There
are many themes are found in the John Osborn’s play “Look Back in Anger” Some
majors themes are going to be discussed
below.
Class Struggle and
Education:
Class
struggle or Class consciousness is also a dominating theme in the play. Jimmy's
anger is directed towards the member of the upper class to which his wife
belongs. He wages a constant battle against the upper class and treats his wife
as a "hostage". Through Jimmy, the underprivileged British youth
responds to the structure and spirit of the Welfare state. By bullying his wife
he wants to take revenge on the upper middle class which he detests. He wanted
the "hostess" to submit to his class culture and to do so he expects
her to disown her past through a purgatory of suffering and humiliation. Jimmy
regards himself as the representative of the "working class" On
behalf of the working class he declares a war on the upper middle class. The
target of his attack is Alison's mother who represents the upper middle class.
He seems to take pleasure on attacking Alison's mother in the harshest possible
language. Jimmy together with Hugh raids the houses of Alison's friends and
relatives in an attempt to humiliate Alison and which they consider to be a war
tactic. He is inspiring in his attack on his wife's family, and Helena too
becomes the target of his vicious attack some time. His grudges against the
upper class comes from his feeling of being deprived of a suitable job in spite
of being highly educated. The intellectual genius in him rebels against what he
feels in a social injustice.
Suffering and Anger vs.
Complacency:
Suffering
and anger are highly associated with lower class in the play, and complacency with
upper class. Jimmy believes that lower class people, who have suffered as he
has, have an insight on the world that upper class people lack. He berates
Alison for lacking “enthusiasm” and “curiosity.” He suggests that her complacency
makes her less human, less connected to life than he is. He sees this suffering
and anger as an important part of his identity. At a climactic moment in the play,
Alison says of Jimmy, “don’t try and take his suffering away from him—he’d be lost
without it.”
In
the end, Alison finally experiences the suffering that Jimmy thinks she has
been lacking: she loses their child to a miscarriage. This, she believes,
forces her to experience the fire of emotion that Jimmy had always wished she
had. But the play leaves us unsure whether their suffering will actually lead
to any redemptive knowledge.
The
circular structure of the play—the beginning of the first and third acts mirror
each other—undermines the sense that Jimmy’s life is really as dynamic as he
suggests that it is. He seems to be stuck in a routine. Osborne’s voice in the
play, seen in his stage directions, also tells us that Jimmy’s fiery energy can
be self-defeating. In his first stage direction describing Jimmy, Osborne
writes, “to be as vehement as he is to be almost non-committal.” When Alison
finally breaks down and tells him that she wants to be “corrupt and futile,”
Jimmy can only “watch her helplessly.” The play ultimately suggests that
Jimmy’s anger is an expression of his social discontentment and suffering, but
not an answer to his problems. He doesn’t channel it in any political direction,
joining a party or holding meetings or organizing his similarly angry friends, or
even conceive of any way that it can be channeled. Though it springs from a
moral fervor, it dissolves into a diffuse attack on many fronts, rather than
pointedly targeting and taking down any oppressive systems.
Disillusionment and
Nostalgia:
Look
Back in Anger is the archetypical play of the “angry young men” movement in British
theater, which was marked by working class authors writing plays about their disillusionment
with British society. In Osborne’s play, we see this in Jimmy’s sense of
political emptiness. Jimmy complains that, in the Britain of the 1950s, “there
aren’t any good, brave causes left.” ”Helena observes that he was born in the
wrong time—“he thinks he’s still in the middle of the French Revolution.”
Jimmy’s angry fervor is out of place in modern society, and this leaves him
feeling useless and adrift.
Other
characters also feel a sense of nostalgia for the past, but for different reasons:
they long for an era characterized by a leisurely life for rich Britons and greater
worldwide power for the British Empire. Many of these themes of nostalgia
revolve around Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, who had served in the British
army in colonial India. Jimmy says that Colonel Redfern is nostalgic for the
“Edwardian” past — early 20th century England, before World War I, when things
were supposedly simpler and more peaceful.
In
the end, the play argues that the characters’ disillusionment is legitimate. Post-war
Britain was marked by a stagnant economy and declining world power, partly due
to the fact that it no longer had many lucrative colonies around the world
(India, where Colonel Redfern served, gained its independence in 1947). The play argues that these factors have left
the country’s young people adrift and disempowered. Jimmy’s anger is therefore
justified.
