The Ruling Class (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole Hamilton

Hamilton is a Humanities teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay she discusses the ways in which the women’s roles in The Ruling Class reinforce its theme of social corruption.

The liberated 1960s valued sexual freedom as a natural right, a legitimate form of expression for those who rejected the rigid morals of the previous generation and of the conservative “establishment.” The Ruling Class’s protagonist, Jack, in his God-is-Love state expresses complete sexual freedom, courting his mate like a bird and successfully impregnating her. As Grace attests, “His mind may be wonky, but there’s nothing wrong with the rest of his anatomy.” His sexual freedom is of a part with his innocence and open-heartedness. But his naive attachment to an idealistic and impractical philosophy of “love and understanding” makes him unfit to “take his proper place in the world. “He is “living in a dream world” (but then, according to Tucker, so are all rich people).

Jack’s family desperately explores legal avenues of removing him, while he further terrifies them with his entreaty that they pray together. He defines prayer as “to ask, to beg, to plead.” Of course, pleading is distasteful to those who command, who “kick the natives in the back streets of Calcutta.” Jack cannot take his place in the ruling class until he accepts its systematic and brutal oppression of other classes and leaves off pleading to God or anybody else. When, through a form of shock psychotherapy, he is transformed to a reactionary and oppressive upper class gentleman, Sir Charles declares Jack “one of us at last.” He has changed socially, but this change has wrought the perversion of his sexual nature, too. As God the Avenger (or Jack the Ripper), Jack punishes prostitutes, including the one woman who met his ideal, Grace Shelley.

The transformation of his sexual feelings parallels the transformation of his social being as he embraces the most distasteful aspects of ruling class behavior: ruthlessness and sexual deviance. In The Ruling Class, playwright Peter Barnes has, according to New York Times writer Julius Novick, “connected the perversions of privilege with the perversions of sexual feeling ... [which] is an important source of both loathing and consequent power.” For Barnes, social power and social deviance are inextricably linked.

The perversions of sexuality and its inflection on the perversions of power and privilege reveal themselves in Jack’s relationships with the female characters, Mrs. Piggot-Jones and Mrs. Treadwell, Claire, and Grace Shelly. Although the first two are minor characters, they carry their weight in terms of symbolic significance in this carefully engineered play. It is not the fact that Jack is insane that shocks Mrs. Piggot-Jones and Mrs. Treadwell but that his insanity consists of rejecting values they hold dear: they become offended by his comment that England is “a country of cosmic unimportance,” and they are miffed that he won’t speak at their church fete on their preferred topics of “hanging, immigration,” or “the stranglehold of the Unions.” They flee altogether when they realize that his ministry of love includes sexual love.

Mrs. Piggot-Jones and Mrs. Treadwell serve in the play as measures of upper class morality, which is uptight and repulsed by natural sexual expression. Their attitude toward sexual expression is conveyed by the wax fruit of Mrs. Treadwell’s hat. Fruit traditionally symbolizes fertility, thus wax (fake) fruit symbolizes sterility. These are women who present a good front but do not “bear fruit.”

Wax fruit first appears in the prologue, when the late Thirteenth Earl says that everything “tastes like wax fruit” after “the power of life and death” of being the hanging judge. The old Earl felt a sense of supreme power in his evening ritual of selfhanging; facing death made him feel fully alive. The Earl whets his appetite for dinner with his brush with death, in his zeal to avoid the wax fruit — or boring aspects of living. With the two church ladies, wax fruit is also equated with sexual frigidity or barrenness. Mrs. Piggot-Jones and Mrs. Treadwell mindlessly join with Jack in his song about toeing the line (“down on the heels, up on the toes”) but cannot withstand his sermon of love that acknowledges their sexual natures. They have no sexual natures; they are wax fruit. When they return later in the play, they find a Lord more along their lines, who, like them, disapproves of girls who “show their bosoms and say rude things about the queen.” They accept the Earl when he accepts their value of suppressing sexuality.

Claire’s sexual nature is suborned to her greed. An “ice-cold biddy” according the voluptuous Grace, Claire openly acknowledges that her husband seeks sexual gratification elsewhere — with Grace, in fact. At the same time, Sir Charles sanctions his wife’s affair with Dr. Herder, essentially prostituting her as a means to wrest the estate away from his nephew. Claire plays this role dutifully and with feigned passion. She drops the affair without regret when the game changes, and Dr. Herder no longer needs to be kept quiet. Her passion is finally aroused when Jack trades his litany of love and understanding for a litany of vengeance and cruelty. Whereas she had found her nephew repulsive during his Jesus, God-is-love phase, he proves irresistible to her during his Jack the Ripper, God the Avenger phase.

