Страница 5 из 155
The friends to whom Shaw read Major Barbara were strongly moved by the power of the second act, in which Andrew Undershaft demonstrates the power of the pound over religion, and in doing so makes his daughter feel as if she has lost all purpose in life. In one of the play’s most profound aphorisms, Undershaft reproves Barbara for feeling self-pity by observing to her: “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something” (p. 132). Perceiving something new often means abandoning a cherished view or opinion, and it often hurts to do so, but Shaw puts the emphasis on “at first.” In other words, one can find compensations for losses; one can mend a broken heart.
And so Barbara does when she gets to her father’s ca
Cusins formulates one of the riddles of creation in an exchange with Barbara over how the ca
THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA
The comical satire of the medical profession in Shaw’s play hardly differs from Moliere’s portrayal of doctors and patients in his comedies devoted to the subject (The Imaginary Invalid, The Doctor in Spite of Himself , Doctor Love). Shaw makes the same points that Moliere makes (points that bear repeating for every generation): that there are fashions in diseases as there are in dresses; that people will use real, pretended, and imagined illnesses to manipulate and dominate their nearest and dearest; that doctors have obsessions in treatments and cure-alls, and resist i
Nor is the real point the ethical dilemma denoted by the title. Doctor Ridgeon has developed a new, effective cure for tuberculosis but can treat only so many patients. He must choose, therefore, who to save: the artist, Louis Dubedat, who creates authentic art but is immoral in his treatment of others — indiscriminately exploitative, deceitful in all things, honest in none, monumentally selfish, and automatically unscrupulous — or the dull but decent Doctor Blenkinsop, a gentle and considerate soul, generous to a fault, congenial to all, genuinely honest, but an ineffectual doctor, i
The very symmetry of this dilemma has misled even some of the best critical minds into faulting the play for contrivance (for example, Lionel Trilling in The Experience of Literature). But the Shavian symmetry aims not for contrivance but for the theme of the Double, the use of paired characters to dramatize the relationship between i
Judith Anderson becomes Je
That Shaw self-consciously reworked the psychological pattern of the woman’s role in the rivalry of the Doubles from The Devil’s Disciple to The Doctor’s Dilemma can be seen from his having given Je
There is yet another link between the two plays. Shaw asserted that the idea for The Doctor’s Dilemma resulted from hearing his friend, the great physician Sir Almoth Wright (upon whom and whose development of opsonin Shaw based Ridgeon’s story), when asked if he could take on an extra patient, say that he would have to consider whose life was more worth saving. In The Devil’s Disciple the saving of lives (and souls) based on moral worth is at issue, for Dick saves the minister’s life, and the minister in turn wants to save Dick’s soul but changes to saving his life. Implicit in each play is the question: Whose lives are worth saving? In the more optimistic and comic vision of The Devil’s Disciple, there is obviously so much goodness in each of the two men that the answer to the question would seem: Everyone’s life is worth saving. In the darker Doctor’s Dilemma, the answer would seem: hardly anyone’s.