CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER

SYNOPSIS OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER

 Major Events Of Look Back in Anger their Significance 

Summary of Page 7-10

The play opens with a description of the setting and the scene. The first act takes place on an evening in April. The setting is the Porter's attic apartment. It is a small room with simple, sparse furniture. It is cluttered with items such as "books, neckties, and odds and ends, including a large, tattered toy teddy bear and soft, woolly squirrel." There is a large window in the attic, but the only light comes from a skylight, so the room is somewhat dim. When the curtain rises, we see Jimmy Porter and Cliff Lewis, seated on opposite sides of the stage and reading newspapers. There are others beside them and between them, forming "a jungle of newspapers and weeklies." Jimmy is smoking a pipe. A tattered stuffed bear and squirrel sit on a chest of drawers at the end of a double bed, which takes up most of the back wall. .

The opening of the play gives detailed descriptions of the disposition of each character. Jimmy, who is about twenty-five years old, is described as "a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, fiull of pride combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike." Cliff, who is about the same age as Jimmy, is almost the opposite of Jimmy. He is relaxed, "almost to lethargy," and easy-going Cliff demands other people's love, while Jimmy mostly repels it. Jimmy tends to push peoplE away, while Cliff draws them to him. Jimmy's wife Alison Porter stands ironing clothes on the left side of the stage, near Cliff. She is wearing Jimmy's shirt, and looks elegant in this working class apartment. Jimmy throws his paper down in disgust. He complains that the Sunday papers are boring, and also that they make him "feel ignorant." He taunts Cliff for not being smarter, then taunts Alison asking her if the papers make her feel stupid, too, even though she's not as "peasant" as Cliff. Alison says that she hasn't read them. Cliff tells Jimmy to leave Alison alone while she works Jimmy asks if "The White Woman's Burden" makes it too hard for Alison to speak. He complains that his talk seems to bore them, and tells Alison to "go back to sleep." Alison, still at her ironing board, finally snaps that she "can't think," and Jimmy says that she "hasn't had a thought for years." Jimmy then becomes upset that nobody is listening to him when he speaks and he steals the newspaper from Cliff. He complains that all the book reviews sound the same and that the papers provide no intellectual stimulation. He asks Cliff antagonistically if the papers make him feel ignorant. He calls Cliff "a peasant." The audience comes to understand that Cliff has not received the same education that Jimmy has received. Jimmy then turns his antagonism towards Alison who is only half listening to his rantings. Cliff tries to deflect some of Jimmy's anger away from her, but Jimmy keeps on with his ranting. Jimmy obviously feels that Alison is not as brilliant as she and others think she is. Jimmy tells the other two that he is hungry and Cliff mocks him for always wanting food. Cliff tells him that he will end up being fat one day, but Jimmy tells him that won't happen because. "We just burn everything up." He demands that Cliff make him some tea, and Cliff complains because he's already had a potful that day. Cliff then complains that Jimmy had creased his paper and Jimmy tells him that "I'm the only one who knows how to treat a paper, or anything else, in this house." 

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 7 to 10

The shabby furnishings mark this apartment as a working class space. The newspapers, which represent Jimmy's attempt to live like a member of the well-educated elite, as does his pir smoking, nevertheless make the apartment seem less civilized, as they form an indoor "Jungle The bear and the squirrel, which return in the couple's more affectionate moments but whose significance is not clear at this point in the play, add some oddness to the scene. The room filled with old furniture, half-read newspapers, and pieces of worn clothing are also representative of the characters and the characters' lifestyle. Like a piece of junk or old furniture, Jimmy, Cliff, and Alison have literally been stowed away in an attic, out of sight from the upper class culture. Their emotions and ambitions do not fit in with the upper class world and this causes a great amount of consternation for Jimmy. Right away, we sense that Jimmy has a strong, but unfocused, energy. His vehemence is self-defeating, turning it into something "non-committal." Alison's high-class background is evident, even though she wears Jimmy's clothes. She can't hide the status that she was born into. The playwright attempts to give definition to each character through an analysis of their physical traits and their emotional make-up. Jimmy is a study in dualisms: he is angry and bitter, yet he is also tender and intense in his zealous love. Jimmy is painted as a very masculine character. Alison Porter is described as a woman that has ben beaten down by life. Osborne uses the word "malaise" to describe her, denoting the fact that her life has not turned out as she hoped it would. Cliff is described as a likable man, unimposing in his physical characteristics. He is the opposite of the kind of person that Jimmy aspires to be, yet Jimmy is much more like him than he knows or cares to admit. Cliff seems to innately understand this relationship and, therefore, suffers Jimmy's abuse with good nature. The opening scene uses stereotypical gender references to define the characters. Jimmy is smoking a pipe and reading a paper whilc Alison is ironing. These represent the way in which both of the characters have attempted to fit into societal roles and expectations that have both made them miserable and angry.  Jimmy claims his status as a well-educated man by saying that the papers are too boring for him, but then immediately rejects that status, saying that they're also too difficult. This points to the way that mass education has made class boundaries more difficult to define. The idea of the "white man's burden" was uscd to justify British imperialism and exploitation of non-white people, but here Jimmy twists it to insult Alison and her privilege, suggesting that Alison has a destructive power, as the British empire used to. Jimmy's angry energy is again self-defeating - it burns him up, rather than giving him life.  

SUMMARY OF PAGE 10 to 19

Cliff shows kindness to Alison; the playful banter between Cliff and Jimmy;  Jimmy's tirade (pp. 10-19)

Cliff is kind to Alison. Cliff reaches up to grab Alison's hand (she is still at her ironing board beside him). He says that she should sit down and join them. Alison smiles, and says she still has work to do. Cliff "kisses her hand and puts her fingers in'his mouth." He tells Jimmy that Alison is a beautiful girl. Jimmy responds, "that's what they all tell me," and his eyes meet his wife's across the stage. Cliff says that he is going to bite off Alison's "lovely, delicious paw." Alison says not to she'll burn the shirt she's ironing. Jimmy tells Cliff to "give her her finger back, and don't be so sickening." Then he asks more about what Cliff's reading in the paper. Letting go of Alison's hand, Cliff says that he'd been reading a "moving" article by Bishop Bromley, who said that Christians should aid the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. Jimmy asks if this moves Alison, and she says that it does. He claims surprise. Reading the column himself, Jimmy announces that the Bishop denies any differences between working class people and others. He quotes from the article, in which Bromley argues that this idea is a lie propagated by the working classes, presumably for their own gain. Jimmy says that this sounds like the kind of argument Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, would make. Jimmy asks Alison to make some tea. She looks up at him, and asks if he wants tea. He doesn't, and when Alison asks Cliff, Jimmy interrupts and says that Cliff'doesn't want any, either Then Jimmy asks Alison how much longer she' me be ironing. She says it'll be a while longer Jimmy says that he hates Sundays. "Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing...  Our youth is slipping away." when he realizes Alison isn't listening, he says "casually," "damn you, damn both of you, damn them all." Cliff suggests that they go to the movies. Alison says that she can't, but that Jimmy might Iike to. Jimmy says no, and steers the conversation back to newspaper articles. Our youth is slipping away." When he realizes Alison isn't listening,  He launches into a speech blaming Cliff and Alison's lack of intellectual interest on "sloth" He says they'll drive him mad with longing for a little "human enthusiasm" on their part. He suggests a game: "Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.

Cliff brings the conversation back to newspapers. Jimmy summarizes another article that he says was written by a man like Colonel Redfem "casting well-fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight from his comfortable, disenfranchised wilderness." Then he asks Cliff what's wrong with the wrinkled trousers that Cliff is wearing he looks like a "savage," He asks what Cliff is going to do about them.  Cliff grins, looks at Alison, and asks what he should do. She says that he should take his trousers off. Jimmy agrees. Alison says she can iron them now. Cliff agrees, and starts taking off his pants, emptying keys, matches, and a handkerchief from his pocket. Jimmy grabs the matches and lights his pipe. Cliff complains of the smell, but Alison says she's gotten used to it. Jimmy says that Alison is "a great one for getting used to things." She'd get used to it quickly even if he died, he claims. Cliff hands Alison his trousers and asks for a cigarette. Jimmy protests that the doctor said Cliff shouldn't smoke, but then gives up - "they're your ulcers." Alison hands Cliff a cigarette, and they both light up. She continues to iron. Cliff sits down in his pullover and boxer shorts and begins to read. Jimmy begins to scan the Radio Times for a concert, and finds one by Vaughan Williams. He says this is "strong" and "simple" British music. He says. "I hate to admit it. but I think i can understand how her Daddy [Colonel Redfern] must have felt when he came back from India..  the old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting." That picture was "phoney," though, Jimmy observes: "it must have rained sometimes." Now, Jimmy says. they're all living in the "American Age." Neither Cliff nor Alison responds to his tirade, even when Jimmy gives Cliff a kick. Jimmy changes the subject, asking whether Alison's friend Webster is coming over that night. Jimmy likes Webster he spcaks a "different dialect" but the "same languagc." Webster, Jimmy  says, has "enthusiasm."  Jimmy begins to say that he hasn't felt that enthusiasm since - and Alison interrupts him. saying that it was when he was with his old mistress, Madeline, whom he dated when he was eighteen. Cliff remembers Madeline "was she the one all those years older than you?" Jimmy says that she was ten ycars older. Cliff says that he's sleepy, and doesn't feel like going to work at the sweet stall tomorrow. Jimmy to b changes the subject back to Madeline - "she had more animation in her little finger than you two put together." She took delight in "being awake." Jimmy says that Webster, while not as thrilling  as Madeline, is "all right- in his way." He's the only one of Alison's friends that's worth much,  Jimmy says, and then stands to look out the window. Webster has both "guts" and "sensitivity," unlike the rest, who have neither. Alison asks Jimmy, "very quietly and earnestly," not to go on. He turns from the window to look at her. Her "tired appeal" has made him pause momentarily, but then he gathers for a fresh round of insults on Alison's friends. He walks to centre stage and stands behind Cliff. Cliff tries to get Jimmy to back off from the tirade, but Jimmy says that he couldn't provoke  Alison anyway, not even by dropping dead. He returns to his attack on her friends, saying that they're "militant," like Alison's mother and Colonel Redfern, and also "arrogant and full ofmalice. Or vague." Alison, he says, is "somewhere between the two."

 Jimmy turns his attack to Alison's brother, Nigel, saying that he "is just about as vague as you can get without being actually invisible." Nigel wants to be a politician, and Jimmy thinks he'll end up a success, though he and his political pals have been "plundering and fooling everybody for generations." In order to keep this ruse going, Jimmy says that Nigel takes sanctuary in stupidity, which is what he learned at his fancy prep school. Alison continues ironing - this is the only sound in the room. "Cliff stares at the floor." Jimmynrecovers from his tirade by again looking out the window. It starts to rain. Then Jimmy returns to his takedown of Alison's family - Jimmy has "been cheated out of his response, but he's got to draw blood somehow." He says that both Alison and Nigel are "sycophantic, phlegmatic, and pusillanimous." Clif asks if he should put the Vaughan Williams concert on the radio. Jimmy says that he looked up the word pusillanimous recently, and found that it's a perfect descriptor of his wife. He calls her "the Lady Pusillanimous," as if she is "some fleshy Roman matron." Alison leans against the ironing board, closes her eyes, and says, "God help me, if he doesn't stop, I'll go out of my mind in a minute." Jimmy encourages her to do so "that would be something, anyway.".limmy picks up a dictionary. He tells Cliff that if he's pronouncing pusillanimous wrong, Alison will probably correct him publicly. He reads the definition out loud: "wanting of firmness of mind, of small courage, having a little mind, mean spirited, cowardly, timid of mind." Jimmy is watching Alison from across the room. Her "face seems to contort, and it looks as though she might throw her head back, and scream." She doesn't. The stage direction says that she's used to Jimmy's attacks, and won't give him the reaction that he wants tonight. Jimmy  crosses and turns on the radio - Vaughan Williams is playing. Jimmy sits back in his chair to listen. Alison gives Cliff back his ironed trousers.   

Cliff thanks Alison, and calls her "you beautiful, darling girl." Then he "puts his arms round her waist, and kisses hcr. Shc smiles, and gives his nose a tug. Jimmy watches from his chair." He doesn't react. Alison suggests to Cliff that they have a cigarette, and offers one to Jimmy, too. He declincs - he's trying to listen to the concert on the radio. "Sorry, your lordship," Cliff says.  Cliff returns to the newspapers, and Alison to her ironing. After a while, Jimmy snaps at both of them for making too much noise. His foot twitches. Then he gets up and crosses towards Alison to turn off the radio. He says he can't focus with all the distraction. He tells Cliff that Alison is always clumsy with household tasks, drawing the curtains "in that casually destructive way of hers." He compares it to launching a battleship. All women, he says, are as noisy and clumsy, He says it's a good thing there aren't many female surgeons, because they'd flip men's guts from their bodics in the same way that they take a powder puff out of its box. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 10 to 19

 Cliff, unlike Jimmy, is kind and gentle with Alison. His affection for her is not destructive. though he, like Jimmy comes from a different class background than she does. Cliff's flirtation which takes place in front of Alison's husband, shows that traditional gender and family roles are fluid in this play. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 19 to 30

 Jimmy's scorn for the landlord speaks to his feeling that those with financial power are out for their own gain, have in fact stolen from those with less power. Alison, in contrast, cares more for social niceties and being polite. This is one of the things about her that Jimmy objects to.  Cliff's attempt to break the tension highlights the fact that Jimmy and Alison's relationship is full of struggle more than it is full of aflection. Yet, even with his friend Cliff, Jimmy has trouble expressing fondness. Jimmy's accusations may have truth behind them, but Cliff is also right: they're nasty and unproductive.

The fight between Jimmy and Cliff isn't malicious - it's a way to break the tension in the room. For Alison, however, it is tiring and frustrating, partly because it doesn't conform to her upper class social norms. This bubbling up of working class culture ends up hurting Alison physically, highlighting both the difficulty that the classes have in understanding each other, and the ways that Jimmy's anger causes Alison personal pain. Jimmy's trumpet playing is an allusion to the twentieth century British fascination with Black American jazz culture. When Jimmy plays the trumpet, it represents his affinity for a culture which he believes is truly alive. This is a common theme in several works of mid-twentieth century white English culture, from literature to popular music. Osborne here suggests that black jazz culture is an embodiment of a "natural" humanity. Jimmy's anger is a result of not being able to live in such a humanity and his trumpet playing is a symbol of his attempt to connect with such a life. Cliff's attention towards Alison shows that a simpler form of love is possible across class lines. The fact that Alison's emotional break occurs when Jimmy is not watching shows that his belief that she has no emotion is unfounded-but also confirms his suspicion that she is suppressing her feelings. Alison makes the same argument about herself that Jimmy made about her - namely, that she is a coward. Cliff believes this about himself, too. This shows that Jimmy's taunts have had the effect of cowing his wife and his friend, not inspiring them to greater emotion, as he might hope. Alison also has come to associate love with anger, but she is beginning to find this unbearable. Alison shows that she hurts Jimmy intentionally, just as he hurts her. However, her way of hurting her husband is to be silent rather than to yell. This suggests that Jimmy's feeling that his wife's lack of emotion is wrong and bad may partly come from the fact that it is her way of lashing out at him. When he asks for "enthusiasm," he is also asking for love. Cliff's image of "tearing the insides out" recalls Jimmy's speech about Alison as a butchering surgeon. Cliff, however, balances the statement by saying that they are both doing this to each other - neither is the main aggressor. The fact that Alison reveals her pregnancy to Cliff before she reveals it to Jimmy shows that the marriage has very little emotional intimacy. The fact that Jimmy resents being unable to support a child shows that he does want a more financially stable life, but is also another reason why he might be angry about British society that gave him an education and then gave him no options other than to be working class and run a sweet stall. The idea that Alison might gct an abortion, and that Osborne would talk about this on stage, would have been shocking to a 1950s audience. This is an example of the ways that the play flouted traditional societal norms to show a new sector of British society on the stage. Cliff's vision of how things might proceed that because Jimmy loves Alison, he will accept her pregnancy suggests an innocence that Alison has moved far beyond. She understands that Jimmy would feel oppressed and threatened by the pregnancy, even though it was unintended. This parallels his feeling of being unfairly limited by his working class status, and given his focus on the "class war" he would likely see the pregnancy as ą way for Allison to punish, trap or mock Jimmy for being working class. This is Alison's own fear ("trap him"). This is an ironic statement since Jimmy is already trapped in a sleepy, domestic life that he does not want. Such a statement also demonstrates the tension that is at the heart of the character of Alison. On the one hand, she is dedicated to the conservative familial structure of her upbringing. On the other hand, she is in love with Jimmy and wants more than all to put his needs above her own. The fact that Jimmy didn't sleep with Alison before marrying her highlights the fact that he does not have a "loose" morality, as her mother would think. Yet, Jimmy likes to think of himself as rejecting the morality of the upper classes - hence, a virginal bride threatens his sense of self- he wants someone who has "lived" and been "passionate" and had experiences and been scarred. This kind of frank, cutting talk would endear Alison to Jimmy, but she doesn't talk this way in front of him, further highlighting their inability (or refusal) to make each other happy. The fact that Jimmy has rich relatives might have alienated him from the lower classes, but instead, he and Cliff share a solidly working class culture. This shows the high value Jimmy places on being working class. Cliff also avoids saying that he disagrees with Jimmy's assessment of Alison further suggesting that there might be some merit in Jimmy's opinion of his upper class wife.  Cliff and Alison's relationship escalates to a kiss. Jimmy is unfazed by this, though many men would consider it a grave insult. This suggests that his anger at other points in the play might be about something deeper than a bad temper (namely, it might reflect a legitimate class grievance). The moment also makes clear the non-traditional set-up of the relationship between these three characters. They rely on each other in ways that defy the usual categorizations. This relationship between the three shows how Cliff's character is integral to Jimmy and Alison's relationship with each other. Alison is able to get the affection that she desires from Cliff while Cliff also provides the masculine friendship and confidence that Jimmy desires. Jimmy seems to unconsciously understand that the two will not consummate their affair because of the very malaise that Jimmy accuses them of having.  Cliff's belief that he isn't the one for Alison suggests that he sees her relationship with Jimmy as having a particular spark- they love each other, even through the anger. Jimmy elevates his own intellect in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner by suggesting that he would like his wife to sleep with his best friend so that he can focus more on the newspaper.

