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Look Back in Anger

by John Osborne

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Discussion Topic

The feminist perspective and attitude towards women in "Look Back in Anger"

Summary:

In "Look Back in Anger," the feminist perspective reveals the struggles and limitations women face in a patriarchal society. The play portrays female characters grappling with societal expectations and personal desires, highlighting issues of gender inequality and the quest for identity and autonomy amidst oppressive structures.

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What is the feminist perspective in "Look Back in Anger"?

Though John Osborne's play represented a new level of realism, occurring during the same period as Tennessee Williams's and Arthur Miller's work in the U.S., much of Look Back in Anger can be seen as presenting a sexist viewpoint that's probably only partly intended as ironic. Jimmy is abusive to both his wife Alison and her friend Helena. That he gets away with this behavior is due to the social norms of the time, but it's also mixed with class resentment. Jimmy's rebellion against the middle class and against the establishment as a whole seems to be directed chiefly against women. He's been to university but chooses to make his living running a market stall, and at home he takes out his frustrations on his wife, in effect blaming her for supposedly being the embodiment of the middle-class values he hates. It's a case of displaced aggression.

Though he is obviously attracted to her friend Helena, he takes it out on her as well, obnoxiously blaring his trumpet while she's staying at their flat. It not only seems the height of his callousness to have an affair with his wife's best friend; it's also another stage in his rebellion, in the playing out of his anger. But it also shows his contempt for women. Osborne can be criticized for showing Jimmy as a kind of "hero" (or anti-hero) in spite of his abusiveness and misogyny. Most of us today would feel little if any sympathy for a character such as Jimmy. But one can also read the play as showing that both women in the story, in being treated this way by Jimmy, are victims of the same class system against which he rebels. Depending—as in all drama—on acting and direction, Look Back in Anger can be seen as a powerful feminist statement.

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What is the feminist perspective in "Look Back in Anger"?

When regarding a text from a feminist perspective one must consider the following things:

1. Does the text depict equality on the social level?

2. Is an attempt made to validate the nature of the woman, the essence of makes a woman a woman as distinguished from the nature of a man?

3. Do religious undertones, or overtones, accept women as being equal to that of men?

4. Is the woman depicted in the text seen as an equal by the other characters and the reader alike?

Any text could be looked at from a feminist perspective. What this means is the reader is looking to see if any women portrayed in the text are treated as equally as the men, their roles are just as important as a man's, and if the nature of the woman validated.

In regards to the play "Look Back in Anger", as with any text, one could find examples which would would show how the text has definable moments where sexism is rabid.

One of the most prominent depictions of the belittling of a woman happens when Jimmy tells Alison that the only way she could be a human would be to suffer. Here, Jimmy does not recognize Alison's nature of being a woman and states that she is not even a human being. Here, Jimmy has taken away Alison's identity of even being a person. Many times throughout the text, Jimmy lashes out at Alison for his inability to recognize her nature as a woman.

According to eNotes' themes section on the play, the theme of sexism is based upon the fact that Jimmy is " a misogamist and Alison a mere cipher struggling to view the world through Jimmy's eyes."

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What is the attitude towards women in Look Back in Anger?

At least in its outward message, Osborne's approach toward women does not come off well by modern standards and even by the standards of his own time, the 1950s. It would be difficult to make a case that the protagonist Jimmy Porter is not a misogynist. He is abusive to his wife, Alison, and her friend Helena. The assumption, however, is that Jimmy is so magnetic and forceful in his supposed masculinity and assertiveness that Helena succumbs to him and thus begins an affair with her best friend's husband.

The only rationale for the dynamic Osborne sets up is that class conflict overrides the gender issue to the point where Jimmy is somehow justified in his actions because he is fighting this class battle. Much is made of Alison's upper-middle-class background. In some sense, then, she is reflexively the "enemy" given Jimmy's working-class roots.

Yet other interpretations are possible. We can view the play as satiric, in which case Osborne's intention is to parody both classism—in this case both the classism that discriminates against working people and also the reflexive dislike of the bourgeoisie by both the working class and by intellectuals in general and left-wing people—and sexism, which is here shown as a kind of corollary of class conflict.

It's unlikely Osborne intended Jimmy as an admirable or sympathetic character. Though his angry-young-man rage became the hallmark of a school of literature indelibly linked to its time and place, Osborne's theme is, arguably, an expression of this visceral emotion and simultaneously a critique of it. Both Alison and Helena are victims of Jimmy's out of control, obnoxious rage. One has to wonder, however, why the women are portrayed essentially as weak characters if Osborne's message was not one in which women are demeaned, though admittedly in an ambiguous or ambivalent way.

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What are the feminist perspectives in Look Back in Anger?

I think it's hard to find any strong perspectives of Feminism in this play.  I am sorry.  I think there are some tendencies of characters that represent glimpses or "hopes" of Feminism, but that might be it for me.  The first would be that there is an emotional reclamation of voice that Alison undergoes.  When she returns from her father's, she is revealed to have understood more of her own emotional state and her own emotional sense of self.  The miscarriage and time away have allowed her to develop this new conception.  She seemed to have emerged from the emotionally "wet" standard she held in her marriage and time with Jimmy.   This claiming of emotional identity is a critical component in Feminism, for it breaks free from patriarchal and "accepted" notions of identity in place of a free and lasting one created by self.  I think this represents a very strong element of Feminism.  If Alison's emotional catharsis is evident, to a lesser extent, Helena undergoes a similar evolution.  Helena schemed to usurp Aliison's role at the at the start of the third act, she has assumed this function in Jimmy's life.  Her lack of solidarity to a fellow woman, Allison, is about as anti- feminist as one can get.  Yet, she does atone for this in her understanding that what she did was wrong and that she should leave in Act III.  This solidarity shown to Allison, a fellow woman, represents the Feminist desire to create community and strength with one another, as opposed to being divided by the larger social order.

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