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CHAPTER I1
SHAW AS A SOCIAL REFORMER
PYGMALZON
By nature Shaw was a tireless crusader for social justice and
righteousness; he was a propagandist for the intellectual enlightenment of the
people. He was a zealous missionary and social reform was his mission. He
tried to liberate his age from, "Humbug, mental sloth, social apathy,
superstition, sentimentalism, collective selfishness, and all the static ideas
which have not been consciously subjected to the tests of real life and honest
thought."
In Pygmalion Shaw has focused on the problem of education. To
educate is to give new life to those who receive the education. This problem is
presented through the medium of a lesser theme which is national one
confined to the English. Another Problem presented in the play is the
predicament of Alfied Doolittle. The dramatist highlighted particularly his
problem.
In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a king of Cyprus who fell in love
with a statue of Aphrodite. But Ovid, the Roman poet (43 B.C.-A.D.18),
invents a more sophisticated version in his Metamorphoses. According to
him, Pygmalion was a sculptor, a worker in marble, bronze, and ivory. He
was exclusively devoted to his art. He had an image of beauty in his mind and
no woman could come up to it in the world. He, therefore, worked over his
statue from morning to evening in search of a loveliness beyond his powers of
expression. In fact, the statues of Pygmalion were always far more beautiful
than real human beings, and each statue was more nearly perfect than the last.
Still in each new statue, Pygmalion felt something lacking. While his
admirers stood entranced before his statues, he never cared to look on them.
But was whole heartedly absorbed in his next attempt.
Finally, in his quest for ideal beauty, he began to work on an ivory
statue of a girl who satisfied him in every way. Even before this statue was
finished, he would lay the chisel and stare at his work for an hour or so.
Tracing in his mind the beauty that had as yet only partly unfolded itself. By
the time, the ivory statue was completed, Pygmalion could think of nothing
else. In his very dreams, the girl in the statue hawed him and seemed to
wake up for, him and come alive. The mere contemplation of the finished
statue filled him with exquisite pleasure. He would sit gazing at the maiden,
whom he had given the name Galatea. Often he imagined that he saw her
move and asked himself what a joy it would be if she were actually living. In
this obsession with the beauty of his dreams, Pygmalion wore out and became
pale and exhausted.
ARer long labour and careful patient working, the statue was actually
finished. The legend has it that half the night Pygmalion gazed at the beautiful
image: then with a hopeless sigh he went to bed, haunted as ever by his
dreams. Then came the day of the festival of Aphrodite, the goddess of
beauty. Pygmalion had always felt a special devotion for this goddess because
he, by his very nature, was a seeker after beauty. He had, therefore, never
failed to give Aphrodite the honour that was due to her. To put it more truly,
he had lived all his life in the worship of the goddess. As custom had it, the
devotees of Aphrodite offered her many splendid gifts. This time when
Pygmalion approached the altar, he prayed earnestly and saw the fire that
burned there leap suddenly in flame. This excitement stirred him and he came
back to his statue though without knowing as to what he would encounter on
his return. His Galatea was as he had left her. He looked at her longingly once
more, and as on several former occasions, he seemed to see her move. On a
sudden impulse, he approached Galatea and held her in his arms.
Certainly by the animating grace of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty,
the statue was really moving. He felt the hard ivory grow soft and warm like
wax in his clasp. He saw the lips grow red and the cheeks blush faintly pink.
Then Galatea opened her eyes and looked at Pygmalion. The red lips parted
slightly and as their creator kissed them, they pressed against his own.
Pygmalion's dream became a perfect reality, when Galatea stepped down
from her pedestal into his arms as a flesh and blood girl. In course of time, the
two were happily married.
The next day Pygmalion went wit11 his lady love Galatea to pray at
Aphrodite's shrine. The beloved thanked the goddess for the gift of love, the
lover expressed gratitude that his dreams and prayers had been fully answered
and his lifelong devotion to the goddess of beauty had been rewarded in a
most befitting manner.
Bernard Shaw has mixed the Pygmalion myth with the Cinderella fairy
tale. After the death of his wife, a rich merchant mamed a woman with two
fair but evil daughters. The child of the first marriage was set to do all the
work and to sleep among the ashes. One day the king gave a grand ball. The
step sisters dressed and set off but Cinderella was left behind weeping.
However, a white bird brought her a lovely dress and Cinderella went to the
ball where she at once won the prince's heart. As she rushed back to her
home, she dropped her slipper and the prince vowed he would wed the maid
who owned it. One step-sister cut off her toe, the other her heel to make it fit,
but the prince was not deceived, and he ultimately married Cinderella.
In Shaw's play, Higgins is Pygmalion and Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, an
uneducated girl who sells,flowersin a London Street. Professor Higgins keeps
the flower girl for six months in his laboratory. She is well trained and
becomes a perfect, refined lady of London. The experiment of Higgins has
succeeded and Eliza Doolittle can pass for a duchess. Thus Higgins is the
creator of a new Eliza, but he does not marry his creation, as Pygmalion does
in the Greek legend.
Thus Shaw has not followed the Greek legend. Eliza Doolittle is the
creation of Professor Higgins. But when she becomes a refined and cultured
lady, she shows no inclination to many Professor Higgins. The Professor also
does not like to marry her. He neglects her after the experiment is over. Eliza
Doolittle then leaves the place as a free woman. Professor Higgins is quite
unsentimental and unromantic in his approach to Eliza Doolittle. He has lived
a life of a scholar and his approach to sex is quite different. Mrs.Higgins, his
mother, has influenced the life of his son so much that he does not love any
other woman except his own mother. Of this strange behaviour of Professor
Higgins, Bernard Shaw says-"If
an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich
mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without
harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to
make her house beautifid, she sets a standard for him against which very few
women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his
affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism, from his specifically sexual
impulses."
It is Oedipus complex which comes in the way of Higgins' marriage
with Eliza, his Galatea, and his own creation. According to Shaw's
philosophy, Eliza-Galatea could not have married Higgins who is old; the Life
Force would prompt her to marry Freddy who is much younger, and is likely
to make a better father to her children, in the conflict between genius
(Higgins) and Life Force (working through Eliza) genius is defeated, and
obeying the dictates of the Life Force, Eliza turns to Freddy and marries him.
Thus Shaw has made the Pygmalion legend the basis of his play, but he
has considerably deviated from it and modified it to suit his purposes. He has
also mixed it up with the Cinderella fairy-tale. The name Cinderella has not
come to stand for any girl who achieves happiness and success after leading a
miserable life. Like Cinderella, in the fairy-tale of that name, Eliza leads a
wretched life for a longtime. Her step-mother does not love her and her father
compels her to earn her own living as she is old enough to do so. Hence we
find her to be a poverty-striken girl selling flowers at the comer of Covent
Garden. But then suddenly a change comes in her life. She is 'created' into a
cultured lady who can easily pass off as a Duchess, and is then loved by
Freddy, a handsome Youngman, who manies her, and with whom she leads a
happy life. He is the prince of the Cinderella story who enters the life of Eliza,
marries her, ind makes her happy and comfortable.
Bernard Shaw has called the play Pygmalion, and added a sub-title to
it, 'Y Romance". As is well known, Shaw was an anti-romantic and in one
play after another lie has punctured age-old romantic notions. Thus in his
Arms and the Man, he has shattered the romantic notions of love and war, and
in his Man and Superman. he has shown that it is the woman, and not the
man, who is the courter and the chaser. It is the woman who chases her man
relentlessly and ultimately marries him. Beauty and sex appeal of a woman
are shown to be traps to capture the man who is likely to make a suitable
father and husband.
Thus Shaw is an anti-romantic, an iconoclast, and this is true of the
present play also. No doubt, the transformation of a shabby, dirty and cockney
speaking flower girl into a fascinating lady, fit enough to pass for a Duchess
even in the garden party of an ambassador, is romantic enough, in the sense
that such creations' are not usual but Pygmalion cannot be regarded as a
romance, because in it the heroine Eliza, does not marry Higgins the hero.
The transformation of Eliza is romantic enough, but the play does not have
the conventional ending of a romance, for the hero and the heroine are not in
love and are not happily married at the end. Rather, the heroine throws the
slippers of the hero into his face, and goes out of his house in anger. Higgins'
intcrest in Eliza is merely scientific and it comes to an end as soon as he has
achieved success in his experiment. He is cold and scientific and not at all a
lover.
However, sexual love is an essential element in a romance and this
element of romance is provided by the Freddy-Eliza love-story. Freddy falls
deeply in love with Eliza when he meets her at the house of Mrs.Higgins. He
is simply fascinated by her and from that day onwards he begins to haunt
Wimpole Street where Eliza lives in Higgins' house. Freddy keeps looking at
Eliza's room every night until the lights go out, when he says: "Good night,
darling, darling, darling." Freddy thus becomes a love-lorn man.
When one night, Eliza comes out of Higgins' house because she can no
longer endure his neglect and bullying, she encounters Freddy in the Street
and asks him what he is doing there. Freddy replies that he spends most of his
nights here in this street because it is the only place where he feels happy. He
then tells her that she is the loveliest, the dearest being for him; and then,
losing all self-control, he smothers her with kisses. She, hungry for comfort,
responds fully to his love-making; and they stand there in the street in each
other's arms till they are interrupted by a police constable. The lovers then
flee from that spot and halt at another place where again they embrace each
other but are once again interrupted by another police constable. Eventually,
they get into a taxi and spend the rest of the night driving about the town.
Subsequently, Eliza tells Higgins that Freddy has been writing very lengthy
love-letters to her and that she has decided to marry him. Now, this whole
episode is romantic even though it appears only towards the end.
In the Appendix which Shaw has added to the play, he has told us that
Higgins could not love and marry, because he was a scientist, and because no
woman could come up to the level of his mother who was his ideal, and to
whom he was deeply a,!tached. We may say that he was the victim of
"Oedipus complex" even though he lives apart from his mother. Similarly,
Eliza could not love and marry Higgins because the Life Force working
within her prompted her to love and marry Freddy, who is young and healthy,
and so is likely to make a better father for her children. Indeed, throughout the
play, there is no sexual attraction or talk of love between Eliza and Higgins.
The play is hot a romance in the sense that the hero and the heroine
fall in love and are happily married in the end. According to A.C. Ward,
"Pygmalion is not a romance, as it could rightly have been called if Higgins
and Eliza had fallen in love and married. It is a problem play, and the problem
goes much deeper than the bare story told in Pygmalion. Every teacher who
sets out to fight ignorance is in a similar position with regard to his pupils as
Higgins was, with regard to Eliza. He leads them towards a new way of life
and is compelled to leave them at its threshold to go on by themselves."' But
the element of romance is provided by the creation of Eliza into an entirely
new 'creature' and the Eliza-Freddy love-story.
Eliza-Higgins relationship has elicited a lot of unfavourable comment
from the critics of the play. They have regarded it as unsatisfactory. In their
view the play should have ended with the marriage of Eliza and Higgins, for
Shaw has called the play a Romance' and in a romance the hero and the
heroine are always married in the end. Critics forget that Shaw was antiromantic all his life and in this play, too, he has been true to himself. It is also
pointed out that in the Pygmalion-Galatea legend, Pygmalion marries Galatea,
so in the present play also, Pygmalion-Higgins should have married GalateaEliza. But in the play, such a marriage does not take place. Hence they
consider the ending of the play defective. It is also considered ambiguous, for
in the play itself Eliza does not marry Freddy, but we are merely told of it in
the Appendix which Shaw has added to it. The marriage has not been enacted
on the stage as it ought to have been done. However, if any one we examine
the matter in some detail, he will find that the marriage of Higgins and Eliza
was an impossibility, andthe play can not have ended otherwise than it does.
Higgins is representative of the Shavian Life Force, fulfilling the
purpast: of the Life Force in his own way by using Eliza as a means of
satisfying his professional vanity, rather than as an individual with her own
spark of life. Throughout the play, Higgin's attitude towards Eliza is
consistently disinterested. Even at the point of accepting Eliza as his student,
, shall we
he treats here as an object: 'shall we ask this baggage to sit d ~ w nor
throw her out of the win do^?"^
Even when Eliza claims that she has feelings, Higgins is preoccupied
with her grammar:
PICKERING: (in good-humoured remonstrance) Does it occur to you,
Higgins, that'the girl has some feelings?
HIGGINS: (looking critically at her) Oh no, I don't think so. Not any
feelings that we need bother about. (Cheerily) Have you, Eliza?
ELIZA: I got my feelings same as anyone else. HIGGINS (to
Pickering, reflectively) You see the difficulty?
PICKERING: Eh? What difficulty?
HIGGINS: To get her to talk grammar. The mere pronunciation is easy
enough'
Valency argues that it is clear that Eliza never interest him as a woman,
though he gets used to being assisted by her. He makes his attitude towards
Eliza quite clear to Pickering:" You see, she'll be a pupil, and teaching would
be impossible unless pupils were sacredW4
Higgins is a typical Shavian hero who is not at all a romantic, but a
rationalist and realist to the core, Shaw takes pleasure in puncturing and
shattering romantic notions and illusions of all kinds. Shaw has done so in
each one of his plays, and Pygmalion is no exception in this respect. Higgins
says to Pickering "I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me,
she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that
the nioment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and
tyrannical. Women upset everythmg. When you let them into your life, you
find that the woman is driving at one thing and you are driving at another."
