Far from Freedom: Women’s Identity Crisis in Brief Encounter and Other Two films
In her On Female Identity and Writing by Women, Judith Kegan Gardiner observes: “the word ‘identity is paradoxical in itself, meaning both sameness and distinctiveness, and its contradictions proliferate when it is applied to women” (Gardiner 347). In the post-war era, it was obvious that, more distinctiveness was added to women’s identity.
According to Arthur Marwick, “In general the war meant a new economic and social freedom for women, the experience of which could never be entirely lost” (Marwick 160). The war had an enduring effect of liberation for women in Britain, which manifested itself in various aspects of their lives. In her enlightening book, Only Half Way to Paradise: Women in Post-war Britain: 1945-1968, Elizabeth Wilson probes into the condition of post-war women from different angles. Although she is critical that women still faced discrimination, oppression and inequity in post-war Britain, she makes it clear that they had become increasingly liberal, since they had more opportunities to work, more sexual freedom, higher levels of education and so on, and this was due to a combination of many social factors.
Liberation was undoubtedly great for women because it meant less repression and oppression, equality and more possibilities in life. However, it may also have exacerbated women’s identity crisis by adding more “distinctiveness”. According to Erik H. Erikson, identity crisis is caused by the loss of “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity” (Erikson 17). In terms of individuals in the group of women, although the liberation they enjoyed in the post-war era brought them more possibilities in life, it also meant that they faced various kinds of predicament in which their original roles were challenged, and this led to uncertainty about their identity. Brief Encounter, A Taste of Honey and The Killing of Sister George are three post-war films which delineated women’s identity crisis. Although the protagonists in these films have some particularity, their encounters still represent some of the possible aggravation of inner turmoil women’s liberation may have brought to individuals. This essay aims to explore the particularity of the plights of identity crisis faced by the protagonists in the three films under the background of the communal changes to women’s lives in the post-war era.
Brief Encounter, directed by David Lynn, is based on Coward Noel's one-act play, Still Life. It depicts the unenduring affair between Laura Jesson, a "happily-married" middle-class house wife and mother and Alec Harvey, a married doctor. The extremely well-received film was released in the immediate post-war year, 1945. During the 1940s, British women experienced a series of transformations under the influence of the war. The labour shortage brought about increasing opportunities of paid work for women, which led to a conflict with motherhood. Since many women were away from home to work, the government began to provide nurseries, “thereby relieving mothers of a burden central to ideal motherhood” (Lant 154). Meanwhile, sexuality became more open. The Second World War was “a very romantic war”, and part of the reason for this was that cinemas (where the two main characters used to date) and dance halls “provided the ideal territory for romantic encounters” (Bruley 114). The total birth rate was falling, while illegitimacy was on the increase, and divorce rate rose rapidly. Married women were no longer “icons of ‘decency and stability’” (Lant 155).
This is the history background of Brief Encounter. It belongs to an age that the image “ideal motherhood” was shaken; therefore Laura’s plight is also encountered by the female audiences at that time. The increasingly liberate social mode enabled them to question their traditional role of mother and wife in marriage and see the possibility of free themselves from it, but many of them could not take the step for reasons like the lack of income or dare not to break the moral code.
Laura is cast as a representation of the women at that time. Her identity crisis is led by the conflict between her awaking self-awareness and the social role of wife and mother which she has always been playing.
In her interior confession to her husband Fred, Laura states:
“You see, we are a happily married couple and must never forget that. This is my home. You are my husband and my children are upstairs in bed. I’m a happily married woman; or rather I was until a few weeks ago. This is my whole world, or it was until a few weeks ago.”
This monologue suggests that, before her encounter with Alec, Laura had identified herself as a wife and a mother, which was not exciting but definitely secure. Addressing the state of “happily married” which she “must never forget”, she is actually defending the identity under threat, and this reflects her dissatisfaction with the marriage in which her individuality is gradually being obliterated. Being a housewife, Laura regards her family as being her “whole world”. As a result, she has to spend most of her time in a house which seems to be so cramped that even the music from the radio can be “deafening”. This restricted domestic space has led to the insufficiency of individual space, which reinforces her social role of mother and wife, but consistently hinders her from being herself. Laura’s monotonous daily life as a housewife is also tedious. When Alec asks her if she comes to town every week, she explains that her regular Thursday schedule which brings about the affair is “not a very exciting routine, but it makes a change.” Moreover, there is some distance exists between Laura and her husband. Having no income, she is sustained by her husband who is described as “kindly, unemotional and not delicate at all” and “not musical at all”. In the film we don’t see he has any leisure activities other than playing crossword puzzles. However, Laura is cast conversely as sensitive and romantic. She goes to cinema every Thursday, borrows Kate O’ Brien’s novel from Boots, listens to classical music and is referred to Fred as a “poetry addict” who is quite familiar with Keats’ poems. The couple seems to lack common interest. Consequently, although Fred seems to be a considerate and understanding husband, he can never fulfil Laura’s demand for romanticism and passion. Their affection is very much based on kinship.
