‘A Taste of Honey’ was written by Shelagh Delaney in 1958 and was staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the same year; it was simultaneously a box office hit and a source of heavy criticism. The main departure of Delaney’s play from the fictional canon was not the representation of a working-class domestic setting on stage (this had been done previously by the likes of Osborne and Wesker) but the focus on working class women and their relationships in harsh conditions. The plot centres around two main characters Jo and Helen, and it is about their relationship developing and changing once it becomes clear that Jo is pregnant. Both characters are deeply inconsistent and reject traditional forms of femininity. Helen is presented as the anti-thesis of what was considered to be the ‘perfect mother’ in the 1950s. She is inconsistent, unaffectionate and thrill-seeking, which was the exact opposite of the culturally constructed contemporary stereotypes of motherhood that were predominantly hearth-loving, conciliatory and constant. Likewise Jo rejects motherhood vehemently, exclaiming that breast feeding is cannibalistic and like ‘being eaten alive’. Delaney wrote ‘A Taste of Honey’ because she thought that certain aspects of society were not being presented on stage, in particular, relationships between women, written and produced by women. Delaney did not shy away from presenting the harsh reality of the strain on mother and daughter relationships.
The dependence Helen and Jo have on men for their own happiness and livelihood, for their ‘tastes of honey’ is very different to the relationship male characters in the play have with it, and is the main source of anger throughout the production. They want to be independent but cannot, so even if they hate each-other, they have to rely on what has been given to them, their relationship with one-another. Jo and Helen’s characters are reacting against these ideas, and reacting loudly, evidenced by the often-violent language and bitter retorts between them. This was so against some critic’s ideas of working-class culture, and probably specifically working-class women, that it prompted the cultural commentator Richard Hoggart to say that Delaney’s characters were ‘not typical’ of the working-classes. Though views like Hoggart’s were beginning to be challenged both on the stage and politically, they were undeniably similar to the vast majority of those who undermined working-class experience by sweeping female voices under the council estate rug.
There is a sense of anger and frustration in ‘A Taste of Honey’ that highlights the very real plight of working-class women during this period. Jo and Helen’s frustration at ‘their lot’ and their bitter but unbreakable reliance on each other is almost a precursor to the fraught mother and daughter relationships discussed by women in autobiographies about the 1950s. This is particularly evident in Margaret Forster’s and Carolyn Steedman’s memoirs of the period, as mothers were encouraged to stay at home with the children and find their joy and passions only in the domestic sphere, rather than pursuing their own interests and enjoyment. ‘A Taste of Honey’, though a work of fiction, accurately depicts some of the circumstances women found themselves in in the 1950s, but it should be understood alongside it’s criticism, as many were also outraged by its themes and depictions.
‘A Taste of Honey’s’ strengths lie in Delaney’s ability to weave details of the reality of women’s lives in the 1950s into the text. Delaney makes it clear throughout the play that ‘outsiders’ who did not fit into the ideals of the breadwinner, nuclear family society, were left behind, particularly from the welfare state. This is explored well in Pat Thane and Tanya Evans’s book Sinners, Scroungers, Saints, about unmarried mothers in twentieth century England, and how the National Council was still needed in order to care for the unmarried mothers that were not benefitting from the welfare state. Many unmarried mothers were in a better state than they had been before the war, however Labour refused to implement the recommendations of the Beveridge report to provide more for specifically unmarried mothers. Equally, many women in these examples were rejected by their families for having a baby out of wedlock, but whilst Helen contemplates leaving at the end of the play, when she finds out the baby might be black, she decides not to, reflecting the idea that after Peter, Jo is all she has. An understanding of the anger of both characters is heightened by the knowledge of the welfare state and the alienation of those in unorthodox family situations from the rest of society. The welfare state was built around certain societal expectations about the male breadwinner, and the dutiful housewife. ‘A Taste of Honey’ was a rejection of these expectations, and the lives women had to lead on the outskirts of society because of them.
Consulted Works:
Bunkle, P., 'The 1944 Education Act and Second Wave Feminism', Women’s History Review, vol. 25/no. 5, (2016), pp. 791-811
Delaney, S., A Taste of Honey, (1959)
Evans, T. and Thane, P., Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012)
Forster, M., Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir, (London, Penguin, 1996)
Pedersen S., ‘Ruin it your Own Way’, The London Review of Books, (2020)
Todd S., Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution. London, 2019.
Steedman, C., 'Landscape for a Good Woman' (London, Virago, 1986)
Wilson, D., 'A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain', Twentieth Century British History, vol. 17/no. 2, (2006), pp. 206-229
Commenti