The Good Fight (original)

Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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ENG 5733HF Professor Redekop 21 August 2006 The Good Fight, in George Walker’s Love and Anger George Walker’s Love and Anger is a play which celebrates the virtues of a good fight, of a good war, and the rewards it offers its participants. Though fights are a kind of embrace, they cannot be engaged between true lovers—they require “good guys” and “bad guys,” who hate one another. Walker understands this, and communicates this understanding primarily by cuing us to appreciate that all the ostensibly good characters involved in the play’s cosmic battle between good and evil have similar seeming, ostensibly evil counterparts. That is, he cues us to see everyone involved in the fray as somewhat interchangeable, the same. So if war is being praised, if construing the world as vice filled and some of its denizens as evil, is made to seem a necessary “step” towards advancing one along own spiritual/emotional journey, is there anything or anyone in the play subjected to unmitigated critique? Yes, someone is—and it is tempting (but not accurate) to say that it is the satiric voice itself which is under satiric attack, for it is Eleanor—the voice of (humourless) judgment—who is the foremost subject of criticism in the play. I understand that many will read or see the play and judge it one which makes a satiric attack on vices such as power lust and greed. They will see it one which clearly establishes two characters—Sean Harris and John Connor—as those most attracted to these particular vices. Yet much would have to be ignored in order to construe the play in this way. One would have to ignore much of how the play begins, for instance, for the play begins with both of these vices being indulged in by the play’s ostensible foremost good and enlightened character—Peter

2 Maxwell. Maxwell believes that though he once was as vice prone as any other, though he agrees with Harris when Harris argues that “for twenty years [he was] [. . .] one of the greediest and one of the biggest” “greedy prick[s]” (70), that he has been reborn, that he is pure. Evidence for him, in part, comes from the fact that he gave up a very lucrative, empowered position as head of a prominent Toronto law firm to deal with society’s downtown’ downtrodden. It also comes from his giving away of all of his possessions. Connor is willing to believe Sarah when she suggests, as part of an effort to manipulate him, that Maxwell might be “env[ious]” (50) of him; but though he is right to suspect that Maxwell may in his new position be indulging in certain vices, the one vice he wouldn’t be inclined to indulge in likely would be envy, for the play begins by showing just how much he gained, acquired, in his descent. What has he acquired? New clientele—of a particularly attractive kind to a man in his position. Yes: Maxwell wants us to imagine them as consisting not just of the disadvantaged but of the “quasi-exotic,” the “pathetic,” the “dregs” (30-1). Harris deems Maxwell’s new clientele reason to pity him, to not draw the law upon him, but the only client of his we actually encounter actually offers him something he likely did not possess with any surety with his previous clientele—namely, clear evidence of his power over them. That is, though Maxwell says that with his previous clientele he used to “piss on their ingrained intelligence” (19), in order to afford his services, his previous clientele would have had to have counted amongst the very rich and very empowered in order to have been able to afford his services. They would have been the sort to know that Maxwell was their lawyer, their servant, that they were paying him; and though they would have respected Maxwell’s reputation and genius, they most surely would have been demanding, expectant—difficult. Indeed, though the play concerns Maxwell’s life after his having left his old law firm, it still reminds us of what previous clientele’ contact could have

3 been like for him by showing us how Harris’s new client—Connor—reacts when he believes Harris is not adequately serving him. When confused and confounded by Sarah’s behavior towards him, Connor reacts by turning to Harris and exclaiming: “Look, you’re my lawyer and I want some answers from you right now!” (51). Gail, Maxwell’s new client, shows some dismay with her lawyer—Maxwell—too, but is much more readily made quiescent, for she is vastly more dependent on her lawyer than Connor is on his. Connor can always hire a different lawyer, an option not available to the relatively impoverished Sarah. Nor is there any chance that even if she could find some other help that this help could count him/herself as one the country’s best lawyerly minds—something, we are told, Maxwell once was and may yet still be. Her dependency upon Maxwell, we note, is made clear both to her and to us at the beginning of the play’s first scene. Maxwell seems to have taken advantage of the fact that he knows Gail really has no one else to turn to, by speaking in ways to her he likely wouldn’t dare with a less pliant and vulnerable client—with someone who really could afford to turn down his services. He has talked to her, or, more accurately, at her for a half an hour, concerning things which clearly interest him but are of little interest to Gail. When Gail complains about his apparent lack of interest in her concerns, Maxwell responds by first reminding her that she is “marginal” (Maxwell tells her, “You’re marginal. Your cause is marginal. Outside the corridor, so to speak” [13]), then of how lucky she is to have found him (Maxwell tells her, “I believe you when obviously no one else does” [14]), and moves her to understand that her desire to see her husband and herself at some point enjoying “a shiny new future” (15) will depend on her “allowing” him to behave exactly as he wishes to behave (Maxwell tells her, “you’ll have to allow me to proceed in my own way” [14]). That is, in response to her assertiveness, Maxwell masterfully manages her into a more complaint pose.