 Jimmy's comments about Alison's parents are meant to suggest that, even though Jimmy himself is common, Cliff is even more so. This strategy of elevating himself over Cliff shows Jimmy's back and forth movement between class boundaries - sometimes he claims upper class, and sometimes working class. At the same time, it emphasizes the way he is in-between the classes, raised up by education and forced down by continuing social hierarchy, and therefore stuck in a kind of limbo. Cliff, Alison, and Jimmy get a moment of respite from their angry bickering when they revert to a game that lets them act like animals rather than like humans. The choice of the mouse as Cliff's animal recalls Jimmy's claims that Cliff and Alison are overly timid, but in this context, those words don't wound. This moment, in which the characters delight in the innocence of being animals, highlights the ways that class conflicts and the human society that creates them, make the characters unable to relate simply and easily to each other during most of the play.  Again, physical fighting is a way for Jimmy and Cliff to strengthen their friendship. Cliff taunts Jimmy for being both domestic and associated with the upper classes when he yells that he should make some tea. Jimmy rejects both of those roles by threatening violence. This exchange shows that both Jimmy and Cliff want to reject feminization and maintain a working class identity. Still feeling close after their animal game, Jimmy and Alison are able to treat each other with love. Jimmy's "fooling about" - his roughhousing play with Cliff, which reflected their shared working class culture has hurt Alison, and he apologizes, recognizing that for her, that type of play was "dangerous." This is a moment where reconciliatIon seems possible, both between Jimmy and Alison and between the class backgrounds that they represent. Previously, Jimmy equated Alison's ability to "get used to things" with her lack of "enthusiasm," which he thinks makes her less human. Here, though, he "gets used" to her while maintaining the high levels of emotion (and physical attraction) that he considers important. This suggests a flaw in Jimmy's view that becoming comfortable with things dampens your ability to feel strong emotions. It seems possible that he might love Alison even more as he gets used to her. Alison refuses to have sex with Jimmy out of a sense of propriety-it wouldn't be right to have sex when Cliff might walk in on them. This kind of thinking has been associated with her upper classiness and her femininity, and Jimmy's disagreement (his view that there isn't a "proper" time) shows that their class and gender conflicts remain, even in the presence of strong emotion (a "passionate" kiss). Jimmy had previously scorned Cliffand Alison's affection, thinking that love should be passionate and fiery, as his is. Here, he begins to demand that softer "fondness" from Alison towards Hugh's mum, who he sees as an embodiment of goodness in the world. This suggests that there is a gendered element in Jimmy's demand for "enthusiasm." He sees a relationship between two women as a place where "fondness" is acceptable. This suggests that his views on the necessity of suffering are not just about class, but also about the way that he thinks love should work. Jimmy and Alison's bear and squirrel game is clearly a longstanding part of their relationship. They use less educated language when they play this game than they do at other times, and they express simple joy and care for each other. They are stripped of class markers - in the animal world, there is no such thing as class. This suggests that it is only by retreating away from their humanity that they can find innocence, and especially innocent love. It also suggests that perhaps Jimmy is right after all that suffering is an integral part of being human, as their suffering drops away when they briefly throw off their humanity. The animal game almost led to a moment of real intimacy between Jimmy and Alison, but again, that intimacy seems always just out of reach in the play. Class concerns, in this case embodied by Helena, Alison's upper class friend, interrupt their shared moment. Cliff returns to his jab about the tea, which represented upper classiness and femininity, but Jimmy is no lenger in the mood to joke. He has realigned himself with working class identity by calling Helena his "natural" enemy. Though in the animal game, Jimmy had rejected class markers, he now suggests that they are just part of who he is. Jimmy's suspicion of Helena also reflects his misogynistic feeling that women are out to get him.  Jimmy shows his educated status by referencing these works of literature to discuss his views of women. Shakespeare's sonnet 129 discusscs the "expense of spirit" (semen, and also vital life force) and argues that lustful sex always leads to regret, but men are still unable to resist it. For this reason, Jimmy envies men like Gide, who aren't attracted to women. He suggests that in associating with women, men like him lose their "revolutionary fire." This is part of Osborne's overall argument about post-war British society: men of Jimmy's social station are disempowered and adrift, with no strong causes or social purpose to guide them. Jimmy's statement that he has his own "strawberry mark" suggests that he, too, has things that make it difficult for him to exist in modern British society - likely his lower class status. Jimmy is going out of his way to find sources of conflict and to confirm his suspicion that his wife is out to get him. He suspects that his wife disdains him and thinks that he is beneath her. The transition between his speech about disempowerment and his rummaging in Alison's purse suggests that Jimmy blames women, and particularly Alison and her mother, for his feelings of impotence and lack of power.

Again, Jimmy uses militant imagery to describe class conflict. This suggests first that domestic issues among men and women have become a stand in for other types of political action, It also shows that Jimmy doesn't conform to traditional views that women should be protected - he sees them as dangerous aggressors trying to hurt him.  This is Jimmy's strongest statement yet that Alison needs to learn suffering in order to become a full person. His curse on her unborn child smacks of dramatic irony and foreshadowing (we know that Alison is pregnant, but Jimmy doesn't, and so what he is saying holds a brutal horror for both Allison and the reader). Jimmy's attack on her foreshadows the death of her child and her future hardships. Yet Jimmy's helplessness after his attack shows once again that his anger ie self-defeating. Jimmy's python image suggests that Alison's lack of emotion is destroying him (note that a python is cold-blooded, too, further linking it with lack of emotion). In his own imagination Jimmy becomes like the baby in her belly, further showing his sense of powerlessness. Alison, too, is powerless by the end of his speech. She tries to respond, but can't form the words. The act ends by highlighting the stagnant nature of their relationship. Jimmy feels assaulted by Alison's placid emotions. When confronted with Jimmy's anger, Alison feels unable to respond, though we know that his words cause her suffering. They have moved through a full act of the play, and nothing has changed, representing the way that Osborne sees post-war British society as being "stuck." 

SUMMARY OF PAGE (31-50)

Helena arrives in Jimmy's home; Alison and Jimmy embrace emotional slothfulness; stuffed squirrel and teddy bear symbols (pp. 31-50) 

It is two weeks later on a Sunday afternoon, in the same apartment. Alison is at the stove pouring boiling water into a teapot. She wears a slip and no shoes. Jimmy plays the trumpet from across the hall. The table in the centre of the room is set for four, and Alison crosscs to putbthe teapot there. The "Sunday paper jungle" is still strewn about the room. Alison crosses to her dressing table and sits down beside it to put on her stockings. Helena enters. Helena is "the same age as Alison, medium height, carefully and expensively dressed." She has a "sense of matriarchal authority" that "makes most men who meet her anxious," bccause she gives off a sense of "visiting royalty." The stage direction identifies this as the "royally of middle-class womanhood." This "royalty" is so sure of its own power that it can allowbmen some measure of freedom, but nevertheless expects to receive respect from all people, including other women like Alison. "In Jimmy," the stage direction says, Helena “arouses all the rabble-rousing instincts of his spirit." She has thus far been able to defend herself from him with "strength and dignity," though she's getting tired of it. Helena carries a salad colander.

Alison asks if Helena "managed all right" with the dinner, and Helena says yes. She 's already cooked a lot during her weeklong stay. Alison says that it's been "wonderful" to have another woman around to help with the housework. Helena savs that it's been fun, although she's not used to having to fetch water from the bathroom downstairs It is primitive, isn't it?" Alison says, and Helena agrecs. Alison notes that Cliff at least, takes care of himself. Helena says hadn't noticed that, and Alison suggests that this is because Helena has been helping her in the ways that Cliff normally does. Alison cornments that Helena has "settled in so easily somehow," despite not being "used to" the surroundings. Helena asks if Alison is "used to" things. Alison replies that things have changed now that she's not on her own. Alison asks if Helena has told Jimmy that tea is ready. She says that she knocked on the door of Cliff's room, where Jimmy is playing the trumpet, but that he didn't answer. Cliff is nowhere to bc found. Alison says she wishes Jimmy would stop playing the trumpet. Helena says, drily, "I imagine that's for my benefit." Alison worries that Miss Drury will kick them out of the apartment for making too much noise, and says she's glad that the landlady isn't there at the moment. Helena asks Alison if Jimmy drinks. Alison, "rather startled," says that he isn't an alcoholic. There is a pause while both women listen to Jimmy's trumpet. Then Helena says the music makes it sound like he'd like to kill her. She isn't used to seeing "such hatred in someone's eyes," and she finds it both "horrifying" and "oddly exciting." Alison turns to face the mirror at her dressing table, and brushes her hair. Helena asks if Cliff is in love with Alison. Alison "stops brushing for a moment," then says that she doesn't think so. Helena asks if Alison is in love with Cliff, and that they behave strangely together, "by most people's standards." "You mean you've seen us embracing each other?" Alison asks. Helena says it doesn't seem to be happening as much since she's around. "Perhaps he finds my presence inhibiting-even if Jimmy's isn't." Alison says that she and Cliff are just "fond of each other," but Helena says that's nonsense - they must be physically attracted to each other, too. Alison confims that she and Cliff feel some attraction, but says that it's not a passionate feeling. They're comfortable with each other, and don't want "to bother moving for the sake of some other pleasure." Helena says it's hard to believe they're so lazy, and asks whether Jimmy approves. Alison says, "it's what he would call a question of allegiances." Then she explains, using confusing and circuitous language, that all of the people that Jimmy loves or has loved innthe past (even old flames) are part of the calculation that he makes in thinking about Cliff and Alison. Alison asks if Helena understands, and Helena replies by asking if Alison does. Alison says that, though she's tried to put herself in Jimmy's shoes, she "can't believe that he's right somehow." Alison continues that her relationship with Cliff is a "fluke." They get along well because of Cliff's kind temperament. It was different with Hugh Tanner, Jimmy's childhood friend (Hugh's mum helped Jimmy start his sweet stall). The couple moved in with Hugh soon after Jimmy graduated from university. Alison says that the university wasn't a prestigious one - "it's not even red brick, but white tile." Alison says that she met Hugh on her wedding night and disliked im immediately. Jimmy was "pathetically anxious" that his friend and his wife would get along. They all got drunk on "cheap pot," and the conversation deteriorated. Alison says that she felt she was "cut off from the kinds of people [she'd] always known." She says, "I suppose I must be soft and squeamish, and snobbish, but I felt as though l'd been dropped in a jungle. I couldn't believe that two people, two educated people, could be so savage." She adds that Jimmy and Hugh thought of her as a "hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on."

 Helena asks what they were doing for money at this time, and Alison says that her mother had taken stewardship of Alison's wealth after the marriage. Instead, Jimmy and Hugh started using Alison's connections to invite themselves to parties, hoping to find money or food. Alison again uses military language to describe their expeditions, saying that they would launch "raids on the enemy." She says she even hoped a host "would have the guts to slam the door in our faces, but they didn't. They were too well-bred." Hugh and Jimmy hated her friends for their cowardice - but Hugh enjoyed his role as a "barbarian invader." Alison says that he once even got a man to give them money for rent, though they were kicked out of another party when Hugh flirted with a young girl. Helena says that she can't understand why Alison acted that way or why she married Jimmy. Alison says that "there must be about six different answers." For one thing, her family, and her father Colonel Redfern in particular, were "unsettled" after returning from India. When Alison met Jimmy at a party, he was sunburnt, and "everything about him seemed to burn- his eyes were so blue and full of the sun." She says that she knew she might not be able to "bear" the relationship, but that it seemed inevitable. It was her family's negative reaction that sealed things for Jimmy, she says, "whether or not he was in love with me." He wanted to marry her as much as her family wanted to stop it. "Frail and full of fire," Alison says, Jimmy fought for her like a knight in shining armour, "except that his armour didn't really shine very much." Helena brings the conversation back to Hugh. Alison says that her relationship with him only got worse, and that Hugh and Jimmy even disrupted some of Nigel's political events. Then Hugh, who was writing a novel, decided to go to China, because England didn't hold any more appeal for him. Jimmy fought with him about this, and "accused Hugh of giving up" and abandoning his mother. In the end, Hugh left for China "to find the New Millennium on his own," and Jimmy and Alison moved to their current apartment. Alison suspects that Hugh's mum and Jimmy both blame her for the quarrel, and for Hugh's Ieaving the country. She doesn't dislike Hugh's mother, she says, though she believes that Jimmy likes her "principally because she's been poor almost all her life." Alison says that, though she knows it sounds "snobbish," she considers Hugh's mother "ignorant." Helena says that it's time for Alison to make up her mind as she has a baby to think of now, and she can't keep going on in this situation. Alison says that she's "so tired." Helena asks why Alison hasn't told Jimmy about the baby, and Alison assures her that it couldn't be another man's child- "I've never really wanted anyone else." Helena says that she should tell Jimmy about the baby, and that he'll either react well, or Alison will have to leave. Alison points to the bear and squirrel on a dresser, and says that the animals represent her and Jimmy. She tells Helena that it's a game they play, and Helena responds by looking “rather blank." The game doesn't seem to be working lately, Alison says. Helena asks if it's her arrival that has made things go downhill. Alison says no - it began as an escape after Hugh left. It was a way for them to show "dumb, uncomplicated affection," and "a silly symphony for people who couldn't bear the pain of being human beings any longer." She says that the creatures have died now .. "they were all love, and no brains." Helena grabs Alison's arm. She says that Alison must fight, or escape - otherwise, Jimmy will kill her. Cliff enters. He asks if the tea is ready. Alison says it is, and Cliff calls Jimmy, sayıng "hey, you horrible man! Stop that bloody noise." Cliff asks Helena if she and Alison are going out. Helena replies, to Cliff's surprise, that they are going to church. She invites him to come, but he offers the lame excuse that he hasn't finished reading the papers. Cliff sits down at the table, and Helena sets the salad on it. Alison sits at the dressing table doing her make-up. Jimmy enters. Jimmy says that "anyone who doesn't like real jazz, hasn't any feeling either for music or people," and sits down at the table with Cliff and Helena. Helena says that's "rubbish," and Jimmy says she's just proved him right. They briefly discuss Webster's banjo playing. Then Cliff asks Jimmy if he can borrow a paper, and Jimmy snaps that he should buy it himself. Then he asks why Cliff would want it, given that he has "no intellect, no curiosity." Cliff agrees that he is nothing," and Jimmy responds that Cliff “ought to be Prime Minister," if he has a high- faluting intellectual thought such as that. Then Jimmy launches into another attack on Alison's friends, while Cliff and Helena eat their meal and don't respond. He says that her rich friends "sit around... discussing sex as if it were the Art of Fugue" (a musical composition by Bach). The stage direction notes that Alison and Helena's "silent hostility” has made him combative, and that though he “looks cheerful,” his voice suggests otherwise. Jimmy says that Cliff is "too anxious to please," and then he offers Helena tea. She thanks him, and he pours. He says that Cliff will end up "evil minded and vicious." Helena takes the full cup of tea and thanks him again. Jimmy says that Alison's friends are, among other things, "pusillanimous." Helena asks if Alison will have her tea, and Alison says she "won't be long." Jimmy says he's thought of a new song, one that is from the perspective of a prostitute turning away a customer named Mildred. He asks if Alison likes it, and she says that she does. Jimmy tells them all the lyrics, which discuss the prostitute deciding to give up on her work. It includes the refrain just pass me the booze." Cliff agrees that it's good. Jimmy says that he wrote a poem while at the market the day before. He says that Helena will like it - "It's soaked in the theology of Dante, with a good slosh of Eliot as well." (Dante wrote the famous epic poem The Divine Comedy, describing hell, purgatory, and paradise. T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948 and was a poet whose famous works include The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.) Jimmy calls his poem "The Cess Pool." Helena asks why Jimmy is being so "unpleasant," "offensive," and "tiresome." Jimmy "roars with laughter," and teases Helena for being stuck up, like the Oscar Wilde character Lady Bracknell. Then Jimmy's "curiosity about Alison's preparations at the mirror won't be denied any longer." He asks if she's going out, and she says that she is. He asks where, and she rebuffs him. Then she sits down at the table. Helena says that they are going to church. Jimmy, like Cliff, is "genuinely surprised." Then Jimmy lets fly an attack against Helena, saying that this is a cheap trick to win Alison to her side. He turns to Alison, saying that he's sick to think how much he endured to get her out of her parents' house, only to see her go back to Helena. Alison sees that an explosion is coming, and responds sarcastically, saying that Jimmy rescued her on a "charger," and that she'd still be "rotting away at home" if he hadn't. Jimmy calms down when he hears Alison getting riled up, and says that she's not too far off - though the charger was "off white," Alison's mother had effectively locked her daughter up in a castle.

