The Homecoming summary and theme
Aged patriarch Max bickers with his second son, Lenny, in the
living room of a North London house. The pair trade insults as Lenny tries to
pick a winner from an upcoming horse race. Max’s brother, Sam, returns home
from his job as a chauffeur and finds himself on the receiving end of Max’s ire
too.
Max’s youngest son, Joey, joins the quarreling trio. Joey has
just come home from training at the boxing gym. He hopes to become a
professional fighter one day. Max complains about the burden these other three
men place on him and then reminisces about the kindness of his own father.
That night, while this warring family sleeps, Max’s oldest
son, Teddy, slips into the house with his wife, Ruth. The family has never met
Ruth. She and Max married six years previously, when Teddy emigrated to America
to pursue an academic career. They are on a surprise visit home after
vacationing in Venice.
While Ruth goes outside to get some air, Teddy reunites with
Lenny, roused from sleep by a mysterious noise. The pair discuss the nature of
this noise before Teddy ascends to his old bedroom to sleep. Ruth comes inside
and in turn chats with Lenny. Their talk becomes flirtatious, with Lenny asking
to hold Ruth’s hand. Ruth takes the lead, and this confounds Lenny. He ends up
shouting up the stairs after her as she heads off to bed too.
The next morning, the family is awake (and back to bickering)
when Teddy and Ruth make their surprise entrance. Max is astounded and accuses
Teddy of bringing a “slut” into the house. Teddy explains that Ruth is his
wife, which fails to mollify Max. Max orders Joey to throw out Teddy and Ruth.
When Joey hesitates, Max turns violent, walloping both Joey and Sam with his
walking stick. This outburst seems to calm Max, and he reconciles with Teddy and
Ruth.
After lunch, the men smoke cigars and Max fondly remembers
his dead wife, Jessie. His mood quickly changes as Sam readies himself for
work, and Max again complains about his difficulty supporting and steering the
family, especially in Jessie’s absence. Max and Lenny grill Teddy and Ruth
about their family in America (they have three sons of their own), as well as
Teddy’s work.
Everyone leaves, granting Teddy and Ruth a brief moment
alone. Teddy wants to cut short the visit and get home to the children as soon
as possible. Ruth is more ambivalent and seems to be enjoying herself. Still,
Teddy rushes upstairs to pack their suitcases.
When he comes back, he finds that Lenny has returned and is
chatting intimately with Ruth. As Teddy stands there with coats and cases,
ready to leave, Ruth and Lenny begin to dance and soon start kissing. At that
moment, Max and Joey return home. Joey is wide-eyed and cuts in to sample Ruth’s
affection too.
THE HOMECOMING CHARACTER ANALYSIS
The family begins to drink. Teddy struggles to leave. He
becomes flustered and defends his life and career in America, which he claims
make him different from the rest of his family and the way they live. However,
he can only rage impotently as his family continues to seduce his wife.
By evening, Teddy seems to have calmed down and resigned
himself to what is happening. Joey emerges, having spent two hours upstairs
with Ruth. The men discuss Joey’s sexual prowess and Ruth’s proclivities—namely,
that she might be a flirt who held out on Joey.
Max hits upon the idea of asking Ruth to stay, filling the
void left in the household by Jessie’s death. To make this work, Ruth would
have to contribute financially, not just by cooking and cleaning (as the men
have planned for her). Lenny, it turns out, is a pimp. The men agree to put
Ruth to work selling sexual services.
Both Ruth and Teddy accept this plan. The shock of it all
prompts Sam to keel over. Ruth is enthusiastic about the arrangement and
negotiates better conditions for herself. Teddy leaves. A shell-shocked Max
begs Ruth for affection, but she, Lenny, and Joey stand over him and the fallen
Sam, seemingly indifferent to their elders and empowered by their new “family.”
MAX
Max is in his seventies, a widower, and the patriarch of The
Homecoming’s family. He lives with his brother and two of his sons in the North
London house he once shared with his deceased wife, Jessie. Max walks with a stick,
which he is not afraid to wield in violent attacks on his brother, Sam, as he
attempts to impose his rule on a family more in competition with each other
than they are loving.
