Hypocrisy, manipulation, and deliberate misinformation are at the heart of Oleanna, in which two characters work to hide parts of themselves from one another even as the twisted intimacy between them deepens. As John and Carol deceive, destabilize, and extort one another, Mamet argues that there can often be an element of manipulation in even the best-intended actions—and that hypocrisy and duplicity often define human relationships.
Both John and Carol are guilty of hypocrisy and manipulation from the very start of the play—and as the action continues to unfold, their crimes against one another, rooted in their sins of duplicity, escalate to a terrifying crescendo. At the start of the play, John is pedantic, self-obsessed, and blind to his own privilege—but he’s not necessarily a bad guy, and certainly doesn’t seem to harbor any ill intent towards Carol (or, for that matter, any desire to have sex with her, as she will later claim he tried to do.) At the same time, underneath all of John’s seemingly good intentions and his desire to genuinely help Carol, he is a hypocrite. John rails against the state of higher education, and yet is a hapless cog in the very machine he claims to loathe. He is up for tenure, and obviously desperate for the promotion to be made official. Though he sees the university as a series of meaningless hoops to jump through, and questions the very value of standardized education in America, he wants to be a part of the institution for selfish reasons—for money, for pride, and, it’s implied, so that his son will have a legacy to slide into and a leg-up into academia when he grows older.
Later in the play, John reveals himself to be not only a transparent hypocrite but also a transparent manipulator. After Carol leverages allegations of assault against him and threatens his chances at tenure, he calls her to his office to talk with her, to apologize to her, and to lay the groundwork for asking her to recant her statement. Carol catches onto what John is up to, and calls him out on it. John is both a hypocrite and a manipulator—and though he’s a failure at both, they clearly define a large part of the way he moves through the world. John’s initial intentions in his relationship with Carol may have been good, but when cornered, John falls back on his worst human impulses and allows hypocrisy and manipulation to seep into his actions and his decision-making.
There are two ways to read the character of Carol, and to account for her actions over the course of the play. At the start, Carol seems to be a meek and confused student struggling to keep up with her coursework. She comes to John out of desperation to ask for his help—she is desperate to do whatever she can to improve her grade, and clearly overwhelmed not just by the contents of John’s class but by academic discourse itself. She doesn’t understand words like “paradigm,” and admits to feeling conflicted about why she’s even pursuing an education in the first place when it only makes her feel incompetent and useless.
As the play continues to unfold, however, Carol changes drastically—in Act Two, she is decidedly more confident, and by Act Three, she is leveraging the kinds of words and syntax John used in the first act against him, railing about the imbalances of power within the university and hinting at her involvement with a “group,” who has been urging her to stand strong behind her complaints against John. Mamet seems to be implying, through Carol’s rapid transformation, that the front she presented not just to John but to the audience in the first act was a mask and a facade. Carol was never the meek, unassuming, dull student she claimed to be, and never felt the depths of frustration and inadequacy she expressed to John: she manipulated him through her words and actions with the intent of bringing him down and destroying his career.
Carol’s actions could also be taken at face-value, and her escalating anger can be read as a consequence of her deepening involvement with her “group.” In this reading of the play, Carol is not a manipulator from the start, but she is still a hypocrite. She claims to be an outsider who can’t keep up with the academic discourse surrounding her at all times, and who hates her peers for smiling and nodding through classes that they must be struggling with, too, but when drawn into her “group,” she adopts the pedantic language of academic and political correctness and chooses to side with the very people she claimed to feel distant from rather than with the man who wanted to help her feel a sense of connection.
Oleanna has endured as a staple of contemporary American theater since its premiere in the early nineties in spite of its controversial messages in part because of the characters at the heart of it. John and Carol are two enigmas: two products of modern-day disillusionment, social politics, and changing standards for how people—especially men and women—can and ought to relate to one another. As political correctness and social accountability rise, old institutions and protocols threaten to fall by the wayside. John and Carol are caught at the intersection of this struggle, and turn to their basest and cruelest survival mechanisms as a result.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Hypocrisy and Manipulation ThemeTracker
Hypocrisy and Manipulation Quotes in Oleanna
JOHN: What is a “term of art”? It seems to mean a term, which has come, through its use, to mean something more specific than the words would, to someone not acquainted with them … indicate. That, I believe, is what a “term of art,” would mean. (Pause)
CAROL: You don’t know what it means…?
JOHN: I’m not sure that I know what it means. It’s one of those things, perhaps you’ve had them, that, you look them up, or have someone explain them to you, and you say “aha,” and you immediately forget what…
CARO: You don’t do that.
CAROL: I did what you told me. I did, I did everything that, I read your book, you told me to buy your book and read it. Everything you say I … (She gestures to her notebook.) (The phone rings.) I do…. Ev…
JOHN:… look:
CAROL: …everything I’m told…
JOHN: Look. Look. I’m not your father. (Pause.)
