to build up
companionship and amiability between the two white characters.
GENTLEMAN: I no longer fear him now that I am quite sane. It clears my brain to talk
to you. We must talk to each other all the time.
DANCER: Yes, we must talk to each other. I do not dream when I talk to you.
GENTLEMAN: … He is a poor Negro sailor- our companion in misfortune. God knows
we are all in the same pitiful plight. We should not grow suspicious of one another.
DANCER: All the same, I am afraid of him. There is something in his eyes when he
looks at me which makes me tremble. (O’Neill, 15)

Particularly the Dancer in this text seems to attest to Morrison’s argument in favour of the Afro-
Americans being merely agents of contemplation on all that is intimidating. Morrison rightly
observed that the slave population acted as surrogate selves for meditations on terrors of all

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forms- the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without
limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed and the like.

Both the Gentleman and the Dancer obsessively nourish the idea that the Sailor is indeed self-
centred and greedy to steal water and to hide it depriving the white characters:
SAILOR: Water! I want water! Give me some water and I will sing.
GENTLEMAN: We have no water fool! It is your fault we have none. Why did you drink
all that was left in the cask while you thought we were asleep? I would not give you any
even if we had some. You deserve to suffer you pig! If any one of the three of us has any
water it is you who have hidden some of what you stole… ( O’Neill 28)

Edward L. Slaughnessy in his essay “O Neill’s African and Irish Americans: stereotypes or
‘faithful realism’? ” thus very pertinently points out :
Emancipated de jure but never de facto, his African-American characters exist in
conditions of effective subjugation. They are often forced to behave in ways that
confirm the very stereotypes others hold of them.Condemned to live out his
prophecy of doom, O’Neill’s black exists in a state of resentment and fear,
conditions which make him simultaneously suspect and pitiable.(149)

The us/ other binary in the play is strongly established by now and one comes to understand that
the stereotypical images of the black Negro are vivified through the Gentleman’s comments-
“nigger”, “fool”, “rotten pig”.

Morrison in the chapter entitled “Romancing the Shadow” of her book calls for a
systematic study of the technical ways in which a black character is often used as a vehicle to
enforce and establish the inventions and implications of “whiteness” and also placed her
argument regarding an in-depth analysis analyze the strategic use of black characters to define
the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters.In Thirst when even the Dancer’s ploy to
tempt the Sailor with the diamond necklace fails, she goes the extreme forward to offer him her
body. Let us have a look at the relevant passage:
DANCER: (Putting her arm around his neck and half whispering in his ear) Do
you not understand? I love you, Sailor! Noblemen and millionaires and all
degrees of gentlemen have loved me, have fought for me. I have never loved any
of them as I will love you. Look in my eyes Sailor, look in my eyes!( O’Neill 37)

And even then when the Sailor is still indifferent the Dancer’s racial prejudice is prominently
betrayed:
Oh, will you never understand? Are you so stupid that you do not know what I
mean? Look! I am offering myself to you! I am kneeling before you- I who
always had men kneel to me! I am offering my body to you- my body that men

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have called so beautiful. I have promised to love you-a Negro Sailor- if you will
give me one small drink of water. Is that not humiliation enough that you must
keep me waiting so? ( O’Neill 37-38)

When the Sailor retains the same answer the Dancer blurts out her extreme indignation , having
debased herself so much so as to be “spurned like a wench of the streets”, that too by a Negro
Sailor, a “black animal”, “a dirty slave”. She had always noble millionaires to attend her and
now even when she voluntarily submits her body to the ignoble Sailor, the Sailor refuses. What
must be pointed out here, is that the “blackness” of the Sailor is used as a trope to emphasise the
literal as also metaphorical “whiteness” of the other characters be it the Dancer or the Gentleman
or even the “noble” Dukes and Millionaires who used to attend the Dancer.