These facts illustrate that, although marriage provides Laura with material things and a feeling of safety, it simultaneously represses her desire for individuality, and this has been the most significant contributor to Laura’s identity crisis.
The inevitability of the affair is implied in their first encounter. Laura thanks Alec for getting the grit out of her eyes, saying that: “Lucky for me you were here.” Alec answered: “Anybody could have done it.” The conversation ingeniously suggests that the affair is ineluctable for Laura because of the contradiction between her family role and desire, and this explains why even the main male character, Alec, is ambiguously constructed --- he can be “anybody”.
The reason for Alec to have captivated Laura is predominately that their relationship is beyond marriage, which enables him to cater to Laura’s need to be desired, not as a wife and a mother, but as a woman. When Laura and Alec bare their souls to each other for the first time in the boathouse, Alec says he loves Laura for her “wide eyes”, the way she smiles, her “shyness”, and the way she laughs at his jokes. His words indicate that it is Laura’s femininity that he adores. Some feminists have made observations about the contradiction between sexuality and motherhood, that the stereotype of mothers tends to be unsexy, and even in its aesthetic form, it is hard “to imagine a mother as ‘something else besides a mother’” (Lant 157). Therefore, the relationship outside marriage with Alec enables Laura to briefly escape from the role of mother and be loved for her herself, for being an individual rather than because her of husband’s obligation to love her simply because they are married.
The extra-marital affair with Alec is led by Laura’s identity crisis, and inversely aggravates the crisis since she finds that her familial identity, which provides her with security, is under threat. Laura realises the peril when it occurs to her that Alec will not tell his wife about their date: “Then the first awful feeling of danger swept over me.” The affair has brought about ambiguity and confusion in terms of her family role. After she lies to Fred, she refers to herself as “a stranger in the house”. Moreover, although motherhood can restrict Laura, the affair, which could possibly have caused her to abandon her children, still runs against her maternal instinct and brings about a sense of guilt. When her son, Bobbie, is knocked down by a car after her first date with Alec, she regards it as being her “fault”, “a sort of punishment” and “an awful, sinister warning”. Also, she thinks that a boy she met in the botanical park who looks like Bobbie should have given her “a pang of consciousness”. Thirdly, as a middle-class white woman, she fears that breaking the moral code could be a source of marginalisation, because her self-identification is also formed from other’s judgment. She is so afraid of the immoral affair being known that, at the end of the date with Alec, she looks around after getting on the train to see if people are looking at her “as if they could read my [her] secret thoughts.” When the affair is discovered by Alec’s friend, she supposes she has been laughed at and thinks of herself as being “cheap and low”. After this incident, Laura ends her relationship with Alec and goes back to her husband. Nevertheless her confusion about her identity grows deeper.
Similar to Brief Encounter, A Taste of Honey is a female-centred film adapted from a play of the same name written by Shelagh Delaney. The play was first produced on the 27th May 1958, while the film was released in 1961, which suggests that the film reflects the landscape of post-war Britain from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s. During that period, the trend of women’s employment did not decline, although women’s working lives were intertwined with child-rearing. Part-time jobs were more popular, especially with married women (Bruley 123), and importance began to be attached to education. Although being treated inequitably with boys, more girls, including those from working-class families, had a better chance of being educated. According to Sue Bruley, this was also a period when “slowly, signs of a liberalisation of attitudes regarding sex were appearing.” The Kinsey Report helped to “create a climate in which sexual activity was demystified and women’s enjoyment of sex more openly recognised” A survey conducted in 1956 revealed that “two-fifths of first sexual intercourse was occurring before marriage” Meanwhile, young people became “more self-aware and self-centred” as disciplines were less strictly forced by their parents” (Bruley 135). This also constituted a reason for teenagers to become more sexually active, which led to a higher rate of teenage pregnancy.
According to Erickson, adolescence is a period of identity crisis because, during the progression from childhood to adulthood, it is quite common that the physical and psychological transformation causes a loss of the “sense of personal sameness” and “historical continuity”. Teenage pregnancy, which was faced by an increasing number of young females in that era, undoubtedly added some complexity to this situation. The predicament confronted by Jo, the protagonist in A Taste of Honey, is fairly representative; at the age of 16, she is made pregnant by her black sailor boyfriend.
