ANALYSIS OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER BY John Osborne
ANALYSIS OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER
Look Back in Anger follows a young husband and wife, Alison and Jimmy Porter, as they attempt to navigate class conflict and deal with a deteriorating marriage in 1950s England. Alison comes from a traditional upper class background. Jimmy comes from a working class background, though he is highly educated. The couple lives with Cliff Lewis, an affable working class man and Jimmy’s longtime friend. The scene opens on a Sunday morning in the apartment. Alison irons clothes while Cliff and Jimmy read the newspaper.
The play’s first act largely consists of Jimmy’s angry tirades against upper class complacency and his wife’s lack of “enthusiasm.” Jimmy thinks that suffering is the only way to experience true human emotion, and that Alison and other upper class people are therefore less “alive” than he is. He also seems to have some nostalgia for a past age in Britain when the country had more power. Jimmy’s attempts to shock his wife into some display of emotion escalate as the act progresses—he insults her family and complains that all women are out to destroy men. Cliff, attempting to cheer Jimmy up, begins to banter and roughhouse with his friend. The two fall against Alison’s ironing board, and she burns her arm. Jimmy apologizes, but she yells at him to leave, and he exits.
Cliff helps Alison treat the burn, and she reveals to him that she is pregnant with Jimmy’s child. She hasn’t told Jimmy yet, because she is afraid that he’ll feel trapped and angry. Cliff comforts Alison, and tells her that Jimmy loves her. He kisses her. Jimmy enters while they are kissing, but doesn’t acknowledge or object (the three live in a non-traditional set-up that would have been shocking to audiences at the time). Soon after, Cliff leaves to get some cigarettes, and Alison and Jimmy share a tender moment. They play their “bear and squirrel” game, which allows them to escape into affection while pretending to be animals. Then Cliff returns and says that Helena Charles, one of Alison’s upper class friends, is on the phone. Jimmy’s mood immediately darkens. When Alison says that Helena wants to stay with them, Jimmy explodes. He says he wishes that Alison would have a baby that would die so that she could experience true suffering.
The second act begins with Helena and Alison sharing the womanly duties of the home while Jimmy plays his trumpet off stage. Alison tells Helena about her first months with Jimmy. They lived with his working class friend Hugh Tanner, and spent time going on “raids” to parties of Alison’s upper class friends. She says that she felt like “a hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on.” Helena asks why they got married, and Alison says that it seemed to be largely because Alison’s mother and her father Colonel Redfern disapproved. That made Jimmy want to marry her no matter what.
Jimmy and Cliff come in to eat. When he hears that Helena and Alison are going to church together later that day, Jimmy also becomes convinced that Helena is out to take Alison away from him. He lets fly a series of outrageous insults against Alison’s mother. Helena tries, and fails, to reason with him, and Jimmy asks whether she has ever watched someone die. He tells the story of watching his father die from wounds received fighting in the Spanish Civil war when he was ten years old, and claims that this taught him more about life than Helena and Alison know even now. Near the end of the scene, Jimmy leaves to go get the telephone. While he’s gone, Helena tells Alison that she has sent a message to Colonel Redfern asking him to come pick Alison up. Alison doesn’t protest. When Jimmy returns, he says that Hugh’s mum, the working class woman who set him up in his candy stall and for whom he harbors deep affection, is dying of a stroke. He asks Alison to come to the hospital with him. Instead, she goes to church. Jimmy is left alone on stage.
In the next scene, Colonel Redfern helps Alison pack to leave. He reveals that he thinks he and Alison’s mother reacted too strongly to her marriage with Jimmy, and that Jimmy might have been right to be angry with them. He says he thinks that Jimmy could be right that he, Redfern, is a relic of an old version of England that has ceased to exist. He also says that he and Alison have a tendency to stay neutral and not take a strong stand on things. She is surprised to hear this from him, and as she finishes packing she briefly re-considers her move. Then Helena enters, and Alison decides to go. She says goodbye to Cliff. Helena stays behind because she has a work meeting the following day. Alison and Colonel Redfern exit, and Cliff, angry that Helena has disrupted their life, leaves before Jimmy comes back. Jimmy returns a few moments later, furious, having seen Alison leaving with her father on his way home. Helena gives him a letter that Alison wrote explaining her decision. Jimmy is angry at her polite, restrained language. Helena tells him that Alison is going to have a baby. He says that he is not overcome with emotion at this news, and insults Helena, who slaps him. This causes Jimmy to collapse in despair. Then Helena “kisses him passionately,” and the act ends.
The scene opens several months later, looking very similar to the beginning of Act 1, except that it is now Helena who is ironing. Jimmy and Cliff joke and discuss newspaper articles. They roughhouse, and Cliff dirties his shirt. Helena leaves to clean it, and while she is off stage, Cliff tells Jimmy that he is moving out. Jimmy wonders why he always chooses women over male friendship, even though he value’s Cliff’s company more highly than he values Helena’s. Helena comes back with the shirt, and Cliff leaves to dry it in his room. Helena tells Jimmy that she loves him, and he asks her desperately to never leave him. Then Alison appears at the door, looking sick and disheveled.
