Invited Essay: Psychoanalytic Understanding of Religion. Journal article by Hans-Günter
Heimbrock; International Journal for Psychology of Religion, Vol. 1, 1991, 76-77
Erikson's view of the ambivalence of religion is more impartial and differentiated than
Freud's. Without deleting anything from Freud's critique of religion, Erikson freed the
analysis of religious experiences and symbols from the dominance of regressive fixation on
infantile phases not yet overcome.
Although Erikson did not write explicitly on the psychology of religion, his thought has
contributed to the modern psychology of religion even though it has not yet been valued
highly enough, particularly with regard to hermeneutics. Suggestive introductions were
offered by Homans ( 1978 ) and Zock ( 1990 ). Erikson brings religion into formal discussion
under two circumstances: when a particular configuration of conflict can also be identified as
the psychodynamic core of religious symbols and when religion is implicated in the collective
conditions -- ideas of value, world images, traditions, and so forth -- for development of
individual identity. The first circumstance can be illustrated by an understanding of the JudeoChristian symbol of Paradise as a recurrence of aspects of the oral phase ( Erikson, 1959) as
well as by the link between everyday ritualization and the psychodynamics of religious rites (
Erikson, 1977). The second, complementary circumstance is represented in a particularly
illuminating way in Erikson ( 1958 ) study of Luther. At the end of Young Man Luther, which
was as revolutionary for psychohistory as it was for the psychoanalytic psychology of
religion, Erikson outlined what in my opinion are the three central themes of the religious
longing of human beings:
One of these is the simple and fervent wish for a hallucinatory sense of unity
with a maternal matrix, and a supply of benevolently powerful substances; it is
symbolized by the affirmative face of charity, graciously inclined, reassuring
the faithful of the unconditional acceptance of those who will return to the
bosom. In this symbol the split of autonomy is forever repaired; shame is
healed by unconditional approval, doubt by the eternal presence of generous
provision.
In the center of the second nostalgia is the paternal voice of guiding
conscience, which puts an end to the simple paradise of childhood and
provides a sanction for energetic action. It also warns of the inevitability of
guilty entanglement, and threatens with the lightning of wrath. . . . At all cost,
the Godhead must be forced to indicate that He Himself mercifully planned
crime and punishment in order to assure salvation.
Finally, the glass shows the pure self itself, the unborn core of creation, the -as it were, preparental -- center where God is pure nothing: ein lauter Nichts,
in the words of Angelus Silesius. God is so designated in many ways in
Eastern mysticism. (p. 264)
With the themes in this passage, Erikson also made comprehensible the specific expansion of
the horizon that he provided for a psychoanalytic understanding of religion, which can be
delineated in two regards. On the one hand, the selection and handling of religious themes are
no longer first.
Erikson on Development in Adulthood: New Insights from the Unpublished Papers
Book by Carol Hren Hoare; Oxford University Press, 2002
LUTHER: ADULTHOOD JOINED
Young Man Luther was Erikson's first full-fledged book to show identity issues as they were
portrayed in Luther's young adult spiritual and intimacy
-32needs. It was also his first complete book on identity proper. When writing about Luther,
Erikson was past his own young adulthood and could consider that stage at some distance
from intimacy's requirements. Believing that good thinking, reflective writing, and the
“peace” to do these arise from “inner space,” Erikson wrote most of the book away from his
work environment. 37 He was on retreat from Riggs, a minisabbatical that marked several
forks in his life: From then on, he saw far fewer patients, and his writing shifted thematically
and methodologically. He moved from a form of writing in which he had illustrated
developmental issues that were buttressed by clinical data to conceptual essays that he crafted
for their ethical, historical, developmental, and teaching appeal. He took himself and his
readers down a seer's pathway toward the end of adult life. The clinician was in retreat. The
psychoanalytic writer with pressing historical and ethical messages increasingly took center
stage. This helped him move decidedly into his own generative ethical years. Comparing his
origin with his aims, he wrote:
That a stepson's negative identity is that of a bastard need only be
acknowledged here in passing …(but) working between the established fields
can mean avoiding the disciplines necessary for any one field; and being
enamored with the aesthetic order of things, one may well come to avoid their
ethical and political …implications. 38
By first elaborating Martin Luther's identity and then showing the power of militant,
nonviolent resistance through the identity needs of a middle-aged Mahatma Gandhi, Erikson
shifted permanently to “social and historical implications … possibly inspired by my great
compatriot Kierkegaard's differentiation of the aesthetic and the ethical life.” 39 Luther was
Erikson's first effort to extend beyond his own aesthetic stage as a psychoanalytic,
developmental clinician and to move into his generative period of caring more deeply about
his message and about the survival of his legacy of concepts.
Beginning with Luther, we can see a change in Erikson's level of thinking, as well as an
altered focus of thought. With this period, Erikson showed his climb up the metacognitive and
historical ladder. Childhood and Society was “written for psychiatrists (and) social workers …
Gandhi's Truth … (was) for people interested in history (and) … the emergence of
nonviolence.” 40 By the closing chapters of Toys and Reasons, Erikson had moved up
cognitively yet again to “shared visions … shared nightmares” and worldviews. 41 In his
always broader and higher metaperspective, he expanded his vista.
At the time he wrote Luther, Erikson was in the middle of his sixth decade of life and, as
such, was increasingly considering the meaning of life. The book served many purposes for
Erikson personally; thus we cannot simplify its meaning to him. Principally, its writing was
his vehicle for finding his voice, for coming to grips with his upbringing, and for
understanding where he stood on issues of faith. 42 With Luther, Erikson considered the
meaning to him of eternity, of the spiritual, and of the way religious institu-33tions required reformation. He began to consider in earnest the human's personal
transcendence of the physical boundaries of life. In this fresh terrain of border thinking,
Erikson showed the meaning of his own generativity as he moved toward the end of life. As
others before and after him, Erikson journeyed from absorption in himself and his discipline,
content, and methods to panhuman concerns—from aesthetics through ethics to spiritual
introspection. Through Luther, Erikson fully joined the problems and issues of adulthood. In
this, he believed he had had little choice. Referring here to Darwin, Erikson was
autobiographical:
It is enough to have persisted, with the naiveté of genius, in the dissolution of
one of the prejudices on which the security and the familiarity of the
contemporary image of man is built. But a creative man has no choice. He may
come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined,
his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal
conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his
one-way will. 43
Thus, with Luther, Erikson launched a two-pronged effort that continued throughout the rest
of his writing years. These were his efforts to understand and more completely portray what it
means to be an adult who develops through the conflicts of one life and its times. This is the
adult who, through the context and content of his or her changing adulthood, comes to a
heightened, introspective self-understanding and a better understanding and care of others. In
his analyses, Erikson illustrated how the society-infused adult influences one microcosm of
time and space. His related aim was to broaden the reach of his perspectives on
developmental ethics. In large-scale psychohistories about Luther and Gandhi, and through
briefer sketches of Einstein, Freud, and Jesus, Erikson's concerns about the intermingled
issues of insight, prejudice, ethics, and spirituality come through. He showed these against the
border at which one adult life joins other lives responsibly and against the fringe of life at
which adults face issues of nonexistence.
Erikson's Young Man Luther sparked near-instant interest in Freudian applications to history
and led to a beginning tide of inquiry and theory that inspired the formation of
psychohistorical conferences and journals. That tide has ebbed somewhat, chased back by apt
criticisms of some historians' reductionistic and simplistic misuses of psychoanalytic
concepts. But Luther led irreversibly to two major happenings.
First, historians and social scientists in this country changed their prisms to look more to the
ways in which adults of different eras consistently thought, felt, and were motivated to
behave, how they supported self and family, and how they adapted to the opportunities and
burdens, inclusions and exclusions, of respective positions in their social structures. Persons,
and the relativity of their views and needs, were now better visualized against where, when,
and how history and society serendipitously lodged them. This
-34is “historical relativity” to Erikson. To historians and social scientists alike, place, time, and
the prevailing views and values of different eras came to assume new prominence. By the
mid-1990s, thoughtful scholars had become wary about taking contemporary notions,
knowledge, understandings, and difficulties and casting them backward through time to
interpret and reconstruct history through latter-day lenses.
Second, for Erikson personally, the publication of Young Man Luther heralded dramatic
changes. Writing Luther, he edged along the catwalk on which psychology and history meet
but cannot be known firsthand. Although he had ventured there before, psychohistory now
became his concentration, a focused way to show how adult psyches intertwine with their
own history, with history proper, and with a tendency to preordain parts of the future through
identity images, visions, ideas, and plans. Erikson's Luther and his concepts about ego identity
and its problems opened a pathway to original work. It also helped him drive toward depicting
the entire life span. Erikson tackled a great part of this plan by showing how unique,
charismatic leaders reverberate against their own psychological needs and against the
demands and deprivations of their special social and historical eras. Instead of crumbling
before ego-thwarting, oppressive conditions, the young man whom Erikson found in Luther
and the middle-aged man whom he uncovered in Gandhi rode their egos and identity needs to
change history.
Luther, published just before Erikson brought his clinical work at Riggs to a close, gave
Erikson notoriety and exposure to a different audience, that of historians and theologians. It
was his favorite among the books he wrote. 44 But with the dangerous territory of
psychohistory, he furthered his distance from traditional psychoanalysis and advanced his
own decline in mainstream psychoanalytic circles. By stretching beyond known data, first in
Luther and later in Gandhi, he opened himself to excoriating criticism. Marking his departure
from contemporary clinical work in this way, Erikson furthered his marginality yet again as
he had done in his youth, even as he simultaneously advanced scholarship about what some—
Luther, Gandhi—had to do in order to gain their identities. More conceptually borderline now
than ever, the spotlight he had once cast onto society and culture, forcing a view to these as
both internal and external to the person's psyche, was now directed backward in the hopes that
this light would then show the way forward. This spotlight onto the comparatively recent
historical past began a fresh view of the developing adult as a biopsychosocialhistorical
human. It became Erikson's lens into portraying the historically, culturally relative adult, an
image of the highly abstract, cognitively developed person who lives in history yet knows the
self as residing in one era in the total flow of time. Erikson's previous triple bookkeeping of
the biopsychosocial person thus evolved into a quadruple ledger. He included the adult self in
historical time and context, as well as within his or her very contemporary psyche, soma, and
culture.
