Look Back in Anger Summary and Analysis of Act II -

Scene I (Pages 39 - 49)

Summary
Act II opens two weeks later. Alison is boiling water for tea on a Sunday afternoon. The
newspapers are again spread out across the floor of the attic apartment. Alison is only wearing a
slip and as she begins to dress, Helena enters. Helena is described as the same age and build as
Alison, but with a “sense of matriarchal authority” that “makes most men who meet her anxious,
not only to please but impress....” Jimmy is vehemently opposed to her in every way. Though she
always retains her dignity in the face of Jimmy’s assaults, “the strain of this is beginning to tell
on her a little.”

Helena places a bowl of salad on the table. Alison expresses her gratitude for her help in the last
couple of weeks. She tells her it’s been nice to have another woman around to help around the
house. When Helena is there, “Everything seems to be very different....” Jimmy is in Cliff’s
room playing his trumpet very loudly. Alison worries that Mrs. Drury is going to kick them out
of the apartment. Helena notes that even his trumpet playing sounds angry. She believes that
Jimmy’s anger is “horrifying...and oddly exciting.”

Helena changes the conversation to Cliff. She asks Alison if they are in love and Alison denies it,
though she does admit that their affection towards each other is a “relaxed, cheerful sort of thing,
like being warm in bed.” Helena asks if Jimmy notices their affection, and Alison tells her that
the situation isn’t easy to explain. Jimmy demands allegiance from those around him; allegiance
both to himself and to the things he believes in as well as the things from his past. He even
expects Alison to be loyal to his past girlfriends. Alison admits that, though she’s tried, she just
can’t feel the way that Jimmy feels towards some people and some things.

She tells Helena the story of their first few months of marriage. Without any money or jobs, they
went to live with Hugh Tanner, a friend of Jimmy’s. Alison and Hugh could tell immediately that
they didn’t like each other. Hugh was even more angry and insulting than Jimmy and Alison
realized that for the first time in her life she was cut off from all the people in her life. Her
mother and father had made her sign over all her money and assets when she married Jimmy
because they believed him to be “utterly ruthless.” Her brother, Nigel, had been running for
Parliament at the time and so didn’t have the time for anyone but his constituents.

Alison tells her about the months they lived with Hugh. They would go and crash the parties of
the wealthy families they had known in London. They would invite themselves in and help
themselves to all the food and drink and cigars of the party. Out of all the parties they crashed,
only one family kicked them out when Hugh tried to seduce a young girl. These old money
families were too polite to turn them away and, besides, Alison believes they felt sorry for them.
She recounts to Helena the first time that she and Jimmy met at a party. It had been soon after
her mother and father returned from India. Because they were distant, she immediately gravitated
towards this young man. “Everything about him seemed to burn, his face, the edges of his hair
glistened and seemed to spring off his head, and his eyes were so blue and full of the sun.” She
believes that because her family distrusted Jimmy he did everything he could to take her from
them and marry her. After a few months, Hugh decided that he wanted to move overseas in order
to work on his novel. He believed “England was finished for us, anyway.” Jimmy did not want to
go and told Hugh that he should not leave his poor, frail mother, but Hugh decided to leave
anyway. A bitter fight broke out between the two of them.

Helena changes the conversation and tells Alison that she must either tell Jimmy that he is going
to be a father or else leave him. Alison points towards the stuffed squirrel and teddy bear in the
corner of the room and tells Helena that those animals represent the two of them. She tells her
about the game they play in which she pretends to be a squirrel and he pretends to be a bear. “It
was the one way of escaping from everything...We could become little furry creatures with little
furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other.” Helena warns that she must
fight Jimmy or else he will kill her. Cliff enters.

