Characterizing the City as a Gendered Space in 'A Taste of Honey' Sophie Hunt College

Despite the numerous attempts to blur boundaries between the genders, it is inevitable that literature reflecting the city will categorise characters to fit into the expectations of the sexes. In fact, ‘the gender of a character … implies imaginative and social assumptions about his/her personality, power and place in the world[1],’ as is evident the film adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Delany constructs characters that are untraditional - such as gay, unmarried or rebellious; the city does not allow the genders to escape their assigned roles, demonstrated through techniques such as camera shots entrapping Jo in the urbanized city, and the ending scene which excludes Geoff from an exclusive woman’s role.

Primarily, Delaney begins to create characters against the expectation of gender with Helen. The audience is introduced to this construct as a woman with no home, husband or respectable job. The character is a woman who has engaged with many love interests, and is aware that how she behaves is not ideal in the expectations the city has – “Why don’t you learn from my mistakes? It takes half your life to learn from your own[2].” From this quote, we can clearly see that Helen has been able to behave against the...