The Violence And Gender Ethics In Harold Pinter’s Plays

Harold Pinter,winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005,is one of the most influential contemporary British playwrights.His plays are rife with various images of violence,these violent scenes demonstrate the indifference between relationships and people’s struggle for power.Pinter’s characters are often under threat in and out of the room,so violence is the tool they use to attack,defend and express themselves.Previously,scholars have focused on the imagery of violence in his plays,but they have mostly focused on power struggles and institutional violence.There is still room for research on the gender violence in the plays and the authors’ gender ethical concerns.Therefore,by drawing on scholars’ related interpretations of violence as well as the gender ethics of Parsons,and combining with a close reading of the text,this paper presents an in-depth analysis of two plays with typical gender violence imagery,namely A Night Out and Celebration,to reveal the distorted mother-child relationship and the confrontational marital relationship in these plays,and thus summarise the mechanisms by which violence occurs between the genders and the motivations for Pinter’s writing of violence and his gendered ethical concerns.The paper is divided into five sections.The first chapter introduces Harold Pinter’s life,the current state of research at home and abroad,the interpretations of violence and gender ethics,as well as the significance of the thesis;the second chapter explores the violence and distorted mother-son relationship in A Night Out,analysing the ethical identity predicament of the mother and son in a gendered culture,revealing the son’s lack of masculinity under the mother’s excessive control,as well as the mother’s dilemma of otherness in a patriarchal culture.The third chapter unpacks the violence and confrontational ethical conflicts between husbands and wives in Celebration,analysing the gendered discursive mechanisms behind the ethical conflicts,namely the couples’ struggle for power and the violation of the ethics of marriage.Chapter four focuses on Pinter’s background and personal experiences,and explores the underlying motivations for Pinter’s writing on gender violence and his gender ethical concerns.Chapter five is the conclusion.The thesis points out that male violence against women stems from the image of women constructed under the patriarchal gender culture,and the perpetration of male violence also reflects the unequal and disharmonious relationship between men and women.As the feminist movement developed,playwright Pinter was also influenced,and the women in his late plays began to resist and redeem themselves through their words and bodies,even transforming from victims of violence to perpetrators of violence.Pinter’s focus on violence between the genders reflects his sympathy for the vulnerable position of women and his humanistic concern for both genders,as well as his anxiety about the alienation,indifference,lack of love and respect that results from the struggle for power between the genders,calling for greater attention to the violence of the genders around him,especially those forms of violence that are not overtly spiritual in nature.Pinter’s writing of gendered violence is an expression he uses to counteract violence,aiming to call attention to the reasons behind the causes of violence and to improve imbalanced gender relations,with positive implications for the harmonious development of contemporary society.