Cliff yells to Jimmy to come in and get his tea. Cliff asks Helena and Alison where they are
going, and they tell him they are going to church. They invite him, but he stammers and tells
them that he hasn’t yet read the papers. Jimmy enters and begins bantering with Cliff. He asks
him why he would want to read the papers since he has no intellect or curiosity and is nothing
but “Welsh trash.” Cliff, with good nature, agrees. Jimmy then turns his venom towards Alison’s
friends and family, those “old favourites (sic), your friends and mine: sycophantic, phlegmatic,
and, of course, top of the bill -- pusillanimous.”
Analysis
Helena Charles is introduced. She is, in many ways, the opposite of Alison, though both
share a common upbringing. Helena is upper class and self assured while Alison is working class
and tired. Alison lacks Helena’s sophistication because of her relationship with Jimmy, though
she had once had it. Like Alison, Helena takes on a domestic role while with the Porters, but the
audience sees that she is not a domesticated female figure. She works as an actress, a profession
which leads her into a certain bohemian kind of lifestyle.
Alison’s line that “things seem to be very different” when Helena is in the house foreshadows a
conversation that will have consequences later on. It is ironic that Alison tells her that things are
different here and that she means it in a good way. Cliff will later utter a similar phrase yet he
will mean it negatively. It is an example of the way the men of the play seem to feed off of and
find normalcy in Jimmy and Alison’s contentious relationship. The women, on the other hand,
find a lack of peace, a motif that both women experience after their relationships with Jimmy.

In attempting to explain her relationship to Cliff, Alison actually proves how Jimmy is partly
right in his assessment that both of them have not found a way to truly live, embracing a
slothfulness to their lives instead. Alison suggest that while their relationship is both emotional
and physical, they are too comfortable in the way things are between them to be consumed with
any real passion towards each other. Jimmy, it would seem, also suffers from this emotional
slothfulness, though he would not admit it, since he does not seem to want to summon the
emotion of jealousy. The audience is left to wonder if Cliff feels the same way about Alison as
she feels towards him.

In this part of Act II, Alison explains to Helena why she is with Jimmy. This scene allows
Osborne to explore the idea of masculine chivalry in the twentieth century. Alison uses her
stories of meeting Jimmy and the party crashing that she, Jimmy, and Hugh undertook as an
allusion to English folklore. In Alison’s telling of the event, Jimmy becomes a knight in shining
armor, though Alison admits his armor never shone very brightly. He is alternately noble while
charming and courting her and then barbaric in storming the gates of the refined culture of
Alison’s family’s friends. Jimmy is thus linked to a British past even though he continually
alludes to the fact that the past is gone.

It is in this scene that Alison explains the symbolism of the bear and squirrel. It is ironic that
Alison explains their game as an “unholy priesthole of being animals to one another,” since it is
arguable that in their normal relationship Jimmy often expresses his emotion in wild animalistic
ways. She explains that by taking on the persona of these stuffed animals they both are able to
have “dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other.” Their games of squirrel and bear show
how the only way that both can truly love each other is to completely detach themselves from the
world. It is also an expression of a lost childhood that both share. The conditions of their real
lives is often too much to bear, and so the game offers a time of retreat into a childishness that
neither had growing up.

Look Back in Anger Summary and Analysis of Act II -

Scene I
Summary
Jimmy tells the group that he has made up a song entitled “You can quit hanging round my
counter Mildred ‘cos you’ll find my position is closed.” He begins to sing the verse. It’s a song
about how he is tired of women and would rather drink and be alone than have to deal with their
problems. He turns to Helena and tells her that he also wrote a poem, one that she will like
because “It’s soaked in the theology of Dante, with a good slosh of Eliot as well.” It is entitled
“The Cess Pool,” and Jimmy says he is “a stone dropped in it....”

Helena confronts him and asks him why he must be such an unpleasant person to be around all
the time. Jimmy becomes delighted that she has taken his bait and continues to goad her on. He
sees Alison dressing in the mirror in the corner of the room and asks her where she is going. She
tells him she is going to church and Jimmy is genuinely surprised. He asks her if she has lost her
mind. “When I think of what I did, what I endured to get you out -- ...” Alison bursts into anger
at this, sarcastically telling Jimmy that she remembers how he rescued her from her family so
that she would never have to suffer with them again.