Apart from the combined reasons for the teenage identity crisis, there is some particularity in Jo’s case, which is the conflict between her wish to be independent and her desire for maternal solicitude, which has continued from her childhood. There is an obvious reversal between the roles of the mother, Helen, and her daughter. Jo is “the more responsible of the two” (Wandor 40). Being a single mother herself, Helen immerses herself in sexual relationships with men and constantly neglects Jo’s interests, since she believes, “In any case, bearing a child does not put you under an obligation to it.” Although Jo has expressed her will to be independent by wanting a room of her own, her desire for maternal affection, as well as her childish possessive instincts, prevent her from truly detaching herself from Helen. Consequently, she is hostile toward her mother’s lover, Peter, blaming him for “planning to run off with my [her] old women”, and feels abandoned when Helen finally marries Peter. What is more, although she moves out in the hope of being independent, it can be perceived that Jo is looking for similar maternal care rather than the independence of adulthood in her relationship with the two male characters, Jimmie and Geoff. Jimmie, the sailor who has sex with Jo and makes her pregnant, is “as mother-surrogate as much as lover” (Lovell 371). Jimmie helps Jo to carry the big cases, which should have been carried by Helen, off the bus when they move to a new flat, and applies a bandage to Jo’s injured knee. Rather than the pursuit of adulthood, their sexual behaviour is more of a compensation for Helen’s abandonment of Jo, since it happens after Helen sends Jo home alone from Blackpool after her bitter wrangle with Peter. Being homosexual, Geoff’s feminine characteristics make him equally proficient at domestic tasks. According to Lovell, like Jimmie, he provides Jo with “the ‘mothering’ which Helen refuses” (Lovell 372). As a result, the unattained maternal love prevents Jo from growing up, and thus deepens her identity crisis.
Moreover, Jo’s crisis is further exacerbated by her adolescence pregnancy. As Terry Lovell observes, at the age of 16, she is “poised between childhood and womanhood, precipitated into adulthood by her affair with Jimmie and her pregnancy” (Lovell 374). It is unquestionable that she cannot bear the responsibility of being a mother, having not completely got rid of childhood herself, and therefore she detests and fears the sudden shift of roles. When talking about breast-feeding, she says: “I’m not having a little animal nibbling at me. It’s cannibalistic.” Then she states, “I hate motherhood.” Also, having seen a “filthy” boy and a dead baby mouse, her sense of refusing to take responsibility for sexuality and motherhood is evoked: “…Think of the harm she does having children… A bit of love and a bit of lust and there’y are. We don’t ask for life; we have it thrust upon us.” Her reflection again indicates that she was not prepared for motherhood and regards it as being something “thrust upon” her. In addition, because Jimmie’s father’s is black, the possibility of the child having a dark skin colour constitutes another factor which leads to the instability of Jo’s identity. When she sees the doll Geoff brings from a clinic for her to “practice a few holds” which is modelled on the mainstream, white, she becomes angry and bursts into tears because “the colour is wrong”. Then she pounds the doll furiously and shouts. “I’ll bash its brain out! I’ll kill it!” Her extreme behaviour reveals her fear of being marginalised by having a black baby, and furthermore, the fear of motherhood itself. Subsequently, she desperately admits, “I don’t want this child! I don’t want to be a mother!” After Helen is thrown out by Peter, Jo ultimately abandons her relationship with Geoffrey and comes back to her mother. This again attests to her identity crisis; being a mother, Jo is not able to cut herself off from childhood.
Apart from the sameness of being play-adapted and women-centred, by directly depicting lesbianism, The Killing of Sister George expresses a much more radical attitude toward women’s sexuality than Brief Encounter and A Taste of Honey. It also touches on the female professional life, which was not mentioned in the last two films. The film was released in 1968, thus it is placed under the historical background of the 1960s, the last decade before the women’s liberation movement. There was an increase in the number of professional women during the 1960s, although they were still discriminated against. People’s attitude toward sexuality became more liberal than in the 1950s, which was suggested by the rising illegitimacy, the wide usage of contraceptive pills, and the availability of legal abortions to women (Bruley 137-139). Moreover, in the 1960s the male and female youth were “far more visually alike”, although the gender behaviour had not markedly changed (136). Lesbianism, which is centralised in The Killing of Sister George, still remained largely invisible. Therefore, the attitude toward women’s homosexuality expressed in the film is actually more radical than the social reality. Nevertheless, as the first commercial lesbian film, it still betrayed the growing tendency for homosexual women to face up to their role and begin to be gradually accepted by society, as the women’s liberation movement, in which lesbians began to claim their rights, began to warm up in 1969 (149), the following year after the release of this film.
Different from Laura and Jo, the protagonist, June Buckridge, is a professional woman, an actress in a soap opera of BBC, and also a lesbian. It seems that she benefits from the increasingly liberal society. Having a decent job, she is able to be economically independent of men, and she has also asserted her homosexuality by cohabiting with her much younger girl friend, Alice. However, these elements also constitute the factors of her identity crisis.
