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George Bernard Shaw and Jean Rhys

George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (Shaw, 1937) and Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1980) both concern themselves, to a very large extent, with the creation of womanhood and notions of how this fits in to a largely phallocentric society. In this essay I would like to look at this and the way that each author conveys this process of creation; paying special attention to the socio-political and moral background of each of the writers; Shaw as a white, Fabian male and Jean Rhys, a West Indian woman writing at a time of increasing feminist social theory. In this way I hope to, not only look at the ways that gender and sexuality are conveyed through texts but, also how this is shaped by the sex and background of the author.

Pygmalion, as Nigel Alexander suggests (Alexander, 1988) was one of Shaw's "plays of ideas" (Alexander, 1988: 19), it sought to examine not only the notion of gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also the concept of class and socio-economics (Alexander, 1988; Crompton, 1969 etc). Taking its title from Ovid , Pygmalion concerns itself with a wager made by Henry Higgins, a phonetics expert, in which he attempts to transform a working class flower seller, Liza Doolittle, into a "duchess at an ambassador's garden party" (Shaw, Act 1).

In constructing the perfect upper middle class woman, Shaw of course, also deconstructs his audiences' notions of femininity. We are party to a stripping away of what constituted womanhood at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. As Liza is created, so womanhood is deconstructed and examined, from the accent and timbre of the voice to the mode of dress and issues of deportment:

"Pickering: We're always talking Eliza. Higgins: Teaching Eliza. Pickering; Dressing Eliza. Mrs Higgins: What! Higgins: Inventing new Elizas. (Shaw, 1937, Act 3)

Here Pickering and Higgins speak of Liza as a tabula rasa, or a blank page to be written on as they wish, so much so that, in the last line of this extract she is spoken of in the plural which is, paradoxically, very near the truth as, throughout the play, the audience is presented with a number of Lizas; each one a "woman" in various stages of becoming, a theme that is commensurate with the playwright's use of classical subject matter.

As I stated in my introduction, the theme of creation of womanhood and femininity also features heavily in Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Wide Sargasso Sea concerns the early life of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole girl who is, as Sue Thomas points out in her The Worlding Jean Rhys (1999) partly based on Rhys' own childhood in Dominica (Thomas, 1999:36).

In most respects, Antoinette is an outsider, she is Creole, neither black nor white, she is the heiress to a plantation that no longer functions but instead exists as a stain on the collective memory of the country that both rejects and fascinates her and, later on in the book, she exists between the states of madness and sanity, without her or the reader knowing exactly to which she belongs. In a scene, for instance, in the last part of the novel, Antoinette wonders about the ghost of Thornfield Hall without realizing it is her:

"Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman whom they say haunts this place. I went down the staircase. I went further than I had ever been before. There was someone talking in one of the rooms. I passed it without noise, slowly." (Rhys, 1980: 153)

An outsider all her life, existing in the space between binominal groupings, Antoinette here literally loses herself and her Self, existing neither as a spirit nor as flesh and blood, but somewhere in between.

This situation is exacerbated by the character of Rochester, Jane Eyre's husband in Charlotte Bronte's novel. Rochester, during the second part of Wide Sargasso Sea acts as Antoinette's Henry Higgins; he "adopts" her, marries her and attempts to recreate her to his own design:

"When I turned from the window she was drinking again. "Bertha" I said. "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by anther name. I know, that's obeah too."" (Rhys, 1980: 121)

Names are crucial to an understanding of Antoinette's character (Harrison, 1988). She is first born with her father's name, Cosway; then, after her mother remarries she changes it to Mason, then to Rochester and then has it changed for her to Bertha. Antoinette is symbolically created by the many male figures in her life who display their ownership of her by changing her name. This facet of the novel, I think, has socio-historical links to the many slave narratives that Rhys would have been familiar with. James Walvin, in Questioning Slavery (1996), details that in many cases African slaves would be renamed by their white owners, not only obfuscating their previous existence but branding their ownership upon them: "Whatever the crop, wherever the region, African slaves un-derwent similar processes of discipline. It took the simplest-but most fundamental-of forms. European settlers were keen, for example, to give the Africans a new identity by renaming them; removing them as far as possible from their African backgrounds." (Walvin, 1996: 52)

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