Look Back In Anger Themes

 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.