Margery Morgan , although correct in deeming Tarleton’s portable bath unit quite “incongruous in the hall of a mansion at Hindhead” (191), doesn’t mention that the biggest incongruity proceeds from the playwright’s specification of visible hot-water pipes in the stage picture, implying the presence in the house of at least one bathroom. Possessing both a presumed bathroom and the portable unit pointedly reveals something about the Tarletons’ consuming habits. As historian David J. Eveleigh notes, “by the early 1900s, acquiring a bathroom became an important social indicator for the upwardly mobile artisan classes. Owning a bath demonstrated that the family cared about their cleanliness and in turn this was a statement of their respectability.” 52
Contemporary design manuals recognized the emerging popularity of a room solely devoted to the fixed bath. In Our Homes and How to Beautify Them (1902), for instance, H. R. Jennings remarks that “there is a room that no self-respecting householder can do without and that is the bathroom.” 53 The probability of a bathroom in the Tarleton house makes the appearance of a new portable bath unit that much more intriguing, especially considering such units were marketed explicitly to (usually urban) residents in houses without bathrooms. The visible pipes and the portable unit reveal that the owners are especially anxious over class position, moral decorum, and hygiene, once more approaching the staging of their homes and their commodity consumption as opportunities for performing status.
Shaw’s scenic direction in the play mirrors an Edwardian construction of the English house as, according to Jon Hegglund, “an organizing structure of national ideology [in which] the health of individual bodies and the collective health of the nation are intimately connected” and duly threatened with contamination by “mass-culture” and “bodily deterioration.” 54 From the start, the playwright depicts the atmosphere of the Tarleton country house as toxic, contaminated not only by mass cultural consumption but also by idleness and physical degeneration. The English characters in Misalliance suffer from a pronounced abatement of stamina, from the senescent infirmity of Tarleton and Summerhays to the physical and mental lethargy of Johnny, Hypatia, and Bentley. Bentley pesters Johnny at the beginning of the play to “argue about something intellectual” because “after a week in that filthy office [his] brain is simply blue-mouldy” (145). He is also physically out of shape; in response to a command to “skip about,” Bentley explains that he “tried exercises with an indiarubber expander; but I wasnt strong enough: instead of my expanding it, it crumpled me up” (175). Bentley’s issues, for American health advocate J. H. Kellogg, would belong to a “class of deformities which may be recognized … among the so-called ‘upper’ classes [marked by] such congenital defects as flat or narrow chest, weakness of the heart, feeble digestive powers, a neurotic temperament, and various idiosyncrasies of mind and body.” 55 Misalliance enacts what Wisenthal calls the “exhaustion of two English ruling classes, the capitalist middle class and the aristocracy.” 56 It recognizes two serious threats to health: the industrialized class system and a state of leisure and commodity consumption.
In the preface to Misalliance , Shaw warns that the lack of meaningful work will produce “a new sort of laziness [that] will become the bugbear of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine.” 57 Such inertia has overcome Tarleton, who laments, “I’m getting sick of that old shop. Thirty-five years I’ve had of it: same blessed old stairs to go up and down every day: same old lot: same old game: sorry I ever started it now. I’ll chuck it and try something else: something that will give a scope to all my faculties” (167). At the other end of the play’s social hierarchy, Gunner describes his professional routine in similarly debilitating terms:I spend my days from nine to six – nine hours of daylight and fresh air – in a stuffy little den counting another man’s money. Ive an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul. … Of all the damnable waste of human life that was ever invented, clerking is the very worst. … How can a man tied to a desk from nine to six be anything – be even a man? (214–15)
The character is a member of the class Kellogg described as “confined in counting-rooms, stores, factories” and “already many hundred thousand strong”: “a deformed creature which might be termed “the sedentary man” who is known by his round shoulders, his flat, hollow, feeble chest, his weak heart, his sunken stomach, his lax and puny muscles, his sallow, sunken, and lusterless eye.” 58 Especially for clerks, life away from work was equally enervating; as Hegglund points out, the leisure industry in cities bombarded consumers with empty-calorie temptations including mass culture entertainments and junk food. 59 Nonetheless, Shaw’s unusually specific setting of the play—May 31, 1909—means that Johnny, Bentley, Tarleton, Gunner, and even Percival are errant from the workplace on a Monday (although “Friday to Monday” represented a standard weekend in the country for those who could take them), indicating that the crisis of health and idleness that so many patent medicine adverts alarmingly proclaimed and that aroused so many public advocates crossed class lines.