June’s profession as an actress has led to her identity crisis, because of the blurring of the boundary between the role she plays and her own identity. In the film, June has played the role of Sister George, a district nurse in a TV soap named Applehurst, for four years. Its popularity has meant that June’s own identity has been replaced by her part, since all the people in the film call her George rather than using her own name. Also, according to Mercy Croft, June’s superior at the BBC, she “is Sister George and far more so than June Buckridge”. Therefore, June loses her own identity to her public role. In addition, June also unconsciously blurs the boundary between her part and herself because of their sharp contrast. Sister George is a much respected character in the soap opera. She represents the mainstream values of British society, while in reality, June is an outsider, an alcoholic, abusive and aggressive middle-aged lesbian. Rather than facing up to herself and resolving her problems, June chooses to make the boundary between her role and herself vague, thus evading the sense of marginalisation in her own identity. When she tells Alice that Sister George is to be killed in the soap opera, she uses “me” to refer to her part, saying, “They are going to murder me”. This line shows her confusion between her role and herself, attests to the blurring of the boundary, and indicates her anxiety about losing her part. For her, the killing of Sister George is the obliteration of her own identity in a disguised form, because the two have been muddled up with one another for so long. As a result, she feels the loss of continuity and sameness in her own identity. Therefore, her profession evokes her identity crisis while bringing her economic independence.
June’s homosexuality also worsens her identity crisis. In the film, there is no obvious discrimination in people’s attitude toward June’s lesbianism. Thus, the tension between the couple is produced by their inner turmoil rather than external pressure. In her conversation with Betty, a prostitute, June expresses her desire for “love and affection”. However, she has never been able to have this in her relationship with Alice. In her Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam refers to June as “an aggressive bully, a loudmouth dyke and an abusive lover”, and then points out that she is actually vulnerable and dignified (Halberstam 182). As a matter of fact, for June, controlling Alice physically and psychologically by abusing her is to get a sort of certainty about their relationship and herself. As Wandor observes, June’s domestic gender is male (Wandor 62). She has established something similar to masculine authority in their lesbian relationship. However, her loss of job leads to the disintegration of such authority, and consequently deepens her uncertainty about her identity.
At the beginning of the film, the relationship between June and Alice is dominated by the former. The scene in which June forces Alice to eat her cigar butt reveals her initial domination, but also becomes a mark of the turning point in their power relationship. While chewing the cigar butt, Alice’s facial expression changes from disgust to enjoyment, and in this way, she makes the punishment a pleasure. Her behaviour signifies the loss of efficiency of June’s authority, as she states desperately, “Once you spoil something, you can never make it work again.” Significantly, this happens the first time June express her anxiety about losing her job, which reveals the impact of June’s job loss on their lesbian relationship. The change in their power relationship is partly caused by economic reasons. When Alice blames June for her frivolous behaviour in assaulting some nuns in a taxi, June says: “Kindly keep your foul-mouthed recollections to yourself and remember who pays the rent.” This denotes that June’s authority is based on her economic superiority to some degree, and is threatened by the possibility of losing her job. Alice answers: ‘Not for much longer, perhaps.” More importantly, their relationship changes because of June’s sense of inferiority after losing her part as Sister George. In fact, in her relationship with Alice, June has always used ferocity and brutality to disguise her inner vulnerability, and the trauma caused by the loss of her job actually makes her more dependent on Alice, and thus, June’s authority begins to collapse. When Alice finally leaves with Mrs. Croft, this signifies the end of June’s domestic role in the lesbian relationship. Interestingly, this happens after the crew’s farewell party for her, which indicates the end of her professional role. Having lost her professional and domestic roles, the continuity and sameness in her identity is destroyed. In the final scene, June walks into the TV studio, only to find that “even the bloody coffin is a fake”. Sitting in her ruined TV world, she desperately let out a “mooo!” like a cow. June’s reduction of herself to a non-human is evidence that she has totally sunk into an identity crisis.
It can be concluded from the above analysis that liberation does not necessarily means freedom for women. If women don’t look up to themselves and really question their role, liberation can pose threaten to the completeness of their identity. From the 1940s to the 1960s, although the social mode became increasingly liberal toward women, the three protagonists experienced the same plight of an identity crisis, caused by their inner turmoil rather than social circumstances in different forms. Therefore, to gain real freedom, apart from asserting their rights, it is equally important for women to go back to themselves, and question who they really are and what they really want.
Works Cited
Bruley, Sue. Women in Britain since 1900, London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Print.
Erikson, Erik. Identity: Youth and Crisis, New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. Print.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “On Female Identity and Writing by Women” Critical Inquiry, 8.2 (1981): 347-361. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Print.
Lant, Antonia. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Print.
Lovell, Terry. “Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism” Screen, 31:4 (1990): 357-376. Web 2 May. 2011.
