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Alan Bennett presents the attitudes towards women in The History Boys in a variety of different ways. One way that Bennett does this is by highlighting the lack of female characters in the play. There are only two female characters in the whole of the play, with only one of these characters having any lines. Mrs. Lintott is another history teacher at the grammar school, who can arguably be considered as one of the most important characters in the play. She’s a very assertive, caring, and intelligent individual who knows a huge amount about the subject. However, although she helped the students achieve excellent A level results, Mrs Lintott still isn’t seen as being ‘good enough’ to get the boys into Oxbridge. Her key role in the play is to contradict the traditional idea of women being submissive to men, and although she’s only one of two women in The History Boys, she uses her position to emphasise how women are muted in society. This can be seen where she states that women “never get around the conference table”, and that “history’s not such a frolic for women as it is for men”. She acts almost like a maternal figure towards the boys, which is a big difference compared to how the men in the play treat the other women around them. Fiona is the other female character in the play, who is the Headmaster’s secretary. She is sexualised throughout by both the Headmaster and Dakin, who explains to the other boys how interested he is to have sex with her. One can also find out that the headmaster has been “trying to cop a feel” of Fiona, as well as “chasing her around the desk”. It’s only when Dakin learns about this that he begins to show a level of respect towards her as an individual, not just treating her as an object.
Furthermore, Bennett uses Mrs Lintott’s character to make fun of the men that she’s surrounded by. For instance, she recognises how sexually obsessed with women Dakin actually is. When speaking with Hector about him, she states she “wouldn’t have said he was sad. The use of maleorientated language like the word “c**t”, a noun primarily used by men, to mock the men around her demonstrates how Mrs. Lintott is an incredibly witty woman, with a dry sense of humour – she uses sarcasm and perspective to emphasise the inequality between men and women. Another instance of this happening is in the second act of the play, where she explains to Hector how “history is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men”, and that “history is women following behind with the bucket.” Lintott believes that men are so good at History because it’s a subject dedicated to story-telling, where the men can make themselves seem a lot better than they actually are. However, it can also be argued that Mrs Lintott feels confined in the school environment and that by using more male-orientated language, restricts her personality.
Another way that Bennett presents attitudes towards women in the play is by making frequent references to the development of feminism in the 1980s. During the time of when The History Boys was set, the idea of equality between men and women still hadn’t been acknowledged (or accepted) by many people. Feminism was a theory that was still relatively new at the time, and the fact that Mrs Lintott taught in a maledominated school makes her much more interesting in context. She describes the feminine approach as “rueful, accepting, taking things as you find them”. The use of the adjective ‘accepting’ indicates that she keeps to her analysis of the approach. This can later be seen in the play when she is ‘accepting’ of Irwin taking over the teaching of her students. As previously stated, the boys see Mrs Lintott as a maternal figure, which proves that she holds a level of power over them. There are various examples of powerful women that dominated the 80s, from pop culture figures like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper to authoritative figures like Margaret Thatcher. To add to this, people like Princess Diana challenged the ideas of behavioural norms of women, which is similar in terms of how Mrs Lintott recognises the way women were ‘put to the side’, and in a way like Diana, contradicted the tradition of women being submissive.
In conclusion, Alan Bennett presents attitudes to women in The History Boys through having a lack of female characters. The fact that there are only two women in the play (with only Mrs Lintott having any lines) portrays how women felt silenced at the time, and that they weren’t considered to be equal to men. Bennett uses Mrs Lintott as a character to break through the stereotype that a woman was unable to speak her mind, and through her intelligence and wit, she does this incredibly well. The boys in the play mostly speak of women in a disrespectful and objectifying manner, and this is particularly highlighted through Dakin’s ‘warfare’ metaphor for his relationship with Fiona, who is treated like a sex object by both Dakin and the Headmaster. By setting the play in the 1980s in a male-orientated environment, Bennett creates an insight into how teenage boys (and older men) spoke about and treated women at the time.
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