HAROLD PINTER - Joshua Ruebl

with an emergency at every stage. A crippled family, three bastard sons, a slutbitch of a
wife- don’t talk to me about the pain of childbirth- I suffered the pain, I’ve still got the
pangs- when I give a little cough my back collapses- and here I’ve got a lazy idle bugger
of a brother who won’t even get to work on time. The best chauffeur in the world. All
his life he’s sat in the front seat giving lovely hand signals. You call that work? This
man doesn’t know his gearbox from his arse” (Pinter, pg. 47)
Here, Max in reference to the life of a butcher draws allusions to the murder of
the livestock and death in general, by “the chopper and the slab,” and makes associations
with that concept of life-taking and childbirth. Here Max regresses to his own birth in
blood, his patriarchal bloodline now stymied by Ruth’s intrusion. Max even emasculates
himself, by commiserating with the female in pangs of childbirth. “Regression can also
be seen in the backward movement through the developmental phases of life. The
movement if the play actually begins with the return of repressed wishes- Oedipal wishes.
All these returning wishes are also homecomings. Ruth’s repressed eroticism returns
along with the old wish to take the mother’s place. The family’s repressed desires for
mother return and take the form of a need to possess and debase her.” (Gabbard, pgs.
195-196.)
Even more so than The Lover, Pinter uses The Homecoming as a vehicle to bring
together elements of Greek tragedy, ritual, and psychology to create a unique parody on
the family drama. Embedded in the play are very complex and stylized elements of
ritual. “In The Homecoming, as various critics have noted, Pinter dramatizes the ancient
archaic rite of the sacrifice of the ritual king and the mating of the fertility goddess with
the new conqueror. Since this rite corresponds roughly to the infantile desires of the
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