Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

And so Barbara does when she gets to her father’s cannon-works town with its powerful foundry, its well-tended workers’ dwellings, its families, and its children. She sees that here is a real challenge for her: Can she induce well-fed and well-paid workers to pay attention to their spiritual selves, to their salvation? She decides to renew hope and marry the man who will take over the cannon works from her father. That man turns out to be Cusins. From the premiere of the play in 1906 people have found its ending ambiguous: Do Barbara and Cusins succumb to the allure of materialism in agreeing to take over the cannon works from Undershaft ? Or do they intend to use their new power to “make war on war”? Shaw leaves the question unresolved, though he clearly leans toward the latter possibility. In any case, as he said in the postscript to the preface to Back to Methuselah (1921), which he wrote in 1944 for the OxfordWorld’s Classics edition: It is the job of classic works to “try to solve, or at least to formulate, the riddles of creation.”

Cusins formulates one of the riddles of creation in an exchange with Barbara over how the cannon works are to be used. Cusins says he will use them to give power to the people. But Barbara laments the power to destroy and kill. Cusins replies: “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too” (p. 155
).
Another way of formulating that idea is: Undershaft’s weapons and explosives are as good or as bad as the man making them (to adapt a line from the film
Shane).
Barbara sees the cannon works as her opportunity to raise “hell to heaven.” Her most immediate impulse, however, is to escape to heaven, away from the “naughty, mischievous children of men.” But her courage returns, and she unites herself to both Cusins and her father (while she also reaffirms her bond with her mother, an affirmation that is the seal of her reborn self). Jonathan Wisenthal (in
The Marriage of Contraries)
has argued persuasively that the end of the play anticipates a tripartite union of three kinds of power: material (Undershaft), intellectual (Cusins), and spiritual (Barbara). But Shaw is well aware that such a union, like Father Keegan’s vision of three in one, is not realized in the play, and may be only a madman’s dream.

The comical satire of the medical profession in Shaw’s play hardly differs from Molière’s portrayal of doctors and patients in his comedies devoted to the subject
(The Imaginary Invalid, The Doctor in Spite of Himself , Doctor Love).
Shaw makes the same points that Molière makes (points that bear repeating for every generation): that there are fashions in diseases as there are in dresses; that people will use real, pretended, and imagined illnesses to manipulate and dominate their nearest and dearest; that doctors have obsessions in treatments and cure-alls, and resist innovation; that they will pretend to knowledge they do not have and are jealous of professional rivals; and that they behave as all other professionals do in using jargon to prevent outsiders from keeping close tabs on them. And though Shaw has much fun with all of this—especially the surgeon determined to remove everyone’s “nuciform sac” as a universal cure for what ails you—the satirical comedy is not the real point of the play.

Nor is the real point the ethical dilemma denoted by the title. Doctor Ridgeon has developed a new, effective cure for tuberculosis but can treat only so many patients. He must choose, therefore, who to save: the artist, Louis Dubedat, who creates authentic art but is immoral in his treatment of others—indiscriminately exploitative, deceitful in all things, honest in none, monumentally selfish, and automatically unscrupulous—or the dull but decent Doctor Blenkinsop, a gentle and considerate soul, generous to a fault, congenial to all, genuinely honest, but an ineffectual doctor, innocuous company, and generally useless to society. One further complication is that Doctor Ridgeon has fallen in love with the artist’s wife, Jennifer, who not only worships her husband but utterly blinds herself to his crimes.

The very symmetry of this dilemma has misled even some of the best critical minds into faulting the play for contrivance (for example, Lionel Trilling in
The Experience of Literature).
But the Shavian symmetry aims not for contrivance but for the theme of the Double, the use of paired characters to dramatize the relationship between inner and outer life in individuals, a theme Shaw had addressed already in
The Devil’s Disciple,
but to which here he gives a deeper development and darker variation. The scalawag Dick Dudgeon of the earlier play, who was not truly villainous but only unorthodox and unconventional in his manners and morals, here becomes the truly opprobrious artist-scoundrel Dubedat, while the minister and man of peace, Anthony Anderson, who turns into a man of war and rebellion, becomes Dr. Ridgeon, medical miracle worker and murderer.