CAROL: What?
JOHN: I’m.
CAROL: Did I say you were my father?
JOHN: I’ll tell you a story about myself. (Pause) Do you mind? (Pause) I was raised to think myself stupid. That’s what I want to tell you. (Pause.)
CAROL: What do you mean?
JOHN: Just what I said. I was brought up, and my earliest, and most persistent memories are of being told that I was stupid. “You have such intelligence. Why must you behave so stupidly?” Or, “Can’t you understand? Can’t you understand?” And I could not understand. I could not understand.
JOHN: If I fail all the time, it must be that I think of myself as a failure. If I do not want to think of myself as a failure, perhaps I should begin by succeeding now and again. Look. The tests you see, which you encounter, in school, in college, in life, were designed, in the most part, for idiots. By idiots. There is no need to fail at them. They are not a test of your worth. They are a test of your ability to retain and spout back misinformation. Of course you fail them. They’re nonsense.
CAROL: I was saying … I was saying … (She checks her notes.) How can you say in a class. Say in a college class, that college education is prejudice?
[…]
JOHN: … that’s my job, don’t you know.
CAROL: What is?
JOHN: To provoke you.
CAROL: But how do they feel? Being told they are wasting their time?
JOHN: I don’t think I’m telling them that.
CAROL: You said that education was “prolonged and systematic hazing.”
JOHN: Yes. It can be so.
CAROL: …if education is so bad, why do you do it?
JOHN: I do it because I love it.
JOHN: You see, (pause) I love to teach. And flatter myself I am skilled at it. And I love the, the aspect of performance. I think I must confess that. When I found I loved to teach I swore that I would not become that cold, rigid automaton of an instructor which I had encountered as a child. Now, I was not unconscious that it was given me to err upon the other side. And, so, I asked and ask myself if I engaged in heterodoxy, I will not say “gratuitously” for I do not care to posit orthodoxy as a given good—but, “to the detriment of, of my students.”
JOHN: Well, all right. (Pause) Let’s see. (He reads.) I find that I am sexist. That I am elitist. I’m not sure I know what that means, other than it’s a derogatory word, meaning “bad.” That I… That I insist on wasting time, in nonprescribed, in self-aggrandizing and theatrical diversions from the prescribed text … that these have taken both sexist and pornographic forms … here we find listed […] instances “…closeted with a student” … “Told a rambling, sexually explicit story […] moved to embrace said student and … all part of a pattern …”
CAROL: I don’t care what you feel. Do you see? DO YOU SEE? You can’t do that anymore. You. Do. Not. Have. The. Power. Did you misuse it? Someone did. Are you part of that group? Yes. Yes. You Are. You’ve done these things.
CAROL: How can you deny it. You did it to me. Here. You did… You confess. You love the Power. To deviate. To invent, to transgress […] whatever norms have been established for us. […] And you pick those things which you feel advance you: publication, tenure, and the steps to get them you call “harmless rituals.” And you perform those steps. Although you say it is hypocrisy. […] You call education “hazing,” and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our confusion as a joke, and our hopes and efforts with it. Then you sit there and say “what have I done?”
JOHN: They’re going to discharge me.
CAROL: As full well they should. You don’t understand? You’re angry? What has led you to this place? Not your sex. Not your race. Not your class. YOUR OWN ACTIONS. And you’re angry. You ask me here. What do you want? You want to “charm” me. You want to “convince” me. You want me to recant. I will not recant.
CAROL: Even if I were inclined, to what, forgive? Forget? What? Overlook your…
JOHN: …my behavior?
CAROL: …it would be wrong.
JOHN: Even if you were inclined to “forgive” me.
CAROL: It would be wrong.
JOHN: And what would transpire.
CAROL: Transpire?
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: “Happen?”
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Then say it. For Christ’s sake. Who the hell do you think that you are? You want a post. You want unlimited power. To do and to say what you want. As it pleases you—Testing, Questioning, Flirting…
CAROL: Do you hate me now? (Pause)
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Why do you hate me? Because you think me wrong? No. Because I have, you think, power over you. Listen to me. Listen to me, Professor. (Pause) It is the power that you hate. So deeply that, that any atmosphere of free discussion is impossible. It’s not “unlikely.” It’s impossible. Isn’t it?
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Do you want our support? That is the only quest…
JOHN: …to ban my book…?
CAROL: …that is correct…
JOHN: …this…this is a university… we… […] No, no. It’s out of the question. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I want to tell you something I’m a teacher. […] It’s my name on the door, and I teach the class, and that’s what I do. I’ve got a book with my name on it. And my son will see that book someday. And I have a respon… No, I’m sorry I have a responsibility… to myself, to my son, to my profession…
