Let's get REALLY old school: Anyone else read GB Shaw's Getting Married (1911)?

[REP]

It, along with other of his writings, influenced me profoundly. For one thing, though I had never planned on actually getting married (it's a paternalistic anarchism that should none the less be legally available to all - until a better option is acceptable and available), when I did, I viewed it as a nice party celebrating the signing of a legal contract. Which it was.

If anyone is interested in reading this, it is available online through Project Guttenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5604

From the Preface (it's a play, but with Shaw, read EVERYTHING!) emphasis added by me

WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be
regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness,
meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming
that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious
citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable
things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish
marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when
the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he
means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch
marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties
wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage
means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the
senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have
unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives,
child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all
of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only
may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these
widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage
at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability,
morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things
that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means
something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth
about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

[Gormy Cuss]

1. Wow. On my reading list now. n/t

[Catherina]

2. I just downloaded it. I'll read anything by Shaw

"He often means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of another human being, for instance.

I really want to read this because My Fair Lady was one of my favorite films growing up but I hated the way Hollywood butchered the story by having Eliza return to Higgins at the end because she never returned in Shaw's Pygmalion.

Pygmalion's available on Gutenberg too if anyone wants to read the original "My Fair Lady" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3825

HIGGINS. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as Freddy? Is that it?

LIZA. No I don't. That's not the sort of feeling I want from you. And don't you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a bad girl if I'd liked. I've seen more of some things than you, for all your learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute.

HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are we quarrelling about?

LIZA (much troubled) I want a little kindness. I know I'm a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I'm not dirt under your feet. What I done [correcting herself] what I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come—came—to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like.

HIGGINS. Well, of course. That's just how I feel. And how Pickering feels. Eliza: you're a fool.

LIZA. That's not a proper answer to give me [she sinks on the chair at the writing-table in tears].

HIGGINS. It's all you'll get until you stop being a common idiot. If you're going to be a lady, you'll have to give up feeling neglected if the men you know don't spend half their time snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes. If you can't stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don't you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate.

LIZA (desperate) Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can't talk to you: you turn everything against me: I'm always in the wrong. But you know very well all the time that you're nothing but a bully. You know I can't go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father's. But don't you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled on and talked down. I'll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he's able to support me.

HIGGINS (sitting down beside her) Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

LIZA (rising determinedly) I'll let you see whether I'm dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a teacher.

HIGGINS. What'll you teach, in heaven's name?

LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.

HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!

LIZA. I'll offer myself as an assistant to Professor Nepean.

HIGGINS (rising in a fury) What! That impostor! that humbug! that toadying ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You take one step in his direction and I'll wring your neck. (He lays hands on her). Do you hear?

LIZA (defiantly non-resistant) Wring away. What do I care? I knew you'd strike me some day. [He lets her go, stamping with rage at having forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he stumbles back into his seat on the ottoman]. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can't take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That's done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don't care that (snapping her fingers) for your bullying and your big talk. I'll advertize it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she'll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

HIGGINS (wondering at her) You damned impudent ****, you! But it's better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and finding spectacles, isn't it? (Rising) By George, Eliza, I said I'd make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I'm not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you're a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can't behave himself in church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman's pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. (She goes to the door).

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm

"He often means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth about his own marriage either to himself or any one else."

Ownership and the desire for ownership are at the root of most of the world's problems.

How can one human possibly believe they can *own* another?

Last night I was reading about all the child prostitution trafficking going through my area for transport to other parts of the world.
The high level traffickers are mostly foreigners who employ locals to do the dirty work. It's all tied in to that same sense of ownership, that a human being is *yours*. No they're not. Not the women you marry, not them women you traffic, not the children you kidnap, not the boys you exploit, not the girls you violate, not the men you exploit on your plantations or exploit and kill in wars.

We're one half of the world population. If we don't change this, no one will.

"You don't own me, I'm not just one of your little toys."

[REP]

3. Shaw regarded Eliza's marriage to Freddie as a failure (in the Epilogue)

Although Doolittle's speech about the "undeserving poor" could be used today.

Androcles and the Lion is also on Gutenberg; another one to read especially for the Preface and Afterword!

[Catherina]

4. As it was bound to be

The romantic in me wishes that weren't the case but it was doomed.

What a brilliant and fresh play, all these decades later.

What's Androcles and the Lion? Is that also about ownership, marriage?

[REP]

7. No. It's about religion.

One of my favorite quotes (of many from the Preface): "Jesus's teaching has nothing to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say "You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract" would have been, to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the proposition of an idiot."

Please note that I am neither Christian, Jew ror Muslim and I find this to be one of the best writings on religion that I have read.

[Catherina]

8. Now I'm intrigued.

I just downloaded it. I'll followup in a week, or two, or a month. Or a year. The problem with this forum is people post so many great links that you end up with a reading list a mile long. And all of it fascinating too!

[gkhouston]

5. Yes, but I'm not sure she would have been any better off with 'enry 'iggins.

IMO, he didn't seem to place much value on her until he'd changed her to conform (outwardly) to his society. Only then, did she seem to become a person to him. I think an argument could be made that the rich de-personify the poor of whatever gender but I'm very sensitive to the "change and you'll be likeable/loveable" message that is so often pushed on women.

[REP]

6. Henry Higgins is not Shaw; Shaw did not think marrying Higgins was a good solution, either

Henry Higgins is actually Henry Sweet (of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer), of whom he said, "Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire."

Shaw thought quite highly of Eliza; Higgins treats everyone exactly the same, regardless of their class (badly).