Jimmy then goes on a rant on Alison’s mother. He tells how “There is no limit to what the
middle-aged mummy will do in the holy crusade against ruffians like me.” He is trying to prod
Alison into anger. He recounts how Alison’s mother was suspicious of his long hair and how she
hired detectives to watch him. Cliff tries to calm the situation, but Jimmy tells him that fighting
is all he’s good at now. Jimmy accuses Alison of having been influenced by Helena, that
“genuflecting sin jobber....” Helena tries to tell Jimmy to back off his anger, but this only makes
him more eager to fight. He tells Alison that her mother should die and that when the worms eat
her they’ll get a bad case of indigestion for their troubles. He looks at Helena and asks her what
is wrong and she tells him that she fells “Sick with contempt and loathing.” Jimmy tells them
that one day, when he is done running his sweet-stall, he will write a book about everyone in the
room, a recollection of their time together “in fire, and blood. My blood.”
Helena asks why Jimmy is being so obstinate. She asks him if he thinks the world has treated
him badly and Alison interjects, telling her to not take away his suffering because “he’d be lost
without it.” Jimmy tries to figure out why Helena is still staying with them since her play
finished eight days earlier. He believes that she is up to no good and trying to influence Alison in
some way. He tells Helena that the last time she was in a church was on their wedding day. They
had had to sneak away to a church where the vicar didn’t know Alison’s father so they could be
secretly married. Her parents, however, found them anyway and were the only people in the
church when the two were married. Jimmy tells Alison that Helena is nothing but a cow and,
further more, a “sacred cow as well.” Cliff tries to tell Jimmy that he’s gone too far, but Jimmy
doesn’t listen.

How does Jimmy respond to Helena's slap?

He laughs.

Jimmy then gives a monologue on Helena’s life. He says that she is “an expert in the New
Economics -- the Economics of the Supernature.” Her type has thrown out “Reason and
Progress” and look towards the past, the Dark Ages, to find a way around the dark problems of
the twentieth century. Her spirituality, he ways, cuts her off “from all the conveniences we’ve
fought to get for centuries.” She is full of “ecstatic wind....” Helena calmly tells him that she will
slap his face and, sensing a challenge, Jimmy rises and starts to slowly move his face towards
her. He asks her if she’s ever watched someone die. She starts to move away, but he makes her
face him. He tells her that if she hits him and tries “to cash in on what she thinks is my
defenceless (sic) chivalry by lashing out with her frail little fists, I lash back at her.” He asks her
again if she has ever seen someone die. She answers “no.” Jimmy then proceeds to tell her about
how he watched his father die for a year when he was ten years old. His father had come home
from the war in Spain where “certain god-fearing gentlemen...had made such a mess of him, he
didn’t have long to live.” Jimmy recounts how his family had abandoned the old man and only
Jimmy had been there to listen to his father’s ramblings; “the despair and the bitterness, the
sweet, sickly smell of a dying man.” He tells Helena that “I knew more about --
love...betrayal...and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know all your
life.” Helena rises, tells Alison that it’s time to go, and exits.
Jimmy addresses Alison in a whisper. He wants to know why his suffering means nothing to her.
He calls her a “Judas” and a “phlegm” and, finally fed up, Alison throws a glass across the room
where it shatters. She tells him that all she wants is peace and goes to the bed to put on her shoes
while Jimmy continues to rant. Jimmy responds that “My heart is so full, I feel ill -- and she
wants peace!” Jimmy asks which of them is really the angry and disturbed one. He turns to Cliff
and tells him that he wishes that he would try loving her so he could know the difficultly of it.
He tells Alison that he wants to be there when she comes groveling back to him. Helena enters
with two prayer books and tells Jimmy that there is a phone call for him. Jimmy exits.

Helena turns on Cliff now and asks him why he does nothing when Jimmy is so angry. He tells
her that, though things are always bad, they have been worse since she arrived. He tells her that
most of the time things are like “a very narrow strip of plain hell. But where I come from we’re
used to brawling and excitement.” He tells her that he loves both Alison and Jimmy very much
and that he pities everyone involved.

Helena accuse Cliff of not doing? 

Why jimmay angry of Alison ?