The next scene opens a few minutes later, with Jimmy playing his trumpet off stage. Alison tells Helena that she is not angry with her, and is not trying to break up the new couple. Helena, however, says that Alison’s presence has reminded her that what she is doing is wrong. Alison has also had a miscarriage, and Helena considers this a “judgment” on her relationship. She calls Jimmy back, and tells him that she is leaving. Jimmy says that he always knew Helena wasn’t strong enough for true love, which requires “muscle and guts.” Helena leaves.
Alison apologizes, and Jimmy says that she should have sent flowers to Hugh’s mum, and remembers his first meeting with her, when he thought that she had a “wonderful relaxation of spirit.” This turned out to be just complacency, he says. Alison lets out a cry, and tells him that the loss of their child has made her understand the depth of emotion that he wanted her to have all this time. She tells him that she wants to be “corrupt and futile,” and collapses at his feet. Jimmy can’t bear to see her this way, and kneels to help her. Then, “with a kind of mocking, tender irony,” he launches into their bear and squirrel imaginary game. “Poor squirrels,” he says to Alison, and she responds, “poor, poor, bears.”
THEMES AND THEIR ANALYSIS
Class and Education
Look Back in Anger was published in the post World War II period in England, in 1956. In 1944, The British Mass Education Act had made secondary education free for everyone in the country. This meant that whole new swaths of British society were now equipped to write about their lives. John Osborne was one of these. His play broke into a world of British theater that had previously been a polite, upper class environment, and brought a new angry energy and previously unencountered point-of-view to the stage that startled some theatergoers. We see evidence of that new class mobility, and the new reality it created, in the play. Jimmy Porter comes from a working class background, but has been highly educated. He went to a university (though not one of Britain’s finest— his upper class wife, Alison, notes that it was “not even red brick, but white tile.”) And though Jimmy went to a university, he is still stuck running a sweet stall. He has in some ways left his background behind, but he also doesn’t feel fully comfortable and hasn’t been accepted into the upper classes. He uses big words and reads the newspaper, but he sometimes has to look those words up in a dictionary, and he says that the Sunday papers make him feel ignorant.
Alison and Jimmy’s relationship is the main place where class tension unfolds. Alison comes from an upper class background very different from Jimmy’s. Both portray the struggle between the classes in military terms, focusing on the ways that these two sectors of society fail to blend. Jimmy and his friend Hugh see her as a “hostage,” and they spend time in the early years of Alison and Jimmy’s marriage going to upper class parties to “plunder” food and drink. Though Alison and Jimmy try to make their relationship work in the end, we get the sense that it’s built on shaky ground, and that they might fall back into the cycle of anger and fighting that they enact throughout the play. Alison and Jimmy may make their relationship work for now, but the divisions between them run too deep to ever fully heal. In Look Back in Anger, truces across class boundaries are ultimately brief and inadequate.
Suffering and Anger vs. Complacency
Suffering and anger are highly associated with lower class-ness in the play, and complacency with upper class-ness. Jimmy believes that lower class people, who have suffered as he has, have an insight on the world that upper class people lack. He berates Alison for lacking “enthusiasm” and “curiosity.” He suggests that her complacency makes her less human, less connected to life than he is. He sees this suffering and anger as an important part of his identity. At a climactic moment in the play, Alison says of Jimmy, “don’t try and take his suffering away from him—he’d be lost without it.”
In the end, Alison finally experiences the suffering that Jimmy thinks she has been lacking: she loses their child to a miscarriage. This, she believes, forces her to experience the fire of emotion that Jimmy had always wished she had. But the play leaves us unsure whether their suffering will actually lead to any redemptive knowledge. The circular structure of the play—the beginning of the first and third acts mirror each other—undermines the sense that Jimmy’s life is really as dynamic as he suggests that it is. He seems to be stuck in a routine. Osborne’s voice in the play, seen in his stage directions, also tells us that Jimmy’s fiery energy can be self-defeating. In his first stage direction describing Jimmy, Osborne writes, “to be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.” When Alison finally breaks down and tells him that she wants to be “corrupt and futile,” Jimmy can only “watch her helplessly.” The play ultimately suggests that Jimmy’s anger is an expression of his social discontentment and suffering, but not an answer to his problems. He doesn’t channel it in any political direction, joining a party or holding meetings or organizing his similarly angry friends, or even conceive of any way that it can be channeled. Though it springs from a moral fervor, it dissolves into a diffuse attack on many fronts, rather than pointedly targeting and taking down any oppressive systems.
Disillusionment and Nostalgia
Look Back in Anger is the archetypical play of the “angry young men” movement in British theater, which was marked by working class authors writing plays about their disillusionment with British society. In Osborne’s play, we see this in Jimmy’s sense of political emptiness. Jimmy complains that, in the Britain of the 1950s, “there aren’t any good, brave causes left.” Helena observes that he was born in the wrong time—“he thinks he’s still in the middle of the French Revolution.” Jimmy’s angry fervor is out of place in modern society, and this leaves him feeling useless and adrift. Other characters also feel a sense of nostalgia for the past, but for different reasons: they long for an era characterized by a leisurely life for rich Britons and greater worldwide power for the British Empire. Many of these themes of nostalgia revolve around Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, who had served in the British army in colonial India. Jimmy says that Colonel Redfern is nostalgic for the “Edwardian” past — early 20th century England, before World War I, when things were supposedly simpler and more peaceful.