Higgins wants to live life only at the cerebral level. He is a book-worm fit
more for science and literature, philosophy and art, than for the company of a
passionate woman. He fr-ankly tells Eliza: "You find me cold, unfeeling,
selfish, don't you ? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like.
Many some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of
lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with."
Higgins is an unsatisfactory companion for Eliza. He likes her, grows
accustomed to her, but does not fall in love with her. He is deeply motivated
by a desire for her companionship, but not marriage. Shaw explains the sexual
attitude of Higgins towards Eliza in Oedipus complex terms. He tells us in the
Appendix: "If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has
intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a
cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house
beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can
struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his
sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This
makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people (like
Eliza), who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or
disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently literature, painting,
sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if
they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that
Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of
Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural."
The following dialogue between Higgins and his mother Mrs.Higgins
brings out the Oedipus complex in Higgins:
"HIGGINS. Not your part of it. I have picked up a girl.
Mrs. HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?
HIGGINS. Not at all. I don't mean a love affair.
MRS HIGGINS, What a pity!
HIGGINS. Why?
MRS HIGGINS. Well, you never fall in love with anyone under fortyfive. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking
young women about?
HIGGINS. Oh, I can't be bothered with young women. My idea of a
lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible. I shall never get into the
way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be
changed". .
He idealises his mother, and cannot establish Satisfactory relations
with any other woman who does not come upto that standard. As the last lines
of the dialogue quoted above show that he is a victim of Oedipus Complex
which may be explained as the excessive love of a person for the parent of the
opposite sex. As N. Alexander points out, there is certainly "emotional
inadequacy' in Higgins as becomes clear from the last lines of the above
dialogue. Therefore, these lines are not to be used when an impression has to
be created that Eliza will marry Higgins. My Fair Lady does not use them and
consequently Alan Lerner is free to bring Eliza on at the end when Higgins is
sitting playing over old records of her voice, turning off the record, softly
speaking the words. I washed my face and hands before I came, I did;' thus
making clear the emotional relationship between the two.
C.E.M. Joad gives even a better explanation for the emotionally
unstatisfylng relationship between Higgins and Eliza. He says "it is not
Higgins, the original thinker and artist, whom Eliza marries but Freddy. There
is a double moral here. First, it is only in the lives of men who are both
common and ordinary that Shaw is prepared to recognize the woman motif as
playing a dominating part. The degree to which a man rises above his fellows
to the level of the creative painter, poet or musician or the original thinker in
philosophy, science, morals or politics or to that of the adventurer, explorer or
pioneer in the world of action, is in inverse ratio to the power of women over
his life and
action^"^.
Hence, Higgins does not cany out his linguistic experiment because of
an interest in Eliza but because of an interest in his job-that is to say, in the
thing itself. When the job is done, having no fiuther use for her, he drops her.
She reacts in the first instance as Cleopatra reacts to Caesar's treatment-that
is to say, she is hurt and humiliated on finding that she has no influence over
Higgins who is indifferent to her. But presently, and here is the second
mora1,she sees quite clearly that Higgins won't do, that he never in fact would
have done, and appropriates the good-natured but commonplace Freddy.
In so doing, she exhibits herself as a consistent exponent of Shaw's
philosophy. Life Force working through Eliza tells her that Freddy, who is
young and healthy, would make a better breadwinner and father for her
children, and hence in marrying Eliza to Freddy, Shaw remains true to his
philosophy.
In Shaw's plays a woman thinks of the man whom she loves and
marries both as a warrior who must make his way and as a child who has lost
his way. In his first capacity, her instinct is to strengthen and encourage him
that he may go out into the world, make his way and earn bread for her and
her children. She also feels impelled to comfort and reassure him,
soothing his bruised spirit and soothing the hurts that the world has given him.
And she feels and acts in this way because of the impulsion of the Life Force
which expresses itself in her as a persistent drive to maintain and conserve life
at the level which it has already reached and to keep it smoothly bctioning
at that level.
Now, men like ~igginsdon't want mothering and reassuring, except in
unrepresentative moments. In their normal moments, they are too full of
confidence in themselves since they are originators and innovators through
wllom life seeks to raise itself to higher levels, they are, as is seen, unlikely to
prove reliable bread-winners. Hence the women's instinct is to fight shy of
them in the role of permanent mates and fathers for their children. It is for this
reason that Eliza chooses Freddy Hill as her marriage partner. Speaking about
the man of her destiny, she says: "And if he's weak and poor and wants me,
may be he'd make me happier than my betters that bully me and don't want
me."
Pygmalion ends on an ambiguous note. It does not make clear whether
Eliza and Freddy really marry each other or not, whether their financial
difficulties are overcome, and whether they lead a happy and comfortable
married life. All these questions are discussed and explained in the Appendix
which the dramatist has added to the play. Hence the Appendix is an essential
adjunct to the play; it is essential for explaining much that is leR vague and
ambiguous in the play itself.
At the close of Act V, Higgins is surprised to hear that Eliza is going to
marry Freddy, and he remarks derisively: "Pickering! Nonsense: she is going
to marry Freddy. Ha ! ha! Freddy! Freddy! Ha! ha! ha ! (He roars with
laughter as the play ends). AAer this speech Shaw does not say anything about
the celebration of Eliza's marriage with Freddy. Therefore, Shaw clears in the
Appendix many obscure points lefi undecided in the play. He begins the
sequel with these words: "The rest of the story need not be shown in action
and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so
enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs
of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of happy endings' to misfit
all stories."
In this sequel, Shaw tells us that Higgins was first and foremost a great
professor of phonetics. ~e had concentrated all his powers of head and heart
into the study of science of language. He was not attracted towards anything
else. Thus Shaw has explained in the following words: "Now, though Eliza
was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins's formidable powers of
resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was
instinctively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or
come between him and his mother, To put it shortly, she knew that for some
mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according
to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and
fondest and warmest interest."
Higgins does not care for anything in life except phonetics. As a
reaction to the strong will of Higgins not to many any woman, Eliza decides
not to m q Higgins. Freddy had been writing love-letters to her every day.
He is young, nearly twenty years younger than Higgins. He is a gentleman
and speaks a very decent language. He is nicely dressed and is quite fit to
many Eliza.
The relations between Freddy and Eliza are not romantic but their
marriage is going to be held on realistic grounds. In the sequel, Shaw has
explained that Eliza would have committed an error in marrying Higgins. She
would have been a slave to Higgins all her life. "This being the state of human
affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and
Higgins ? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins's slippers or
to a life-time of Freddy fetching hers? "
Her reasons for marrying Freddy are economic and not romantic. Shaw
has explained at length the causes that have led Eliza to choose Freddy and
give up the hope of marrying Professor Higgins. All the intricate motives for
the marriage of Eliza with Freddy have been explained in the Appendix to the
play.
The Appendix is a scintillating expression of Shaw, justifying the
marriage of Freddy with Eliza. The piece is marked with sharp logical
arguments. But from the view-point of dramatic art, this addition is definitely
a drawback. This matter should have been dramatized at the end of the play or
in the middle of the play. Had the play been allowed to take, what in terms of
drama is, its predestined course, Eliza would have married Higgins- for better
or for worse. It would have made trouble-but
making life means making
trouble. The issue is left in the air when the curtain falls, but a long postscript
to the printed play informs the reader by a meandering rigmarole that Eliza
married the young man to whom she spoke quite startling words in Act I1 and
that they at length found good in a flower-and-vegetable shop subsidized by
Colonel Pickering. Show's anti-romanticism here carried him into a maze of
improbability whereas the conventional romantic solution would have
conformed him aptly to probability and, would have also satisfied
requirement of poetic justice.
If Shaw had made Eliza marry Higgins, the play would have had
greater popular appeal, but it would have become a romantic play. Therefore,
to save it from romanticism Shaw wrote the sequel and proved that the
marriage of Eliza and Freddy was most suitable, but critics have differed from
Shaw. A.C. Ward writes in this respect: "The account of Eliza's marriage to
Freddy Eynsford Hill after the play ends is one of Bernard Shaw's least
successfi~lpieces of writing. He was anxious not to give Pygmalion the kind
of 'happy ending' that audiences would expect, and he, therefore, rehsed to
have Eliza marry Higgins. But it often happens in plays and novels that
characters come to life on their own account and want to behave differently
from what the author intended. Although Higgins and Eliza might not have
'lived happily ever after', as the heroes and heroines of fairy-tales usually do,
they would have certainly been better matched than Eliza and the feeble
Freddy could be. In his determination to make his Romance unromantic,
Shaw twisted Pygrnalion from what would have been, by the principles of
drama, its natural end."6
The prose sequel clarifies two other points as well, that have not been
dramatised. First, Clara Hill is snobbish and she would have created a row
over the marriage of Freddy and Eliza, Eliza being much lower in social status
than the Hill family. However, in the Appendix it is explained that the
difficulty was overcome by Clara's herself taking up an occupation much
lower than their status. When Freddy visited the Hills to make the
announcement that he and Eliza were to marry, he found, "the little household
already convulsed by a prior announcement fiom Clara that she also was
going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started
by a fellow Wellsian And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the
expected opposition to the flower-shop melted awy. The shop is in the
arcade of a riiilway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The anti-romantic Shaw does not say that the shop was a grand success
from the very beginning owing to the earlier experience of Eliza, He is antiromantic to the core and tells us of the hard reality that, "the shop did not pay
for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to
keep it. True. Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the
names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded
when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap. pretentious,
and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but
enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his
ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing else: and
Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had
acquired a certain familiarity with the language of Milton from her struggles
to qualify herself for winning Higgins's bet, could not write out a bill without
utterly disgracing the establishment."
Freddy had not the slightest knowledge of accounts or business.
"Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank
account meant. And the pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy
backed up Eliza in her obstinate refbsal to believe that they could save money
by engaging a book-keeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they
argued, could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you
already could not make both ends meet ? But the Colonel after making the
ends meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to
the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the uproarious
derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anytlung
was a big joke that never pulled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics,
has to be learned." It may also be added here that it was the help of Colonel
Pickering that had enabled the two to set up the shop, and it was his continued
help for sometime more which kept it going.
However, Shaw tells us, that the two struggled hard to make their
business a success. They worked hard at learning book-keeping, shorthand,
and type-writing, and other details of commercial dealings. Eliza learned how
to write well from Higgins, though it was a great humiliation for her to make
a request to the Professor. The result was that their business soon began to
prosper, and Pickering's help was no longer needed. Soon they also enlarged
their business and also turned greengrocers and found that selling vegetables
was much more profitable.
The dramatist concludes with the remark that Eliza continued to enjoy
good relations both with Higgins and Pickering, but she could no longer be
bullied by Higgins. Rather, she could always have her own in their frequent
war of words. She often wished that she and Higgins could be alone together
for sometime to enable her to drag him down from his high pedestal. But
when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished
from the life of dramas and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the
Colonel: and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does
quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether
agreeable.
The Appendix is not superfluous; it is essential to clarify much that has
been left vague and uncertain in the play itself, and that could not be
embodied in the play and enacted on the stage, for limitations of time and
space. Two hours traffic on the stage carries with it, its own constraints, and
Shaw was quite alive to them. Indeed, we would not be far wrong if we say
that the Appendix is the outcome of Shaw's empiricism, an expression of his
sense of the realities of stagecraft.
Shaw's Pygmalion is a complex work of art and as such a number of
themes and ideas stand out. However, its central theme is the education of
Eliza Doolittle, and the progress of her soul horn spiritual darkness to light.
She achieves spiritual illumination through successive stages of despair, selfrealisation, illumination and the ultimate achievement of social identity and a
sense of belonging.
When the play opens, we find that Eliza is an illiterate ignorant girl,
selling flowers in Covent Garden and speaking the kind of cockney which
only the native Londoners can understand. She is at this time crude, illmannered, and saucy girl. On account of her low-class origin, Eliza has
received no education at all. When a bystander tells her that the note-taker
might be a police detective who would bring against her a charge that she has
been soliciting customers for herself, she feels alarmed. But, although she is
not a timid girl, even at this stage, when she is poor and is leading a wretched
existence, she shows enough courage to speak to the note-taker in a defiant
manner. Her going home in a taxi, when she can hardly afford this luxury,
also shows a spirit of defiance in her and as also her pride and ambition. She
feels that she is not an ordinary girl, but a girl who can hold her own against
heavy odds, that she can rise very high if she is not crushed by adverse
circumstances.
Her education begins when the very next day, she comes to the
residence of Professor Higgins to take lessons in phonetics. Higgins accepts
the bet of Pickering that he would transform the shabby flower girl into a lady
who would be able to pass on as a Duchess in the garden of an ambassador.
