Summary
The second act begins like the first, with John and Carol seated across from each other in John’s office. John launches into a monologue about his love of teaching and obsession with tenure. He explains that tenure gives him the security to purchase a home and support his family. These are all jeopardized, he says, by a complaint that Carol has filed against him. While John is certain that the complaint will be dismissed, he understands that Carol is angry and tells her that this will impact his life, as well. For John, the complaint which was sent to the tenure committee was personally painful because it was a manifestation of his own failings as a teacher.
John then asks Carol if there is a way to solve the conflict, which Carol reads as John trying to persuade her to withdraw the report. Turning the discussion back to Carol, John asks her what he has done to hurt her. Rather than provide a detailed answer, Carol answers that a list of his actions are contained within the report to the tenure committee. In response, John reads from the report, which catalogs a variety of instances from the previous act. From Carol’s language it is clear that these events were organized to create a narrative of inappropriate and predatory behavior. John is particularly enraged by the parts of the report that suggest that he attempted to cultivate an intimate relationship with Carol by referencing his feelings toward her, touching her, and discussing problems with his home life.
Throughout their discussion about the report, John is particularly concerned with Carol’s feelings and repeatedly asks her what he has done to her. Carol replies that her feelings are irrelevant—all that matters are the facts included in the report. John once again offers to help her, but Carol refuses, saying that she no longer needs his help and that he no longer holds power over her. In an attempt to gain her sympathy, John mentions his family and the effect that this report will have on his personal life and on his purchase of the house, in particular.
Carol ignores this manipulative attempt and bolsters her claims by informing John that she is meeting with him on behalf of a larger group, all of whom have accused John of wrongdoing. From this, she extrapolates a more dubious accusation: that John’s persona and writing on the higher education system constitute direct attacks on students like her, who pay large sums of money and work hard to succeed in school.
Analysis
In this section, the play’s central, paradoxical conflict comes into full view. Again and again, John asks Carol to discuss her feelings, and to consider his feelings, with regard to the accusations she has made against him. In John’s worldview, the most important part of this conflict is emotional. He wants to understand what he has done to hurt Carol, and he wants Carol to understand that she is hurting him. As John sees it, his intentions are of the utmost importance. Since his only intentions were to be an engaging, empathetic teacher, Carol should, he feels, act sympathetically towards him.
Carol puts less of a premium on emotion, preferring to discuss the bare facts of her and John’s history. In large part, this is because Carol—as we come to understand through her words, actions, and engagement in an activist community— has begun to view the world in terms of patterns and structures. Rather than seeing herself and John as lone actors engaged in a singular conflict, she has begun to see the conflict as exemplary of a broader one between genders and social classes. John’s behavior, she believes, is part of a pattern in which men in positions of power impose that power inappropriately on powerless people like Carol.
According to Carol’s worldview, her and John’s emotions don’t much matter—especially because, if emotions are privileged in the conversation, people will tend to care more about the feelings of a person in power like John, and dismiss the feelings of a young woman like herself. Rather, Carol wants to let the facts speak for themselves. If their conversation is limited to a discussion of what has actually happened, rather than what people intended, then, Carol believes, people will begin to see that John’s well-intentioned behavior is remarkably similar to the ill-intentioned manipulation that we often associate with sexual harassment.
The lines in which John reads Carol’s litany of complaints against him represent these conflicting worldviews starkly. Many items on the list seem, as John reads them, like misrepresentations of their most recent interaction, removed from context to make them sound more inappropriate than they actually were. Like John, the reader’s first reaction is likely to be surprise and dismay. However, as Carol points out, the facts are undeniable. Every single item on the list did, in fact, occur. John may not have intended his actions to be threatening, but, as we reconsider and reflect on the list of complaints, we may start to understand Carol’s perspective. After all, how much context would be appropriate? The emotional, social, and political complexity of her and John’s relationship is so vast that she would never be able to adequately explain it all—the one thing she can do is lay out the bare facts, which she has done.
Ultimately, Carol’s list of accusations becomes a symbol of the slippery nature of objectivity. The list, as John acknowledges, is objectively correct, yet it does not represent John’s reality or perception of events. David Mamet shows us, through Carol’s letter, that two intelligent people can agree on the plain facts of a situation and still fundamentally disagree as to how to interpret those facts.
