Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 4

In a huge Edwardian role-reversal by Shaw, Freddy is a very feminine, heterosocial man, totally subservient to Eliza, content to spend their married life being the one bringing his wife her slippers whilst Eliza goes out to work for their income, and far from having a broad knowledge or education or any practical life skill, is seemingly not fit for anything more trying than being a devoted, loving husband. Nor does Freddy have any interest in displaying any of the brutish, domineering manliness of toxic masculinity: instead, “he loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing”. Unlike his contemporary fellow men, expected to brandish their strength to control their wives in the home, he recognises and embraces the strength of Eliza to sustain their marriage. Unable to cope with life by himself, Freddy, and men like him, are assured by Shaw that “though they may fail in emergencies, life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out”. For Freddy, Eliza’s strength of character is enough to see them through both of their lifetimes without too much hardship.

Contrary to the misguided beliefs of those that think Higgins should win Eliza in the end simply by virtue of being the designated male lead of the play, Shaw maintains that, with her newfound self-respect, Eliza refuses to be subjected to a lifetime of endless demeaning comparisons to Higgins’ mother, and considers it far beneath her dignity to be made some sort of substitute for Mrs. Higgins when she could instead have a man like Freddy devotedly treating her not only like a lady, but most importantly, as an individual and as a human being instead of a phonetics experiment or a “living doll”, as she feels she deserves to be treated by an ideal man. It matters not that Freddy fails as a powerful physical specimen, or that he lacks gumption, for as Shaw puts it, “Strong people do not marry stronger people[…]The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.”

Freddy and Eliza flee the watchful eyes of the police through the night-time streets of London.

For Shaw to even suggest the idea, let alone put into writing in the face of so much contemporary anti-Suffragist sentiment, and prevailing Muscular Christianity’s insistence that men were in every sense superior to women that it is, indeed, “a truth everywhere in evidence” that Eliza is more a man than Freddy, and that a woman could ever prove stronger and more powerful than a man in any circumstance would have been anathema in his time, and yet it remains a startlingly relevant, controversial view in our own modern era. There are, doubtless, many men, even today, that would be intimidated by the prospect of being somehow bested by a woman, much less be willing to settle into a long and happy marriage with one that outclasses them in almost every meaningful aspect of life. That foundational Victorian Masculinity has lingered so long in our socio-cultural consciousness that many would still consider Freddy’s untrammelled depth of feeling and feminine disposition a threatening affront to proper manhood. After all: all men absolutely must at all times be on a war footing, always ready to use violence, ever-prepared to go to war in an instant, never showing any vulnerability to an unseen enemy of the empire that is everywhere, and could be anywhere. The exceptionally well-documented, ruinous physiological impact of long-term stress be damned.

Fortunately, the passionately socialist Shaw cares little for the status-quo. The more we consider the socio-political context and content of the text, ably assisted by our sparse Brechtian staging, and continue to build on Act IV’s encapsulation of everything Freddy and Eliza have, made able to see their future through the medium of Shaw’s written sequel, the more apparent it is that their inverted power dynamic is a radical celebration of the possibilities of a socialist society governed by the not by stratified class, but by a spirit of shared humanity. Shaw’s writing recalls the sentiment of his early feminist forebear John Stuart Mill, who in 1869’s The Subjection of Women, remarks:

“the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”

Perhaps most significantly, though, it is Simone de Beauvoir that can best offer a summation of Shaw’s seemingly prescient, impassioned socialist attack on the divisions of class with her powerful words in The Second Sex: “The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another”.

Further Reading:
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen

Squiers, Anthony (2015). "A Critical Response to Heidi M. Silcox's "What's Wrong with Alienation?"". Philosophy and Literature.

Cole, Margaret (1961). The Story of Fabian Socialism. London: Heinemann

Shaw, Bernard (1884). A Manifesto (Fabian Tract No. 2). London: Grant Richards.

Pelling, Henry (1965). The Origins of the Labour Party. Oxford: Oxford University Press

https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/black-friday

https://titanicfacts.net/titanic-victims/

Tozer, Malcolm David William (1978). Manliness: the evolution of a Victorian ideal. lra.le.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Leicester

Manliness and morality: middle-class masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940. Mangan, J. A.,, Walvin, James,. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1987

Kingsley, Charles (1889). Letters and Memoirs of His Life, vol. II. Scribner's. p. 54. Quoted by Rosen, David (1994). "The volcano and the cathedral: muscular
Christianity and the origins of primal manliness". In Donald E. Hall (ed.) (ed.). Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge University Press

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/toxic-masculinity-definition-what-is-boys-men-gillette-ad-behaviour-attitude-girls-women-a8729336.html

https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/thehistorian/2017/05/12/man-up-the-victorian-origins-of-toxic-masculinity/

Cotton Minchin, J. G. (1901). Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English History; Charter House, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors', Rugby, St. Paul's Westminster,

Winchester. Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

Rosenthal, Robert; Jacobson, Lenore, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ intellectual Development, Crown House Publishing, 2003

E. M. Forster, On British Public School Boys

Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion Sequel

https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress-body

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/stress

Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books 1989, c1952.