Look Back in Anger: Act 2, Scene 1 Summary & Analysis

Jimmy’s jazz trumpet is a symbol of his suffering (jazz has traditionally been music of protest and struggle). His anguish dominates the scene even while he is not physically present. His efforts to disrupt domestic peace are certainly succeeding, though his ability to disrupt any social dynamics outside his home has yet to be proven.

The contrast between Helena’s and Alison’s attire suggests that Alison has assimilated more to working class culture, while Helena retains her middle-class status. At the beginning of the previous act, Alison’s rich upbringing was apparent in this backdrop, but with Helena as a foil, we can see that Alison has shed class markers more fully than Jimmy’s tirades would have us believe. Helena’s strength comes from her class and her gender. The stage direction implies that women are tyrannical by nature—women like Helena allow men “freedom” only when they are sure that this freedom will not interfere with their power. This also speaks to Osborne’s feeling that working class men are not allowed their full masculinity.

Helena and Alison’s shared understanding that the apartment is “primitive” shows their common class context. Although Alison might appear to be fitting into the working class apartment, she still retains some sense of scorn for it. The fact that Cliff usually helps Alison with the feminine labor points to the non-traditional gender roles in this household, and also to the feminization of working class men that the play finds objectionable.

Helena and Jimmy have strangely similar reactions to the idea of Alison’s getting “used to” things. Jimmy had previously scorned his wife as a “great one for getting used to things” when she said she no longer minds his pipe smoke, and Helena is similarly scandalized that Alison could get “used to” a situation that, to her, seems intolerable. This suggests that Alison may, indeed, be particularly prone to avoiding the conflict and “suffering” that Jimmy hopes she experiences – she gets “used” to things, rather than fully experiencing them, liking them or disliking them. Her reaction to Miss Drury (and Jimmy’s comparative disregard for the landlady) speaks again to Alison’s urge to calm the waters rather than making waves.

Helena’s statement that hatred is “oddly exciting” speaks to the fact that Jimmy’s anger is sexually attractive. It isn’t just Alison and Jimmy who feel this mixing of hatred, sexuality, and love—the fact that Helena feels this way too suggests that the couple’s volatile love might be the result of class difference rather than of a simple personality clash.

Helena tries to find a logical explanation for the non-traditional dynamic between Cliff and Alison: he is in love with her. Alison doesn’t agree, showing that Helena can’t understand the complexity of their relationship. This, and the fact that Cliff feels less able to embrace Alison around Helena, implies that their non-traditional love is something that is possible in a working class context, but that upper class norms are more traditional and constricting.

This lack of energy is what Jimmy finds so frustrating about Cliff and Alison’s relationship, too—he thought it showed too much complacency and too little feeling. Yet Helena’s questions suggest that she finds Jimmy’s tolerance of a non-traditional cultural standard to be a different kind of complacency. This shows their class conflict—they can’t agree on which battles are most important, even if they both object to the laziness of the relationship. According to Alison, Jimmy sees his class allegiance to Cliff as more important than his need to defend his wife against Cliff’s flirtations. Alison doesn’t share his view. She retains, deep down, a more traditional view of gender.

This passage suggests that Cliff and Alison’s relationship shouldn’t be taken to suggest that peaceful relationships across class lines are possible—Cliff is the outlier. Alison’s scorn for Jimmy’s non-elite university reminds the audience that his education has brought him only tenuous acceptance into a higher echelon of society.

Jimmy’s hope that Alison and Hugh would get along is a poignant memory. Outwardly, at least, he seems to have given up on bringing Alison into his world without conflict, believing instead that the classes will inevitably clash. The imagery of Alison as a “hostage” conforms to this view, as well. Alison’s use of the words “jungle” and “savage” again point to her scornful class-based view of how Jimmy lives.

The class conflict here is dramatized still further, with the working class men launching targeted attacks on upper class bastions, in an attempt to steal their resources. There is a certain simplicity to the plan that speaks to the genuine idealism that underlies Jimmy’s anger. The complicating factor is Alison. She adopts Jimmy’s values: like her husband, Alison wishes that her friends would have “guts.” Yet, she hopes this so that their plan of attack will fail (a plan that she herself helped to orchestrate). Alison has consistently chosen ambivalence rather than choosing sides in the class conflicts that arise.