Marwick, Elizabeth. Only Half Way to Paradise: Women in Post-war Britain: 1945-1968, London: Routledge, 1980. Print.
Wandor, Michelene. Post-war British Drama: Looking Back in Gender, London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
According to Arthur Marwick, “In general the war meant a new economic and social freedom for women, the experience of which could never be entirely lost” (Marwick 160). The war had an enduring effect of liberation for women in Britain, which manifested itself in various aspects of their lives. In her enlightening book, Only Half Way to Paradise: Women in Post-war Britain: 1945-1968, Elizabeth Wilson probes into the condition of post-war women from different angles. Although she is critical that women still faced discrimination, oppression and inequity in post-war Britain, she makes it clear that they had become increasingly liberal, since they had more opportunities to work, more sexual freedom, higher levels of education and so on, and this was due to a combination of many social factors.
Liberation was undoubtedly great for women because it meant less repression and oppression, equality and more possibilities in life. However, it may also have exacerbated women’s identity crisis by adding more “distinctiveness”. According to Erik H. Erikson, identity crisis is caused by the loss of “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity” (Erikson 17). In terms of individuals in the group of women, although the liberation they enjoyed in the post-war era brought them more possibilities in life, it also meant that they faced various kinds of predicament in which their original roles were challenged, and this led to uncertainty about their identity. Brief Encounter, A Taste of Honey and The Killing of Sister George are three post-war films which delineated women’s identity crisis. Although the protagonists in these films have some particularity, their encounters still represent some of the possible aggravation of inner turmoil women’s liberation may have brought to individuals. This essay aims to explore the particularity of the plights of identity crisis faced by the protagonists in the three films under the background of the communal changes to women’s lives in the post-war era.
Brief Encounter, directed by David Lynn, is based on Coward Noel's one-act play, Still Life. It depicts the unenduring affair between Laura Jesson, a "happily-married" middle-class house wife and mother and Alec Harvey, a married doctor. The extremely well-received film was released in the immediate post-war year, 1945. During the 1940s, British women experienced a series of transformations under the influence of the war. The labour shortage brought about increasing opportunities of paid work for women, which led to a conflict with motherhood. Since many women were away from home to work, the government began to provide nurseries, “thereby relieving mothers of a burden central to ideal motherhood” (Lant 154). Meanwhile, sexuality became more open. The Second World War was “a very romantic war”, and part of the reason for this was that cinemas (where the two main characters used to date) and dance halls “provided the ideal territory for romantic encounters” (Bruley 114). The total birth rate was falling, while illegitimacy was on the increase, and divorce rate rose rapidly. Married women were no longer “icons of ‘decency and stability’” (Lant 155).
This is the history background of Brief Encounter. It belongs to an age that the image “ideal motherhood” was shaken; therefore Laura’s plight is also encountered by the female audiences at that time. The increasingly liberate social mode enabled them to question their traditional role of mother and wife in marriage and see the possibility of free themselves from it, but many of them could not take the step for reasons like the lack of income or dare not to break the moral code.
Laura is cast as a representation of the women at that time. Her identity crisis is led by the conflict between her awaking self-awareness and the social role of wife and mother which she has always been playing.
In her interior confession to her husband Fred, Laura states:
“You see, we are a happily married couple and must never forget that. This is my home. You are my husband and my children are upstairs in bed. I’m a happily married woman; or rather I was until a few weeks ago. This is my whole world, or it was until a few weeks ago.”
This monologue suggests that, before her encounter with Alec, Laura had identified herself as a wife and a mother, which was not exciting but definitely secure. Addressing the state of “happily married” which she “must never forget”, she is actually defending the identity under threat, and this reflects her dissatisfaction with the marriage in which her individuality is gradually being obliterated. Being a housewife, Laura regards her family as being her “whole world”. As a result, she has to spend most of her time in a house which seems to be so cramped that even the music from the radio can be “deafening”. This restricted domestic space has led to the insufficiency of individual space, which reinforces her social role of mother and wife, but consistently hinders her from being herself. Laura’s monotonous daily life as a housewife is also tedious. When Alec asks her if she comes to town every week, she explains that her regular Thursday schedule which brings about the affair is “not a very exciting routine, but it makes a change.” Moreover, there is some distance exists between Laura and her husband. Having no income, she is sustained by her husband who is described as “kindly, unemotional and not delicate at all” and “not musical at all”. In the film we don’t see he has any leisure activities other than playing crossword puzzles. However, Laura is cast conversely as sensitive and romantic. She goes to cinema every Thursday, borrows Kate O’ Brien’s novel from Boots, listens to classical music and is referred to Fred as a “poetry addict” who is quite familiar with Keats’ poems. The couple seems to lack common interest. Consequently, although Fred seems to be a considerate and understanding husband, he can never fulfil Laura’s demand for romanticism and passion. Their affection is very much based on kinship.