-35-
Peacock, D. Keith. Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre. Westport, Connecticut
London: Greenwood Press, 1997.
5 Caught in the Past: The Memory Plays and After
By the beginning of the 1970s, Pinter was spoken of as Britain's leading dramatist, while the
other members of the advance guard of the New British Theatre--John Osborne, Arnold
Wesker, John Arden, Ann Jellicoe, and Shelagh Delaney--for various reasons no longer held
sway. Even by the mid-1960s it had become evident that Osborne was not, as was first
thought, a political radical, but was essentially conservative in outlook and nostalgic for the
perceived certainties of Edwardian England. It also became apparent that his plays were more
concerned with emotional relationships than with social change. His dissidents--Porter,
Luther, Rice, Maitland, and Holyoake--conveyed pain and rage, not an ideologically based
argument. After Luther ( 1964), which was basically a realistic biographical play cloaked in
the then fashionable and much misunderstood Brechtian epic form, the protesting voice that
had characterized his lessons in feeling became increasingly petulant and less embodied in
dramatic action. This was most evident in A Sense of Detachment ( 1972), in which there was
no imaginative setting or plot, and the characters, abetted by actors planted throughout the
theatre, spent much of their time abusing the audience, critics, and society in general. In a
stage direction that appears just over halfway through the play one of the actors on stage
"surveys the audience and addresses them [sic]--if there is still any left" 1 (my italics). In fact,
during a performance of the play at the Royal Court Theatre, missiles were thrown at the
actors. In 1976, during the National Theatre's production of Osborne Watch It Come Down,
members of the audience shouted and walked out. The play is set in a converted country
railway station, inhabited by a representative selection of contemporary artists--a film
director, a painter, a biographer, and a novelist--who, with their partners, have opted out of
degenerate English society. The countryside they inhabit is, however, also home to "Beef
barons, pig and veal
-91concentration camps, Bentleys and pony traps and wellies . . . the one last surviving colony" 2
; while the wife of one of the characters is taking their dog for a walk, the animal is shot by
the local landlord. Unfortunately the group has brought its society's violence with it, and at
the end of Act One Sally attacks her husband, the film director Ben, and "they kick and tear at
each other, clothes tearing and splitting" (42). At the end of the play the barbarian society they
have tried to escape catches up with them and the station is shot to pieces by "yobbos." Like
England, it is all coming down. After Watch It Come Down Osborne wrote only two more
plays for the stage--in 1988 a version of Strindberg's Father and in 1990 Déjà Vu, a rather
mechanical and very disappointing revisiting of the characters of Look Back in Anger thirtyfour years on.
British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context 1956-1965
Book by Stephen Lacey; Routledge, 1995
BRECHT, HISTORY AND REALISM
One sign of the breaking up of the moment of Working-Class Realism was the
reappearance of history plays. By the mid-sixties, plays that were set wholly in the
past constituted a significant proportion of new work on the London stage. Some of
these plays were written/produced by writers/companies that were associated with
the New Wave; Osborne’s Luther (1961), Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959)
and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964), Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War
(1963), and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960)—these are the most relevant
examples. Set in a defined period of history—and therefore not ‘contemporary’ in the
sense in which it was normally used—these plays, and their productions, were
connected to the opening out of the realist stage, with an extensive, episodic
narrative, a movement beyond the ‘domestic’ situations of the earlier plays, and with
conventions of performance that were anti-naturalistic, frequently drawing on popular
genres.
This renewed interest in history may be seen as a rejection—or at least a
superseding—of the early concerns of the New Wave. There was a sense, for
example, that to write history plays was to have ‘grown up’, and to have connected
with legitimate drama. Writing on Luther, Michael Foot commended Osborne for
having written a play that stepped ‘with such assurance from his crowded bed-sitting
rooms and sleazy music halls on to the stage of world history’ (Page 1988:31). This
kind of judgement not only erects a hierarchy, in which the local concerns of
contemporary realism are seen to be less important—because less ambitious or farreaching— than the ‘universal’ themes of history, but also blurs the degree to which
plays about history are connected to the present, if only implicitly. In fact, the
relationship between past and present in the history plays of this period is often
complex and varied; indeed, in some senses, many of them are not ‘history’ plays at
all.
One recurrent point of reference in the discussion of history plays was Brecht, who
provided one of the main European models of a serious and committed historical
drama. Brecht and the
-154Berliner Ensemble visited Britain in August of 1956. The company brought three
productions, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Trumpets and
Drums, which were generally met by a contradictory response from the West End
audience, attracting ‘much attention but not much critical acclaim’ (Elsom 1976:113).
However, the visit did have an impact on British theatre practitioners and critics,
erecting a set of criteria against which political/ historical drama could be judged.
Both Milne (in Encore) and Tynan (in the Observer) compared Bolt’s A Man for All
Seasons unfavourably to Brecht’s plays in general, and Galileo in particular. Tynan
also used Galileo as a point of reference for his review of Luther, a play which was
also seen more generally in relation to a Brechtian dramaturgy.
The influence of Brecht (and his company) was, and continues to be, complex and to
stretch beyond the practice of playwrighting. With its emphasis on a permanent
working group, on collective effort, and the value of the ensemble as a means of
organising a company, the Berliner was a clear alternative to the ethic of the star
system and the half-hearted amateurism that was one of the most persistent
criticisms of British theatre. Devine visited the Berliner in East Berlin in 1955 and was
clearly impressed by both the professionalism and the ‘artistic dedication’ in what he
saw there. ‘The group appears to function in a natural and unneurotic manner’, he
noted, linking the fact that it was an ensemble to a ‘strong artistic conception’ (Devine
1970:16). What Devine saw in the Berliner was the fulfilment of his ambitions for the
English Stage Company; a theatre heavily supported by the State, with a permanent
company, a strong professionalism, a clear artistic policy (although Devine did not
share this) and a popular audience.
What was missing from British Brechtianism in the late fifties was a clear
engagement with Brecht’s politics. 4 The idea of Brecht as a committed artist was an
attractive one. The editors of The Encore
4 That this was not an inevitable process, but rather one that was specific to British
theatrical and intellectual formations in the period, is apparent when the British
response is compared with that of a group of French intellectuals who were
encountering Brecht at about the same time. Roland Barthes, for example,
responded to very different themes in Brecht’s work. In an article written in 1956,
Barthes considered the implications of Brecht’s thinking in the fields of sociology,
ideology, semiology and morality, arguing that ‘A knowledge of Brecht, consideration
of Brecht—in short, Brechtian criticism—is by definition to cover the basic issues of
our time’ (Barthes 1979:25).
-155-
Reader argued that ‘there was no question about the pervasive all-infecting influence
of Bertolt Brecht’, and that To be Brechtian was to be politically concerned,
theatrically bold and artistically disciplined’ (Marowitz et al. 1970:135); there is little
doubt that it was really the latter two qualities that were most influential—and, to
illustrate the paradoxical nature of the appropriation of Brecht, they were not the
exclusive properties of a ‘Brechtian’ theatre.
The marginalisation of Brecht’s politics was a result of both the difficulty of finding a
coherent politics within the New Wave itself, and of the persistence of a Cold War
rhetoric that automatically coloured perceptions of Brecht’s relationship with the East
German government (a relationship that was not without its paradoxes). Mathers has
argued that Encore’ s interest in Brecht was ‘almost exclusively centred on certain
aesthetic criteria, on the “technical elements of alienation”’ (Mathers 1975:81). And
although Encore did not have a particular ‘line’ on Brecht, or anyone else, it is
certainly the case that Brecht was appreciated mainly as a ‘professional’ and to the
degree to which he could be used to contribute to, and shape, debates that had
already been established. On the one hand, this led to an emphasis on Brecht as a
poet (Ernest Bornemann lionised him as a ‘lyric poet’ whose gifts ‘transformed
everything he touched’; Bornemann 1970:141). On the other, Brecht’s name became
a shorthand for a general anti-naturalism, particularly in performance. Lindsay
Anderson, for example, commended Avis Bunnage’s performance in A Taste of
Honey as ‘real Brechtian playing’ (Anderson 1970b:80).
The influence of Brecht on most British history plays did not proceed, therefore, from
a similar politics but tended to focus on particular narrative techniques. Like Brecht’s
plays, A Man for All Seasons and Luther use a particular period of history, and are
written in an episodic manner, with a narrative of self-contained actions that appears
to fracture the strict temporal unity and cause and effect logic of the three-act drama.
Both use a form of narration; A Man has a recurrent character, the Common Man,
who gives a view of the events of the play, whilst in Luther each scene is announced
by the figure of a knight. However, these connections are at best superficial and at
worst misleading, not least because ‘history’ is largely absent from both of these
plays.
The comparison with Brecht threw up the degree to which the precise contours of
another historical period and society were the
-156subject of the plays, even when the ultimate lessons to be learnt were about
contemporary Britain. Brecht’s history plays, notably Galileo and Mother Courage, set
the main narratives within a carefully drawn historical context, one which is defined in
terms of the social and political processes that govern the relationships between his
characters. For Tynan, this was precisely what was missing from A Man.
Mr Bolt is primarily absorbed in the state of More’s conscience, not in
the state of More’s England or More’s Europe. …Brecht, on the other
hand, though he gives us an intimate study of Galileo’s conscience,
takes pains to relate it at every turn to Galileo’s world and to the
universe at large.
(Tynan 1984:287-8)
Gascoine, in a generally favourable review, observed a similar lack in Luther : ‘The
play offers no analysis of the causes of the Reformation, no explanation of Luther’s
magnetism, nor even the picture of an age’ (Page 1988:29).
