Chapter threeTwo: Two plays and their meanings

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw

We cannot analyse a play unless we have a considerable reading background. The first
layer of our background is made of the stories that we were told when we were children.
Cinderella or The Sleeping Beauty or the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion or Galatea,
about which we read or heard about later in life, are the inspiration sources mainly used by
George Bernard Shaw for his play Pygmalion. When we read the play we associate it with
what we already know. That didn’t prevented Shaw from being the sculptor of his own story,
and to modernise the plot.

"“Shaw wrote the play in the spring of 1912 and it premiered at the Hofburg Theatre
in
Vienna on October 16, 1913 in a German translation by Siegfried Trebitsch. Its first New
York production was in March 24, 1914 at Irving Place Theatre and it opened in London in
April 11, 1914."”1 He wrote about the lustful and shameful life of women, about veneration
and didacticism, about the fact that even ordinary people get a chance to change something,
about the mundane vs the divine, beauty reflects absolute perfection or not, is the man
superior to the woman?

Shaw takes into consideration the language issue. If the language causes someone to
have a greater social status or not or to act like a visit card for someone who knows how to
pronounce and makes them into a society where not a lot of people has access to. "“Beside
Ovid’s version in his Metamorphoses that very closely sticks to the original of Greek
mythology and G.B. Shaw’s one that, although he changes the frame and the plot of
Pygmalion, he still holds on to the idea of the original story, there is for example Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion(1770), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s poem Pygmalion

1
Simion, Otilia Minodora, ‘The Creation-Creator Relationship in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion’,
Targu Jiu, Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuși” University of Târgu Jiu, Letter and Social Science
Series, Issue 4/2014
(1767) and others. "“2 Furthermore, when the play was firstly set, at His Majesty’s Theatre, in
the German-language production, the audience was horrified because Eliza has used the word
bloody…"”to assess accurately the critical response to the play itself because of the totally
disproportionate amount of space, time and attention that was given to the use by Shaw …of
the word bloody…some critics have affirmed that the word affects them."”3 The play was
widely acclaimed, and the play was a success. But even so, the narrow views of the public is
overwhelming. The author’s main purpose of the play, I think, is to boil the pot.

Moreover, Shaw’s wit and irony are so powerful and brilliant. Mastering the language,
he renders an ironical situation in the first Act, when the flower girl shouts after the unlucky
boy who was send by his mother to call the taxi on a heavily rainy evening. His name was
Freddy, but it was merely a coincidence the fact that Eliza names all the boys the same. In the
play, there are many ideas, but none of them is still dominant. That is, in my opinion, because
he disliked the restrictiveness that he confronted with in the society. Starting with the name,
this is how the irony begins, and goes on with the fact that he present the play as being a
Romance. "“The name, of course, suggests an old story, and probably was chosen mainly to
anticipate charges of plagiarism, for there is little if Pygmalion or Galatea element. The
programme description, a Romance, was obviously a joke. The play is only a parody, in the
darkest sense, of the romantic element. "“4 Although, Higgins may have secretly been in love
with Eliza. But, to my opinion, Higgins is a convinced bachelor and a misogynist.

Shaw’s play has been a source of inspiration for a lot of directors or dramatists ever
since. My fair lady is the most prominent movie made after the play. Pygmalion is one of the
most well-known comedy of manners of all times. It is not so surprisingly as the play, but is
easier to get to the minds or hearts of people. "“Shaw revolted against deeply-held ideas that
literature is writing which supersedes a specific purpose other than to communicate life
experience, and is not didactic. "“5 In Shaw’s play, the Professor doesn’t fall in love with his
creation. "“As Joshua points out, Shaw’s play owes more to W.S. Gilbert Pygmalion and
Galatea, than to the Ovidian myth, because the first version focussed on the expanding role of

2
Kern, Catharina; Changing Gender Roles and the Pygmalion Motif - Shaw's Pygmalion and the
Musical "My Fair Lady" in their contexts, GRIN Verlag, Opne Publishing GmbH, 2007, page 3.
3
Gale, Cengage Learning, A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, 1998, Critical
Overview, page 9
4
Evans, T. F; George Bernard Shaw, The Critical Heritage, Routledge London and New York, 1976,
page 224
5
De Gale, Cengage Learning, A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Gale Research,
1998, page 2
Pygmalion as educator of his Galatea."”6 Gilbert’s play was about the changing modes of the
Galatea, who is first a statue, springs to life, but disrupts everything that she touches and
because she feels sorry she turns back into being a statue. In Shaw’s play, Eliza, our Galatea,
manages to do better everything she goes.

