Look Back in Anger Themes

The Angry Young Man

Osborne’s play was the first to explore the theme of the “Angry Young Man.” This term describes
a generation of post-World War II artists and working-class men who generally ascribed to leftist,
sometimes anarchist, politics and social views. According to cultural critics, these young men were
not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals angry at a post-Victorian
Britain that refused to acknowledge their social and class alienation.
Jimmy Porter is often considered to be literature’s seminal example of the angry young man. Jimmy
is angry at the social and political structures that he believes has kept him from achieving his
dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison.

The Kitchen Sink Drama

Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social
relations. Realism, in British theatre, was first experimented within the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. This genre attempted to capture
the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically reflected the ordinary drama of ruling
class British society.
According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century, the genre of realism had become tired and
unimaginative. Osborne’s play returned imagination to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and
immediacy of post-war youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working classes.
Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic social dilemmas in this time
period. Most importantly, it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of
this generation that festered just below the surface of elite British culture.

Loss of Childhood
A theme that impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison Porter is the idea of a lost childhood.
Osborne uses specific examples — the death of Jimmy’s father when Jimmy was only ten, and
how he was forced to watch the physical and mental demise of the man — to demonstrate the way
in which Jimmy is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. Alison’s loss of childhood is
best seen in the way that she was forced to grow up too fast by marrying Jimmy. Her youth is
wasted in the anger and abuse that her husband levels upon her.
Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has experienced this same loss of childhood
innocence. Osborne uses the examples of World War, the development of the atomic bomb, and the
decline of the British Empire to show how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other
generations were able to maintain.

Real Life
In the play, Jimmy Porter is consumed with the desire to live more real and full life. He compares
this burning desire to the empty actions and attitudes of others. At first, he generalizes this
emptiness by criticizing the lax writing and opinions of those in the newspapers. He then turns his
angry gaze to those around him and closes to him, Alison, Helena, and Cliff.
Osborne’s argument in the play for a real-life is one in which men are allowed to feel a full range of
emotions. The most real of these emotions are anger and Jimmy believes that this anger is his way
of truly living. This idea was unique in British theatre during the play ’ s original run. Osborne
argued in essays and criticisms that, until his play, British theatre had subsumed the emotions of
characters rendering them less realistic. Jimmy’s desire for a real-life is an attempt to restore raw
emotion to the theatre.

Sloth in British Culture

Jimmy Porter compares his quest for a more vibrant and emotional life to the slothfulness of the
world around him. It is important to note that Jimmy does not see the world around him as dead,
but merely asleep in some fundamental way. This is a fine line that Osborne walks throughout the
play. Jimmy never argues that there is nihilism within British culture. Instead, he sees a kind of
slothfulness of character. His anger is an attempt to awaken those around him from this cultural
sleep.
This slothfulness of emotion is best seen in the relationship between Alison and Cliff. Alison
describes her relationship with Cliff as “ comfortable. ” They are physically and emotionally
affectionate with each other, but neither seems to want to take their passion to another level of
intimacy. In this way, their relationship is lazy. They cannot awaken enough passion to consummate
their affair. Jimmy seems to subconsciously understand this, which is the reason he is not jealous of
their affection towards one another.

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

The character of Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, represents the decline of and nostalgia for the
British Empire. The Colonel had been stationed for many years in India, a symbol of Britain ’ s
imperial reach into the world. The Edwardian age which corresponded to Britain’s height of power
had been the happiest of his life. His nostalgia is representative of the denial that Osborne sees in
the psyche of the British people. The world has moved on into an American age, he argues, and the
people of the nation cannot understand why they are no longer the world’s greatest power.

Masculinity in Art
Osborne has been accused by critics of misogynistic views in his plays. Many point to Look Back
in Anger as the chief example. These critics accuse Osborne of glorifying young male anger and
cruelty towards women and homosexuals. This is seen in the play in specific examples in which
Jimmy Porter emotionally distresses Alison, his wife, and delivers a grisly monologue in which he
wishes for Alison’s mother’s death.

Osborne, however, asserts that he is attempting to restore a vision of true masculinity into a
twentieth-century culture that he sees as becoming increasingly feminized. This feminization is
seen in the way that British culture shows an “indifference to anything but immediate, personal
suffering.” This causes a deadness within which Jimmy’s visceral anger and masculine emotion is
retaliation.

Symbol Analysis In Look Back in Anger

Newspapers

Jimmy and Cliff read newspapers throughout Act 1 and Act 3, and they are a major visual feature in
the apartment. Jimmy uses the newspaper as a symbol of his education. They are a way for him to
mimic the habits of the upper class, university-educated elite.