Both Luther and A Man, in fact, show quite marked and unexpected connections to
the earlier, more intensive naturalism— and in Osborne’s case, to the intensive form
of his own earlier plays. Both centre on a dominating central protagonist, who is
constructed as a psychologically rounded individual, pitted against a ‘society’ that is
outside him. This was emphasised in production with the casting in the central roles
of charismatic actors, Paul Scofield (More) and Albert Finney (Luther), and was
perfectly compatible with an episodic scene structure and a design that eschewed
naturalism. As Martin Priestman has argued, ‘the disturbance of the unities by backprojections and over-familiar narrators was actually quite helpful in allowing classical
stars…to wrestle tragically with their consciences in full costume’ (Priestman 1992:
119). This view of psychology is also at odds with Brecht’s concept of the individual
as the site of social contradictions, the point where social and historical forces meet
and are played out. One result of this is that the conflicts that are then explored—
More’s crises of conscience, for example—appear ‘timeless’, very much like our own.
Raymond Williams argued that A Man exemplified a kind of history play that is really
‘a kind of ante-dated naturalism: the characters talk and feel in the twentieth century,
but for action and interest are based in the sixteenth’ (Williams 1978:505). The effect
-157is not of one historical period finding a resonance in another, but of history itself
being obliterated, dissolved into a pool of universal human concerns.
Luther is also remarkably like Osborne’s other protagonists at this time; Tynan
remarked that he was remarkably like Osborne himself. ‘Why…should John Osborne
have wanted to write a play about the founder of Protestantism?’ he asked. ‘Is there
not something here that might speak to the author of Look Back in Anger,
embarrassed to find himself dubbed an apostle of social revolution when in fact, like
Luther, he preached nothing but revolutionary individualism?’ (Tynan 1984:314). Like
both Jimmy Porter and Archie Rice, Luther is almost outside history altogether, the
essential conflicts that trouble him arising not out of his time but out of a kind of
original sin of self-doubt and a compulsion towards the truth as he sees it. He is a
character who is not produced by history, but rather acts upon it, his inner conflicts
played out on a world stage.
A different attitude towards history—and a different relationship to Brecht—is
revealed in Arden’s writing. Arden’s plays are unlike any others in the New Wave,
drawing on a range of popular and literary forms to engage not only with the
processes of history, but also to explore, along a different path from his
contemporaries, the possibilities of a contemporary political theatre. Although both
Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight were set in the past,
the impetus for both of them was contemporary political events—as it was for all of
Arden’s plays. Arden wrote Musgrave, a play about the impact of a group of
deserters from a British colonial war on a northern mining town in the mid to late
nineteenth century, after reading a newspaper account of an incident involving British
troops in Cyprus. And Armstrong, set in late medieval Scotland, was written after
reading Conor Cruise O’Brien’s To Katanga and Back, an account of events in the
Belgian Congo. In neither play are these original sources openly acknowledged, and
the connections are partly at the level of the issues explored. Thus Musgrave is a
play about the nature of pacifism and the correct response to acts of violence,
colonial or otherwise, and Armstrong discusses questions of political morality.
However, the choice of period was not arbitrary, nor was it based on an attraction to
particular individuals from the past, but arose out of similarities between the two
historical situations. Therefore, Musgrave, a play written in response to contemporary
colonialism,
-158was set in the period of colonial expansion; and Armstrong-was set in a period of European
history that had clear parallels to the Africa of the mid-1950s.
Radical Stages: Alternative History in Modern British Drama
Book by D. Keith Peacock; Greenwood Press, 1991
Although with Luther, in 1961, John Osborne also appeared to be emulating the
Brechtian Epic approach to historical drama, like Bolt, in the portrayal of his hero, he
too was unable or unwilling to abandon individualism. Inevitably, this factor was again
to militate against a broadening of the play's historical perspective. Like Galileo (and
A Man for All Seasons), Luther belongs to a long tradition of plays of individual
conscience and, in spite of Osborne's intention that the intense private interest of Act
1 should be replaced in Act 2 by a "physical effect" which would be "more intricate,
general, less personal; sweeping, concerned with men in time rather than particular
man in the unconscious", 14 he does not convey that interplay between the historical
figure and his peculiar historical environment which, in Brecht's plays, resulted in the
portrayal of man not only as an individual but also as a member of society. Luther
centres instead almost exclusively upon the problems of personal belief and private
conscience experienced by one particular man who suffers from a painful bowel
disorder. Luther is portrayed, like Jimmy Porter, as a disaffected outsider in his own
society. He is an individualist who, in consequence of his theological doubts and his
desire to attain unmediated communication with God, finds himself in opposition to
the institution of the Catholic Church. Significantly, Osborne's chosen source for
Luther's characterisation was Eric H. Eriksons psychological study, Young Man
Luther ( 1959), and the play returns repeatedly, often employing Luther's own words,
to the character's evident anal fixation.
If the source material selected by a dramatist reflects his or her own perception of
character and event and exercises a major influence upon the dramatic realisation of
both, then the difference between Osborne's approach and that of earlier
biographical historical dramatists lies merely in his application of modern psychology
to the creation of his hero and in the scatological nature of the
-28-
expression of Luther's personal angst. As Simon Trussler points out in his study of
Osborne's work, Luther "is conceived much more fully as a private man hemmed-in
by his own physicality than as a politico-religious animal". 15 This is a viewpoint
supported by such emotive stage action as Luther's epileptic fit which concludes
Scene 1, and by the powerful visual image of a man sprawled across the blade of a
huge butcher's knife which opens Scene 2 and which effectively communicates the
physicality of Luther's anguish. Luther's individualism is also emphasised by the fact
that, in spite of his own humble background and his role as a religious revolutionary,
he has no sympathy for political revolution and arrogantly disassociates himself from
the Peasants' Revolt which was partly inspired by his own radical ideas. Mrhen the
Knight upbraids him with the accusation that, had he involved himself in the
peasants' rebellion, he "could even have brought freedom and order in at one and
the same time", Luther retorts that "There's no such thing as an orderly revolution.
Anyway Christians are called to suffer, not fight." It becomes evident that he is
personally afraid of the chaos that accompanies revolution, seeing it as "the devil's
organ". "They deserved their death", he says of the peasants, for, as he tells Christ,
"they kicked against authority, they plundered and bargained and all in Your name!"
The play ends inconclusively with a scene of extreme personal domesticity which
involves Luther and his child, and our last image is of a very private person who has
put radical activity behind him. In his critique of the play, Kenneth Tynan was again to
recognise, as he had in the case of Bolt A Man for All Seasons, that, in spite of its
pseudo-Brechtian structure Luther was radical neither in its theatrical approach nor in
its ideological standpoint. He concluded somewhat bitterly that Osborne, whom five
years earlier he had praised for his contribution to the revolution in British theatre,
must have been somewhat embarrassed to have been dubbed an apostle of social
revolution when in fact, like Luther, "he preached nothing but revolutionary
individualism". 16
While emulating some of Brecht's stage techniques, both Bolt and Osborne were
ideologically incapable of adopting his non-individualistic interpretation of history.
During the 1960s there were nevertheless a number of British dramatists who, in
their dramatisation of history, were to present alternative interpretations to those
offered by the Establishment and successfully alter its focus from personal to public.
For them, the past was neither merely a source of "human interest" stories, of
romance, spectacle or nostalgia, nor even a context for the expression of universal
spiritual or moral concerns or the exploration of personal angst. For these dramatists
whose political
-29sympathies, while not identical, were broadly socialist, all history was now to become
contemporary history. It was to be employed primarily as a means of discussing the
present and as a vehicle for confronting public rather than personal issues. Outside
the West End, in various regional theatres, at the Royal Court and at the Theatre
Royal, Stratford East, in the work of Arnold Wesker, Joan Littlewood's Theatre
Workshop and John Arden, the new approach was to be expressed in the form of
Social Realism, the Epic, or Documentary theatre. Although this new approach to
historical drama should not be considered as intrinsically "better" than that which it
replaced, it was, nevertheless, to be more in tune with the thoughts, feelings and
political and social aspirations of its age.
-30-
The Angry Theatre: New British Drama
Book by John Russell Taylor; Hill and Wang, 1962
What Osborne is after in this use of narration seems clear enough, but the weakness of A
Matter of Scandal and Concern is still the same as that of The Entertainer: that his adoption of
Brechtian processes is only half-hearted. What happens in both of them is that the framework
of comment -- the music-hall songs, the narration -- is in one convention and the scenes
contained by that framework are in another: the same verismo as Look Back in Anger. This
persistent failure to evolve an integrated new dramatic technique to replace the old lent a
particular interest to the appearance of his second historical play, Luther; would he in this,
tackling for the first time a theme right away from contemporary realism in the medium in
which he was most at home, the stage, manage at last to find a satisfactory new form for his
work?
The answer is still yes and no, but the reasons for this evasion are unexpected. First it must be
said that the play as a whole corresponds very closely in dramatic method to the reconstructed
scenes in A Matter of Scandal and Concern: the historical material is straightforwardly
presented on the whole, with Luther's own words used whenever possible (as Osborne and his
supporters rapidly pointed out to the tender-minded who
-54-
quailed at the dramatist's apparent obsession with constipation and defecation). Moreover, it is
not 'Brechtian' in the senses conventional to the English theatre, being neither dressed up with
songs and dances ὰ la Theatre Workshop nor equipped with a ubiquitous audiencerepresentative in the shape of a Common Man (as favoured by such examples of Brecht tamed
and commercialized as A Man for All Seasons): 'narration', in fact, is reduced to a brusque
announcement from the stage of time and place. Here the model seems to be rather the direct
chronicle of Galileo, in which man as an individual and man in society are held as far as the
spectator's interest is concerned in an edgy balance. Brecht manages to preserve the balance
very effectively between the inner forces which drive Galileo on and the social forces (Church
and State) which hold him back. In Osborne the balance is less satisfactory, since so much
time is spent on the 'psychological' material early on -- Martin's obsession with his own
sinfulness, with the sinfulness of merely being alive, and his relations with his father, whom
he loved, and his mother, who beat him -- that by the time this all bears fruit in his rebellion
and heresy, and he moves out (like Galileo) into the world of repressive social forces
(emanating, like those that opposed Galileo, from the Vatican), there is not enough room left
to deal with them properly.
