harold_pinter

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servant, power and submission, developing “the notion of erotic wish-fulfillment fantasy.” (Esslin, pg. 137.)

After coitus, the stage lights come up and we see Richard as Max, sitting in a chair while Sarah pours tea. “Max” seems despondent, internal. Sarah questions him as to what’s wrong. Richard, after a short exchange asks her “where’s your husband?” This line acts like a break in the new reality created by Richard’s role as “Max.” It becomes obvious that Richard is trying to take back the power in the game:

RICHARD: Why does he put up with it?

SARAH: Oh, shut up.

MAX: I asked you a question. (Pause.)

SARAH: He doesn’t mind. MAX: Doesn’t he? (Slight pause.)

Well, I’m beginning to mind. (Pinter, pg. 180.)

At this juncture it becomes obvious to Sarah that Richard is trying to subvert the game and the ritual as well, so she goes on the offensive. She behaves as though an elaborately crafted alternate reality, one that she has created for herself, is being shattered. It is insinuated that Richard has been playing this game with Sarah for a long period of time before the action of this play. When Richard as Max begins to fight against the game and change the rules, he is trying to reassert his place as the patriarch and the master of the household.

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As this part of the game becomes more complex, and as Richard tries to take back the power, he uses negative verbal insults against the female body, and brings up “the children” as reasons to not carry on the affair in an attempt to reassert traditional values back into the marriage. Sarah, in response, plays up the whore persona she has been cultivating as part of the game. At the end of this scene, Richard tells Sarah “you’re too bony” (Pinter, pg. 184.) saying he prefers plump women. Sarah is broken down with the assault on her body as she lays vulnerable in her position playing the whore. It seems as though Richard is jealous in his role as the lover, thinking that his wife’s marital transgressions exceed the bounds of their arrangement without his knowing. Sarah by playing both roles as mother and whore plays priestess to Richard’s vacillating role as Priest and supplicant. In her mind, she is faithful to her husband, and as part of the ritual, is the fertility goddess and Richard her supplicant. Up until “Max’s” revolt, Richard has played the role of husband and lover, being dutiful to his wife and her needs. Richard on the other hand, sees this arrangement as beyond the social bond, and Richard’s suggestion that he prefers a whore to a married woman, allows him to gain control in the relationship. Burkman states that Richard uses Sarah as if she “were a handy possession” (Burkman, pg. 106) Here, the ritual of Richard as king and Sarah as concubine has kept Sarah in check as to her role in the master/slave relationship.

When Richard finally returns home from work after telling Sarah, as Max, that the relationship with her “lover” is over, the game shifts again. Sarah remains coldly obstinate to Richard as he offers her a drink and recounts his day at the office. At this juncture, the audience wonders whether or not Richard has a job at all. His return as “Richard” still carries the aura of the game, as though he is still playing a role even as

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himself. Sarah ignores him, retaining her power in the game, not acknowledging her role as whore. According to Burkman, “Sarah’s desire to keep her roles of wife and mistress separate (she does not accept the role as whore) is her way of trying to defeat time, the eternal cycle of life enacted in other Pinter dramas. By playing both roles with her own husband, Sarah removes the need for a new god or king.” (Burkman pg, 106)

Richard, jealous of his role as the lover, and his sense of power loss, tries once again to put a stop to the game as Sarah puts up resistance:

RICHARD: Do you think it’s pleasant to know that your wife is unfaithful to you two or three times a week, with great regularity?

SARAH: Richard-

RICHARD: It’s insupportable. It has become insupportable. I’m no longer disposed to put up with it.

SARAH: (to him). Sweet...Richard...please.

RICHARD: Please what?

She stops.

Can I tell you what I suggest you do?

SARAH: What?

RICHARD: Take him out into the fields. Find a ditch. Or a slag heap. Find a rubbish dump. Mmmm? What about that?

She stands still.

Buy a canoe and find a stagnant pond. Anything. Anywhere. But not my living room.

SARAH: I’m afraid that’s not possible.

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RICHARD: Why not?

SARAH: I said it’s not possible. (Pinter, pg. 191)

Sarah in this exchange, seems to be adamant on keeping the game within the confines of her identity of wife and mother, refusing to give in to Richard’s demands for sexual power. Here, it becomes clear that Sarah has built a self-identity on the game she has played with Richard, having him as both husband and lover, and that is the way she has been able to define herself in the confines of her social role. Richard, however, shatters this illusion by demanding her play a role as a whore, or the game is finished. Sarah becomes desperate when Richard says he’s “paid off” his whore. As Sarah makes one last attempt to retain her privileged status in the game, she attempts to coerce Richard by resuming her “wifely duties” by cooking for him and assuming a more traditional role. Richard responds by getting up, going over to the cabinet and pulling out the bongo drum. This deeply distresses Sarah.