Jimmy says that he knew from the moment he met Alison's mother that she would stop at nothing to keep him from her daughter. He compares her to a "Thinoceros in labour," whose bellow" makes male rhinos run away and "pledge celibacy." Yet, he says he "under-estimated her strength." Hoping to shock Helena, he says that Alison's mother is as "rough as a night at a Bombay brothel, and as tough as a matelot's arm." (A matelot is a sailor.) Jimmy gives an example of Alison's mother's dirty tactics of motherly protection. She jumped to terrible conclusions about Jimmy due to his long hair, and had him watched by a private detective. She did all this so that Jimmy couldn't "carry her daughter off" on a horse decked with "discredited passions and ideals." "The old gray mare that actually once led the charge against the old order" could hardly carry Jimmy's weight, he says, and gave up when he loaded Alison on her back, too. Jimmy asks Alison if Helena has really won her back. Helena cuts in - "You've no right to talk about her mother like that." Jimmy says he has every right, and, of Alison's mother, says, "that old bitch should be dead." Then he asks Alison to confirm his statement, and asks why she doesn't come to her mother's defence. Cliff gets up from the table and trics to stop Jimmy from continuing, but Jimmy pushes him away, then “sits down helplessly, turning his head away on to his hand.” Jimmy says that Alison wouldn't come to his defence, either, if someone were attacking him.N Then he begins to picture Alison's mother dead, and being eaten by worms. "What a bellyache you've got coming to you, my little wormy ones ... she will pass away, my friends, leaving a trail of worms gasping for laxatives behind her." Jimmy smiles at Alison, who is still at her dressing table, and "hasn't broken." Helena is the only one who meets his gaze. She says that she feels "sick with contempt and loathing." Jimmy says that when he's out of the sweet-stall business, "I may write a book about us all. It's all here. Written in flames a mile high.” It won't be a peaceful poem of the type that "Auntie Wordsworth” (referring to poet William Wordsworth, who wrote “The Prelude," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and other poems). Instead, "it'll be recollected in fire, and blood." Helena decides to try "patient reasonableness," and says that a little thing like going to church doesn't merit all this fuss. Jimmy says that if she can't understand that, she isn't so "clever" after all. Helena says to Jimmy, "you think the world's treated you pretty badly, don't you!" Alison cuts in, "Oh don't try and take his suffering away from him - he'd be lost without it." Jimmy "looks at her in surprise," but then keeps his focus on Helena. Jimmy asks why Helena is still around, given that her play has already finished up. Helena saysnthat Alison asked her to stay, and Jimmy asks what they are "plotting." Jimmy tells Alison that she doesn't believe "in anything," and asks why she is letting Helena "influence" her. Alison begins to show signs of stress, covers her ears with her hands, and says that the word "why is "pulling [her] head off." Jimmy says that he'll continue to use it, and turns to Helena to tell her that the last time Alison went to church was on her wedding day. Jimmy says that on that day, they were in a hurry to marry - it seems hard to believe now. They avoided the city registrar because he was a friend of Colonel Redfern's, and chose a vicar who was less likely to know Alison's parents. But Colonel Redfern and Alison's mother found out nonetheless, and came "to watch the execution carried out." Jimmy had drunk beer for breakfast, and picked a stranger at the bar for his best man. Alison's mother looked like a dead rhino, he said, and Colonel Redfern looked as though he was "dreaming of his days among the Indian Princes." He says that he can't remember the wedding after that, except throwing up later in the vestry. Helena asks Jimmy again whether he's done talking yet. Jimmy asks Alison if she's going to be swayed by Helena. Her friend, he says, is "a cow." Cliff says that Jimmy has gone too far, but Helena says that he should go on. Jimmy accuses Cliff of defecting to Helena's side, too. He says that Helena will make it pay off," because she is "an expert in the New Economics." Continuing to use economic language, he says that the era of Reason and Progress is over, and that old traditions and beliefs are getting more valuable. "The Big Crash is coming," he says, so people should go to Helena's side to avoid disaster. "Helena and her kind" have overrun Britain, he says. "They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past." The "Dark Ages" seem to her the lightest time, and she lives in her own "soul," "cut right off from the ugly problems of the twentieth century altogether."

Helena says, calmly, that if Jimmy weren't so far away, she'd have slapped him. Jimmy asks Helena if she has ever seen somebody die. She begins to stand, and he tells her not to move. She sits. Jimmy says that death "doesn't look dignified enough for you." Helena says that she'll slap him if he comes close, and Jimmy replies that he isn't a gentleman, and has "no public school scruples about hitting girls." If she slapped him, he would slap her back. Helena says that this doesn't surprise her. Jimmy responds that he hates violence, and that's why, "if I find some woman trying to cash in on what she thinks is my defenceless chivalry by lashing out with her frail little fists, I lash back at her." Helena asks if that's "subtle, or just plain Irish?" Jimmy smiles, and says that they seem to understand each other. Jimmy says that Helena hasn't answered his question, and she replies that she has never seen anybody die. "Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity," Jimmy says. He loses his "good humour" as he falls into a memory. When hebwas ten, he said, he watched his father die for a year. He had been fighting in the Spanish Civil) war in Spain. He was wounded in battle, and Jimmy knew that he would die. He says that he was "the only one who cared," and turns to look out the window. The rest of the family was embarrassed, he says. His mother was all for being associated with minorities, provided they were the smart, fashionable ones," and his father's conviction that he should fight for democracy in Spain was not well-received by society at large. Jimmy says that his family sent money every month, "and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.” His mother may have pitied his father, Jimmy says - but she didn't care as he did. “At the end of twelve months," he says, "I was a veteran." He learned through that experience "what it was to be angry-angry and helpless." He claims, “I knew more about - love... betrayal - and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in all your life.” The group sits silently. Then Helena gets up and says that she and Alison should go to church. Alison nods, and Helena leaves to get her things. 

Without looking at Alison, Jimmy asks why she lets people do these things to him, when, he says, "I've given you just everything." Jimmy's voice has weakened. "His axe-swinging bravado has vanished, and his voice crumples in disabled rage." He says that Helena is taking Alison away, and his wife is "so bloody feeble" that she'll allow it to happen. Suddenly."  Alison flings her cup to the floor she looks at the pieces, and at Jimmy, and then crosses the stage to put on a dress. “As she is zipping up the side, she feels giddy, and she has to lean against the wardrobe." Eyes closed, Alison says, "all I want is a little peace." Jimmy is “hardly able to get his words out." "My heart is so full, I feelill--and she wants peace Alison puts on her shoes. Cliff moves from the table to an armchair and looks at a paper Jimmy has regained his composure slightly, and says that people find his yelling objectionable, but that girl there can twist your arm off with her silence.” He says that Alison callously ignores his feelings. "One of us is mean and stupid and crazy," he says. But is it him, "standing here like an hysterical girl, hardly able to get my words out?" Or is it Alison, "sitting there, putting her  shoes on to go out?" Jimmy turns to Cliff, and says that he should try loving Alison. Then he goes over to watch Alison rummaging for her gloves.

Jimmy says that Alison might want toreturn to him someday. When that happens, he says, "I want to stand up in your tears, and splash about in them, and sing." Helena enters with twobprayer books in her arms. Jimmy says that he hopes to someday see Alison's "face rubbed in the mud." There is a short pause, and then Helena tells him that there is a phone call waiting for him. Jimmy says that can't mean anything good, and exits.

Helena asks if Alison is ready to leave, and whether she feels all right. llelena says that she is shocked to think of how hard things will be for Alison during her pregnancy, and how it's all due to these men." She turns to Cliff, and berates him for sitting there and doing nothing. Cliff agrees: “I just sit here.” Helena asks what's wrong with him. Cliff says that he may not agree with Jimmy, but that doesn't mean that he's on Helena's side. Her presence has made things worse in the house than they've ever been. It was always a "battlefield," but his presence has meant that the couple can stay together. "Where I come from," Cliff says, "we're used to brawling and excitement." He adds, "I love these two people very much. And I pity all of us. Helena asks if he is including her in that statement, but keeps speaking to avoid giving him the chance to reply.

Helena tells Alison that she has sent Colonel Redfern a wire, telling him to come pick up his daughter the next day. Alison responds, her voice "numbed and vague". "Oh?” Helena springs into action. She says that she felt that she had to do something, and then says, "gently," "you didn't mind, did you?" Alison says that she doesn't, and thanks Helena. Her friend asks if she will go with her father when he comes, and Alison says, after a pause, that she will. Helena is relieved. She says that Colonel Redfern will arrive around "tea-time" the next day. She hopes that Alison's departure will cause Jimmy to "come to his senses, and face up to things."

Alison asks who was on the phone. Helena says it was “Sister somebody." Alison speculates that it was a hospital, as Jimmy is unlikely to know anyone in a convent. She says they should get going. jimmy enters, and Cliff asks if he's all right. To Alison, says that the call was about Hugh's mum, who has had a stroke. After a slight pause Alison says that she's sorry. Jimmy sits down on the bed . Cliff asks how bad it is, Jimmy says that sounds like she's dying, and that it doesn't make any sense at all." Cliff asks if there's anything he can do. Jimmy says he should call a taxi. Cliff gets up to do this, then asks if Jimmy would like him to come to London. Jimmy says, "it's not for you to go," given that Cliff had hardly known Hugh's mum. "Helena looks quickly at Alison," who says nothing. Cliff exits.  To Alison, Jimmy says that he remembers Hugh's mum's reaction to their wedding photo. She rhapsodized over how beautiful Alison was. Alison is standing by the dressing table with her back to him. He asks for his shoes. She kneels to hand them to him. Looking at his foot, he asks if she's coming to London with him. He says, "I...need you...to come with me." Jimmy meets her gaze, but Alison turns away and stands. The church bells begin to ring. Helena watches. Finally, Alison crosses to pick up the prayer book. "She wavers, and seems about to say something." but then turns towards the door. In a soft voice, she says to Helena, "let's go." Alison and Helena exit. Jimmy "looks about him unbelievingly," rising to lean against the dresser. The teddy bear is nearby. Jimmy lifts it "gently," then throws it to the floor, where it makes a "rattling, groaning sound." Jimmy falls onto the bed, his face in the covers. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 31 to 50

Jimmy's jazz trumpet is a symbol of his suffering (jazz has traditionally been music of protest and struggle). His anguish dominates the atmosphere even while he is not physically present. His efforts to disrupt domestic peace are certainly succeeding.  Helena Charles is introduced. She is, in many ways, the opposite of Alison, though both share a common upbringing. Helena is upper class and self-assured while Alison is working class and tired. Alison lacks Helena's sophistication because of her relationship with Jimmy, though she had once had it. Like Alison, Helena takes on a domestic role while with the Porters, but the audience sees that she is not a domesticated female figure. She works as an actress, a profession which leads her into a certain bohemian kind of lifestyle. The contrast between Helena's and Alison's attires suggests that Alison has assimilated more to working class culture, while Helena retains her middle-class status. At the beginning of Act I, Alison's rich upbringing was apparent in this backdrop, but with Helena as a foil, we can see that Alison has shed class markers more fully than Jimmy's tirades would have us believe. Helena's strength comes from her class and her gender. The stage direction implies that women are tyrannical by nature - women like Helena allow men "freedom" only when they are sure that this freedom will not interfere with their power. Helena and Alison's shared understanding that the apartment is "primitive" shows their common class context. Although Alison might appear to be fitting into the working ciass apartment, she still retains some sense of scorn for it. The fact that Cliff usually helps Alison with the feminine labour points to the non-traditional gender roles in this household, and also to the feminization of working class men that the play finds objectionable. Helena and Jimmy have strangely similar reactions to the idea of Alison's getting "used to" things. Jimmy had previously scorned his wife as a "great one for getting used to things" when she said she no longer minds his pipe smoke, and Helena is similarly scandalized that Alison could get "used to" a situation that, to her, seems intolerable. This suggests that Alison may, indeed, be particularly prone to avoiding the conflict and suffering" that Jimmy hopes she experiences - she gets used to things, rather than fully experiencing them, liking them or disliking them. Her reaction to Miss Drury (and Jimmy's comparative disregard for the landlady) speaks again to Alison's urge to calm the waters rather than making waves. Helena's statement that hatred is "oddly exciting" speaks to the fact that Jimmy's anger is sexually attractive. It isn't just Alison and Jimmy who feel this mixing of hatred, sexuality, and love, the fact that Helena feels this way too suggests that the couple's volatile love might be the result of class difference rather than of a simple personality clash.  Helena tries to find a logical explanation for the non-traditional dynamic between Cliff and Alison: he is in love with her. Alison doesn't agree, showing that Helena can't understand the complexity of their relationship. This, and the fact that Cliff feels less able to embrace Alison around Helena, implies that their non-traditional love is something that is possible in a working class context, but that upper class norms are more traditional and constricting. This lack of energy is what Jimmy finds so frustrating about Cliff and Alison's relationship, too - he thought it showed too much complacency and too little feeling. Yet, Helena's questions suggest that she finds Jimmy's tolerance of a non-traditional cultural standard to be a different kind of complacency. This shows their class conflict -- they can't agree on which battles are most important, even if they both object to the laziness of the relationship. According to Alison, Jimmy sees his class allegiance to Cliff as more important than his need to defend his wife against Cliff's flirtations. Alison doesn't share his view. She retains, deep down, a more traditional view of gender This passage suggests that Cliff and Alison's relationship shouldn't be taken to suggest that peaceful relationships across class lines are possible - Cliff is the outlier. Alison's scorn for Jimmy's non-elite university reminds the audience that his education has brought him only tenuous acceptance into a higher echelon of society. Jimmy's hope that Alison and Hugh would get along is a poignant memory. Outwardly, at least, he seems to have given up on bringing Alison into his world without conflict, believing instead that the classes will inevitably clash. The imagery of Alison as a "hostage” conforms to this view, as well. Alison's use of the words "jungle" and "savage" again point to her scornful class-based view of how Jimmy lives.

