Among the men of the house a continuing, back-biting struggle for power rumbles along, characterized by ageism and mutual attempts at feminization, in which power accrues to the man most successfully portraying himself as virile and heterosexually active. Into the midst of this walk Teddy and Ruth. Teddy stands aside from combat with the other men, though not before suffering an apparent defeat on his own ground – that of the detached intellect – at the hands of his brother Lenny. Gradually, attempts by the men to dominate Ruth are turned by her to her advantage, and she emerges as probably the most powerful figure in the play. There is room for debate on this last, especially given the final stage direction: “Lenny stands, watching”, but at the very least Ruth emerges in an unexpectedly strong position. At the end, Teddy has left the house, and a tableau on stage has Ruth seated at its centre, apparently willing to become a prostitute while role-playing the maternal figure at the middle of the house. Around her, the men, apart from Lenny, lie or kneel, beseeching her favour.
Whatever degree of ambiguity surrounds The Homecoming, the play's primary engagement with gender politics and conflict is inescapable, as is the final dominance of Ruth, though the terms on which that dominance is achieved leave considerable scope for debate. Some commentators have regarded Ruth as a kind of victim, increasingly degraded by the power of her own sexuality as it is awakened in this seedy, testosterone-fuelled North London den. And there is some credibility in the view that the madonna/whore role that she has adopted by the end of the play is one defined by patriarchal power. On such a reading, Ruth becomes a male-defined creature, to be worshipped as madonna or treated as a sexual object – a whore. Against this view must be set the consistency with which Ruth wins her battles – for example with Lenny over the glass of water; with Teddy when she ignores his command to put her coat on and leave with him; and with all except perhaps Lenny in the final tableau.
The title and the blood relationship between the male characters are two areas of debate within the play. As to the title, the question is, “whose homecoming is this?” At first glance, it has to be Teddy's return to his boyhood home. However, given Teddy's absence from the scene at the end of the play, and Ruth's very central presence, perhaps it is actually Ruth who has come home. Of course, Ruth as an individual has not been here before, but Ruth as the female archetype, the replacement for the dead Jessie, may very well be coming home. Alternatively, Ruth may be coming home to a situation in which she can achieve a measure of personal fulfilment, transcending the limitations imposed on her by her role as Teddy's wife.
The question of the blood relationships in the play has its significance in that, if the late Jessie was a prostitute, then there is at least a possibility that Lenny, Teddy and Joey are all the offspring of different fathers. Max, in fact, need not necessarily be the father of any of the boys – a conjecture made the more colourable by the very different masculine stereotypes embodied in the men. Whatever the true position as regards the paternity of the sons, there seems no reason to doubt that Jessie was in fact their mother. This provides something of a link between Jessie and Ruth, who is also the mother of three sons, perhaps reinforcing the notion that it is she who is coming home.
The development of Ruth is central to the play. There is a sense in which it does not really matter whether her position at the centre of the final tableau represents entrapment or liberation. What is fairly clear is that, for her, this new role is preferable to her previous one as wife and mother in America. To that extent, much of the play's power lies in its ability to explode the dream of bourgeois marriage: if life in this grim North London household with the prospect of being forced into prostitution is, for Ruth, a pleasanter prospect than her previous married life, then how hellish that married life must have been. Ruth's description of America: “it's all rock. And sand [....] And there's lots of insects there” gives no very comfortable impression of the place, and contrasts very much with Teddy's assertion that “She's a very popular woman. She's got lots of friends. It's a great life, at the University”. This represents one of several occasions in the play where Ruth presents a bleakly matter-of-fact picture of her life, and thus confronts a bland, conventional, essentially masculine view of what life is like for women. The challenge that she mounts to a widespread misogyny may thus establish her as the completed female figure for whom the women in Pinter's earlier plays had been prototypes.
Ruth's role at the end of the play as victor or victim – perhaps both simultaneously – embodies the central ambiguity of The Homecoming. However, this central ambiguity can be represented in a number of ways. For example, Ruth's vitality may be necessary in order to enable the male characters to escape the stasis of their existence and render themselves open to change. Such a reading presumably requires the confinement of Ruth to the house, as a sacrificial prisoner/victim, no matter how much power she may wield therein. It must also call into question the role of Teddy in bringing Ruth to the house in the first place, a matter raised by a number of commentators. Could it be, for example, that Teddy has intentionally delivered Ruth to the house precisely in order that she can become the new mother-figure at the centre of the household? Given the forcefulness demonstrated by Ruth in the course of the play, she might prove insufficiently tractable to flourish as the conventional image of a provincial American university campus wife, and Teddy could thus be relieving himself of a continuing embarrassment by this manoeuvre. However, a more straightforward approach would treat Ruth's relationship with the men in the house as a questioning and critique of conventionally misogynistic masculine attitudes towards women