Jack the Ripper exudes power; he can make Claire “feel alive,” and he is the acknowledged master of the estate. She can afford to love a man one step up on their social ladder. Her life of pretensions has deadened her, and now she wants Jack to “wake” her, “with a kiss.” Like the late Earl, however, she has an attraction to death. She tells Jack how a prowler outside her window made her shiver with excitement. But it is “impossible” for the ruling class “to feel,” so she wants Jack to say he loves her “even if it isn’t true.” She blindly, and pathetically, plays a perverted duet with him, whispering “lover” in response to his filthy talk of “maggots,” “gut-slime,” and “gullet and rack.” He calls her Mary, conflating her with Jack the Ripper’s prostitute victims. Having scorned him in his loving phase, she becomes his first guilty victim in his avenging phase. Instead of feeling alive herself, Claire sacrifices her life so that Jack can shriek, “I’m alive, alive!” With dramatic irony, Sir Charles tells Jack that he has finally “behaved like a Gurney should”; that is, he has murdered a prostitute — Sir Charles’s own wife — and blamed the crime on the butler.

Grace comes from the lower class but has “done it all, from Stanislavski to Strip ... greasy make-up towels, cracked mirrors, rhinestones and beads.” According to Claire, Grace made her living “on her back.” However, although Grace freely indulges in sex, she is not sexually free: sex is her stock in trade. An actress-prostitute, she assists her lover Sir Charles by play-acting the role of the Lady of the Camelias, Jack’s ideal lover. Dumas’s Camille was a martyr to love, but Grace’s Camille, as she points out to Claire, carries a wax flower, one that cannot wilt. In Grace’s case, the wax flower takes on a new meaning, now symbolizing the resilience and artificiality of plastic. Like the wax camellia, Grace is here for show, but she is also required to blossom and bear fruit.

Grace plays the role of a twentieth-century Mary Magdalene, the whore-mother-lover, to Jack’s Jesus. Unexpectedly, Grace falls in love with Jack, because of the very qualities that obstruct Jack’s ascension to the ruling class. Perhaps because she is not of the upper class, she is more vulnerable and open to the truth contained within his madness. She has not been contaminated with upper class perversions, although she desperately wants to be called “Lady Grace Gurney.”

Ironically, just when Grace begins genuinely to love Jack, having started the relationship as an empty charade, she becomes his victim. Like Claire, Grace finds the power of the Avenger God irresistible and wants his attentions, complaining that he was more loving when he was “batty.” Of course, his new status as a proper gentleman precludes an

interest in healthy sex. Now Grace, like Claire, fulfils Jack the Ripper’s appetite for vengeance against whores. It matters little when Jack says “She betrayed you,” whether he refers to Grace’s relations with his uncle or to her complicity in his “cure.” Either way, she has prostituted herself, ruthlessly using her attractions to control him. When she voices genuine encouragement over his upcoming speech to the House of Lords, her words take on an ironic quality. “Don’t worry, you’ll kill ‘em,” she says, “and then you’ll get around to me.”

Once again, the threat of death is conflated with sex, since she means getting around to having sex with her, not killing her. Her murder is somewhat justified by her guilt, and Jack is deemed sane because “It’s a sign of normalcy in our circle to slaughter anything that moves.” She has become dispensable to the ruling class now that she has produced the wanted heir. The play becomes a tragedy with her death, since she and her love represented Jack’s only hope for true redemption: salvation through love and the power to resist taking his place in the ruling class.

Source: Carole Hamilton, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Barnes’s play Bewitched (1974) sets his themes of greed, religious superficiality, and the corruption of the ruling elite in the context of seventeenth-century Spain, as King Carlos II tries to beget an heir. Once again, the self-indulgences of those in authority leads to chaos and futility.
• The Ruling Class may have been influenced by some of the ideas in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a 1939 film that exposes the moral bankruptcy of the French upper class.
• Volpone, Ben Jonson’s satire about the lengths to which people will go to acquire an inheritance, is arguably the finest comedy of the Jacobean era. The play also illustrates Jonson’s influence on Barnes.
• Two plays by George Bernard Shaw, whose influence on Barnes is considerable, explore class inequalities and upper class hypocrisy: Major Barbara, about a Salvation Army officer disturbed by her father’s morals, and the classic Pygmalion, a story of a street girl “passing” in high society after being trained how to act and speak like a lady.