From Act II, Scene IV, at the end of which Luther nails his theses to the church door at
Wittenburg, the issues involved are scurried over in unseemly haste, with a rather feeble scene
of disputation between Luther and Cajetan, the papal legate (which again demonstrates
Osborne's deficiencies when a conflict of equals rather than a tirade to a captive audience is
called for, since, though apparently engaging in a discussion, Luther and Cajetan never really
interlock so that one answers the other; their 'dialogue' turns out, in fact, to be two
monologues skilfully intercut), and another, even weaker, showing Pope Leo about to go
hunting, to take care insufficiently of the theological side before we get to the Diet of Worms.
Then we jump four years to learn something, but not to the uninitiated enough, about the
intervening period of war and Luther's apparent betrayal of the peasants, but what happened
and why remains obscure (even
-55though the scene with the Knight, not in the original text, was inserted to clarify matters), and
the closing scene, in which we see Luther at home two years later with his wife and son,
returns unashamedly to the personal with, finally, a note of nostalgia which should by now be
familiar to us in Osborne's work: Luther, himself the instigator of a period of unrest and
unsettled values, looks back to an earlier, happier day:
A little while, and you shall see me. Christ said that, my son. I hope that'll be
the way of it again. I hope so. Let's just hope so, eh? Eh? let's just hope so.
Well, what about Luther? Does it really represent, as one critic opined, 'the most solid
guarantee yet given of Mr John Osborne's dramatic stamina'? Alas, although after the relative
failure of The World of Paul Slickey and A Matter of Scandal and Concern one had hoped
that it would provide a reasonably clear answer, there is nothing for it but to hedge again.
However, one or two pointers there are. It is noticeable, after the extreme thinness of the
material in The World of Paul Slickey, that both A Matter of Scandal and Concern and Luther
are historical reconstructions relying closely for their material and even for their dialogue on
the documentary sources. This seems to suggest a drying-up, perhaps temporary, of Osborne's
inventive faculties at least in so far as they concern the creation of new characters and plotsituations; instead he is turning to plots and characters already in existence. The failure of The
World of Paul Slickey and A Matter of Scandal and Concern, followed by the popular and
critical success of Luther, suggests also that after some fumbling he has mastered the
technique of handling pre-existent material efficiently, to form a play which if not completely
satisfactory in detail is at least well enough written and interesting enough in its material to
provide a generally satisfactory evening's theatre.
I do not think anyone would deny that Luther is that -- especially with the magnetic
personality of Albert Finney in the title role -- but it would surprise me if anyone on mature
consideration can find it as intense, as eloquent, as personal, as -- to bring out the key word
here -- as felt as Epitaph for George Dillon, Look Back in Anger, or The Entertainer. It is a
good, sensible, com-56mercial piece of work, spiced with enough anger and naughty words to establish it as
representative of a later generation than, say, Rattigan Adventure Story, but basically it is not
so different from Adventure Story, or for that matter A Man for All Seasons or Anouilh
Becket. It is popular, as they (the last two, at any rate) were popular, and on the whole it
deserves its popularity. But the most positive new discovery about Osborne it offers us is that
he is not just the primitive we feared he might be -inspired or nothing; he can turn his hand to
play-writing simply as a craft and turn out something perfectly presentable. But equally, taken
in conjunction with the two previous plays, it does make us wonder whether, barring any
sudden unforeseen transformation, we must say good-bye to Osborne the innovator and greet
instead Osborne the careful craftsman. A 'guarantee of dramatic stamina'? No doubt, but
perhaps not in quite the sense intended.
-57-
At a critical point in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), Jimmy Porter suddenly
alters the tone of his relentless provocations. "Have you ever watched somebody die?" he
queries Helena, the visiting friend of his wife Alison (57). When she replies "no" Jimmy
begins a crucial speech of this seminal drama. He was only ten years old, Jimmy recalls, when
his father, severely wounded in the Spanish Civil War, returned home to die. "Embarrassed
and irritated," his mother nursed her ailing husband without complaining but without
compassion. For twelve months "a lonely, bewildered little boy" witnessed the despair and
bitterness of a dying man. "You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry--angry
and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about--love ... betrayal ... and death,
when I was ten years old, than you will probably ever know all your life." When Jimmy
recalls his father's death, he provides the core autobiographical experience that to his
understanding vindicates his difficult behavior. Critics sometimes wondered why this young
university graduate was so angry, and they puzzled over what motivated his extraordinary
outbursts. The answer remains hidden in plain view. Jimmy Porter looks back in anger to the
death of his father. He tells a story about his father's victimization by government ("Certain
god-fearing gentlemen there had made such a mess of him") and by his own family ("As for
my mother, all she could think about was the fact that she had allied herself to a man who
seemed to be on the wrong side in all things" [57-58]). But the real story centers on Jimmy
himself. The death of his father leaves him alone, abandoned, betrayed, and angry.
Osborne dedicated Look Back in Anger to his father and often acknowledged its origins in his
own background. It was not until 1981, however, when he published the first volume of his
autobiography A Better Class of Person, that parallels between Jimmy Porter and his literary
creator became widely known). (3) Like Jimmy, Osborne witnessed as a boy the death of his
father. Osborne's "panic sense of loneliness" (100) at the final Christmas dinner with his
father, difficult relations with his mother and grandmother, and brief confinement in a
sanatorium helped shape the playwright's preoccupation with loss and betrayal in his literary
works. In The Entertainer Archie Rice feels abandoned by his family and by a music-hall
audience that no longer finds him amusing; in Luther Martin feels alienated from both his
father and the Church he revolutionizes; in Inadmissible Evidence a solicitor, Bill Maitland,
watches helplessly as colleagues and lovers depart; even the raucous Tom Jones, for which
Osborne wrote the film script, centers upon an abandoned child. (4) Above all, Look Back in
Anger returns again and again to the theme of abandonment. "People go away. You never see
them again," Jimmy says to Alison (33). His father dies young; his best friend, Hugh, departs
for Canada; at various points Alison, Helena, and even Cliff leave Jimmy. "I seem to spend
my life saying good-bye" he remarks near the end of the play (84).
For many, both in the 1950s and today, Jimmy Porter's outrageous behavior invites social
condemnation or psychological intervention. Certainly he can be "explained" therapeutically,
as recent feminist interpretations about his insecure masculinity demonstrate. (5) Still,
whatever his behavior's origins, Porter takes people outside their conventional expectations
and, not unlike the political radicals of the 1960s, forces them to reconsider a range of social
and political issues. He was, says Alison, a revolutionary "born out of his time" (94). Like
Colin Wilson's "Outsider," Jimmy pursues a missionary quest. He believes that only tragedy
can awaken Alison from her "beauty sleep" the death-in-life existence of complacency and
banality (37). Alison's leaving of Jimmy and loss of a child represent a far more profound
rupture than her earlier rebellion from family and social position. As with Jimmy's witnessing
his father's death, she has discovered the transforming power of suffering. No longer
"neutral," she has been reborn into the "lost cause" of understanding the tragic human
condition (95). The death-in-life of her "beauty sleep" shattered, she emerges as both victim
and existential heroine.
By the end of the play, both figures carry a difficult ethical burden that, to them, most people
miscomprehend. "The heaviest, strongest creatures in this world seem to be the loneliest,"
Jimmy maintains. "Like the old bear, following his own breath in the dark forest. There's no
warm pack, no herd to comfort him. That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's,
does it?" (94). This speech, with its Nietzschean sentiments also praised in Wilson's book,
means that the existential hero remains the ultimate individualist--indifferent to public
opinion, contemptuous of its standards. The "weak" and "emotional" Jimmy, like the Alison
who "grovels" (95), turns out to be strong and courageous. Rather than repress emotions and
deny tragedy, they both confront the irrational and assimilate it.
As other commentators have noted, such a philosophy can have reactionary, even fascist,
implications. Its individualism and contempt for average humanity undermine democratic
principle and communal values. Its pessimism negates hopes for a bright future. Indeed,
Osborne's later reactionary politics are prefigured in his first successful play. Like other
"angry young men," Jimmy turns out in retrospect to have been riper for the Spectator than
the New Left Review (see Langford). What the Osborne of the 1950s and that of later years
share is the iconoclasm of the Outsider, whose opinions rarely become widely fashionable and
whose politics remain subversive. To his mind Osborne protested consistently against both
the right-wing complacency of the 1950s and the left-wing smugness of the 1960s. His plays
demonstrate the power of victims to grasp deeper truths.
Honest to God and the Discourse on Patriarchy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain.
by D.L. Le Mahieu
On 17 March 1963 the Observer ran a feature article titled "Our Image of God Must Go" that
outlined the main ideas of a forthcoming book. Bishop John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God
was published three days later, its first edition selling out in a week. Within a year it sold over
300,000 copies, within a decade over 1,000,000. No religious publication other than the Bible
sold as well in Britain. The Bishop of Woolwich became a national celebrity. The BBC
devoted radio and television programs to Robinson's ideas; the popular press caricatured his
theology in its headlines; magazines outlined his life and ideas in feature articles. Thousands
of individuals sent letters of approbation and condemnation (Clements 178-79; James Life
115-16).
Robinson rejected the image of God as a patriarch in heaven or, as he put it, "an Old Man in
the sky" (HG 18). This traditional spatial metaphor survived from an earlier era, he wrote,
before modern science exploded the three-decker universe of Heaven, Earth, and Hell.