4 Gail will not being paying Maxwell in cash—there is something else he wants from her. This “something” isn’t sex, but the play guides us to appreciate that if he had been a slightly different man, this is what he might have expected from her as a form of payment. For with Gail the play presents us with a childish—with her ball cap and jeans—young woman whose readiness to be servile is suggested in that she is there in his office in response to the middle aged Maxwell’s beckoning (i.e., his “call” [14]). She has a husband; but his return to her seems to rest entirely with her managing to get this middle aged man to agree to take on her cause. This he agrees to, but only if she agrees to “trust” (15) him, and submit to his unusual behavior and requests. He hints that the thing she most has to offer is “love,” a willingness and an ability to service the needs of all those in “need [of] love” (15). She shows this willingness, but also some fear: she suspects he might be “crooked.” In sum, though I think—especially with his move to assuage her fears, to get her to trust him, and his assurance that if she does so her reward will be “a shiny new future”—there is more than a hint in the nature of their relationship, especially as it is introduced to us at the beginning of the play, of the stereotypical pedophilic “relationship” between the candy laden pedophile and his child prey, very likely, we more strongly sense in his interaction with her, the middle aged man who seeks revitalization through associating with young women: that is, someone who is undergoing a midlife crisis. It should be difficult to not strongly consider understanding Maxwell as someone who is undergoing a midlife crisis. He is in his early fifties, and has been reminded of his mortality by just having suffered a stroke. His mind is clearly on death: when he surveys his life, he imagines it one where “Death was surrounding [him] [. . .] like a demon inevitability” (17). He suddenly understands the way he had been living as unfulfilling—the standard assessment someone who is undergoing a midlife crisis makes of his/her life. We should note that his

5 complaint about life no longer being fulfilling is also aired by his former partner, Harris. And when Harris visits them, we are offered numerous cues to imagine them both as still being in some way conjoined, as still, in their new directions, pursuing essentially the same goal. With Harris and Maxwell we have two men of about the same age (specifically, Maxwell is “50” and Harris is in his “early 50s” [12]), who pursued the same career path—law, and who both seek rejuvenation: Maxwell seeks “rebirth” (31); Harris seeks “new challenges” (27). Maxwell prefers to understand himself as someone who has taken a fundamentally different turn than the one Harris has taken. And they might indeed seem far more opposite than they do similar to one another. Maxwell has stripped himself of his earthly goods; Harris’ new pursuit is built on all that he had accumulated: he will use the friends and reputation he garnered from being an established lawyer to launch a career as a politician. Maxwell locates himself in the “gutters” and associates with the destitute; Harris seeks “new mountain” (tops) and takes on increasingly affluent and powerful clients (i.e., Connor). But unless we are determined to see them as opposites, they could very easily be understood as two who have chosen paths which both work equally well to help satisfy the very same needs and assuage the exact same fears. The (stereo)typical midlife fear is fear of death. Both paths Maxwell and Harris are on would help alleviate these fears. Obviously Maxwell believes that in with his new life he has in some sense become a child again. He prefers now to be called “Petie” because it better suits who he has become: namely, “[y]ounger,” “more unfinished” (30). He believes he has become the person he once was before law school corrupted him—the young Maxwell who once had principles, who followed his parents’ code of honor. Rather than someone who will soon face death, he believes his miraculous re-invention of himself amounts to a re-birth, to starting again, once more from the beginning. He will help create a “new era,” one he imagines he will help

