harold_pinter

1

Rituals of Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter’s 1960’s plays The Lover and The Homecoming are narratives that represent changing roles for women in modern society and the decline of patriarchal family traditions. This essay will compare and contrast these two plays and the ways in which they illustrate masculine and feminine relationships, class and family structures in British society, and social attitudes regarding sex. It will also illustrate how these social concepts have changed within the progressive era of the 1960’s. Though oftentimes accused of misogyny, Pinter’s plays represent a change in both the theatre and a change in society. They present women playing games and roles of power and this essay will explore how these power games and social changes intersect in both of these intricate pieces of drama.

Harold Pinter began writing in the late 1950’s after years working as a reparatory actor. Since his first play The Room, his work has displayed a very tense hostile environment, where characters show a sense of alienation, a cruel sarcasm, and a deeply concealed violence that sometimes erupts in short spasms. A distinctive style has emerged out of his plays, a sort of heightened reality with sparse, almost staccato dialogue in which the silences punctuate the action and create a thick unspoken violence in the ambience. This has been termed as the famous “Pinter Pause” remarked upon by critics of the theatre.

During the time of Pinter’s emergence as a playwright, British society was in a revolutionary upheaval both in the political realm and in the theatre. The 1960’s were a particularly volatile time in Post War culture. Old structures of power were being

2

questioned, especially the calcified class system of British culture and the place of women within those structures. Traditional roles for men were also being challenged and forms of sexuality, once pushed to the periphery of the culture, were now beginning to achieve attention in the mainstream.

Also, Pinter’s work is representative of changing styles in the arts with the advent of Post-Modernism, a movement which denies the notion of a universal truth or metanarrative. A meta-narrative is any over-arching religious or political philosophy that defines the story of a culture. In modernist writing, using Shaw for an example, one can find within his politically motivated plays a universal truth. Pygmalion is an example of this, with the notion that social class and education creates the person rather than internal virtue. Shaw’s Modernism was steeped in moralizing. Another meta-narrative would be the superiority over Marxist concepts over Capitalist philosophy or vice versa. PostModernism prefers ambiguity, pastiche, and micro-narratives to meta-narratives. A person’s ethnic or sexual identity and their personal story as a micro-narrative, for example, may be an Other within the confines of a meta-narrative of a culture. Postmodernism would prefer that micro-narrative. Overall, Post-Modernism questions truth in general. Modernism itself presented unity (the play set in a room, god, humanism, realism, etc.) as its basis. Austin Quigley asserts that “like Modernism in general, Post-Modernism is, of course, constituted by its own variants, variants which we can heuristically characterize but not exclusively define. What is at issue here is not whether Pinter to be Post-Modern must invoke pop art and deploy multi-media nor whether he is prepared to abandon the dramatic text in favor of performance art of scenic imagery and ritualistic gesture, but the contribution he might make to our understanding

3

of Post-Modernism and the kind of political play that could be consistent with it. In Pinter’s plays the political, when it becomes overt, is always one component of situations of larger social complexity, and as the political problems emerge from no clearly defined institutional base, their resolution or evasion depends on no particular political program.” (Quigley, pg. 15.)

The Lover and The Homecoming both written in the same period of Pinter’s career, grasp with the changing sexual mores of the 1960’s and mark a distinct move in Western drama toward postmodernism and the removal of the meta-narrative. In these plays, binary power conflicts emerge without solid resolution, which is indicative of a nascent postmodern style. This does not mean that the plays are without strong political content, because like much of contemporary postmodernism, these two plays merge the personal with the political with strong tendencies toward ambiguity. The plays are rituals that use heightened language, and in the case of The Lover, take on almost a meta-theatre conceptualization.

In The Lover and The Homecoming, both Sarah and Ruth are playing games of power as they try to achieve autonomy in their relationships. In The Lover, for instance, an animalistic male quality is unleashed as the middle-class household and its morals are shattered by the actions of the female character. The women in these plays subdue male violence with the force of their intellect ability to change. Old patriarchal ideas of man seem to be crumbling and the new power structure seems to be put in place. Ruth in The Homecoming, is a gentile woman married to a Jewish professor, and she returns with him to his working-class family in Hackney. There she takes over the household with her sexuality and gains power and autonomy in the process.

4

In his 1963 play The Lover; Pinter gives us the story of Richard and Sarah, a suburban middle-class couple. Richard is the typical thirty-something commuter, seemingly cold and detached. Sarah is the traditional housewife. At the beginning of the play, we see Sarah cleaning the house with a feather duster, setting the tableau as an icon of domesticity. Richard enters the scene, destabilizing the middle-class veneer by uttering amiably “Is your lover coming today?” (I, Pinter, pg. 161)

Richard is leaving for work, knowing that his wife will be alone in the afternoon with another man. Here, as Victor Cahn asserts “one tension of the play is established: that between uncivilized passion and constricting social decorum.” (Cahn pg. 44) Here, Pinter sets up a world of seemingly blissful bourgeois tranquility and then immediately shatters it by allowing in a new, more primal reality.