The process of her education is a dificult one. First she has to be scrubbed
and cleaned and dressed decently. She creates difficulties, defiantly refuses to
be cowed down by Higgins, and threatens to call the police if she is ill-treated
and coerced.
Her education in phonetics is a severe ordeal for her, but she has
courage, talents and determination and so is able to face the ordeal. As her
education proceeds, she realises that the difference between a flower girl is
not how she behaves but how she is treated. Her experience is that apart 6om
the thingsany one can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of g-s
and so on what gives estimation to a person is the attitude of the person to
whom he or she is related. Eliza became a duchess in the eyes of others,
except in those of Higgins whose pupil she was and who could not forget her
earlier status. Higgins has picked her up as "a guttersnipe" girl and even when
his science of phonetics had refmed her speech and improved her personal
impression, he continues to treat her as a low-class flower girl. On the other
hand, Colonel Pickering always regarded Eliza as a lady because, h m the
very beginning, he had adopted an encouraging attitude towards her.
In Act I11 of the play, Eliza's progress in her education is tested. She is
dressed like a lady, behaves like a lady, and all are impressed. She has
progressed considerably. Eliza of Act I11 is quite different from the flower girl
of Act I. But her education is not yet complete, for her 'small talk' betrays her
social background. She still does not know what a lady should talk about at a
social gathering. When a reference is made to the possible outbreak of
influenza, Eliza says that her aunt was supposed to have died of influenza, but
that actually her aunt had been murdered by some of her own relatives who
had killed her only to take possession of the old woman's new straw hat. And
then Eliza goes on to speak of the habitual drunkenness of her father. In
short,Eliza talks about matters which easily betray her low origin, even
though the language which she speaks is almost flawless and the manner in
which she speaks is worthy of a highly educated person. The upshot of this
test is that Eliza is found wanting and in need of some further instruction. His
mother tells Higgins that Eliza is a triumph of his art and also of the art of her
dressmaker. but that every sentence that Eliza had uttered had given her away
But three months still remain to complete the process of her education.
Higgins continues to give her lessons in phonetics. She is a talented
pupil, and s soon able to talk fluently and correctly like any high born lady. At
the conclusion of six months of training, she is again subjected to a test. This
time she is taken to the party of an ambassador where she is able to pass off
not merely as a Duchess, but as a princess with royal blood in her veins. All
are deceived by her lady-like manners and deportment, and it is said that she
speaks like Queen Victoria herself. It has all been a grand success.
But during the course of her education in phonetics, her soul has been
awakened and she has progressed from spiritual darkness to light. The hidden
possibilities of her soul have been fully developed. She is completely
transformed spiritually, and that is the real education. She now seeks social
identity. Hersout has been awakened and she is aware of the problem that now
faces her. She has been lifled out of her social environment and she cannot
return to it. But also she does not belong to the middle class to which her
education has raised her. Her quest for social identity and the loss of her
previous identity fill her with despair. She must 'belong' and such
belongingness is essential for social happiness.
She has acquired aspirations and ambitions and seeks for emotional
fulfilment. Higgins and Pickering have lost all interest in her. She was merely
the object of their experiment and the experiment being over, their interest in
her has come to an end. They ignore her completely, and her despair and
frustration is forcefully expressed, when she throws the slippers of Higgins
into his face, divests herself of all the jewellery that has been given to her and
forthwith leaves the house. She must work out her own salvation, and by her
own efforts carve out a place for herself in society. She has been alienated
from her earlier social environment and now her quest is for identity and
belongingness in the higher social environment to which she has been raised.
In modem parlance Cinderella stands for any girl who achieves
happiness and success after a period of wretchedness. Eliza, the modern
Cinderella, has suffered terribly at the hands of her stepmother, her father,
Higgins, and even Mrs. Pearce the housekeeper. But her soul has not been
crushed. She does not lose her vitality and her spiit. Some fairy godmother as
in the Cinderella story comes to her rescue, and everydung is set right. As she
comes out of the house of Higgins at midnight. she meets Freddy, a romantic
youngman, passionately in love with her. Difficulties in the way of their
marriage vanish as if by the turn on a magic wand. Soon they are happily
married and Eliza, the modem Cinderella, sets up a flower shop with the help
of Colonel Pickering. They work hard. learn book-keeping, accountancy and
type-writing and their business grows and flourishes and there are clear
indications that they would live happily together ever afterwards.
Such is the process of Eliza's education. She has not only been made a
lady, her soul has also been awakened. She has acquired self-confidence and
that search for identity and belongingness which was the most serious
problem that confronted her after Higgins's experiment, had been successfully
completed.
Shaw had no use for "art for art's sake", and firmly believed that art
should be for "life's sake". Art should not keep away from life and its
problems, rather it should deal with such problems, focus attention on them
and thus provoke thinking, so that the problems concerned may be tackled
and solved. In the present play, too, he has exposed conventional morality,
shown that environment has much to do in moulding character and
personality, and has dealt with social alienation and its consequences. Shaw's
didacticism is clearly brought out, if we consider the various themes of the
play, in some detail.
Shaw's didacticism is seen in the fact that from the very beginning, he
has stressed that environment is the most important factor in moulding
character and behaviour. The education of Eliza in phonetics, her new
environment and her training in middle class manners and morality transform
her from a flower girl to a duchess which Higgins intended to make her. Thus,
as a mouthpiece of Shaw. Higgins illustrates the truth that speech which
differs from environment to environment is a great barrier between social
classes and the difference between a flower girl and a duchess is no greater
than the difference between the sounds they make when talking hollowness of
Social Distinctions
This very didacticism is seen in the story of Alfred Doolittle. Through
him, Shaw has exposed the hollowness of conventional morality, and has also
shown his wretchedness and misery at his suddenly being lifted out of his
social environment by the sudden acquisition of wealth. There is no doubt that
Doolittle is a dissolute person given to immoderate drinking and debauchery.
He has hardly any concept of what is right and wrong and wants to enjoy life
without caring for generally accepted morals. Eliza is his illegitimate child,
for whom he has no fatherly responsibility. She lives in hunger, rags and
squalor and when she is big enough to take care of herself, he turns her out: "I
have not got any parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my own
living and turned me out."
And when Eliza comes to Higgins to re-educate herself so that she may
become a lady and shed her old miserable social position, Alfred Doolittle
calls on her tutor not to enquire after her whereabouts or well-being but only
to extract f 5 as her price. To extort money in this way is his real profession.
But despite his poverty, he is happy. He lives with his mistress and has a good
time whenever he is able to extort some money by "touching" others, as he
calls it. He does not many his mistress because he is of the unconventional
view that after marriage he would no longer be her lord and master, but would
be ruled by her and would have to act according to her wishes.
Doolittle is a spokesman of Show's unconventional views. Through
him Shaw exposes the injustice and folly of conventional standards of
morality. Doolittle laughs at the conventional morality
41
turns it upside down and inside out. He ridicules the claim that society should
distribute its wealth among its members as they deserve. 'I am' says he, "one
of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man.
It means that he's up aginist middle-class morality all the time. If there's
anythmg going, and I put in for a bit of it, it is always the same story: 'You're
undeserving: so you can't have it.' But my need is as great as the most
deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one
week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving
man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him: and I drink a lot more
Well, they charge me just the same for everydung as they charge the
deserving."
It cannot be denied that there is much truth in what he says. He may be
undeserving but true morality means that he should be made deserving by
society which should provide him with suitable work with sufficient
emoluments and so make him deserving, honest and a useful member of
society. But this is not done and so the 'undeserving poor' becomes more
dishonest, dissolute and so even more undeserving than before. One feels that
there is much truth in what Shaw says and that people like Doolittle deserve a
better lot.
Further, Doolittle loses his social identity, by the sudden acquisition of
wealth and his consequent suffering and misery is pathetic in the extreme.
Like his daughter, Alfred Doolittle is also suddenly lifted out of slumdom by
the caprice of Pygmalion-Higgins. Higgins once mentioned him in a letter as
the most original moralist at present in England to Ezra D.Wannafeller, "who
was giving five millions to found Moral Reform Societies all over the world
and who wanted Higgins to invent a universal language for him. Wannafeller
is dead and has left Doolittle three thousand pounds a year on condition that
he delivers six lectures to his moral reform society.
Higgins is thus, by an accidental joke, responsible for the
transformation of Doolittle from undeserving dustman to a gentleman. But as
Eric Bentley points out, "Unlike his daughter, Alfred Doolittle is not reborn.
He is too far gone for that. He is the same as the rich as he was as the poor,
the same or worse; for riches carry awhl responsibilities, and Doolittle
commits the cardinal sin on the Shavian scale-he
is irresponsible. He tells
Pickering and Mrs. Higgins: A year ago I hadn't a relative in the world except
two or three that wouldn't speak to me. Now I have fifty and not a decent
week's wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for
myself; that's middle class morality. You talk of losing Eliza. Don't you be
anxious: I bet she's on my door-step by this time: she that could support
herself easy by selling flowers it I wasn't respectable. And the next one to
touch me will be you, Enry Iggins I'll have to learn to speak middle class
language from you, instead of speaking proper English. That's where you'll
come in: and I daresay that's what you done it for."
N. Alexander rightly says "Doolittle feels that he has become a slave to
his income. Nor can Doolittle give up his income and return to his former
state any more than Eliza can return to selling flowers at Covent Garden. His
transformation like Eliza's has, therefore, worked to his disadvantage since he
is now worse off and a less happy man than before he received his income.
This argument is comic because it is not possible to feel any great or
particular sorrow for a man who has just received an unearned income of
three thousand a year"7.
Shaw, however, is using this argument to make another point. Doolittle
has ceased to be one of the undeserving poor. He has become rich but is still
undeserving because he does not earn his money by the six lectures a year that
he has to give on morals. Shaw is comparing those who did little and were
poor and those who did equally little, but happened to be rich because they
possessed unearned income. For Shaw, the great dividing line in the world
was not between rich and poor; nor between socialists and capitalists. It was
between those who did some honest work in the world and those who did
little or nothing. And whatever the attractions of doing nothing, Shaw
believed that the business of the world depended in the end, on people caring
about and respecting the interests of their fellow human beings. Indeed, he
believed, and often said, that the urge to care for others was not only a normal
human instinct but one of the great passions of the world.
Alfred Doolittle remains hostile to middle class morality in spite of his
coming to a large inheritance. Feels that his spirit of life will be crushed by
middle-class morality and he will no longer be his real self, that assured him
of his independence though he was poor. His new social status intimidates
him. He tells Mrs. Higgins: "We are all intimidated. Intimidated, maam: that
is what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the work-house in my
old age? Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their
tip; and I'll look on helpless, and envy them."
He is wretched and miserable for he is alienated from his earlier social
environment, but has not yet acquired his new identity and sense of
belongingness to the middle class to which he has been raised. But One feels
that such is his vitality and his zest for life that he would continue to enjoy
himself and will, in the course of time, "feel at home in his new social'
environment". His dressing himself in fancy clothes as a bridegroom and
going to the church to marry his mistress confms such a faith.
According to Shaw's philosophy, the Life Force works in two ways. In the
woman its purpose is to multiply life, and so instinctively the woman pursues
and marries the man who is likely to make the best possible father to her
children. Man succumbs to her romantic charms and sex-appeal and she is
able to have her own way. But there are certain rare men-men
of genius-
who do not succumb to the wiles of women. Such men of genius are also
subject to the working of the Life Force, but through them the purpose of the
Life Force is not to multiply life, but to raise it to a higher level. To quote
C.E.M. Joad: "In the genius, life's purpose is to carry life itself to heights of
consciousness not previously achieved: in the woman, to safeguard and
maintain the level which has already been attained."8
Thus as in the genius, too, Life Force is extra-ordinarily intense, he is
ready to.sacrifice woman to his higher purposes, just as woman sacrifices the
ordinary man to her own. The mind of the genius is in advance of the age in
which he is born; the world is not ready to pay for the work which the genius
does. in other words, he does not make a good bread-winner and hence the
clash between woman and man of genius. Woman may sometimes win him
over by making him devote his energies to her own glorification. in this way
is born romantic art, i.e. art devoted to the glorification of woman. But in
most cases, the genius has visions of beauty and devotes his time and energy
to make others see it. In a genius, "Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as
irresistible as her own: and the clash is sometimes tragic"
Such men of genius, therefore, are impervious to the charms of
women. They are devoted scientists, scholars, artists, professors, etc. in
Shaw's plays, there is ever a conflict between the woman and the man of
genius, and Pygmalion is no exception in this respect.
In the present play, Higgins is the genius who has acquired name and
fame as a professor of Phonetics, and his fame as a scholar has spread to far
countries so much so that Colonel Pickering comes all the way from India to
meet him, and exchange views with him. He has such a command over
language that within a short period of six months he is able to transform Eliza,
the shabby flower-girl into a lady who can pass off as a foreign princess at an
ambassador's garden party. But he does not many her as the Pygmalion
-
Galatea legend leads us to presume. His interest in her ceases as soon as his
experiment is over, even though her soul is his own creation.
