CHAPTER III THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: THE ARCHETYPAL WOMAN Pinter wrote Birthday Party, the second play, in 1957. Its first performance took place on 28 April 1958 at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. There are three acts running for two hours or more. The drama has an ABA pattern. It starts with a given situation seemingly calm, but replete with signs of doom. It then explodes in a burst of action, and the play returns to the initial situation. Stanley, the protagonist, lives in the boarding house of Meg and Petey. Two new guests are expected. Stanley s sudden mood transitions like his irritated comments concerning the poor breakfast, shows his restlessness about coming visitors. Towards the conclusion of the first act, Goldberg and McCann, the unexpected guests, appear. Suspense is developed by their referring to the job they have come to do.
In the B section, the second act, there is nagging and bullying as Stanley and his tormentors Goldberg and McCann jostle for position. A series of questions lead to a crescendo, an exchange of blows revealing that words do not culminate in the truth. There is physical conflict and violence, game playing, and singing. In the final act, the C section, calm seems to have returned. How Goldberg and McCann have produced the new Stanley remains mysterious. The Birthday Party is a play full of disagreeable characters. Meg is presented in her serving role which reflects her subordination to her husband. On the other hand, in her role as a nourisher of Petey and Stanley, she tries her best to exercise power over them. She pesters Petey with trivial questions but his indifference to her questions makes her extremely unpleasant and tiresome. Stanley also turns a deaf ear to Meg s tiresome instructions, and thus avoids her domination. He even senses her vulnerability and plays with her repressed sexuality. [MEG]: Was it nice? What? The fried bread. Succulent. You shouldn t say that word.
What word? The word you said. What, succulent-? Don t say it! What s the matter with it? You shouldn t say that word to a married woman. Is that a fact? Yes. Well, I never knew that. Well, it s true. Who told you that? Never you mind. Well, if I can t say it to a married woman who can I say it to? You re bad. (Pinter 27) Later Meg deliberately takes up the word succulent which was rejected by her: Am I really succulent? (29). Thus she exhibits an erotic nature of women which they try to suppress. Critic Martin Esslin refers contemptuously to Meg s senile eroticism (Esslin 88). Instead of dominating Stanley and Petey, she becomes a toy
of their hands. Stanley knows well how to play with it. Calculating Meg s level of idiocy, Stanley indulges in mock-terrorisation of her. STANLEY (advancing): They re coming today. They re a van. coming in Who? And do you know what they have got in that van? What? They ve got a wheelbarrow in that van. MEG (breathlessly): They haven t. Oh yes they have. You re a liar. STANLEY (advancing upon her): A big wheelbarrow. And when the van stops they wheel it out, and they wheel it up the garden path, and then they knock at front door. the They don t. They re looking for someone. They re not. They re looking for someone. A certain person.
MEG (hoarsely): No, they re not. Shall I tell you what they re looking for? No! You don t want me to tell you? You re a liar! (Pinter 34) Above dialogues are much more than mock-terrorisation. This is how Stanley guesses his bad time. Elizabeth Sakellaridou explains it more explicitly: Meg s fears are apparently unmotivated. She seems to have no distinct personality boundaries; she is presumably confusing, at this point, her identity with that of Stanley. Thus her quasi-existential anxiety is a mere parody of Stanley s grave situation. Stanley, though defenceless, at least is fully aware that a dirty trick is played against him. Meg, on the other hand, is never conscious of the strangers insidious manipulations. Stanley is a tragic figure, Meg is only a cartoon. (Sakellaridou 35) In most of the play, Meg is naive and oppressive wife with a desire to dominate the male world. Only in one prominent incident, she voices her point of view clearly which is about brief evocation of her past:
My little room was pink. I had a pink carpet and pink curtains, and I had musical boxes all over the room. And they played me to sleep. And my father was a very big doctor. That s why I never had any complaints. I was cared for, and I had little sisters and brothers in other rooms, all different colours. (Pinter 70) This speech may be true or fabricated, but this is Meg s expression of her identity and longings, which goes unnoticed. willing to accept her as a separate personality. None of the male characters is Her portrayal is rather archetypal of woman. She projects male superiority in disguised form. When she is told by Petey that a lady gave birth to a girl, she expresses strong disappointment and her own preference for a boy. This female wish accepts the male domination in the world, and is one of the causes of girl foeticide. There is a great bewilderment in categorising Pinter s male characters. They are not typed as good or bad. On the whole, Pinter s character s seem to belong to real world though they are not real. In an interview to Lawrence Bensky he said that he likes all his characters, even a bastard like Goldberg (Bensky 361). There is always something equivocal about them that defies categorisation. They
possess both virtue and vices as we experience in the life. Even Goldberg and McCann can t be stereotyped as symbol of vice as they possess other human and realistic aspects. Meg s house is the seedy place where all the characters compete with one another in mental and moral weakness. Initially Goldberg and McCann look powerful, determined and confident. Soon mask of superiority falls off McCann as he starts asking questions, clearly revealing his insecurity. Goldberg is the only person who enjoys superiority over the others for quite some time. Soon mask of his superiority also smashed to the ground when the deficiency of his own nature is revealed: Goldberg:...And don t go near the water. And you ll find-that what I say is true. Because I believe that the world (Vacant) Because I believe that the world (Desperate) WORLD BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT THE (Lost). (Pinter 87-8)
Goldberg tries to pull his scattered thoughts together but all in vain. His momentary mental and vocal failure brings him down to the same paralytic position as his own victim Stanley at the end of the play. (Sakellaridou 41). Goldberg and McCann are projected as victimizers, but they are as vulnerable as their own victims. Pinter once said that we are all in the same boat (Thompson 9). No one in this world is absolutely a victim or a victimizer. A victim can change into victimizer and vice-versa. Katharine Burkman points out the blending of victim and victimizer more precisely: Stanley is victimized by the two men who are themselves frightened, potential victims of the power they serve. And Stanley becomes more than a victim when he attempts to strangle his landlady Meg and rape the visiting Lulu. (Burkman 21)
Petey is also no exceptional character. He is the victim of an oppressive wife, and same time with the weapon of verbal silence and physical absence, he fights effectively his wife s domination. Another female character, Lulu, is the stereotype of the young, provocative, and sexual object. Critics have regarded her as a nubile bundle of fluff called Lulu (Anonymous 44). She is depicted merely as a sex object. She doesn t have much job in the play. Lulu is portrayed as stupid and empty headed as Meg. Still these women have importance in male dominated world. Nancy Chodorow describes male s ambivalence towards women explicitly which can illuminate the situation in The Birthday Party: Dread of the mother is ambivalent, however. Although a boy fears her, he also finds her seductive and attractive. He cannot simply dismiss and ignore her. Boys and men develop psychological and cultural ideological mechanisms to cope with their fears without giving up women altogether. They create folk legends, beliefs, and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing and objectifying women They deny dread at the expense of realistic views of women. On the one hand they glorify and adore. On the other they disparage. (Chodorow 183)
In whole of the play business is conducted by men. Meg and Lulu are redundant and useless. The hero victim is man and so the victimizers Goldberg and McCann. Women are portrayed on the level of marginality. The play projects an archetypal image of women. And its strong influence is felt up to The Homecoming.
WORK CITED Anonymous, (New Plays) The Word as Weapon,Time, 13Oct. 1967. Bensky, Lawrence M, Harold Pinter ( Interview), in Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (Harmondsdworth, 1977). Burkman, Katherine, The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978. Esslin, Martin, Pinter the Playwright. London: Methuen, 1982. Originally Published in 1970 by Methuen & Co. Ltd under the title The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter. Revised edn published in 1973 as Pinter: A Study of His Plays by Eyre Methuen Ltd.
Pinter, Harold, Plays: One (The Birthday Party, The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out). London: Methuen, 1976. Sakellaridou, Elizabeth, Pinter s Female Portraits. London: The Macmillan Press, 1988. Thompson, Harry, Harold Pinter Replies, New Theatre Magazine, 11 Jan. 1961, 8-10.