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Osborne’s Problematic Relationship With Women

Osborne’s relationships with women are always problematic. He had problems even with his wives. He portrays women such a way that he gained a reputation as a slandering misogynist bigot ( Armistead 25). But he doesn’t like being labelled like that and in an interview, he says “ Ask any woman who knows me. I have been hug-ridden by women, but I have also been wonderfully well served” (Barber 9). But we see that women are not only represented notoriously in his Works but also as sexually subversive, especially in Look Back in Anger.
Although he had many relationships with women and married for several times, he was regarded as a woman-hater and a male chauvinist. What makes him so aggressive and hostile towards women?
When we look at his life more closely, we see that he got into serious troubles and difficulties with women from the barmaid mother, Nellie Beatrice, to his daughter, Nolan, in his hostile words, ‘a very unpleasant girl’. Another cause of this hate is his discontent with his mother with whom he spent most of his childhood and part of boyhood. In his A Better Class of Person, he describes his mother as ‘monster’. He hated her maybe because he was from lower middle class. He would like to be born into a better class of family. In his long essay “They Call it Cricket”, Osborne starts his offensive words on his mother:
My mother has worked behind the bar most of her life. She still does because she likes to ‘be with other people’… She is a tough, sly old Cockney, with a harsh, often cruel wit, who knows how to beat the bailiffs and money-lenders which my grandfather managed to bring on to her. Almost every working day of her life, she has got up at five o’clock to go out to work, to walk down what has always seemed to be the most hideous and coldest streets of London. Sometimes when I have walked with her she has grinned at me, her face blue with what I thought was cold (Osborne 1957 80-81).
In an interview, Osborne explains his hatred for his mother like that:
Well she used to make fun of me in front of other people, about my appearance and things like that. She had absolutely no feelings for me all-which is a kind of brutality I suppose. I never expected it. When you are a child your expectation depends on what you’ve experienced. She didn’t have any love. She didn’t like people at all. She was a very cold natured woman (Barber 10).
We see that Osborne had a long record of unhappy, unstable relationships with women and a loveless married life. It’s a result of his unsteady relationships with women that led him to develop some anti-women postures. In his plays, women are seen as “traps ready to ensnare you and then devour you” (Chambers 128).
Look Back in Anger is often regarded as a misogynist play (Wandor 71). It seems to be autobiographical. We can identify the author with his protagonist, Jimmy Porter, a woman-hater who seems to have declared a sex war on women. Women are symbolically represented as sexually destructive force who can never be trusted at all.
One striking feature of the play is the presentation of the gender conflict which mainly seems to revolve around the sexual battleground of Jimmy’s marriage to the upper-class Alison. Here, Osborne is demonstrating the conflict between the spouses not in the egalitarian marriage where they interact as equal partners.
Alison is made to suffer both emotionally and physically. Alison also becomes the principal target of her husband because in her husband’s eyes she symbolises anything he hates in class terms. Therefore she is bullied, taunted and described as having little mind and mean spirited: “ Pusillanimous. Adjective. Wanting of firmness of mind, of small courage, having little mind, mean-spirited, cowardly, timid of mind. From the Latin pusillus, very little, and animeus, the mind. That’s my wife. That’s her isn’t it? Behold the Lady Pusillanimous. (Shouting hoarsely) Hi, Pusey!” (Osborne 1986 22). At first, seen as a slander on Alison in particular, but these abusive words may be taken as the degradation of women in general. Alison’s only guilt is that she’s from middle class and a virgin. By being virgin, in a way, she pulls her husband into accepting the middle class values which he hates. All Alison can do against all the aggressive and insults of Jimmy is to suffer the assault, being unable to cope with the male world and the macho games they play. In the play, even pregnancy seems ‘symbolic’; a threat to man’s potency in a woman’s life” (Wandor 81).
In the play, the use of animal metaphors like ‘python’, ‘squirrel’, ‘rabbit’, is one of the recurring images of the play. Through these animal images, women are reflected as sexually hungry, possessive and toothy ‘animals’ always designing evil plans.
Helena is the another foil character who is described in the stage as the ‘matriarchal authority’. She is not bound to any man by any marital obligation. Helena dominates, interfering with the marriage of Jimmy for Alison’s goof, arranging for her to go home and have an abortion, and takes the necessary steps to see that she really does. In doing so, Helena asserts the continuity in her of a traditional moral belief. At no stage in the play does she allow her middle-class values to be questioned by the protagonist. She knows her own mind and does not hesitate to express herself.
Jimmy’s fear of women may well have been conditioned by his mother’s behaviour towards his father. Since the father has been betrayed by the mother, Jimmy also fears that the same process of betrayal must occur as an inevitable part of all kinds of relationships. His friend’s, Hugh Tanner’s mother is the only one ‘good mother’ in the play.
In these peculiar relationships between men and women, female characters, figures of mothers in particular, are feared and therefore symbolically destroyed. In short, according to the writer women exist not for themselves but for the satisfaction of men’s wishes and inadequacies.
Osborne emerges as sexist, a male chauvinist and a misogynist. What he defends is both the necessity and the dominance of the male because in his view men alone have the true sense of the individual. ( Chambers 133).