Jimmy's anger seems largely rooted in his war against society and the way he feels that Britain in the 1950s is inimical to working-class people. Jimmy is a bright but bitter man who has educated himself but who still feels lacking. Even at the beginning of the play, he asks his friend Cliff, "Do the Sunday papers make you feel ignorant?" Jimmy is bitter because, as a working-class person, he has not had the opportunity to be educated, and he resents his wife, Alison, as he believes that she has had an easier life as a member of the middle class. As a result of his bitterness, Jimmy is cruel and has a biting sense of humor. His targets include religious figures, such as the Bishop of Bromley, who denies that there are class differences in England, and Alison's relatively posh family.
Jimmy also says he regrets the passing of the...
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English empire in the following excerpt:
Still, even I regret it somehow, phoney or not. If you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's. I must be getting sentimental. But I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you're an American of course.
However, Jimmy does not really have a sense of nostalgia, as he regards the old British upper-crust ways as "phony." He has no real desire to return to the world of yesteryear, so he is not truly nostalgic.
Jimmy is opposed to most everything and everyone. His sense of anger at society is also perhaps a sign of his mental instability and of a larger psychological issue, but he cloaks his anger in resentment about being from the working class stuck in a society that will not change.
England had unseated Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in the wake of a Labour party victory on behalf of the working and lower classes of England's society and thereby ushered in social reforms like nationalized health care and the trumpeted end of the class system of divided privilege and opportunity. In reality, Whig factions imposed other limitations that effectively thwarted the overthrow of social control by the privileged upper classes, and the youthful generation all over England was rankling at the inability to reap the new privileges they had been promised. For example, they now had educational opportunity at newly built universities but no high status jobs were forthcoming.
Jimmy's anger is bred of the resultant social war but it is born of the personal psychological agony of watching his father die over six long months after having gone off in the grand spirit of democratic freedom to help fight in the Spanish Civil War as so many idealistic young English people did. Jimmy says that he learned at the age of ten, while watching over his father's death and keeping him company, to be angry and helpless. It is his helplessness that fires the anger into an invective against his wife and the other people he knows, and especially against the upper classes and their (at least sometimes) unearned and undeserved privilege.
In Look Back in Anger, why is Jimmy angry? Is it nostalgia or social/psychological causes?
Look Back in Anger is a 1956 play written by English playwright John Osborne. Previous plays were dominated by the escapist theatre, which avoided broaching the dark, difficult, and harsh aspects of life. Look Back in Anger instead falls within realism as it examines the breakdown of romantic relationships through the lens of class difference. Alison comes from an upper-middle-class military family, and her family disapproves of her relationship with Jimmy, who comes from a working-class family.
The genesis of Jimmy’s anger is both societal and psychological. In Britain in the 1950s, access to higher education was more common for the working-class; previously, this was reserved just for the higher classes. However, even though Jimmy is highly educated, he does not have many career prospects, and he makes money with a stall in the local market—something that he certainly did not need to go to college to do. So, while higher education was more accessible, the access to high-paying jobs was still reserved for the upper classes. This dynamic lead to the rise of “Angry Young Men.”
The audience can also see how these societal effects impact Jimmy’s psyche, specifically when the audience observes Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern. Redfern admits he is completely out of touch with the modern world. So, Jimmy feels beneath a class of people who are much less in-touch with modern society, yet this lack of knowledge has not loosened their grip on the control of careers and money.
Alison deftly tells her father:
You're hurt because everything's changed and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same.
Jimmy Porter is mainly angry because, despite being incredibly bright and well-educated, he feels there's no place for him in 1950s British society. Although more and more young people from working-class backgrounds were going into higher education at this time, society was still structured quite rigidly, with the best opportunities reserved for the established upper classes.
That would explain why Jimmy is particularly hostile towards his father-in-law, a colonel in the British Army and the very epitome of an Establishment figure. In the person of the colonel, Jimmy sees a representative of everything that's wrong with British society. Despite increased access to higher education and Britain's decline as a world power in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, the Establishment are clinging tenaciously to their control of the country. And it's men and women from Jimmy's social background—intelligent, but not upper class or well-connected—who end up losing out.
The toxic combination of a university education with no real prospects of getting on in life induces a burning rage in Jimmy and countless other "Angry Young Men" just like him. But it also induces a crippling sense of apathy, which prevents Jimmy from doing anything to address his current situation or change his life in any way.
In Look Back in Anger, the reason Jimmy Porter gives for his own anger is that he had to watch over his father's protracted death process from wounds gained in the Spanish Civil War. This suggests that there are twin reasons for Jimmy's anger. The first and deepest is psychological. The other is social.
Jimmy was only ten years old at the time of his father's death. This means that if he watched over his father for one year, his vigil as comforter began when he was nine and ended when he was ten. While he lay slowly dying, Jimmy's father talked and endlessly talked "pouring out all that was left of his life to one bewildered little boy." Watching at a tender age over your father's death is traumatizing in its own right but when that watching means being exposed to desperate discourse of a man trying to reconcile himself with the rationality of irrational ironic events, the trauma is compounded.
His father was a man of high ideals. England had joined with the U.S. and France in signing a Non-Intervention Pact that left the freedom fighters, fighting against Fascist Franco, without aid or reinforcements. Many individuals with noble ideals defied their countries and went to Spain to fight against Franco as mercenaries (Jean Brody in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie advises one of her girl students to go fight in Spain).
This is what Jimmy's father had done. And all that had been gained for him and his family by it was a slow agonized death in front of his young son. We can only guess whether the father's ideas were still in favor of blind idealism or whether his impending death made him angry and disillusioned--or perhaps he talked trying to find his way out of a fog combining both. We do know that it all made Jimmy very confused, very alienated and very angry. We also know that other young men in England had similar feelings to what Jimmy had.
Jimmy's anger then is first personal and psychological with its foundation in youthful trauma of one of the worst kinds. Jimmy's anger is also social because his father's actions, leading to his death, were the direct result of social factors. Furthermore, Jimmy was inculcated one way or another by social precepts because of his father's experience and as the consequence of his vigil.