The play brings into attention matters like the mythological background of the story
itself, a wide range of themes and actions, among which a love story -never fulfilled or even
drafted in the Shavian version- a powerful criticism of society and a tribute to the inner
changes that an individual is capable of. The rigid British society is designed to have multiple
social layers in the Victorian society. One could not be part of the most influential layer,
unless they were politically correct from all points of view.

The play is about a professor of phonetics who ventures into trying to change a flower
girl into a lady. He makes a bet that he can prepare her and transform her from a Cinderella
into a princess. We came across a split personality, because the professor, the mighty
Pygmalion has two helpers, small Pygmalions: Mrs. Pierce and Colonel Pickering. A
Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, will be changed into a duchess that will become an
ambassador for the way in which a superior mind can turn into a bright lady a poor girl. If he
succeeds into polishing her speech, he assumes that her flawless speech will be the defining
element that shows that she has changed for the better. He doesn’t know, yet, that in order to
change her for the best, there must be an inner change, not only a veneer of aristocracy
imposed to her.

As I will further discuss in the next chapter and as I underlined in the case of Blanche
and Susan, the plays are, somehow, a manifesto for the way in which women were treated by
the rigid social system where men were rulers. The independence of women was only a matter
of how powerful they were, regardless of their husbands. That is why Shaw wanted to dismiss
the first view of the sculptor Pygmalion. This view is largely known as that of a man who
gave up his love and attraction for women because his life endeavours with them were
gruelling. And that is why he strenuously put his daily effort into making a master piece. He
designed and created a mostly utopic woman who was so perfect that he fall in love with her.
Out of ivory, he made the body of a woman which was brought to life by Venus, on the day of
her celebration, to fulfil the sculptor’s desire. When de dared to tell the goddess his wish,
Venus her part of the promise. When Pygmalion kisses and embraces the statue, she gains life
6
Eck, Stefanie; Galatea’s Emancipation: The Transformation of the Pygmalion Myth in Anglo-Saxon
Literature since the 20th century, Anchor Academy Publishing, 2014, page 19
and nine months later they have a son, Paphos. The Sleeping Beauty is the tale celebrated by
his kiss, because as the Prince awakes the Princess from her sleep, so as the sculptor gives the
breath of life to the statue. In some versions, Anchises, the mortal whom Aphrodite had a
child with, and who was her weak point, resembles Pygmalion. Why? Because as Aphrodite
had a weakness for a human, so did Venus when she made his wish came true. More than that,
"“it would seem in some ancient traditions Venus’s desire for the handsome Trojan Anchises
was in retribution for her bad behaviour."” 7 William Caxton wrote a text in 1480 in which he
talked about a noble man who wanted to educate a beggar girl. Tobias Smollet does the same
thing and follows the paradigm of the teacher and student. But Shaw follows closely the steps
of Caxton or Rousseau and talks not only about education, or even about refinement, but
about aristocracy. Eliza is transformed and transforms herself the others. Eliza is not just a lab
rat, but a spring that triggers in the Professor the need for more, the need to demonstrate
himself and to others that he can change someone. Following the steps of the fairy tales, we
must underline that just as Cinderella passes the test of the shoe so does Eliza when she
remains truthful to herself in spite of her change in manners. But the Prince is interested in
marrying and having a wife as delicate and wonderful as Cinderella, whereas Higgins is
interested only in his mother and profession.

Shaw underlines a mixture of visions. He is reluctant to only one way of seeing things.
He believes that only through a partnership between the reader or audience, and the writer or
dramatist, author and narrator we can reach the true meaning of the play. "“Prosopopoeia,
Pygmalion’s creative gesture, it is the correct name for what author, narrator and reader do.
But it is equally supported beyond the realm of allegory and metaphor through Bakhtin’s
recognition of the active role played by the listener/reader in the communication process. "“8