These facts illustrate that, although marriage provides Laura with material things and a feeling of safety, it simultaneously represses her desire for individuality, and this has been the most significant contributor to Laura’s identity crisis.
The inevitability of the affair is implied in their first encounter. Laura thanks Alec for getting the grit out of her eyes, saying that: “Lucky for me you were here.” Alec answered: “Anybody could have done it.” The conversation ingeniously suggests that the affair is ineluctable for Laura because of the contradiction between her family role and desire, and this explains why even the main male character, Alec, is ambiguously constructed --- he can be “anybody”.
The reason for Alec to have captivated Laura is predominately that their relationship is beyond marriage, which enables him to cater to Laura’s need to be desired, not as a wife and a mother, but as a woman. When Laura and Alec bare their souls to each other for the first time in the boathouse, Alec says he loves Laura for her “wide eyes”, the way she smiles, her “shyness”, and the way she laughs at his jokes. His words indicate that it is Laura’s femininity that he adores. Some feminists have made observations about the contradiction between sexuality and motherhood, that the stereotype of mothers tends to be unsexy, and even in its aesthetic form, it is hard “to imagine a mother as ‘something else besides a mother’” (Lant 157). Therefore, the relationship outside marriage with Alec enables Laura to briefly escape from the role of mother and be loved for her herself, for being an individual rather than because her of husband’s obligation to love her simply because they are married.
The extra-marital affair with Alec is led by Laura’s identity crisis, and inversely aggravates the crisis since she finds that her familial identity, which provides her with security, is under threat. Laura realises the peril when it occurs to her that Alec will not tell his wife about their date: “Then the first awful feeling of danger swept over me.” The affair has brought about ambiguity and confusion in terms of her family role. After she lies to Fred, she refers to herself as “a stranger in the house”. Moreover, although motherhood can restrict Laura, the affair, which could possibly have caused her to abandon her children, still runs against her maternal instinct and brings about a sense of guilt. When her son, Bobbie, is knocked down by a car after her first date with Alec, she regards it as being her “fault”, “a sort of punishment” and “an awful, sinister warning”. Also, she thinks that a boy she met in the botanical park who looks like Bobbie should have given her “a pang of consciousness”. Thirdly, as a middle-class white woman, she fears that breaking the moral code could be a source of marginalisation, because her self-identification is also formed from other’s judgment. She is so afraid of the immoral affair being known that, at the end of the date with Alec, she looks around after getting on the train to see if people are looking at her “as if they could read my [her] secret thoughts.” When the affair is discovered by Alec’s friend, she supposes she has been laughed at and thinks of herself as being “cheap and low”. After this incident, Laura ends her relationship with Alec and goes back to her husband. Nevertheless her confusion about her identity grows deeper.
Similar to Brief Encounter, A Taste of Honey is a female-centred film adapted from a play of the same name written by Shelagh Delaney. The play was first produced on the 27th May 1958, while the film was released in 1961, which suggests that the film reflects the landscape of post-war Britain from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s. During that period, the trend of women’s employment did not decline, although women’s working lives were intertwined with child-rearing. Part-time jobs were more popular, especially with married women (Bruley 123), and importance began to be attached to education. Although being treated inequitably with boys, more girls, including those from working-class families, had a better chance of being educated. According to Sue Bruley, this was also a period when “slowly, signs of a liberalisation of attitudes regarding sex were appearing.” The Kinsey Report helped to “create a climate in which sexual activity was demystified and women’s enjoyment of sex more openly recognised” A survey conducted in 1956 revealed that “two-fifths of first sexual intercourse was occurring before marriage” Meanwhile, young people became “more self-aware and self-centred” as disciplines were less strictly forced by their parents” (Bruley 135). This also constituted a reason for teenagers to become more sexually active, which led to a higher rate of teenage pregnancy.
According to Erickson, adolescence is a period of identity crisis because, during the progression from childhood to adulthood, it is quite common that the physical and psychological transformation causes a loss of the “sense of personal sameness” and “historical continuity”. Teenage pregnancy, which was faced by an increasing number of young females in that era, undoubtedly added some complexity to this situation. The predicament confronted by Jo, the protagonist in A Taste of Honey, is fairly representative; at the age of 16, she is made pregnant by her black sailor boyfriend.
