In_What_Ways_Does_This_Passage_Develop_or_Clarify_Our_Understanding_of_Jimmy’S_Anger__(from_P.19_“Don’T_Try…”_to_P.20_“…Racket_of_the_Female.”)

In what ways does this passage develop or clarify our understanding of Jimmy’s anger' (from p.19 “Don’t try…” to p.20 “…racket of the female.”) “Look Back In Anger” by John Osborne is a 1956 play relating the relationships between Jimmy, a working class young man, his rather more upper class wife, Alison and the people that surround them. This play completely revolutionised English theatre with its scandalous portrayal of marriage, pregnancy and human relationships in general. Throughout the play, Osborne explores the idea of marriage as the “unhappy beginning” rather than the fairytale “happily ever after” of literary tradition. Osborne’s own misogynistic views are reflected in Jimmy’s bitterness towards Alison and the stereotypical woman as show in the extract I have chosen. These views are especially apparent during Jimmy’s rant about the “eternal flaming racket of the female”. Jimmy’s clearly pre-meditated and well rehearsed attack and his cruel claims that Alison is “clumsy” and like a “dirty old Arab” which show both severe sexism and racism in their comparison of women to unsavoury images. While this shows Jimmy’s barely hidden contempt for Alison, a couple of fraises give away Jimmy’s fear of emasculation, intimidation at the success of the modern woman and misogynistic presumptions made about women in daily life and professional jobs, such as his completely unhidden “relief” at the lack of women in medicine saying that their “primitive hands” would “drop your guts like hairclips”. Jimmy’s constant over exaggerations, such as the comparison of the girls’ going to the toilet sounding “like a medieval siege” and Alison’s getting into bed “as if she were stamping on someone’s face”. These details could be added to further hurt Alison, or to make his speech more entertaining to Cliff, or both. However they show Jimmy’s insecurities with women and his almost physical repulsion of them. His remarks that one must be “fundamentally insensitive to be as noisy” as women, show that perhaps rather than Alison being fundamentally insensitive, Jimmy is hypersensitive to all, but the quietest of noises, preferring to be the loudest in the room and to theatrically draw attention to himself at regular intervals. This is further proved throughout the play with Jimmy mostly starting his tirades as attention shift from him to other people. Jimmy’s anger is channelled at the people who surround him that refuse to be angry and show that “they’re alive”, at the society that did not fulfil his expectations or its own promises of opportunity, and at everyone born to privilege and wealth, unlike him. His opinions on the class divide are explicitly shown in his obvious contempt of Alison’s parents as well as any and all of Alison’s friends from her old circle. Although Jimmy’s own mother and her relatives are “pretty posh”, he hates them as much as the rest of the ruling classes for the circumstances of his father’s neglected death. The class system in general makes Jimmy and his existence seem even more meaningless, as his university degree shows, unless you come from the “right” background, no doors are open to you. This explains Jimmy’s constant slighting of Alison as she, like ironically his mother, comes from a higher class background than him. Jimmy’s anger, characteristics and mannerisms stem from a deep sense of disillusionment and unfulfilment with the way his life has turned out; he is apparently unhappy in his marriage, his university degree did not bring him professional success, the only person he cared for and that cared for him, Hugo’s mother, is dead and his wife deliberately ignores him. However one could argue that his negativity and aggression made his life what it is that his mistreatment of Alison has made her cold and trapped him in the unhappy marriage he is in. the insults he throws at Alison on a daily basis in an attempt to make her “human” further clarifies our understanding of Jimmy’s character and beliefs and his voiced anger and discontentment at the what he views as the oppressive class system and its ignorance.