Tuesday
In my Feuding Couples Comedy class this week, I looked at George Bernard Shaw and Edward Albee. I’ll focus on Man and Superman and Pygmalion today and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? tomorrow.
To belong to the genre as I am defining it, the couple must compete on a more or less even playing field. As a supporter of the suffragettes, Shaw peopled his comedies with strong female figures, making verbal gender battles inevitable.
Freud tells us that laughter arises out of relationship anxiety, meaning that witty banter can mask vulnerability fears. Many of Shaw’s male leads, like Shaw himself, hide their emotions under a barrage of words. “Always be verbally attacking” could be the motto of both Jack Tanner and Henry Higgins.
In Man and Superman, Ann goes after Tanner as Hellena goes after Willmore in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, another feuding comedy. We watch the advantage swing back and forth until she finally lands her man. Ann makes the first move:
[Ann, musing on Violet’s opportune advice, approaches Tanner; examines him humorously for a moment from toe to top; and finally delivers her opinion.]
ANN. Violet is quite right. You ought to get married.
TANNER. [explosively] Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t, WON’T marry you.
ANN. [placidly] Well, nobody axd you, sir she said, sir she said, sir she said. So that’s settled.
TANNER. Yes, nobody has asked me; but everybody treats the thing as settled. It’s in the air…
Like an expert fencer, Ann appears to let down her guard. As she anticipates, Tanner charges in, words flying. In the process, he sets forth the age-old tension between the freedom of bachelorhood and the stability of marriage:
ANN. Well, if you don’t want to be married, you needn’t be [she turns away from him and sits down, much at her ease].
TANNER. [following her] Does any man want to be hanged? Yet men let themselves be hanged without a struggle for life, though they could at least give the chaplain a black eye. We do the world’s will, not our own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married because it is the world’s will that you should have a husband.
ANN. I daresay I shall, someday.
TANNER. But why me—me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility, shall be merely somebody else’s property—and damaged goods at that: a secondhand man at best.
ANN. Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you in countenance, like my grandmother.
TANNER. So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim!
Behn’s Willmore also compares marriage to a hanging, and like Willmore Tanner ultimately surrenders to a persistent woman, salvaging his pride only by saying he’s not happy about it:
I solemnly say that I am not a happy man. Ann looks happy; but she is only triumphant, successful, victorious. That is not happiness, but the price for which the strong sell their happiness. What we have both done this afternoon is to renounce tranquillity, above all renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown future, for the cares of a household and a family. I beg that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and utter imbecile speeches and coarse pleasantries at my expense. We propose to furnish our own house according to our own taste; and I hereby give notice that the seven or eight travelling clocks, the four or five dressing cases, the salad bowls, the carvers and fish slices, the copy of Tennyson in extra morocco, and all the other articles you are preparing to heap upon us, will be instantly sold, and the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the Revolutionist’s Handbook. The wedding will take place three days after our return to England, by special license, at the office of the district superintendent registrar, in the presence of my solicitor and his clerk, who, like his clients, will be in ordinary walking dress.
VIOLET. [with intense conviction] You are a brute, Jack.
ANN. [looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm] Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.
TANNER. Talking!
Universal laughter.
Henry Higgins in Pygmalion isn’t much different. In class I contrasted Shaw’s most popular play with Taming of the Shrew, noting that Shrew starts as a feuding comedy but veers away while Pygmalion starts as something else but ends as one. Because she is Higgins’s pupil, Eliza Doolittle is not initially an equal opponent, but she has become one by the closing scene. Watch them go at it after Higgins threatens to wring her neck. Liza has threatened to branch out and teach phonetics on her own:
LIZA [defiantly non-resistant] Wring away. What do I care? I knew you’d strike me some day. [He lets her go, stamping with rage at having forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he stumbles back into his seat on the ottoman]. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertize it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.
HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut, you! But it’s better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and finding spectacles, isn’t it? [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.
LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of you, and can do without you.
HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.
Note that Higgins, although seeming to yield, still imagines a life lived on his terms. Here’s their final interchange:
LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good-bye. [She goes to the door].
MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.
HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].
LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].
Despite this abrupt ending, however, audiences were still convinced of a future with wedding bells. According to Public Radio’s Studio 360, Shaw’s play was transformed from a feminist manifesto to a chick flick in its very first performance:
At the end of the play, after Eliza “sweeps out,” the actor playing Henry Higgins created a moment for himself — a moment Shaw never wrote and clearly didn’t want. As Eliza was leaving, Higgins watched her go, and then gave her a look. He didn’t change any lines, but he gave the audience exactly what they wanted to see: that Eliza and Higgins had been in love all along and that after the curtain fell, they’d be together….
Apparently there was nothing Shaw could do to rein this actor in. By the hundredth performance, the actor was throwing flowers after Eliza.
Both the 1938 film version and My Fair Lady (1964) are even more explicit, showing Eliza returning to Higgins. This in spite of Shaw’s long afterword explaining why Eliza would have married the worshipful Freddy, not Higgins.
Audiences craving for a union between a feuding couple were not altogether out of line, however. Although Shaw lambastes those of us “enfeebled” by our dependence on romantic endings and makes a compelling case for an Eliza-Freddy marriage, it’s also true that he makes Eliza’s continued relationship with Higgins sound far more interesting. Shaw makes it clear that Liza no less that Higgins is stimulated more by combat than soft romance:
It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy’s mind to his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity—and may they be spared any such trial!—will ever alter this. She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have private imaginations of that sort.
Many great feuding couples comedies predict marriages that look something like this, including Much Ado about Nothing, The Rover, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, and Man and Superman. Turning to a work in an entirely different genre that captures the dynamic, C.S. Lewis in Horse and His Boy reports the following future for Aravis and Shasta/Cor:
Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.
To be sure, this is a bachelor Oxford don talking, one who may share the same fears of emotional vulnerability as Shaw. But it helps explain why actors, directors, and audiences weren’t going to listen to an author dictate their imagining. They knew real love when they saw it.
On the other hand, if you want to see some marital quarreling that might get even Shaw and Lewis to think twice, tune in for tomorrow’s essay on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?