Looking Outward: Dylan Thomas’s Portrayal of Men and Women

Abstract

The increased precision with which Thomas, taking his cue from Joyce, began to delineate the community and to explore the relationship between the individual and the community is part of a general movement in his work away from nightmare into the light of common day until the caricature of Under Milk Wood. The external, as opposed to the internal private, world gradually acquires a stronger presence in Thomas’s writing and the extent to which men and women appear as fully realised individuals serves almost as a measure of Thomas’s developing empirical observa­tion. This chapter tries to explore the gradual realisation of character in Thomas’s work vis-a-vis the changing outlook of adolescence and early adulthood, the working-class culture in which Thomas grew up, and his concern to develop some of the themes and preoccupations of the more introspective, early work.

Give me my glasses. No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out. I want to see.

(Mrs. Pugh, Under Milk Wood)