I also think that Shaw’s story is one of the first, from the beginning of the world. Just
as God decided that Adam is better with Eve, Pygmalion decided that she had to take out a
large part of his soul to create, from pieces, just like a puzzle an Eve. Pygmalion was not
capable of living without the nearness of a woman. She was the product of his imagination
rather than an attempt at classical mimesis; he had, after all, rejected the women who
surrounded him. The female characters created in his writing are often barely recognisable to
the female reader. Some critics have said that there might be a resemblance between
Pygmalion and Narcissus, thinking about the fact that Pygmalion loved in his ivory sculpture
7
James, Paula; Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman, Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2011, page 27
8
Tompkins, Bridget; Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm, Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2015, xxxi, page 168.
his own version. Pygmalion is seen as a sculptor who shapes a ghost of his own self. This
shaping of an image is the principal thing which seduces the audience. Fortune favours the
brave and the handsome, and the readers know this perfectly.

Let us not forget about the man and superman debate. Nothing justifies the self-
indulgence in not knowing these ideas, the ideas that consolidate a paradigm of thought. That
is the fact that only the human beings that are perfectly designed are worthy of living or being
superior. Shaw intensifies these ideas when he puts the words of blame into the professor’s
mouth. Which blame? That of being poor and uneducated, that of not meeting the
expectations of the modern world or the standards of living. For Higgins, and those who think
like him, human beings like her, namely "“a woman who utters such disgusting sounds as
Eliza in Act 1 has no right to live."”9 Let us not also forget that a lot of ideas from the Fabian
society are welcomed are presented here. The play is just a screen upon which are exposed
moments like the one from Act I, when a policeman who was disguised into an honourable
citizen is no more than a cop trying to fine an innocent girl who was earning an honest living,
not doing harm to anybody. The actions and attitude of the other, bystanders, is what we all
should do. Defend the poor and apply the law of love, not only the law of blind justice. Shaw
brings together people from all of the society layers, so that his painting of the society is more
concluding. The storm is a mirroring of the storm from the society.

The end is evasive. Shaw undoes the myths and educates us in order to read the play
without misconceptions. Because it brings us back to what we stressed before. That is the fact
that numerous ideas are present in the play. It had to be a balance and also a kind of closure.
Eliza is not lured with chocolate now, not manipulated with kind words, and she leaves the
house leaving the professor alone, with no remorse. But the most important thing resides in
belief that a great author swims against the waves of its times. The words of the critic are
eloquent. "“Nevertheless, Shaw went on to try to resist the blandishments, to be Ulysses, as he
said, and to be Pygmalion-that is, to be the elocution teacher if his later play."”10

A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams

9
Eck, Stefanie; Galatea’s Emancipation: The Transformation of the Pygmalion Myth in Anglo-Saxon
Literature since the 20th century, Anchor Academy Publishing, 2014, page 14
10
Ganz, Arthur,George Bernard Shaw-Macmillan Education UK, Macmillan Modern Dramatist, 1983, page 71
 Before starting analysing the Streetcar, I would like to underline the significance of
three elements. The first one is the quote from the poem The Broken Tower by Hart Crane, the
second important element is the description of the bleak scenery and atmosphere of the play
and the third is the evoking of the first staging of the play.

The stanza from the poem is meaningful for the play because it talks about religious
symbols and a significant mixture of vivid imagery and music. Not only the music as we
know it, but also the music of the wind and the voice of love. It transposes us into a touchable
world of the psyche and into the broken world seen by the voice of the poet who knows that
his actions or decisions will be taught, given the fact that he must decide upon the lesser evil,
to make the desperate choice. It is, somehow, an epigraph on which it is written an elegy. An
ode for the sensations, for the life itself and for the gift of being. It got me thinking about
Hyperion and Whitman and about times When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. I think
that the play received a harsh analysis only because Whitman tried and succeed in doing
something greater than was done before and wished to bring sensationalism and greatness
from life to the stage.