Christian theology found itself on the defensive as scientific fact overwhelmed traditional
religious cosmology. By the 1960s satellites and other space probes evacuated the concept of
"God in His Heaven." "Now it seems there is no room for him," Robinson wrote of the
archaic representation of the Deity, "not merely in the inn, but in the entire universe: for there
are no vacant places left" (HG 13-14). Modern thought transcended the image of God as an
anthropomorphic projection of the Father, the paterfamilias of lost childhood. Sigmund Freud
demonstrated the psychological origins of this archaic Patriarch and, like Friedrich Nietzsche
earlier, abandoned it. "Inevitably it feels like being orphaned," Robinson declared (HG 18).
Borrowing from Paul Tillich and others, Robinson portrayed God as the "Ground of our
Being" and the "Beyond in our Midst" (HG 44, 53). "Belief in God is the trust, the well-nigh
incredible trust, that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded but
`accepted,' that Love is the ground of our being, to which ultimately we `come home'" (HG
49). This Supreme Being was at once personal and abstract: God became defined by agapic
affiliations that reflected, however imperfectly, a transcendent reality, not unlike a Platonic
Form. As Robinson acknowledged, some found such transcendence difficult to grasp. At the
same time, however, he retained a characteristic Protestant bias by grounding authentic
religion in a deeply personal encounter, the love of one individual for another or for God.
Invoking Martin Buber, the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, Robinson
deemed this encounter an I-Thou relationship (HG 53).
"How does one pray to `ultimate reality?'" The Times asked (qtd. in Edwards 99). Robinson
answered this question by transforming prayer into a deflected transaction among humans:
"My own experience is that I am really praying for people, agonizing with God for them,
precisely as I meet them and really give my soul to them" (HG 99). Again Robinson
surrounded a secular encounter with traditional religious nomenclature. Heavily influenced by
the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Robinson suggested that "worldly
holiness" removed the barriers between the religious and secular world. Whatever revivified
Love, the Ground of our Being, ought to be considered worship: "Anything that fails to do
this is not Christian worship, be it ever so `religious'" (HG 88). Within this theology Jesus
became a "man for others," "the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is
utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being" (HG 76). Jesus embodied the
Unconditional in the Conditional, the Transcendent Love of God in an individual who walked
on earth. He was "self-emptying" (HG 74), surrendering himself to others completely and
accepting fallen humanity in Grace.
Honest to God provoked enormous controversy. Typical of the book's harshest critics,
Alasdair MacIntyre argued that Robinson's muddled theology too easily assimilated the
destructive arguments of religious skeptics. MacIntyre emphasized how Robinson rejected the
supernatural and, like modern humanists, translated theological impulses into secular pursuits:
"His book testifies to the existence of a whole group of theologies which retained a theistic
vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance" (7). Accommodation to intellectual
modernity, MacIntyre and others warned, could not rescue Christianity from skeptics, only
condemn it to gradual extinction. (1) Other critics, however, recognized that Robinson was
less radical than many supposed. E. L. Mascall, Professor of Theology at London University,
wrote that "any mental picture of God may be a hindrance if it is taken univocally" (117). C.
S. Lewis noted wearily that "the Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian
laymen less than he anticipates. We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne
in a localized heaven.... His view of Jesus ... seems wholly orthodox" (Edwards 91-92).
The astonishing success and intense controversy surrounding Honest to God might be situated
within any number of historical contexts. Theologically, as Lewis noted, the book popularized
issues familiar to the religious establishment. A year before Robinson's book a group of
Cambridge intellectuals debated many of the same doctrines in a collection titled Soundings:
Essays Concerning Christian Understanding (Vidler). Robinson's book and its predecessors
reflected a much larger cultural encounter with existentialism, a seminal philosophy among
intellectuals and artists from the 1940s through the late 1960s. Honest to God also selfconsciously represented a modernist response to the decline of Anglicanism. Statistics
verified Robinson's alarm. Between 1960 and 1970 attendance in the Church of England fell
by 19%. During roughly the same period, baptisms decreased by 15% and confirmations by
37%. The Church of England ordained 605 men in 1961; by 1972 only 392 were ordained
(Beeson 42-47). (2)
Robinson's recasting of the image of God and his call for revitalized human relationships,
however, can also be situated within a broader discourse about the changing nature of
patriarchy in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This discourse shared a structural pattern with
Robinson's controversial bestseller. The loss of a father or patriarchal figure becomes the
occasion for different social relationships whose apparent radicalism often masks underlying
continuities. Variations of this pattern can be found, first, among the emergent working and
lower-middle-class writers who helped define culturally the period following the Suez Crisis.
Such writers as John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Raymond Williams created autobiographical
fiction that lamented the death of a father and reflected upon his legacy from one generation
to another. A second, often more abstract, variation within this discourse on patriarchy can be
found among prominent second-wave British feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s. These
nonfiction writers emerged from the often aggressively male New Left politics of the era.
Figures such as Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, and Germaine Greer rejected traditional
patriarchy but also confronted the complexities of defining new roles for women. The
following essay, which creates homologies rather than dissecting causes, describes a number
of episodes within this discourse and argues that Robinson's Honest to God contributed to a
pattern of thought that transcended disciplinary boundaries.
I
At a critical point in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), Jimmy Porter suddenly
alters the tone of his relentless provocations. "Have you ever watched somebody die?" he
queries Helena, the visiting friend of his wife Alison (57). When she replies "no" Jimmy
begins a crucial speech of this seminal drama. He was only ten years old, Jimmy recalls, when
his father, severely wounded in the Spanish Civil War, returned home to die. "Embarrassed
and irritated," his mother nursed her ailing husband without complaining but without
compassion. For twelve months "a lonely, bewildered little boy" witnessed the despair and
bitterness of a dying man. "You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry--angry
and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about--love ... betrayal ... and death,
when I was ten years old, than you will probably ever know all your life." When Jimmy
recalls his father's death, he provides the core autobiographical experience that to his
understanding vindicates his difficult behavior. Critics sometimes wondered why this young
university graduate was so angry, and they puzzled over what motivated his extraordinary
outbursts. The answer remains hidden in plain view. Jimmy Porter looks back in anger to the
death of his father. He tells a story about his father's victimization by government ("Certain
god-fearing gentlemen there had made such a mess of him") and by his own family ("As for
my mother, all she could think about was the fact that she had allied herself to a man who
seemed to be on the wrong side in all things" [57-58]). But the real story centers on Jimmy
himself. The death of his father leaves him alone, abandoned, betrayed, and angry.
Osborne dedicated Look Back in Anger to his father and often acknowledged its origins in his
own background. It was not until 1981, however, when he published the first volume of his
autobiography A Better Class of Person, that parallels between Jimmy Porter and his literary
creator became widely known). (3) Like Jimmy, Osborne witnessed as a boy the death of his
father. Osborne's "panic sense of loneliness" (100) at the final Christmas dinner with his
father, difficult relations with his mother and grandmother, and brief confinement in a
sanatorium helped shape the playwright's preoccupation with loss and betrayal in his literary
works. In The Entertainer Archie Rice feels abandoned by his family and by a music-hall
audience that no longer finds him amusing; in Luther Martin feels alienated from both his
father and the Church he revolutionizes; in Inadmissible Evidence a solicitor, Bill Maitland,
watches helplessly as colleagues and lovers depart; even the raucous Tom Jones, for which
Osborne wrote the film script, centers upon an abandoned child. (4) Above all, Look Back in
Anger returns again and again to the theme of abandonment. "People go away. You never see
them again," Jimmy says to Alison (33). His father dies young; his best friend, Hugh, departs
for Canada; at various points Alison, Helena, and even Cliff leave Jimmy. "I seem to spend
my life saying good-bye" he remarks near the end of the play (84).
For many, both in the 1950s and today, Jimmy Porter's outrageous behavior invites social
condemnation or psychological intervention. Certainly he can be "explained" therapeutically,
as recent feminist interpretations about his insecure masculinity demonstrate. (5) Still,
whatever his behavior's origins, Porter takes people outside their conventional expectations
and, not unlike the political radicals of the 1960s, forces them to reconsider a range of social
and political issues. He was, says Alison, a revolutionary "born out of his time" (94). Like
Colin Wilson's "Outsider," Jimmy pursues a missionary quest. He believes that only tragedy
can awaken Alison from her "beauty sleep" the death-in-life existence of complacency and
banality (37). Alison's leaving of Jimmy and loss of a child represent a far more profound
rupture than her earlier rebellion from family and social position. As with Jimmy's witnessing
his father's death, she has discovered the transforming power of suffering. No longer
"neutral," she has been reborn into the "lost cause" of understanding the tragic human
condition (95). The death-in-life of her "beauty sleep" shattered, she emerges as both victim
and existential heroine.
By the end of the play, both figures carry a difficult ethical burden that, to them, most people
miscomprehend. "The heaviest, strongest creatures in this world seem to be the loneliest,"
Jimmy maintains. "Like the old bear, following his own breath in the dark forest. There's no
warm pack, no herd to comfort him. That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's,
does it?" (94). This speech, with its Nietzschean sentiments also praised in Wilson's book,
means that the existential hero remains the ultimate individualist--indifferent to public
opinion, contemptuous of its standards. The "weak" and "emotional" Jimmy, like the Alison
who "grovels" (95), turns out to be strong and courageous. Rather than repress emotions and
deny tragedy, they both confront the irrational and assimilate it.
As other commentators have noted, such a philosophy can have reactionary, even fascist,
implications. Its individualism and contempt for average humanity undermine democratic
principle and communal values. Its pessimism negates hopes for a bright future. Indeed,
Osborne's later reactionary politics are prefigured in his first successful play. Like other
"angry young men," Jimmy turns out in retrospect to have been riper for the Spectator than
the New Left Review (see Langford). What the Osborne of the 1950s and that of later years
share is the iconoclasm of the Outsider, whose opinions rarely become widely fashionable and
whose politics remain subversive. To his mind Osborne protested consistently against both
the right-wing complacency of the 1950s and the left-wing smugness of the 1960s. His plays
demonstrate the power of victims to grasp deeper truths.