Apart from the combined reasons for the teenage identity crisis, there is some particularity in Jo’s case, which is the conflict between her wish to be independent and her desire for maternal solicitude, which has continued from her childhood. There is an obvious reversal between the roles of the mother, Helen, and her daughter. Jo is “the more responsible of the two” (Wandor 40). Being a single mother herself, Helen immerses herself in sexual relationships with men and constantly neglects Jo’s interests, since she believes, “In any case, bearing a child does not put you under an obligation to it.” Although Jo has expressed her will to be independent by wanting a room of her own, her desire for maternal affection, as well as her childish possessive instincts, prevent her from truly detaching herself from Helen. Consequently, she is hostile toward her mother’s lover, Peter, blaming him for “planning to run off with my [her] old women”, and feels abandoned when Helen finally marries Peter. What is more, although she moves out in the hope of being independent, it can be perceived that Jo is looking for similar maternal care rather than the independence of adulthood in her relationship with the two male characters, Jimmie and Geoff. Jimmie, the sailor who has sex with Jo and makes her pregnant, is “as mother-surrogate as much as lover” (Lovell 371). Jimmie helps Jo to carry the big cases, which should have been carried by Helen, off the bus when they move to a new flat, and applies a bandage to Jo’s injured knee. Rather than the pursuit of adulthood, their sexual behaviour is more of a compensation for Helen’s abandonment of Jo, since it happens after Helen sends Jo home alone from Blackpool after her bitter wrangle with Peter. Being homosexual, Geoff’s feminine characteristics make him equally proficient at domestic tasks. According to Lovell, like Jimmie, he provides Jo with “the ‘mothering’ which Helen refuses” (Lovell 372). As a result, the unattained maternal love prevents Jo from growing up, and thus deepens her identity crisis.
Moreover, Jo’s crisis is further exacerbated by her adolescence pregnancy. As Terry Lovell observes, at the age of 16, she is “poised between childhood and womanhood, precipitated into adulthood by her affair with Jimmie and her pregnancy” (Lovell 374). It is unquestionable that she cannot bear the responsibility of being a mother, having not completely got rid of childhood herself, and therefore she detests and fears the sudden shift of roles. When talking about breast-feeding, she says: “I’m not having a little animal nibbling at me. It’s cannibalistic.” Then she states, “I hate motherhood.” Also, having seen a “filthy” boy and a dead baby mouse, her sense of refusing to take responsibility for sexuality and motherhood is evoked: “…Think of the harm she does having children… A bit of love and a bit of lust and there’y are. We don’t ask for life; we have it thrust upon us.” Her reflection again indicates that she was not prepared for motherhood and regards it as being something “thrust upon” her. In addition, because Jimmie’s father’s is black, the possibility of the child having a dark skin colour constitutes another factor which leads to the instability of Jo’s identity. When she sees the doll Geoff brings from a clinic for her to “practice a few holds” which is modelled on the mainstream, white, she becomes angry and bursts into tears because “the colour is wrong”. Then she pounds the doll furiously and shouts. “I’ll bash its brain out! I’ll kill it!” Her extreme behaviour reveals her fear of being marginalised by having a black baby, and furthermore, the fear of motherhood itself. Subsequently, she desperately admits, “I don’t want this child! I don’t want to be a mother!” After Helen is thrown out by Peter, Jo ultimately abandons her relationship with Geoffrey and comes back to her mother. This again attests to her identity crisis; being a mother, Jo is not able to cut herself off from childhood.
Apart from the sameness of being play-adapted and women-centred, by directly depicting lesbianism, The Killing of Sister George expresses a much more radical attitude toward women’s sexuality than Brief Encounter and A Taste of Honey. It also touches on the female professional life, which was not mentioned in the last two films. The film was released in 1968, thus it is placed under the historical background of the 1960s, the last decade before the women’s liberation movement. There was an increase in the number of professional women during the 1960s, although they were still discriminated against. People’s attitude toward sexuality became more liberal than in the 1950s, which was suggested by the rising illegitimacy, the wide usage of contraceptive pills, and the availability of legal abortions to women (Bruley 137-139). Moreover, in the 1960s the male and female youth were “far more visually alike”, although the gender behaviour had not markedly changed (136). Lesbianism, which is centralised in The Killing of Sister George, still remained largely invisible. Therefore, the attitude toward women’s homosexuality expressed in the film is actually more radical than the social reality. Nevertheless, as the first commercial lesbian film, it still betrayed the growing tendency for homosexual women to face up to their role and begin to be gradually accepted by society, as the women’s liberation movement, in which lesbians began to claim their rights, began to warm up in 1969 (149), the following year after the release of this film.
Different from Laura and Jo, the protagonist, June Buckridge, is a professional woman, an actress in a soap opera of BBC, and also a lesbian. It seems that she benefits from the increasingly liberal society. Having a decent job, she is able to be economically independent of men, and she has also asserted her homosexuality by cohabiting with her much younger girl friend, Alice. However, these elements also constitute the factors of her identity crisis.