6 shepherd along: Phase two will amount to “[t]he amazing rebirth of Petie Maxwell and the new era to which he is dedicated” (31). But though Maxwell will be reborn, Harris’s new path will in a sense mean he will never die: for though no matter how successful a lawyer becomes, it is only the lawyer who moves on to becoming a politician who has any chance of becoming a historically relevant figure, i.e., of becoming immortalized. The politician can become an epic figure, someone who might potentially be seen as superhuman—beyond the merely mortal, who is looked to satisfy needs no one person could possibly satisfy. In short, the play offers us very good reasons for believing that Maxwell and Harris are not as different as they would prefer to imagine themselves to be. Maxwell evidently believes that Harris used him. He wants Harris to believe Harris’ theft of his wife and kids made him feel like one of “God’s lowest creatures” (32). But we should not be so quick to believe him in this, for the play hints that Harris’ theft may well have been an especially fortuitous development for Maxwell. In pursuit of a new life path, Maxwell seeks to shorn himself of all that ties him to a former one he associates with death. He gleefully gives away all that he had acquired during his twenty years as a lawyer; but had he had to distance himself from his wife and kids as well, he might not have been able to do so without feeling guilty for having done so. Middle aged men who in their mid-life crisis act childishly and hang out with young women, often experience a crippling hangover: they must deal with the anger and disappointment they inevitably receive from wives and children they’ve abandoned and humiliated. Thanks to Harris’ “theft” (for though Maxwell chides Harris for thinking of his wife as a possession, it seems clear that Maxwell thinks of her as one as well: He exclaims, “You’d been screwing my wife” [32; emphasis added]), Maxwell can more easily imagine his rebirth as righteous.

7 If Harris’ own path wasn’t predicated on accumulation rather than on abandonment, Maxwell might actually “owe him one” for taking his wife (a wife, we note, he thought a “jerk” [31]) and kids off his hands. The play, by having Maxwell assess that his humiliation could be completed either by Harris allowing him to bend down and kiss his ass or by Harris bending down and kissing Maxwell’s, strongly suggests that who exactly is using whom may not be so clear. More than this, with satisfaction being made to seem achievable regardless of who does the bending down and who stands erect, it encourages us to assess Maxwell’s actual descent and Harris’ would-be ascent as amounting to the very same thing—as interchangeable. Since Harris is Maxwell’s old partner, and since Connor is made to seem as much Harris’ new partner as he is his new client (they are likened to a team throughout), we are guided to compare Maxwell and Connor as if they were old and new partners of Harris’. And indeed, in how they both differ from Harris, and despite Maxwell’s attempt to delineate Connor as nothing other than a Nazi, they can actually seem quite similar to one another. Maxwell acknowledges that Harris is charming. His charm and ease are the product of his affluent and assured family background. He is polished, good looking, superior—the sort of person people feel almost obligated to promote to societies’ highest positions, regardless of whether they’ve done anything to do deserve such elevation. Both Maxwell and Connor have also made good—but despite the odds, through their ingenuity (genius) and boldness. Connor makes clear that he more-or-less emerged from nothing—that is, from a working class background. The same seems true for Maxwell as well, for he characterizes the background he was raised in one which promoted values usually associated with lower middle class backgrounds: namely, humility and honour. Both, too, are hotheads. Connor is explosive and quick to anger; and even though Maxwell can be tender, he can rage as loudly and as emphatically as Connor can. (Harris accuses him of

