Eroding the Language of Freedom

Identity Predicament in Selected Works of Harold Pinter

Farah Ali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351625555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Let down by the uncertainties of memory, language, and their own family units, the characters in Harold Pinter's plays endure persistent struggles to establish their own identities.

Eroding the Language of Freedom re-examines how identity is shaped in these plays, arguing that the characters' failure to function as active members of society speaks volumes to Pinter's ideological preoccupation with society's own inadequacies. Pinter described himself as addressing the state of the world through his plays, and in the linguistic games, emotional balancing acts, and recurring scenarios through which he put his characters, readers and audiences can see how he perceived that world.

1 Strong-arm her

Gendered identity in Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska (1982)

A Kind of Alaska

I

A Kind of Alaska premiered in the Cottesloe Theatre in London on 14 October 1982. The play opens with a room, which had always been a secure refuge for Pinter’s characters in his early plays.¹ However, Deborah’s room does not appear as ‘[a] warm haven’ to us; it is more like a cold, sterile, clinical space in which Deborah sleeps on all-white sheets and is tied to a bed that proves to be an instrument of torture rather than a place in which to rest. Although Ann C. Hall (1993, p. 5) believes that Pinter used the domestic setting for his later dramas, the setting in this play, uncharacteristically, gives us the impression of formality and coldness rather than domesticity. However, Hall believes in the importance of a domestic setting for female identity: ‘For a feminist, this setting is noteworthy because the home and family have been the centres of female oppression both on stage and off’.

Contrary to Hall’s assumption in relation to domestic space, Deborah’s oppression is taking place in a small hospital-like room, in which, from the very beginning of the play, Pinter gives us the impression of her being alienated by being tied to the bed almost all of the time. Whilst for the most part women’s subjection through domesticity is central to Pinter’s plays (because it reflects the restriction and constriction of female identity), in this case things are different. Pinter understands that women are relegated to and earn credibility through domestic, private duties, whereas men are positioned as instruments in public domains, such as law, business, and politics. These ideas have gained general cultural acceptance because men’s interests carry more weight. In other words, men control the institutions that sustain all modern and historically dominant ideologies, such as schools, churches, governments, and the media. Men also have the upper hand in families and, therefore, the prevalence of male power has meant that the ideas they have historically supported have been dominant. The ideology of female domesticity thus achieved three goals: (i) it specified enough domestic tasks to keep women busy at home; (ii) it justified the allocation of such responsibilities to women; and (iii) it promised compensatory advantages to women in return for their accepting the domestic role. In short, it gave women work to do at home, and made them feel that this work was virtuous and worthwhile. Thus, for many feminists, the domestic setting is noteworthy, because home and family stand for the centre of female oppression and the elimination of female voices and authority both onstage and off (Hall, 1993, p. 7).

Luce Irigaray (1985, pp. 85–86) outlines the importance of the female role in this context, referring to: ‘Child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general’ as part of women’s ‘responsibility … to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it’. Despite the fact that Deborah’s awakening takes place in a non-domestic environment, being tied to her bed articulates more forcefully her subjectivity to male power and her inability to escape it. In addition, in both domestic settings and institutions (hospitals, churches, and schools) safety is taken for granted, as each of these institutions promises a shelter and a haven from outside dangers that in reality they can never provide.² Although Pinter establishes audience expectations in this sense of protection and healing at the beginning of the play, at the end of it he does not offer us the nurturing ideas that society expects from a social institution. As we soon see, the fact that Deborah’s awakening takes place inside a hospital-like room does not render her safe at all. R.F. Storch (Hall, 1993, p. 61) writes:

In spite of the clever dislocation of common sense, Pinter’s plays affect us because they are about middle-class family, both as sheltering home longed for and dreamed of, and as many-tentacled monster strangling its victim. It does not, after all, surprise us that there is more menace and irrationality in this dramatic material than in any other.

After awakening her from a twenty-nine-year coma with an injection, the play’s first male figure, Hornby, starts talking to Deborah to make sure that she realises who she is after such a long time:

Hornby:	Do you recognise me? Silence Do you know me? She doesn’t look at him.
Deborah:	Are you speaking?

(Pinter, 1993, p. 149)

Deborah’s question sets the boundaries from the very beginning of the play between her world and that of Hornby. To her, Hornby is ‘no one’ (Pinter, 1993, p. 145).

The procedure of administering an injection to wake Deborah may prompt us to pay attention to the invasiveness of this procedure, and its effect on subduing the identity of the patient (in this case, Deborah). Over the past quarter of the twentieth century, feminist criticism has emphasised women’s inability to access the health system because of men’s dominion, which causes doctor-patient interactions to be characterised by domination and subordination (Schofield et al., 2000, 247–256). Thus, women’s experience within the health system reflects their place in society, with men’s experience being the norm and women’s deviating from this (Rogers-Clark, 1998, pp. 1–18). Furthermore, women’s health has been understood in terms of science and medicine (with a focus on illness, not wellness), which have a long male-dominated history that focuses on male experience and interests, and never on those of women themselves (Astbury, 1996). There is also a need to understand that the women’s health movement arose from community development and has been based on women’s right to access information and services that they themselves see as appropriate. The movement arose from within the feminist movement and has been deliberately political from the beginning (Johnstone et al., 2001, p. 4). Some feminists argue that male domination of the health system is primarily caused by the influence of old assumptions and conclusions about women’s health, especially the mental component. In Crazy for You, Jill Astbury (1996) cites Freud’s work on the female psyche as a biased example that had great influence until the 1980s. Lois Bryson (2001) echoes this by saying: ‘Every day we confront the drag of the past. Old ideas about women’s and men’s roles and ways of behaving still flourish … and get in the way’.