Max himself is caught between these roles. Sometimes he
bullies his family members or hurls abuse at them (including misogynistic
epithets for Jessie and Ruth). At other times he reveals a longing for his
family’s love and approval—especially that of Teddy, his highly educated son
visiting from America. He is caught between embracing the cynicism of his
society (as depicted by Pinter) and a more caring family role. Ultimately, he
finds himself hoisted by his own petard as his sons Lenny and Joey turn against
him.
In the original production of The Homecoming by the Royal Shakespeare
Company at London’s Aldwych Theatre in June 1965, Max was played by Paul
Rogers.
LENNY
Lenny is the middle child of Max’s three sons and in his early thirties. He often treats his father with disdain, as when he insults his father’s cooking and scoffs at his racing tips in Act I, Scene 1. Lenny is cruel to others too, boasting to Ruth about his violent treatment of women, including a sex worker and an old woman who asked for his help moving a mangle.
Perhaps partially explaining this violence towards women,
Lenny reveals in the second act that he is a pimp with several women working
for him in Soho: “I’ve got a number of flats all around [Greek Street]” he says
(72), as the family plots the same fate for Ruth. Lenny’s exploitative nature
is rewarded when Ruth accepts the plan devised for her, and with Joey’s help,
Lenny usurps Max as the family’s leader. This says something about Pinter’s
perception of 1960s Britain and the kind of people prospering in it: Lenny is
an entirely cynical new breed.
TEDDY
Teddy is the family’s prodigal son. The oldest of Max’s three
sons (and in his mid-thirties), he left England for the US six years previously
with his new wife, Ruth, in tow. Although it is not specified where in the US
he now lives, he has met with academic success there, finishing a doctorate and
publishing numerous critical articles.
Teddy has returned to London with Ruth for a surprise visit
to his family, having just visited Venice on vacation. What he finds in the
North London home could not be further from the genteel life he leads in
America. In the absence of his dead mother, Jessie, the family has become a
node of masculine impulses, many of them toxic. His introduction of Ruth to
this milieu proves the undoing of his own family. Teddy surrenders Ruth to his
father, uncle, and brothers, ultimately leaving his own three sons in America
bereft of a mother. The Homecoming ends with his exit and Ruth staying in
London, suggesting that Teddy’s three sons may end up mirroring Teddy, Lenny,
and Joey as they grow up.
Teddy’s story is essentially one of social mobility,
represented not only by his move to a country mythologized as a land of
opportunity but also by his intellectual profession. His return to his
childhood home risks sucking him back into a realm he thought he had escaped,
and he succumbs to its depravity in trading away his wife to make good his
escape for a second time.
RUTH
Ruth is Teddy’s wife and in her early thirties. She married
Teddy somewhat secretly before he left for the US, but it is unclear if she
herself is British or American. Nonetheless, Ruth has built an outwardly happy
life in America, where she has birthed and raised the couple’s three children.
She even helps Teddy with tasks related to his job, like organizing his lecture
notes. As Teddy says of her, “She’s a great help to me over there. She’s a
wonderful wife and mother. She’s a very popular woman” (50).
However, something is gnawing at Ruth. From the moment she
and Teddy arrive at the house, she seems to be out of sync with her husband: He
wants her to go to bed, but she wants to stroll, and so on. She seems no longer
bound to Teddy in the way a partner might be, following her own instincts
throughout. This leads to some shocking moments—for example, her casual
reaction to Lenny’s violent anecdotes, none of which deter her from flirting
with him and Joey or ultimately from abandoning her own family to fill the void
in the London household.
This portrayal might not seem wholly realistic, but Pinter
uses Ruth to explore ideas about agency. Ruth surprises the men throughout the
play by finding agency when they expect her to submit to male desires. In Act
I, she turns the tables on Lenny, riling him when she suggests he lie on his
back while she pours water in his mouth—a position with sexual, but more
specifically passive and feminized, connotations. In the second act, she stuns
Max by embracing her planned exploitation. To what extent these ideas might
read as feminist is debatable, but they reflect the evolving sexual mores of
the 1960s and illustrate one of the societal factors that might be contributing
to the crisis of masculinity The Homecoming’s men face.