Helena notices Alison’s ambivalence, and can’t identify with it. She is a character who sticks to her values, which are solidly middle class. Alison’s mention of India suggests a connection between her relationship with Jimmy and Britain’s fall from imperial power. The “unsettled” state of things, both in her home and in the country, laid the groundwork for her marriage. Alison knew that the relationship might destroy her, but still wanted it. For Jimmy, the fight with her parents was more important than love. Their relationship is “unsettled” partly because love is secondary to anger and pain.

Jimmy’s anger rarely takes on an explicitly political edge. Here, it does—but then Hugh abandons the cause. This seems to Jimmy a betrayal, and that fact reveals his underlying patriotism and traditional sense of family duty. Hugh goes off into the future, while Jimmy remains stuck and angry, unable to create political change in his country.

Alison here criticizes Jimmy’s view of right and wrong. He equates poverty with moral superiority, and wealth with moral corruption. Alison is right to find this simplistic, but she also proves that she does look down upon people who are of a lower class status than her. Helena’s reaction is practical: Jimmy’s morality doesn’t particularly matter to her, because she, unlike Alison, is sure of her own.

Alison thinks that the baby will make Jimmy feel trapped, but Helena doesn’t understand this—she thinks that Jimmy should just accept his child and his wife. In her middle class world, values like social disruption and class conflict don’t enter into the domestic equation. Jimmy, on the other hand, thinks of his marriage partly as a battleground for the working class. Alison makes explicit the way that their bear and squirrel game allows the couple to escape into simpler affection. She implies, however, that this type of love is not strong enough to survive in the real world. She has come to believe Jimmy’s idea that social conflict must enter into personal relationships.

Helena urges Alison to action, as Jimmy has before. Her presence makes it clearer in this act than it was in the first that Alison has neither fully abandoned her upper class ideals, nor embraced Jimmy’s working class fervor. Cliff’s surprise that the women are going to church illuminates the way that Helena’s presence is changing Alison’s behavior—she is being pulled back to her old life of traditional values .

Jimmy embraces jazz as a working class art form, and voices his opinion that working class people are more in touch with the real, emotional side of life. Webster, the only one of Alison’s friends who he considers worthwhile, also accesses this emotion through music. Jimmy turns around immediately, however, and claims the mantle of the educated man, taunting Cliff for being both too ignorant and too high-faluting. The exchange typifies Jimmy’s strained relationship to his own education and how to it placed him in a position that is stuck between working class and middle class.

Here, Jimmy argues that Alison’s friends’ high education keeps them from understanding earth-bound pleasures like sex. He suggests that Cliff is like them in his desire to keep the peace. He thus rejects both his wife’s absent friends and his own friend at the table, leaving himself socially isolated—Jimmy values his ideals over people. Helena’s calm politeness during Jimmy’s outburst recalls the high-class composure that Jimmy detests in Alison, and shows Helena’s strong belief in the value of politeness.

Jimmy counters Helena’s politeness by acting overly bawdy and brash. Yet he also paints himself as an intellectual, a person who composes music and writes poetry on the fly. He quotes famous authors like Eliot and Dante, but then writes a poem with a very earth-bound name (“The Cess Pool”) thus differentiating himself from Alison’s friends, who compare sex to classical music. This speech also calls to mind Osborne’s project with the play itself. He takes a formerly high-class art form—drama—and fills it with realistic, working class content. Jimmy’s poem, like Osborne’s play, might be a legitimate political statement—while also reflecting the particular and possibly limited worldview of its creator.

Lady Bracknell is a stuffy old Victorian woman from Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, so Jimmy’s comparison suggests that he finds Helena old-fashioned. He sees himself as a modern man, and people like her as outdated. His curiosity about Alison speaks to the intense and often uncomfortable nature of their love. Though he has been trying to ignore her, he fails.

