The Modern literature

   

                Assignment

Name: Rupa Bambhaniya

Paper No: 9 The modernists literature

Enrollment no: 2069108420200002

Class: M.A sem 3

Submitted by: Smt.S.B.Gardhi, Department of English

Email I'd: rupabambhniya166@gmail.com

 

    Introduction Harold Pinter : 

    Born 10 October 1930 in East London, playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. He died 24 December 2008.

 

He wrote twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room at The Almeida Theatre, London in the spring of 2000.

"My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish."

 

He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg), the European Prize for Literature (Vienna), the Pirandello Prize (Palermo), the David Cohen British Literature Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award, the Legion d’Honneur and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He received honorary degrees from eighteen universities.

 

Pinter's interest in politics was a very public one. Over the years he spoke out forcefully about the abuse of state power around the world, including, recently, NATO's bombing of Serbia. 

 Characters : 

Stanley Webber 

Meg Boles

 Lulu 

Monty 

Nat Goldberg

Dermont McCann

  After examining the dramatic action of the characters and their relation to the principal character, studying the title of the play, and uncovering the philosophical statements, a final summary of the idea can be made about The Birthday Party. Mankind is in control of its destiny by the decisions it makes in life. When bad decisions are made, we often wish we had a second chance to turn our life a round. Fate has called upon Stanley on this special day of celebration, his birthday, and has given him that second chance. The opportunity to face his fearful realities of the past and move on to a better, more hope filled life has come. The past is just that. It is gone. Let's enjoy the present and seek a bright future with many birthday celebrations of life to come.

                "What's happened to the love, the bonhomie, the unashamed expression of affection of the day before yesterday, that our mums taught us in the nursery?" This statement not only reflects the idea of The Birthday Party, but it relates directly to our ordinary lives as human beings. Every person is faced, at some time in their life with a chance to re-evaluate life; to question their past, to look at the presentand to hope for a better future. In The Birthday Party, the main character, Stanley, is given a chance to do just this. He is approached by two men who force him to examine his past and present by evaluating his decisions in life, and give him a chance to hope for a better future.

In order to uncover the idea of The Birthday Party, it is necessary to first search within the dramatic action of the principal character.

  Stanley Webber.

 

 Stanley represents mankind; the total existance of all human beings. Therefore, the result of his actions and those around him, reflect how not only Stanley sees himself, but how mankind sees itself. We learn that Stanley was once a pianist in a concert party on the pier, who left his job and came to live in the boarding house.He has been a resident for about a year. Stanley finally came to live here as a result of the concert hall shutting down and the lack of love between him and his parents. This is significant because it not only justifies Stanley's actions in the play, but it parallels society. Unfortunately when people run into trouble and are faced with disaster or grief, like death or divorce, or must deal with major changes in life, like losing a job, many people run away from that situation. People run away to avoid the situation, to find something better, or to hide from what is troubling them. In Stanley's case, he is running from betrayal and the lack of acceptance. He runs far away to a boarding house near the sea. A place where he can be secluded from others outside the house and nurtured by those inside.

Yet when someone or something disrupts that sanctuary that you have created, you feel violated andthreatened, which is what happens to Stanley through the course of the play.

 Along with her husband, Petey, Meg is one of proprietors of the boarding house in which Stanley lives. ... Her connection to Stanley is particularly bizarre, as she treats him both maternally and romantically, forever scolding him to eat his breakfast while also making potentially sexual remarks about their relationship.

 

Stanley's dread of what lies beyond the boarding house traps him in a trying relationship with Meg, for whom he must act as both wayward child and surrogate husband. He is not always able to mask his disgust with this relationship and is prone to express his contempt for her in cruel verbal jibes and petty behavior. He also teases her. For example, he tells her that "they'' are coming in a van with a wheelbarrow, looking for someone to haul off, presumably Meg. His hostility finally takes a more violent form, when, during the birthday party, he tries to strangle her but is stopped by McCann and Goldberg.

Stanley, the nominal protagonist of The Birthday Party, barely struggles against his persecutors, quickly succumbing as if before some inevitable and implacable doom. Although he never evidences any guilt for his betrayal of the unspecified cause, he responds to his inquisitors as if he knows that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. At the end, although unable to voice his feelings, he seems resigned to his unknown fate.