The class conflict here is dramatized still further, with the working class men launching targeted attacks on upper class bastions, in an attempt to steal their resources. There is a certain simplicity to the plan that speaks to the genuine idealism that underlies Jimmy's anger. The complicating factor is Alison. She adopts Jimmy's values: like her husband, Alison wishes that her friends would have "guts." Yet, she hopes this so that their plan of attack will fail (a plan that she herself helped to orchestrate). Alison has consistently chosen'ambivalence rather than choosing sides in the class conflicts that arise. Helena notices Alison's ambivalence, and can't identify with it. She is a character who sticks to her values, which are solidly middle class. Alison's mention of India suggests a connection between her relationship with Jimmy and Britain's fall from imperial power. The "unsettled" state of things, both in her home and in the country, laid the groundwork for her marriage. Alison knew that the relationship might destroy her, but still wanted it. For Jimmy, the fight with her parents was more important than love. Their relationship is "unsettled" partly because love is secondary to anger and pain. In Alison's telling of the event, Jimmy becomes a knight in shining armour, though Alison admits his armour never shone very brightly. He is alternately noble while charming and courting her and then barbaric in storming the gates of the refined culture of Alison's family's friends. Jimmy is thus linked to a British past even though he continually alludes to the fact that the past is gone. Jimmy's anger rarely takes on an explicitly political edge. Here, it does - but then Hugh abandons the cause. This seems to Jimmy a betrayal, and that fact reveals his underlying patriotism and traditional sense of family duty. Hugh goes off into the future, while Jimmy remains stuck and angry, unable to create political change in his country. Alison here criticizes Jimmy's view of right and wrong. He equates poverty with moral superiority, and wealth with moral corruption. Alison is right to find this simplistic, but she also proves that she does look down upon people who are of a lower class status than her. Helena's reaction is practical: Jimmy's morality doesn't particularly matter to her, because she, unlike Alison, is sure of her own. Alison thinks that the baby will make Jimmy feel trapped, but Helena doesn't understand this - she thinks that Jimmy should just accept his child and his wife. In her middle class world, values like social disruption and class conflict don't enter into the domestic equation. Jimmy, on the other hand, thinks of his marriage partly as a battleground for the working class. Alison makes explicit the way that their bear and squirrel game allows the couple to escape into simpler affection. She implies, however, that this type of love is not strong enough to survive in the real world. She has come to believe Jimmy's idea that social conflict must enter into personal relationships. Helena urges Alison to action, as Jimmy has before. Her presence makes it clearer in this act than it was in the first that Alison has neither fully abandoned her upper class ideals, nor embraced Jimmy's working class fervour. Cliff's surprise that the women are going to church illuminates the way that Helena's presence is changing Alison's behaviour - she is being pulled back to her old life of traditional values. Jimmy embraces jazz as a working class art form, and voices his opinion that working class people are more in touch with the real, emotional side of life. Webster, the only one of Alison's friends who he considers worthwhile, also accesses this emotion through music. Jimmy turns around immediately, however, and claims the mantle of the educated man, taunting Cliff for being both too ignorant and too high-falutin. The exchange typifies Jimmy's strained relationship to his own education and how it has placed him in a position that is stuck between working class and middle class. Here, Jimmy argues that Alison's friends' high education keeps them from understanding earth- bound pleasures like sex. He suggests that Cliff is like them in his desire to keep the peace. He thus rejects both his wife's absent friends and his own friend at the table, leaving himself socially isolated - Jimmy values his ideals over people. Helena's calm politeness during Jimmy's outburst recalls the high-class composure that Jimmy detests in Alison, and shows Helena's strong belief in the value of politeness. Jimmy counters Helena's politeness by acting overly bawdy and brash. Yet he also paints himself as an intellectual, a person who composes music and writes poetry on the fly. He quotes famous authors like Eliot and Dante, but then writes a poem with a very earth-bound name (The Cess Pool") thus differentiating himself from Alison's friends, who compare sex to classical music, This speech also calls to mind Osborne's project with the play itself. He takes a formerly high- class art form 'drama' and fills it with realistic, working class content. Jimmy's poem, like Osborne's play, might be a legitimate political statement - while also reflecting the particular and possibly limited worldview of its creator. Lady Bracknell is a stuffy old Victorian woman from Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest, so Jimmy's comparison suggests that he finds Helena old-fashioned. He sees himself as a modern man, and people like her as outdated. His curiosity about Alison speaks to the intense and often uncomfortable nature of their love. Though he has been trying to ignore her, he fails.

Jimmy sets himself up as a rescuer, showing the idealism that he feels about his role in the class conflict. Alison turns this back upon him sarcastically, suggesting that she thinks this is a perverted version of a classic love story. Jimmy himself recognizes that it's not a traditional story of valour -- the charger was "off white." This reflects his inability to find a valiant cause to hold on to a situation that contributes to his general disillusionment.  Jimmy's offensive language ratchets up a notch when he speaks about Alison's mother, suggesting that his dislike of her may be misogynistic as well as idealistic. Here, he suggests that her motherly protectiveness makes her sexually unattractive, and that her un-ladylike "roughness" makes her comparable to a prostitute.  Jimmy mocks Alison's mother's suspicion of him, but he has been equally suspicious of Alison, snooping in her handbag and reading her letters. His morality isn't actually superior to that of this upper class character. Jimmy's statement that his mare gave up under Alison's weight suggests that his quest to improve his working class lot is failing, and that this is largely due to his marriage. Calling Alison's mother a "bitch" and painting a vivid, disgusting picture of her worm-eaten corpse seems to show unbridled hatred rather than a moral or political statement. Yet, Jimmy wants Alison to defend her mother and her husband. The insult is also a test of his wife's moral fortitude. This moral purpose is muddied, however, by Jimmy's personal hatred of Alison's mother, and the word "bitch” adds an element of gendered hatred, as well. Jimmy cannot be said to be purely an idealistic social crusader. His "helplessness” in the midst of his slew of insults shows the self-defeating nature of his anger.

Again, Jimmy plays up his education and intellect. Yet he also rejects the feminization that he sees in Wordsworth, who was famous for his meditations on nature. Jimmy plans to write about social situations, which are his primary concern and a primary cause of his pain. Like "fire,"

Jimmy's vision of his life can both give energy, and consume or damage people. Jimmy's insult about Helena's cleverness suggests that his bravado about his own intelligence is overblown. Alison's statement that Jimmy would be "lost” without his suffering shows her clear understanding of the fact that the anger that he often directs at her is something that he needs. It gives him a sense of purpose and direction that he otherwise has no way to find.

Alison's strong negative reaction to the word "why" speaks to the fact that she doesn't understand her own actions. She is still stuck between truly accepting her husband's world, and staying in her own. Helena's presence is bringing that conflict slowly to its climax. Church has become a flash point for Alison's allegiance -- with Jimmy, she avoids it, but with Helena, she doesn't Jimmy did not take the wedding seriously, further showing the ways that his values diverge from the traditional values of people like Alison's parents (who apparently feel it would be improper not to show up for the ceremony, even though they disapprove). The fact that Jimmy doesn't remember saying his vows suggests that the marriage was more about his fight with Alison's parents than it was about marrying Alison herself. Jimmy's sense that Colonel Redfern was nostalgic for the colonial past while watching his daughter marry a working class man dramatizes the idea that Jimmy and Alison's relationship signals the end of a certain era of British history. In modern times, Colonel Redfern is no longer a "prince," and his precious daughter marries a working class man like Jimmy. Jimmy's use of economic language to describe Helena's worldview suggests that he sees her as an embodiment of the social and political forces in Britain that are trying to erase the plight of the poor and the working class. He accuses her of living in a way that denies reality, and bringing Britain back to the "Dark Ages." This is, more broadly, his critique of society. He thinks that the powerful forces in England are disconnected to the struggles of people like himself, and intent upon preventing progress. Helena has previously shown little inclination to respect or obey Jimmy, so the fact that she sits when he tells her to suggests that his statement about seeing someone die comes across as more powerful and true than his previous tirades. His reminder that death isn't "dignified" is powerful evidence for his belief that politeness isn't connected to the real things in life. As is often the case, however, his legitimate moral statement begins to mix with misogyny when he scorns Helena's "frail little fists." He says that this is about his working class moral outlook - he doesn't have the politeness that those who went to fancy "public schools" would have. Yet Helena sees through him, noting that this might be about a "subtle" moral critique, but it also might be "just plain Irish”-a scornful and classist (and even racist) way to say that it might just be about Jimmy's natural inclination towards belligerence. Jimmy's criticism of Alison's virginity takes on a different meaning here, when he suggests that "virginity" means one hasn't suffered. This gives us an idea of his vision of sex, which he must see as partly an act of suffering. British soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War did so for idealistic reasons, and Jimmy bemoans that lack of idealism in his own generation. His father and others like him had the chance to fight for important causes, but that also caused them grave suffering; Jimmy's generation cannot be ignorant of the costs involved, and has thus lost some sense of innocence. Jimmy's mother had the "fashionable" values that he derides in Alison and Helena, so this gives us an idea of the psychological origin of his outlook - which involves, again, both scorn for a woman in his life, and a valid critique of upper class complacency. Jimmy himself ties the origin of his anger to "helplessness," further driving a sense that his vitriol is partly about frustration, rather than about arguing for a just cause. Yet, his statement that he learned hard lessons at ten years old seems also to be legitimate. Helena and Alison deny him the pleasure of a response.  Jimmy's emotional pain, and his belief that he has given Alison a good life, shows that, in his mind, he treats her this way out of love. His rage is again "disabled," powerless, Alison's emotional break and her statement indicating that she simply wants "peace," show that his love of passion and suffering has had the effect of pushing her away. At the same time, it shows that Alison really may be closed off to passion and suffering. She just wants things to be easy. Jimmy is emotional to the point of discomfort, but, as we have seen many times before, he prefers this to "peace," which he translates as upper class complacency. Jimmy argues that he might seem crazy, but Alison's silence could make her the crazy one, too. This is one of the arguments that the play has been taking seriously. Though Jimmy's anger makes him seem unhinged, he also has flashes of real ideological clarity. Alison, the calm nie, is also occasionally shown to be a coward. The play suggests that some iconoclastic thinkers might be personally distasteful, as Jimmy often is.  The fact that Helena witnesses only Jimmy's angry statement that Alison's face should be "rubbed in the mud" parallels the way that upper class observers often see only the ugly side of Jimmy's anger. The two prayer books symbolize the upper class respectability that Helena brings with her. Helena draws the battle lines according to gender, not class - Alison's problem is "men." Cliff, on the other hand, suggests that it is indeed a matter of class. He confirms that Jimmy's way of speaking is partly a result of his class upbringing, and that Cliff himself doesn't find it offensive, given their shared context. He seems resigned to the fact that love entails conflict. He expresses pity, which seems to be an overall pity for the human condition. Cliff's resigned attitude, and his love for both Jimmy and Alison, suggests that he doesn't see their fights as a problem to solve in the way that Helena does.

Alison reacts to Helena's extreme gesture with the "vague" attitude that Jimny detests. Helena's past tense statement that Alison "didn't mind” shows a desire to avoid conflict (she doesn't ask about Alison's feelings in the present, but assumes her retroactive approval). Alison's decision to leave seems to come from a scnsc of incvitability. As Jimmy fears, Helena is indeed in charge. This is beginning to have real, potentially disastrous, effects for the couple. Cliff springs into action in a moment of conflict, asking what he can do to help, and calling Jimmy a taxi. Alison, who actually know Hugh's mum, can only apologize repeatedly. Though they at times have similarly unemotional responses to Jimmy's tirades, Cliff holds up much better under strain here than Alison does. We are meant to dislike Alison in this moment, she seems as emotionally callous as Jimmy often says that she is. Cliff's different reaction shows that Alison's behaviour is due to cowardice, and not to a peace-loving nature. Jimmy's admission of weakness is the emotional climax of this sequence. He has allowed himself to become fully vulnerable, and to admit that he relies on Alison. This could be a moment of affection and love between them, but Alison remains emotionally closed. The church bells call her away with their respectable appeal, she follows, and returns with Helena to her old life, leaving Jimmy alone. In this moment, it is Alison, and not Jimmy, who is an aggressor. Alison's declaration that she is attending church with Helena is one of the only times in the play that Jimmy expresses genuine surprise and shock at his wife's actions. Even when she leaves him and withholds the information from him that she is pregnant, it is apparent that those are all things he can accept because they fit into the portrayal that he has of her in his mind. Going to church, however, is not one of those things. In fact, Jimmy equates church-going with Alison'sbpast, a past that like a knight in shining armour, he rescued her from. Alison's church-going also relates to the issue of allegiances that she discussed with Helena earlier in the act. Jimmy, she tells Helena, is a fiercely loyal man. He expects that those in his life will also he loyal to the same things, whether it is the political viewpoints he takes or his previous lovers. By going to church, Jimmy considers this a breach of allegiance to him and this proves to be a justification for his further vicious humiliation of her. It is here that Alison explains the symbolism of the bear and squirrel. It is ironic that Alison explains their game as an "unholy priesthole of being animals to one another," since it is arguablebthat in their normal relationship Jimmy often expresses his emotion in wild animalistic ways. She explains that by taking on the persona of these stuffed animals they both are able to have "dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other." Their games of squirrel and bear show how the only way that both can truly love each other is to completely detach themselves from the world. It is also an expression of a lost childhood that both share. The conditions of their real lives is often too much to bear, and so the game oflers a time of retreat into a childishness that neither had growing up. In addition, the bcar symbolizes Jimmy himself. He and it fall at the same time, full of immense suffering and disbelief. The fact that he flings it to the ground himself suggests the way that he welcomes suffering, however painful it may be

SUMMARY OF PAGE 51 to 59

Colonel Redfern comes to take his daughter, Alison, home; Jimmy gets to know from Helena that his wife is pregnant (pp. 51-59)

 It is the next evening. Alison is at her dressing table, packing a suitcase. Her father, Colonel Redfern, sits in a chair on the other side of the room. Ile feels disturbed and bewildcrcd by cverything that is happening to his daughter. The Colonel asks where Jimmy has gone. Alison says that Jimmy is seeing Hugh's mum, because she's had a stroke and her son is away. She says that Jimmy had hoped she would go with him. Colonel Redfern remembers that it was Hugh's mum who gave Jimmy the sweet-stall, and asks whether she's anything like her son (Hugh Tanner). Alison says that she's "ordinary. What Jimmy insists on calling working class." Colonel Redfern replies, so you didn't go with him?" and Alison confirms that she did not.  The Colonel asks who is looking after the sweet stall, and Alison says that Cliff is. Her father asks if Cliff lives here, too, and Alison says yes. The Colonel says that a sweet stall "does seem an extraordinary thing for an educated young man to be occupying himself with.” He's never been able to understand it, and thinks that Jimmy is probably "quite clever in his way." Alison says, without interest, that Jimmy has tried a variety of careers, and seems to be as happy doing this as anything else." Her father says that he has often wondered what her living situation is like, because Alison was reticent on this point in her letters.  Alison says that there wasn't much to say, and the Colonel interprets this to mean that she was "afraid of being disloyal to Jimmy. Alison laughs at this, saying that Jimmy thought she was disloyal to write to her parents at all. The Colonel remarks, blandly, that Jimmy really does hate them. Alison agrees that he hates "all of us." The Colonel says that this is a "pity," and that the fuss about the marriage was "unfortunate and unnecessary. I'm afraid I can't help feeling that he must have had a certain amount of right on his side.” This confuses Alison. He says that he thinks that he and Alison's mother deserve some blame for the nasty battle. He has "never said anything." but he thought that Alison's mother "went too far." He confirms that Alison's mother did hire private detectives, and that he tries now to pretend that it never happened. Alison says that he shouldn't blame himself, and the Colonel agrees that everyone involved deserves some blame. Yet he says that Jimmy is "honest enough" and that Alison's mother "acted in good faith as well." Of Alison and himself he says, "Perhaps you and I were the ones most to blame." This surprises Alison. "I think you may take after me a little, my dear. You like to sit on the fence because it's comfortable and more peaceful." Alison rejects this interpretation, saying that she married Jimmy even though her parents vehemently disapproved. Her father says that this is true, but that it may have been better if she had cut off communication after the fact, given the dislike between Jimmy and her parents. He "looks at her uncomfortably," and apologizes, but "glances at her nervously, a hint of accusation in his eyes, as if he expected her to defend herselffurther. She senses this, and is more confused than ever." Alison tells the Colonel what Jimmy said about her mother and the worms. The Colonel responds with a mild "I scc," and asks what Jimmy says about him. Alison says that he isn't as insulting. He calls the Colonel "one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can't understand why the sun isn't shining anymore." The Colonel says that Jimmy 'has quite a turn of phrase," and then, "simply and without malice," asks why he and Alison ever had to meet, and why Jimmy decided to marry her. Alison says that she believes it was for "revenge." Colonel Redfern looks baffled. Alison confirmsbthat "some people do actually marry for revenge." Jimmy, she says, complicated her life bynthrowing down the "gauntlet." Colonel Redfern says, "your husband has obviously taught you a great deal...what any of it means, I don't know. I always believed that people married each other because they were in love." It seems, he says, "that's too simple for young people nowadays," and that her love is instead about "challenges and revenge." Alison says that this is only true for some people, and the Colonel wonders why it should be true for her.nColonel Redfern says that Jimmy might be right - he might be a relic of the Edwardian past. Ilenleft England for India in 1914, he didn't see the country again until 1947. He heard rumours that it was "going to the dogs," but he was also too busy commanding an army to think about it much. He loved his life in India, and "it looked like going on forever... Those long cool evenings up in thenhills, everything purple and golden... I think the last day the sun shone was when that dirty little train stcamed out of that crowded, suffocating Indian station." Alison replies, 'you're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same...Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?" The Colonel agrees that it has. Alison is about to put the squirrel in her suitcase, but then puts it back. "For a few moments, she seems to be standing on the edge of choice." Then she turns to Colonel Redfern and begins crying.