Both
Jimmy and Colonel Redfern, from their different places in society, have nostalgia
for a time when Britain was more powerful on the world stage. The passing away
of Britain’s imperial power is thus painted in a negative light—and though Look
Back in Anger voices a revolutionary social critique of class conditions in
England, it stops short of criticizing Britain’s exploitation of its colonies.
Instead, it argues that the decline of the empire has led to the disenfranchisement
of the men of Osborne’s generation, and gives those disenfranchised citizens a
strong and angry voice in Jimmy Porter.
Gender :
During
World War II, many British women had stepped into new roles in the labor force.
After the war ended, most were expected to move back into their traditional roles
in the household, but many still held jobs outside the home. The play takes a conflicted
view of gender that parallels these shifting dynamics. On the one hand, Jimmy’s
angry, destructive, and typically masculine energy drives much of the action and
dialogue. On the other hand, women are given agency, and female characters act
in their own interests, independently of men (most notably, both Alison and Helena
leaves Jimmy). Femininity in the play is highly associated with upper class,
and masculinity with lower class. This leads to clashes between the genders
that also have an economic dimension. Sticking to conventional gender roles
means sticking to the propriety and politeness of British society (which also
means acting along with your class role). For example, in stealing Alison away
from her family to marry her, Jimmy took on the traditional male role of a
“knight in shining armor.” But, Alison says that “his armor didn’t really shine
much,” subverting this traditional gender role by adding a class dimension to
it. Jimmy was almost heroic, but not quite. There is clearly something attractive
in Jimmy’s virile, lower class masculinity, as first Alison and then Helena are
drawn to him sexually. Yet there is something destructive in it as well, as
both also end up leaving him. Further complicating the gender dynamics, women,
too, are portrayed as having a destructive power over men. Jimmy says he’s
thankful that there aren’t more female surgeons, because they’d flip men’s guts
out of their bodies as carelessly as they toss their makeup instruments down on
the table. He likens Alison’s sexual passion to a python that eats its prey whole.
At the end of the play, he says that he and Cliff will both inevitably be “butchered
by women.” The muddled gender roles in
the play add to the sense of realism that made it such a sensation when it was
first performed. Characters defy social convention. Alison disobeys her parents
to marry Jimmy. Helena slaps Jimmy at the very start of their affair, and later
walks out on him. An unmarried man (Cliff) lives with a married couple. He
flirts with Alison, but Jimmy doesn’t particularly mind. The fluid and shifting
gender roles in the play reflect the more fluid realities of post-War British
society, portrayed for the first time in the traditionally staid and
upper-class medium of theater.
Love and Innocence:
Jimmy
believes that love is pain. He scorns Cliff and Alison’s love for each other,
which is a gentle sort of fondness that doesn’t correspond to his own brand of
passionate, angry feeling. When Helena decides, suddenly, to leave him at the
end of the play, Jimmy reacts with scorn and derision. Love, he says, takes
strength and guts. It’s not soft and gentle. To some extent, Jimmy’s definition
of love has to do with the class tensions between Jimmy and Alison. Alison
tells her father that Jimmy married her out of sense of revenge against the
upper classes. In asking her to leave her background, he laid out a challenge
for her to rise to, and their passion was partly based on that sense of
competition between classes. This subverts a traditional love story—Jimmy’s
anger at society overshadowed his feelings for Alison, at least in her eyes.
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.
Historical Importance
(Realism)
The
aim of realistic drama is "putting ourselves and our situation on the
stage". Look Back in Anger appealed to the audience of that time because
of the immediacy of the subject matter. Osborne presented the contemporary
scene on the stage and expressed the disapproval of the post-war youth of the
society through Jimmy. By his command of contemporary idiom, his sharp comments
on subject ranging from the "posh Sunday newspapers and 'white tile'
Umnusities to the Bishops and the Bomb, Osborne caught the fancy of the
audience of his time. The youth of his time identified themselves with Jimmy
Porter, a dissatisfied, disgruntled young man who lashes out at everyone with
his scathing comments. The hero represented the post-war British youth who
looked around the world and found nothing right in it.
