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Harold Pinter's play, The Homecoming, represents a series of urban characters involved in the family relationships whose prime interest is in wining dominance over another, and the depiction of gender roles which radically severed from traditional family in urban life. This essay will explore the family relationships between the characters against traditional family and how it relates to modernity. I will exam the text in the following aspects: I will identify the way that in urban life, characters struggle for dominance over another, in attempt to assert identity in order to secure love and identity. I will then illustrate the situation of gender roles, in which possess freedom from constraints of tradition notion of being at home. Finally, I will explore the penetration of homecoming and how it against traditional family, as a way to announce itself as modern. Throughout the analysis, I argue that pinter formulate the notion that the struggling for power, constantly revolves around the city, which demonstrates the disruption of traditional family structure and relationships, in order to comment on modernity.
The homecoming is located in the north London and introduced in 1965. The boom site is considered as an image of the post war Britain, which was reeling from the economical and psychological cost after the World War II. The war has encouraged the disintegration of the class system and mutual distrust between the genders. the increasing social acceptability of contraception help to modify tradition of gender roles.
In the play of The Homecoming, "all of Pinter's characters struggle for power over others, and beneath the surface that struggle is again an attempt to assert identity in order to gain attention, admiration,...
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...the main site of modern commodification of both nurturing and sexual services. The dysfunctional family relationships are presented through the manipulation of sexual attraction, as well as the exertion of dominance between characters in the urban London city after the World War II.
Reference:
M. Billington, The life and work of Harold Pinter, London: Faber and Faber, 1996. p.168
E. Diamond "Pinter's comic play, Lewisburg: Associated University Presses, c1985.
J. Donald imagining the modern city (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
P. Penelope, The Pinter ethic: the erotic aesthetic. New York: Garland, 1994. p.131
Gale Stephen H. Harold Pinter: critical approaches. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. London: Associated University Presses, 1986. p.113
Volker S. Harold Pinter: towards a poetics of his plays New York: P. Lang, c1989.
Judith R. Walkowitz is a Professor Emeritus at John Hopkins University, specializing in modern British history and women’s history. In her book City of Dreadful Delight, she explores nineteenth century England’s development of sexual politics and danger by examining the hype of Jack the Ripper and other tales of sensational nature. By investigating social and cultural history she reveals the complexity of sexuality, and its influence on the public sphere and vice versa. Victorian London had upheld traditional notions of class and gender, that is until they were challenged by forces of different institutions.
At the beginning of the 1900s, there was a “sexual revolution” in New York City. During this time, sexual acts and desires were not hidden, but instead they were openl...
“Ray(mond Douglas) Bradbury (1920).” Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 42 (1987): 31-47. Web. 10 Nov. 2013
1970, pp. 7-8. Rpt. In The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. New York.:Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
Through the actions of the male hegemony and the mother figure, both plays show the different perspectives both sexes have towards homosexuality. The patriarchal figures, show an intolerant and abusive perspective whereas the mother figures show a more understanding way of coping with the identities of their sons. By seeing the reactions of both males and females, it is to say that the maternal figures of the play show a more comprehensive attitude towards the struggles that the male protagonist undergo. Both plays are related to today´s society, because there are still families in which homosexuality is not accepted. People are still
In Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier the continual coverage made by the media of the war during its occurrence and the infectiousness it had on those back home is portrayed through the eyes of her narrator, Jenny. The use of a female narrator wasn’t uncommon nor new but the way West includes her feminist values into Jenny without making it central to the story is fascinating. Up to this point in history, coverage of a war had never been read about as it was during this period. Because of this advancement in getting news out had improved drastically from the last war, people back home were more aware of what was occurring from reading a newspaper without having to wait for letters from their loved ones out on the front lines. West took this information in full stride and wrote about the emotional turmoil it causes the women back home waiting for their men to come back. She makes mention by focusing and bringing to attention the elements of class, exile from being deployed and the trauma that war causes on the soldier.
...am Victorian society, sexual liberalism transformed the ways in which people arranged their private lives. Shifting from a Victorian environment of production, separate sexual spheres, and the relegation of any illicit extramarital sex to an underworld of vice, the modern era found itself in a new landscape of consumerism, modernism and inverted sexual stereotypes. Sexuality was now being discussed, systemized, controlled, and made an object of scientific study and popular discourse. Late nineteenth-century views on "natural" gender and sexuality, with their attendant stereotypes about proper gender roles and proper desires, lingered long into the twentieth century and continue, somewhat fitfully, to inform the world in which we live. It is against this cultural and political horizon that an understanding of sexuality in the modern era needs to be contextualized.
This new sense of equality and freedom manifested itself through what might be termed as “unladylike things”. The introduction of birth control in the last decade empowered women to take control of their own body as well. The Flapper became more open to experiment with sexual behaviors than previous generations. Sigmund Freud, a modern-day psychoanalyst, claimed that this sudden expr...
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. A. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print
Pinsker, Sanford. The Catcher In The Rye: Innocence Under Pressure. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
...lass and sexuality by including papers like Stead's which brought middle-class readers in touch with the events of working-class London and provided workers with middle-class representations of themselves. City of Dreadful Delight is an assortment of cross-cultural contact and negotiation between class and sexuality in Victorian era London. Walkowitz's analysis emphasizes distinct “classes,” and the impact of events on each group. Through close social and cultural analysis of the explosion of discourses proceeding and surrounding Jack the Ripper, Walkowitz has demonstrated the historical importance of narratives of sexual danger particularly in the lens of sexuality and class. She explicitly demonstrated the conflicted nature of these discourses, outright showing the women marginalized by male discursive dominance, whose struggles continue to even generations later.
Lipking, Lawrence I, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 1c. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Tucker, Martin. Moulton’s Library of Literary Criticism. Volume 4. Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. New York. 1967.
Marshall Cavendish Corporation. Sex and Society. New York, NY: Marshall Cavendish Corporation , 2010. Print.
Throughout his life, Pinter has written about and protested against social pathologies like war, human rights violation, terrorism, discrimination and totalitarianism. Having first-hand experience of the horrors of World War II and growing up at a time of Holocaust which caused large scale extermination of Jews in Hitler’s Europe, led Pinter to voice against all forms of social pathologies and the totalitarian institutions which inflict social evils or diseases. The trauma that Pinter went through in the early years of his life made him comprehend and relate with the physical and mental trauma that victims of social pathologies go through. His plays especially the early comedies of menace and the later overtly political plays exhibit his concern with post-war man’s egotism, hopes, feelings, struggles, crises, aspirations and objections against dominion, power, self-obsessed government, menace, suppression, coercion, injustice,