Lulu : 

Described as a "girl in her twenties,'' Lulu is a neighbor who first appears carrying Stanley's birthday present,

the toy drum and drum sticks that Meg had bought for him. On the flirtatious side, she is self−conscious about her sexual appeal and cannot sit still for long without taking out a compact to powder her face. To her, looks are obviously important, and she sees Stanley as a "washout" because he seems to care nothing about his unkempt appearance.

Behind her glamour, there is some youthful innocence to Lulu. She is blind to Goldberg's predatory nature and is drawn into his charm. She sits on his lap and flirts with him, a foreshadowing of what occurs between them later that night. That she is some sort of sexual sacrifice is also suggested in the conclusion to the bizarre events that take place when the lights go out during the party. When they are restored, she is revealed "lying spread−eagle on the table,’’ with Stanley hunched over her giggling insanely.In the last act, Lulu seems broken by the night's experiences, but she is also angry. Goldberg, who baldly claims that he shares some of her innocence, had entered her room with a mysterious briefcase and begun sexually abusing her, using her, she complains, as ‘‘a passing fancy.’’ She leaves angry and frightened when McCann and Goldberg threaten to exact a confession from her.

Lulu, a woman in her twenties. She appears mysteriously with a package. After flirting with both Stanley and Goldberg, she departs the next morning after being interrogated accusingly by Goldberg and savagely ordered by the puritanical “unfrocked” McCann to confess.

Meg :

Meg enjoys caring for her husband and her guest Stanley. She is happy to cook breakfast for them. She seeks reassurance from men through tending to their needs and some flirting. She is afraid of not being liked. Meg organizes a birthday party for Stanley. She wants to make it a perfect celebration. She worries when Stanley breaks down at the party and does not realize how disturbed Stanley is.

Along with her husband, Petey, Meg is one of proprietors of the boarding house in which Stanley lives. What Meg lacks in intelligence, she tries to make up for in fastidiousness, constantly trying to please her guests and establish routines that will impose order on the boarding house. Her connection to Stanley is particularly bizarre, as she treats him both maternally and romantically, forever scolding him to eat his breakfast while also making potentially sexual remarks about their relationship. What’s most interesting about Meg, though, is that she devotes herself to order and routine even when it doesn’t make sense to enforce these everyday practices. For example, when she runs out of cornflakes one morning, she still insists that Stanley should come downstairs to eat breakfast, caring more about going through her habitual motions than acting in accordance with reality.

Petey : 

Petey comes and goes from his home throughout the day. He attends to the deck chairs early in the morning and then expects his wife to bring him breakfast. He responds to her chatter while he reads the paper. Petey is not at the party where Stanley breaks down because he is out playing chess. He shows that he cares about Stanley when he tells Goldberg and McCann that they cannot take Stanley away. At the end he does not tell Meg that the men took Stanley away.

Petey Boles, a man in his sixties, Meg’s husband. A compliant husband, he functions in the story primarily to exchange breakfast banalities with Meg or with Stanley, their boarder. His blandness puts into sharp focus the strange behavior of Meg and Stanley and the menacing threats of McCann and Goldberg. He returns from work one day to announce the arrival of their two new guests. At the end, he returns to his routines as husband and deck-chair attendant as though nothing unusual has happened.

Conclusion

The private everyday encounters of characters in Pinter's plays point t toa social dislocation at several levels, which disrupts the homogeneity of social life and culture. Therefore, the social dislocation in the selected plays of Harold Pinter was studied in terms of subcultural processes, which segment the society . The plays selected for analysis were divided into four categories in terms of their subcultural representations. The four categories chosen for the discussion of social dislocation reflect different social contexts, significant from the point of view of initiating and maintaining a subcultural identity. These social contexts are: social mobility, use of official procedures, resistance to the existing social order and incorporation of categories . The actions in the plays were analysed in terms of their subcultural significance, within the given contexts of social encounters.

Work citation:

Lannamann, Taylor. "The Birthday Party Characters." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 18 Dec 2018. Web. 11 Dec 2020.

Burkman, Katherine H. The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual, University of Ohio Press, 1971.

Hollis, James. Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence, Southern Illinois University Press, 1970, p. 15.

M. M. W. “The Birthday Party” in the Manchester Guardian, May 21, 1958, p. 5.

“Puzzling Surrealism of The Birthday Party” in the Times, May 20, 1958, p. 3