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“Working-Class Hero Is Something to Be”, John Lennon Sings, and He Might Mean

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FROM ANGRY YOUNG SCHOLARSHIP BOY TO MALE ROLE MODEL:THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS HERO SEBASTIAN MÜLLER Abstract “Working-Class Hero is something to be”, John Lennon sings, and he might mean: “at least something.” Thus it becomes understandable that the “original angry young men” Jimmy Porter (John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger) and Joe Lampton (John Braine’s Room at the Top) fall back on this mythologically charged mode of subcultural subject formation. And a closer look reveals that both are not only in a class, but also a gender conflict. Both of them produce themselves as typical working-class heroes, a subcultural male subject form that gains further influence through protagonists like Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (in his bestselling Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). As a consequence, the working-class hero slowly but unstoppably steps out of the depths of his former realms into the light of social attention, becoming a male role-model to believe in, and thus becoming some- thing to really be. In a modern or postmodern world of shifting identi- ties, the working-class hero provides a very simple but effectively re- affirming mode of male identity formation; a mode of subject for- mation that, as we shall see, even gains global influence through one outstanding and very specific product of mass media representation: James Bond. When John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th, 1956, and Kenneth Haigh hit the stage as a “working class Hamlet”1 Jimmy Porter, a new era for 1 This phrase is used on the back cover of the current Penguin paperback edition. Analogously, a 1962 Centre 42 National Youth Theatre performance of Hamlet in © Sebastian Müller, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004299009_010 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. 170 Sebastian Müller English literature began: fostered not so much by a consistent literary movement but mainly by considerable media attention and an extraor- dinary publicity campaign, “angry young men” conquered theatre stages, cinema screens and bestseller lists.2 In this essay, I will argue that Jimmy Porter and the “post-Osborne revolution”3 not only set the stage for upcoming vital theatre productions and became a role-model for a series of angry texts, but that they also provided an effective mode of male identity formation, that is the “working-class hero”, as a model of male identity that is still effective in our time. I intend to show that Jimmy Porter as well as Joe Lampton – the protagonist of John Braine’s Room at the Top and one of the many other original an- gry young men – fall back on this mythologically charged mode of subcultural subject formation when they are trapped between the brave new world of the aspiring middle class and their ambiguous working-class origins. A closer look will reveal that both are not only in class trouble, but also in a gender conflict. With their pride and masculinity at stake, Joe and Jimmy strive for compensations for their frustration: Jimmy by attacking and intimidating upper-class prigs, Joe by materially extend- ing his working-class physicality through financial potency and status symbols. Yet both of them produce themselves as typical working- class heroes, since this subcultural male subject form serves as a very simple but effectively reaffirming mode of male identity formation. Moreover, it develops into a male role model that, as we shall finally see, even gains global influence today through one outstanding and very specific product of mass media representation: James Bond. The post-war years and the 1950s: from euphoria to the “angry decade” Revolutionary though he might have been, Jimmy Porter was still a product of his time, the “angry decade”, as the 1950s were called by Kenneth Allsop.4 A short summary of the socio-cultural changes of Nottingham was billed as “Shakespeare’s Jimmy Porter” (see Alan Sinfield, Litera- ture, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 265). 2 See Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-Class Life, 1957-1964, London: Macmillan, 1986, 62. 3 Ibid., 87. 4 Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen- Fifties, Wendover: Goodchild, 1985. .
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