Stanley Flashcards
Pinter on Stanley’s regression to childhood
Stanley ‘reverts to a childhood malice and mischief, as his first shelter’
Pinter arguing that the audience is meant to have sympathy for Stanley
‘Couldn’t we all find ourselves in Stanley’s position at any given moment?’ - TBP as an expression of Pinter’s own political and social anxiety
Pinter on Stanley’s freedom from societal structures
Freed from the ‘strictures of centuries of tradition’ by renouncing everything that society would have expected of him
Pinter questioning Stanley’s rebellious character
‘neither hero, nor exemplar of revolt’
Pinter on Stanley’s mental breakdown
Stanley’s ‘core becomes a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box’
Pinter on Stanley’s rebellious character
‘Stanley represents that spirit of defiance’
Simon Lesser on Stanley’s relationship with Meg
‘Meg satisfies his desire to be infantilised’
Bill Naismith on the metaphor of Stanley’s experience
‘a metaphor for the fear that anyone might have of offending society at large’ - because Stanley’s offence is never made clear
E.T. Kirby on Stanley’s violence at the end of the party
‘Stanley’s violence at the end of the party is the discharge of his paranoid fear’
E.T. Kirby’s wider argument
The events of Act II should be seen as being through Stanley’s mind - filtered through his paranoid perspective (ideas that the audience is somehow implicated or implicit in his paranoia)
Although this argument is flawed given the lack of sufficient production values to suggest such a shift in perspective, it does mark the heightened sense of paranoia in Act II and explores the idea that the audience becomes complicit in Stanley’s bewilderment and fear
Pinter forces the audience into darkness upon the ‘blackout’ just as Stanley is
Pinter on what Stanley was fighting against
Stanley was fighting against the ‘strictures of centuries of “tradition”’