The racial prejudice finds its culmination at the end of the play where the Sailor is shown to
behave in the most macabre and eerie vein when he decides to hack the Dancer’s flesh and drink
her blood.
SAILOR : One of us had to die. It is lucky for us she is dead.
GENTLEMAN: What do you mean? What good can her death do us?
SAILOR: We will live now.( O’Neill 42)

The dramatist very meticulously mentions the next steps undertaken by the Sailor as he takes the
Sailor’s knife from his heath, like an expert person who knows how to effectively use the
weapon of murder sharpens it on the sole of his shoe, supplants his hitherto monotonous Negro
song with a happy melodious one and finally points with his knife to the body of the Dancer. The
Gentleman, now comprehending the Sailor’s motive bursts out in tones of anguished horror:
No! No! No! Good God, not that!( O’Neill 42)

Thwarting the Sailor’s motive the Gentleman somehow grasps the Dancer’s body pushing it into
the water. Thus the Sailor here is shown to display cannibalism, a concept much in keeping with
his primitivism and his “blackness” whereas the “white” Gentleman, even when he has already
denigrated morally as a human being often using slangs or derogatory racist language here
emerges out as somebody who has at least the last streak of humanity left in his character. This
again is a politics. To say the white author O’Neill has a racist bias would indeed be stooping to
conquer the thrust area of the present paper, but now that “the author is dead” the text is open for
a reading against the grain. While discussing the whiteness project Morrison, in her book ,
observes:
We need to analyze the manipulation of the Africanist narrative as a means of
meditation on one’s own humanity. …analyze how that narrative is used for
discourse on ethics, social and universal codes of behavior, and assertions about
and definitions of civilization and reason .

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Whiteness in this play, subtly though, is celebrated and blackness, more subtly dismissed
specially when the Negro Sailor could think of cannibalism and the White Gentleman, could
defiantly react thus. In his essay “O’Neill and the Racial Myths” Peter J. Gillett comments
regarding this play:
If there any black people in the audience at the play’s first night at Provincetown
in 1916 they might well have seen it as a stupid insult to themselves, a
contribution to a set of dangerous stereotypes.

Thus, though literally the Gentleman, the Dancer and the Sailor were sailing in the same boat,
Morrison’s “whiteness” lens clearly attests to the fact that metaphorically they were not. In fact
the black Sailor in the boat could only mark the unmarked and render visible the invisible
normative “whiteness”.

Works Cited:

Dyer, Richard. White. New York: Routledge, 1997.Print.

Gillet Peter J. “O’ Neill and the Racial Myths”. Twentieth Century Literature. 18.2
(1972): 111-20. JSTOR. Web.25 April 2017.

Hartigan Jr, John. “Establishing the fact of Whiteness”. American Anthropologist. 99.3
(1997): 495-505. JSTOR. Web.20 April 2013.

… “ “White Devils” Talk Back: What Antiracists Can Learn from Whites in Detroit”.
The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Ed. Bright Brande et al. Durham &London:
Duke University Press,2001.Print.

Jacobson, Matthew Fry. Whiteness of a Different Colour : European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race. New York: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America”. The Journal
of American History. 89.1 (2002) : 154-173. JSTOR. Web. 24 April 2011.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. NewYork:
Vintage Books, 1993. Print.

…, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken : The Afro-American Presence in American

Literature”. Michigan Quarterly Review . 27.1 (1989) : 123-163. Web. 25 April 2011.

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O’Neill , Eugene. Thirst and Other One Act Plays. Boston: The Gorham Press, 1914.
Print.

Ranald, Loftus Margaret. “From trial to triumph: the early plays”. The Cambridge
Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Michael Manheim. UK: Cambridge University Press:
1998.Print.

Slaughnessy, Edward L. “O’Neill’s Africans and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “

faithful realism”? The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Michael Manheim.
UK: Cambridge University Press: 1998.Print.

Woollacott, Angela. “Whiteness and “ the Imperial Turn””. Re- Orienting Whiteness. Ed.
Leigh Boucher et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

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