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Socialism and Jerusalem in I’m Talking about Jerusalem

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2020, 33(1), pp.31-59
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : March 15, 2020
  • Accepted : April 14, 2020
  • Published : April 30, 2020

Soim Kim 1

1건국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

I’m Talking about Jerusalem, the third play of Arnold Wesker’s Socialist Trilogy, dramatizes Dave and Ada’s alternative socialist experiment in Norfolk. Sick and tired of the inhumanely competitive capitalist labor condition and the ineffectual labor movement, the couple chooses the 19th century socialist, William Morris’ art and craft lifestyle. Without amenities including running water, Dave works as a carpenter in the colonel’s farm and eventually opens his workshop. Even though his family and friends compare Dave’s Norfolk experiment to Jerusalem, which is equivalent to utopia, eventually it fails. But after 13 years of misunderstandings and ridicules from the neighbors as well as financial difficulties, the couple gives up their Norfolk life, decides to move back to London and joins back to the capitalist market. The failure of their experiment shocks their family especially Ronny, Ada’s younger brother. This paper analyzes the various elements contributing to their failure relating to Judaism, socialism and Morris’s philosophy. From the socialist point of view, Dave’s failure can be explicated by his deviation from one of the communist’s basic creeds--the unification of the proletariat. But by analyzing Dave’s interactions with his family, neighbors and fellow workers, we can find that he lacks the sympathy, communication skills as well as insight into the changing industrial atmosphere. These characteristics are drastically different in comparison to the works of Marx and Morris. The lack of perceptions into the current situation of his fellow human beings isolates Dave from not only his community but also the furniture market and leads to his financial collapse. Even though his family frequently compares Dave to the Jewish prophets such as Moses and Jesus, obviously Dave is far from the ever reaching out prophets. Rather than providing the concrete reasons for the failure of socialism in the late 50s, this play dramatizes various problems that an idealistic socialist laborer in a capitalist society would be faced with, and explores the responsibilities for the failure and alternative solutions to it. Even though this play shows a negative example of a socialist experiments, Wesker certainly intends to use it as an educational tool for the working class who is his target audience as he repeatedly claims in his essays and interviews. Juggling with the issues related to the basic concepts and assumptions about Judaism and socialism such as the responsibility of an individual vs. society, ideology vs. virtue, production vs. consumption etc., this play not only enlightens the laborers about the potential and limits of socialism and provides the ongoing central themes to the new left playwrights.

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