Harold Pinter’s Mindscape: His Food–Clothing Paradoxes

Abstract

From 1952, when Pinter began writing his only novel, The Dwarfs, until the mid-1970s, Pinter invoked a food–love–clothing–honesty cluster to ground his characters’ feelings and anxieties in sensuous metaphors. Whereas food and costume had practical functions in his plays, they usually had wider significance regarding his characters’ likes and dislikes, memories of the past and aspirations for the future. Imagery in Harold Pinter’s early drama links the scarcity of food and drink to lovelessness, a loss of psychological underpinnings, and social instability. Disorder, uneasiness, and distaste often emerge in food imagery, as food providers give or withhold food in lieu of love. Manipulating food involves the exercise of power, ways of taking advantage, or showing approval or disdain. Pinter also uses clothing symbolically, not only to shield nakedness but as a stand-in for society’s weakening repressions. Clothing is a proxy for lying, gratuitous display, subjugation, spurious self respect, and social hypocrisy. Pinter’s food–clothing clusters vanish in the mid-1970s when his character orientation shifts from lower- to middle-class.