Regarding the description of the scenery, it has the gift of taking us into the world of
the play, like any other scenery would do. But this one is different, for me. Because it appeals
to our five senses and to our intuition and sixth sense. We see, we smell, we sense through his
pictures and conditions and we handle things with caution, like a blind man. He talks about
gracefulness, colours, the city, black and white, the river and the women. And about a
melange of things, just like an all-knowing small god would do: "“you can almost feel the
warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of
bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a
barroom around the corner. "“11
Thirdly, we can get a glimpse of how important and well-known the play is just by
reading when the play was staged first, as it is stated in the beginning of the book: "“A
Streetcar Named Desire was presented at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December
3, 1947, by Irene Selznick. It was directed by Elia Kazan, with the following cast…"”
As impressing as it may seem, "“A Streetcar has been produced more than 20,000 times, and
worldwide remains the most popular American play. "“12

11
Williams, Tennessee; A Streetcar Named Desire, A New Directions Book, 1947, page 7
 Not all critics have considered from the beginning that the play is going to be, maybe,
the most famous in America and among the most important in the world. Some have
considered that the plot is erratic and unsteady, "“not understanding that in Williams’s plastic
theatre, realism, expressionism, and naturalism coalesce to (re)present Blance’s illusions.
Several critics-for example Corrigan, Adler and Murphy-explore Streetcar as a lyrical drama
with non-realistic staging. Yet, as Adler points out, Streetcar easily adapts itself to the three-
act structure common to the commercial theatre of its day. "“13 Things like shedding light
upon one’s white collar-identity and consideration for the easy-targets if social injustice, let
alone the psychological aspect of the human conditions are the main elements followed by
Pauly in directing the Streetcar.

Not every play, even in those triumphs days, "“met with critical acclaim, another
Southern play, Summer and Smoke (1948) was premiered in a small theatre in Dallas, at
almost the same time as Streetcar, but was delayed to give Streetcar the spotlight. "“14

According to Williams, the message in Streetcar is "“if we don’t watch out, the apes
will take over"”. If we don’t take actions immediately, thigs such as crimes, violence, social
inequalities and vulgarity will dominate the society. It is no point in saying what it is so
obvious to the naked eye, that what Williams was afraid of is today in its climax. Even in his
time things like this happened, and let us not forget that like everything else in Tennessee
Williams wrote, A Streetcar Named Desire is intensely autobiographical. Williams himself
admitted that it was his favourite play because it said everything I had to say.15

Starting with issues that had never been explored before, like sexuality and
psychology, we may emphasise that A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real (1953), which
premiered the same year as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, brought the concept of
existential absurdity to the American theatre, also introducing the concept of plastic theatre, a
mixture of expressionism and symbolism. Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is the
best well-known American `memory play`, a genre in theatre in which a central character
remembers his past as it is acted out on stage. "“One could argue that Williams’s other plays,

12
Heintzelman, Greta; Smith Howard, Alycia; Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams, Facts on File, New
York, 2005, page 77
13
Kolin C., Philip, Tennessee Williams; A Guide to Research and Performance, Literary Criticism, 1998, page 63
14
Tischler, Nancy Marie Patterson; Student Companion to Tennessee Williams, page 10

15
Rice, Robert, A Man Called Tennessee, New York Post 30 Apr, 1958: M2.
which do not adhere to the structure of the memory play, too, are concerned with the way the
past preoccupies a character and shapes his or her identity."”16

Intertextuality is also present. Diachronic and synchronic, in an essay, Williams refers

to a "“Cinderella story as our favourite myth, implicitly criticising capitalism and its potential
for exploitation. `Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is
terrible bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service. "“17But let’s
start from the beginning. According to Paul Ibell, on 3 December 1947, the Barrymore
Theatre hosted the Broadway opening of A Streetcar Named Desire.18

This play, the best known of all his works and the one which seems to most define his
writing style and character types, is set in a tenement building in New Orleans, where one of
the well-bred Stella DuBois, the youngest of the sisters, lives with her crude, still good-
looking, athletic and ordinary husband, Stanley Kowalski. Into this modest and narrow,
stuffed, still substantially happy homely life, comes Blanche, Stella’s older sister, who took a
streetcar named Desire in order to arrive to their apartment. Lonely and desperate, Blanche
has come to receive support from her sister until something arises. That something would
normally be a spouse. In a world where a men it is expected to provide for his family, to keep
it safe and to bring home the money he earns, without which women, couldn’t survive, no
matter how rich or powerful. Blanche is a teacher, and now she says she has received a leave
because of her nerves trouble. The truth is that she had a liaison with a teenage student and
that she continued in doing so when she was evicted from her house, with multiple partners.
She hasn’t been so close to her sister as one would expect, but she thinks that her sister would
let her stay as long as she wants, given the fact that she brought her large trunk with her and
that she lost their mansion due to a mortgage situation, Belle Reve, alongside with the death
of almost all her family members. The name of the mansion is a metaphor for the life that she
wanted, the beautiful dream, and what she received: long hopes not fulfilled yet, absence of a
husband and of children, not having financial security, and most of all her alcohol problems
and not being able to find her one way. She doesn’t have a good relationship with her brother-
in-law, because he suspects her of having kept of her the inheritance part that was her sister’s.