At this point, Richard breaks the ritual and breaks Sarah’s self-constructed reality. This is the moment where Sarah has no choice but to take the game to a new, more dangerous level. Before the climax of the ritual, Sarah makes one more attempt to keep things in the old order:

SARAH: (with quiet anguish). You’ve no right to question me. No right at all. It was our arrangement. No questions of this kind. Please. Don’t, don’t. It was our arrangement. (Pinter, pg. 193.)

Sarah, in her “quiet anguish” becomes Pinter’s illustration of the paradox of human sexuality: one often desires a human connection and loses themselves, secretly knowing that a whole sense of self requires solitude. Sexuality, for Sarah, becomes an

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internal struggle for both intimacy and aloneness. Psychologist Judith Bardwick speaks

of female sexuality and emotion as such:

“She will need to be reassured that she is precious and loved and that by loving she is being good. Her lack of self-esteem will make affiliation very important and sex an emotionally loaded useful tool for garnering love. But this will also be a source of danger because if she uses sex in order to create love she may feel she is prostituting and degrading herself. When sex is psychologically over determined, reflecting one’s attitude toward oneself and the need for approval from others, when sexual attitudes are an expression of needs that are not directly sexual, romanticism will result. But if a woman accepts herself as loved, and if the derivations of early fears are resolved, she can become very erotic.” (Bardwick, pg 69.)

Sarah uses Richard’s role as “Max” to be sexually validated within the safe

confines of monogamous marriage. At the end of the play, when Richard affirms that he

does indeed love his wife, Sarah is willing to push the game even further. For Sarah, the

games exist to bring a level of eroticism to a stale life. Richard, out of a deep insecurity,

has attempted to put an end to it. He holds the bongo up to Sarah in an act of defiance:

RICHARD: How does he use it? How do you use it? Do you both play it while

I’m at the office?

She tries to take the drum. He holds on to it. They are still, hands on the drum.

What function does this fulfill? It’s not just an ornament, I take it? What do you

do with it? (Pinter, pg. 193)

Sarah struggles and then breaks down. As her world and her equilibrium created

by the game is destabilized. After desperately pleading she assaults him with a

declaration:

SARAH: You stupid...! (She looks at him coolly.) Do you think he’s the only one

who comes! Do you? Do you think he’s the only one I entertain? Mmmnn?

Don’t be silly. I have other visitors, other visitors, all the time, I receive all the

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time. Other afternoons, all the time. When neither of you know, neither of you. I give them strawberries in season. With cream. Strangers, total strangers. But not to me, not while they’re here. They come to see the hollyhocks. And then they stay for tea. Always. Always.

RICHARD: Is that so? (Pinter, pg 193)

At this point, Richard decides to take the game back to the park, where he as “Max” played at being the aggressor, but in a much more intense, violent way. He chases her to the table with the bongo, going back to asking her for a cigarette as he did in his role-play earlier in the piece. She seems genuinely terrified as Richard almost threatens her with possibly physical violence and rape. At the moment when Sarah is trapped behind the table, she laughs at Richard and gains control in the game by assuming her place as the whore, disarming Richard’s sexual aggression. Richard’s taunts “come on, don’t be a spoilsport. Your husband won’t mind, if you give me a light. You look a little pale. Why are you so pale? A lovely girl like you,” (Pinter, pg. 194) give the impression of impending violence. When Sarah laughs him off and responds by adopting once and for all the role of the whore, she attains the level of the archetype of “holy whore.”

When Sarah brings him down to the floor, she gains control of Richard within the only space she can controlthe home. Elizabeth Sakellaridou in her feminist analysis on the character of Sarah, asserts that “Pinter denies (Sarah) an outlet to the world of society, which he keeps strictly for the male, but he lets her assert her ego in the limited space of personal relations within which she is confined, thus proving the strength of her personality and the vitality of her imagination.” (Sakellaridou, pg. 105.)

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This play represents a change in attitude occurring in British culture in the 1960’s. Calcified notions of the nuclear family were being challenged, women were gaining more power in the workplace, and traditional concepts of what it meant to be masculine were being replaced by a more cosmopolitan bisexuality (as evidenced by some of Richard’s traits when he is himself.) Sarah, though still confined within the traditional marriage, is being allowed to assert a rebellion against it, even if only she and Richard participate in such actions in the form of a game. Sex and power are inevitably intertwined, and throughout the dramatic action of The Lover, husband and wife play a complex game, each taking on characters and archetypes that represent different aspects of being male or female. Though Richard is the protagonist, he is dominated by his wife, who when backed into the corner of the house, merely has to change the rules of the game, and then the power is hers. As Sarah and Richard test the bounds of their marriage, and even their consciousness, atavistic tendencies bubble up from beneath the surface. What civilization tries to keep sanitized and hidden (domestic violence, rape, psychological anguish and abjection etc.) comes to the forefront in extraordinary circumstances. Richard and Sarah both tap into the primal chthonic sexuality of pagan ritual and provide an unsettling illustration of the roles we play in our fragmented modern existence.