He tells her that she's taking a big step, and asks if she's sure that this is what she wants. Then Helena enters, saying that she came to see if she could help. Alison closes her suitcase, and says that she's ready. Cliff is going to send the rest of her stuff to her, but he hasn't returned from the sweet stall. The Colonel says that they should get going - Alison's mother will be worried, and she's ill Helena says that she hopes the telegram isn't to blame, and the Colonel says that it isn't, and thanks her for sending it. He asks if he can take her suitcase, and Helena says, to Alison's surprise, that she is staying the night. Cliff enters. Helena says that she must stay, because she has a work appointment the next day. Alison greets Cliff and introduces him to her father. They exchange awkward greetings. Then the Colonel says goodbye, and exits to pack the car. Cliff says that Jimmy will return soon, and asks Alison to wait for him. She refuses, and Helena says that she'll tell Jimmy what has happened, if she's still there. Cliff says, "quietly," "you'll be here." He asks Alison if she thinks she should tell Jimmy the news herself. She hands him a letter. He says that's a "bit conventional," and Alison confirms, "I'm a conventional girl." He crosses to embrace her, and over Alison's shoulder, tells Helena that he hopes she's right. To Alison, he says that the apartment will be off-balance without her. She kisses him, and says she'll be in touch. She tells Cliff to take care of Jimmy, and glances around the room. Helena kisses her cheek, and says she'll see her soon. Alison nods, and exits. Helena asks Cliff if he would like some tea. He says no, and she says that she'll make herself some. Cliff asks if she's staying, and she says yes. She asks what Jimmy will do when he finds out, and wonders if he might look up Madeline. Cliff says that he doesn't think so, and when Helena asks him why, he breaks. "Why the hell should I know," he says, in a voice that indicates that "for the first time in the play, his good humour has completely deserted him." Helena is surprised. She asks if Jimmy is private about these things - she would be surprised, given how many "souls stripped to the waist" she has seen in the apartment. Cliff turns to leave. Helena asks if he's staying. Cliff says that he's leaving, in case Jimmy is about to come in from the London train. He's had a hard day, and wants to eat and drink before he sees Jimmy devastated. He tosses Alison's letter to Helena, and says "I hope he rams it up your nostrils!" Then he exits. Helena puts out her cigarette, and a door slams downstairs. She looks around the room, and eventually picks up the teddy bear, and lies down on the bed with it. Jimmy enters with a crash, and throws his raincoat down. "He is almost giddy with anger." Jimmy says that Colonel Redfern almost hit him with the car on his way out. It was “fitting," he says, that Alison was the "passenger.” Then Cliff avoided him on his way out the door. He asks if Helena is the only one who's not afraid to stay," and she gives him the letter. Jimmy reads Alison's letter: “I need peace so desperately, and, at the moment, I am willing to sacrifice everything for just that ... I shall always have a deep, loving need of you." Jimmy says this makes him "puke." She should have written angry words, but instead "she has to make a polite, emotional mess of it.” He rips Alison's dress from the wardrobe, saying, "Deep, loving need! I never thought she was capable of being as phoney as that!" Helena says that Jimmy should stop being so selfish, and tells him that Alisen is going to have a baby. He doesn't reply, and she asks if that means anything to him. He says that he's surprised, but isn't going to "collapse with remorse." He doesn't care about the baby, and asks if that disgusts her. Then he reminds her of their previous conversation, and says that he has spent the day watching someone die. "And you think I should be overcome with awe because this cruel, stupid girl is going to have a baby!” Jimmy calls Helena an "evil-minded little virgin," and she slaps him. Henlooks horrified, then his face fills with pain. "A muffled cry of despair escapes him" as he covers his face with his hand. Helena pulls his hand away, "and kisses him passionately, drawing him down beside her."

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 51 to 59

Colonel Redfern's demeanour points to the fact that he represents an old world order that has lost its power. He doesn't understand Jimmy's way of talking. He's used to being respected, but Jimmy instead finds him contemptible. His high-class status has shifted beneath him and come to represent something different, and less admirable, in England than it did in India. Colonel Redfern refuses to engage with Alison's attempts to insult Hugh's mum He also implies that she should have gone with her husband to visit her. He brings an energy that is similar to Cliff's with Jimmy, attempting to calm Alison's anger. In these first moments with her father, then, it seems as though Alison has become more like Jimmy than like her parents. The Colonel's lack of reaction to Cliff's presence in the apartment is unexpected - a true traditionalist would object. He does, however, wonder why Jimmy is not using his education for better things. This is not a malicious observation, however. The Colonel seems to have a high opinion of Jimmy's intelligence. This view from an outsider (and a former enemy, at that) adds credibility to charitable interpretations of Jimmy's anger, though it perhaps also suggests the ways that the upper class are blind to the fact that the working class may not have the option of doing "something better" despite their education Again, Alison has taken a middle path that ends up leaving her to betray both Jimmy and her parents. Writing at all was disloyal to Jimmy, but she also refrained from giving her parents the information that they desire. This shows her cowardice. The Colonel explains his objection to the "fuss" over the wedding in moral terms, but also suggests that he was ruffled by conflict, showing an upper class sensibility. He, like Alison, mixes upper class and working class ideas. He also shows some of Alison's tendency to avoid entering an argument. He has not questioned or intervened with Alison's mother, though he disagrees. This is the climactic moment of the play in terms of our understanding of Alison's complacency. Jimmy, Alison's mother, and Helena all fight strongly for their various beliefs and values, even when those values come into conflict. Colonel Redfern suggests that Alison and himself do not Alison herself sees her relationship as a radical act, but the Colonel points out that she has not fully committed to this course of action. His alignment with Jimmy in his assessment that Alison should defend herself more, and his indictment of himself, makes this seem a very credible accusation. Jimmy is right that Alison's temperament is not as radical, nor as honest, as Jimmy's is. Again, the Colonel's reaction to Jimmy's language mirrors Cliff's. He is not overly offended by Jimmy's overblown insults. His comment that Jimmy "has quite a turn of phrase" also adds retroactive clout to Jimmy's tirades, reminding the reader that, while he is volatile and angry, he is also astute and intelligent. Jimmy is partly correct, however, in his assessment that the Colonel represents the past. Alison relays Jimmy's insults towards him. She tells him that Jimmy believes he is a leftover from the "Edwardian Wilderness." The Edwardian period in British culture was a period in the early twentieth century during the reign of King Edward VII in which elite British culture was influential in both fashion and ideas throughout Continental Europe. This period in British history represents both the high water mark of British culture and also the beginning of the end for the prominence of Great Britain. In a few decades, this prominence would wane when countries such as India and Egypt gained their freedom from British colonialism and when the British economy was devastated by World War II. Alison and Jimmy's angry, volatile love is a modern phenomenon, and reflects a general loss of innocence and "simplicity" in their generation. Colonel Redfern feels alienated by their anger. He speaks here for those members of society who do not feel class conflict as acutely as the younger generation does. His comments reflect a sadness about this state of affairs that runs through the play as a whole. Alison's statement that both Jimmy and her father are "hurt" by the state of the country encapsulates the play's argument about disillusionment and nostalgia. The end of Britain's imperial age has left both the old guard and the new guard adrift, and suspicious of each other. Jimmy and Colonel Redfern have no feeling of purpose and meaning. Yet, their common feeling does not give them common cause-cultural rifts leave them blaming each other for their own sony state. Seeing the squirrel reminds Alison of the moments of affection that she has shared with Jimmy, and this makes her doubt her decision to reject him and his lifestyle. That moment of doubt makes us all the clearer that it is Helena, and not Alison, who feels strongly that upper class values are correct. Alison and Colonel Redfern remain stuck taking the path of least resistance. We have seen that the Colonel is not sure that Alison's leaving Jimmy is a good idea, yet he treats Helena with the reflexive courtesy of a upper class gentleman, telling her that he is glad that she sent the telegram. As with Alison, Colonel Redfern has a difficult time offending or hurting others, and this leads him to be dishonest about his thoughts. Cliff, here is a moral centre. He sees (presciently) that Helena is not going to leave the apartment (perhaps indicating that he sees her attraction to Jimmy), and he thinks that Alison should do right by Jimmy, and face up to her difficult decision. Alison, however, has fully embraced her "conventional" persona. This moment of Alison's exit is a second damning example of her cowardice and inability to take a strong stand. Though Jimmy has driven her to this action, the play here paints him as the wronged party, and Alison as the coward.Cliff's anger at Helena suggests that class tension has been simmering beneath his calm surface. This further drives home the fact that Jimmy's anger is justified, even the unflappable Cliff feels that Helena has unfairly disrupted their world. Helena also attacks Jimmy for being improper and impolite for walking around the apartment shirtless in front of ladies. She implies that he is only out for sex. Cliff sces Jimmy more fully than Helena does, and knows that ideological concerns are perhaps even more important to him than sex is. Cliffexits because of his concern for Jimmy's feelings, but nevertheless, the move seems callous. He and Alison both feel unable to face Jimmy's anger. Helena, who has experienced less of it than they have, is ready and willing to face him - Jimmy ascribes this to bravery. The teddy bear symbolizes Jimmy himself, and Helena's casual embrace of it suggests both a latent tenderness for Jimmy, and the fact that she is about to displace Alison. Again, Jimmy desires authenticity from Alison, and sees her letter as a way to avoid intense feeling. She is being "phoney" and "polite." For Jimmy, love is not "need," but rather the choice to feel deeply with another person.

Helena has previously thought that Jimmy should love his child and his wife unconditionally, but he here argues that love should be given based on merit, and that Alison has not carned it. Helena responds to Jimmy with the anger that he craves from Alison, and her reaction releases his despair. This suggests both that Jimmy might not be able to withstand the anger that he himself dishes out, and that his anger is in fact an expression of vulnerability. The fact that Helena kisses him underscores the seductive power of his raw honesty and emotion, and perhaps also indicates (now that there is a pattern of upper class women falling for him) that passion such as his really is lacking in the upper classes. Viewed differently, the kiss that Jimmy and Helena share at the end of the scene appears forced and rushed and ultimately unneeded. The point of the scene is to provide a complex understanding of Jimmy's view of the past. The scene can be summed up in Alison's observation that Jimmy and the Colonel are alike in many ways. The Colonel is upset because the present is not like the past. He sees his best days as behind him. Jimmy is upset because he views the present as the same as the past and sees no future for himself or anyone else. This is the same problem viewed from different angles. Osborne's point here is that the past has definite consequenees for the present. In the Colonel's case, the past creates resignation and bewilderment in the present. For Jimmy, the past creates stagnation and anger.

SUMMARY OF PAGE 60 - 70

Helena takes on Alison's exact role in the household; Jimmy lays claim to Helena; the concept of blood sind sacrifice (pp. 60-70)

It's several months later, and it is once again a Sunday. Jimmy and Cliff sit in their armchairs with the Sunday papers. Helena, whose things now occupy the apartment, is ironing in a comer. Jimmy is smoking a pipe. Cliff tells him to put it out. Helena notes that she likes the pipe and this pleases Jimmy. Jimmy begins to tell them of an outrageous tabloid story in one of the papers: adult in the Midlands is partaking in "grotesque and cvil practices." The cuk is drinking the blood of a white cockerel and making "midnight invocations to the Coptic Goddess of fertility." Jimmy wonders if perhaps this is what Mrs Drury, their landlord, does in her spare time. Jimmy wonders if someone is performing evil magic upon him and then, humorously, suggests that Alison's mother is performing voodoo rituals to cause him pain. Helena tells Jimmy that he should perform the rituals on her, and Jimmy suggests that Cliff could be the voodoo doll. Jimmy notes in a "brooding excursion" how sacrifice is really not a big deal because most people only sacrifice the things they didn't want to begin with. He ponders that "we shouldn't be admiring them. We should feel rather sorry for them." Returning to the playful banter, Jimmy suggests they make a loving cup from Cliff's blood, which wouldn't be very good since his blood is so common. He suggests making the cup from Helena's blood instead, a "pale Cambridge blue..." Jimmy says that he suspects somebody's been sticking pins into my wax image for years." Then he says that it must be Alison's mother. He imagines that she does this with a hatpin, and that it might have "ruined her bridge game." Helena suggests that Jimmy should try it himself. Jimmy says that's a good idea, they could sacrifice Cliff over the stove. The "whole point of a sacrifice," Jimmy says, "is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place." People gain unfair recognition for sacrifices of this kind, he believes. He says that rather than admiring them, he should feel sorry for them. Then he returns to his joke, and says that they could also drink Helena's blood, which must be a "pale Cambridge blue." Then they could invoke the fertility goddess. Cliff grumbles that Jimmy doesn't need to invoke that goddess, and Jimmy says that he's right. He asks for the "posh paper," where there is a "savage correspondence" about Milton that he wants to read. Cliff says that he has just read that, and Jimmy says, “I think you're actually acquiring yourself a curiosity, my boy." He summarizes some gossipy articles about Shakespeare, and Helena laughs. She tells Cliff that she's gotten more adept at telling when Jimmy is being serious, and when he's joking. Cliff says he's not sure Jimmy always knows himself. Jimmy tells him to shut up, and asks Helena if she's going to church that evening. "Taken aback," she says that she isn't. Jimmy asks if it's “living in sin" that makes her stay away. Helena "can hardly believe that this is an attack," and is "shaken by the sudden coldness in his eyes." He soon resumes his cheerful joking with Cliff.

Then Jimmy asks if he saw Helena talking to a reverend the other day. She says that it was indeed a reverend, and he says that she's acting defensive. Jimmy asks why they shouldn't have the parson over for tea, and whether it's because his moral manliness would overtake Jimmy, the "liberal skinny weakling." Helena asks why they can't have one day, just one day, without tumbling over religion or politics," and Cliff chimes in his agreement. Jimmy changes the subject to a song that he made up that day, then suggests some names for a band they could form together, but dismisses them as "too intellectual." Cliff begins to brainstorm names, too, and then they fall into a routine, pretending to be a pair of performers. The scene has a vaudeville air, with two men trying to find a man named "nobody." In the end, it turns out that Helena is to play nobody. Jimmy throws a pillow at her, pretending that it is an instrument case, and it hits her ironing board. Jimmy and Cliff launch into a song and dance routine, like the famous British performers Flanagan and Allen. They sing about a suitor wanting to marry a middle class woman, even though her mother doesn't like him. Jimmy tires of the song, and tells Cliff to make some tea.

Jimmy then stops and tells Cliff that he kicked his ankle and that the routine is no good. Cliff pushes him hard and he falls. Jimmy jumps up and they start to wrestle until Cliff pushes him off. Cliff complains that his only clean shirt is dirty now and Helena offers to wash it for him. Cliff hesitates but then takes the shirt off and lets Helena launder it for him. When she exits, Jimmy notes that Cliff doesn't like Helena very much. Cliff answers that, at one time, Jimmy didn't like her either. Cliff then tells Jimmy that he is thinking of leaving. He says he is tired of the sweet stall and that he would not be such a burden on Helena if he left. Jimmy takes this news casually and tells him that maybe he can find one of Helena's "posh girl friends with lots of money, and no brains" to take care of him. Jimmy tells him that he's been a good friend but that he is prepared for him to leave. He tells him that he's looking for something from Helena that she could never give and that he's worth a half a dozen Helenas to me or to anyone." Jimmy wonders “why, why, why do we let these women bleed us to death?" He thinks, "people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids." He thinks that if they should all die in a nuclear explosion it will “just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you." Helena enters and gives Cliff his shirt. Jimmy tells him to dry it quickly so they can all go out for drinks. Jimmy tells Helena to cheer up and that he wished her "heart stirred a little" when she looked at him. She tells him that it does and that she knows Cliff is leaving. Jimmy tells her that he's been a good friend, that "he's had to learn how to take it, and he knows how to hand it out." Helena goes over and sits on the arm of his chair, running her hand through his hair. He tells her that she had always put out her hand for him and that she has made a good enemy. "But then, when people put down their weapons, it doesn't mean they've necessarily stopped fighting." Helena tells him that she loves him. Helena and Jimmy share a tender moment, embracing. He tells her that they should leave and start their act, "T.S. Eliot and Pam," and that he'll "close that damned sweet-stall and...start everything from scratch” (p. 69). Helena tells him that this is wonderful. She goes to change out of her shirt and Jimmy goes to hurry up Cliff when there is a knock at the door. Jimmy opens it and finds Alison, standing in a raincoat and looking ill. Jimmy tells Helena that she has a visitor and walks out of the room, leaving the two women together.