II
In Alan Sillitoe's magnificent short story "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner"
(1957), the main character, known only as "Smith," clearly represents something more than a
surly criminal of working-class origins. In his long-distance runs, Sillitoe makes clear, Smith
touches upon the experience of Everyman, every life. Described as the first and last man on
earth, he begins each morning in the State of Nature, solitary and shivering in the pre-dawn
darkness. As he runs, he moves from death to life, from winter to spring. "Everything's dead,
but good, because it's dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive" (8-9). As Smith
ponders the larger issues of freedom and meaning, each run resembles a temporal cycle that
he himself has only partially completed. The long-distance runner travels metaphorically
through the stages of existence. Perhaps that is why the title remains so haunting. In the
journey from birth to death, each individual encounters the loneliness of the long-distance
runner. (6)
In Smith's final race this loneliness acquires a new dimension. As he nears the finish line,
ahead of the others, thoughts of death gradually overwhelm him. He passes corn that "would
be cut down soon with scythes and mowers"; pain knifes through his exhausted body; he
weeps when he realizes that he will never again "trot this lovely path." In a daydream of
surreal intensity, he imagines himself underwater, "looking at the pebbles on a stream
bottom," and suddenly recalls the death of his father (41, 43-44). Smith's father appears twice
before in the story. The life insurance that Mrs. Smith collected after his death from cancer
results in brief, happy prosperity for the entire household, and in an imagined encounter with
the police after the burglary, Smith invokes his father's disease to explain the cash box that
bulges from under his clothes. In both cases the father becomes a sacrificial figure whose
suffering benefits others.
Now, as intimations of mortality crowd Smith's mind and make him fearful, he understands
something new about his father:
I'm still thinking of the Out-law death my dad died, telling the doctors to
scat from the house when they wanted to finish him off in hospital.... He
got up in bed to throw them out.... It's not till now that I know what guts
he had.... By God I'll stick this out like my dad stuck out his pain and
kicked them doctors down the stairs; if he had guts for that, then I've got
guts for this. (43-44)
The elder Smith rejects the medical care that might ease his suffering; even near death
he will not compromise his freedom. He refuses the mercy of "Them." His death once again
benefits his survivors, his final hours teaching the son that courage often demands a sacrifice
of immediate self-interest. Smith can now carry through his plan. He will forfeit long-distance
running, his great passion, but retain his personal independence from standards dictated by
others. Though such cunning might seem perverse to the doctors and the governor, father and
son unite in their rejection of upper-class control. In a short story of mythopoeic depth,
Sillitoe unveils the inner logic of tradition that passes from generation to generation and the
emotional complexity of historical continuity. III
Raymond Williams' first and best novel, Border Country (1960), makes the case that tragedy
can happen in modern life to ordinary people. A young lecturer in London with a wife and
young children must return to Wales when his father suffers a massive heart attack. As he
arrives in Glynmawr, a small farming village near the English border, he journeys not only
across a significant geographical border but also back in time to his own childhood and a
network of personal relationships. Above all, Matthew Price must confront the imminent loss
of a beloved parent, lying frightened and incapacitated in a small upstairs bedroom. Few postwar British novels portray this intense, personally tragic episode with as much sensitivity and
grace. Williams interweaves chapters on past and present to create vivid portraits of father and
son. Though much can be made critically of the various "borders"--geographic, temporal, and
emotional--within the novel, the book's power lies in its moving evocation of this central
family relationship. (7)
Williams describes Harry Price in almost wholly admirable terms. Often silent, Harry conveys
a sense of profound understanding. Above all, he remains "intransigent," one of Williams'
favorite words. He refuses to concede defeat easily during the General Strike, and he remains
firmly rooted in his working and family routines. He has "settled" and will not be
transformed. More jarring to contemporary sensibilities, his stubbornness also extends to
relations with his wife Ellen, a shadowy figure in the novel. He makes the decision to change
houses despite her protests, and he names their son Matthew against her wishes (56-57). In his
appearance and masculine ethos, Harry bears more than a passing resemblance to the strong,
silent heroes of the American Western.
Although some still equate Harry Price with the author's father (Inglis 170), Williams himself
acknowledged a more ambiguous pedigree. In the final chapter of The Country and the City,
published thirteen years after Border Country, he wrote that "I had to divide and contrast what
I had seen in my father as conflicting impulses and modes. I had to imagine another character,
Morgan Rosser, the politician and dealer,... who could express ... an internal conflict" (299).
On the one hand, this explanation illustrates Williams' characteristic honesty and ripening
intelligence. A fictional work written by a young, relatively obscure author during the 1950s
might easily embody a different "structure of feeling" than an analytical text of an ensuing
decade, when its author had attained wide recognition. On the other hand, for a novel
rewritten seven times, what Williams calls in the above passage "the two figures of a father"
involves more than an imaginative solution to a technical problem. It reveals tensions and
ambiguities within an otherwise intransigent class allegiance.
Morgan Rosser is quite a different character from Harry Price. Whereas Harry communicates
his feelings quietly, with a look or a gesture, Morgan expresses himself more volubly. He
expatiates upon a wide range of subjects and often delivers his opinions bluntly. Then too,
whereas Harry settles comfortably, Morgan stays restless and dissatisfied. He understands the
social limitations of Glynmawr and correctly forecasts how modernity will transform the
valley and its inhabitants. Above all, Morgan seeks to improve his own material condition;
ambitious and opportunistic, he leaves his job as a signalman to become a successful
entrepreneur. This key development, which Williams handles with great skill, clearly
separates the two old friends. Although Morgan retains a strong commitment to the Labour
Party and the working man, he becomes seriously disillusioned by the failure of the General
Strike (153-54).
Morgan restores his future through capitalism. During the Strike he delivers fresh produce to
miners in nearby valleys. When the Strike ends, he converts this service into a small business
that expands rapidly, forcing him to hire more personnel. He asks Harry Price to join him and
become a trusted partner in the business. Stubbornly and without offering a persuasive
explanation, Harry refuses. Morgan takes this rejection as provisional and later, in one of the
novel's tensest confrontations, extends to Matthew, the son, a similar offer with his much
larger operation, a jam factory. Like his father Matthew declines for vague reasons, provoking
an outburst from Morgan. The narrator comments that this disagreement represented "a border
defined, a border crossed" (254). Though Williams permits Morgan to score points, especially
about the linkage between the aristocratic and proletarian disdain for business, Harry and
Matthew clearly emerge as morally victorious. They are intransigent; they reject capitalism;
they remain settled within their own class borders.
"A father is more than a person," Matthew remarks in Border Country; "he's in fact a society,
the thing you grow up into" (282). This "social father" profoundly affected Williams' personal
values and intellectual development. The community at Pandy provided him with a model of
social relations that buttressed his political thinking and cultural analysis. Like other radical
figures in the British past, including William Cobbett, Williams based his critique of
modernity, as well as his vision of a socialist future, on an agrarian past. "Nostalgia," he wrote
in The Country and the City, "is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offends"
(12). Though he remained alert to its dangers, Williams never completely escaped the
phenomenon he so successfully exposed in his most original book. The communal ideal, with
its emphasis on neighborhood and mutual personal concern, animated both his vision of
childhood and his socialist aspirations. Both temporal projections, one past and the other
future, retained their utopian elements--their comforting habitation in the nowhere of
imagination. The Pandy community that he often recalled in his autobiographical asides, like
Glynmawr in Border Country, rarely suffered from the problems that impelled its young,
including Williams himself, to flee elsewhere. Memories of childhood remained powerful but
selective. As a result, his most authentic personal statements about his "social father" became
no less distorted than the figure of Harry Price, the "personal father" of his most
autobiographical novel.
IV
Sheila Rowbotham came to feminism slowly after a lengthy parturition. As she recalled in
Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (1973), she found it painful as an adolescent to
identify with the girls portrayed in pop songs. Rather than as an object of male sexual desire,
Rowbotham lodged her self-esteem within "an inner world of mysticism and reverie.... Only
moments of intense subjectivity seemed to have any honesty or authenticity" (13-14). Such
moments also connected Rowbotham with male working-class writers. Like the long-distance
runner of Sillitoe's short story, Rowbotham defined herself not as others would have her but
as she herself intuited the outer world. She sought to hinge her personal identity more upon
inner reflection, private and solitary, than upon an outer reality whose social standards
functioned beyond her control. Though Rowbotham abhorred Jimmy Porter's misogyny, she
emerged from adolescence with an appreciation for the authenticity of intense subjectivity. To
many existentialists the social often betrayed the personal; it called upon individuals to
compromise their genuine identities; it required self-denial.
Rowbotham, however, often defined herself by her relationships with men. To her the
"ultimate man" mixed James Dean and Marlon Brando, both toughness and an inarticulate
sensitivity, to form "a new kind of saint" (15). Eventually this search for a satisfactory
relationship would lead to a seminal event in her young life. While at a university, she writes,
"I met a man who loved me patiently until I had orgasms and who resolutely bullied me into
Marxism. Mine was a timely but painful conversion" (17). Her embrace of ideology
originated not from within, like her visionary moments, but imposed itself from outside.
Moreover, the "conversion" experience proved yet another instance of the religious language
that pervaded her autobiographical reflections. Like Karl Marx, she believed that history
possessed a larger meaning, a purpose, a teleological goal, that transcended the individual
lives within it. (8)
Marxism, however, could not fully integrate the personal and the political. Despite
Rowbotham's commitment to socialism, which animated her early adulthood with worthy
causes and partisan disputes, she still felt divided and conflicted. Marxism failed to address
existential issues. The inner life, the spiritual and aesthetic, became engulfed by an
historicized political economy. "We had no means of relating our inner selves to an outer
movement of things" Rowbotham recalled. "We lumbered about ungainly-like in borrowed
concepts which did not fit the shape we felt ourselves to be" (30). As she gradually realized,
the resurgence of revolutionary ideology in the 1960s remained distressingly male. Men
dominated the movement and its aggressive thinking. They saw themselves as insurgent
guerrillas and wore military fatigues. They rarely treated women as equals. Their revolution
"went around with naked genitals" (24).
