Symbols and Literary Device in Look Back In Anger
Look Back in Anger Dramatic Techniques - Language and Style
Language
Osborne's use of language is basically in the realistic tradition. The characters' speech and rhythms reflect their class and education. Helena is very proper and conventional and so is her speech. Cliff
is humble and his Welsh accent is clearly understood from his speech, Colonel Redfern is calm and reflective, Alison is proper and non-judgmental and non-committal. Jimmy Porter, though, broke with tradition. Working class characters were not new to the English stage, but previously they had been comic figures who were usually inarticulate, or even angry figures who were inarticulate and thus held back by their class and lack of language skills and could thus be pitied. Jimmy is extremely articulate
and self-confident. His passion is overwhelming and he has the language to overwhelm others with that passion. Jimmy shouts and swears most of the time he opens his mouth to talk. His language is not polite, though one suspects it would be a great deal more impolite if theatre censorship had not been in effect when it was written. Jimmy can also be very humorous and even poetic, as when he describes Colonel Redfern as a "sturdy old plant left over from the Edwardian Wilderness.” Osborne's aim to use everyday language in the play also involves his wish to shock the audience with its bluntness. The language, too, still has the power to shock, such as when Jimmy, unaware of Alison's pregnancy, says to her:
If only something - something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please - if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it.
Some of the imagery and language don't travel too well historically and reflect only the preoccupations of the era. It is difficult, for example, to imagine jazz being quite as exotic as it is for Jimmy. Or to understand the intellectual courage of saying about a gay man, "He's like a man with a strawberry mark ... he keeps thrusting it in your face because he can't believe it doesn't interest or horrify you particularly. As if I give a damn which way he likes his meat served up." At the time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Indeed, the powerful use of language seems almost to be a second form of
structure for the whole play, one that covers various other faults.
THE USE OF IMAGERY
Two sound images from off-stage are used very effectively in Look Back in Anger: the church bells and Jimmy's jazz trumpet. The church bells invade the small living space and serve as a reminder of the power of the established church, and also that it doesn't care at all for their domestic peace. The jazz.
trumpet allows Jimmy's presence to dominate the stage even when he is not there, and it also serves as his anti-Establishment "raspberry.” We see another imagery when Jimmy shares with Cliff his sexual life with Alison, he compares her to a python: "She has the passion of a python. She just devours me
whole every time... She'll go on sleeping and devouring until there is nothing left of me." The python imagery is a metaphor which encapsulates Jimmy's fear of female sexual and maternal domination and overwhelming power of a woman.
The Kitchen Sink drama Look Back in Anger is the first well-known example of Kitchen Sink Drama." This style of theatre
was given the name "Kitchen Sink" because of its focus on the interior domestic and emotional lives of ordinary people. It was about the raw emotions and living conditions of the people. Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Osborne's play returned imagination to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and immediacy of post-war youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working classes. Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic social problems of its period of creation. Most importantly, it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that irritated just below the surface of best British culture. Kitchen Sink dramas, however, turned this notion around and made the kitchen the centre of familial and social life. In the case of the Porter's attic apartment, the kitchen and living spaces were all one room on the stage. The boundaries of intimate domestic life and public life were blurred and created a realism not seen before in British theatre.
Use of elaborate stage direction
Osbome's use of elaborate stage direction to situate his plays is a special milieu. The specific mention of the hero, Jimmy Porter, "wearing a very warm tweed jacket and flannels" signifies his belonging to a very specific time period, particularly the 1950s and to a certain social order, i.e. the non-moneyed middle class. His wife, Alison, wearing a "cherry red shirt of Jimmy's” and Helena too being clothed in
Jimmy's old shirt symbolize both of them as Jimmy's women, a sign of his personal possessions. The act of ironing of a pile of "erased clothes” also suggests a number of troubles that are infesting their lives that need to be sorted. Along with the background images of stagnation, washing, and the cistern, the symbolic analogy of dirt and squalor that need to be cleansed is highly interesting.
One is reminded of the rottenness of the state of Denmark in Shakespeare's Hamlet that needed the protagonist's intervention
SYMBOLS
Symbolism has always been an innate part of literature and a large number of authors have used this device for different cultures, for traditional stories, fables, legends, religious context. It is not only important for providing the writers with a freedom to give different interpretations but has also given universality to the characters as well as to the themes in the world of literature. It is through this extensive use of images and symbols that the audience/readers are able to empathize with Jimmy and understand the reason for his extreme anger and frustration. They also serve the purpose of bringing out the dynamics of the different types of relationships that the characters have with one another.