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 60-70

There is allusion to Act I here. Helena has taken on Alison's exact role in the household, and Jimmy has even laid claim to her with his shirt. This suggests that the cycle of conflict will continue, because Helena has not changed Jimmy's world but he has changed hers. There is also a sad feeling of stagnancy to the scene. Not much has really changed. The concept of blood plays an important role in this scene. In the previous act, Jimmy made the comment that he would one day write a book from his own blood. This idea of blood symbolizes the sacrifice that he believes he is making by living a domestic life first with Alison and now with Helena. In this scene, blood is a symbol of the violence and sexual tension that still remains between Jimmy and Alison. Jimmy makes reference to a brutal ritual in which blood is spilled as a sacrifice to a fertility god. This reference to the sacrificial rite symbolizes Jimmy's own violent sacrifice and Alison's pregnancy which, the audience will soon learn, came to an end. Jimmy still believes that it is Alison's past, and her parents that are responsible for his sacrifice. Alison in Act I said that she had gotten used” to the pipe, but Helena positively likes it. As in the previous act, she takes a stronger stand than Alison did, and this provides us with a sense of hope that perhaps Helena will be able to stand up to Jimmy in a way that Alison didn't. Jimmy still has the sense that he suffers more than anyone else does - he here ascribes it to voodoo. The upper class imagery (hat pins and bridge) shows that he ties his personal suffering to his class status. He also mentions Alison briefly her presence still hangs in the air. Jimmy makes an incisive psychological commentary about people's tendency to congratulate themselves too much for too little. He also pities those who must fake values, rather than truly having them. His subtle jab at Helena's upper class "blue blood" status goes unremarked upon, but suggests that the same tensions as were present in Act I are present now. Jimmy's fatherly interest in Cliff's intellect paints him as a certain kind of old, upper class patriarch, revealing again his subtle nostalgia for Britain's past. Jimmy's attack on Helena reveals that he wants to keep her under his thumb - he doesn't like feeling laughed at. His reminder that she has wronged her friend is a way of reminding her that she is a hypocrite. He uses a moral argument to hurt Helena, and the pain he causes seems gratuitous - it's not really about ideals. Jimmy's sarcasm reveals that he thinks religion is "phoney" morality. He paints himself as the weaker man in order to suggest that the reverend is overcompensating for a failing. The scene from the first act is beginning to re-play. Though Helena has a stronger tie to her own values than Alison did, it is becoming clear that what Jimmy really wants is for a woman to give up her politeness and reserve and fight him toe to toe, to step onto his ground as a full and honest combatant in love. Jimmy's tendency to make up songs is one of the things that he takes pride in, and is found very creative. This scene also contains Jimmy's most famous speech in the play. He believes that there are no longer any worthy causes to die for. Previous generations, represented by Colonel Redfern, were the last to sacrifice themselves for their country and their belief in a right way to live. According to Jimmy, the world is a subjective place now. There is a poverty of ideals in the modern world. Jimmy, thus, is a character trapped between his nostalgia for the past and his assessment of his present prospects. This nostalgia for the past is also the reason why Jimmy is able to calmly accept Cliff's desire to leave. Cliff sees the present as changed in a fundamental way; Helena entered their household and the dynamic between the three characters changed. Jimmy, however, finds solace and a sense of stability in the past. In his reassurance that Cliff has been a good friend, he is already memorializing Cliff. Jimmy idealizes Cliff's friendship just as he does Hugh and Mrs Tanner and every other relationship in his life. The audience should remember how Jimmy consistently requires allegiance to the people in his life. Cliff now enters that nostalgic sphere.

ANALYSIS OF PAGE 70 - 77

Alison returns to Jimmy after miscarriage and Helena prepares to leave; strong moral code versus flexible moral code; Cliff moves on with his life, Jimmy does not; Alison and Jimmy reconcile (pp. 70-77)

The scene opens just a few minutes later. Jimmy is playing his jazz trumpet across the hall. Helena is standing at the table pouring tea. Alison sits in an armchair. She bends to pick up Jimmy's pipe, and drops the ash from it into an ashtray. She notes that he still smokes the pipe, and says that she had come to miss it. Last week at the movies, she sat behind a man who was smoking the same pipe. Helena brings her a cup of tea and says that it should help. Alison takes it, and thanks her.  Alison says that she must be mad" to show up at the apartment, and apologies to Helena. Helena says that Alison, of all people, doesn't need to apologize. Alison protests that it was "unfair and cruel” to return. She has adopted Jimmy's sense of dramatic timing, she says, but it is in "bad taste." She says that she has often prevented herself from coming, but that today, she finally made it. She says that she has often thought of the apartment, but that it seemed like another world. She says that Helena makes a good cup of tea, then covers her face. "You must all wish me a thousand miles away," she says. Helena says that Alison has "more right" to be there than Helena does. Alison protests, "Helena, don't bring out the book of rules," and Helena says that Alison is Jimmy's wife, and that she has never forgotten her friend's "right" to him. Alison says that she "gave up believing in the divine rights of marriage long ago. Even before I met Jimmy." Now, she says, it's a constitutional monarchy. "You are where you are by consent." She, on the other hand, has been displaced. Alison says that she regrets coming here, and that she didn't intend to break up Helena and Jimmy. Helena says that she believes that, but that it makes things seem even worse. Alison should have been outraged," but wasn't. Helena says that she feels ashamed, and that Alison sounds like she is "quoting" Jimmy. "At least, I still believe in right and wrong," Helena says, "Even though everything I have done is wrong, at least I have known it was wrong. Alison says that Helena wrote that she loved Jimmy, and Helena confirms this. Alison says that she couldn't believe this at first, but then she realized that Helena used to say lots of very harsh things about Jimmy, and that made it easier to believe. Helena agrees that she was "over-emphatic."

Helena says that she has discovered "what is wrong with Jimmy...He was born out of his time." Alison agrees. Helena says that there's no place for him in the world now, but that he should have been in a time like the French Revolution. This means that he'll never get anywhere. Alison says that he's an "Eminent Victorian," Helena says that she sees now that it's over" between her and Jimmy. Alison's presence reminds her how wrong the situation is. She says, "he wants one world and I want another, and lying in that bed won't ever change it! I believe in good and evil, and I don't have to apologise for that." By her own moral code, her actions have been unconscionable. She's leaving, and she thinks Alison would be a "fool" to stay, but she won't stand in her way. Alison protests that Jimmy will be all alone. Helena says that Jimmy will find another woman. "I know I'm throwing my book of rules at you," she says, but Alison won't be happy without it. Helena has tried living that way, and "t just doesn't work." Helena says that seeing Alison at the door made everything come clear to her, and that she "didn't know about the baby...It's like a judgment on us." Alison says that she "lost the child. It's a simple fact. There is no judgment, there's no blame." Helena says that she still feels it, and that though it isn't "logical,"it's "right." Offstage, "the trumpet gets louder." Alison says that Helena shouldn't leave Jimmy, because he needs her. He wants something specific from women, she says - a "cross between a mother and a Greek courtesan, a benchwoman." Helena teils Jimmy to slup his damned noise." The trumpet eventually stops, and Helena calls Jimmy to speak with them. Jimmy asks if Alison is still there, and Helena says that he shouldn't be stupid. Alison is worried that he doesn't want to see her, but Helena tells her to stay. Jimmy enters. He says that Alison should sit down, because she looks "ghastly." Helena begins to explain, but Jimmy says that she doesn't have to draw a diagram." He can tell that Alison has had a miscarriage. Helena asks if that means something to him, and Jimmy says that he isn't glad to think of anyone being ill or in pain, and that it was his child too. But, he says with a shrug, "it isn't my first loss." Alison replies that it was her first loss. Jimmy looks at her, then looks back at Helena. She crosses to him, and says that it isn't Alison's fault. Jimmy asks what she means. Helena says that she doesn't "want a brawl," and Jimmy tells her to get on with it. Helena says that she is going downstairs to pack [her] things." It was her own decision, but she realized that she couldn't be happy doing something "wrong" and hurtful. She says that she won't love anyone else like Jimmy, but "I can't take part in all this suffering. I can't!" Jimmy "looks down at the table, and nods." Helena says that she'll get Alison a hotel room. Jimmy says that he always knew that Helena would eventually leave him when the going got too tough. "It's no good trying to fool yourself about love," he says. "You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts." If Helena doesn't want to dirty her soul, he says, she could become a saint - "because you'll never make it as a human being." As he says this, he takes a dress out of the closet, crosses the room, and gives it to her. Helena takes it, and exits. The church bells begin to ring outside, and he curses them. Alison says that she's sorry, and Jimmy says that she never sent any flowers to Hugh's mum. She starts to move, but stops when he speaks. He says that the world is full of injustice, with "the wrong people dying." Alison moves again, and he turns to her. He says that the heaviest, strongest creatures in this world seem to be the loneliest." Jimmy asks if Alison remembers the first night they saw each other. He said that she seemed to have "a wonderful relaxation of spirit... You've got to be really brawny to have that kind of strength - the strength to relax." He says that once they married, he realized he had misread her.

"In order to relax, you've first got to sweat your guts out," which Alison had never done. Alison lets out a cry, and moves to lean on the table. Jimmy says, “I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter." Alison is crying. She yells out, "it doesn't matter! I was wrong, I was wrong! I don't want to be neutral, I don't want to be a saint. I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile!"

Jimmy watches "helplessly." She says that the "human being inside [her] body" has gone. She had never known pain like that she wanted to die. She thought of Jimmy. “This is what he's been longing for me to feel... l'm in the fire, and I'm burning." She says that the cost was the child, and all her future children, but that it was worth it, because this was what Jimmy had wanted. She looks up at him, and says, “don't you see! I'm in the mud at last! I'm groveling! I'm crawling!" She collapses on the floor. Jimmy kneels to her. He says, “Please don't...I can't," and tells her that she's all right. She "relaxes suddenly." Jimmy says "with a kind of mocking, tender irony," that they'll go be happy in their bear's cave and squirrel's drey. They'll write songs, and live on honey and nuts, and she'll help him stay clean. He'll see that she keeps her tail looking nice, and that he'll watch her, because she's beautiful and "none too bright," so they have to be careful of traps. “Poor squirrels," he says. "Poor bears," Alison says, and then, tenderly, "Oh poor, poor, bears." She embruces him. The curtain falls.

SIGNIFICANCE OF PAGE 70 to 77

Jimmy has retreated into the wordless anger of his jazz trumpet, which is in some ways thebequivalent of the animal game - it lets him express his feelings in a non-intellectual way. Alison is still inclined to clean up the apartment, suggesting that she retains some upper class sensibilities. Now she, like Jimmy and Colonel Redfern, has fallen into nostalgia, missing her old life. Alison and Helena are retreating into a polite, restrained way of talking to each other, but Alison also notes that her decision to return has a flavour of Jimmy to it. She showed up unannounced to provoke strong feelings and reactions. We are not yet sure whether Alison's time away has resolved Alison's identity crisis over working class and upper class values. Alison's protestation that the rules of marriage don't apply, and the fact that she felt this way before meeting Jimmy, suggest a radical streak that might be stronger in her than we had at first realized. Her comment on "constitutional monarchy" reflects the fact that British society, like her love life, has become more chaotic as it becomes freer. The question of Alison's muted emotions still has not been resolved. She is not operating underneither Jimmy's or Helena's moral code, both of which would require outrage. Yet, she seems to have developed a moral narrative of her own that doesn't quite ascribe to either of their visions. Helena retains her strong and traditional moral sense, as indicated in her belief in the wrongness of her relationship with Jimmy Alison has adopted the view that insults and anger can be the result of love. Grappling with theblove between Jimmy and Helena has helped her reach this realization. Alison and Helena come to a deeper understanding of Jimmy and his motivations. Helena claims that she sees Jimmy as still being stuck in the French Revolution, meaning that his extreme emotion and turmoil seem to bring anarchy to his life and to the lives of those around him. Alison has a slightly different view, she understands him as an "Eminent Victorian," meaning that he is chiefly nostalgic for an idealized past. Alisun realizes this judgment on her husband is an echo of the previous conversation she held with her father. In both cases, Alison comes to understand Jimmy's life is lived in the suffering he experienced at the death of his father. Helena has had a strong moral code for the duration of the play, and though she has strayed into "sin" by having an affair, her action here accords with the standards that she has set for herself. She begins and ends the play with the same upper class values. Yet, Alison's more flexible moral code might make her able to find happiness with Jimmy where Helena couldn't even if Helena believes she won't find happiness overall. As opposed to Helena, Alison and Jimmy would not be "lying in that bed" with two totally different worlds in mind. Alison has been trying to bend her imagination to include Jimmy's world. The fact that Helena takes Alison's miscarriage as a “judgment" suggests that her morality isbpartly religious, meaning that it comes from the upper class world that Jimmy scorns. Yet, she has no desire to question it. She also takes a more feminist view than Alison, and is unwilling to conform to Jimmy's highly demanding view of what a woman should be. Also Jimmy's power over the other people in his life is contrasted with his helplessness. Alison begs Telena to stay with Jimmy precisely for the reason that he will have no one to care for him if she leaves. The images of earlier scenes of Alison or Helena ironing take on a different meaning now. They were participating in such domestic activity not because Jimmy forced them to do so, but because they feel a tenderness for a man who is ultimately helpless. Helena is able to let this tenderness go as she leaves, Alison is not able to forget Jimmy. Jimmy's statement that he doesn't want others to be ill or in pain shows that his view of suffering isn't just confined to the moral realm, he also succumbs to genuine emotion, as he does when he sees Alison's pale face. The miscarriage has softened him as it has softened Helena, but it has not shocked him. This is a privilege reserved for those who have not suffered much and, to Jimmy, differentiates those who understand the world from those who don't. Jimmy unknowingly cursed Alison's unbom child in the first act, and now, his prophecy has come true. Alison has suffered as he hoped that she would. Helena's decision to remove herself from "suffering" suggests that her morality also has a tinge of what Jimmy would call cowardice as she doesn't want to take part in the darkest side of life. Alison has deepened her emotional capacity by opening her life to Jimmy, but Helena chooses not to. Jimmy's statement that love takes "muscle and guts" is an indictment of the cowardice that Helena has just displayed. The upper classes maintain their sense of self-worth because they ignore the very real plight of the working class people around them. The bells ringing symbolize the peal of middle class morality, which has caused Jimmy, and the working class in general, so much pain. Jimmy here berates Alison for not showing simple human decency by reaching out to Hugh's mum for her funeral, suggesting that to him, politeness is about human connections, not about social rules. This might, however, lead him to a lonely life. His plight is that of any person who stands out from society - he might alienate others as he tries to change the way the world works. For perhaps the first time in the play, we perceive what Jimmy's personal, emotional goals might be. He hopes to achieve a state of “relaxation" through sweat and suffering. Failing that, true love will do. His anger is meant to achieve both, even as, throughout the play, it has been pushing them away In the face of Alison's emotional break, Jimmy's anger dissolves into helplessness. He has driven her to this point, and both he and the reader are shocked by the depth of pain that his anger and tirades have caused. The moment is cathartic, suggesting that Jimmy may have been right to invite such powerful emotion, perhaps it will lead to the release and love that he craves. Yet, it is also terrible to behold. The question of whether Jimmy is right that suffering is the most essential human emotion remains open at the end of the play, it is attractively powerful, but we also wonder whether all this pain would have been better off avoided, if it could have been avoided.

As the play ends, Alison makes Jimmy realize she has become the person he wanted her to be. In Act 1, Jimmy berated Alison as something less than a human being because she had not gone through the kind of suffering that he had once gone through at the death of his father. Now, with the death of her unborn child, Alison tells him that she understands suffering. Jimmy's ultimate reaction to this news, and to Alison herself, is left unexplored. Their immediate reaction, however, is to return to their game of bear and squirrel. They now both understand, even if not consciously, that the only way to escape the suffering of the real world is to create a fantasy world that is just as powerful and stable. This is Osborne's ultimate statement with the play: the only way for people of modernity to truly understand and cope with the world around them is to create fiction. As a playwright, this is the course that Osborne himself has charted with Look Back in Anger. His fiction, no matter how realistic, is a diversion from the rest of the world. The irony of the couple's return to the bear game is that they both now know that such a simple world is impossible. Before, Alison hoped to remain forever in affectionate love, but now that she has known suffering, that more shallow existence is closed to her. The tender embrace between the couple leaves us with a sense of hope. It seems possible that they will unite their worlds and form a happy relationship, but it is equally possible that they will launch into a cycle of suffering and reconciliation. The class factions that they represent might find a way to live in harmony or they might remain perpetually at war. Helena's conclusion at the end of the play establishes her as the moral compass of all the characters. The audience was meant to question her morality at the end of Act II and in this act Alison becomes her interlocutor. Alison tells her on the one hand that she should not feel guilty for staying with Jimmy while on the other hand her questions and reassurance make Helena re-evaluate her decisions. In the end, it is her sense of wrongdoing of stealing Alison's husband from her, that makes her leave to start her own new life. This morality is represented by the church bells that ring throughout various scenes of the play and which ring at the end. With her renewed sense of right and wrong, Helena represents an alternative to the subjective meaninglessness that Jimmy projects onto the modern world. Helena retains her moral centre.