To Rowbotham, something more immediately relevant than traditional Marxism was required
to unite her spiritual inner world with the political convictions that fueled her radicalism. It
took time for her and others to take the extraordinary imaginative leap to feminism. Women
sought a distinctive vocabulary to depict accurately their inner and outer selves. They needed
to perceive their bodies not as men judged them but with a fresh authenticity. Many also
wanted to persuade men, whose notion of equality women borrowed and transformed, to
embrace this liberating humanist vision. To Rowbotham, feminism bonded an earlier
existentialism with her later Marxism because it provided the connecting tissue between her
inner spiritual life and a breathtakingly original public world, a polis that reflected and
nurtured a woman's identity rather than repressed it (33-37).
This vision could not be easily realized, however, even by those who passionately shared its
utopian goals. Rowbotham's The Past Is before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s,
published at the end of two decades of feminist struggle, documented with remarkable
detachment the unpredictable evolution of second-wave British feminism. To render the
personal as political, committed women organized themselves into small groups to exchange
stories, forge bonds of loyalty, and improve morale. Women shared intimate concerns with
others sympathetic to both their past frustrations and their aspirations for a brighter future.
Initially such encounters served their purpose admirably. Women renewed themselves with an
emerging, more authentic notion of gender. Soon, however, what transpired in these
remarkable sessions often complicated the movement's politics and confounded its leaders.
Issues proved more complicated than expected. Blacks, for example, wished to preserve the
family structure, not to criticize and perhaps erode it. These women volunteered concrete
illustrations of how racism and imperialism undermined family structure. Black women
sought to reinforce an institution that their more privileged companions weakened. Other
illustrations of conflicting interests began to materialize. The arguments for economic
compensation for housework, while complex in detail, attracted wide support among the Left
in the early 1970s. Then, as the debate evolved, other feminists recognized at least one
predicament of such a scheme. If the state paid women to remain home and raise children, it
effectively condemned them to the very isolation and estrangement that so many women
despised. The solution exacerbated the problem (Past 22-58).
Rowbotham documents case after case of such strategic dilemmas. As she relates this history,
a certain sentiment recurs: "The more we pondered, the more complexities opened up" (Past
37-38). "After the initial release of lifting the guilt from the complaint, the ambiguity of desire
began to surface.... The assumption that the personal is political led into deeper water than we
had imagined" (Past 97). The irreducible uniqueness of each "personal" story often
confounded the more general and synthetic demands of the "political." Contradictory social
tendencies among women of different personal needs and distinct social agendas could not be
unified into a coherent political analysis. Second-wave British feminism confronted one of the
most basic issues of political theory: how to reconcile opposing interests without unduly
sacrificing either freedom or equality.
In 1983 Rowbotham contributed an essay to Fathers: Reflections by Daughters in which she
charted a troubled relationship within her own family. Already in his fifties at Sheila's birth,
Lance Rowbotham had been a scholarship boy whose subsequent career in India and Britain
included a string of business failures. He and his daughter were never close: "Even as a small
child my father suffocated me with instructions." "To me," she writes, "he was simply a tyrant
to be resisted" ("Our Lance" 209). When he died in 1967, she felt more relief than sadness.
Only later, in a consciousness-raising group specifically dedicated to the relationships
between fathers and daughters, could Rowbotham confront this element of her past: "Because
we were not dealing with abstractions of a vaguely defined `patriarchy' but talking about
actual men, a complex picture began to emerge of `manhood' and `fatherhood' and our
contradictory needs and images of both" ("Our Lance" 213). For the first time Rowbotham
began to understand the historical pressures that shaped her father. She acknowledged the
personal traits that she inherited from him, including a resentment of social privilege. She
recognized how his Edwardian upbringing in Wales curiously echoed within her: "It is as if I
can almost remember fragments of a social order he both reverenced from his village boyhood
and rebelled against" ("Our Lance" 214). Rowbotham concludes her essay by calling for a
renewed understanding of the past. Women must not simply resist men but understand the
history that shaped them. They should attempt to do generally what she did specifically with
the memory of a distant, tyrannical parent. As she would later observe, "feminism appears a
round-about way to reach your own father" (Past 17).
V
In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, published in 1974, Juliet Mitchell attempted to rescue Freud
from the condescension of feminists. "Psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a
patriarchal society," she argues in the introduction, "but an analysis of one. If we are
interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to
neglect it" (xiii). Most of Psychoanalysis and Feminism consists of detailed summary, first of
Freud's elaborate system of thought and then of the writings of William Reich and R. D.
Laing, who Mitchell believes enjoyed more influence than they deserved. Only near the end
of this 400-page volume does she offer her own theory of women's psychological and social
development. (9)
To Mitchell, Freud explains better than anyone the persistence of women's subordination:
"The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than
conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than
economic exploitation" (362). Freud, asserts Mitchell, discovered among late-nineteenthcentury Viennese women something universally applicable--namely, that as small children
their entry into feminine identity was marked by hostility toward their mother for not making
them male, and by a profound denial of their lack of a phallus. Though some girls developed
neuroses by denying their castrated condition, most exploited their sexual passivity to attract
first the father, then later other men who acted as unconscious substitutes. "This transference
from mother to father is the girls' `positive' Oedipus complex and, as it is the first correct step
on her path to womanhood, there is no need for her to leave it" (97). Unlike most Marxists,
who argued that exploitation must be economically and historically conditioned, Mitchell
heralded a source that transcended space and time.
Many feminists, however, dismissed Freud as a hopeless male chauvinist. Kate Millet's
Sexual Politics, for example, passionately condemned a system of thought that either ignored
women's unique problems or trivialized their psychological development by hinging it on
"penis envy." Like other feminists in the United States and Britain, Millet challenged the
bourgeois, patriarchal assumptions that buttressed Freud's system (249-87). Women, who
constituted the majority of patients among psychoanalysts, entrusted their most intimate
personal secrets to male authority figures whose power over them reinforced rather than
ameliorated their social inferiority. Soon feminists began to question the traditional authority
of the medical profession to render judgment upon women's minds and bodies.
By taking Freud seriously and demonstrating his relevance to contemporary feminism,
Mitchell pursued another strategy: she showed how the movement might appropriate a
powerful but apparently hostile system of thought for its own purposes. Feminism need not
always detach itself self-consciously from the past; it might establish bonds with prevailing
orthodoxies in order to flourish within the very social order it sought to revolutionize. Indeed,
radicalism needed continuity. Marx himself proclaimed the doom of capitalism, not by
jettisoning the powerful theoretical categories of Adam Smith but by appropriating them for
his own purposes. This preservative tendency among revolutionary thinkers often went
unnoticed, but, as Edmund Burke showed and Marx recognized in a different philosophic
vocabulary, historical traditions survived not by arbitrary fiat, easily reversed, but by serving
practical functional needs that revolutionaries might adapt as their own.
There was something else original about Mitchell's reclamation project. Both in Britain and
America, feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s inhaled the bracing air of revolutionary
optimism. Society could be transformed; equality achieved; a healthier relationship would
prevail between the sexes. Mitchell shared some of this optimism, especially in her early
writings. By Psychoanalysis and Feminism, however, the tone had changed. She introduced a
chilling reality into feminism: patriarchy may not be so easily vanquished. Its roots extended
deeper than those of most established social institutions. Patriarchy lay embedded within the
unconscious mind, quite beyond the immediate, the visible, and the compliant. Indeed,
repression lay at the core of gender--not the conscious self-denial of political choice but the
more inaccessible unconscious repression of our bisexual, androgynous nature. At the end of
her book, Mitchell integrates Freud's later, more sociological studies into her own vision of
psychoanalysis. "The determining feature of Freud's reconstruction of mankind's history,' she
writes, "is the murder of the primal father in a prehistorical period. It is this dead father that is
the mark of patriarchy" (403). This lost father becomes far more powerful in death than life;
he remains emblematic of an authority that boys aspire to attain but that women must repress
and deny. "Both children desire to be the phallus for the mother. Again, only the boy can fully
recognize himself in his mother's desire. Thus, both sexes repudiate the implications of
femininity. Femininity is, therefore, in part a repressed condition that can only be secondarily
acquired in a distorted form" (404).
If, confusingly, Mitchell suggests at the end of her book that the eclipse of capitalism might
transform the universal experiences of childhood, her analysis remains strongly deterministic.
The unconscious resides more in nature than culture. If patriarchy grounds itself more upon
physical force than sexuality, however, such power becomes vulnerable to social and political
control. Socialists, like European liberals before them, might establish collective rules to
enforce prescribed limits on male authority. Once again, culture might reshape nature, an
historical process that Victorians once called "civilization." The dead Patriarch of both Freud
and Mitchell's psychoanalytic theory might then become an historical artifact, a "lost father"
in quite another sense.
VI
Germaine Greer's best-selling book The Female Eunuch (1970) defined the terms of feminism
for many British readers. Impassioned, learned, and cleverly provocative, it provided an
extended survey of women's concerns about "Body," "Soul," "Love," and "Hate." Greer
combined scholarly discussions of feminist issues with frank opinions about women's
personal lives. She knew how to make the personal into the political. Like Jimmy Porter, she
enjoyed deliberate provocation: "No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horsecollar" (39); "If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your
menstrual blood--if it makes you sick, you've a long way to go, baby" (51). Blunt language
and transgressive subjects had become commonplace among the socially privileged in the late
1960s. Greer's impolite topics and extraordinary mastery of slang revealed a woman unafraid
of conventional respectability, a Cambridge Ph.D. hip to the street.
