Class-Consciousness and Conjugal Relations in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1957)

It is generally suggested that Britain is essentially a class-conscious society where the upper classes are considerably preoccupied with the view of social position, the language and manners. It is sensitivity of people to gradations of prestige, the ritual and etiquette of inter-personal relationships within and across the lines that divide the population in form of social hierarchy. British literature throughout the Victorian period in particular and the twentieth century in general is a reflection of this manifestation of British society. The class-consciousness or social hierarchy has continued to plague the British society through the turbulent years and is still a phenomenon to reckon with. Alan Carter aptly observes, “In Britain they have inherited a society riddled from top to bottom with class barriers and petty snobberies, an establishment still powerfully entrenched, and a royal family still regarded as a British status symbol long after the rest of the world had got rid of even laughing at our pretensions”( 20). In the Post-War Britain, the successive governments initiated a horde of social measures to create a just and egalitarian society, but class continued to be principal feature of the British society. John Osborne responded to this social malaise and dramatized it faithfully and artistically in his plays. He neither condemns the upper class nor glorifies the working class, but places both the classes in a critical perspective, highlighting their virtues and weaknesses.

In Look Back in Anger, Osborne dramatizes how acute class consciousness makes roads into the conjugal relationships between the spouses from the diametrically different social strata of British society. Jimmy Porter, a graduate from the working c...

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