An emphasis on the importance of corporeality in such processes of medicalised subjugation is underlined by Stacey Weber-Feve (2010, p. 25):

Historically speaking, women and their socio-political-economic position and status have typically been determined by their bodies – their individual awakenings and action, their pleasure and their pain all competing against representations of the female body in larger social frameworks.

Although several aspects may have changed, it is deeply disheartening that the original aims of the women’s health movement (objectives of having women’s voices heard, and the granting of women’s right to access the information they need or to have control over their choices) are still being pursued by women. Recent consultation with women (in 1998) found that women needed information to make informed choices, but were not receiving it.³

In connection with the play, Hornby’s injection to wake Deborah can thus be interpreted in gender-political terms: he deprives her body of making the choice to wake up (as a result of other, more normal, aural or other non-invasive sensory stimulation), or of taking the time necessary to do so. He thereby strips her of the right to have a choice and voice, eventually crushing her own identity as a human being first and as a woman second.

In such ways, Hornby reveals his power over Deborah from the beginning of the play; he tells her that he is there to take care of her, meaning that he watches over her. In other words, Hornby’s power over Deborah is first revealed as a function of his gaze. The power of the one who watches is discussed by Sartre, in the section on the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). According to Sartre (1956, p. 345), the Other – ‘The one who looks at me’ – steals the world from me. The centre of the world moves from me because of the gaze of the other, and I am no longer a subject but have become an object of the gaze. I am there to be judged by he who gazes, from his point of view.

More specifically, in The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault (1980, p. xii) coins the term ‘medical gaze’ to denote the dehumanising medical separation of a patient’s body from the patient’s person (identity). Foucault refers to scientific observation in this context:

In order to be able to offer each of our patients a course of treatment perfectly adapted to his illness and to himself, we try to obtain a complete, objective idea of his case; we gather together in a file of his own all the information we have about him. We ‘observe’ him in the same way that we observe the stars or a laboratory experiment.

Thus, in entering the field of knowledge, the human body has entered the arena of power. It is a world of men. For the nineteenth-century moderns, doctors were equal to clergy; yet physicians save bodies, not souls. Thinking of the human body as the sum of the person, biological reductionism became a powerful tool through which a thorough examination of the body’s symptoms of illness in simply corporeal terms could be carried out. Hence, the medical gaze was believed to penetrate surface illusions, to reach truth.

From such a perspective, Hornby is one who owns the medical gaze that observes Deborah as ‘a laboratory experiment’, to borrow Foucault’s (1973, p. xii) term. The fact that Hornby owns the gaze presumes that he owns the truth; once he has ascertained the truth of Deborah’s body, he moves towards an invasive intervention of it through the unsolicited penetration of his injection.

On a different level, Hornby’s gaze can also reflect his castration anxiety as part of his attempt to reassert male dominion. In an interesting article entitled ‘Look Back in Anger: Three Gazes in Harold Pinter’s Old Times’, Kim Jungsoo comments on the issue of the gaze in Pinter’s Old Times (1971) in light of Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975),⁴ observing that: ‘The gaze shapes the identity of the one being watched, and in [Old Times], memory works just as the gaze does. As each character iterates his or her memory, they shape the other character’s identity’ (Kim, 2009, p. 125).

Mulvey emphasised that the male gaze in most of the sixties and seventies films and theatre is an erotic one, treating the female as an object to be looked at. Although Mulvey’s notion of spectatorship raised as much criticism as interest from feminist and film theorists as the one that is fixed on masculine/feminine polarities, or the one that considers only the masculine or the heterosexual,⁵ I believe that Deeley’s gaze as described in Jungsoo Kim’s (2009, p. 128) article is not too far from that of Hornby in terms of looking at the female as an object of desire. The male here is the only owner of the gaze, while all the female is entitled to is to be looked at, therefore she will be always coded with to-be-looked-at-ness like in the case of Deborah.

Also, in relation to Mulvey’s binary categorisation of the gaze into a male/female, I would add another layer to that gaze by looking at it from a political point of view in terms of the Eurocentric gaze to the oriental. I will borrow here Edward Said’s (1935–2003) Orientalism theory, which states that the Westerners do not understand Easterners because they always think that they are culturally beneath them and therefore their gaze is a mix of exotic fascination that does not wish to encounter the Oriental, but to look through it, examine it, and solve it as a problem. Said (1978, p. 207) comments: ‘Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analysed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined’. Therefore, Mulvey’s article as well as Kim’s argument could even be taken further by highlighting another kind of gaze that is still related to the construction of our identity, yet not on a gender level, but on a nationality level. The point that I want to underline here is that Deborah’s suffering as a woman/object below the man in the gender hierarchy will be worse if she were a woman of a different nationality. Then the pejorative gaze will be double-layered. She will be looked at as a lacking human being as a woman and as a citizen. And although Deborah is not in this situation as staged to us, I’m reading the play more in metaphorical terms than literal to explore further unpacked issues from the social reality of which Deborah’s situation could be a representative.

Against this background, the problem of the male/female gaze in relation to the ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the question of identity in Harold Pinter’s drama
• 1 Strong-arm her: gendered identity in Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska (1982)
• 2 The indelible memory: memorial identity in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996)
• 3 Eroded rhetoric: linguistic identity in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988)
• 4 Chic dictatorship: power and political identity in Harold Pinter’s Party Time (1991)
• 5 The ethics and aesthetics of existence: sexual identity in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978)
• 6 Crumbling families: familial and marital identity in Harold Pinter’s Celebration (2000)
• Index