Greer became a celebrity first in Britain, then later in the United States. Time and Newsweek
ran flattering pieces about her; Life placed her on its cover with a headline that encapsulated
the American view: "SAUCY FEMINIST THAT EVEN MEN LIKE." "The rowdy erudition
with which this Australian amazon pursues her themes" the piece proclaimed, "has made her
the star performer of the feminist movement in Britain." A full-page picture of a giggling
Greer, snuggling with a counter-culture boyfriend, accompanied the article (Bonfante 30). As
a celebrity Greer provided a different spin to the phrase the "personal is political." As with all
figures in the public eye, certain aspects of her personal life became public property. Her
disastrous three-week marriage could not be overlooked, nor her many abortions. Greer
enjoyed acting outrageously, contributing to her good value for journalists. Though never a
celebrity long enough to sustain the relentless intrusions endured by famous actors, athletes,
and politicians, she nevertheless became a representative figure of the feminist movement for
millions of people in the early 1970s. (10)
Feminists, however, disavowed her. As Claudia Dreifus wrote in her review of The Female
Eunuch for The Nation:
Germaine Greer is not the feminist leader she is advertised to be. Back
home in London she has no active connections with any women's liberation
group. And the book she has written is hardly feminist.... The Female
Eunuch is shallow, anti-woman, regressive, three steps backward to the
world of false sexual liberation from which so many young women have fled.
Though politically left-wing, Greer rejected Marxism and ideological vanguardism.
Her libertarian individualism in The Female Eunuch alienated radicals who connected it with
patriarchal, bourgeois liberalism. As Dreifus noted, more than most second-wave feminists
Greer provided a direct link to the Swinging Sixties, when the new sexual freedoms and social
permissiveness struck many as revolutionary. In her independence and enthusiasm for sexual
experience, Greer uncomfortably resembled the women of James Bond films. However much
she repudiated the "male gaze" in her writings, she became identified with it among
influential feminists. (11) In the 1970s Greer's public image as a libertine began to addle. In
1975 the BBC television program "Face Your Image" featured Greer as its guest. This show,
an extraordinary exercise in ritual humiliation, allowed a group of accusers to confront both
the person and her "image." Jenny Mulherin volunteered that Greer's "always been something
of an exhibitionist. Certainly at Sydney University she strove to be the most outrageous
person around, and the details of her sexual adventures were common knowledge." David
Dimbleby, the distinguished journalist, discovered in his research that "your husband wrote of
you that you have what he called a simple faith in promiscuity." Jacky Gillott talked about
Greer's "childhood of anger." Clive James said that "she's one of those people who need fame
as other people need meat and drink" ("When the Courting").
Greer gradually faded from public view. In 1979 she published The Obstacle Race: The
Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work that, while scholarly and eloquent, came
nowhere near the impression made by The Female Eunuch. Five years later her book Sex and
Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility marked yet another step in the evolution of her
thinking. Here Greer distanced herself from her earlier, more libertarian individualism by
positing an often sentimental defense of Third World families and social practices. Greer had
become what one critic labeled a "cosmic feminist" one who found Authentic Woman among
the poor, the illiterate, the dispossessed. (12) Feminists ignored the book or noted that Greer
defended large families while having no children of her own. Her opinions seemed more
eccentric than apt. Yet, this emphasis on personal fulfillment through family reflected a
changing mood, when feminists themselves often discovered the limitations of earlier
intellectual formations. Like the movement itself, Greer had become older and more alert to
the personal transformations that accompanied the process of aging.
Then in 1990 she published her most autobiographical book, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You,
an extraordinary and revelatory document. Here she sought to discover the true identity of her
recently deceased father, an elusive figure in her youth and one she deeply feared never loved
her. The complex, textured story resembles a mystery, as Greer embarks on a frustrating
search through libraries and public-record offices on three continents to discover the man
behind the polished image. What she finds disturbs her. He was not "Reg Greer" publicschool old boy and gentleman, but a fraudulent, somewhat pathetic figure. Reg Greer often
bragged that he survived the terrible siege of Malta during World War II; in fact, he suffered
from a nervous disorder similar to anorexia and departed the island months before the siege.
His heritage was not English and privileged but Australian and illegitimate. He was the son of
a domestic servant, who abandoned him, and was raised by the "true heroine" of the story, a
foster mother who provided unselfishly for him and whom he later utterly and unforgivably
ignored. Greer discovered more information about her father's ancestry than he himself knew.
By the end of her searches, the knowledge of his many deceptions alienated her more than she
anticipated. "In finding him I lost him," she concludes (331).
The story operates on many levels, often difficult to demarcate. On one, as Greer makes
explicit, she exposes the fraudulent pretensions of at least one male authority figure. "I think
his version is typical of the lie of history that concentrates on elites" she tells her brother; "the
truth about Reg Greer is a classic example of herstory, puncturing the ideology" (303). In her
highly personal quest for a lost father, Greer performs one task of the feminist agenda: she
unmasks the falsehoods of a patriarch. Although the fraudulence of one father cannot be
visited upon all daughters, Greer's relentless quest for the reality behind the image mirrors the
larger itinerary of the feminist movement. Men often ruled on grounds that could not be
justified by facts. Her-story shattered the myths of His-story. However, Greer drew from the
experiences of her own life something larger: an ongoing parable of modern feminism. She
brought her private life into the public domain, where her views, like those of other feminists,
evolved as times changed. In her own iconoclastic manner, she made the personal and
political equate.
VII
In mid-twentieth-century British culture, then, it was not simply Bishop Robinson who
pondered the disappearance of a patriarch. Honest to God contributed to a larger discourse
about male authority and the nature of inheritance. Osborne placed the death of a beloved
father at the center of his seminal Look Back in Anger; Sillitoe made such a loss a key
motivation in "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner"; Williams made a father's
passing the pivotal episode of Border Country. For second-wave British feminists the
rejection of patriarchy became the starting point of a diverse social movement. Rowbotham,
Mitchell, and Greer discovered that the transformation of the personal into the political forced
revaluation of father figures both real and abstract. In literature and feminist politics, as well
as in modernist theology, the discourse on patriarchy included a complex mixture of the
theoretical and the concrete, the fictional and the autobiographical, the older image and the
new reality.
The implications of such lost fathers entailed both radicalism and historical continuity.
Robinson adopted the existential language of Tillich and Bonhoeffer to reassert a traditional
emphasis on Christian charity. Jimmy Porter's incendiary attacks on the class system emerged
from conventional demands for personal authenticity. Smith's refusal to finish the race
became a parable of existential choice and self-sacrifice. Williams drew his inspiration for
personal relationships within a future socialist community from distilled memories of a
childhood in Wales. For British feminists each individual journey embodied its own ironies
and trajectories. Rowbotham's transition from Marxism and existentialism to radical feminism
became complicated by her discovery of women's diverse, often politically contradictory,
experiences: she excavated history for an understanding of such entanglements. Mitchell
rescued Freud from the scorn of other feminists only to discover that the psychoanalytic roots
of patriarchy could not be easily overcome. Greer's evolving feminism underwent continuous
revisions: she reinvented herself no less dramatically than what she uncovered about her
father. The discourse on patriarchy involved many such ironies and crosscurrents.
One final affinity might be noted. In the late twentieth century, modernist theology, workingclass radicalism, and second-wave feminism became favored targets of conservatives, whose
remarkable resurgence helped redefine British culture and politics. Within this resurgence,
however, can also be found continuities with what traditionalists wanted to displace. Margaret
Thatcher, who inherited the benefits of second-wave feminism while disavowing any
connection to it, centered her political agenda on the rejection of collectivist paternalism. Her
criticisms of the state echoed a central theme of the feminist rejection of patriarchy:
dependency on another must yield to a new, sometimes risky, independence. Indeed, with its
emphasis on individual choice and personal responsiblity, Thatcher's resurrection of classical
liberalism was not all that distant from the existentialism of Osborne and Sillitoe. Like these
writers she stressed the personal over the social and, like others examined here, her radicalism
revived traditional values. In all its variations the discourse on patriarchy proved remarkable
capacious.
Lake Forest College
NOTES
(1) For Robinson's reply see "Reality and Revelation." Among many other critiques see
especially Jenkins, Morrison, McBrien, and Routley. For more recent evaluations see, among
others, Kee, James (God's Truth), Bowden, Donner, and Hannaford.
(2) On such decline see Hastings 550 and Welsby 104. See also Curie, Gilbert, and Horsley's
Churches and Churchgoers and, for a different perspective, Davie.
(3) For contemporary responses to Osborne's A Better Class of Person, see Treglown and
Pritchett.
(4) Criticism of Osborne abounds. Two earlier works that I found particularly useful are
Trussler and Carter. A good recent collection of essays is that edited by Denison.
(5) Regarding the play's misogyny, see Wandor's Look Back 8-14 and Carry On 143. See also
Hinchliffe 15-20 as well as Cairns and Richards.
(6) On Sillitoe's fiction I have found especially useful Hurrell, Staples, Penner, and Byars. See
also Gindin, Nardella, Atherton, and Hanson. The film differs, of course, from the short story
in a variety of ways. For the best analysis of the differences, see Harcourt.
(7) Border Country has prompted relatively little sustained criticism, but see Davies and Di
Michele. For the impact of the novel on another scholarship boy, see Potter.
(8) For a recent account of this period, see her Promise of a Dream: A Memoir of the Sixties.
(9) For Mitchell's memories of this period, see her interview with Mori.
(10) For a recent essay on Greer and publicity, see Spongberg. See also Wallace.
(11) Such feminist puritanism was anticipated in the cinema of the 1960s. Popular films such
as Darling and Alfie, which celebrated the decade's permissiveness, also revealed its
emotional limitations. Julie Christie's seductive character in Darling, alluring to a succession
of increasingly prominent men, turns out to be hollow and superficial. At the end of the film
she becomes bored as the "fairy-tale princess" of an Italian aristocrat and returns to the film's
most sympathetic character, a journalist played by Dirk Bogarde, who rejects her. Her male
counterpart, Michael Caine's Alfie, tries to appear the charming rake, but as the film
demonstrates in a haunting scene of a sordid abortion, he also lacks depth and compassion.
Solitary and bewildered ("What's it all about?"), he embodies the unreflective misogyny that
Greer explored so brilliantly in her book.
(12) On "cosmic feminism" see Ferguson 97-120. On Greer's writings and position within
feminism generally, see Sternhell.
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