After this short scene, we see Sarah alone, mixing a drink, wearing the same clothing as the first scene, with one exception: she is wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes. This is the first break in the realistic image that Pinter sets, letting the secrets of their relationship come to the surface. This is the first instance where Sarah dons the costume of the whore archetype. Richard comes home, sets his briefcase down, and is brought a drink by Sarah as he reads the paper. The conversation begins with polite chatter:

SARAH: Tired?

RICHARD: Just a little.

SARAH: Bad traffic?

RICHARD: No. Quite good traffic actually. Very smooth. (Pinter, pg. 162.) Again, Pinter begins the scene with a display of traditional domestic tranquility-

the husband returns from work, the wife provides the drink and the meal. Everything

5

seems to be in balance: husband and wife are in their place, and the evening routine is starting. However, Richard shatters the illusion with the question: “Did you show him the hollyhocks?” This surprises Sarah, and it is possibly the first time Richard has been this inquisitive in regards to Sarah’s meetings with her lover.

The conversation continues, as Richard delves deeper and deeper into Sarah’s secret relations, first by making small talk about the blinds, and the sun making the room hot, which is a subtle reference to the nature of Sarah’s encounters with her lover. Sarah becomes increasingly unnerved by this exchange:

RICHARD: Oh by the way...I rather wanted to ask you something.

SARAH: What?

RICHARD: Does it ever occur to you that while you’re spending the afternoon being unfaithful to me I’m sitting at a desk going through balance sheets and graphs?

SARAH: What a funny question.

RICHARD: No, I’m curious.

SARAH: You’ve never asked me that before.

RICHARD: I’ve always wanted to know. (Pinter, pg. 165.)

Richard seems at this point in the play, to be displaying a feeling of jealously towards Sarah’s relationship with her other man. At this point, the ritual of the play involves simple domestic chores and amiable chatter, but then the dialogue about the hollyhocks and then the various questions about the nature of Sarah’s relationship with her lover seem almost rehearsed by the couple. The interrogation is more of the ritual’s opening incantation, taking the game to the next level. Richard, through his emotion and

6

prodding, drives the action and the change. Sarah responds to his prodding with the line “but it’s you I love.” Her dispassionate response reveals an individual who has created a very complex role in this situation in order to fit her sexuality into the bourgeois morality of marriage. In these passages Sarah “resembles Ruth in The Homecoming for whom sex is no more than a business, and who manages simultaneously to conceal or control all emotion.” (Cahn, pg. 44)

As the ritual proceeds to the next level of conflict, Sarah presses Richard about his mistress. At first Richard takes this as a surprise, but chooses instead to play along with Sarah’s questioning. Richard responds to Sarah’s questions about his mistress by responding “But I haven’t got a mistress. I’m well acquainted with a whore, but I haven’t got a mistress. There’s a world of difference.” (Pinter, page 167.)

At this next crescendo in the ritual, Richard reveals to Sarah his need for an animalistic connection with another woman, free from the confines of monogamy and socially prescribed norms. Here, the play begins to focus on contractual relations between characters, a focus of much of postmodern analysis. “Political thinking for Pinter audiences involves not so much questions occupying the right or left in the political spectrum or commitments to one political party or another, but a requirement to explore the complexities of local social exchange in terms of local social contracts, both those invoked by the characters and those emerging from their interaction.” (Quigley, pg. 15.) Here, Austin Quigley refers to Pinter’s use of money and investments to negotiate emotional gift-exchange in interpersonal social arrangements. Ruth negotiating her salary as a prostitute, for example, and Richard and Sarah negotiating love through the conflict in their sex-game is all part of the way the conflict unfolds in this postmodern

7

play. Within these conflicts over contractual exchange, raw emotions come to the surface. Rather than make an overt political statement with The Lover, Pinter illustrates in these ambiguities situations where every sexual act contains elements of the political.

At the end of The Lover, when Sarah is confronted by Richard and forced into changing or ending the game and she revolts, she is holding to the contract she has created in the household. Quigley continues by saying, “It is noteworthy, in this respect, to see how often the relationship between characters becomes explicitly contractual, as personal, family and professional concerns so often intermingle and collide. Sarah, in

The Lover, resists Richard’s attempts to introduce afternoon games into their evening life by insisting, unsuccessfully, on their formal status.” (Quigley, pg. 15)

As the play continues, Richard and Sarah in their bedroom, have an almost blasé’ conversation in regards to each other’s extramarital partners:

SARAH: Richard?