He repeatedly comments on what he is reading, sometimes using erudite vocabulary. He also uses
newspaper articles as a way to belittle the intelligence of Cliff and Alison, which is one of the
tactics he employs to make himself feel smarter and more worthwhile.

Yet, Jimmy’s relationship with newspapers also shows his ambivalent relationship to his educated
status. He says that the newspapers make him “feel ignorant,” and he often mocks “posh” papers,
which, in his mind, are out of touch with the real concerns of working-class men like him.

The newspapers in the apartment also form a “ jungle, ” showing that, in a working-class
environment, this status symbol becomes something that upper-class characters like Alison would
consider chaotic and dangerous. This reflects the way that greater social mobility has caused social
upheaval in Britain.
PipeSymbol Analysis

Jimmy’s pipe is another example of an upper-class symbol that Jimmy uses instead to reflect his
working-class status. Pipes call to mind old, educated, university professors. Jimmy’s pipe is a way
for him to dominate the scene and assert himself as a rebellious force in the world (and he uses his
force largely to rail against upper-class norms).

His pipe smoke fills the room and creates a smell that other characters come to associate with him.
Alison says in the first act that she has “gotten used” to it, reflecting the way that she adapts her
values and sensibilities depending on the context that she is in.

Helena later says that she has grown to “like” the smell, reflecting the attraction that she feels to
Jimmy, and also the fact that she retains more of a sense of self than Alison does in the same
situation—Helena positively likes the smell, while Alison is merely “used” to it. While living
with her parents in the third act of the play, the smell of pipe smoke reminds Alison of Jimmy, and
soon after, she comes back to him.

Once in the apartment, she absentmindedly cleans up the ashes from the pipe, reflecting the fact
that she retains her upper class sense of respectability and order, even as she returns from her
parents’ home to live in Jimmy’s world. The pipe thus becomes a litmus test of Helena and Alison’
s relationship with Jimmy throughout the play.
Bear and SquirrelSymbol Analysis

Alison and Jimmy’s bear and squirrel game give them a way to access a simple affection for each
other that they cannot achieve in normal life. The bear is associated with Jimmy, and the squirrel
with Alison. The animals symbolize the fact that social norms and conventions interfere with the
love that these two characters have for each other.

Their relationship is a site of class and societal conflict, and this means that their love becomes
fraught with anger and fighting. When they act like animals, whose only concerns are food, shelter,
cleanliness, and sex, they can forget that conflict and feel a simpler version of love for each other.

The fact that they keep stuffed animal versions of the bear and squirrel in the apartment reflects a
childlike innocence that these characters find difficult to maintain in their troubled world, but that
they still hope for.

Church bells
The church bells symbolize a respectable middle class morality that Jimmy finds oppressive.
Helena subscribes to this version of morality, which posits that some things are clearly right, while
others are wrong and “sinful.” Jimmy, on the other hand, believes that the rules of respectable
society are something to struggle against. In his mind, it is moral to act in allegiance with his
oppressed class, and to feel emotions as keenly and intensely as possible.

The church bells chime from outside the window at various points in the play, reflecting the fact
that these middle-class rules are a fact of life in most of the world, and that they often intrude into
the apartment, and into Jimmy’s life. He curses and yells when he hears them, reflecting his anger
at this system of morality. Alison leaves for church with Helena in the middle of act 2, following
Helena back into a middle-class world.
TrumpetSymbol Analysis

Jimmy’s jazz trumpet can be heard off stage at various points in the play. Jazz has traditionally been
protest music and is associated with the working classes. It symbolizes Jimmy’s desire to be a voice
of resistance in society, but it also shows the futility of that dream.

It serves largely to annoy and antagonize those around him, not to call a movement to attention.
Like Jimmy’s pipe smoke, the trumpet also allows Jimmy to assert his dominance non-verbally. He
disrupts his domestic scene (playing the trumpet only inside), but makes little headway truly
disrupting the world around him

Imagery In Look Back in Anger

Two sound images from off-stage are used very effectively in Look Back in Anger: the church bells
and Jimmy’s jazz trumpet. The church bells invade the small living space and serve as a reminder
of the power of the established church, and also that it doesn’t care at all for their domestic peace.
The jazz trumpet allows Jimmy’s presence to dominate the stage even when he is not there, and it
also serves as his anti-Establishment “raspberry.”