Even the country house itself seems unable to purge internal toxins; quite immediate to Mrs. Tarleton’s concerns in the play are the lethal threats in established households posed by poor sanitation. Alice McEwan has written extensively about Shaw’s views on proper plumbing and how they dovetail with the Edwardian middle-class obsession with domestic drainage in which “sewage operates as part of a language of pollution, disturbing and disrupting, posing a threat to the health of the nation” and even became “something of a literary trope,” 60 one which Shaw in Misalliance satirically takes up, perhaps because of plumbing issues he and Charlotte were currently experiencing at their house in Ayot. In the play, one of the Tarletons’ children has died as a result of faulty drainage, and Mrs. Tarleton expresses her shock that the local aristocracy so frankly discusses their systems. Encountering a duchess who “began talking about what sour milk did in her inside and how she expected to live to be over a hundred if she took it regularly,” Mrs. Tarleton’s dyspeptic response is to flee, “never [having] dared to think that a duchess could have anything so common as an inside” (159). Middle-class moral pretensions dangerously silenced frank talk of matters of personal and structural drainage.
In his book, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, Richards makes clear that advertising copy for patent medicines in Edwardian periodicalsavoided any implication that any existing social structure was to blame for disease in the first place. In other words, they neatly separated the effects from the causes of disease … Nowhere in patent medicine advertising does one find the remotest suggestion that society at large is to blame for the social reality of sickness. Illness in England is neither endemic to the capitalist system nor historically determined. 61
Surprisingly, in its own crusade against “effete matter” that “[poisons] the entire system” (13), the Century pamphlet goes both ways. On the one hand, it figures these ailments as ubiquitous across time and cultures, the cure a blend of wisdom derived from Native American, East Asian, classical, and contemporary technological innovation. On the other, the bath is marketed specifically to the professional class whose work necessitates large amounts of time spent inside crowded city offices performing non-physical tasks. Implicitly, then, the pamphlet lodges a critique that is systemic, against a lethargic, robotic middle class made up of “ministers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, editors, teachers, and stenographers, and all those who follow a vocation which allows but little active exercise” (11). A testimonial included in the Century pamphlet, reputedly from a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada, directs attention to environmental sources of corruption: “circumstanced as we are in cities, [deprived of] the effect of bracing air and the sun’s rays … [existing] in an artificial state of life, with clothes that exclude the air, enervated with excesses, late hours, and unwholesome food, … we require something that wi
ll help the skin to act” (14). The Pamphlet acknowledges the health costs of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and speaks directly “to those of sedentary habits, who do not take exercise sufficient to throw off impurities of the skin and blood by perspiration,” to the “thousands of people [who] exist in a lifeless sort of way, year after year, dragging themselves about with a skin the colour of a lemon, and a body loaded with poisons” (11, 13). Yet, in the end, its prescription doesn’t directly offer remedy to that miasmatic environment but tallies with the industry’s rhetoric of self-improvement; the Century booklet exhorts its readers to “HAVE A MIND OF YOUR OWN! Too many people can’t think and act for themselves, they wait and watch to let others lead. Be a Leader Yourself!” (2). Purchasing a mass-produced commodity becomes an expression of individual thought and free will, illness ultimately a personal failing rather than a cultural one. Shaw too represents the decline as the result of both individual infirmity and the caste system and similarly packages his diagnosis with a prescription.