Eliza too, instinctively feels that he would remain impervious to her
charms, and she would always be to him a humble and shabby flower girl.
She makes no effort to use her charms on him for she realises that he would
not make a proper father and bread-winner for her children. So, she throws his
slippers into his face, leaves his house and marries Freddy for he is young and
so is likely to be a better father for her children. Higgins wants her to live
with him and Pickering, another bachelor like him. He does so because she
can manage his household, and leave him free to devote more time to his
intellectual pursuits. But such a life is not acceptable to the spirited and
dynamic Eliza. The result is the "conflict of wills," between the two--the
woman and the man of genius-and
in this conflict the woman (Eliza) is able
to have her own way.
The play centers round the conflict of wills between the two. If one
puts aside momentarily all of the witty social criticism which Shaw's drama
contains, it becomes a portrayal of life in which the key to human
relationships is, in one degree of intensity or another, conflict of wills. Since
Pygmalion as its title implies, is concerned with the creation of a human
being, the clues which it offers to Shaw's conception of basic human nature
and of human relationship are especially significant. Essentially Eliza
Doolittle is transformed from a sub-human flower girl into a truly human
being because she shakes off her fears, develops a will of her own and is able
to meet Higgins as an equal in the strife of wills which is the human
condition.
After his lot in.life is magically transformed by the Wannafeller
bequest, Alfred Doolittle announces the Psychological theme of the play
when he proclaims that he can no longer assert his will to be one of the happy
and "undeserving" poor because he is "intimidated"-bound by fear to a life
he has not chosen. So also is Eliza intimidated. At the beginning of the play,
her famous cockney outcry expresses her mingled bewilderment and fear in
the face of pressures on her which she cannot resist and does not understand.
Even after she has successfullypassed the test of the garden party, she is still
not fully human-as
is indicated by her attempting a 'bargain in affection'
with Higgins, trying to exact love from him in return for fetching his slippers.
and making herself generally as indispensable as possible.
Her final transformation takes place only when she asserts purposes of
her own which are not born of intimidation, knocking Higgins off the god-like
perch from which he has viewed her only as an object, awakening for the first
time, his anger and his genuine human concern for her. The "squashed
cabbage leaf becomes, as Higgins puts it, "consort battleship". The military
metaphor is significant. Eliza is fully human because she is now prepared to
engage on equal terms with Higgins in a warfare of wills. Ultimately the
worst thing which can happen to an individual in the strife at the
psychological level, as the example of Eliza Doolittle suggests, is to be
'intimidated or bbdiscouraged"by another human will. It is in this way that
one experiences the humiliation of becoming merely an object in another's
world, merely means to another's personal ends. Thus in her intimidated state,
Eliza knows the wretchedness of being nothing more than an experimental
object in Higgins' scheme, to demonstrate the power of speech-training to
bridge the gap between class and class.
But she rises above such intimidation, is able to hold her own in the
conflict of wills with Higgins, the genius, works out her own destiny and
marries Freddy because the Life Force tells her that he would make a better
father to her children. In the conflict of wills as usual the victory goes to the
woman and the man, the genius, is left alone to carry on his work to raise life
to a higher level.
The most important problem presented in the play is the problem of
education. Eliza Doolittle's education in phonetics is a difficult problem, but
Higgins successfully overcomes the difficulties so much so that within six
months Eliza can easily pass off as a foreign princess at an ambassador's
garden party. But her education creates problems for Eliza. Her education has
made her a lady, and so she cannot go back to her former environment and
sell flowers as she used to do. She has been cut off from her earlier
environment. She has become a lady and has lost her earlier identity. This
problem, this dilemma, this predicament, was foreseen by Mrs.Pearce in the
very Act 1 of the play, and it is foreseen by Mrs. Higgins in Act 1 11 of the
play. Eliza is confronted with the problem of loss of identity, and alienation,
and she must search for belongingness in the new social environment to
which she has been raised by her education. She poignantly puts her own
problems in the following words: "What am I fit for? What have you left me
fit for? Where do I go? What am I to do? What's to become of me? "
As A.C. Ward puts , "The problem in Pygmalion, therefore, like the
world-problem of education. To educate is to give (or at least to offer) new
fife to those who receive the education, and that new life produces discontent
with existing circumstances and creates the desire for a different kind of
world. In places where the spread of education has led to personal and social
unrest, any teacher might be told, as Eliza tells Higgins: 'You never thought
of the trouble it would make for m~ to which Higgins replies: 'Would the
world ever have been made, if its maker had been afraid of making trouble"?
This world-problem is presented in Pygmalion through the medium of
a lesser theme which is a national one confined to the English who, wrote
Shaw, 'have no respect for the language, and will not teach their children to
speak it.' Bernard Shaw was disgusted by the harsh and slovenly speech of
many people in England. He blamed this on to English spelling, and he left
most of his large fortune to pay the expenses of starting a new English
alphabet based on phonetic principles which would provide a separate symbol
or sign for each spoken sound, thus enlarging the alphabet considerably. Shaw
believed that this exact representation of sounds, in writing and in print,
would bring about correct pronunciation by everyone, and break down classdistinctions.
But the class distinctions are not so broken in the present play, and so
Eliza's predicament remains. As Higgins takes no further interest in her, she
has to work out her own solution. Indications in the play are given that the
problem would be solved by marrying Freddy. But he is a weakling and has
been brought to no occupation. Eliza her self would have to support him, if
she manies him. Their marriage and after life has not been depicted in the
play itself.
But the account of their maniage and of their success as florists and
green grocers (vegetable sellers) has been given in the appendix which Shaw
has added to the play and which A.C. Ward considers to be, "one of Bernard
Shaw's least successful pieces of writing"I0. Not all can hope to find generous
patrons like Colonel Pickering who, through financial help, would enable
them to resolve their problems. Nor are all husbands so responsive and docile
as Freddy is, nor are all wives so painstaking, loyal and dedicated as Eliza is.
The natural solution to Eliza's problem would have been a marriage with
Professor Higgins or Colonel Pickering. But they are both 'confirmed old
bachelors'. Higgins is a victim of Oedipus complex or mother-fucation, and
takes no human interest in Eliza. This would have been a proper solution to
the problem of Eliza, hut this does not happen, and so basically, her problem,
as those of countless others who face a similar predicament remains unsolved.
The dramatist has provided no solution, but he has certainly focused on the
problem, and made his readers sit up and think.
Another problem presented in the play is the predicament of Alfred
Doolittle. He was poor, he was considered "an undeserving poor", and so
nothing was done for him by society. Still he was happy in his poverty. He
would from time to time get money by "touching" others, i.e. by blackmailing
them, and then he would have a good time with his mistress. He was quite
happy and contended with his life as a poor dustman.
But then suddenly, as a result of joke of Professor Higgins, he acquired
large wealth and became one of the newly rich. He was raised to the status of
the middle class. He could no longer be a happy dustman. It became
imperative for him to conform to the middle class morality and social code.
He had lost his former identity. He was alienated fro^ his former class and
the kind of life he led as a poor dustman, and he must now acquire a new
identity and a new sense of belonging to a higher class.
Further, he must now marry his mistress with whom he was happy so
far, but after marriage he would lose his happiness, for she would no longer
be so docile and obedient as she was in her unwedded state. But middle class
morality intimidates him into marrying her. He cannot refuse to accept the
wealth that has come to him, for it is only this wealth which can protect him
from the workhouse. It alone will be his support and stay in his old age and so
he cannot refuse to accept it. He must, therefore, acquire the middle class
moral code and must try to belong to it, though in the process, he would lose
all his happiness.
Such is the predicament of Alfred Doolittle. The dramatist has
highlighted his problem and of many others like him, but no solution has been
provided. The readers must think for themselves and find out their own
respective solution. Pygmalion is one of the most logically constructed plays
of Shaw. Shaw's plays are 'plays of ideas'. He was more interested in
discussion of such ideas and cared little for plot- construction. But Pygmalion
is an exception. It is one of his well-constructed plays.
There are three themes or actions in the play. They have been skillfully
blended and organised, and it is a well-constructed play, a play which forms a
single whole. First, there is the Phonetic experiment which Higgins conducts
so successfully on Eliza. Secondly, there is the theme of loss of identity and
alienation and quest for a new identity and a fresh sense of belongingness.
This is the problem of Eliza and this problem has been created for her by the
education in Phonetics imparted to her by Professor Higgins.
Running parallel to the story of Eliza is the story of her father. Alfred
Doolittle, who too suffers a loss of identity and sense of belonging as a result
of a sudden acquisition of wealth and his predicament also arises from a
jocular remark of Professor Higgins in a letter to a millionaire friend of his in
which he described Doolittle as, "the most original moralist in England".
Thus Professor Higgins is the source of the predicament of both Eliza and
. may be successful in his experiment of huning Elim into
Alfred ~ o o l i k eHe
a duchess through education, but he has no solution to offer to the
predicaments of Eliza and Doolittle respectively. Thus the three strands in the
drama have been skilfblly blended and hsed and we get a play which is an
organic whole.
Critic after critic has praised the structure of the play. According to
Eric Bentley, "Pygmalion is a well-constructed play. If we call Act 1 the
prologue, the play falls into two parts or two Acts apiece. Both parts are
Pygmalion myths. In the first, a duchess is made out of a flower girl. In the
second, a woman is made out of a duchess. Since these two parts are the main
inner actions, the omission of the climax of the outer action-the
ambassador's reception-will
seem particularly discreet, economical and
dramatic. The film version of Pygrnalion was not the richer for its inclusion.
To include a climax that is no climax only blurs the outline of the play.
Pygmalion is essentially theatrical in construction, It is built in chunks two by
two. The fluidity of the screen is quite inappropriate to it. On the screen, as in
the novel, a development of character naturally occurs gradually and
smoothly. Natasha in War and Peace passes imperceptibly from girlhood to
n
in dramatically marked stages one,
womanhood: Eliza in ~ ~ g m a l i oproceeds
two, three, four, Act by ~ c t " "
Eric Bentley further remarks "Pygmalion follows the pattern of earlier
Shavian works, not duplicating them, but following up another aspect of a
similar problem. One can see how an important character is often the
representative of vitality and that he remains constant like a catalyst while
producing change in others, especially in the antagonist whom he is
educating, disillusioning or converting. Pygmalion diverges from this type.
He is not really a life-giver at all. To be sure, Eliza is his pupil. But the
education of Eliza in Acts Ito I11 is a caricature of the true process. In the end,
Eliza turns the tables on Higgii for she, finally, is the vital one, and he is the
prisoner of a system, particularly of his profession."'2
Ironically parallel with the story of Eliza, says Bentley, is the story of
her father. Alfred Doolittle is also suddenly lifted out of slumdom by the
caprice of Pygmalion-Higgins. Unlike his daughter, however, he is not reborn.
He is far too gone for that. He is the same as the rich as he was as the poor,
the same or worse for riches carry awhl responsibilities, and Doolittle
commits the cardinal sin on the Shavian scale-he
is irresponsible. In the
career of the undeserving poor who suddenly becomes an undeserving rich,
Shaw wrote his social comedy, his Pleasant Play. Those who think Pygmalion
is about classless society are thinking of Doolittle's comedy rather than
Eliza's. The two are carefully related by parallelisn and contrast. One might
work out an interpretation of the play by comparing their relation to the chief
artificial system depicted in it-middle class morality.
Bentley rightly concludes: "In short the merit of Pygmalion cannot be
explained by Shaw's own account of the nature of modem drama, much less
by popular or academic opinion concerning Problem Plays, Discussion
Drama, Drama of Ideas and the like. It is a good play by orthodox standards
and needs no theory to defend it. It is Shavian, not in being made up of
political or philosophical discussions, but in being based on the standard
conflict of vitality and system, in working out this conflict through an
inversion of romance, in bringing matters to a head in a battle of wills and
words, having an inner psychological action as counterpoint to the o ~ t e r
romantic action, in existing on two contrasted levels of mentality, both of
which are related to the main theme, in delighting and surprising us with a
constant flow of verbal music and more than that, verbal wit."I3
The construction of the play is neither bad nor inartistic as some critics
tend to believe. Following variant patterns the play progresses from ignorance
to knowledge: the myths Jude into the reality, the didacticism, turns from
phonetics to 'life. Eliza's spirit evolves from darkness to light. Even the
comedy complements a rising sense of temporal and spiritual awareness,
moving generally from a humour of confusion toward a humour which seeks
order and understanding. Act 1 thrives in chaos, the delight of the side show.
Act ii plays levels of comprehension against each other, provoking a humour
of misunderstanding of fact versus fairy tale, of science versus melodrama.
Act 111 is Bergonian, Eliza being comic as she is mechanical, the decorous
manner of her presence being sharply incongruous with the earthy matter of
her speech. Act IV involves the humour of lover's quarrel, with a comic turn
or twist occwring when the underdog triumphs and the master loses all
dignity. And Act V canies this to greater personal depths through a humour of
inversion, involving a psychological and spiritual search in which the total
complex is sensitively analysed.