Therefore, the elaborate pattern of symbols that John Osborne uses enriches the realism and provides a structural coherence to the play. The symbols do not disrupt the plausibility but strive to provide a deeper understanding of the richness and depth of the text. Some of the symbols used in the play include the following:
NEWSPAPER
Jimmy and Cliff read newspapers throughout Act I and Act III, and they are a major visual feature in the apartment. Jimmy uses the newspaper as a symbol of his education. They are a way for him to mimic the habits of the upper class, university-educated elite. He repeatedly comments on what he is reading, sometimes using bookish vocabulary. He also uses newspaper articles as a way to belittle the intelligence of Cliff and Alison, which is one of the tactics he employs to make himself feel smarter and more worthwhile. Yet, Jimmy's relationship with newspapers also shows his ambivalent relationship to his educated status. He says that the newspapers make him "feel ignorant," and he often mocks "posh”
papers, which, in his mind, are out of touch with the real concerns of working class men like him. The newspapers in the apartment also form a "jungle,” showing that, in a working class environment, this
status symbol becomes something that upper class characters like Alison would consider chaotic and dangerous. This reflects the way that greater social mobility has caused social upheaval in Britain.
PIPE
Jimmy's pipe is another example of an upper class symbol that Jimmy uses instead to reflect his working class status. Pipes call to mind old, educated, university professors. Jimmy's pipe is a way for him to dominate the scene and assert himself as a rebellious force in the world (and he uses his force largely to complain against upper class norms). His pipe smoke fills the room, and creates a smell that other characters come to associate with him. Alison says in the first act that she has "gotten used" to it, reflecting the way that she adapts her values and sensibilities depending on the context that she is in. Helena later says that she has grown to “like” the smell, reflecting the attraction that she feels to Jimmy, and also the fact that she retains more of a sense of self than Alison does in the same situation
Helena positively likes the smell, while Alison is merely used to it. While living with her parents in the third act of the play, the smell of pipe smoke reminds Alison of Jimmy, and soon after, she comes back to him. Once in the apartment, she absentmindedly cleans up the ashes from the pipe, reflecting the fact that she retains her upper class sense of respectability and order, even as she returns from her parents' home to live in Jimmy's world. The pipe thus becomes a litmus test of Helena and Alison's relationship with Jimmy throughout the play.
IRONING AS A SYMBOLIC DEVICE
Alison's endless ironing represents the kind of routine with which Jimmy is fed up. The ironing serves to add to Jimmy's boredom and it therefore becomes also a symbol of his boredom. In one of his early speeches in the play Jimmy complains: “Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing." Subsequently also, he shows his impatience with the ironing. It is ironical that, after Alison has gone away and has been replaced by Helena, we find Helena also ironing the clothes like Alison, so that from one point of view at least there is no change in Jimmy's life.
BEAR AND SQUIRREL
The bear and the squirrel symbolism is one of the most important in the play: "a tattered toy teddy bear" and a "soft wooly squirrel" initially appeared on stage props in the first stage directions. The bear is associated with Jimmy, and the squirrel with Alison. The animals symbolize the fact that social norms and conventions interfere with the love that these two characters have for each other. Their relationship is a site of class and societal conflict, and this means that their love becomes fraught with anger and fighting. This animal symbolism occurs with other brute references such as pig (Jimmy), bitch and rhinoceros (Alison's mother), and cat (Alison). Jimmy and Alison's bear and squirrel game is their own way to access a simple affection for each other that they otherwise cannot achieve in their real life. It expresses their desire for an imaginative release from the pain of their human existence. As animals depend on their instincts, whose only concerns are food, shelter, cleanliness, and sex, in the same way the couple's game signifies a nullification of the rational lifestyle. They can forget their conflict and feel a simpler version of love for one another. "We could become little furry creatures with little furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other...And now, even they are dead, poor little silly animals. They were all love, and no brains" (Act II Scene 1).
The bears-and-squirrels game, a symbolic device The bears-and-squirrels game in Look Back in Anger occupies a special place. It is a symbolic device which serves an important dramatic purpose. According to a critic, this game is a brave attempt by Jimmy and Alison to compensate themselves for the failure of their marriage.
As such, the game is a kind of "extended metaphor.” As we witness this game developing in the play, it is not in the least embarrassing, but strangely moving. As a form of conventionalized sexual play, it has an undoubted dignity of its own, for as Osborne himself has suggested, such a mutual perpetuation of a fantasy-level of experience can be a sophisticated form of sexual communication. However, this
fantasy is compensatory rather than complementary to the sexual relationship. The play explores, within a formally perfect framework, a particular kind of sexual relationship, the incidental frustrations which are expressed in Jimmy's outbursts. In this way, the bears-and-squirrels game is intimately connected with the theme of marriage in the play.