8 having spread “outrageous, bullheaded, unsupportable, inflaming crap” about Connor, and given what we see of Maxwell, we do not doubt that Harris’s characterization of Maxwell’s efforts are on the nose.) Maxwell and Connor also seem similar in that both are making claim to the very same territory—both are ostensibly about “serving” the needs of the lower classes: Maxwell would be their legal and moral crusader; Connor would be their guide to all they need know of the world they live in. In fact, at the beginning of scene three, when Sarah is telling her story of an invasion to Eleanor and Gail, given all we had by then heard of Connor and Maxwell, as we hear her story and think of its protagonists we might be thinking as much of Maxwell as we are Connor. Her story is about invasive men who are “looking for a place to take over,” that are “[l]ooking for adventure” (33). These men have “sold” (33) all their goods, have “prostitute[d]” “their wives,” and have set up for themselves a “headquarters” in this alien territory (33-4). They believe themselves “indestructible,” are intent on being “free to be themselves,” have voices inside them “talking to them,” and have a proprietary, expansive desire to get their “word [. . .] out” (34). Maxwell is looking for adventure (he will identify his activities as an “adventure” [42]), has given away all his goods, has a wife who is now sleeping with another man, believes he is “immune” (32) to persecution, has entered an unfamiliar part of town and set up headquarters there, has argued that his turn to the “dark side” in law school resulted from a force taking him over, believes himself finally “back” (26) to being the man he once was, and has made the whole city aware of his opinion of Connor and has his mind on the “reorganization of an entire culture” (29). So even though Sarah’s story is about white crusaders who hate those who aren’t white, and even though Maxwell and others repeatedly call Connor a Nazi, it is a

9 story which hints that its main protagonists are more readily comparable to Maxwell than they are to Connor. So given that the play would have us question just how different villains actually are from heroes, it might seem this play is a satire on the supposed virtues of would-be progressive crusaders. Though I have focused on the play’s first act, the play’s ending could even more readily be looked to for evidence to buttress such a thesis. Most particularly, the trial which terminates the play evidences an outrageously greedy and unfair Maxwell. Though he acknowledges that you can repent just by “say[ing] to yourself ‘I repent’” (70), he won’t allow that Harris can do the same to exonerate himself from damnation. “Me!Me! [, Maxwell exclaims]. The demigod. The former greedy prick. The man with a hole in his brain. The angry man. The reborn man. The avenger!” (71), is the only one who gets to repent. One cannot but sense here that to Maxwell, Harris amounts to means by which to satisfy his own enormous need to feel purposeful and grandiose. The trial also evidences a greedy and unfair Sarah as the presiding judge. Sarah believes she is a fair not a prejudicial judge (79), but she too is shown to be interested in using the trial to satisfy her need to humiliate Connor and Harris— the same need she satisfied earlier in the play when she pretended to be Maxwell’s lawyer (“Well that just shows how stupid you are. I’m a mental patient. You’ve been tricked by a person with a shattered mind” [51]). Her verdict that Harris and Connor are to be brutally humiliated and killed (drowned in washroom toilets) is a verdict evidently influenced by whim, not evidence. And since this verdict follows a long series of humiliations (which include brutal physical assault and extensive name calling) inflicted upon the two (on Connor, especially), it is no surprise that many reviewers of the play assess it indulgent, ineffective.

10 Mel Gussow, in a review for the New York Times, argues that the play is “selfdefeating[,]” for “[a]s the lawyer [Maxwell] [. . .] sinks deeper into misanthropy and into sermonizing, he becomes increasingly tiresome” (New York Times, 9 December 1990). Of course, if the play was construed a satire on the vices of progressive reformers rather than those of the rich and powerful, the particular nature of Gussow’s reaction to Maxwell should encourage us to see it as a rather effective satire. Indeed, those who react to the play as Gussow did and who are familiar with the history of satire, might see the play as akin to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses; for according to Ronald Paulson, just as Love and Anger makes the rich and poor seem similar to one another, just as it repeatedly emphasizes their intrinsic similarity and mutual culpability by having them frequently fuse into one another into “a mass of punching, kicking, groaning bodies” (52), and just as it seems to use cheese as a metaphor for making some sort of critique against interchangeability/interrelatedness: The Metamorphoses shows that in a narrative satire fictions operate through the interrelatedness of characters: not only the relationship between two people, a fool and a knave, but between rich and poor fools, [. . .] and so on. They are held close to a theme or a vice, but they also project a visualizable world of total interrelatedness, like a cheese completely infiltrated by maggots [. . .] [.] As it is unrolled, this world is monotonously similar in all its details, and finally static; but a world nevertheless in which Lucius [principle character of the Metamorphoses] is himself deeply implicated. 57 Or perhaps they would see the play as akin to picaresque satires, to those satires Paulson believes feature Quixote (heroic) figures akin to Maxwell in that though they aim to be honourable they “easily become [. . .] selfish egoist[s] who tr[y] to make over the world in [their] [. . .] own image” (101). But though in so many ways Love and Anger might seem a play which observes