Judith Anderson becomes Jennifer Dubedat. We may note that in the transformation Shaw shifts the woman’s position in the triangle: In the later play, she is the wife not of the socially respectable older man, but of the transgressive young artist; and she has become the erotic object of the older Ridgeon, who sees in her some fantasy of female artistic beauty, a fantasy for which he is willing to kill by withholding his medical skill. The perfect irony of Ridgeon’s infatuation is matched by Jennifer’s tragi-comic fantasy of her husband as the noble artist. The poisonous ending of the play keeps her a primarily comic figure because she remains perfectly happy in her deluded picture of her dead husband, while Ridgeon is turned into a mainly tragic figure by the mere addition of self-knowledge. He comes to see himself through the woman’s eyes: a jealous old man who “committed a purely disinterested murder” (p. 357).

That Shaw self-consciously reworked the psychological pattern of the woman’s role in the rivalry of the Doubles from
The Devil’s Disciple to The Doctor’s
Dilemma can be seen from his having given Jennifer a line virtually identical to a line he gave Judith—a line, moreover, that describes the relationship of the two men to be that of psychological twins. In the earlier play, Judith reproaches Dick Dudgeon for being jealous of her husband: “Can you not forgive him for being so much better than you are?” In the later play, Jennifer reproaches Ridgeon: “Can you not forgive him for being superior to you? for being cleverer? for being braver? for being a great artist?” (p. 326). Where the earlier pair’s rivalry centered on a question of relative moral worth, each wanting to be the better man, each discovering the truth about himself, the later play’s pair of Doubles compete as twin artists. (For Shaw the defining characteristic of the artist was that he or she should create new thought; hence, he regarded scientists like Ridgeon, inventor of a new treatment for tuberculosis, or Henry Higgins, the phoneticist in
Pygmalion,
as artists in that broad sense.)

There is yet another link between the two plays. Shaw asserted that the idea for
The Doctor’s Dilemma
resulted from hearing his friend, the great physician Sir Almoth Wright (upon whom and whose development of opsonin Shaw based Ridgeon’s story), when asked if he could take on an extra patient, say that he would have to consider whose life was more worth saving. In
The Devil’s Disciple
the saving of lives (and souls) based on moral worth is at issue, for Dick saves the minister’s life, and the minister in turn wants to save Dick’s soul but changes to saving his life. Implicit in each play is the question: Whose lives are worth saving? In the more optimistic and comic vision of
The Devil’s Disciple,
there is obviously so much goodness in each of the two men that the answer to the question would seem: Everyone’s life is worth saving. In the darker
Doctor’s Dilemma,
the answer would seem: hardly anyone’s.

The most prevalent paradigm for stories of Doubles—
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
to take examples contemporary with
The Doctor’s Dilemma
—is that the destruction of one’s Double means the destruction of oneself. When Doctor Ridgeon kills Louis Dubedat he is trying to kill his unrealized self. In an unguarded moment, after discovering Dubedat’s true nature to be that of an unscrupulous liar, cheat, and monstrous egotist, Ridgeon remarks to his old patron and friend, Sir Patrick: “I’m not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as Blenkinsop does” (pp. 300—301). That is, he feels the world would be better if everyone behaved with regard to self-interest and without regard to the interest of others. Sir Patrick challenges Ridgeon to explain why he then does not behave so. Ridgeon replies that he cannot. He would like to act that way but cannot get up the courage. He calls it a dilemma, and thus explains the title: To think one way and to live another is the doctor’s dilemma. Finally, though, he tries to resolve his dilemma by killing Louis. But as the play’s final scene—one of Shaw’s greatest—shows, in doing so he destroys himself, for Jennifer categorically rejects his attempt to take Louis’s place in her bed and in her heart. She has married someone else, according to her husband’s dying wish.

Historian and critic Jacques Barzun says that if you open a Shaw play to any scene and begin reading, you quickly become convinced that the characters are talking about life and death matters. So intensely do they listen to one another and turn every assertion, query, and rejoinder into blows, thrusts, and shots, that one feels both of them cannot possibly emerge from the “discussion” alive. This is particularly true of Ridgeon’s final confrontation with Jennifer. The scene anticipates the ferocious struggle between Higgins and Eliza in
Pygmalion—another
play in which an older man has a potential sexual relationship with a younger woman that ends in a checkmate.

