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?

STANLEY: What?

MEG: The fried bread.

STANLEY: Succulent.

MEG: You shouldn‟t say that word.

 STANLEY: What word?

MEG: The word you said.

STANLEY: What, succulent-?

MEG: Don‟t say it!

STANLEY: What‟s the matter with it?

MEG: You shouldn‟t say that word to a married

woman.

STANLEY: Is that a fact?

MEG: Yes.

STANLEY: Well, I never knew that.

MEG: Well, it‟s true.

STANLEY: Who told you that?

MEG: Never you mind.

STANLEY: Well, if I can‟t say it to a married woman

who can I say it to?

MEG: 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 coming in

a van.

MEG: Who?

STANLEY: And do you know what they have

got in that van?

MEG: What?

STANLEY: They‟ve got a wheelbarrow in

that van.

MEG (breathlessly): They haven‟t.

STANLEY: Oh yes they have.

MEG: 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 the
front door.

MEG: They don‟t.

STANLEY: They‟re looking for someone.

MEG: They‟re not.

STANLEY: They‟re looking for someone. A

certain person.
 MEG (hoarsely): No, they‟re not.

STANLEY: Shall I tell you what they‟re

looking for?

MEG: No!

STANLEY: You don‟t want me to tell you?

MEG: 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:

 MEG: 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. None of the male characters is

willing to accept her as a separate personality. 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)…

BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT THE

WORLD…

(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.