A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney - Essay Example

A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney Thesis emnt Women's concerns from a woman's perspective. Outline First two paragraphs discuss the theme of "A Taste of Honey" Delaney's writing techniques discussed Comparison other books of the time Views of other writers on the novel are also included Motherhood, the family and gender politics are central to A Taste of Honey, which was one of relatively few plays in the period to explore women's concerns from a woman's perspective. As Wandor put it, 'the territory is largely domestic, and the dramatic action is controlled by women. The gender dynamics are female-centred, and women are centrally placed as subject matter' (Wandor 1987: 42-3). A Taste of Honey does this not by exploring a radically new dramatic language (as women writers have done more recently) but by subverting the conventions of the intensive dramatic mode of naturalism that Delaney had adopted. There is no attempt to connect the play to a wider social world, by 'argument' (characters do not debate the issues between themselves); nor does the play articulate a position on that world (there is no obvious authorial 'point of view' on display); nor, despite the contextual readings, does Delaney exploit the metonymic function of the characters, action or set, but rather the issues are visible in the texture of the personal relationships themselves. Stuart Hall noted this aspect of the play: Delaney is not at all self-conscious about her ability to portray Salford life but she accepts this as a framework for what she is really interested in communicating-her extraordinarily fine and subtle feel for personal relationships. No themes or ideas external to the play disturb its inner form: her values are all intensive. A Taste of Honey is remarkable partly because it breaks a number of racial and sexual taboos: Jo's lover is a black sailor and her flat-mate is homosexual, and the main action of the play is the journey into motherhood of a young, unmarried teenager. It is not simply that these things are represented, but that they are represented positively-that the form of the play elicits sympathy for characters that come to us heavy with connotations, who are part of a world that we 'read about every Sunday in the News of the World'. It is precisely such socially marginal and 'a-typical' characters with which the Wolfenden Report-and the press debate that followed it-was so concerned. The action of the play is contained by a 'comfortless flat', and the stage space is clearly marked as domestic. It is, however, an interior in which all the domestic activities are potentially on display; the kitchen area, the double bed, the living and eating areas-these are all visible, delineating a whole 'way of life' in its routines and chores. Very little conventional domestic activity actually takes place in this space, though, and when it does, it is not performed by characters who inhabit traditional roles. This is part of a complex series of reversals and oppositions in the play, in which expected connections are severed. The mother figure, Helen, is very unlike a 'mother', having no domestic abilities, being feckless and sexually active. The caring role is taken initially by Jo, the daughter, and then by Geoff, a man who displays none of the conventional 'male' attributes. The nearest to a white, male, heterosexual gender norm in the play is to be found in Peter, Helen's lover and fianc, who is presented as a lecher and a drunk. The three central characters are all potentially sexually active, and the two women become so. However, sex is destructive to happiness in the world of the play-as it is in Look Back in Anger. It separates mother and daughter (Helen's marriage to Peter) and leaves Jo with a baby. Jo's relationship with Geoff is only possible because it is without sex. The only moments of genuine difficulty between them are when sex is involved; Jo's demand that Geoff tell her what he does with men nearly leads to his departure, and Geoff's attempt at a physical relationship with her is rejected as irrelevant. As a result of this, it is implicit that happiness can only be found in a 'family' that is constituted on a different basis to that of the traditional family, one which breaks all the rules, and in which the central role, that of mother, is detached from the biological mother and becomes the subject of negotiation. Geoff and Jo are as much mothers at different points in the play, in this sense. The problem that the play identifies is, as Wandor suggests, that 'motherhood is thrust upon some women, and some men are denied the chance to nurture' (Wandor 1987:42). The main action of the play, which is Jo's transition from childhood to the adult world, is largely an accommodation to motherhood. The ending of the play sees Jo and Helen reunited, and the mutually nurturing relationship of Jo and Geoff disrupted. The play, therefore, reinstates the biological mother/daughter relationship as the central one, completing the circle. Wandor sees this as the triumph of 'the old values, however dislocated' (Wandor 1987:42). Lovell, however, places the relationship in two different contexts, seeing it as an alternative to both the mother/son relationship that was central to The Uses of Literacy, and to the father/ child relationship that is 'at the centre of one of the most powerful interpretative devices of our culture, Freud's "family romance"' (Lovell 1990:375). The parallels are useful; the play was performed a year after the appearance of Hoggart's book, and was received into a critical context that was partially shaped by it, as we have seen. And the exploration of the mother/daughter relationship-pain-ful, ambivalent and full of rage though it may be in this instance- can be seen as a crucial story that has a central place in the development of women's writing. One of the most important and influential attempts both to define the nature of working-class culture and to question and assess the logic of affluence and classlessness was conducted by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy (1957); it was also closely connected to Working-Class Realism and its critical context. Part autobiography and part critical enquiry, the book is an account of working-class culture that draws heavily on Hoggart's own childhood in pre-war Leeds, and offers a working model (rather than an explicit theory) of working-class culture in a context where there was a perceived lack of any credible definitions. Hoggart offers a view of class that is essentially anthropological, in