Discuss Pinters dramatic presentation of Ruth in The Homecoming
Surrealistically representing the pugilistic life of a pack of ‘Hackney predators’, Pinter portrays the mounting conflict within the tribe as each male fights for the Alfa position, with the reward of the lone female, Ruth.
Embroidered with elaborately hidden meanings, pregnant pauses and ellipses, this play strips the characters of the outside shell of etiquette and politesse associated with society and left with only language as an attempt to cover the nakedness of their animalistic cores. These characteristics are recognized through the ‘Pinteresque’ themes of nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred, and mental disturbance. The plot follows the course of Teddy returning home with his wife, Ruth, and her journey in to ‘take on’ the pack and eventually take over the role of Queen Bee. During the course of the drama, she exacts her revenge on Teddy in leaving him for his family of sexually screwed up ‘butchers’.
Teddy and Ruth’s arrival from America is symbolically representative of Teddy’s homecoming after nine years away. He returns married with a ‘Doctorship of Philosophy’ and supposedly father of three sons, although later questioned by Max, ‘all yours, Ted?’, suggesting Ruth is, as ever, unfaithful and a prostitute.
‘Are you tired?’ this passage opens with the estranged couple struggling to find coherence with the blatant discord, ‘No’. Ruth’s replies are cold, quasi-monosyllabic and detached, perhaps in an attempt to undermine Teddy’s ascension to authority as he blatantly refuses to listen and orders her around: ‘Go to bed. I’ll show you the room’ shows the reader that ultimately, Ruth’s opinions are irrelevant as the subordinate member in a marriage. Like Joey is to Lenny, Teddy sees Ruth as merely an appendage, thus his patronizing condescendence, ‘You can help me with my lectures when we get back’.
Teddy’s long speeches reveal him as nervous despite his seeming attempts to reassure Ruth : ‘You’ll be perfectly all right up there without me.’ He uses excessive language to cover his vulnerability in face of the confident and controlling Ruth, whose short, sharp syntax displays her self-assured disposition. Similarly, Max and Lenny, who appear to feel her authority also go off into long, pre-rehearsed monologues, for example Lenny’s encounter with ‘a certain lady’ ‘with a certain proposal’ ‘one night, not too long ago’.
Ruth’s presence evokes ambiguous emotions within Teddy’s family: alternately revered and rebuked, she is perceived as both the absent mother-figure (Jessie) : ‘make the beds’, ‘do the cooking’, ‘scrub the place out a bit’, ‘keep everyone company’, and as a sexual object ‘in a dress in pale corded blue silk, heavily encrusted in pearls’ and ‘pantaloons in lilac flowered taffeta’.
Significantly mentioning the structure of the house, Pinter reminds the reader and the audience of the boneless, spineless family, now that Jessie, ‘the backbone’ has died. Teddy, who wants to ‘stay up for a bit’ and ‘walk about’, provokes sub-textual connotations of the returning male reassuming his dominance as eldest son and marking his territory. However, giving Ruth the house key, having his cigar go out and going to bed prior to Ruth culminates into his eventual emasculation and loss of power among his brothers.
Subtextually, Teddy’s ‘You…need some rest, you know’ is ambivalent in expressing Ruth’s mental instability, or that Teddy is sending her away for doing something he doesn’t approve of. The audience might relate this with ‘she’s a very popular woman, she’s got lots of friends’, once again suggests Ruth’s involvement with prostitution as a ‘photographic model for the body’. Stifled in her relationship with a British academic, Ruth’s, ‘I think I’ll have a breath of air’ and ‘just a stroll’ suggests she’s out and about and ‘on the Game’ even before Max and Lenny agree to sponsor her.
Quintessentially, Ruth’s confrontation with Lenny opens her ascension to power. If language is an attempt to cover nakedness, Ruth’s short, direct syntax show her to be in a position of power over Lenny. Not dissimilar to courting males in the animal kingdom trying to hide their vulnerabilities from the females with bright colours or confrontational battles, Max and Lenny use long and decorously embroidered renditions of what have happened previously to appear intelligent and dominating.
And yet, Lenny still seeks his absent mother, ‘Do you mind if I hold your hand?’. Psychoanalytically, Pinter portrays the mental decay of his characters as Lenny oscillates between the maternal craving and desire to punish women with ‘a belt in the nose and a couple of turns of the boot.’ He expresses his assumed dominance in stating ‘I decided she was’, referring to the irrelevance of whether or not the prostitute was diseased, but rather that his word_as a pimp and ‘escort’_is law. Even so, Ruth overrides his authority, threatening, ‘if you take the glass, I’ll take you’. Proposals such as ‘sit on my lap’ and ‘lie on the floor’ have significantly provocative innuendoes, versus the maternal figure naming Lenny, ‘Leonard’.
Pinter’s intricate depiction of Ruth is her reminiscent, contemplative nature. She cunningly employs frequent ellipses ‘…’ as a time of careful planning to put the angle of vision on her in a positive light. ‘I…move my leg’, ‘I wear…underwear…which moves with me…it…captures your attention’. Employing this teasing, provocative language register, Ruth enacts a wordy striptease, seducing the men around her and putting herself in the spotlight. She describes America as ‘all rock. And sand’, portentous of the ‘arid scimitar’ in To the Lighthouse, while the ‘insects’ metaphorically refers to her popularity amongst her ‘friends’.
‘once or twice … cold buffet’ insinuates Ruth is a high-class prostitute. Contrastingly with Max’s diction, Ruth’s language register is not full of expletives but rather strategically thought out. She applies legal diction to decide the conditions of her contract with Teddy’s family: ‘All aspects of the agreement and conditions of employment would have to be clarified to our mutual satisfaction before we finalized to contract’, showing she is able to take care of herself as an individual and will not let the ‘butchers’ exploit her. This independence helps her stand out even more prominently than Teddy in all his aloofness, as she rises to position of Queen and orders Lenny , ‘I’d like something to eat’, ‘I’d like a drink’.
In noting how Lenny does not reject the subordinate role to Ruth, the reader might suspect he enjoys being told what to do by a woman and thus deduce that Pinter’s own fantasies play a significant part in the play. He models Ruth on his wife, Vivien, embodying her as both saint and sinner, contrasting maternal and temptress. Biblically, Ruth, symbolic of ‘pity’ but also a Moabite widow who left her own people to live with her mother-in-law Naomi. All assets of femininity are sewn into one character, exposing her to the male’s sex drive and simultaneous desire for a mother presence.
Ultimately, Pinter’s presentation of Ruth significantly exposes her as the model female, simultaneously dominate and subordinate, maternal and temptress. Through his pack of Hackney predators, he depicts her as a tool for sexual enjoyment but the eventual Queen Bee with Joey ‘kneeling at her chair’ in the final, still-life portrait.