Synopsis 

Act 1 opens on a dismal April Sunday afternoon in Jimmy and Alison's cramped attic in the Midlands. Jimmy and Cliff are reading the Sunday papers, plus the radical weekly, "price ninepence, obtainable at any bookstall" as Jimmy snaps, claiming it from Cliff. This is a reference to the New Statesman, and in the context of the period would have instantly signalled the pair's political preference to the audience. Alison is attempting to do the week's ironing and is only half listening as Jimmy and Cliff engage in the expository dialogue. It becomes apparent that there is a huge social gulf between Jimmy and Alison. Her family is upper-middle-class military, while Jimmy belongs to working class. He had to fight hard against her family's disapproval to win her. "Alison's mummy and I took one look at each other, and from then on the age of chivalry was dead," he explains. We also learn that the sole family income is derived from a sweet stall in the local market—an enterprise that is surely well beneath Jimmy's education, let alone Alison's "station in life". As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative, transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally, calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff. (Some actors play this scene as though Jimmy thinks everything is just a joke, while others play it as though he really is excoriating her.) The tirade ends with physical horseplay, resulting in the ironing board overturning and Alison's arm getting burned. Jimmy exits to play his trumpet off stage. Alison, alone with Cliff, confides that she's accidentally pregnant and can't quite bring herself to tell Jimmy. Cliff urges her to tell him. When Jimmy returns, Alison announces that her actress friend Helena Charles is coming to stay, and Jimmy despises Helena even more than Alison. He flies into a rage.

Act 2

Act 2 opens on another Sunday afternoon, with Helena and Alison making lunch. In a two-handed scene, Alison says that she decided to marry Jimmy because of her own minor rebellion against her upbringing and her admiration for Jimmy's campaigns against the dereliction of life in postwar England. She describes Jimmy to Helena as a "knight in shining armour". Helena says, firmly, "You've got to fight him". Jimmy enters, and the tirade continues. If his Act 1 material could be played as a joke, there's no doubt about the intentional viciousness of his attacks on Helena. When the women put on hats and declare that they are going to church, Jimmy's sense of betrayal peaks. When he leaves to take an urgent phone call, Helena announces that she has forced the issue. She has sent a telegram to Alison's parents asking them to come and "rescue" her. Alison is stunned but agrees that she will go. The next evening, Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, comes to collect her to take her back to her family home. The playwright allows the Colonel to come across as quite a sympathetic character, albeit totally out of touch with the modern world, as he himself admits. "You're hurt because everything's changed", Alison tells him, "and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same". Helena arrives to say goodbye, intending to leave very soon herself. Alison is surprised that Helena is staying on for another day, but she leaves, giving Cliff a note for Jimmy. Cliff in turn hands it to Helena and leaves, saying "I hope he rams it up your nostrils". Almost immediately, Jimmy bursts in. His contempt at finding a "goodbye" note makes him turn on Helena again, warning her to keep out of his way until she leaves. Helena tells him that Alison is expecting a baby, and Jimmy admits grudgingly that he's taken aback. However, his tirade continues. They first come to physical blows, and then as the Act 2 curtain falls, Jimmy and Helena are kissing passionately and falling on the bed.

Act 3

Act 3 opens as a deliberate replay of Act 1, but this time with Helena at the ironing-board wearing Jimmy's Act 1 red shirt. Months have passed. Jimmy is notably more pleasant to Helena than he was to Alison in Act 1. She actually laughs at his jokes, and the three of them (Jimmy, Cliff, and Helena) get into a music hall comedy routine that obviously is not improvised. Cliff announces that he's decided to strike out on his own. As Jimmy leaves the room to get ready for a final night out for the three of them, he opens the door to find Alison, looking like death. He snaps over his shoulder "Friend of yours to see you" and abruptly leaves. Alison explains to Helena that she lost the baby (one of Jimmy's cruellest speeches in Act 1 expressed the wish that Alison would conceive a child and lose it). The two women reconcile, but Helena realises that what she's done is immoral and she in turn decides to leave. She summons Jimmy to hear her decision and he lets her go with a sarcastic farewell. The play ends with a sentimental reconciliation between Jimmy and Alison. They revive an old game they used to play, pretending to be bears and squirrels, and seem to be in a state of truce.

ANALYSIS OF ALL CHARACTERS IN LOOK BACK IN ANGER

 The Character of Jimmy Porter

Role of Jimmy Porter

Jimmy Porter is a loud, obnoxious man, rude and verbally abusive. He is born working class but highly educated, like his friend and roommate Cliff, but has an ambivalent relationship with his educated status, seeing himself mostly as a working class man and yet frustrated that his education can do nothing to affect his class status. "He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty." He is usually found spouting tirades against the complacency of the British upper classes, and especially against his wife Alison and then his lover Helena. Jimmy is married to a pretty girl, Alison, whom he feels he almost had to steal away from her family, the kind of family whose strength and graces were grounded on England's 1914 Empire. Jimmy not only resents his wife's family and all the institutions that bred them because they led to nothing but the dust and ashes of 1945; he also berates her for having lost the stamina presumed to be characteristic of her background, without having it replaced with any new values of her own, even romantically negative ones like his. Jimmy Porter is an aggressive young man. He is angry at almost every British institution such as the Church, the Monarchy, the government and he rants against 'posh' Sunday papers, although he buys them every weekend. But most of all, he is against any form of upper-class manners. However, he married a girl from the class which he hates. As a result of his class hatred Jimmy attacks Alison both verbally and physically throughout the play since his wife reminds him of everything he despises in terms of class distinctions. He berates Alison for being too reserved and unfeeling. Jimmy expresses physical aggression towards Alison by pushing Cliff on the ironing board and Cliff falls against Alison and she burns her arm on the iron. At first, Jimmy tells Alison that he did not mean to hurt her but then he apologizes for doing it deliberately: "I'm sorry... I mean it... I did it on purpose" (p. 26). Jimmy is frail and dependent on Alison. Although Jimmy has graduated from a university, albeit one with no prestige, he works with Cliff as owner/proprietor of a candy stall in an outdoor market. In spite of his tendency to sortimes cruelly insult Cliff, Jimmy genuinely likes him. Cliff lives with Jimmy and Alison and he's close friends with both.

Significance of the OF JIMMY PORTER

 Jimmy Porter is the play's main character. He is the "Angry Young Man” who expresses his frustration for the lack of feelings in his placid domestic life. Jimmy can be unders ood as both a hero for his unfiltered expressions of emotion and frustration in a culture that propagated unemotional resignation. He is restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike; a man of decency and charity who is one of life's beau. losers"; "a lovable monster with the gift of the gab and a talent for resentment." He can also be considered a villain for the ways in which his anger proves to be destructive. to those in his life. Jimmy "alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike," and his "blistering honesty, or apparent honesty... makes few friends." Jimmy is a frustrated character, railing against his feelings of alienation and uselessness in post-war England. He is a character of immense psychological complexity and interest. He dominates the play through the power of his anger and language. He unleashes his invective on what he calls the Establishment (those "born" to power and privilege), the church as part of the Establishment, and his loved ones. Jimmy, "risen" from the working class, is now provided with an intellect which only shows him that everything that might have justified pride in the old England - its opportunity, adventure, material wellbeing, have disappeared without being replaced by anything but a lacklustre security. He has been promoted into a moral and social vacuum. He fumes, rages, nags at a world which promised much and has led to a dreary plain where there is no fibre or substance, but only fear of scientific destruction and the minor comforts of “American" mechanics. His wife comments to the effect that "my father is sad because everything has changed, Jimmy is sad because nothing has." In the meantime, Jimmy seeks solace and blows defiance through the symbolic jazz of his trumpet, while his working-class pal, though he adores Jimmy and his wife, wisely leaves the emotionally messy premises. In bullying Alison, Jimmy is certainly getting an easy revenge on the class he detests. His assaults on Alison are nasty and sometimes savage. He seems to be trying to force her to have a genuine response, something coming from her that is not coloured by her class and upbringing. He says she is not real because she has not suffered real pain and degradation. By redirecting his class hatred towards Alison, Jimmy makes use of one of the ego defense mechanisms, that is "displacement. Because he directs his anger and hatred for the middle-class towards Alison, the weaker object that is less able to react to any hostility. Alison becomes the main target of Jimmy and is made to suffer both psychologically and physically. Jimmy bullies, taunts, and humiliates Alison and her middle-class parents, friends, and manners as the play develops. Jimmy hates Helena for the same reasons he hates Alison, namely her social class and proper" upbringing. While Jimmy apparently hates Alison's mother, he seems to like Colonel Redfern, her father, because he can feel sorry for him. Jimmy's aggression can also be seen as a defence mechanism that creates a vicious circle. The more he hurts Alison, the more he feels vulnerable and insecure. It appears that by hurting others Jimmy actually hurts himself. His biting sarcasms are in a sense really directed inwardly against self. It is not the love he had envisioned; it is self-laceration.

Jimmy is vulnerable and he hates his own vulnerability and dependency. It can be claimed that Jimmy cannot cope with the reality that he is frail and vulnerable; therefore he prefers to deny it. He frequently accuses Alison of being weak and frail. That is to say, he projects the unacceptable aspects of his character onto Alison. He frequently attacks Alison's timidity and weakness. Jimmy adopts just the opposite behaviour by verbally attacking Alison because of the reality that he is dependent on her which causes anxiety in him. He makes use of one of the ego defence mechanisms called 'reaction formation', that is, he expresses anger and aggressive behaviour in order to hide his vulnerability and dependency. Jimmy is frail because as he says he was exposed to death, loneliness and pain at a very early age. He watched his father's death when he was ten. He claims that he knows what it is like to lose someone. However, he thinks that Alison does not know anything about loss or the feeling of helplessness. Therefore, he tells her that she should have had a child and had lost it so that she could have experienced the feeling of loss. Another reason why Jimmy is so frail can be the fact that he feels insecure due to being married to a woman above his social status. Because of his insecurity he suspects Alison's devotion, and he attacks her submissive behaviour against his assaults. He displays his doubts about Alison's loyalty when he tells Cliff how he goes through her things in her absence. His insecurity is felt as he tells Cliff about his sexual life with Alison. At the end of the play, when Alison returns having lost her baby, Jimmy does not seem to feel sorry for the baby. Instead, he tells her that he is hurt since Alison did not send any flowers to Hugh's mother's funeral.

Their bear and squirrel game can be considered as Jimmy's Oedipal need for Alison in addition to an escape from the harsh reality as Jimmy tells Alison: "We'll be together in our bear's cave, and our squirrel's drey, and... we'll sing songs about ourselves - about warm trees and snug caves, and lying in the sun" (p. 77). The images of 'caves' and 'lying in the sun' somewhat indicate the return to the womb-world of mother once again. Consequently, it may be stated that Jimmy expresses anger and aggressive behaviour due to several reasons and he directly expresses his angry feelings both verbally and physically by assaulting Alison, whereas Alison either suppresses her anger or aggresses passively by giving no reaction against her husband's aggressive attacks.

 The Character of Alison Porter

Role of Alison Porter

Alison Porter, Jimmy’s wife. A woman of upper-middle-class background, she is perceptive enough to understand that her husband resents everything in her that reminds him of the social differences between them. After three years of marriage, she is miserable. The only way that she can survive Jimmy’s constant verbal attacks on her and on her family is to conceal her feelings and remain silent. Although she says that Jimmy is the only man she has ever loved, Alison so yearns for peace that, with the encouragement of her friend Helena, she finally leaves him without telling him that she is pregnant. After losing the baby, she returns to Jimmy, begs his forgiveness for betraying him, and promises that because she has experienced suffering, she can now be the kind of wife he wants and needs.

SIGNIFICANCE OF ALISON'S CHARACTER

Alison is drawn to Jimmy's energy, but also exhausted by their constant fighting. Jimmy accuses her of being too complacent and lacking "enthusiasm," and her own father, Colonel Redfern, agrees that she has a tendency towards too much neutrality. Alison is aware of the fact that Jimmy is trying to make her angry. She knows that if she give any reaction to his attacks he will be triumphant. Alison's submissive and silent manner against Jimmy's assaults is also a way of expressing aggression because of the fact that she reach  passive aggressively. It can be claimed that passively aggressive behaviour, or in other term  silent aggression, is much preferred by women in particular due to the fact that this type aggressive behaviour does not invite retaliation since the opponent cannot decide whether there is an aggression or not. Therefore, the submissive behaviour of Alison functions as a disguise form of aggressive behaviour which she uses to protect herself against her husband's attacks Alison's silence and seeming ignorance can also be considered as a weapon in order to go herself from Jimmy's assaults. It seems as if she is not listening to Jimmy when he shouts at to say something The way Jimmy describes Alison's friends reveals his aggressive attitudes towards them: "The all sit around feeling very spiritual, with their mental hands on each other's knees, discussing sex as if it were the Art of Fugue." Upon these words both Alison and Helena give no reaction against Jimmy but the stage direction says; "the silent hostility of the two women has set Jimmy off the scent..."

As a result, it can be said that both Jimmy and Alison provoke each other. Cliff who witnesses the aggressive interaction between the couple says to Alison: "I'm wondering how much longer can go on watching you two tearing the insides out of each other. It looks pretty ugly sometimes Alison is drawn back to Jimmy at the end after she has suffered the pain and loss brought by the miscarriage of her child. This suffering changes her, and causes her to commit more fully to the intense emotion inherent in Jimmy's world.

Even though Alison feels stuck between her upper class upbringing and the working class work of her husband, she finds more internal peace with Jimmy and his ways. She returns to reconcile  with the ways of the working class and enrich her humanity.

 The Character of Cliff Lewis

Role of Cliff Lewis 

 Cliff Lewis, a friend of Jimmy, also from the working classes. A gentle person, he does not have Jimmy’s fire or his wit, but he also lacks his cruelty. Cliff is genuinely fond of Alison. He shows his appreciation for her housekeeping efforts, and he tries to defend her from Jimmy’s verbal abuse. It is he, not Jimmy, who bandages Alison’s arm after she burns it. Of all the characters in the play, Cliff seems to understand best what other people are feeling. Even when Helena thinks that she hates Jimmy, Cliff guesses that she really desires him, and he alone sees through her attempts to break up the marriage. Because he so dislikes Helena, Cliff moves out when he senses that she is moving in.

Significance

 Cliff is warm, loving, and humorous. He genuinely loves Alison but adjusts when she leaves and Helena moves in. Cliff's first allegiance is to Jimmy. Cliff believes that Jimmy keeps him as friend because of his little education. Living with the couple creates an avenue for him to help keep them together. Cliff is "easy and relaxed, almost to lethargy, with the rather sad, natural intelligence of the self-taught." He and Alison have an affectionate relationship that borders on a sexual one, but both of them are content with comfortable fondness rather than burning passion. Cliff eventually decides to leave to pursue his own life, rather than staying in Jimmy's apartment. 

 The Character of Helena Charles

Role of Helena Charles

Helena Charles, a beautiful, elegant actress, a friend of Alison and a member of her social circle. Helena comes to spend a few days with the Porters, but, finding herself increasingly attracted to Jimmy, she stays on, intent on driving a wedge between Jimmy and Alison. As Alison’s confidant, Helena urges her to face up to Jimmy or to leave him; meanwhile, she increases the pressure by wiring Alison’s father to come for her. When Alison walks out, Helena remains, becoming Jimmy’s mistress and his housekeeper. By the time Alison comes back, Helena has realized that the affair is finished, and with her usual dignity she goes on her way.

Significance

Helena represents that middle class which obstinately holds on to its customary traditions. Even though she seems genuinely concerned about Alison's constant altercation with her husband, it also appears she schemes her out of the scene. She is described as having a "sense of matriarchal authority" that "makes most men who meet her anxious.” Helena has a strong code of middle class morals that eventually force her to leavebJimmy. Her sense of morality leads her to leave. She can be considered the play's moral compass. 

 The Character of Colonel Redfern

Role of Colonel Redfern

Colonel Redfern is a handsome man in his late sixties. He is slightly withdrawn. He was a dedicated and strict soldier for forty years but now: he has an air of kindness and gentleness to him. He is Alison's father and a former colonel in the British army stationed in the English colony of India (back before 1947, when India still was a colony of England). He is "gentle” and “kindly," but also "brought up to command respect.” After leaving his post in India, "he is often slightly withdrawn and uneasy" because he lives "in a world where his authority has lately become less and less unquestionable." He does not approve of Jimmy, but he does find things to admire in him and even agrees with Jimmy in some instances.