11 and critiques would-be heroes, its intention is ultimately not to show their foolishness. Nor is it a play whose primary intent is to critiques their counterparts, i.e., the bad guys. For the play is actually one which would have us attend to the real wisdom not the folly of those who would enthusiastically involve themselves in brutal, dangerous behavior. The plays makes this point primarily through what happens to Sarah as she engages with those she deems evil and beyond redemption. Like Maxwell, the play draws us to understand Sarah as akin to several other characters frequently found in the masses which inevitably develops in the play’s various melees. She believes that both she and Connor have mean spirited voices in their heads which speak to them and control them, and she serves as Maxwell’s new partner—and thereby draws us to compare her to his former partner, Harris. And she, too, is someone who seeks revitalization and freedom. And though, while pretending to be his new law partner, she is the one who voices a loud critique of simple and brutal solutions—she gets Connor to admit that killing the poor might be a solution to downtown problems, she actually demonstrates why brutality may indeed serve to provide solutions to long troubling problems. After Sarah does the admirable and amazing in persuading a veteran lawyer and a canny businessman that she is in fact a competent lawyer and holds means by which Maxwell might be managed, she, Gail, Harris, and Connor enter into a wild melee. Stage instructions tell us that this melee is followed by a blackout and an intermission: the audience is encouraged to wonder what might have happened to those involved—to wonder what might have happened to the two women who took on at least one opponent who “wanted to kill” (53) them. When the play resumes, the audience is seemingly offered very good reasons for suspecting things turned out poorly, for “[t]he office is a mess,” “Gail is sitting on the floor against the desk [,] [. . .] and Sarah is lying face down near the door” (53). But though Sarah says she likely has a broken

12 bone, she (and Gail) is doing very well indeed. Sarah found delivering blows very “satisfying”—she thoroughly enjoyed getting “in a few really good whacks” (53). She guesses that she’d have been better off if she’d “started hitting earlier in [. . .] life” (53)—and she may well be right; for hitting has lead not just to elation but to an ability “to make sense” (54), to sanity, and to a willingness to admit she does not in fact believe herself black—a step, perhaps, to not needing to lie to herself in order to better cope with life. At the very least, the battle proved therapeutic—and in the loving and supportive sisterhood it helped engender between Gail and Sarah, it seems to promise even more. And we note that after the fight, neither of them seem to hate those they fought with. There is indeed little hate in evidence. Instead, there is only love and reflection. Gail explores why her perception of how the rich ostensibly operate could drive her to hate them, and admits that the rich might not be the villains she sometimes feels they are. Sarah admits that she imagines herself black because it helps her “feel brave” (54)—an admission which might soon lead her to understand that she preferred to conceive of her foes as Nazis (or vampires) because it gave her reason to feel brave, to act heroically. There is real reason for believing so, for previously Sarah admitted that though she “doesn’t take messages” from ordinary people, she would rise to action if such calls came from “[p]eople threatening Petie” (35). Though her therapist likely wouldn’t let Sarah punch him up in order to help her feel sane, her doctors—though they seem to do little more than drug her up—might well appreciate that what Sarah really needs is to be around those who inspire fear and hatred. For we are told that they believe Sarah “has to have a way, even in her state, to manifest her courage [. . .] [--] [t]hat her courage is still the most important thing to her” (35). It is Eleanor who relates this information, and it is Eleanor who clearly does not believe it to be true: for her response to

