Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

rain over Covent Garden. Higgins fails to recognize the gumption she shows in seeking him out to improve her speech so she can earn enough to live a decent life. To him she is only the subject of an experiment whereby he may demonstrate his art; to him she has no feelings that he need bother about. But he is wrong: Eliza feels intensely. Indeed, the powerful drive of her feelings brings her to life in the fourth act and drives her to independence from Higgins in the fifth act. (Like The Doctor’s Dilemma, Pygmalion has five acts, showing the affinity between the two plays, but also showing that Shaw is particularly conscious here of the Shakespearean model.)
    Higgins says to Pickering that all the attractive young, rich American women he teaches “might as well be blocks of wood,” as far as their sexually tempting him is concerned. And at first he regards Eliza this way—as a block of wood out of which he will carve a duchess. When Leontes looks upon his wife Hermione’s statue in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, he becomes ashamed, remembering the grave injustice he did her, and asks rhetorically: “Does not the stone rebuke me for being more stone than it?” (act 5, scene 3). Eliza’s flexible humanity rebukes Higgins for being stone cold. It is an accusation that stings and provokes Higgins to one of his great outbursts about the life of science, of art being utterly unlike the life of the gutter, not immediate, not warm. (The speech actually reflects an intensely dramatic letter Shaw sent to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, while she was rehearsing the part of Eliza Doolittle, in which he reproaches her for rejecting him.) Eliza retorts that she was not seeking from him what the gutter gave; she wanted from him respect for her as a fellow human being, some regard for her feelings. She rightly says that she will not care for someone who does not care for her. But she does not quite succeed in penetrating his defense system until she shows the shrewdest understanding of where his pride lies. She threatens to set herself up as a rival artist by becoming a teacher of phonetics. That finally makes Higgins actually think of her as an original herself, and not just a copy of him. When at the end of the play Eliza rebuffs Higgins’s final attempt to bully her, she tells Higgins to buy his own gloves, and then “sweeps out”; she becomes mobile, while he remains, statue-like, standing in place.

HEARTBREAK HOUSE
    The Doctor’s Dilemma and Pygmalion, for all their embedding in social problems—doctors having a pecuniary interest in their patients’ illnesses, language as class barrier—grew out of Shaw’s preoccupations with the figure of the artist, the dangers of self-absorption combined poisonously with lack of self-knowledge. Heartbreak House grew out of and during the four-year cataclysm World War I, the family feud among the ruling houses of Europe, which nearly ended them all, along with everyone else. To Shaw, who forged—and I mean forged—through an intense exercise of will and faith an optimism about the future course of the human race in the face of his own subcutaneous suspicions that human beings harbor within a fugitive desire for self-destruction, the war was a nightmare come true.
    He first reacted, as writers tend to do, by writing something—a pamphlet he called “Common Sense About the War.” In it he argued that first of all, now that we (Great Britain and its allies) are in the war we must prosecute it vigorously to the finish, but we must seize the opportunity when it is over to insure that it is the last war. While conceding the necessity of victory, though, Shaw argued that we must not deal with the defeated Germans from a morally superior position. He also opined that if the Germans behaved badly to the civilian population in Belgium, we have behaved badly to subjects of our empires, that the Germans’ militarism differs little from ours. He challenged the rhetoric of the war by suggesting