Contrast Alice and Helena

Alison Porter
Alison Porter is Jimmy’s wife. She comes from Britain’s upper class, but married into Jimmy’s
working-class lifestyle. The audience learns in the first act that she is pregnant with Jimmy’s child.
Jimmy ’ s destructive anger causes her great strain and she eventually leaves him. Her child
miscarries and she comes back to Jimmy to show him that she has undergone great suffering.
Helena Charles
Helena Charles is Alison’s best friend. She lives with them in their apartment while visiting for
work. Helena is from an upper class family. She is responsible for getting Alison to leave Jimmy.
She and Jimmy then begin an affair. Her sense of morality leads her to leave. She can be considered
the play’s moral compass.

The Language In Look Back in Anger

The language in Look Back in Anger is different compared to its contemporaries. The language is
realistic; the characters are able to say what they would say in that situation in real life. In a way, the
writer John Orsborne had no limits because if something had to be real it needed everything to be
realistic. Osborne uses his characters as a mouth piece to examine the reality of life in the 1950s in
Britain.

At the start of the play there seem to be a lot of exposition from the characters to describe
themselves or tell us about the situation. For example ” James Porter, aged twenty-five, was bound
over last week after pleading guilty to interfering with a small cabbage and two tins of beans on his
way home from the Builders Arms.”

This tells us Jimmy’s age and that he likes going to the pub, and shows that Cliff seems to have a
sense of humour. The exposition goes on throughout the play. We see this when jimmy is talk about
Alison family and what was happening to his dying father when he was 10.

The colonel has his share in exposition when he’s talking to his daughter Alison about the past. “It
was March 1914, when left England, and, apart from leaves every ten years or so, “the information
Osborne constantly provides us with about each character ’ s past helps the audience understand
their personalities.

In this play Orsborne uses dramatic irony. For example, jimmy has some lines of dramatic irony, for
example when he says to Alison “ if you could have a child, and it would die. ” This is ironic
because towards the end of the play Alison has a miscarriage.

Although Jimmy wanted her to go through this sort of pain he is affected in a way he never
expected. The other ironic line Jimmy has is when Helena tells him that his got a phone call and he
says ” well, it can’t be anything good, can it?” this is ironic because as he gets the message from
the call that Hugh ’ s mother has had a stroke. Jimmy at some extent is a product of what has
happened to him during his life.

The play involves a lot of emotion. Jimmy chief motivating emotion is anger throughout the play
until the end when he embraces Alison, this is no doubt it is the characters most vulnerable point in
the whole play.

The pauses are very important in the play because they make the moments of tension more effective,
and shows us the emotion of most of the characters. For example, when Alison tells cliff she ’ s
pregnant.
Alison: you see- (hesitates) I’m pregnant.
Cliff: (after a few moments) I will need some scissors.
Alison: They’re over there.
Cliff: (crossing to the dressing table) that’s something, isn’t it? When did you find out?

At this point it shows that Cliff is troubled about this, that’s why he asks for the scissors just to hide
his feelings for her. Another point that we worked on in class is when Alison arrives at the end of
act 3 scene 1; there is a big pause before she says anything.

Alison: (quietly) Hullo.

Jimmy: (to Helena, after a moment) friend of yours to see you.
After saying the line he leaves the room and the two women are left staring at each other. This is
obviously a cliffhanger ending to the scene, there is tension between the two women.

Osborne has included several monologues in the play. Jimmy is the character with most of the
monologues. In the majority of his monologues, his objective is to provoke the others but they
desperately try to ignore his taunts. His main objective usually is to irritate his wife Alison that it
could lead to an argument.

From the beginning of Act 1he is constantly trying to make his wife angry, he finally succeeds
when she gets burnt with an iron and she tells him violently to get out.

Alison: Get out!

Jimmy: (her head shaking helplessly) clear out of my sight.

This s the first time that Alison is actually showing that she is angry with jimmy. Even though the
fight that caused the accident was between him and Cliff.

The monologue that I worked on in class was from act 2 scene 1 when Alison is about to go to
church with Helena and jimmy is not in favour of her decision. In this monologue, I had to think of
the emotions which were associated with jimmy at the time, and I had to picture the way he would
talk and act to these emotions. At the start of the monologue, he is motivated and wants everyone to
see how he feels and as he goes on he loses his inspiration because he knows that no one is paying
any attention to him.

The emotion and realism in the language make the play very realistic because it helps the audience
understand the situation the characters are in and helps the audience make a good mental judgement
of the characters.