 Jimmy expresses this resignation later in the play when he tells Cliff that there are no great causes to fight for anymore. The Colonel's generation, he says, was the last generation to believe unquestionably in an absolute right. Now, the Colonel is confused by the world around him. He does not understand the new British generations. When the Colonel comes to help Alison pack to leave Jimmy, he shows himself to be self. aware and incisive, commenting that both he and Alison like to stay neutral and avoid showing emotion, to their detriment,

Significance

The Colonel symbolizes the softening of the British character. Just as the Colonel is resigned and withdrawn, Osborne is suggesting that British culture and character is resigned and withdrawn in this new American age. He represents Britain's great Edwardian past. He was a military leader in India for many years before returning with his family to England. He is critical of Jimmy and Alison's relationship, but accepts that he is to blame for many of their problems because of his meddling in their affairs. His world ended with the independence of India. He is a reasonable man somewhat bemused by the post-World War II England,

 Jimmy says that the Colonel is stuck in a past version of England, and the Colonel himself agrees with this. Osborne argues that this attitude mirrors the collective British conscience which cannot understand the angry young men populating its working classes. Colonel represents the values and beliefs of another period, a time of British Empire. His values are those of duty, honour, and loyalty to one's country and one's class. He feels disturbed and bewildered by everything that is happening to his daughter. He does not hesitate to help Alison and does not attempt to control her. He is bewildered and impotent in an England he no longer recognizes.

 The Character of MINOR Characters

Hugh Tanner

Jimmy's friend, who took Alison and Jimmy into his apartment in the first months of their marriage. He was Jimmy's partner when they went on "raids” against Alison's upper class friends at fancy parties, and Jimmy saw him as a co-conspirator in the class struggle. Then Hugh decided to leave for China to write a novel, and Jimmy felt betrayed. This reveals Jimmy's deep traditional values (he was angry that Hugh abandoned his mother, Mrs Tanner) and his sense of patriotism.

MRS TANNER

The mother of Hugh Tanner, called "Hugh's mum" by Jimmy, she helped set Jimmy up with his sweet stall. Jimmy loves her, and Alison thinks this is just because she is lower class and "ignorant." In the middle of the play, Jimmy learns that Hugh's mum has had a stroke, and Jimmy goes to visit her in the hospital. In one of his few expressions of true vulnerability, he asks Alison to come with him. She refuses, and leaves him shortly thereafter. Jimmy is offended that Alison seems to see Hugh's mum only in terms of her class, and not as a person. He thinks that society in general ignores the humanity of working class people, and that Alison's and others' treatment of Hugh's mum is a prime example. 

WEBSTER

The only one of Alison's friends that Jimmy thinks has any value. Webster plays the banjo and is able to talk in Jimmy's “dialect." Jimmy believes that Webster is gay.

MADELINE

Jimmy's first love, a woman ten years older than he is. He sees her as an example of the "enthusiasm" that Alison lacks. 

Nigel

Alison's brother, a politician. Jimmy considers him “just about as vague as you can get without actually being invisible." Alison wishes that she could have reached out to Nigel during the difficult first months of her marriage, because he would have been affectionate and loving to her.

Alison's mother

Alison's mother strongly disapproved of Jimmy and Alison's marriage, and went to great lengths to prevent it. She did this out of a protective love for Alison. However, Colonel Redfern says that he thinks his wife went too far in her actions. 

Miss Drury

The couple's landlord. Alison is worried that she'll evict them for being too rowdy and noisy with the trumpet, while Jimmy considers her a thief, reflecting his negative view of people with financial power.

 THEMES of LOOK BACK IN ANGER

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. These ideas as expressed in Look Back in Anger are examined below. 

THE THEME OF 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 a 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 and their humanness behind can they find the innocence to enjoy simple love. 

THE THEME OF 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. Jimmy Porter comes from a working class background, but has acquired university education. 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.

THE THEME MASCULINITY IN ART

Masculinity in art manifests when Jimmy Porter emotionally distresses Alison, his wife, and delivers a grisly monologue in which he wishes for Alison's mother's death. The playwright, Osborne, however, declares that he is attempting to restore a vision of true masculinity into a twentieth century culture that he sees as becoming increasingly feminized. This feminization is seen in the way that British culture shows an "indifference to anything but immediate, personal suffering." This causes unresponsiveness within which Jimmy's instinctual anger and masculine emotion is a revenge against. He berates his wife, Alison, in a rude attempt to get her to strike out at him, to stop "sitting on the fence" and make a full commitment to her real emotions; he wants to force her to feel and to have vital life. He calls her "Lady Pusillanimous" because he sees her as too cowardly to commit to anything. Jimmy is nervous to give a great deal and is deeply angry because no oņe seems interested enough to take from him, including his wife. He says, “My heart is so full, I feel ill - and she wants peace!" It appears that Osborne is glorifying young male anger and cruelty towards women and homosexuals. 

THE THEME OF SUFFERING AND ANGER VS COMPLACENCY

Suffering and anger are highly associated with lower classness in the play, and complacency with upper classness. 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 beginnings of the first and third acts mirror each other. It 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, Osbome 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 dissatisfaction 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 channelled. Though it springs from a moral fervour, it dissolves into a diffuse attack on many fronts, rather than pointedly targeting and taking down any oppressive systems. 

THE THEME OF  DISILLUSIONMENT AND NOSTALGIA

Look Back in Anger is the archetypical play of the "angry young men" movement in British theatre, which was marked by working class authors writing plays about their disillusionment with British society. In Osbome'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” (p.68). 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 fervour 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. These nostalgic feelings 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 of 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 citizensna strong and angry voice in Jimmy Porter. 

THE THEME OF GENDER

During World War II, many British women had stepped into new roles in the labour 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 mucho 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 classness, and masculinity with lower classness. 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 armour.” But, Alison says that “his armour 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 himn. 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 fernale surgeons, because they'd flip men's gutsbout of their bodies as carelessly as they toss their make-up 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."

  MUDDLED GENDER ROLES

We have muddled gender roles in the play. 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 serious and upper-class medium of theater. 

THE THEME OF SEXISM

Readers can find ample evidence that suggests the relationship between Alison and Jimmy, and the short-lived one between Jimmy and Helena, is rife with sexist undertones. In the first act alone, Jimmy begins an angry tirade about Alison and women in general. Jimmy's anger and hatred is directed at women in general. The examples in the play that are taken to represent a greater sexism on Jimmy's part are his relationships with Alison and then Helera, the most striking point of which is that after a time, Helena stands silently and emotionally passively at the ironing board on Sunday night just like Alison used to do. The similarity between Helena and Alison is that they are both from the upper class and are both religious with "establishment" church affiliations. Jimmy's great criticism is against the satisfied, unthinking privilege given to and assumed by the upper classes who have no need to think or be intelligent, as Nigel represents, or feel, as Alison and Helena represent. When Jimmy's treatment of Alison and Helena are seen from a 1950s perspective as representative of Jimmy's hatred of a class division that defrauds individuals - on both sides of the class divide - of their humanity, the undertones of sexism take a secondary position. 

THE THEME OF ALIENATION AND LONELINESS

Alienation is an important theme in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Jimmy Porter, the main character of the play, typifies the overeducated, underemployed worker. He cannot reconcile himself to upper classes. He is a social rebel. Though he is a graduate, he is earning his livelihood by running a sweet stall with the help of Cliff. He has tried his hand at many other occupations but he could not stick to any one of them. He is dissatisfied with his wife because the society has not treated him well. He feels that he is unwanted by society because he has been unable to find a suitable career. So he may be regarded as a maladjusted person both at home and outside. Jimmy Porter spoke for a large segment of the British population in 1956 when he ranted about his alienation from a society in which he was denied any meaningful role. According to Jimmy, Britain has lost its soul, and they are living in an "American age" that has left men like Jimmy Porter behind. He feels alienated from the Establishment, the upper-crust of British society, which has shut him out of the most lucrative jobs because of his class

He graduated from a "white-tile" university, one of the newer and least prestigious universities in Great Britain, so his education, as good as it ended up being, doesn't mean much to the British Establishment. He also feels alienated from his wife, Alison, whose father is a colonel and whose brother is now a

member of parliament. He regularly berates Alison, characterizing himself as the only thinking person in the household. He has even given her a nickname: Lady Pusillanimous. This nickname emphasizes both Jimmy's intelligence (via his vocabulary) and Alison's timid nature. It also suggests that at least part of Jimmy's alienation stems from his behaviour, not his socioeconomic status, and that he might have an easier time connecting with people if he treated them with respect.

THE THEME OF ANGER AND HATRED

Jimmy Porter's anger dominates the play. He operates out of a deep well of anger. His anger is directed at those he loves because they refuse to have strong feelings, at a society that did not fulfil promises of opportunity, and at those who smugly assume their places in the social and power structure and who do not care for others. This theme is pervasive, affecting the plot, the characters, and the tone of the entire play. In the first act for instance, Jimmy's anger causes him to lash out at his wife and his business partner, Cliff, calling them boring, stupid, and unambitious, in large part because they don't share his rage and frustration. Like many working-class men, Jimmy feels overlooked by the Establishment, shut out by polite society, and relegated to menial jobs where he is underutilized and underpaid. He also lashes out in anger because of his deeply felt helplessness. When he was ten years old he watched his idealist father dying for a year from wounds received fighting for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, his father talking for hours, "pouring out all that was left of his life to one bewildered little boy." He says, "You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it."

THE THEME OF THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN

Osborne's play was the first to explore the theme of the "Angry Young Man." This term describes a generation of post-World War II artists and working class men who generally subscribed to leftist, sometimes anarchist, politics and social views. According to cultural critics, these young men were not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals angry at a post-Victorian Britain that refused to acknowledge their social and class alienation. Anyone in the "angry young man" leaning, due to their low social class, would be "required" to dislike anyone of upper-class heritage. Jimmy Porter is often considered to be literature's seminal example of the angry young man. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that he believes have kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison.

THE THEME OF APATHY AND PASSIVENESS

Although Alison is the direct target of Jimmy's criticism, her apathy and passiveness are just the immediate representation of the attitudes that Jimmy sees as discouragement in the whole society. It is the satisfied flashiness of society that infuriates Jimmy. The Church too, comes under attack in part because it has lost relevance to contemporary life. Jimmy sees the Church as providing an easy escape from facing the pain of living. For Helena it spells a safe habitat, one that defines right and wrong for her, although she seems perfectly willing to ignore its limits against adultery when it suits her. Of course, Jimmy has also slipped into a world of sameness as illustrated by the three Sunday evenings spent reading the newspapers and even the direct replacement of Alison at the ironing board with Helena. 

THEMES OF CLASS CONFLICT

Jimmy comes from the working class and although some of his mother's relatives are "pretty posh," Cliff tells Alison that Jimmy hates them as much as he hates her family. It is the class system, with its built-in special treatment for those at the top and exclusion from all power for those at the bottom, that makes Jimmy's existence seem so meaningless. He has a university degree, but it is not from the "right" university. It is Nigel, the "straight-backed, chinless wonder” who went to Sandhurst, who is stupid and

insensitive to the needs of others, who has no beliefs of his own, who is already a Member of Parliament, who will make it to the top." Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, is not shown unsympathetically, but her mother is portrayed as a class-conscious monster who used every method she could to prevent Alison from marrying Jimmy. The only person for whom Jimmy's love is apparent is Hugh's working-class mother. Jimmy likes Cliff because, as Cliff himself says, “I'm common."

THE THEME OF IDENTITY CRISIS

While Jimmy criticizes everyone around him to open themselves to honest feeling, he is trapped in his own problems of social identity. He doesn't seem to fit in anywhere. As Colonel Redfern points out, operating a sweet-stall seems an odd occupation for an educated young man. Jimmy sees suffering the pain of life as the only way to find, or "earn," one's true identity. Alison does finally suffer the immeasurable loss of her unborn child and comes back to Jimmy, who seems to embrace her. Helena discovers that she can be happy only if she lives according to her perceived principles of right and wrong. Colonel Redfern is caught out of his time. The England he left as a young army officer no longer exists. Jimmy calls him “just one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can't understand why the sun isn't shining anymore,” (p. 54) and the Colonel agrees. Cliff does seem to have a strong sense of who he is, accepts that, and will move on with his life. 

THE THEME OF LOSS OF CHILDHOOD

The idea of a lost childhood impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison Porter as a the ne. Osborne uses specific examples like the death of Jimmy's father when Jimmy was only ten, and how he was forced to watch the physical and mental demise of the man, to demonstrate the way in which Timmy is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. Alison's loss of childhood is best seen in the way, at she was forced to grow up too fast by marrying Jimmy. Her youth is wasted in the anger and abuse that her husband levels upon her. Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has experienced this same loss of childhood innocence. Osborne uses the examples of World War, the development of the atomic bomb, and the decline of the British Empire to show how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other generations were able to maintain. 

THE THEME OF  REAL LIFE

In the play, Jimmy Porter is consumed with the desire to live a more real and full life. He compares this burning desire to the empty actions and attitudes of others. At first, he generalizes this emptiness by criticizing the lax writing and opinions of those in the newspapers. He then turns his angry gaze to those around him and close to him, Alison, Helena, and Cliff. Osborne's argument in the play for a real life is one in which men are allowed to feel a full range of emotions. The most real of these emotions is anger and Jimmy believes that this anger is his way of truly living. Jimmy's desire for a real life is an attempt to restore raw emotion to the theatre which hitherto had subsumed the emotions of characters in British theatre and rendered them less realistic.

THE THEME OF SLOTH IN BRITISH CULTURE

Jimmy Porter compares his quest for a more vibrant and emotional life to the slothfulness of the world around him. It is important to note that Jimmy does not see the world around him as dead, but merely asleep in some fundamental way. This is a fine line that Osborne walks throughout the play. Jimmy never argues that there is a nihilism within British culture. Instead, he sees a kind of slothfulness of character.

His anger is an attempt to awaken those around him from this cultural sleep. This sluggishness of emofion is best seen in the relationship between Alison and Cliff. Alison describes her relationship with Cliff as 'comfortable. They are physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, but neither seems to want to take their passion to another level of intimacy. In this way, their relationship is lazy and idle. They cannot awaken enough passion to complete their affair. Jimmy seems to subconsciously understand this, which is the reason he is not jealous of their affection towards one another. 

THE THEMES OF THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The character of Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, represents the decline of and nostalgia for the British Empire. The Colonel had been stationed for many years in India, a symbol of Britain's imperial reach into the world. The Edwardian age which corresponded to Britain's height of power, had been the happiest of his life. His nostalgia is representative of the denial that Osborne sees in the psyche of the British people. The world has moved on into an American age, he argues, and the people of the nation cannot understand why they are no longer the world's greatest power.  

THE THEME OF THE KITCHEN SINK DRAMA

Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Realism, in British theatre, was first experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. This genre attempted to capture the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically reflected the ordinary drama of ruling class British society. According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century the genre of realism had become tired and unimaginative. 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 dilemmas in this time period. Most importantly, it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that festered just below the surface of elite British culture.

 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.

Symbols In Look Back In Anger

 Settings of look back in anger 

Look Back in Anger takes place in the Porters' one-room flat, a fairly large attic room. The furniture is simple and rather old: a double bed, dressing table, book shelves, chest of drawers, dining table, and three chairs, two shabby leather arm chairs. The drab setting of the play emphasizes the contrast between the idealistic Jimmy and the dull reality of the world surrounding him. The apartment is located in the Midlands, a region in the centre of Britain sometime during the early 1950s. The play opens in April, which is a reference to T.S. Eliot's line from The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month."  Eliot is mentioned several other times in the play and is used as a definitive English cultural reference for Jimmy.

ENGLISH MIDLANDS

English Midlands are the central region of England in which the play is set. Midlands counties contain the country's major industrial cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Leeds. Factories dominate their urban landscapes, and their residents are largely working-class. Historically, the Midlands have often been viewed with condescension by more cosmopolitan residents of London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Relatively few literary works prior to the 1950s were set in the Midlands. 

PORTERS' FLAT

Porters' flat is described as "a fairly large attic room, at the top of a large Victorian house," the one-room apartment of Jimmy and Alison Porter, is an example of the trend derided as "kitchen-sink realism" by some critics during the 1950s and 1960s. In stark contrast to the stylish and elegant upper-and middle-class settings of then-popular plays by Noël Coward and others, Osborne's setting is economically downscale. Its furniture is "simple and rather old," including two "shabby" armchairs. A double bed takes up much of the space along the back wall. The mere presence of the young married couple's bed on stage connotes a certain frankness about sexuality that was considered daring for its time - as does

Alison's  being seen wearing only a slip during the second act. Books crowd the shelves and cover the  chest of drawers, indicating that Jimmy Porter, though of working-class background, is educated, in contrast to virtually all working-class characters depicted in literature earlier. The fact that on Sundays he reads the "only two posh papers," which are strewn about the room, also indicates his level of intelligence and interest in the larger world, though he complains that the London-based book reviews all sound the same. The ironing-board symbolizes Alison's unfortunate status in the marriage and the domestic subordination of women in the 1950s, though her parents are more middle-class than her husband's. 

UNIVERSITY

University. It is an unnamed institution of higher learning that Jimmy apparently attended but left early. He alludes to a university that is "not even red brick, but white tile." In contrast to Oxford and Cambridge, where England's social and intellectual elites are educated amid buildings of centuries-old gray stone, "red brick" universities were primarily twentieth century institutions that were morenaccessible to the public. White tiles are associated with public toilets.