Arriving from a world far away from the Hindhead house, Gunner initially seems the most likely choice for cultural renewal and (not coincidentally) is the only character who inhabits the Turkish bath unit during the play. For McEwan , “Tarleton’s portable cleansing contraption is contaminated by a working-class radical,” epitomizing the playwright’s “socialist critique of Edwardian middle-class anxieties about dirt and waste in terms of a fear of contagion.” 62 Yet, Gunner’s radicalism is merely a pose, its edge sapped by “slavery” to the economic system not only as a clerk but, oddly enough, as a consumer. Characterized by his son as “mad on reading,” Tarleton has created a series of free libraries, an act that frustrates Johnny even though he sees “its value as an advertisement” (153). As his son shrewdly observes, Tarleton’s libraries have a marketing agenda, inculcating a literacy that transforms the reader into a consumer, the great authors into copy. Tarleton is furious when he finds out that Gunner has been educating himself with books from the free library, recognizing that the young man’s revenge posturing betrays a puerile sensibility proscribed by melodrama and armchair Marxism. Gunner musters no resistance to the lure of commodity within the Tarleton household either when, as Shaw writes “his attention is caught by the Turkish bath . He looks down the lunette, and opens the panels” (204). What is it that so entrances the young clerk? The unit’s novelty, its class resonance, its copy-reputed rejuvenative properties? In any case, his fixation is interrupted by the arrival of Hypatia and Joey, and his refuge into the bath will further illustrate his immaturity by activating his own kneejerk middle-class morality. In contrast to Samuel Beckett’s fascination with disembodied figures to illustrate existential fragmentation, the cyborg union of Gunner and the bath literalizes the process through which human beings become commodities, not only in Gainor’s political sense but according to the logic of late capitalism. This too is the endgame of patent medicine advertising, “not only directly to address the consumer’s self but in a very real sense to transform it, in its entirety, into a spectacular commodity.” 63 Unable to think outside the box, Gunner falls victim to the conspiracy of middle-class hegemony disseminated through mass-produced cultural forms: “I’m so full of your bourgeois morality that I let myself be shocked by the application of my own revolutionary principles” (221).
Gunner’s experience in the bath enervates rather than invigorates him, reversing the expected process. Indeed, the transformative potential of the Turkish bath not only was a prominent feature of patent cure advertisement copy but points to the well-known literary and cultural trope of bathing. In Misalliance , Lord Summerhays’s title—Knight Commander of the Bath—evokes the medieval confirmation process from which the name is derived that began with bathing in order to purify the candidate. Within a Christian framework, the practice generally has been figured as a first step towards purging sinfulness and symbolic rebirth. The trope also appears in Pygmalion , replete with a cheeky nod to Salvation Army practices, when Eliza’s vigorous bath marks the first step in her transformation. In Shaw’s Daughters, Gainor understands the Misalliance Turkish bath , replete with its Orientalist overtones, as a touchstone for Shaw’s view that the “class distinction and cultural distance between [Gunner and the Tarletons] correspond to the kind of apartheid found in colonized areas.” 64 Both Gunner and Eliza emerge from the bath transfigured, according to Gainor , “into an oppressed Other[, part of a] network of polarized social groups that all feel the force of imperial domination.” In another sense, though, Gunner emerges from the unit with a degree of material power, armed with a pistol and secret knowledge about both Tarleton and Hypatia, threatening the integrity of the household. (After all, Turkish bath units also reputedly had the propensity to explode.) Gunner’s potential though evaporates when he is easily disarmed, and the family unites to incapacitate and lethargize him. If Gunner emerges from the bath occupying a moral high ground and pregnant with revolutionary potential, the outraged outsider in this Hindhead culture is in the end corrupted by gin, humiliatingly abused, and ultimately silenced, unable to realize his initial desire to administer justice and escape so as not to “breathe this polluted atmosphere a moment longer” (219). The task of revitalization will thus fall to an even more alien intruder.
