6 Conclusion 16

Bibliography 18 

1 Introduction

Harold Pinter, (1930–2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007).

Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. (Net1)

The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter which first performed in 1965. The play published in Broadway won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play, while its 40th-anniversary version got 2008 Tong Award for Best Revival of a Play nomination. The play sets in London, where four males live there. The rest two characters are a couple who return to their London home. The four men lives in the London home are: Max, a retired butcher; his brother Sam, a chauffeur; and Max’s sons-Lenny, a pimp; and Joey, a future boxer. The couple are: Teddy, the husband, a college philosophy professor; Ruth, Teddy’s wife. The play starts with Teddy brings Ruth back to his London home, where his family lives. After having lived in the United States for several years, Teddy brings his wife, Ruth, home for the first time to meet his working-class family in North London, where he grew up and which she finds more familiar than their arid academic life in America. Much sexual tension occurs as Ruth teases Teddy’s brothers and father and the men taunt one another in a game of one-upmanship, resulting in Ruth’s staying behind with Teddy’s relatives as “one of the family” and Teddy returning home to America and their three sons without her.

Since its first run, The Homecoming has attracted much controversy. Critics hold varied and even opposite views on the astonishingly absurd description Pinter used to illustrate illness, sex, and sadism in this work. Those literature reviewers at the very beginning rarely looked positive on this play, who regarded the play as ridiculous and preposterous. According to Robert Brustein(1965:121-122), a famous drama critic, who delivered his opinion that the play tends to exploit the bizarre too much merely for its own sake. 

Comparing with the other mature criticisms, feminist criticism, which pays more attention to the female roles in Pinter’s plays, has its rising occupation on the study of Pinter’s work. Victor Cahn (2011) analyzed the relationship and connection between gender and power in his book, Gender and Power. Elizabeth Sakellaridon (1988) analyzed Pinter’s play from different female characters. However, feminist study still remains a lot undercover and waits for revealing, especially The Homecoming. Even today, the feminist approach still can be regarded as a prevailing perspective to interpret The Homecoming.

Aimed at analyzing the identity pursuit of the heroine in the play, this paper probes into the reasons why Ruth has made such a seemingly absurd choice. The entire paper can be pided into three parts, Ruth’s unhappy marriage, her realization and pursuit of the true self, and Pinter’s impact on this play. Through the approach of making detailed textual analysis, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the turnover from Teddy’s good wife to the replacement of dead wife in London’s home and a part-time whore is not the absurdity of Ruth’s mentality but the realization of her identity pursuit.源:自*优尔~·论,文'网·www.youerw.com/