However the end of the play has come in for a good deal of criticism,
though it is entirely in keeping with Shaw's theory of Life Force. The readers
and play-goers are disappointed because Pygmalion-Higgins does not marry
Eliza-Galatea who is his own creation. As one critic puts it, "In the portrayal
of Eliza there has been an unfortunate shift in emphasis. The ending should
have clcrated Higgins and reduced Eliza. It should have emphasized the hero
above his work, and the transformed over the transformer." Shaw's play is a
re-telling of the mythlcal transformation: and one can see clearly that Shaw
gave the first part to Higgins reserving the last part to Eliza. Eliza was not
intended by Shaw to be a reward for the hero, a slipper fetcher and a housemanager. The flower girl has been changed into a strong and independent
woman, a woman almost equal to the hero, Joining the ranks of the other,
strong, female characters in Shavian drama, Eliza Doolittle stands upto
Higgins and takes an active part in deciding her own destiny. Therefore, her
love of and maniage with Freddy, who is a weakling, comes as an anticlimax. It disappoints for it goes counter to the expectations of the readers.
Such a strong character, a consort battleship is not expected to love and marry
a weakling like Freddy, who instead of working and supporting his wife,
would have to he supported by her.
According to A. C. Ward, "Shaw's most impressive achievement in
Pygmalion was that he made an interesting, amusing, and popular play out of
what is largely a lecture on phonetics, a subject which most people find
difficult and dull. Shaw's success here in transforming the science of speech
into entertaining drama comes from the human interest of the characters and
from Shaw's sparkling b.Professor Higgins is a good teacher and he is also
a social rebel: he hates the shallow politenesses of smart society and will not
practise its small hypocrisies. He, therefore, interests us as a rebel, even
though his rebellion makes him rude and heartless."14
"Eliza Doolittle is a character one cannot quickly forget, because Shaw
makes ant one see that inside the rough flower-girl as one meet her at the
beginning of the play, is the fine and sensitive woman who emerges later as a
result of Higgins's teaching and Colonel Pickering's kindness and courtesy.
Whenever the play is performed, Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father is a favourite
with the audiences. Through him, Shaw laughs at the conventional morality of
the English, making Doolittle turn it upside down and inside out, and finding
real humour in his plight when he becomes an uncomfortable conventional
rich man after having been a poor but happy dustman."
The very opening of the play is a triumph of dramatic art. It at once
captms attention, arouses suspense and introduces us to the main characters
of the play, as well as hints at the theme of the play. It is a thrilling piece of
stagecraft, for it provides a genuine theatrical thrill when the curtain rises,
with rain pouring down in the semi-darkness and voices coming from the
pillared spaces. Eliza's indignant howlings and muttered complaints project
her uniformed character firmly to the audience, while her magnificent
departure in the taxi closes the scene on an effervescent burst of hilarity.
Higgins's utter devotion to phonetics, his apparent boorishness and his
disregard of social observances, are drawn from Henry Sweet, the eminent
Oxford phonetician, though Higgins's is enlarged in the play to the stature of
a genuine creation. Eliza's tribute to Colonel Pickering is also a tribute to
Shaw's success in bringing a gentleman to life on the stage, for she says that
self-respect began in her when she found that Pickering treated her as a lady
from the first. Alfred Doolittle. Eliza's father delights to proclaim himself one
of "the undeserving. poor'. and when an unexpected legacy from America
hoists him into prosperity, he bemoans his subjection to respectability and
middle--class morality. All this is interesting in the extreme.
Higgins amuses every one greatly by his satirical remarks to Eliza in
the very opening Act. He refers to Eliza's "kerbstone English" which he says,
will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. He calls her a "squashed
cabbage leaf and says that she is a disgrace not only to the noble architecture
of the cathedral under the porch of which she sits, but an incarnate insult to
the English language. Later, in Act 11, he amuses us greatly by the logic
according to which he calculates, that Eliza's offer of a shilling per lesson to
him is equal to an offer of sixty or seventy pounds from a millionaire.
Subsequently, he amuses us by his scornful way of talking to the members of
the Hill family, in the final Act; he again amuses us by his bitterly sarcastic
remarks to Eliza.
The play is rich in suspense. Readers are always eager to know what is
going to happen next. Suspense is created in the very opening Act when the
note-taker, who turns out to be a professor of phonetics, makes a claim which
seems to us as most extravagant. In Act 11, suspense is created when the
professor of phonetics actually takes charge of Eliza in order to make good
the boast he has made. One wonders what the upshot of this undertalang
would be. Then there is suspense of both the tests to which Eliza is subjected
though we heave a sigh of relief when the second test ends in Eliza's triumph.
There is suspense in Act IV when Eliza throws Higgins's slippers at his face
and when she steps out of his house into the street. in Act V there is more
suspense when a conflict of wills takes place between Higgins and Eliza and
the outcome remains uncertain.
There is conflict in the very opening Act when Clara, feeling annoyed
with Higgins, snubs him, asking him to leave her alone, and a little later,
when Higgins snubs Eliza, when he asks her to stop "boohooing" and take
shelter in some other place. In Act I1 there is more conflict. Eliza does not
yield easily to Higgins bullying and then Mrs. Pearce resists Higgins'
arbitrary orders and demands certain assurances from him. In Act IV there is
episode of Higgins' slippers being thrown at him by Eliza. Higgins is stunned
by this action of Eliza, asks what on earth is the matter with her and he calls
her a L'presumptuousinsect". Eliza tells him that she had thrown the slippers
at him in order to smash his face and that she would in fact, like to kill him
It is this conflict between the two that is the focal point of the play.
This is the conflict between the woman and the man of genius, and contrary to
expectation, it is "the squashed cabbage leaf, the "guttersnipe" who comes
out triumphant. The final and the most crucial conflict takes place in the final
Act when Higgins and Eliza have a long and serious discussion about their
attitudes towards one another. One waits for the ultimate outcome. Here
suspense is created because one does not know whether Eliza would go back
to Wimpole Street to live with the two bachelors or not.
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
George Bernard Shaw was a ruthless critic but he critisised in a most
charming and pleasant manner. He was a zealous missionary and social
reform was his mission.He attacked institutions,which are not sensitive,in
preference to ,people who are, and when he did critise individuals he added
suger to the pill, so that they could swallow it without making a wry face. He
could not only take the attacks of his enimies with good humour but by means
of his wit was able to turn them to his own adventage.
The play The Doctor's Dilemma deals with the follies and futilities of
medical science
a socialist, Shaw knows that diseases are generally caused
by poverty and over work, and he also holds that it is the duty of society to
cure them by introducing socialism. In this play, Shaw has shown that some
of the celebrated doctors are, both scientifically and pratically considered
blundering idiots.
He wrote the play The Doctor's Dilemma in 1911. The play is oddly
constituted, for the story of the doctor-lover's, and the artist is simply
presented in his ambivalent relation to common life. Yet the play is subtitled
' A Tragedy' more for the artist's sake than the doctor's. However, 'tragedy'
and 'comedy' are deprived of their ancient antinomy in this play. Shaw once
wrote to Archibald Henderson: "The Doctor's Dilemma was called a tragedy
partly for the absurd reason that Archer challenged me to write a tragedy, and
partly for the much better reason that its theme: that of 'a man of genius who
is not also a man of honour' is the most tragic of all themes to people who can
understand its importance. Even the comedy which runs concurrently with it:
the comedy of the medical profession as at present organized in England is a
tragic comedy, with death conducting the orchestra. Yet the play is funnier
than most farces. The tragedy of Dubedat is not his death but his life;
nevertheless his death, a purely poetic one, would once have seemed wholly
incompatible with laughter.""
This conflation of, on the one hand, the comic tragedy of the artistscoundrel and, on the other, the tragic comedy of the Doctor's romantic
dilemma, reflects a division in the antecedents of the play which deserves
elucidation.
In a classification of Shaw's plays according to genre foundation
Candida and The Doctor's Dilemma fall under domestic comedy.
Domesticties and romantic longings were the subject matter of Domestic
Comedy. Marital infidelity and sexual adventure is the staple subject of Farce.
While avoiding sexual irregularity in the irresponsible vein of Farce,
the English mid-century theatre beheld it freely in the vein of Domestic
Comedy. Domestic Comedy was an intermediate kind of play which lacked
the frightening a morality of Sex Farce and still supplemented with lighter
tones, the more tragically turned' studies of sexual misadventure. In the plays
of this middle range, a domestic triangle invariably ends in the defeat of the
lover by the husband. Domestic Comedy, is in a sense, the obverse of the
domestic magdalen play, for the adultery is always unconsummated, though
the possibility provides the interest and the intrigue. It is in a sense the reverse
of Sex Farce, for domesticity triumphs and morality reigns.
Most of the plays which took it upon themselves to provide a treatment
of domestic infidelity that was lighter than Domestic Drama but less
irresponsible than Palais Royal Farce, were of French origin or inspiration,
since the French theatre of the time provided not only the tragic and farcical
extremes of sexual misadventure hut the whole range between. The
connection with The ~ o c t ' o'sr Dilemma is less simple, but no less essential. In
it Shaw uses the conventions of Domestic Comedy to say something not only
about the nature of domesticity hut also about the relation of the artist to
ordmary life.
Sen Gupta remarks, "The Doctor's Dilemma has as many as three
episodes ;the follies and futilities of the medical profession, the doctor's
dilemma and courtship and Louis Dubedat is an episode by him self. These
episodes have very slender links of connection and they have prevented the
author from giving adequate expression to his ideas on poverty disease and
In the Doctor's Dilemma, a bachelor of fifty years who at
medical s~ience."'~
the time gains social and scientific recognition, fails iu love with a woman
who comes to beg him to have her artist husband from tuberculosis. This
doctor lover, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, is too honourable to make love to another
man's wife, and too modest to refuse a cure in the hope of making the wife a
widow. He has the capacity to save ten lives, and he must decide on the value
of the man himself. The choice is ultimately given full embodiment: it lies
between the artist-husband, Louis Duhedat, and Ridgeon's sympathetic
friend, Dr. Blenkinsop.
Louis Duhedat is thoroughly immoral and totally unscrupulous with
money and women, but he is a gifted and devoted artist with most of his
painting life ahead. Blenkinsop is totally without genius or importance, but he
is exceedingly scrupulous (especially with money) and exceedingly good. The
Doctor's Dilemma is stated at the end of two (out of five) acts: "it's a plain
choice between a man and a lot of pictures": and a good case is made for
both.
Dubedat's destiny is finally decided through his relation with his wife.
Jennifer Dubedat is extravagantly devoted to her husband, whom she
passionately idealizes. His carelessness with money, and even with women,
she attributes to his transcendent superiority to ordinary life. He, on the other
hand, exploits her unconscionably, using her attractiveness to coax money out
of interested men, using even her unreserved love for him as a basis for a
scheme of blackmail. When Ridgeon's choice is put to him, as between "a
man and a lot of pictures," he says. "I'm not at all convinced that the world
wouldn't he a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does", and he
adds, "It's easier to replace a dead man than a lot of good pictures." But his
temporary antagonist has as much to say for saving the man rather than the
pictures in an age that runs to pictures and statues and plays and brass bands
because its man and woman are not good enough to comfort its poor achmg
soul For Shaw, Dubedat is a problem which extends beyond the question of
what a society should do with the man who is valuable in one respect and
intolerable in another, to the question of what a society should do with its
heretics.
The doctor chooses finally, not between the man and the paintings, hut
between enshrining an illusion and shattering it. By willhlly allowing
Dubedat to be treated by an incompetent doctor, and by supplying a
dangerous treatment, Ridgeon intends to preserve her hero for Mrs.Dubedat.
Consequently, Ridgeon becomes a figure of comedy, not by making the
wrong choice (practically speaking, perhaps it was the right one), hut by
choosing on irrelevant grounds. Dubedat dies splendidly, and Jennifer's hero
is preserved to her; in fact he is twice magnified. Jennifer's feelings for
Dubedat never depended on ignorance of fact, as Ridgeon had assumed; but
now all hints of morality are erased, and beside the sanctified splendour of the
dead artist the physician seems old and absurd, his actions mean and envious
and, of all things, immoral, Following Dubedat's dying recommendation,
Jennifer has already remarried, and Ridgeon can not even buy any pictures.
The lover, as usual, has been defeated by the husband.