June’s profession as an actress has led to her identity crisis, because of the blurring of the boundary between the role she plays and her own identity. In the film, June has played the role of Sister George, a district nurse in a TV soap named Applehurst, for four years. Its popularity has meant that June’s own identity has been replaced by her part, since all the people in the film call her George rather than using her own name. Also, according to Mercy Croft, June’s superior at the BBC, she “is Sister George and far more so than June Buckridge”. Therefore, June loses her own identity to her public role. In addition, June also unconsciously blurs the boundary between her part and herself because of their sharp contrast. Sister George is a much respected character in the soap opera. She represents the mainstream values of British society, while in reality, June is an outsider, an alcoholic, abusive and aggressive middle-aged lesbian. Rather than facing up to herself and resolving her problems, June chooses to make the boundary between her role and herself vague, thus evading the sense of marginalisation in her own identity. When she tells Alice that Sister George is to be killed in the soap opera, she uses “me” to refer to her part, saying, “They are going to murder me”. This line shows her confusion between her role and herself, attests to the blurring of the boundary, and indicates her anxiety about losing her part. For her, the killing of Sister George is the obliteration of her own identity in a disguised form, because the two have been muddled up with one another for so long. As a result, she feels the loss of continuity and sameness in her own identity. Therefore, her profession evokes her identity crisis while bringing her economic independence.
June’s homosexuality also worsens her identity crisis. In the film, there is no obvious discrimination in people’s attitude toward June’s lesbianism. Thus, the tension between the couple is produced by their inner turmoil rather than external pressure. In her conversation with Betty, a prostitute, June expresses her desire for “love and affection”. However, she has never been able to have this in her relationship with Alice. In her Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam refers to June as “an aggressive bully, a loudmouth dyke and an abusive lover”, and then points out that she is actually vulnerable and dignified (Halberstam 182). As a matter of fact, for June, controlling Alice physically and psychologically by abusing her is to get a sort of certainty about their relationship and herself. As Wandor observes, June’s domestic gender is male (Wandor 62). She has established something similar to masculine authority in their lesbian relationship. However, her loss of job leads to the disintegration of such authority, and consequently deepens her uncertainty about her identity.
At the beginning of the film, the relationship between June and Alice is dominated by the former. The scene in which June forces Alice to eat her cigar butt reveals her initial domination, but also becomes a mark of the turning point in their power relationship. While chewing the cigar butt, Alice’s facial expression changes from disgust to enjoyment, and in this way, she makes the punishment a pleasure. Her behaviour signifies the loss of efficiency of June’s authority, as she states desperately, “Once you spoil something, you can never make it work again.” Significantly, this happens the first time June express her anxiety about losing her job, which reveals the impact of June’s job loss on their lesbian relationship. The change in their power relationship is partly caused by economic reasons. When Alice blames June for her frivolous behaviour in assaulting some nuns in a taxi, June says: “Kindly keep your foul-mouthed recollections to yourself and remember who pays the rent.” This denotes that June’s authority is based on her economic superiority to some degree, and is threatened by the possibility of losing her job. Alice answers: ‘Not for much longer, perhaps.” More importantly, their relationship changes because of June’s sense of inferiority after losing her part as Sister George. In fact, in her relationship with Alice, June has always used ferocity and brutality to disguise her inner vulnerability, and the trauma caused by the loss of her job actually makes her more dependent on Alice, and thus, June’s authority begins to collapse. When Alice finally leaves with Mrs. Croft, this signifies the end of June’s domestic role in the lesbian relationship. Interestingly, this happens after the crew’s farewell party for her, which indicates the end of her professional role. Having lost her professional and domestic roles, the continuity and sameness in her identity is destroyed. In the final scene, June walks into the TV studio, only to find that “even the bloody coffin is a fake”. Sitting in her ruined TV world, she desperately let out a “mooo!” like a cow. June’s reduction of herself to a non-human is evidence that she has totally sunk into an identity crisis.
It can be concluded from the above analysis that liberation does not necessarily means freedom for women. If women don’t look up to themselves and really question their role, liberation can pose threaten to the completeness of their identity. From the 1940s to the 1960s, although the social mode became increasingly liberal toward women, the three protagonists experienced the same plight of an identity crisis, caused by their inner turmoil rather than social circumstances in different forms. Therefore, to gain real freedom, apart from asserting their rights, it is equally important for women to go back to themselves, and question who they really are and what they really want.
Works Cited
Bruley, Sue. Women in Britain since 1900, London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Print.
Erikson, Erik. Identity: Youth and Crisis, New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. Print.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “On Female Identity and Writing by Women” Critical Inquiry, 8.2 (1981): 347-361. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Print.
Lant, Antonia. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Print.
Lovell, Terry. “Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism” Screen, 31:4 (1990): 357-376. Web 2 May. 2011.
Marwick, Elizabeth. Only Half Way to Paradise: Women in Post-war Britain: 1945-1968, London: Routledge, 1980. Print.
Wandor, Michelene. Post-war British Drama: Looking Back in Gender, London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
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