Anger, Nostalgia, and the End of Empire: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger

Abstract

As he reminisces about his Edwardian past during the period of British colonial rule in India, Colonel Redfern, who belongs to the class that ostensibly constitutes Jimmy Porter's "natural" enemy, is overcome by nostalgia. When Jimmy Porter, the working-class protagonist and anti-establishment hero, remembered by commentators as "represent[ing] a postwar generation in his anger, petulance, dissatisfaction, infirmity of purpose, railing, [and] complaining," alludes to the Colonel (after endless bouts of indiscriminate attacks on Alison, his wife and the Colonel's daughter, in an attempt to shake her out of her upper-class complacency), his anger wanes. Exhibiting sympathy for the Colonel, he sighs about the end of the imperial dream. The attitudes of the Colonel and Jimmy shed a new light on John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, a play that has been recorded as "the beginning of a revolution in the British theatre," and lead to some interesting insights about Jimmy Porter, hailed as the voice of a whole generation of disgruntled anti-establishment intellectuals On one level, references to the imperial dream reveal that at the time that Osborne wrote the play, the Raj was a pressing issue for both Jimmy Porter and his creator, Osborne. More importantly, they illuminate an essential contradiction in Jimmy Porter's anti-establishment stance. Even as he is critical of the establishment, Jimmy's sympathetic attention to the Colonel, and by implication to the executors of imperial policies in India, brings into the playa discourse of imperialism that refuses a critique of the empire.