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Essay on Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming'
Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming' contrasts America and England by showing America as an ideal place, while England is portrayed as an ugly reality represented by a lower-class English family. The son, Teddy, who arrives from America with his wife, praises America and brings hope that the family may be saved from their state. His wife, on the other hand, does not like America just as she does not like her husband. That she agrees to remain with the family and prostitutes herself to her in-laws signifies her homecoming and rejection of a better life.
Harold Pinter's The Homecoming derives much of its impact from its calculated assault on the viewer's normal expectations about family life. Pinter's lower-class English family is in no usual sense a family. Instead of a home, the house is a cage in which the inmates snarl and scratch at one another; life there is a community of vituperation. In what obviously passes for everyday discourse, Max, the family patriarch, describes his dead wife as having a "rotten stinking face," himself as a "lousy filthy father," his brother as a "tit" and a "maggot," his daughter-in-law as a "pox-ridden slut," and her husband as "stinkpig." The epithets are returned in kind by the family. (John Lahr, 1971)
The dramatic situation of the play is the return of the eldest son, Teddy, from America, where in six years he has married, had three children, and established himself as a professor of philosophy in a university. His welcome home is exactly what the viewer has by now been led to expect: an explosion of insult. And the major event of the play is a fitting conclusion to all this gemutlichkeit: In the second and final act, after Teddy's wife willingly has sex with Joey, the aspiring-boxer son.....
