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Her objection is ridiculous because there is no reason why a simple visit by a man should necessarily imply sexual encounter. One can imply that as reflection of a neurotic state of a sexually repressed woman. Rose is afraid of the revealing of a guilty past, that of a whore. There are several clue that she might have formerly been a prostitute and is trying to have an honest life now. Her strong denial to Mr. Kidd that she knows other men, her mention of mysterious ‘customers’ in the house ‘Oh those customers. They come in here and stink the place out’ (THE ROOM 123), the change of her name from Sal to Rose and her denial of the former- all these could imply her anxiety to destroy a dishonoring past and a desire to change identity and lifestyle. The name Sal, as a homonym of the French ‘sale’ for dirty, could have the connotation of moral filth according to Cambridge French to English dictionary.
Rose’s feminine vulnerability and shaky position are stressed further in her encounter with the Negro who introduces himself as her father. A mysterious character in Pinter’s dramatic world, Riley, whose being actionless, his words have a tone of authority and terror is being created verbally. Rose, eventually, accept her prepared destiny by admitting the relational and submissive role of a daughter and a wife. “She herself is part of man’s patrimony, first her father’s and then her husband’s. . . . When she is a young girl, the father has total power over her; on her marriage he transmits it entirely to her spouse” (de Beauvoir 117-118). Thus, the killing of the father figure (the Negro), on the symbolic level, means nothing but his replacement by another male, the husband, as the master of the woman in patriarchal society.
When Bert returns, interrupting his wife’s scene with the Negro, he is a changed man. He was no longer a mute passive man of the opening of the play. Here Bert enters and dominates the stage in movement and words just as his wife did at the beginning. Bert sings his triumph over his van, which he addresses as ‘she’, an obvious substitute for his wife:
BERT: Then I drove her back, hard. They got it very icy out.
ROSE: Yes.
BERT: But I drove her.
Pause.
I sped her.
Pause.
I caned her along. She was good. Then I got back. I could see the road all right. There was no cars. One there was. He wouldn’t move. I bumped him. I got my road. I had all my way. There again and back. They shoved out of it. I kept on the straight. There was no mixing it. Not with her. She was good. She went with me. She don’t mix it with me. I use my hand. Like that. I get hold of her. I go where I go. She took me there. She brought me back. (THE ROOM 126)
Esslin touched upon this episode that “The erotic overtones of this impassioned outburst about the van, always referred to in the feminine gender, are unmistakable. Bert’s account of his trip in his van clearly shows that his sexual energy is no longer focused on Rose; the van, which Bert treats as a ‘she’, has ousted her from his affections. The journey into the winter night becomes an act of intercourse with its own triumphant orgasm. No wonder Rose is totally annihilated as the play ends” (1976 65).
Bert’s final outburst of an erotic imagination with his van is an outcome of an oppressed man. It reflects his dream – turning now into a decision – to subordinate and dominate his wife. Here Rose’s ‘quasi-philosophical quest’ which is a pursuit independent from her marital situation is nullified and she is brought back to the ‘normality’ of a dependent feminine existence (Sakellaridou 28). Throughout this scene she is reduced to a theatrical passivity which leads to her final destruction, her blindness. This blindness symbolize her submission to the male power. In the last scene Rose becomes the nonentity that Bert was in the first of the play. In the end it is Bert who takes the lead of the action. First he dominates verbally and then by physical action. Rose in the meantime has lost her basic human ability: liberty, thought, oral competence and last of all she loses her sight. She is turned into a mute and blind subhuman female. As de Beauvoir presents:
This very ambivalence of the Other, of the Female, will be reflected in the rest of her history; until our times she will be subordinated to men’s will. But this will is ambiguous: by total annexation, woman will be lowered to the rank of a thing; of course, man attempts to cover with his own dignity what he conquers and possesses; in his eyes the Other retains some of her primitive magic; one of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman’s destiny. . . . Insofar as woman is considered the absolute Other, that is—whatever magic powers she has—as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject. (115)
Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958, right after The Birthday Party and then he discarded it as a ‘useless’ piece. In 1979 he reread it and ‘decided it was worth presenting on the stage’ as Pinter notes in The Hothouse (qtd. in Pinter’s Female Portraits 46). Pinter noted ‘Synopsis for a Play’ which is submitted to the BBC on 12 Nov. 1958 that early draft revolves round a female doctor and her assistant, another woman, who are conducting scientific experiments. Among their human guinea-pigs there are an innocent young man and an experienced old woman. It is clear from this early version of the play that Pinter is trying to make a point, which he summarized himself as ‘the excesses to which scientific investigation can lead when practiced by adherents dedicated to the point of fanaticism’. However, there is much more than this in the draft. The doctor and her assistant are presented as being more absorbed in their female vanity and feminine interests than in the fate of their male guinea-pig. Behind the sinister portrayal of the two female doctors there is a strong malice against woman. When Pinter sat down to write The Hothouse some time later, he strengthened the story-line, which was very thin in the synopsis, and brought radical changes to his set of characters by eliminating the all-too-obvious female dominance and the overt condemnation of women. The female doctor becomes a man, Gibbs, and the old woman disappears. (qtd in Pinter’s Female Portraits 48). By turning the woman doctor into a man and by eliminating the old lady the dramatist certainly moderates his strong message of misogyny. However, there is still a great deal of mixed skepticism and antipathy towards women. Miss Cutts, the head assistant in a mental hospital, is young woman who is sexually attractive and has a highly responsible and specialized job. In reality, however, her professional status is an empty form. On the other hand, the dramatist can give their portrayal greater differentiation by introducing several male characters. Naturally all these men had the same stereotyped views about women and from this aspect they can be seen collectively as symbolizing the male principle in the play. In The Hothouse, Pinter’s women come out of the family picture.