JOEY
Joey is the youngest of the three brothers (i.e., Max’s
sons), a demolition worker and would-be boxer in his mid-twenties. He is a
taciturn character compared to Lenny and seems less intelligent than his
brothers and father. However, this lends to the pathos of his relationship with
Ruth over the course of the play.
Joey, as the youngest, seems to be the son most affected by Jessie’s absence. Rather than receiving what Max, at least, describes as Jessie’s moral instruction, Joey has been brought up and influenced by Lenny and (especially) Max. They take pride in having made a brute of him, as they show when they recount a tale of his cavorting with a sex worker and forcing unprotected sex on her. This kind of performance belies what Joey seems to most need: a mother rather than a lover.
He spends two hours alone with Ruth, in what the other men
assume will be an opportunity for sex with her. When he says he didn’t have sex
with her, the others immediately jump to the conclusion that Ruth is at
fault—that she is a “tease.” What goes unspoken is that Joey might not have
needed sex as much as simple affection or advice or nurturing. Joey does not
correct the others, perhaps ashamed that he has not lived up to his macho image
or his family’s expectations of how he should treat or interact with women.
However, he does defend Ruth and seems satisfied that she will stay.
SAM
Sam, 63, is Max’s long-suffering brother and the uncle of
Lenny, Joey, and Teddy. Max treats Sam extremely poorly, goading him over
everything from how well he does his job to how skilled he is in comparison to
their old friend MacGregor to how he cleans the kitchen to and even his
sexuality. At one point, Max turns this abuse physical and thumps Sam in the
guts with his walking stick.
Despite this abuse, Sam is the most “normal”-seeming of the
play’s characters. Were this a comedy (and some critics would argue that it is,
albeit a pitch-black one), Sam would be the straight man—the “normal” character
against whom jokes are thrown into contrast. Uniquely in The Homecoming, Sam’s
behavior feels plausible or recognizably motivated. He does his best to earn a
living, is proud of a job well done, does his bit for the upkeep of the home,
and tries to connect emotionally with Teddy, the cherished nephew he hasn’t
seen in so long. For example, he tells Teddy, “You know, you were always my
favourite, of the lads. Always” (62). He also thanks Teddy for writing to him
from America and invites him to stay for a few weeks. Unlike the more
calculating Max or Lenny, Sam’s motivation for wanting Teddy to stay is not
exploitative. He simply wants to “…have a few laughs” with his nephew (63).
THE HOMECOMING THEMES
EROSION
OF POSTWAR SOLIDARITY
Pinter was writing at a pivotal moment in the 20th century,
in the middle of a decade that would become synonymous with social upheaval.
Although The Homecoming does not deal explicitly with stereotypical tropes of
swinging London, a sense of societal and generational change pervades the play,
wreaking havoc on the characters and their family.
Pinter’s London is a place still pockmarked by bomb sites—as Joey
says, “We took them [the police] to a bombed site” (67)—but one in which the
privations of World War II are fading away. Rationing, for example, ended in
the United Kingdom in 1954 after 14 long years. While that kind of progress was
cause for celebration, it also marked the return to a society riven by class—by
haves and have-nots. The experience of World War II, including the
indiscriminate bombing of the Blitz, had created a sense of solidarity in the
UK that led to advances like the National Health Service (founded in 1948). The
development of a welfare state acknowledged the equal suffering of all during
the war and attempted to distribute resources to everyone fairly.
The Homecoming, however, anticipates how efforts towards
collective justice would shift towards a hunger for personal freedom in the
late 1960s. Baby Boomers would go through their hippie phase only to become the
individualistic social-climbers of the 1980s. The solidarity of the postwar
years would be forgotten or at least undermined by a segment of the population
more interested in itself as the collective suffering of the war faded from
view.
