The Homecoming

Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. Chatham: W.J. Mackay & Co, 1965. Print.

I am not quite sure what to make of The Homecoming. It has a bit of Waiting for Godot’s absurdist and dark physical comedy flavour, while at the same time, it comes off as a realist narrative, especially at the start of the play. As with Waiting for Godot, I’d be interested to see how this was staged, or at least to have a look at the 1973 film (screenplay by Pinter) if I could get a copy of it.

I think the play speaks to a number of issues –– the violence (physical and mental) of the patriarchal family, the psychological warfare used in a culture dominated by of masculinity, the objectification and commodification of women in patriarchal society –– by taking them to extremes in this story.

The play drips with contradictions and irony. Its title brings to mind a warm family gathering (there is a Walton family movie by the same name, as I’ve discovered - probably not quite the same plot!) but the interactions of the family––though hot-tempered––are decidedly not warm. The narrative does play off of the conventional homecoming narrative. At the start of the second act in particular, Max’s words are sickly sweet. He calls his late wife a woman with “a will of iron, and a heart of gold,” quite a contradiction to his earlier description of her as a bitch with a “rotten stinking face” (9) and a whore (42). He refers to his daughter-in-law Ruth in similarly degrading terms. His son Lenny, who seems to be a pimp, and who confesses to beating two women (one possibly a prostitute, the other an elderly woman) clearly considers women to be similarly disposable (32, 33). In the play, women are simultaneously seen as those who will continue on the the family through reproduction (as in the traditional family reunion narrative - although here it’s explicitly okay for the sexual union to be rape) and as a source of contagion or disease (31, 42, 68). In fact, any family member who is at all considered dependent is feminized and is referred to in terms of disease. Max calls his family members “one flow of stinking pus after another” and he also makes reference to his brother Sam (whom he feminizes) as being disabled, both mentally and physically (15):

My mother was bedridden, my brothers were all invalids. I had to earn the money for the leading psychiatrists. I had to read books! I had to study the disease, so that I could cope with an emergency at every stage. A crippled family, three bastard sons, a slutbitch of a wife. (47)

Here, Max’s medicalization of Sam and of his other brothers and mother is a part of his overall cruelty. As such, I think that the play locates violence not only on the street, but shows that street violence (such as that connected to prostitution) is intimately intertwined with domestic sexual verbal and physical violence, institutional/psychiatric/state violence and the conditions of poverty. This culture of violence, furthermore, has deep psychological affects, as is demonstrated by Teddy’s capitulation (which goes against every narrative of gentlemanliness, and family honour hence the irony) to his family’s cycle of sadism, despite his having attained a different perspective through his education (61-2).