which it is primarily the sum of its cultural practices, its shared routines, values and habits, focused at the level of 'everyday life'. The chapter headings and sub-headings give a sense of how this dense, homogenous world is constructed; The Neighbourhood, 'Them' and 'Us', The Full Rich Life. It is an account that centres on the street, the home and the clubs, that evokes in a clear, direct and highly nuanced way, the 'common sense', the naturalness and the vitality of the particular 'way of life'. At one level, this is the book's major strength. The sense of a culture that is so manifestly 'present', so deeply rooted in everyday experience, is presented with such force and clarity that accounts of affluent, consumerist culture seem insipid by comparison. It is-at least in the first, and most influential part of the book-more a reflection of rather than a reflection on a class and its culture, and one in which such crucial arenas of social and cultural experience as the workplace, or forms of working-class politics have little place. Each His Own Wilderness A play that can be usefully compared with A Taste of Honey is Doris Lessing's Each His Own Wilderness (1959). The play is ostensibly about the possibilities for political action in post-war Britain and presents a critical view of mid-fifties a-politicism. However, this theme is anchored by another, which redefines the political at the level of gender and sexuality. The action of the play is contemporary, and follows a familiar Ibsenite pattern. The events of the narrative occur over a two-day period and centre on a family party in the home of the Bolton family. The action concerns the crisis in the relationship between Myra Bolton and her son Tony (a crisis which also resonates for each of them individually, and which has broader significance). The generational opposition that is signalled here represents two contrasting attitudes to 'commitment' (Myra is politically active, a figure from a pre-war generation, whilst Tony is militantly unengaged). It is also an opposition between male and female, between mother and son. In these terms, the domestic is not simply a backdrop to the action, or a signifier of conservative 'ordinariness', but rather the main battleground, on which sexual and gender identities are struggled over in the play. Like A Taste of Honey, Wilderness sets its action in domestic interiors, but challenges expectations about what is appropriate activity within them. There is little that is conventional about the Boltons' home. The action opens in the Hall, which is described in the following terms: Everything is extremely untidy; there are files, piles of newspapers...posters lying about inscribed BAN THE BOMB, WE WANT LIFE NOT DEATH etc. A typewriter on the floor. The radio is playing tea-room music behind the war-noises from the tape-recorder. (Lessing 1959:13) The domestic space is, therefore, politicised. Furthermore, attitudes towards the domestic are at the centre of the significant oppositions and reversals of the play, in the sense that it is the son, Tony, rather than the mother, Myra, who assumes conventionally 'female' attitudes towards the home. Myra is untidy (we first see her looking 'slovenly') and undomesticated, uncomfortable about possessions and money, and wears trousers; Tony is obsessively neat, and attacks his mother for her tolerance of domestic squalor. Myra wants to sell the house; Tony wishes to remain in it. As Myra urges him to assume a more active male role, Tony becomes progressively more childlike, 'making machine-gun noises like a small boy' at one point. These oppositions are extended into the sexual sphere, for Myra is sexually active, whereas Tony appears a-sexual (despite a thwarted oedipal relationship with Myra's closest friend, who is also of her generation, and who, also like Myra, refuses to be a 'mother' to him). Most of the male characters in the play are present, past or would-be lovers of Myra's; sometimes this seems transgressive as well, as one of them, Sandy, is of comparable age to Tony. The issues of the play, therefore, are both 'personal' and 'political', to do with the possibilities of political action on the one hand, and the way that these are rooted in personal, and especially gender identities on the other. Neither commitment nor a stable sexual identity is easily won, however, and the play explores the difficulties of achieving them both, and the contradictions that the struggle sometimes entails. It is possible to read the ending of the play, in which Myra walks out, leaving Tony to a member of his own generation, Rosemary, as an acceptance that it is impossible to be both a mother and pursue an independent life; Tony blames her for refusing to be a 'proper' mother, whilst Myra realises that, despite all her political activity, her priorities have been determined with reference to him. 'You may not think so', she tells him at the end of the play 'but the way I've lived, what I've done, my whole life has been governed by your needs' (Lessing 1959:93). This level of the play's interests, though it is played out on familiar domestic territory, is not easily recoupable within the main concerns of late-fifties theatre, but then Lessing's own history gave her a particular viewpoint on contemporary debates. On the one hand, she was partly a figure from an earlier generation, whose political commitment did not evaporate in the early fifties as faith in communism collapsed and the contours of the Cold War hardened, and this position is represented in Myra. On the other, her subsequent writing became important for an emerging women's movement in the 1970s, where questions of the relationship between personal and political identities were framed in a different way. The kinds of issues that were later to emerge-and the consciousness that working them through gave rise to-are prefigured in Wilderness, yet have little resonance in the fifties. The play received one performance in a Sunday night production without decor at the Royal Court in 1959. Showing 'how things really are' may have been important to the realism of the NewWave, but the 'real' at this point had no space for a feminist interpretation of the politics of gender. Works Cited Delaney, Shelagh. A Taste of Honey. Published by Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1992 (originally 1959.) Lessing, Doris., Each His Own Wilderness, New English Dramatists, 1959 Lovell, Bernard, Astronomer by Chance (Basic Books), 1990 Wandor, Michelene., Arky Types, Methuen, 1987 Wandor, Michelene., Plays by Women. Selected and introduced. London; New York: Methuen, 1987 Read More