Miss Cutts relationship with Roote, the head of the institution, is presented as being exclusively sexual and her talk to him as erotic. Even when Roote is busied with other thoughts she tries to distract him by drawing his attention to her sexuality. At the same time she has a dual relationship, both erotic and professional, with Gibbs. He who is second in rank after Roote in the institution. Gibbs and Cutts work together on scientific experiments on the human nervous system. However, Miss Cutts’s behaviour in the lab suggests that her dedication to research is not the result of scientific interest but has an erotic motivation. In short she is an incessant sex-machine and pretended to be a loving woman who is ready to comfort the males and satisfy their needs.
Apart from her role as a sexy, manipulative female, again we have an archetypal depiction of woman, Miss Cutts paradoxically takes the role of the substitute mother in her relationship with Lamb, the innocent young man who volunteers as a guinea-pig. Miss Cutts, whose plan is to use Lamb for her experiments, shows a friendly interest in him and thus wins his trust. As she is his superior and hides her sexual nature, he sees her as a mother figure whom he can trust on: ‘Do you know what I mean? I wouldn’t say this to anyone else but you, of course. The fact is, I haven’t made much contact with any of the others.’ (HH, 33). Cutts remains silent at this confession. It seems that Lamb takes this silence as a sign of friendliness which results in revealing all his thoughts and ambitions in an uninterrupted two-page long monologue. Miss Cutts conducts Lamb’s with her own hands. The traits of motherhood are used to stain the image of woman. Here the mother figure is treacherous and completely devoid of human feelings.
In The Hothouse real mothers are stay away from the stage. There are several references to two women, the mother of a male patient and a female patient who has recently had a baby from one of the staff. The audience hears about them but never sees them. The mother figure is more like a phantom than a reality. It is a memory, not a living human being. As such its presence is manifested in the male staff’s recollections of their own mothers, as sentimental and imaginary such as Mr Kidd in The Room.
In a short dialogue with Rose, Mr Kidd expresses his disrespect for certain ‘women round the comer’ (THE ROOM 106) and denies the presence of any women in his house. This remark puts Rose’s own existence in danger. The only women he can accept in his world are the chaste mythical figures of a mother and a sister. If we follow his vision of a split female image, we will see that he loses himself in a long romantic recitation of his confused past life with his phantom mother and sister:
MR KIDD: Oh, I used to count them [i.e. the rooms], once.
Never got tired of it. I used to keep a tack on everything in this house. I had a lot to keep my eye on, then. I was able for it too. That was when my sister was alive. But I lost track a bit, after she died. She’s been dead for some time now, my sister. It was a good house then. She was a capable woman. Yes. Fine size of a woman too. I think she took after my mum. Yes, I think she took after my old mum, from what I can recollect. I think my mum was a Jewess. Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was a Jewess. She didn’t have many babies.
ROSE: What about your sister, Mr Kidd?
MR KIDD: What about her?
ROSE: Did she have any babies?
MR KIDD: Yes, she had a resemblance to my old mum, I think. Taller of course.
ROSE: When did she die then, your sister?
MR KIDD: Yes, that’s right, it was after she died that I must have stopped counting. She used to keep things in very good trim. And I gave her a helping hand. She was very grateful, right until her last. She always used to tell me how much she appreciated all the -little things – that I used to do for her. Then she copped it, I was her senior. Yes, I was her senior. She had a lovely boudoir. A beautiful boudoir. (The Room 108-9)
In The Hothouse, the other two women are both mentally defective and are easy victim of male scheme. The female patient is sexually exploited and the other woman is easily deceived about the truth of her son’s death in the asylum. Miss Cutts is the only woman that has a devil’s shrewdness. She disguise her sinister nature by assuming gentler feminine features: She either poses as a tender mistress or she pretends a fake sensitivity to maternity and child-bearing which is again a portrayal of a mother or a whore.
As the play continues, it makes a division between the two aspects of the feminine, the mother and the whore, and there are very few instances when the two interact briefly.
By and large, I have traced in Pinter’s works a progression from the mother figure to the whore figure which is still in the framework of the categories of patriarchy has created for them. They are defined by the men around that are mainly husband and lovers. Pinter investigated woman at the multifaceted center of their essence, described all aspects of the mother and the whore and simultaneously illustrates the treatment of them as the Other in the paternal masculine imagination without any human values as if they are stand in the man’s world.
Women are forced to admit their destiny. What started as an ‘existential confrontation’ of a female human being ends in the replacement of strict patriarchal order. The disintegration of women is the result of the woman’s placement within a patriarchal moral and social order which hinder their development into a full-dimensional human being.
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