RICHARD: Hmn?

SARAH: Do you ever think about me at all...when you’re with her? RICHARD: Oh, a little. Not much.

Pause.

We talk about you.

SARAH: You talk about me with her?

RICHARD: Occasionally. It amuses her.

SARAH: Amuses her?

RICHARD: (Choosing a book.) Mmnn.

SARAH: How...do you talk about me?

8

RICHARD: Delicately. We discuss you as we would play an antique music box. We play it for our titillation, whenever desired.

Pause.

SARAH: I can’t pretend the picture gives me great pleasure.

RICHARD: It wasn’t intended to. The pleasure is mine.

SARAH: Yes, I see that of course.

RICHARD: (Sitting on the bed.) Surely your own afternoon pleasures are sufficient for you, aren’t they? You don’t expect extra pleasure from my pastimes, do you?

SARAH: No, not at all.

RICHARD: Then why all the questions?

SARAH: Well, it was you who started it. Asking me so many questions about...my side of it. You don’t normally do that.

RICHARD: Objective curiosity, that’s all. (Pinter pgs. 170-171)

In this exchange, it seems as though Sarah and Richard have reconciled their need to find sexual gratification outside the confines of marriage. As Sarah remarks before bedtime “I think things are perfectly balanced, Richard,” (Pinter, pg. 173) the audience is set up for a surprise. The next morning after Richard leaves for work, Sarah gets ready to meet her lover. The doorbell rings and the milkman John answers. This character, put in to have a third character in the program, acts as a red herring to set the stage for a twist in the play. The milkman’s appearance according to Cahn “suggests the blandness of Sarah’s existence outside her life with Richard.” (Cahn, pg. 46.) This scene also illustrates the vulnerability of Sarah’s home life in her secluded house. The milkman’s

9

question “Cream?” can be read as a sexual double entendre, and sets the tableau with the threatening ambience. The milkman’s come-ons represent “life outside her marriage (in which) Sarah must be demure and accept the milkman’s attitude which borders on insolence. Only with Richard can Sarah release her more passionate, more powerful aspect. Thus we are again reminded that her marital arrangement satisfies her.” (Cahn, pg 46.)

After the milkman leaves, the doorbell rings again. Sarah opens it, and it is Richard, wearing a suede jacket and no tie, his outfit changed from before. Richard goes to the cabinet, pulls out a bongo drum, and proceeds to engage Sarah in an erotic game. It is obvious at this point that Richard is the lover as Sarah calls him by the name of “Max.”

After playing with the drum together on the chaise lounge, Richard plays at being both a sexual aggressor in a park and then after Sarah fights him off, plays at being a gentle park-keeper. Then as part of the game he switches from the park-keeper back to the aggressor. At this point he takes Sarah underneath the table and performs sexual acts with her.

All the stage directions in this section of the script are highly ritualized, the pauses suggesting an almost rehearsed reaction between Richard and Sarah as characters. As in much of absurdist drama such as the works of Jean Genet, characters play at being other characters, adding many layers to the actor’s performance. This heightens the language and the mood and adds another ritualized element for the actors who take part in it. It is as though the characters of Richard and Sarah are like a primordial couple, playing a game of power and submission.

10

To interpret Pinter solely through psychology does any reading of this play a disservice. Each ritualized action embedded in Pinter’s domestic black comedies is there to speculate upon human behavior rather than comment upon it. The audience is “given no psychological explanations for the couple’s role playing and sexual games in the play; their odd behavior is in no respect treated as a study in neurosis. Rather, Pinter makes his modern British suburban couple enact their ritual of love in counterpoint with the ritual of their married life together, the alternation of roles suggesting at once the fragmented nature of modern life and the archetypal, eternally divided role of the female.” (Burkman, pg. 105.)

Sarah and Richard seem to be reenacting a Dionysian ritual, beginning with the bongo as the mating standoff, but when Sarah denies “Max” his cigarette, Sarah denies him his turn taking the sacrament (the symbol that signifies phallic power,) thus changing the ritual and taking the power herself. “Max’s” need to soften himself by assuming the role of the less aggressive park keeper, representing the castrated male in this new power dynamic in this section of action.

Pinter’s characters in this play represent archetypal roles: Richard as both the hunter and the subservient prey (such as the scene where “Max” transforms from the aggressive stranger to the passive park-keeper,) and Sarah as the mother and the whore. In Richard’s performance as Max the park keeper, Sarah finds the same disgust at Max’s timidity as she did at Max’s behavior as the aggressive stranger. Just as Sarah vacillates between the archetypes of mother and whore she utilizes her power by vacillating between victim and femme fatale. Richard and Sarah’s game is one of master and