Jimmy sets himself up as a rescuer, showing the idealism that he feels about his role in the class conflict. Alison turns this back upon him sarcastically, suggesting that she thinks this is a perverted version of a classic love story. Jimmy himself recognizes that it’s not a traditional story of valor—the charger was “off white.” This reflects his inability to find a valiant cause to hold on to, a situation that contributes to his general disillusionment.

Jimmy’s offensive language ratchets up a notch when he speaks about Alison’s mother, suggesting that his dislike of her may be misogynistic as well as idealistic. Here, he suggests that her motherly protectiveness makes her sexually unattractive, and that her un-ladylike “roughness” makes her comparable to a prostitute.

Jimmy mocks Alison’s mother’s suspicion of him, but he has been equally suspicious of Alison, snooping in her handbag and reading her letters. His morality isn’t actually superior to that of this upper class character. Jimmy’s statement that his mare gave up under Alison’s weight suggests that his quest to improve his working class lot is failing, and that this is largely due to his marriage.

Calling Alison’s mother a “bitch” and painting a vivid, disgusting picture of her worm-eaten corpse seems to show unbridled hatred rather than a moral or political statement. Yet, Jimmy wants Alison to defend her mother, and her husband—the insult is also a test of his wife’s moral fortitude. This moral purpose is muddied, however, by Jimmy’s personal hatred of Alison’s mother, and the word “bitch” adds an element of gendered hatred, as well. Jimmy cannot be said to be purely an idealistic social crusader. His “helplessness” in the midst of his slew of insults shows the self-defeating nature of his anger.

Again, Jimmy plays up his education and intellect. Yet he also rejects the feminization that he sees in Wordsworth, who was famous for his meditations on nature. Jimmy plans to write about social situations, which are his primary concern and a primary cause of his pain. Like “fire,” Jimmy’s vision of his life can both give energy, and consume or damage people.

Jimmy insult about Helena’s cleverness suggests that his bravado about his own intelligence is overblown. Alison’s statement that Jimmy would be “lost” without his suffering shows her clear understanding of the fact that the anger that he often directs at her is something that he needs. It gives him a sense of purpose and direction that he otherwise has no way to find.

Alison’s strong negative reaction to the word “why” speaks to the fact that she doesn’t understand her own actions. She is still stuck between truly accepting her husband’s world, and staying in her own. Helena’s presence is bringing that conflict slowly to its climax. Church has become a flash point for Alison’s allegiance—with Jimmy, she avoids it, but with Helena, she doesn’t.

Jimmy did not take the wedding seriously, further showing the ways that his values diverge from the traditional values of people like Alison’s parents (who apparently feel it would be improper not to show up for ceremony, even though they disapprove). The fact that Jimmy doesn’t remember saying his vows suggests that the marriage was more about his fight with Alison’s parents than it was about marrying Alison herself. Jimmy’s sense that Colonel Redfern was nostalgic for the colonial past while watching his daughter marry a working class man dramatizes the idea that Jimmy and Alison’s relationship signals the end of a certain era of British history. In modern times, Colonel Redfern is no longer a “prince,” and his precious daughter marries a working-class man like Jimmy.

Jimmy’s use of economic language to describe Helena’s worldview suggests that he sees her as an embodiment of the social and political forces in Britain that are trying to erase the plight of the poor and the working class. He accuses her of living in a way that denies reality, and bringing Britain back to the “Dark Ages.” This is, more broadly, his critique of society. He thinks that the powerful forces in England are disconnected to the struggles of people like himself, and intent upon preventing progress.

Helena has previously shown little inclination to respect or obey Jimmy, so the fact that she sits when he tells her to suggests that his statement about seeing someone die comes across as more powerful and true than his previous tirades. His reminder that death isn’t “dignified” is powerful evidence for his belief that politeness isn’t connected to the real things in life. As is often the case, however, his legitimate moral statement begins to mix with misogyny when he scorns Helena’s “frail little fists.” He says that this is about his working class moral outlook—he doesn’t have the politeness that those who went to fancy “public schools” would have. Yet Helena sees through him, noting that this might be about a “subtle” moral critique, but it also might be “just plain Irish”—a scornful and classist (and even racist) way to say that it might just be about Jimmy’s natural inclination towards belligerence.