13 Sarah’s manifestation of tremendous courage is to berate her for it. She sees the results of the melee and gauges it the result of Sarah’s impulsive decision to attack Gail. She goes irate, and tells her sister to stop “scaring [her] [. . .] to death” (56). Eleanor would have Sarah remain pacified, sedated through drugs, because an active and alert Sarah is someone who might do things which would cause Eleanor considerable distress. We note that Eleanor would have wished Maxwell had been inhibited from moving to “the slums” for the same selfish reason. For even with Maxwell suffering from another stroke, she can’t help but berate him (something the now sane Sarah notices and comments on) about how the move has ended up making her “very uneasy” and unable to “function” (56). Maxwell, however, wants Eleanor to join in with his group, to join in with his movement. It is a request he makes several times, and we note her typical response to it is the one she offers to his initial request: “Don’t involve me in whatever it is you’re up to these days. I have problems of my own” (16). Near the play’s close, however, she says she would be “grateful” (61) to be included—but this may actually be cause for Maxwell to curse rather than celebrate, for, arguably, nowhere in the text is there evidence that her involvement would be anything but a bad thing for Maxwell and his gang. Eleanor, from the play’s beginning to its end, is portrayed as someone who does or very easily could spoil all the fun others are up to. She is a bummer. Even after she has said she would “honestly” be very grateful to be included in Maxwell’s plans, just her presence causes Sarah to lose confidence in her performance as the trial’s judge (we notice her ascent from cowering “patient” to competent lawyer to compelling judge), and prompts her to start to cry. Her active part in the trial proves to be her slapping of Connor’s face for his blasphemous prayer, an action which serves to make her seem every bit the same person she was at the beginning of the play, when she responded defensively to Maxwell’s lambasting of religion. (A battle follows

14 her slapping Connor, but we note that somehow everyone but Eleanor ends up “form[ing] [the] [. . .] mass of [tangled] bodies” that end up on the couch—a development which may in part make it seem as this melee is a combined effort by everyone involved to exclude Eleanor.) She is the one who would call in either the police or the hospital in response to any dangerous development. And we note that if she had called an ambulance after Maxwell suffered his stroke, he would have been denied the opportunity to die honorably and redemptively in battle. (Harris and other characters also at times threaten to call the police, but they always pull back, find reasons for not doing so—indeed, their threats to call the police seem akin to those made by kids who make the threat with no real intention of following through.) We also note that in scene one, Maxwell’s sudden need to berate people on the street, to insist that they “[h]ave a little self-respect” (19), follows his being schooled by Eleanor on the proper way to treat people. That is, Eleanor seems to make Maxwell, the would-be crusader of the downtrodden, to sound, in his demand that the street people “[g]et out of the garbage” (19), like her—who is first shown “[c]arrying a bag of cleaning supplies” (16), and who is identified by her sister as being “brilliant” at “tidy[ing] up” (61). The real threat to Maxwell and Sarah’s rejuvenation, we are told, is clearly not Harris and Connor—who, though they begin by mocking the trial, not only actively participate in it, but end up showing admirable enthusiasm, emotion, and belief in its legitimacy (they dance and cheer when they believe the trial has proved their innocence and virtue)—but rather, Eleanor. And we note that after she shows some capacity to unsettle Maxwell and Sarah, to make them seem less assured, that Eleanor becomes the victim of some sort of violence. Connor disturbs Eleanor when he handles and moves her because “[s]he was in [his] [. . .] way” (20); and in this particular instance violence is set up as praiseworthy, not because it can

15 make people feel good, but can make them feel quite terrible. Maxwell gauges Connor’s behavior odious: he essentializes Connor as a “bully” (20), as suggests that it suggests that he might have beaten his own secretary so badly that she needed to be sent to the hospital (21). But the play guides us to question just how offended Maxwell is by Connor’s violence towards Eleanor, to wonder if at some level if Connor—in attacking Eleanor—essentially served as Maxwell’s proxy. The principle way in which it does this is to suggest that Maxwell understands Eleanor as his mother, and that he—not Connor—is actually the person with pressing Oedipal’ (or, rather, inversed Oedipal—as he is would welcome violence to his mother not his father) issues. Connor’s assault on Eleanor follows a contest between Maxwell and Eleanor, which is very much made to seem one between child and mother. While interacting with Gail, he takes out and plays with a string of coloured paper clips. Eleanor, wishing him to behave less childishly, takes them from him—an action he follow up by rebelliously taking another paper clip out from his pocket. But since the contest they have between one another concludes with her successfully shaming Maxwell into temporarily terminating his unorthodox and childish behavior and become an advocate of orthodox and “adult” virtues (cleanliness, self-respect), it is a contest which is ultimately won by Eleanor. But then she is bullied by Connor, and we note that Maxwell makes an effort to construe the assault one made by a child upon a mother. He asks Connor, “What’s wrong. Some trouble with mummy?” (20). But the play ultimately makes it very clear that it is Maxwell, not Connor, who is prone to think of Eleanor as his mother: for his near last words are, “Eleanor, you look like my mother” (83). Unlike Maxwell, Sarah wants Eleanor to understand that she (i.e., Eleanor) is not to liken herself to a (specifically, her) mother. And we note that in the way Sarah characterizes mothers, that she does not assess them in the standard Freudian way: that is, she understands mothers as

