Sexual Harassment and Political Correctness Theme Analysis

Written largely in response to the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas—and the allegations of sexual harassment leveraged against him by his former coworker Anita Hill during said hearings—Oleanna takes a cynical view of contemporary gender relations. When John’s student Carol brings harassment allegations against him just as he is about to be reviewed for tenure at the university, his life comes crumbling down—and Carol, backed by a “group” implied to be a feminist organization determined to root old-guard masculinity out of the university, seems all too happy to watch him fall from grace. David Mamet, whose conservative views and disdain for political correctness are intrinsic to his work’s point of view, argues through Oleanna that the rise of political correctness in American society has emboldened feminists to take vindictive action against powerful men for no reason other than to delight in their suffering. This argument, though controversial and decisively flawed, is at the heart of the twisted power dynamics between John and his student Carol.

Oleanna transfigures a real-life political fracas into a more personal tale, but retains the same bitterness towards women who, in Mamet’s view, vindictively try to interfere with men’s ascension to greater personal or political power and influence. Mamet certainly takes an unforgiving stance as he uses John, Carol, and John’s tenure review as an allegory for Thomas, Hill, and Thomas’s Supreme Court hearings. He suggests that Carol—with the support of her “group,” implied to be a radical feminist cadre—either becomes determined to prevent John from ascending to further power after she is offended by his braggish nature and slights against the modern university system, or, more insidiously, went to his office portraying herself as meek and confused in order to gather ammunition to use against him at the behest of her “group.” Either way, Mamet suggests that Carol has designs on John’s tenure—and his reputation more generally—as a form of retribution against the status quo and old-guard policies that elevate and favor even mediocre men. He frames Carol as vindictive and petty at best—and, at worst, part of a larger feminist conspiracy.

In the first half of the play, John is a slightly self-obsessed and pompous if benign presence. Once he begins to get agitated by Carol’s attempts to prevent him from getting tenure—which she ultimately reveals are transparently retaliatory, meant to put him in his place as a reaction to his “self-aggrandizing” teaching methods and “sexist and pornographic” views—John becomes more sinister, and in turn seeks retribution against Carol. He physically restrains her when she tries to leave his office without promising that she’ll retract her statement, thus fulfilling the claims Carol made against him: that he is self-obsessed, power-hungry, and sexist.

Towards the end of the play, as John begins to act as weary, beaten, and meek as Carol herself did at the start, Carol only becomes more powerful and self-assertive. While in the first act she claimed not to understand the definitions of several relatively simple terms, in the final act her speech becomes nuanced and even weaponized. She attempts to control how John himself speaks, and her casual, biting insinuation that he shouldn’t call his wife Grace “baby” is ultimately what sends him off the deep end. He beats her savagely, completing his transformation into the abusive, dangerous, unhinged man Carol wanted to portray him as all along.

Mamet ultimately implies that Carol’s trajectory in the play has been to infiltrate John’s life, weaponize his own words against him, and deprive him of the power and job security he has rightfully earned. Even if John’s views on education are mildly offensive and provocative for the sake of being provocative, and even if he’s a bit of a drag as a person, at the start of the play he isn’t violent or dangerous. It is only through the pressures of Carol’s systematic attack on his character that John becomes the very thing Carol wanted to paint him as.

Mamet portrays Carol as an angry, jealous, vindictive woman who decides to stop John from achieving more power because she disagrees with him and what he stands for. He asserts that her leveraging of sexual harassment claims against him are baseless and false, built off of an exaggerated reaction to John’s comforting gesture of putting a hand on Carol’s shoulder in a moment of distress. Mamet wants to demonstrate, through Carol, his belief that “angry” feminists have the power to dismantle the lives of relatively innocent men—and seek to wield that power, emboldened by society’s tilt towards political correctness and sympathy for anyone who claims to be a victim.