Helena tells Alison that she has sent a wire to Alison’s father to come and get her. She asks if
Alison will agree to leave Jimmy and return home and Alison says that she will. Alison seems
numb and distant and Helena knows that she must take charge of the situation. Jimmy enters
solemnly. He tells Cliff that Hugh’s mom has had a stroke and is dying and that he must leave to
go see her. Cliff leaves to make arrangements for Jimmy’s trip. Jimmy becomes nostalgic and
remembers how Hugh’s mother had gushed over how beautiful Alison was after they had been
married. Jimmy tells Alison that he needs her to come with him. Church bells ring and Alison
stands in the middle of the room, undecided on whether to leave with Helena or stay with Jimmy.
She walks over to the table and picks up her prayer book and leaves. Jimmy, stunned, leans on
the chest of drawers and picks up the teddy bear. He throws it across the room and then falls on
the bed, burying himself in the covers.

Analysis
Alison’s declaration that she is attending church with Helena is one of the only times in the play
that Jimmy expresses genuine surprise and shock at his wife’s actions. Even when she leaves him
and withholds the information from him that she is pregnant, it is apparent that those are all
things he can accept because it fits into the portrayal that he has of her in his mind. Going to
church, however, is not one of those things. In fact, Jimmy equates church going with Alison’s
past, a past that like a knight in shining armor, he rescued her from.

Alison’s church going also relates to the issue of allegiances that she discussed with Helena
earlier in the act. Jimmy, she tells Helena, is a fiercely loyal man. He expect that those in his life
will also be loyal to the same things, whether it is the political viewpoints he takes or his
previous lovers. By going to church, Jimmy considers this a breach of allegiance to him and this
proves to be a justification for his further vicious humiliation of her.

This part of Act II also allows Osborne to demonstrate Jimmy’s misogynistic viewpoints, some
of which it is alleged Osborne personally shared with his character. His attacks on Alison’s
mother are the best demonstration of this in the play. Jimmy is particularly cruel to older, upper
class women. Alison’s mother is the archetype of such a character. Jimmy hurls insults at her and
ends his rant in a grisly depiction of her death. It is revealed here that Alison’s mother took
extreme steps, including hiring a private detective, to try and stop Alison’s relationship with
Jimmy. This seems to have been the catalyst for Jimmy’s extreme hatred of all women like her
mother.

Jimmy then turns his hatred towards Helena and begins to attack her character and her
worldview. Because she is churchgoing and seemingly respectable, Jimmy accuses her of living
in a dark age. Here, Jimmy claims to hold an understanding of the world that Helena and most
everyone else in the world does not hold. He understands that traditional morality has no
meaning in the modern world. At best, Jimmy understands the church to be simply a puppet of
political and social power; the audience is reminded of Jimmy’s mockery of church figures
through the Bishop of Bromley in the first act. At worst, the church has become irrelevant.

To demonstrate this irrelevance of morality, Jimmy confronts Helena and dares her to slap his
face. He tells her that he has no chivalry now and will hit her if she hits him. Helena is forced to
make a choice: either slap his face in a moment of violence and abandon her moral center or
abandon her sense of bourgeois feminist pride by letting him attack her. In the end, Jimmy does
not give her a chance to choose because he moves the conversation deeper. He asks her if she has
experienced death. In this way, Jimmy is attempting to make Helena just like Alison; a stupid
girl that has never been through suffering and so cannot understand what it means to truly live.

The audience then learns of Jimmy’s own personal suffering, of how he watched his father die at
a young age and how his family did nothing to help him. It is this early case of suffering that
haunts Jimmy and allows him to feel both superior to others and to long for a more real way of
living. Since neither Helena nor Alison have suffered in this way, Jimmy believes that they have
not truly been born into the world. This is ironic since it is Alison who suffers most under
Jimmy’s cruel moods. The end of the scene makes suffering a central breaking point between
Alison and Jimmy. With Hugh’s mother on her deathbed, Jimmy cannot handle her suffering
alone and begs Alison to come with him to visit her. Alison, knowing that her father is coming to
pick her up the next day and taker her away, chooses to go with Helena. It is a choice for a world
that Jimmy feels is unreal in some way and he is devastated by her choice.