In the play, Sir Ridgeon's dilemma is to choose between a young artist,
who is a man of genius and an honest old Friend who is a poor general
practitioner. Sir Ridgeon has discovered a cure for tuberculosis and is
awarded knighthood for it. The doctor is unable to treat both with his new
cure for tuberculosis and can take only one more patient and whichever he
decides to save he inevitably condemns the other to death. Finally Ridgeon
decides to take the general practitioner, Dr. Blenkinsop. Apparently, the art.ist
is rejected because he is not a virtuous man. Though Sir Colenso Ridgeon and
his doctor friends are all charmed by him, when they meet him o v a a dinner
at the terrace of the "Star and Garter" to celebrate the conferment of
knighthood on Sir Colenso Ridgeon. Later they find that Dubedat has been
borrowing money from each of them, and that a waitress at the hotel, claims
to be his real wife. Thus he is considered to be a worthless man. He is
immoral, bigamous and capable of blackmailing. He Das a young second wife,
Jennifer with' fascinating beauty. Sir Colenso is attmcted towards Dubedat's
wife, yet he does not agree to cure her husband. He entrusts Dubedat to Sir
Bloomfield Bonington who, he feels sure, will kill him. Dubedat worsens
under Bloomfield Bonington's treatment and finally he dies. And now the real
motive of Sir Colenso Ridgeon is revealed by him. He tells Jennifer that he
did not accept her husband's case because he wanted to marry her after she
had become a widow. Jennifer turns down his proposal with a scorn.
G.K. Chesterton concedes "We cannot feel The Doctor's Dilemma,
because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw being in dilemma. His mind is
both fond of abruptness and fond of finality; he always makes up his mind
when he knows the facts and sometimes before".
" Moreover,
this particular
problem (though Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about
it than about anyhng else) does not strike the critic as being such an
exasperating problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is
also a scamp of vast profligacy and treachery has a chance of life if specially
treated for a special disease. The modem doctors (and even the modern
dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially favoured because he is
aesthetically important or specially disregarded because he is ethically antisocial. They see-saw be&een the two despicable modern doctrines, one that
genius should be worshipped like idols and the other that criminals should be
merely wiped out like germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be
treated like men does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these
affairs of life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody
does shout out at sea, "Bad citizen overboard".
In fact, Shaw has not faced the dilemma honestly in the play. He has
spoilt the unity of the story by introducing the attractive woman Jennifer. Dr.
Ridgeon's refusal to accept Jennifer's husband as his patient shows that he
has no dilemma in his mind. He saves Blenkinsop and destroys Dubedat not
simply because he chooses the good man in preference to the genius but
because he has fallen in love with the genius's wife and finally rejected by
her. The play, however, does not end with its solution. The play proceeds to
show Ridgeon's proposal to Jennifer and his ultimate frustration.
Bernard Shaw, in this play inflicts a fierce attack on doctors, on
medical profession and on medical science. His argument is that the medical
profession has cormpted at the root by pecuniary interest. Private practitioners
depend on their patients for their livelihood. However, the real cause of
people falling ill is poverty, under-nourishment, or excessive wealth and want
of physical exertion. Conscientious doctors should realize this but
unfortunately they do not feel so. Shaw himself wrote, "They cannot stop to
consider where the root of the malady lies and that is why their diagnosis and
their treatment have little relation to reality and look like their exploits and
antics and witch craft". He M e r pointed out, "since curing of diseases has
become a trade, the doctors who like other people want to live and to make a
living have to exploit the plight of their patients and to stand by their
colleagues in the trade". Infact, the doctors stand by each other and every
specialist sees that every other specialist gets a share of the pickings.
Therefore, it is but natural that what was considered to be a brotherhood of
experts and benefactors has become a conspiracy of quacks and profiteers. As
Sir Patric Cullen, an aminent physician in the play, says, "we are not a
profession: We're a conspiracy." Shaw further remarks that since the private
practitioners are poor, they have a beneficial interest in ill-health. A poor
doctor is more dangerous than a poor employer or a poor landlord. He feels
inclined to perform unnecessary operations and prolongs illnesses for the
reason that they are a source of his profit.
According to A.C. Ward "The Doctor's Dilemma is among the best
and most entertaining of Shaw's plays. In one respect it is perhaps his most
remarkable piece of work, for the long first act is not only a fine example of
his skill in sustaining dramatic interest by conversation alone, but he also
here, solely through the medium of conversation, creates a group of characters
each of whom grows in our minds and imaginations as a clearly defined
personality. Shaw's success in this act is all the more remarkable in as much
at the talk is almost entirely concerned with medical matters which it might
have been thought would be baffling or without interest to a non- medical
audience. But in truth this opening scene engages the attention of a general
audience by a virtue which critics have been disposed to assert that Shaw did
not possess: the virtue of friendly feeling for individual human beings.
Neither his own life nor his plays bear out the frequent assertion that while he
was profoundly concerned for the welfare of humanity in the mass, he was
uninterested in men and women singly. Though all the men in the early pages
of The Doctor's Dilemma are engaged in discussion of affairs relating to their
own profession, the real substance of the matter is the relationship between
them as human beings and those other human beings, their patients, whose
lives are affected-and
either saved or ended-by
their professional skill or
by their blundering. Whereas Dubedat in the later scenes never entirely comes
alive as an independent character, but only does and says what is convenient
for the argument of the play, the doctors are so hlly created that they appear
to have breath and blood and individual existence. Although, in the customary
Shaw convention, each is introduced by a descriptive stage-direction
summarizing his manner and general character, One does not need these
descriptions: the doctors create their own separate and distinguishable
personalities in their own speeches. One does not need to be told that Sir
Ralph Bloomfleld Bonington (known as B.B.) 'radiates an enormous selfsatisfaction, cheering, reassuring, healing by the incompatibility of disease or
anxiety with his welcome presence', for his conversation radiates its own
effmvescent assurance; and even if he is, as Shaw alleges, 'scientifically
considered, a colossal humbug', he is nevertheless so endearing a humbug
that the audience becomes as much charmed by him as his patients are said to
be. When Ridgeon warns him that anti-toxins are 'dangerous unless you use
them at the right time', B.B. sweeps the solemn warning aside with buoyant
self-confidence and audacious irresponsible humour: 'Everythmg is
dangerous unless you take it at the right time. An apple at breakfast does you
good: an apple at bed time upsets you for a week. There are only two rules for
anti-toxins. First, don't be afraid of them: second, inject them a quarter of an
hour before meals, three times a day.""
If Bloomfield Bonington's light and airy nonsense is a source of
gaiety, Sir Patrick Cullen's sombre realism introduces a rock-like stability.
Disillusioned by long years of experience, but morally fortified by a personal
conviction that experience enables him to distinguish clearly and with
certainty between right and wrong, he has no such doubts as cause Ridgeon to
view his own compulsion of choice between Blenkinsop and Dubedat as a
dilemma. And when Bloomfield Bonington sighs, after Dubedat's death,
'Poor young fellow ! How well he died' Sir Patrick cuts through his
colleague's sentimentality, saying: 'When you are as old as I am you'll know
that it matters very little how a man dies. What matters is, how he lives. Every
fool that runs his nose against a bullet is a hero nowadays, because he dies for
his country. Why doesn't he live for it to some purpose ?' There,
undoubtedly, Sir Patric speaks for Bernard Shaw as well as for himself. It is
Shaw's own lifelong conviction that brave dying was of little significance
unless it was the sequel to good living.
The another side to The Doctor's Dilemma also deserves our
consideration. The doctor had a narrow notion of human morality. Ridgeon as
well as Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington were unduly critical about Dubeda:'~
private life. They tell him that Jennifer is living with him without being
married to him. They also accuse him of having deceived the room maid at
the seaside hotel into a mock marriage and deserted her. Their most serious
charge against him is bigamy. Dubedat who has more unconventional
approach to morality, bursts out: "Bigamy, bigamy, bigamy' What a
fascination anything connected with the police has for you all, you moralist
I've proved to you that you were utterly wrong on the moral point now I'm
going to show you that you were utterly wrong on the legal point: and I hope
it will be a lesson not to be so jolly cocksure next time." Dubedat reveals to
them that the hotel-maid was married to the steward of a liner but even this
they interpret against him by saying that he let her risk imprisonment by not
disclosing that he was already married. Dubedat however argues that he
risked imprisonment for her sake, he could have been punished for it just as
much as she. The point is that Dubedat is a finer brain in moral issues. He
thinks more deeply about man-made morality than Ridgeon and his friends.
He tells them: "Why don't you learn to think, instead of bleating and baahing
like a lot of sheep when you come up against anything you're not accustomed
to ?". Here, is the mouthpiece of Shaw himself. Like his creator, he is an
iconoclast. His assertion is: "Look here. All this is no good. You don't
understand. You imagine that I'm simply an ordinary criminal .. Well, you're
on the wrong track altogether. I'm not a criminal. All your moralizings have
no value for me. I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw."
Viewed in the above perspective, Ridgeon can be considered more
immoral than Dubedat. He has deliberately killed him to marry his wife who
is much younger than him, As a doctor, he has failed to overcome a moral
dilemma. He ought to have forgotten Mrs.Dubedat while making his choice
between Dubedat and Blenkinsop. Dubedat dies a beautiful death. He declares
on his death bed, 'I'm perfectly happy. I'm not in pain. I don't want to live.
I've escaped from myself. I'm in heaven, immortal.,.' And he goes on to
justify himself 'I know that in accidental sort of way, struggling through th
unreal part of life, I haven't always been able to live up to toy ideal. But in
my own real world I have never done anything wrong, never denied my faith,
never been untrue to myself.'
In the play the fundamental human morality is best represented by the
old Sir Patrick Cullen. He says, "To me, its a plain choice between a man and
a lot of pictures". Ridgeon's reply: 'It's easier to replace a dead man than a
good picture' provokes Sir Patrick to declare that 'when you live in an age
that runs to pictures and statues and plays and brass bands because its men
and women are not good enough to comfort its poor aching soul, you should
thank Providence that you belong to a profession which is a high and great
profession because its business is to heal and mend men and women'.
According to A.C. Ward "The basic problem in The Doctor's Dilemma
is as to who is the more valuable, a good man who has no genius, or a man of
genius who has no other goodness?. But at the end one does not know what it
is about. One of the most adverse opinion is about the uncertainty of the end:
does it deal with the follies and fatuities of medical science or does it treat of
a dilemma which a particular doctor has to face, or does it show the futility of
his courtship? "If the first theme is its subject-matter? "the episodes described
in the latter portion of the play have no organic connection with it. Louis
Dubedat does not survive, but Blenkinsop does, and for once at least. Dr.
Ridgeron through his Opsonin treatment has blundered into success. If,
therefore, the play is looked at from this point of view, the conclusion does
not support the premises with which the dramatist starts. if, again Shaw
wanted only to portray a dilemma, there seems to be no reason for introducing
the episode of courtship, which is unconnected with it. It is very dificult to
ascertain what Shaw really wanted to 'express' in this drama. If he desired to
makc a play out of the difficulties of private doctors, they should have been
represented as real saviours of men rather than as blundering idiots. If he
means it to be a drama of courtship, the title is a misnomer, and there seems to
be no reason why so much importance should have been given to the follies
and foibles of medical men, simply because the hero (or the villian?) is a
doctor.
Further Shaw just skims over the real problem of poverty and disease
and confines himself to the exposure of trivialities. He wants to write serious
comic dramas, but here he has produced a serious preface and a comical
drama. The most important things in the play are the caricature of individual
doctors and the picture of the brilliant rescality of an individual patient. Shaw
has shown that all the celebrated doctors are, both scientifically and
practically considered, blundering idiots; hut he does not show how in a rotten
social system all these honest, decent, all-meaning gentlemen are gradually
reduced to colossal humbugs when they begin to trade on the diseases of
others. Louis Dubedat, again, is an arresting and interesting figure, but he is
introduced into the play only incidentally and then he and his wife usurp a
space which is out of all proportion to the part they were meant to play in the
story. The first act is a comedy of doctors, but in the second half of the play
Louis is the one dominant figure and throws all others into the shade. Shaw is
so much amused by his villainy that he forgets the doctors whom he originally
introduced as the principal characters in his drama. To the last he remains an
incidental figure in a drama of doctors and their follies. But Shaw, having
failed to make an effective drama out of the main problem, tries to render it
interesting by introducing this rascal who sports with the moral convictions
on which modem society is based. It is an amusing episode, no doubt; but it
does not make up for the poverty of the drama as a whole.
A.C. Ward also suggests, "More is required than a mere statement that
a particular character is a man of genius. We must be made to feel that he has
qualities which mark him out in some way as the superior to other men. The
dramatic force of The Doctor's Dilemma is weakened by the fact that
Dubedat does not compel us to believe that he was anything more than a
commonplace rascal lacking moral sense; we have to take Shaw's word for it,
that this painter was capable of producing great pictures. The play would he
more impressive and the problem more perplexing if we were given some
imperative cause to believe that Dubedat's death would be a genuine loss to
the world."
l9
Like Candida, The Doctor's Dilemma is preoccupied with the artist's
relation to common life, and rooted in the seemingly remote comedy of
unconsummated adultery. The reasons for this unlikely conjunction lie in the
usefulness of the convention which brought an intrusive artistic sensibility
into the sphere of prosaic domesticity. The opposition between lover and
husband in the conventional triangle of Domestic Comedy was already a
symbolic conflict between apparent lawlessness, romance, and poetry, and
apparent prudence, prose, and propriety.