The parallels between Eliza Doolittle and Jennifer Dubedat result chiefly from their involvement—their struggles—with older men whose apparent coldness stems from their scientists’ approach to life and human relations. And just as Shaw revealed that Jennifer occupied a niche in his imagination similar to Judith’s (in
The Devil’s Disciple)
by giving the former an expanded version of a line belonging to the latter, so too does Shaw give Eliza one of Jennifer’s lines. In that no-quarter-given final dialogue between Jennifer and Ridgeon, Jennifer expresses her frustration at trying to converse with him: “I don’t understand that. And I cant argue with you” (p. 357). In Eliza’s last verbal smack-down with Higgins, she expresses a similar sense of futility: “I cant talk to you: you turn everything against me” (p. 456). Both women are complaining about more than traditional male-female miscommunication (though there is plenty of that in their dialogue); each is rebelling against Ridgeon’s and Higgins’s automatic treatment of them as creatures, as means to an end rather than ends in themselves. In Ridgeon’s case, he wants to possess Beauty itself in the person of Jennifer, whose beauty first attracts him through one of her husband’s drawings of her, for then he would take the place of the artist, Louis, who is capable of creating beauty.

Higgins’s case is more deranged. The man admits he has never married because he has never found a woman enough like his mother—a woman, Shaw takes pains to point out, who surrounds herself with art. Now, a son who looks for a replicate of his mother in a wife is a son who wants to take his father’s place, to be his own father (note that Higgins’s father is never so much as referred to in the play). Higgins has mastered the art of speech, of phonetics, so that he can identify people’s hidden origins, as he does with the crowd that gathers around Eliza when she suspects he is a detective ready to arrest her for prostitution and is protesting her innocence. As soon as he hears their accents, he tells them where they were born, all the while concealing his own identity. (There is something of Shakespeare’s “Duke of dark corners” in
Measure for Measure,
walking amongst his people incognito, as well as of Shakespeare’s Prospero about Higgins.) Pickering even asks him if he does this in a music hall for a living, as if Higgins were a magician. (Shaw had a similar experience when, while lecturing dock workers on elocution, they called him a “quick-change artist.”)

Higgins belongs with Ibsen’s Master Builder (in
The Master Builder,
1892) and Rubek the sculptor (in
When We Dead Awaken,
1899) among modern drama’s most profound studies of the artist’s psychology, for the Professor of Speech forgets the difference between life and art. When he undertakes the experiment of turning the “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” Eliza Doolittle into a “duchess at an ambassador’s garden party,” Higgins imagines that he is a god creating out of nothing, out of the “squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden.” He fails to see that he has only transported her from one kind of limiting garden to another. As part of the fantasy of creator he lives out, he must become Eliza’s father: “I’ll be worse than two fathers to you.” He considers the “gift of articulate speech” he is to give Eliza a “divine” one, but it is really the parent’s gift to the child; more particularly, the mother gives language to the child (which is why we speak the “mother tongue”). Much later in the play, Shaw will make this point comically by having Henry’s mother, Mrs. Higgins, trick her son into not whistling by provoking a remark from him, and explain herself by saying, “I only wanted to make you speak” (p. 445).

In making Eliza speak, Higgins becomes her parent; he becomes a creator, instead of someone who is himself created. He can fantasize that he is an original, in the way all artists want to believe that their art is original. That is why Shaw has Higgins tell everyone where they originated; and why Shaw makes Higgins identify himself professionally to Pickering as one who does “a little as a poet on Miltonic lines” (p. 378). (When Shaw prepared the play to be filmed, he excised this reference to Milton, perhaps because it was too revealing of his anxieties about his own originality), for Milton’s Satan (in
Paradise Lost)
claims not to have been created by God: He considers himself to be coeval with God. In other words, Satan considers himself self-begotten, the author of himself; he has no origin outside himself. Nor does Higgins. Shaw plays a great deal with images of Higgins as a satanic tempter, as when Eliza feels “tempted” by his offer of chocolates, or when Mrs. Pearce reproaches him for “tempting” Eliza; he even munches an apple, the biblical symbol of temptation, as he suggests to her that she might marry someone or other.