Key Quote
“"I'm not just somebody's mother. I'm me"”
Jo · Act Two
Focus: “me”
Jo's double declaration — rejecting definition through motherhood and asserting autonomous selfhood — is the play's most explicitly feminist statement.
Technique 1 — NEGATIVE THEN POSITIVE DEFINITION
Jo defines herself through a two-step process: first negation ('I'm NOT just somebody's mother') then assertion ('I'm ME'). This structure — deny the imposed identity, then claim the authentic one — mirrors the process of feminist self-definition: women must reject the roles assigned to them (mother, wife, daughter) before they can discover who they actually are.
The diminishing word 'just' does important work: Jo does not reject motherhood entirely but rejects being ONLY a mother. 'Just' targets the reduction of women to a single function. Jo can be a mother AND herself — what she rejects is the cultural insistence that motherhood REPLACES personal identity rather than adding to it.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
Jo progresses from externally defined (somebody's daughter, somebody's girlfriend) to self-defined ('I'm me'). This progression is the play's central arc: the journey from being defined by others to defining oneself. The progress is hard-won — Jo achieves selfhood not through support but through the ABSENCE of support, forced to become herself because nobody else will do it for her.
Key Words
Technique 2 — PRONOUN EMPHASIS — 'I' AND 'ME'
Both sentences begin and end with first-person pronouns: 'I'm not... I'm me.' The pronoun 'I' appears twice, and the reflexive 'me' closes the statement. This pronominal saturation (filling a sentence with self-referencing pronouns) makes Jo linguistically central to her own statement — she is both subject and object, both the speaker and the subject spoken about. The grammar enacts the self-possession it describes.
The phrase 'I'm me' is a tautology (a statement that is true by definition) — of course 'I' am 'me.' But in context, it is revolutionary because the society around Jo constantly tries to make her be someone else: Helen's daughter, Peter's stepdaughter, the Boy's lover, the baby's mother. 'I'm me' resists all of these by asserting an identity that is irreducible to any role.
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Context (AO3)
1950s MOTHERHOOD
In 1950s Britain, motherhood was presented as a woman's primary identity and greatest fulfilment. Jo's rejection of definition-through-motherhood was culturally radical — it challenged the dominant ideology that women existed primarily as mothers.
DELANEY'S OWN LIFE
Delaney wrote *A Taste of Honey* at 18, before she became a mother. The play anticipates feminist arguments about motherhood and identity that would not enter mainstream discourse until the 1960s and 1970s. Delaney's insight was ahead of its time.
Key Words
WOW — THE SECOND SEX (De Beauvoir)
Simone de Beauvoir's *The Second Sex* (1949) — published just nine years before Delaney's play — argues that women are defined as the 'Other' in relation to men: they do not exist as autonomous subjects but only as men's wives, mothers, and daughters. Jo's 'I'm me' is a direct enactment of de Beauvoir's central argument: she refuses to be defined as 'somebody's' (always in relation to another person) and insists on being 'me' (an autonomous identity). De Beauvoir argues that women must transcend the role of Other and claim the status of Subject — the one who defines rather than is defined. Jo's two-sentence statement performs this transcendence grammatically: the first sentence ('I'm not just somebody's mother') rejects the Other position; the second ('I'm me') claims the Subject position. De Beauvoir would recognise Jo as a working-class existentialist heroine — a woman who, without academic philosophy, arrives at the same insight: identity is not given but CLAIMED.
Key Words