CHURCH BELLS
The church bells symbolize and exemplify a cultural value and a respectable middle class morality that Jimmy finds oppressive. Helena subscribe to this version of morality, which posits that some things are clearly right, while others are wrong and "sinful." Jimmy, on the other hand, believes that the rules of respectable society are something to struggle against. In his mind, it is moral to act in allegiance with his oppressed class, and to feel emotions as keenly and intensely as possible. The church bells chime from outside the window at various points in the play, reflecting the fact that these middle class rules are a fact of life in most of the world, and that they often intrude into the apartment, and into Jimmy's life.
He curses and yells when he hears them, reflecting his anger at this system of morality. Alison leaves for church with Helena in the middle of Act II, following Helena back into a middle class world. When
the church bells ring, Jimmy expresses his abhorrence: “I don't want to hear them!” The church bell serves as a reminder of his failure to transform the world and bring out harmony in his personal life. He associates a radical orthodox facet of society with the churches, both of which irritate and annoy him to no end. The church bells also suggest in a vague manner the existence of a world other than the one with which Jimmy is familiar, and that other world is the spiritual world. Another auditory image, the sound of his own trumpet becomes very important. It is his way to protest against what is bothering and annoying him all the time and also channeling out his anger through the monotonous tone.
THE TRUMPET
We find Jimmy blowing on his trumpet often. Although playing on the trumpet is only a hobby for him, it also serves a symbolic purpose in the play. In the first place, Jazz has traditionally been protest music, and is associated with the working classes. It also symbolizes Jimmy's desire to be a voice of resistance in society, but it also shows the futility of that dream. It further offers Jimmy an escape from the irritating world of routine, and is therefore a source of some comfort to him. He really thinks that the sound of the trumpet has a wholesome quality. That is why he says that those who cannot appreciate jazz can have no feeling either for music or for human beings. But the sound of the trumpet also suggests an atmosphere of breaking nerves. While Jimmy may resort to his trumpet as an escape, the sound of the
trumpet annoys others. It serves largely to annoy and antagonize those around him. For instance, when Alison and Helena hear the sound of the trumpet, they feel very upset. Alison says: "God, I wish he'd lose that damned trumpet.” She is afraid that the landlady will ask them to vacate the flat because of the noise Jimmy makes. Helena says that it seems to her that Jimmy wants to kill someone, herself in particular, with the sound of the trumpet. Afterwards, Cliff shouts to Jimmy, saying: "Hey, you horrible man! Stop that bloody noise, and come and get your tea!" Thus the sound of the trumpet reinforces the tension of the play by drawing our attention to another point of difference between Jimmy and the other inmates of the house. Viewed in another breath, the trumpet also allows Jimmy to assert his dominance non-verbally. He disrupts his domestic scene (playing the trumpet only inside), but makes little headway truly disrupting the world around him.
PLOT DEVICES
Some plot devices stand out as the author's contrivances, such as Cliff's exit in Act I to buy cigarettes, and his unconvincing reasons for returning a couple of minutes later just as Alison is about to tell Jimmy that she is pregnant; the telephone call from Helena prepares for the Act I curtain and a phone call saying Hugh's mother is dying prepares the Act II, Scene 1 curtain. The end of Act II, Scene 2, with the two women left looking at each other, has been viewed as artificial. Osborne's innovations were not in form but rather in character, language, and passion which, for the most part mask the clumsy mechanics when the play is being acted. The construction of Look Back in Anger is that of an old- fashioned well-made play in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, or most of Osborne's contemporary commercial playwrights. There is one plot developed over three acts (the expected number in 1956), and the basic plot device is ancient: misalliance (mismatch) in marriage compounded by a love triangle.
FORESHADOWING
When Jimmy tells Alison that he wishes that she could see her child die, it is a moment of both dramatic irony and foreshadowing. It is ironic because the audience already knows that Alison is pregnant.
Jimmy's attack on her foreshadows the death of her child and her future hardships. Alison's line that "things seem to be very different" when Helena is in the house foreshadows a conversation that will have consequences later on. It is ironic that Alison tells her that things are different here and that she means it in a good way. Cliff will later utter a similar phrase yet he will mean it negatively. It is an example of the way the men of the play seem to feed off of and find normalcy in Jimmy and Alison's contentious relationship. The women, on the other hand, find a lack of peace, a motif that both women experience after their relationships with Jimmy.