16 Freud conceives fathers—as formidable beings who would bully and dominate their children. She portrays Sarah as responding to Eleanor’s mothering in the same Freud argues children were want to react to their father’s, that is, by finding means by which to safely “air” their desire to retaliate, for revenge, without arousing the attention of the censuring super-ego. She encourages Eleanor to take pills she knows will leave her in a death-like comatose state. When Eleanor is espied in this state, she jokes/hints that Eleanor might be dead: “Besides, there’s no waking her anyway. She took a couple of my pills. These things are lethal” (63). There are other hints in the play that suggest that Maxwell implicitly wishes for Eleanor to incur harm. We note, for instance, that despite Maxwell’s outrage at Connor for his having physically moved Eleanor, that at one point Maxwell himself tries to do the same: We are told that “He tries to push her out the door” (42). We also note that the play commences with his making clear he would war with institutions such as religion, an institution Eleanor finds “comforting” (17); and that Maxwell aims to include Eleanor, who is shown resisting him, in his project when it reaches the “dangerous part” (42). Eleanor is not hurt or slain by play’s end, and if we construe the play as holding the same conception of mothers as many of those living in the twentieth-century’s other extended period of Darwinian capitalism—the 1920s—did, this development would in fact have been too much to ask. At one point in the play, Maxwell calls God a “she” (42), suggesting that rather than a man and a father, the most powerful entity anywhere is in fact a woman and a mother. Ann Douglas writes that 1920s New Yorkers essentially believed the same thing: that the most powerful negative influence over their lives was the lasting influence of the Victorian Titaness. Specifically, she writes in Terrible Honesty that for its cultural emergence, modern New York (believed that it) depended upon a collective and ruthless effort to distinguish itself from a

17 Victorian, matriarchal past. She writes that modern New Yorkers believed their predecessors were mere puppets of leading matriarchs whose influence suffocated and smothered them, and, in order to avoid their fate, she writes that they worked to make their era, their city, one which could easily be imagined as readily opposed and hostile to empowered mother-figures (matriarchs). Douglas spends a great deal of her book delineating how writers, especially, played a big part in helping New Yorkers imagine themselves as living in a matricidal environment, in showing how writers especially not only helped create but helped maintain the manic 20’s momentum going. And it may be that works such as Love and Anger may have played a part in helping sustain the manic period of indulgent capitalism that Torontonians found themselves in at the termination of the twentieth-century. This is a radical proposition, but it deserves attendance. For just like writers (and theorists such as Freud, who downplayed the mother’s influence in pursuit of erecting the conception of the father as so very brutal but also so very empowered) in the 20s helped effect the idea of the brutal but very empowered father-figure male in their works, Love and Anger leaves one with the sense that the featured bully of mothers —Connor—will continue to rule the Toronto environs. It ends with him, most especially, feeling rejuvenated, righteous, and determined to “keep the momentum going” (81). And though it is easy to imagine playgoers being disappointed that he wasn’t defeated, it also easy to imagine the affluent amongst them, those who were enjoying the spoils Darwinian capitalism offered them (which likely includes the bulk of them: left leaning professionals should count themselves amongst those who have benefited most in the new economy), might at some level be reassured that the play did not in the foretell the termination of current economic trends and/or the rise of successful and empowered populist campaigns against luxurious living and the rich, in the

18 foreseeable future. Since satires are normally construed as aiming to not just critique but help bring to an end a vice ridden age, they might be fairly imagined as being glad that the play— which in various ways seems to be a satire—may actually more accurately be deemed, antisatiric.

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