Jimmy’s criticism of Alison’s virginity takes on a different meaning here, when he suggests that “virginity” means one hasn’t suffered. This gives us an idea of his vision of sex, which he must see as partly an act of suffering. British soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War did so for idealistic reasons, and Jimmy bemoans that lack of idealism in his own generation. His father and others like him had the chance to fight for important causes, but that also caused them grave suffering; Jimmy’s generation cannot be ignorant of the costs involved, and has thus lost some sense of innocence. Jimmy’s mother had the “fashionable” values that he derides in Alison and Helena, so this gives us an idea of the psychological origin of his outlook—which involves, again, both scorn for a woman in his life, and a valid critique of upper class complacency.

Jimmy himself ties the origin of his anger to “helplessness,” further driving a sense that his vitriol is partly about frustration, rather than about arguing for a just cause. Yet, his statement that he learned hard lessons at ten years old seems also to be legitimate. Helena and Alison deny him the pleasure of a response.

Jimmy’s emotional pain, and his belief that he has given Alison a good life, shows that, in his mind, he treats her this way out of love. His rage is again “disabled,” powerless. Alison’s emotional break, and her statement that she just wants “peace,” show that his love of passion and suffering has had the effect of pushing her away. At the same time, it shows that Alison really may be closed off to passion and suffering. She just wants things to be easy.

Jimmy is emotional to the point of discomfort, but, as we have seen many times before, he prefers this to “peace,” which he translates as upper class complacency. Jimmy argues that he might seem crazy, but Alison’s silence could make her the crazy one, too. This is one of the arguments that the play has been taking seriously. Though Jimmy’s anger makes him seem unhinged, he also has flashes of real ideological clarity. Alison, the calm one, is also occasionally shown to be a coward. The play suggests that some iconoclastic thinkers might be personally distasteful, as Jimmy often is.

The fact that Helena witnesses only Jimmy’s angry statement that Alison’s face should be “rubbed in the mud” parallels the way that upper class observers often see only the ugly side of Jimmy’s anger. The two prayer books symbolize the upper class respectability that Helena brings with her.

Helena draws the battle lines according to gender, not class—Alison’s problem is “men.” Cliff, on the other hand, suggests that it is indeed a matter of class. He confirms that Jimmy’s way of speaking is partly a result of his class upbringing, and that Cliff himself doesn’t find it offensive, given their shared context. He seems resigned to the fact that love entails conflict. He expresses pity, which seems to be an overall pity for the human condition. Cliff’s resigned attitude, and his love for both Jimmy and Alison, suggests that he doesn’t see their fights as a problem to solve in the way that Helena does.

Alison reacts to Helena’s extreme gesture with the “vague” attitude that Jimmy detests. Helena’s past tense statement that Alison “didn’t mind” shows a desire to avoid conflict (she doesn’t ask about Alison’s feelings in the presence, but assumes her retroactive approval). Alison’s decision to leave seems to come from a sense of inevitability. As Jimmy fears, Helena is indeed in charge. This is beginning to have real, potentially disastrous, effects for the couple.

Cliff springs into action in a moment of conflict, asking what he can do to help, and calling Jimmy a taxi. Alison, who actually knew Hugh’s mum, can only apologize repeatedly. Though they at times have similarly unemotional responses to Jimmy’s tirades, Cliff holds up much better under strain here than Alison does. We are meant to dislike Alison in this moment—she seems as emotionally callous as Jimmy often says that she is. Cliff’s different reaction shows that Alison’s behavior is due to cowardice, and not to a peace-loving nature.

Jimmy’s admission of weakness is the emotional climax of this scene. He has allowed himself to become fully vulnerable, and to admit that he relies on Alison. This could be a moment of affection and love between them, but Alison remains emotionally closed. The church bells call her away with their respectable appeal—she follows, and returns with Helena to her old life, leaving Jimmy alone. In this moment, it is Alison, and not Jimmy, who is an aggressor.

The bear symbolizes Jimmy himself. He and it fall at the same time, full of immense suffering and disbelief. The fact that he flings it to the ground himself suggests the way that he welcomes suffering, however painful it may be.