16
Bottoms, Stephen; Kolin, Philip; Hooper, Michael, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams:
The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama, 2014, page 275, page 6
17
Bloom, Harold, Tennessee Williams, Updated Edition, 2007, Infobase Publishing, page 98

18
Ibell, Paul, Tennessee Williams, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2016, page 54
 The play is about nymphomania, promiscuity, greed, misunderstandings, inequality,
and violence and even rape. This is mostly shown when Stanley hosts a poker game evening
and things start to go off because of drinking, his male friends and of the complicated nature
of the relations between Mitch, Stanley’s closest friend, and Blanche. Stella dreams big. She
tries to persuade her sister into leaving her husband, her home and city and to marry a rich
man. Stella laughs at her proposals and Stanley overhears parts of the discussions, trying to
blackmail his sister-in-law after that. And, after that, it is shown in the way which Stanley
treats Blanche. Although she is carrying his child, he forces himself on her and she doesn’t
have enough power to overcome him because she is drunk. Another kind of brutal scene is
that of Blanche leaving for the mental asylum, where Stanley puts her, and the ending with
Stella being comforted by her brother-in-law, with the baby in her arms.

Stella’s relation with Mitch goes on and the share each other’s past life experiences,
mainly the loved one, when talking about Stella’s dead husband, who way a homosexual or of
Mitch’s former sweetheart, with who the relationship gone bad. Mitch finds out about Stella’s
sordid past, on Blanche’s birthday, just when things were about to fall apart. Mitch doesn’t
want to marry Stella because she tells her that she isn’t innocent enough for her mother.

As Tennessee Williams confesses in his letters: "“I no longer felt any pride in the play
itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another."”
19
In my opinion, the play served two functions: advertisement and confession. We can talk
about two realities. The real reality, and the reality of the play. Reality overcomes fantasy.
But the reality of the play itself remains untouched. It is fulfilled only by each and every
person from the audience or reader who enriches its sense.

Williams’ subtle handling of the relations between crying and breaking create A
Streetcar Named Desire as a tragicomedy, a genre that offers its audience a less cathartic,
more ambiguous and disturbing kind of theatrical experience than tragedy might, but also an
experience better suited to the needs and tastes of audiences in mid-to-late twentieth-century
America. In an interview for Bill Briggs, T. Williams admitted: "“I have never cared whether
I shocked people. People who are shocked by the truth are not deserving of the truth."” That is
why I do believe that all the people who are seeking for the truth are going to identify
themselves in the play. I think that nobody can have the ability of seeing the others just as

19
Williams, Tennessee; The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945) Williams, Tennessee, volume I,
2000, The University of the South, page 564
they are. We all have our own projections of others, throughout our feelings, our judgemental
parts of character and blame for we are or could have become.

It is enticing to put in range the visions of all the plays that Williams wrote, as a
puzzle, to make a whole one, like that of the Wingfield family of The Glass Menagerie,
Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, Margaret and Brick Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth are designed by
misleading the audience or the reader. "“Although they create fantasies to survive their brutal
realities and the past disappointments haunting them, his characters are not liars. Williams has
more in common with frail characters, with make-believe worlds. "“20

Nobody is fully bad or fully good, that is why the fundamental purpose of the play is
to have compassion for the characters, to try to forgive them even if we don’t approve or
understand their action, to try to put ourselves in their shoes and not to forget the law of love,
not the one of justice. Even if some character’s traits have been nuanced or the scenes of rape
or talking about homosexuality have been censored, or others have shed light upon the
magical life that Blanche created for herself, the vitality of the play could not have been
tamed.

Treated sometimes less overtly, this hasn’t diminished its importance. The rhythm and
symbols, the visionary sense of a poet, the anxious, yet moralistic nature of writing well about
life like a madhouse where you can drink wine to celebrate…anything and everything, with
no looking-glass, and emotionally complex plays are his visit card.

20
Bottoms, Stephen; Kolin, Philip; Hooper, Michael; A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams,
Bloomsbury2014, page 1