This book focuses on two important topics in Shaw’s Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two “Shavian sisters”― Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle―are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls “the problem of language.” Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is Eliza’s acting coach and phonetics teacher, as well as the star of an impromptu, open-air phonetics show. The language content in these two plays is just as intriguing. Did Eliza Doolittle have to learn Standard English to become a complete human being? Should we worry about the bad grammar we hear at Barbara Undershaft’s Salvation Army shelter? Is English losing its precision and purity? Meanwhile, in the background, Shaw keeps reminding us that language and theatre are always present in our everyday lives―sometimes serving as stabilizing forces, and sometimes working to undo them.
Author(s): Jean Reynolds
Series: Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 228
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Part I Barbara and Eliza
1 Shavian Sisters
1.1 Wellsprings of Energy
1.2 Language and Theater
1.3 Shaw and Postmodernism
1.4 God, Mammon, or Dionysus?
1.5 Novelist or Playwright?
1.6 A Pit of Philosophers
2 “What’s to Become of Me?”
2.1 An Empty Space
2.2 Six Months Later
2.3 Eliza Tells Her Story
2.4 “What’s to Become of Me?”
2.5 “What Am I Fit for?”
2.6 “A New Sort of Human Being”
2.7 The Myths Have Their Say
2.8 “A Quite Different Human Being”
2.9 “I’ll Marry Freddy, I Will”
2.10 “The Classes Would Not Mix”
2.11 A Social Revolutionary?
2.12 A Not-So “Trivial Comedietta”
2.13 “When He Sees Your Beauty and Goodness”
3 The Power of Imagination
3.1 A Sin Against Imagination
3.2 A Fine Bromance
3.3 Barbara Undershaft’s Regression
3.4 Barbara’s Destiny
3.5 Barbara’s Return to the Colors
3.6 Kitty, Eliza, and Barbara
Part II A Playwright at Work
4 Seeing Double
4.1 The Show Must Go on
4.2 What is a Play?
4.3 “Cast Him in Another Play”
4.4 Shavian Fingerprints
4.5 Literature—or Life?
4.6 An identity—or a Role?
4.7 Stephen Makes a Decision
4.8 To Be, not to Seem
4.9 The Show Must Go on
4.10 “When the ‘Role’ is Called up Yonder”
5 A Girl Becomes a Woman
5.1 The Story of Psyche and Eros
5.2 Psyche Through the Ages
5.3 From Maid to Matron
5.4 Eliza and Psyche
5.5 Teacher or Lover?
5.6 “A Pit of Playwrights”
5.7 Methodist or Mystic?
6 The Undershaft Inheritance
6.1 “Andrew Undershaft’s Profession”
6.2 Point and Counterpoint
6.3 The Undershaft Inheritance
6.4 Differing Definitions
6.5 “Under Erasure”
6.6 Absent or Present?
6.7 The Andrew No One Knows
6.8 “The Faith of an Armorer”
6.9 Andrew’s “True Faith”
6.10 Looking into the Future
6.11 The End—Or the Beginning?
6.12 “Dialectical Tension”
Part III The Problem of Language
7 “Why Can’t the English?”
7.1 Higgins or Shaw?
7.2 “An Energetic Enthusiast”
7.3 “Hold Your Tongue”
7.4 The “Real People”
7.5 The Silent Majority
7.6 “A New Sort of Human Being”
7.7 Kicks and Kisses
7.8 The Pros and Cons of Language
8 “It Don’t Matter, Anyhow”
8.1 The “Lisson Grove Lingo”
8.2 The Language of Milton
8.3 “The Integrity of Our Language”
8.4 “My Own Language”
8.5 Eliza’s Language Toolbox
8.6 A Versatile Language
8.7 “It Don’t Matter, Anyhow”
8.8 From Illusion to Coherence
8.9 “Talking Grammar”
8.10 The Singular “They”
8.11 What Did Shaw Think?
8.12 A Language Ideology
8.13 Will English Survive?
8.14 The “Contrasting Components” of Grammar
8.15 The Future of English
9 Competing Components
9.1 Eliza Snatches a Handkerchief
9.2 A Butler Opens a Door
9.3 Classic or Modern?
9.4 “The Word Made Flesh”
9.5 “The Play’s the Thing”
9.6 From Dishwasher to Actor
9.7 “The Original Sin of Being Born Female”
9.8 It’s All in the Family
9.9 In His Own Image and Likeness
9.10 A Hidden Supply Chain
10 “The Holiest and Greatest Things”
10.1 “All One Body We”
10.2 “What Price Salvation?”
10.3 “Just the Same Sort of Sinner”
10.4 Bill Walker
10.5 A Future for Bill
10.6 “I Must Have Work”
10.7 A “World Betterer”
Afterword
“A World Betterer”
Works Cited
Index