The Homecoming, arguably Harold Pinter’s most famous and best play, takes up similar themes and content as the The Lover and was written several years afterward. Pinter had actually written both characters of Sarah and Ruth for his wife Vivian Merchant to play. As we analyze both plays, we find striking similarities between both characters. In The Homecoming, we see ideas begun with the character of Sarah, come to full fruition in the character of Ruth. The games that Ruth plays are subtler and more

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complex than Sarah, and the games of masculine and feminine power conflict and archetypes are much more fleshed out.

The dramatic action of The Homecoming revolves around Teddy, a university professor working in America, who returns home with his wife of five years to his working class North London family. As his wife Ruth, who is native to the area, returns, she begins to rediscover herself, her sexuality, and her relationship to the world.

Teddy’s two brothers, Lenny and Joey still live with their father Max and their Uncle Sam. Their mother Jessie has since passed on. As Teddy and Ruth become more integrated in their surroundings, the audience is slowly made aware of a very complex, sex game going on with the couple.

There have been many essays written on this play and many misconceptions. Upon closest inspection, the cultural analysis of the play, finds it to be a Jewish one. It is well known that Harold Pinter was raised in a working class Jewish household. According to Baker and Tabachnick, The Homecoming represents a family that “belongs to an insecure ethnic group. For Pinter’s family is a Jewish family. The family occupations –or non-occupations- fit into the sociological patterns outlined by J.W. Carrier in his “A Jewish Proletariat.” (Baker and Tabachnick, pg 110.)

The cultural need to “keep up appearances” in the working-class Jewish household allows us to look at the occupations and interests in the family; Sam is actually a taxi-driver who calls himself a “chauffeur;” Max works as a butcher and behaves like a rich dictator, and Teddy works in the realm of academia hiding his working-class roots. Again Baker and Tabachnick assert that “the pastimes of the family fit into the East-End Hackney patterns of horse racing and dog racing and the petty gambling that attends

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these, along with the card, particularly poker-playing, and the more general obsession with football.” (Baker and Tabachnick, pg. 110.)

The play contains the Jewish names of “Max,” “Lenny,” “Sam,” Joey,” “Teddy,” and “Jessie.” This is evidence of the inherent Jewish content of the play, but still allows itself to be interpreted in many different ways. Stories about paternity are universal. In this play, the paternal anxiety created by the marriage of the oldest son to a gentile, has engender in Max the fear of breaking the blood lineage in his offspring. Ruth is seen as a gentile, but still a product of her surroundings. The name “Ruth” in this context “gives everything away, for ‘Ruth’ is the name of King David’s non-Jewish Moabite princess.” (Baker and Tabachnick, pg. 111.)

Before the arrival of Teddy and Ruth, the mise en scene is set with Max rummaging about, half-demented, asking in a hostile manner what Lenny, who is minding himself reading the paper, has done with the scissors. From this opening, starts a hostile father son exchange, setting the mood for Pinter’s Comedy of Menace. Max, in his decrepit state, is still able to wield his patriarchal power. Lenny, though in forced subservience to Max, wields the financial power within the family with his “career” as a pimp. The games played in this play are those of gift-exchange. What Lenny cannot give in exchange value in regards to a wife and lineage, he offers with vestments (clothing) and his women. Ruth’s exchange value is her sexuality, and so forth.

Max holds in high esteem is old friend MacGregor with whom he used to “knock about” with in North London when they were youths. Though Max thought highly of MacGregor, he gives the hint that there may have been clandestine liaisons between

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MacGregor and Jessie, though at this moment in the script, this fact is not yet made explicit. Max, continually makes degrading references to his dead wife:

“He was very fond of your mother, Mac was. Very fond. He always had a good word for her. (Pause.) Mind you, she wasn’t such a bad woman. Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn’t such a bad bitch. I gave her the best bleeding years of my life, anyway.” (Pinter, pg. 9)

Lenny, through sarcasm and force of wit continually checks Max. After Max lectures Lenny on horseracing, Lenny mocks Max’s cooking. This is one of Lenny’s assaults on his father’s masculinity in the absence of the mother Jessie. With Max and Lenny, the action is set to illustrate “the relationship between power and identity, as characters struggle to gain authority within the family structure. One front of the war is fought among the men, but the key conflict is between these men and the lone woman who invades their home.” (Cahn, pg 55.)

It becomes apparent that Max functions as the patriarch symbolically, though is the weaker figure. He is forced to assume the duties of the woman in the house and is sexually depleted. Max’s counterbalance is his asexual brother Sam, who functions as a stoic non-entity within the household. Sam is both the chauffeur for the family’s prostitution business and he also acts as the family’s moral center. He is the weakest member of the family structure. Also, he exhibits no outward sexuality and is even assaulted verbally by Max:

“When you find the right girl, Sam, let your family know, don’t forget we’ll give you a number one send-off, I promise you. You can bring her here, she can keep