Look Back in Anger

Alienation and Loneliness prise Porter spoke for a heroic segment of the British population in 1956 when he ranted about his alienation from a order of magnitude in which he was denied any meaningful role. Although he was meliorate at a white-tile university, a reference to the newest and least prestigious universities in the United Kingdom, the real power and opportunities were reserved for the children of the Establishment, those born to privilege, family connections, and entree to the right schools. infract of the code of the Establishment was the stiff upper lip, that reticence to show or even to feel strong emotions. appreciates alienation from Alison comes precisely because he cannot break done her cool, her unwillingness to feel deeply even during sexual intercourse with her husband. He berates her in a coarse attempt to get her to strike out at him, to stop sitting on the fence and make a full commitment to her real emotions he wants to force her to feel and to have vita l life. He calls her Lady Pusillanimous because he sees her as too cowardly to commit to anything. esteem is anxious to give a great deal and is deeply uncivilised because no one seems interested enough to take from him, including his wife. He says, My heart is so full, I feel ill and she wants peace petulance and HatredJimmy Porter operates out of a deep well of anger. His anger is directed at those he loves because they refuse to have strong feelings, at a society that did not fulfill promises of opportunity, and at those who smugly assume their places in the social and power structure and who do not care for others. He lashes out in anger because of his deeply felt helplessness. When he was ten years old he watched his idealist father dying for a year from wounds received struggle for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, his father talking for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one bewildered little boy. He says, You see, I learnt at an early age what it was t o be angry angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.Related reading My Problem With Her AngerApathy and PassivityAlthough Alison is the direct target of Jimmys invective, her apathy and passivity are merely the immediate representation of the attitudes that Jimmy sees as undermining the whole of society. It is the complacent fluency of society that infuriates Jimmy. When speaking of Alisons brother Nigel, he says, Youve never heard so many well-bred commonplaces coming from beneath the same bowler hat. The Church, too, comes under antiaircraft in part because it has lost relevance to contemporary life. For Helena it spells a safe habit, one that defines right and wrong for her although she seems perfectly willing to ignore its strictures against fornication when it suits her. Jimmy sees the Church as providing an easy escape from facing the pain of living in the here and now and thus precluding any real redemption. Of course, Jimmy has also slipped into a world of sameness as illustrated by the three Sunday evenings spent reading the newspapers and even the direct replacement of Alison at the iron out board with Helena. Deadly habit is portrayed as insidious.Class ConflictJimmy comes from the working class and although some of his mothers relatives are pretty posh, Cliff tells Alison that Jimmy hates them as much as he hates her family. It is the class system, with its built-in preferential treatment for those at the top and exclusion from all power for those at the bottom, that makes Jimmys humans seem so meaningless. He has a university degree, but it is not from the right university. It is Nigel, the straight-backed, chinless wonder who went to Sandhurst, who is stupid and insensitive to the needs of others, who has no beliefs of his own, who is already a Member of Parliament, who will make it to the top. Alisons father, Colonel Redfern, is not shown unsympathetically, but her mother is portrayed as a class-conscious monster who used every tacti c she could to retain Alison from marrying Jimmy. The only person for whom Jimmys love is apparent is Hughs working-class mother. Jimmy likes Cliff because, as Cliff himself says, Im common.Identity CrisisWhile Jimmy harangues everyone around him to open themselves to average feeling, he is trapped in his own problems of social identity. He doesnt seem to fit in anywhere. As Colonel Redfern points out, operating a sweet-stall seems an odd occupation for an ameliorate young man. Jimmy sees suffering the pain of life as the only way to find, or earn, ones true identity. Alison does finally suffer the immeasurable loss of her unhatched child and comes back to Jimmy, who seems to embrace her. Helena discovers that she can be happy only if she lives according to her perceived principles of right and wrong. Colonel Redfern is caught out of his time. The England he left as a young army officer no longer exists. Jimmy calls him just one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwa rdian natural state that cant understand why the sun isnt shining anymore, and the Colonel agrees. Cliff does seem to have a strong sense of who he is, accepts that, and will move on with his life.SexismA contemporary reading of Look Back in Anger contains inherent assumptions of sexism. Jimmy Porter seems to many to be a misogamist and Alison a mere encipher struggling to view the world through Jimmys eyes. Note There are comments associated with this question. 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