Toxic masculinity certainly has been around as long as men have been around, but in a modern context, it germinates best when men feel most useless. Specifically, in the post-WWII era, men’s anger is born out of a perceived sense of being rudderless, and as is often the case with the expression of toxic masculinity, it’s directed at and funneled into the women in the man’s life. Which is to say, the anger is not a hatred of women in reality, but a hatred of themselves via projection. And yet, there is still something to be said for women attracted to men of this type, these sorts of Healthcliffian men, or antiheroes as it were. John Osborne’s 1956 play, Look Back in Anger, is a meditation on these forces working within the psyche of men. To look back in anger at the object of one’s scorn (women) is to in fact look through the woman to the past that has wrought the man futile, emasculated.
Jimmy is a cantankerous type who likes to hear himself talk. More than that, he talks so as to get a rise from his audience. He likes to be offensive and odious. In other words, he’s a troll before that was common parlance. His wife, Alison, irons away, trying to not break, as it were, to such attempts at breaking her. Their live-in roommate, Cliff, is in the middle of it all, seemingly friendly and rough-housing with Jimmy at times while also doting upon and defending Alison. Alison and Cliff’s interactions at times verged beyond platonic, and often in front of Jimmy. That’s perhaps another encroachment upon his perceived masculinity. At one point, Jimmy and Cliff’s rough-housing goes too far and they tumble into Alison’s ironing causing her to burn her arm with the iron. Jimmy doesn’t seem to much care. Sure, he apologizes later, but more in a perfunctory way than an empathetic manner. As Cliff is consoling Alice, she reveals that she’s unhappy with Jimmy, of course, but also, that she’s pregnant.
Then, Helen, Alice’s best friend, comes into the picture and she’s depicted as essentially a feminist, which would make her the archenemy of a Jimmy type. Indeed, she’s the one who encourages Alice to get away from Jimmy. More still, she calls upon Alice’s father, Colonel Redfern, to pick Alice up and take her home. He obliges. But most bizarrely of all, after Alice is most certainly on her way out the door and leaving the brutish Jimmy, a moment comes to pass that was teased before. In a volatile exchange earlier, Helen said she would slap Jimmy if he kept talking the way he was. Jimmy retorted that he had no qualms about hitting a girl and would knock her out for daring to hit him. That moment happens: Helen slaps Jimmy. The response from Jimmy isn’t to hit her back, though; instead, they passionately kiss. They become an item! Helen effectively replaces Alice, and in the next scene, we’re back to the beginning of the play’s arrangement with Jimmy and Cliff in their chairs reading the paper and a woman (this time, Helen) at the ironing board. What?! And then it is Alice this time, who returns a few months later, that convinces Helen to leave Jimmy! That’s when we also learn Alice lost her baby, to which again, Jimmy did not care one iota. This time, he doesn’t even offer anything perfunctory to the news.
Osborne offers a few key lines in the play that further elucidate my opening salvo about toxic masculinity. I believe in an exchange between Helen and Alice early on, Helen remarks to Alice regarding Jimmy, “Don’t try and take his suffering away from him — he’d be lost without it.” One of the defining features of toxic masculinity is a sense of victimhood. More than a sense, it becomes an identity and a way of life. It is the axis on which all the rage turns. And where does this “suffering” originate from? Again, that of a “lost cause” sensibility. Jimmy even explicitly states it in one of his rambling, biting monologues: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.” As if all there is for a man is to take up a good, brave cause. As if being kind and gentle is not itself a good, brave cause! And finally, expanding upon this, in an exchange with her father, Alice reflects: “You’re hurt because everything is changed [England of the 1950s isn’t the same as the England he knew in 1914]. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same.” The former are more melancholic usually (nostalgia can be wielded dangerously, though, to be certain), whereas the latter men of Jimmy’s ilk become listless and angry, a dangerous combination. You see, they have fully realized their part in the sameness of it all and it’s killing them.
Alice and Jimmy’s relationship is analogized to that of a bear and a squirrel. Of course, Jimmy sees himself as one of the strongest creatures in the wild, the bear, but he also recognizes that a bear is inevitability lonely. And he sees her as the squirrel, owing to her not being very bright and being pusillanimous (he loved going on and on about that). So, as the play ends, Alice is back where she started: in the bear’s cave with Jimmy. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Did losing her child push her back to Jimmy? As she said, she was ready to grovel because she had no direction left but down.
As someone who has written a lot about toxic masculinity in the past, Osborne’s book clearly resonated with me, and phew, could you imagine how this would have hit reading it in 1956?! They weren’t talking about men’s anger and listlessness in this way back then. Or how it reverberated against women. Prior to this, I haven’t read a play since, I don’t know, Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, years ago? Which, those two plays are part and parcel with each other. The interesting difference is that in this play, the couple is young, mid-20s, whereas in Albee’s play, Martha and George are a middle-aged, long-married couple. That creates a different dynamic. Anyhow, I quite enjoyed jumping back into reading a play and I look forward to doing more.
Milam's Musings 