Drawing upon the materials of Domestic Comedy, the Doctor's
Dilemma varies the conventional triangle unexpectedly. Having presented the
artist as lover in Candida, Shaw now presents him as husband; and the
middle-aged, sober and respectable professional man, who would ordinarily
be the husband, serves as the extra-domestic lover. The reason for this
reversal is a reversal in emphasis
In Candida Shaw takes seriously the romantic concept of the artist as
an alien creature. The artist is out of place in ordinary life, and the idea of
happy domesticity functions (in Candida as in Man and Superman) as the
sum and symbol of ordinary life. The artist-lover in Candida is thus
spiritually as well as legally an intruder into domesticity, and the point of the
play is his fundamental alienation. On the other hand, the emphasis in The
Doctor's Dilemma is on the artist as ordinary citizen, and the difference
between alienation and bohemianism. Only a year after The Doctor's
Dilemma, Shaw wrote, with reference to the play," it is idle to demand
unlimited toleration of apparently outrageous conduct on the plea that the
offender is a genius, even if by the abnormal development of some specific
talent he may be highly skilled as an artist." Nevertheless, the last thug in the
world Shaw wanted to do was to deny the artist's specialness or to offer a pat
formula for dealing with his unorthodoxies. Shaw varies the conventional
triangle and presents the artist as husband, first of all, because his emphasis is
on the artist in ordinary life, and secondly, because he is raising questions. A
conventional, immoral artist-intruder and a respectable physician husband
would have called up an automatic response. No such response was likely
with the respectable physician as lover.
In writing The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw drew upon the materials of
Domestic Comedy, drama of the professions, and dramatic satire of the
professions, and the result is reasonably unified Shaw's unembarrassed fusion
of these materials in characteristic of the period of his Discussion Plays in
which he freely invoked the conventions of the particular genre associated
with the subject of discussion. In The Doctor's Dilemma, when considering
the artist in relation to common life, Shaw called upon the conventional
triangle of Domestic Comedy, as he previously had in Candida, because the
genre was associated with the subject. But, because he wished to reverse the
emphasis of Candida, he reversed the roles of the romantic lover and the
prosaic husband.
The final importance of conventional Domestic Comedy as an
antecedent of The Doctor's Dilemma corresponds to the importance of the
consideration of the artist in the total scheme of the play. In both Candida and
The Doctor's Dilemma, a conventional genre (Domestic Comedy) hmishes
the fundamental relationship (the artist-inclusive triangle) and the
fundamental metaphors (domesticity and the romantic intruder) by which the
idea of the artist's relation to common life is made flesh.
Dr. Ridgeon is an eminent doctor, who is presently honoured with a
knighthood for his discovery of an anti-toxin, which is a hundred percent cure
for tuberculosis. Dr. Ridgeon's 1 1 1 name is Sir Colenso Ridgeon. His age is
around fifty but he still considers himself youthful and looks also a young
man from his face and physical appearance. He is a shy and sensitive man hut
has acquired a little boldness to overcome his shyness. The announcement of
his knighthood has made him selfconscious rather than proud. Redpeniy, a
medical student, works as his domestic laboratory assistant and Emmy, his
old maid-servant looks after him and his house. Emmy is the first in the
household to know about Dr. Ridgeons knighthood. She tells Redpenny about
it and informs him that the eminent doctors have started coming in to
congratulate Dr. Ridgeon.
Dr. Schutzmacher is a middle aged gentleman. In appearance he looks
like a handsome and good looking Jew. He is well dressed, which shows his
prosperity. He has come to congratulate Dr. Ridgeon though he is not sure,
whether Dr. Ridgeon will recognise him. He has studied with him and thirty
years have passed since then. He gives his introduction to Dr. Ridgeon, who
recognises him on hearing his name, Loony. Dr. Schutzmacher then goes on
to tell Sir Ridgeon about the secret of his prosperity. He tells him that he has
painted on his shop window 'Cure Guaranteed' and these two words are his
secret of his success. He has firm belief in Parrish's Chemical Food which are
phosphates. According to him one tablespoon to a twelve ounce bottle of
water is a cure of almost all diseases.
Sir Patrick is an old man of about 70 years, but is still quite active. He
is of Irish origin but has lived all his life in England. His attitude towards
Ridgeon is sort of fatherly but to others he is rough and uninviting. He is
sincerely happy on Ridgeon's success and congratulates him heartily. They
discuss profoundly about Ridgeon's discovery and his achievements. Dr.
Patrick feels that these discoveries are not new and they have been long
before known but they did not get recognition.
In the beginning of the play, Ernmy tells Redpenny that a lady is
standing outside and wants to meet Dr. Ridgeon. Redpenny tells Emmy to
turn her out because Dr. Ridgeon cannot take any new patient because his
hands are already full. However, this lady does not go away and waits
patiently. She waits for a long time. Many doctors come to congratulate Dr.
Ridgeon and meet her standing on the door, but Sir Ridgeon is reluctant to see
her. From the description given by other doctors we come to know that this
lady is a charming woman. Her patience is finally rewarded and she is able to
meet Sir Ridgeon in the end of Act I.
Sir Ralph is a tall man of more than sixty years. He has a musical voice
and he himself never gets tired of hearing it. He is a born healer and it is said
that even broken bones unite at the sound of his healing voice. He is an
excellent orator and as energetic as Walpole. In the medical world he is better
known as B.B. He congratulates Ridgeon and is pleased to meet Sir Patrick
and Walpole. He reveals that he has bravely tried Ridgeon's new discovery of
the opposing serum for tuberculosis on little Prince Henry with complete
success. It acted like magic on the little Prince and the Royal family was
greatly obliged to him. But he told them that they owed it all to Ridgeon. As a
result Dr. Ridgeon has been made a knight. Sir Ralph is opposed to all drugs
and according to him a disease occurring in any patient is caused by the
entrance of a pathogenic germ in the body and then the multiplication of that
germ. The remedy of all the diseases is to find this germ and kill it by
stimulating the phagocytes of the blood cell, which in return destroy these
germs.
Dr. Blenkinsop's shabbiness is dearly distinct from his appearance. He
is untidy and shabbily dressed. He lacks self confidence and he has to struggle
hard for his bread. Dr. Blenkinsop's patients are all poor middle-class people
so he recommends more fruit and vegetables to his patients rather than drugs.
He knows that his patients can not afford expensive treatment so he suggests
cheap remedies which they can easily bear. This has made Blenkinsop
popular among his patients but his practice does not bring him much income.
He congratulates Ridgeon but does not know anythmg about the discovery
which Ridgeon had made because he could not afford to read the medical
papers. Though he does not want any monetary help from his friends, yet he
asks Ridgeon to give him his old suits as he has no proper clothes to wear. He
takes his leave soon because he has to earn every penny and even half an hour
away from his work costs him eighteen pence.
After some discussion all the doctors go away. Emmy comes to
Ridgeon and persuades him to meet the lady still standing downstairs. Sir
Ridgeon is irritated but finally gives his ascent to send her up. The lady,
whose name is Jennifer is an extra-ordinarily beautiful lady. She has a perfect
and a graceful body and she carries herself confidently. She has no complex
of any sort. She is tall, slim and has dark hair. Her hair style suits her face.
Her eyes are dark fringed and full of expressions. At present her expression
shows anxiety. Her husband's left lung is infected and she wants Ridgeon to
treat him. She has full faith in him and she feels that her husband can be cured
only if Ridgeon treats him. Initially Ridgeon puts on a strict and distant
professional manner and boldly rejects her case. He tells her that he can treat
only ten patients at a time with his new found opsonin serum. He also tells her
that these ten patients are selected by taking into account whether their life is
worth saving or not. From fifty patients, these ten patients are chosen as their
life is found to be worth saving. Jennifer feels discouraged, but she shows
some of the paintings done by her husband, Mr. Louis Dubedat. Ridgeon is
impressed on seeing his paintings. One of the paintings is of Jennifer, and
Ridgeon is certainly charmed by it. He feels a sort of attraction towards
Jennifer.
Ridgeon's attitude softens towards Jennifer. He wants to buy the
painting of Jennifer, but Jennifer tells him to take them all and in return, save
her husband's life. Ridgeon tells her that he can take her husband as his
patient only if she convinces him that her husband's life is more important
than his other patients. He invites the Dubedat couple for dinner at the Star
and Garter at Richmond, where he is inviting all his doctor friends to
celebrate his knighthood. He wants Jennifer and his husband to prove his
genius in front of the most eminent men in his profession. If everyone
approves of him, he is ready to take him as his patient.
Jennifer is very pleased to hear Ridgeons decision. She feels highly
obliged. In fact, she is confident that her husband's genius will be proved and
Ridgeon will save his life. She thanks again and again to Ridgeon and
hesitatingly asks for his fee. Ridgeon tells her that his fee will be only a
beautiful drawing of her for the whole @eatmentJennifer goes away. Ridgeon
is left musing upon her.
After dinner at Star and Garter, all the doctors sit down on the terrace.
Jennifer asks the doctors what they think of her husband, and whether her
husband's life is worth saving. All the doctors give their consent and Ridgeon
also assures her that her husband's life is worth saving and he shall he saved.
Jennifer is delighted and full of gratitude. She feels so relieved that she has
tears in her eyes. All the doctors console her.
Louis is a slim man of 23 years. He is turquoise blue eyes which are
full of confidence. He is not at all shy of these most eminent doctors and
moves among them naturally. He has made sketches of all the doctors, infact
to prove his genius. All the doctors praise his genius and ask him to sign his
name under their individual sketch. However, Dr. Schutzrnachcr seems not to
be pleased with his portrait. After many thanks and byes the couple at last
leave in Dr. Walpole's car.
In the course of conversation Dr. Walpole tells that he has given
twenty pounds to Louis, because he was short of money. Gradually B.B. also
tells that Louis had borrowed ten pounds from him also. Blenkinsop, who
himself is short of money, breaks down and tells that he had only four
shillings when he came and Mr. Dubedat had taken half-a-crown from him
and had promised to pay it back in five minutes. But he went away without
returning it. Dr. Schutzmacher is also surprised by Louis's behaviour. First,
Louis praised Dr: Schutzrnacher of being a Jew and then asked for 50 pounds.
When the doctor refbsed to give him any money he made very unjustified
remarks about a Jew. When Dr. Schutzmacher got angry, he started
apologizing and asked for only a couple of sovereigns.
Just then a hotel-maid comes on the terrace of the hotel. She is a pretty
woman of about 25 years. She tells the doctors that she is the legal wife of
Louis's and she can show them her legal marriage-certificate to prove it. She
asks for Louis address and tells them about her short-married life of three
weeks. The doctors are shocked to hear this. They send back the maid
assuring her to help her.Choice between Blenkensop and Louis: Blenlunsop
tells that he has also tuberculosis. He does not know anything about
Ridgeon's ten patients and also about Louis's disease. He simply asks
Ridgeon if he would cure him also. Ridgeon is in a confused state. He could
not decide whether to save an honest, decent man or that rotten cheat, who is
also a skilled artist. In fact Ridgeon's altraction towards Mrs. Dubedat created
this dilemma in his mind.
Louis promises his wife, Jennifer, that he will never borrow again,
unless he has first asked her. But as soon as her back is turned on him,he tries
to borrow 150 pounds from Ridgeon. When Ridgeon refuses to do so, he
suggests him that he can. get the money for him, by blackmailing his wife.
Ridgeon again objects to his suggestion. Louis then asks Ridgeon to
blackmail his patients into sitting to him for their portraits.
After some time Walpole remembers his golden cigarettecase which
was borrowed by Louis at the Star and Garter. When Walpole asks him for his
cigarette-case he tells him that he has taken a loan against it from a broker.
Ridgeon gets stem on Louis's behaviour. He strictly asks Louis to pay back
the half-crown to Dr. Blenkinsop. But Louis without any shame asks the other
doctors to give him half-a-crown to pay his debt. Finally Dr. Walpole settles
the matter.
Louis tells the doctors that he had given heavenly happiness to Minnie
Tinwell, the maid of Star and Garter. She was aheacly married to a steward of
a liner, who had left her. Louis was also married to Jennifer at that time. But
to have a physical relationship with her, he married her because she refused to
have any relation with him unless they were married. Louis kept secret about
his marriage and also misguided her by telling that if a woman does not hear
fiom her husband for three years; she might marry again. So both of them got
married. Minnie out of ignorance and Louis out of immorality. After spending
all their money in three weeks time, they parted without any hassles and just
like good friends. So there was no complication.
Disgusted by Lois's immorality, Ridgeon rejects his earlier decision
of saving Louis. He decides to take Dr. Blenkinsop as his patient instead of
Louis. Walpole offers to operate Louis's nucifom sac but Louis asks money
in return of it. Finally, Sir Ralph offers to take Louis as his patient because for
him character does not count. A man may be morally good or bad, but his
body is simply a field of battle in which the phagocytes fight with the
diseased germs. Also the doctors have promised Mrs. Dubedat to treat Mr.
Dubedat, so he willingly accepts to treat Louis.