John Osborne’s technique in Look Back in Anger reveals his indebtedness to Henrik Ibsen and his contemporary Samuel Beckett in naturalistic plays. He uses images and symbols, both verbal and non verbal for the sake of objectification. These symbols not only include the structure of the play and the location of action, but also stage props, acting postures, sounds (both on stage and off), dialogues, character movements, and the human beings themselves. In fact, Osborne drew inspiration from his personal life and failing marriage with Pamela Lane while writing Look Back in Anger.
Osborne’s use of elaborate stage direction to situate his plays is a special milieu. The specific mention of the hero, Jimmy Porter “wearing a very warm tweed jacket and flannels” signifies his belonging to a very specific time period, particularly the 1950s and to a certain social order, i.e. the non moneyed middle class. His wife, Alison wearing a “cherry red shirt of Jimmy’s” and Helena too being clothed in Jimmy’s old shirt symbolize both of them as Jimmy’s women, a sign of his personal possessions. The act of ironing of a pile of “erased clothes” also suggests a number of troubles that are infesting their lives that need to be sorted. Along with the background images of stagnation, washing, and the cistern, the symbolic analogy of dirt and squalor that need to be cleansed is highly interesting. One is reminded of the rottenness of the state of Denmark in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that needed the protagonist’s intervention.
Both Alison and Helena seem to be occupied with ironing clothes throughout the evening on Sundays. Mary McCarthy points out the stagnant boredom of Sundays in a provisional term when the newspapers and book reviews also appear to be the same. The newspaper itself assumes the symbol of Jimmy’s intellect and he complains at all times that nobody in his family treats it with respect except him.
Jimmy Porter’s anger against the earlier generation is one of the most important aspects of the play and it is to be noted that such exasperation and frustration was the most common feature of the post war cohort. The social complacency of the Edwardian era that Jimmy thinks to be responsible for his present plight is the “Edwardian twilight” that Jimmy refers to. It stands for everything that his world lacks. Colonel Redfern, Nigel, Alison’s mother, and Miss Drury are all people who are privileged in comparison to Jimmy and hence the subject of his ire. He resents these people and fills and instinctive antipathy for the upper class including Alison and Helena. Likewise he feels a strong empathy for the poor and suffering like Hugh Tanner, his mother, Mrs. Tanner, and Jimmy’s own father whose death is still poignant in his mind. He admires his former lover Madeline in whom he sees an example of the “enthusiasm” that is lacking in Alison; she is vivacious while the latter is almost somnolent. Alison is not only his class enemy but also his sexual antagonist. Her toilet is conceived by Osborne in symbolic terms as weapons in a battlefield, almost like Belinda’s toilet in The Rape of the Lock.
The church exemplifies a cultural value that Jimmy detests. Thus, when the church bells begin to ring, he expresses his abhorrence: “I don’t want to hear them!”. The church bell serves as a reminder of his failure to transform the world and bring out harmony in his personal life. He associates a radical orthodox facet of society with the churches, both of which irritates and annoy him to no end. Another auditory image, the sound of his own trumpet becomes very important. It is his way to protest against what is bothering and annoying him all the time and also channeling out his anger through the monotonous tone.
The bear and the squirrel symbolism is one of the most important in the play: “a tattered toy teddy bear” and a “soft wooly squirrel” initially appeared on stage props in the first stage directions. This animal symbolism occur with other brute references such as pig (Jimmy), bitch and rhinoceros (Alison’s mother), and cat (Alison). Jimmy and Alison’s bear and squirrel game is their own way to access a simple affection for each other that they otherwise cannot achieve in their real life. The bear is associated with Jimmy, while his wife embodies the squirrel. It expresses their desire for an imaginative release from the pain of their human existence. As animals depend on their instincts, whose only concerns are food, shelter, cleanliness, and sex, in the same way the couple’s game signifies a nullification of the rational lifestyle. They can forget their conflict and feel a simpler version of love for one another. “We could become little furry creatures with little furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other…And now, even they are dead, poor little silly animals. They were all love, and no brains.” (Act 2 scene 1).
Thus, symbolism has always been an innate part of literature and a large number of authors have used this device for different cultures, for traditional stories, fables, legends, religious context. It is not only important for providing the writers with a freedom to give different interpretations but has also given universality to the characters as well as to the themes in the world of literature. It is through this extensive use of images and symbols that the audience/readers are able to empathize with Jimmy and understand the reason of his extreme anger and frustration. They also serve the purpose of bringing out the dynamics of the different types of relationships that the characters have with one another. Therefore, the elaborate pattern of symbols that John Osborne uses enriches the realism and provides a structural coherence to the play. The symbols do not disrupt the verisimilitude but strive to provide a deeper understanding of the richness and depth of the text.