Dramatic Representation of the Gendered Other in Harold Pinter’s The Room

This paper examines Harold Pinter’s first play The Room (1957) focusing on an immured heroine (Rose), who becomes the gendered Other without female subjectivity. She is marginalized and trapped, literally and metaphorically, in the precarious domestic location of the room while her space is successively intruded by visitors. The Other is an important philosophical concept in existentialism and has well been applied to the feminist criticism. Drawing on the existential theories of the Other, including Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering articulation in The Second Sex (1949), the study contextualizes Pinter’s play and analyses the dramatic discourses and ambiguous interactions between Rose and other characters - her domineering husband, the talkative landlord, the mysterious black visitor, and a young married couple hunting to rent the room of the play’s title. In doing so, the paper argues that The Room serves as a disconcerting metaphor to demonstrate how men try to disempower and control women as a means to consolidate their dominant position in the territorial room and, by extension, in the society dominated by white, patriarchal ideology.