Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

Clive

Clive is definitely the bad guy in this one. To be fair, he's the product of a racist, sexist British society, but (and this is a big but and we cannot lie) he's also a total hypocrite scumbag. For starters, Clive has an affair with Mrs. Saunders and says all kinds of crazy dirty stuff about having sex with her dead body. But then he turns around and tries to act all prim and proper in front of others.

Worse yet, Clive actually gets really mad when he finds out that his wife Betty has kissed another man. He even follows this up with a menacing, guilt-tripping comment to Betty, "If I shot you every British man and woman would applaud me" (1.3.173-174). And toward the end of the play Clive is really the one character who hasn't learned a thing. He's still totally stuck in his ways and won't give up his sexism, especially when he tries to tell Betty that she's "not that sort of woman" (273-274), meaning that she's not a liberated modern woman.

Sorry, Clive, but the modern world just doesn't have a place for your kind of thinking anymore, at least the progressive world envisioned by Churchill. A quick scan of Internet message boards, however, will show that sexism, racism, and homophobia are unfortunately still alive and well in the world.