In the end, the play argues that the characters’ disillusionment is legitimate. Post-war Britain was marked by a stagnant economy and declining world power, partly due to the fact that it no longer had many lucrative colonies around the world (India, where Colonel Redfern served, gained its independence in 1947). The play argues that these factors have left the country’s young people adrift and disempowered. Jimmy’s anger is therefore justified. Both Jimmy and Colonel Redfern, from their different places in society, have nostalgia for a time when Britain was more powerful on the world stage. The passing away of Britain’s imperial power is thus painted in a negative light—and though Look Back in Anger voices a revolutionary social critique of class conditions in England, it stops short of criticizing Britain’s exploitation of its colonies. Instead, it argues that the decline of the empire has led to the disenfranchisement of the men of Osborne’s generation, and gives those disenfranchised citizens a strong and angry voice in Jimmy Porter.
Gender
During World War II, many British women had stepped into new roles in the labor force. After the war ended, most were expected to move back into their traditional roles in the household, but many still held jobs outside the home. The play takes a conflicted view of gender that parallels these shifting dynamics. On the one hand, Jimmy’s angry, destructive, and typically masculine energy drives much of the action and dialogue. On the other hand, women are given agency, and female characters act in their own interests, independently of men (most notably, both Alison and Helena leave Jimmy).
Femininity in the play is highly associated with upper class-ness, and masculinity with lower class-ness. This leads to clashes between the genders that also have an economic dimension. Sticking to conventional gender roles means sticking to the propriety and politeness of British society (which also means acting along with your class role). For example, in stealing Alison away from her family to marry her, Jimmy took on the traditional male role of a “knight in shining armor.” But, Alison says that “his armor didn’t really shine much,” subverting this traditional gender role by adding a class dimension to it. Jimmy was almost heroic, but not quite. There is clearly something attractive in Jimmy’s virile, lower class masculinity, as first Alison and then Helena are drawn to him sexually. Yet there is something destructive in it as well, as both also end up leaving him. Further complicating the gender dynamics, women, too, are portrayed as having a destructive power over men. Jimmy says he’s thankful that there aren’t more female surgeons, because they’d flip men’s guts out of their bodies as carelessly as they toss their makeup instruments down on the table. He likens Alison’s sexual passion to a python that eats its prey whole. At the end of the play, he says that he and Cliff will both inevitably be “butchered by women.”
The muddled gender roles in the play add to the sense of realism that made it such a sensation when it was first performed. Characters defy social convention. Alison disobeys her parents to marry Jimmy. Helena slaps Jimmy at the very start of their affair, and later walks out on him. An unmarried man (Cliff) lives with a married couple. He flirts with Alison, but Jimmy doesn’t particularly mind. The fluid and shifting gender roles in the play reflect the more fluid realities of post-War British society, portrayed for the first time in the traditionally staid and upper-class medium of theater.
Love and Innocence
Jimmy believes that love is pain. He scorns Cliff and Alison’s love for each other, which is a gentle sort of fondness that doesn’t correspond to his own brand of passionate, angry feeling. When Helena decides, suddenly, to leave him at the end of the play, Jimmy reacts with scorn and derision. Love, he says, takes strength and guts. It’s not soft and gentle. To some extent, Jimmy’s definition of love has to do with the class tensions between Jimmy and Alison. Alison tells her father that Jimmy married her out of sense of revenge against the upper classes. In asking her to leave her background, he laid out a challenge for her to rise to, and their passion was partly based on that sense of competition between classes. This subverts a traditional love story—Jimmy’s anger at society overshadowed his feelings for Alison, at least in her eyes.
It’s clear that Jimmy and Alison’s relationship isn’t characterized by much tenderness. However, the two do manage to find some when they play their animal game. Jimmy and Alison as the bear and squirrel are able to express more simple affection for each other, but only in a dehumanized state, when they leave their intellects behind. In the final scene, Jimmy describes their game as a retreat from organized society. They’ll be “together in our bear’s cave, or our squirrel’s drey.” Jimmy and Alison are not able to enjoy love as a simple human pleasure. Their relationship is buffeted by class struggle, anger, and suffering. Only when they remove class markers and withdraw from society in their animal game are they able to reach some level of innocence.
This reflects a broader loss of innocence in a generation of post-war Britons that had seen the hydrogen bomb dropped on Japan and 80 million soldiers and civilians die during World War II. Their parents and grandparents were able to grow up with some measure of peace of mind, but these characters (and the real Britons of their generation) cannot. This affects them even in fundamental parts of their domestic lives, like love and marriage. They have trouble experiencing these things as simple pleasures, because the world surrounding them is so difficult and complex. Only by leaving their society, their human-ness, behind, can they find the innocence to enjoy simple love
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