Mrs. Dubedat is disappointed to know that Sir Ralph is going to treat
her husband. She had always wanted Ridgeon to take her husband's case. But
Ridgeon assures h a of Sir Ralph's ability. Jennifer again persuades Sir
Ridgeon to take Louis as his patient, but Ridgeon tells her that it is better if
Sir Ralph treats her husband because this is the only chance that will preserve
her husband ever after. Jennifer puts all her faith in Ridgeon's advice and both
wish to have a lasting friendship.
Louis dies due to negligence in treatment. Before his death he tells
Jennifer that he has found deep happiness and real satisfaction in her. He
urges her to always remain beautiful as she is now, He tells her not to mourn
his death, because crying will make her look ugly. He also make her promise
to marry again because he can't bear to think her as a widow. Jennifer also
faces her husband's death bravely. She goes inside a d gets herself dressed
up beautillly and shakes hands with all the doctors except Ridgeon, because
she now does not consider him as a friend.
Louis's last wish was to hang his pictures at the one man show in the
art gallery. Jennifer arranges it in one of the smaller Bond Street Picture
Galleries. Ridgeon comes and admires the pictures. Jennifer accuses him of
saving Dr. Blenkinsop and killing her husband, Louis. Ridgeon confesses his
love for her and assures her that Louis had made her life miserable when he
was alive, but after his death, she has become the happiest woman in the
world, because his paintings are her imperishable joy and pride and his words
are the heavenly music in her ears. Ridgeon then tells her that he is her true
fiiend because he has brought this happiness to her. In the end, Jennifer tells
him that she had married again. Ridgeon is shocked to hear this. He loses all
interest in her and goes away.
Dr. Ridgeon is the pivotal figure in the play. He is a man of fifty years,
but looks younger than his age. Though his face has lines of overwork and
restlessness and his hair has lost its lusture, 'but his figure and manner is
more the young man than the titled physician".
Dr. Ridgeon's new discovery of the opsonin-serum for tuberculosis has
caused a wonder cure. As a result he has been made a Knight and his
Knighthood has been announced in the King's birthday honour's list, as the
play begins. Dr. Ridgeon, by his nature, is rather self-conscious of this
honour. Number of eminent doctors and surgeons come to congratulate him
on his newly won distinction. Dr. Ridgeon greets them all and there is a
discussion on the diseases, their diagnosis and treatment. All the doctors
differ entirely in their treatment and each has a scientific and logical
explanation to defend it. Dr. Ridgeon is confident about his cure and his
treatment is hundred per cent guaranteed.
Dr. Ridgeon consults Sir Patrick, who is like a father to him about his
minor ailment. He describes his ailment as I have a curious aching. I don't
know where: I can't localize it. Sometimes I think it's my heart: sometimes I
suspect my spine. It doesn't exactly hurt me: but it unsettles me completely. I
feel that something is going to happen-and
there are other symptoms. Scraps
of tunes come into my head that seem to me very pretty, though they're quite
commonplace."
Sir Patrick tells him that it is nothing but only foolishness. He further
advises him to be carehl as he is a bachelor and these symptoms occur
between the age of seventeen and twenty-two, when a youth feels an
attraction towards the opposite sex. So he says, "You're not going to die; but
you may be going to make a fool of yourself. So be careful." Ridgeon,
however, fails to remember Sir Patrick's advice and makes a fool of himself
in the end of the play.
Dr. Ridgeon's humanity is true to his profession. He feels uneasy at
Blenkinsop's poverty and asks him if he could help him, without hurting his
pride. Yet another time, when Louis Dubedat cheats Blenkinsop of his half a
crown, Ridgeon finds it damnable. Later he tells Louis to pay this debt
especially because other doctors could afford to give money as charity (but
Blenkinsop could not afford such things and also he is too self-respectful to
take monetary help from others. So he says, "To clean poor Blenkinsop out of
his last half-crown was damnable. I intended to give him that half-crown and
to be in a position to pledge him my word that you paid it. 1'11 have that out of
you, at all events."
Ridgeon's dilemma is to choose between a dishonest, immoral man of
genius and his old friend a sick, and poor general practitioner and it is certain
that whichever he decides to save the other is condemned to death. Dr.
Ridgeon can take only one more patient for his cure for tuberculosis. When
Sir Patrick asks him which one he is going to choose, Ridgeon replies, "It's
not an easy case to judge, is it?. Blenkinsop's an honest decent man, but is he
any use?. Dubedat's a rotten blackguard but he is a genuine source of pretty
and pleasant and good things." During further discussion, Sir Patrick asks
Ridgepn, "Suppose you had this choice put before you; either to go through
life and find all the pictures bad but all the men and women good, or to go
through life and find all the pictures good and all the men and women rotten.
Which would you choose?" To this Ridgeon replies, "It would be simpler if
Blenkinsop could paint Dubedat's pictures."
Sir Ridgeon is attracted towards Jennifer Dubedat in his first meeting
with her. He tries to be stern and strict with her but on looking at Duhedat's
drawing with Jennifer as the model, he is impressed by her beauty. He asks
her to bring her husband to meet the most eminent men in medical profession:
Sir Patrick Cullen.
However, Ridgeon is tempted with Jennifer and the dilemma arisen in
his mind is complicated due to the presence of Jennifer. Dr. Ridgeon refuses
to accept Duhedat, apparently because he is not a virtuous man but his real
motive is to many his widow. Sir Patrick warns him that Jennifer might not
have him, after her husband's death, but Ridgeon is quite sure about it. He
says, "I've a pretty good flair for that sort of thing. I know when a woman is
interested in me. She is. '"dgeon
entrusts Duhedat to Sir Ralph Bloomfield
Bonington, who he knows for certain, will kill him. Dubedat really becomes
worse under Sir B.B.'s treatment. At last he dies. Ridgeon makes a fool of
himself by proposing to Jennifer. Jennifer is taken in surprise and blurts out,
"I love you an elderly man". Ridgeon feels as if thunderstruck and cries,
"Dubedat, thou art avenged", and after some time he goes away.
Viewed in the proper perspective, Ridgeon can be considered immoral.
He has intentionally tried to kill Dubedat to many his widow who is much
younger him. As a doctor he has failed his duty. His refusal to accept Louis
Dubedat as his patient shows that he has no dilemma in his mind. He had
wanted to see Jennifer as a widow so that he might many her. He ought to
have forgotten Jennifer while making his choice between Dubedat and
Blenkinsop. But in making such a choice he became a blundering idiot rather
than a real saviour of men.
Mrs.Dubedat is an arrestingly good looking young woman. She has a
graceful figure and she "carried herself with the unaffected distinction of a
woman who has never in her life suffered fiom those doubts and fears as to
her social position which spoil the manners of most middling people". She is
tall, slim and strong. She has dark hair and dark fringed eyes which change
with her expressions. She is softly impetuous in her speech and swift in her
movements. She has the elegance arid dignity of a fine lady.
Jennifer, truly and deeply loves her husband, Louis Dubedat. She
comes to know about Dr. Ridgeon and his wonder cure for tuberculosis in
newspapers, and comes to ask him to treat her husband, who is suffering fiom
tubrculosis. Dr. Ridgeon, insultingly refbses to see her and tells his rnaidservant to say so, but Jennifer does not mind it and is ready to wait
indefinitely. She bribes Ridgeon's maid-servant, Emrny to coax Ridgeon into
seeing her. Emmy persuades Ridgeon, who ultimately agrees to meet her only
for few minutes.
Jennifer, than tells Ridgeon that her husband is a genius and his life is
worth saving. She persuades Ridgeon to take her husband as his patient.
When Ridgeon asks her to bring her husband at Star and Garter, so that
eminent physicians may select him or reject him, Jennifer is too confident of
her husband's talent. She is confident that her husband will be selected and
saved by Ridgeon.
Jennifer knows about her husband's short-commings, but inspite of it
she loves him dearly. She says, "I know he has little faults: impatience,
sensitiveness, even little selfishness that are too trivial for him to notice. I
know that he sometimes shocks people about money because he is so utterly
above it, and can't understand the value ordinary people set on it" and later,
"He is perhaps sometimes weak about women, because they adore him so,
and are always laying traps for him."
In the end when Ridgeon accuses him as the 'most entire and perfect
scoundrel, the most miraculously mean rascal, the most callously selfish
blackguard that ever made a wife miserable', Jennifer calmly replies that he
had made her the happiest woman in the world. And later she says, "I can't
argue with you: you are clever enough to puzzle me, but not to shake me. You
are so utterly, so wildly wrong, so incapable of appreciating Louis
Jennifer tells Ridgeon that she married Louis because as a child she
had always wanted to bring some charm and happiness into a man of genius's
life, who had to struggle with poverty and neglect at first. She had some
property and also she was conscious about her beauty. She met Louis and he
was like a child to her. Both were drawn towards each other, but according to
Jennifer, Louis is not like other men. He never thought of marrying her. When
she proposed to him, he told her that he had no money. When Jennifer told
him that she had some money, he agreed to marry her just like a boy. Jennifer
further says, "He is still like that, quite unspoiled, a man in his thoughts, a
great poet and artist in his dreams, and a child in his ways. I gave him myself
and all that I had that he might grow to his full height with plenty of sunshine.
If I lost faith in him, it would mean the wreck and failure of my life. 1 should
go back to Cornwall and die."
Jennifer constantly tries to make a better man of Louis. She makes him
promise again and again, not to ask money from other people. She coaxes him
to complete his drawings in given time, in order to earn money. But in doing
so, she is never harsh on him. She understands his indifference and urges him
to change his behaviour gently and lovingly.
Louis knew that he was going to die. On his death bed he asks Jennifer
not to mourn his death and never to live as a widow. He asks her to remarry
and to always look beautiful. Also his last wish was to hang his pictures in an
Art Gallery at the one-man show. Jennifer does as he had wished. She dresses
up beautifully immediately after Louis's death and remarries after some time.
She also organises a one-man show in an Art-Gallery.
She is aware of the tensions between her husband and Dr. Ridgeon, so
after Louis's death, she shakes hand with each and every person present at
that time, except Ridgeon. When Ridgeon offers his hand to her, she gently
draws back her hand and tells him that she will shake hands only with her
husband's friends.
Jennifer rejects Ridgeon in the end scornfUlly. Ridgeon is confident
that Jennifer will accept him after becoming a widow. But when he proposes
her in the art-gallery, she is shocked at first to hear it coming from an elderly
man, who is more than twenty years older than her. Moreover, she had loved
her husband so dearly that she could never think of other man in her life. She
says, "But even so, how could you think I
- his
wife could ever think of
you."
Shaw started the play with Jennifer as the central character, possibly
with the idea of tragedy, but soon discovered that his real concern was not
with Jennifer and problem of her husband, but with the doctor and the
temptation with which he was faced, which might have led to tragedy. This
explains the last Act, which is unnecessary from any other point of view, for
there: must be no doubt about the doctor's comic defeat. Jennifer is important,
for the Dilemma would not have arisen without her.
REFERENCES
1.
Ward A.C., Bernard Shaw, 3"' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P.103.
Shaw, George Bernard, The Bodley Head Bemard Shaw, Collected
Plays with their Prefaces, 7 Vols., London, Sydney, Toronto, Max
Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1970, Reprinted 1079. P.722
Shaw, George Bernard, The Bodley Head Bemard Shaw, Collected
Plays with their Prefaces, 7 Vols., London, Sydney, Toronto, Max
Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1970, Reprinted 1079. P.724
Valency Maurice, the Cart and the Trumpet: the Plays of George
Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), P. 267.
Joad., C.E.M., "Shaw", London, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949, P.63.
Ward A.C., Bernard Shaw, 3' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P.97.
Nicoll, Allardyce, "English Drama 1900-1930: The Beginnings of the
Modem Period, London, New York, Cambrige University, 1973, P.68.
Joad., C.E.M., "Shaw", London, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949, P.73.
Ward A.C. Bernard Shaw, 3' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P. 108.
Ward A.C. Bernard Shaw, 3"' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P.54.
Bentley Eric, "The Making of a Dramatist (1892-1903); in R.J.
Kaufinann, ed., G.B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood C1iffs;N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), P.61.
Bentley Eric, "The Making of a Dramatist (1892-1903)," in R.J.
Kaufmann, ed., G.B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), P. 62.
13.
Bentley Eric, "The Making of a Dramatist (1892-1903);
in R.J.
Kaufmann, ed., G.B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), P. 67.
14.
Ward A.C., Bernard Shaw, 3' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P. 107.
15.
Henderson Archibald, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and works
London:Hurst and Blackett Ltd., 191l), P. 439.
16.
Sen Gupta, S.C., "The Art of Bernard Shaw", Calcutta, A. Mukherjee
and Co., 1998, P.73.
17.
Chesterton, G.K., George Bernard Shaw, London, Max Reinhardt,
1961.
18.
Ward A.C., Bernard Shaw, 3' ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P.148.
18.
Ward A.C., Bernard Shaw, 3* ed. (London: Longmans, 1957), P. 151.