Pinter’s family in The Homecoming is a microcosm of this
society. The bonds between its members are fraying as its leader, Max, swings
between pining for a more caring past and embracing a new individualistic
breeze he seems ill-placed to capitalize on. His sons, Lenny and Joey, are
better adapted to the forces shaping this world, the former a brutal pimp, the
latter a pugilist. Max’s fate in the play—to be subjugated by his sons (and Ruth)—is
a warning to stand up for the values that bind a family or community together
rather than to throw in one’s lot with the cynics or the selfish.
SOCIAL
MOBILITY IN BRITAIN VERSUS THE US
Hand-in-hand with the social tumult that The Homecoming depicts
is the reassertion of the British class system. Class in Britain is not defined
simply by how much you earn; rather there is a perceived inherent quality that
goes with it, making it difficult to advance in society even if one’s material
conditions improve. It is no wonder, then, that Teddy feels so fortunate to
have made a life in America, a land where social mobility (for white Americans
at least) has been a hallmark of society, mythologized in the notion of the
“American Dream.”
Opportunities in Pinter’s Britain are more limited. Although
the Harold Wilson government of the time was a high watermark for social
progress, with increased funding for the welfare state and the liberalization
of laws on everything from abortion to gay sex to the death penalty, Pinter
senses a reactionary backlash to come—or, more precisely, the immovability of
some of Britain’s underlying structures. Sam’s service in the war and lifetime
of work have only elevated him to the rung of chauffeur. Lenny’s business is
illegal and exploitative. Joey’s best bet for advancement seems to lie in
sacrificing his body for the entertainment of others rather than in his job,
which barely gets a mention.
Little wonder that Teddy is so reluctant to stay at the house
when he finally arrives. The longer he stays, the hollower his upward mobility
feels. His family cannot understand his work, which in any case seems
specialized to the point of irrelevance: He responds to Lenny’s philosophical
and religious questions with answer-dodging remarks and protestations that such
things aren’t in his “province.” Meanwhile, he risks being dragged back into
their situation, which seems to be corrupting their behavior or at least making
betterment impossible. “I won’t be lost in it” (62), Teddy says. He leaves Ruth
to his family in order to make good his escape and return to a supposed land of
opportunity.
The family he leaves will have to contend with the strictures
of the British class system as best they can. It seems Ruth will provide
comfort in her role as the family’s new matriarch (and breadwinner). However,
as money is not by itself enough to ensure social mobility in Britain, Ruth’s
sex work (and Lenny and Joey’s part in it) seems destined only to trap the
family even deeper in its predicament.
MASCULINITY
IN CRISIS
The men in The Homecoming feel compelled to compare
themselves with other men. That might mean Sam’s moneyed American passenger,
the fabled tough guy MacGregor, or even men who served with more distinction in
World War II. The shifting of postwar society, as well as affecting the
characters socioeconomically, is also challenging their beliefs about gender
and what constitutes a man.
This is one reason why Lenny, for example, finds himself so
confused about his treatment of women. The stories he tells Ruth in a bid to
seduce her aim to paint him as gentle and kind, but both end in violence
towards women—he spares a sex worker death only to beat and kick her, and he
agrees to help an old woman but hits her when her mangle proves too heavy to
move. Lenny’s confusion represents some ostensible shift towards a new, more
compassionate masculinity, but Lenny, who still brutalizes the women in his
life (not least, one suspects, his Soho sex workers), exposes how superficial
that shift can be.
This crisis of masculinity extends to the men’s treatment of each other, which often devolves into insults questioning each other’s masculinity or straightness. As early as Act I, Scene 1, Max calls Lenny “…you bitch” (11). Later, Max questions Sam’s sexuality when he says, “Anyone could have you at the same time. You’d bend over for half a dollar on Blackfriars Bridge” (48). In the same tirade, Max questions Sam’s war record—“This man didn’t even fight in the bloody war!” (48)—explicitly linking Sam’s record in the war to his identity as a man.
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