Polish acrobat Lina Szczepanowska intimidates and dominates for much of the play and is given by the playwright the climactic aria diagnosing the degenerative state of its English characters: “This is a stuffy house. … It is disgusting. It is not healthy” (248). Shaw renders the foreigner a figure of health and vitality, a force for spiritual and sexual renewal; in a letter to Irene Vanbrugh, Shaw called Lina “the St Joan of Misalliance,” her way of living “a hieratic act on her part.” 65 Be that as it may, the character’s genesis may partially have consumerist roots as well since, right before Shaw began writing Misalliance in 1909, Louis Bleriot’s monoplane was displayed by Selfridges in its famous windows, capitalizing upon its notoriety. Plus, if Tarleton explicitly apes copy style, Lina is his counterpart in spectacle, replete with her own product to sell and an equally distinct way of speaking.
Closer perhaps to P. T. Barnum than Gordon Selfridge , Lina displaces the Turkish bath at the center of the play, retaining to a degree its foreign exoticism but modeling a different approach to health. Lina arrives in the play to break the stalemate the Tarleton household represents. When she asks for six oranges, Tarleton immediately assumes “she’s doing an orange cure of some sort” (198), making clear not only his familiarity with that industry but also the limitations of his consumerist approach to cultural revitalization. Committed to physical challenge and perpetually engaged in self-conditioning, Lina successfully integrates physical, spiritual, and mental agility and resists commodification in the traffic in women, nimbly rebuffing sexual advances from Tarleton, Johnny, and Lord Summerhays. Her long speeches about her lifestyle, her various demonstrations of vigor, and her final speech denouncing the effete Tarleton household display her autonomy and strength, a stark contrast to the country house’s other inhabitants. Her initial attempts to transform the withered English family members though are largely failures. After she whisks Tarleton off to the gymnasium for exercise to stop him from crying, he reappears “exhausted by severe and unaccustomed exercise” (208) and sapped by the exertion. Similarly, Bentley emerges from his session with Lina “as if he too had been exercised to the last pitch of fatigue” (247). After witnessing the brazen flirting between Hypatia and Joey, Gunner becomes self-righteously indignant, prematurely declaring, “I went into that Turkish bath a boy: I came out a man” (219). In response, Lina, after quickly disarming him, advises Gunner that he “doesn’t need Turkish baths” but to “put on a little flesh” (219), a contrast drawn between cure-all product and individual action that underscores the play’s critique of an Edwardian masculinity that aligns commodity consumption with hypocritical middle-class moral pretension. Frustrated, at the end of the play, Lina expresses her desire to “get
out of this [stuffy house] into the air: right up into the blue” (247).
Lina is a version of the Shavian realist, the world-betterer, the superman—individuals animated solely by their own will who “by their ruthless action could compel order and efficiency, mold an unruly and recalcitrant population into a disciplined social body, and therefore clear the ground for the true supermen who would evolve biologically in the distant future [bolstered by] a dynamic ever-moving biological Life Force.” 66 The Century Thermal pamphlet describes their bath unit as enabling the body’s inherent ability to purge itself of toxins, in principle a kind of corporeal Fabianism; the bath performs nothing radical or revolutionary and merely accentuates the system’s own drainage process to achieve verdure, vitality, and balance. 67 Misalliance’s abrupt recalibration, in which Lina displaces the Turkish bath at its center, may indicate a shift in Shaw’s political thinking, away from therapeutic gradualism within parliamentary democracy and towards the dynamic individual of will weeding out the intractable, unproductive elements and rehabilitating those who can be swayed. In a letter written to Beatrice Webb in December 1910, Shaw described his strenuous effort at a recent Fabian speaking engagement: “in a hall crammed with a howling opposition, I spent an hour and a half shouting, bullying, chaffing, challenging, thundering and reparteeing until I was as one in a Turkish bath .” 68 In contrast to marketing claims, Shaw envisions the patient in the bath as exhausted, worn out rather than rejuvenated, a sign perhaps of his frustration and impatience with the Fabian process and movement, the endless debates and slow progress. Misalliance provides an alternative in the form of deus ex machina, a kind of positive soft eugenics in which those with the potential to evolve are plucked from the jaws of commodity capitalism and conventional morality. At play’s end, only Bentley expresses a renewed vigor and vision in his desire to embrace Lina’s lifestyle and sensibility. The acrobat thus provides an antidote to the toxic ecology of the country house, one that produces strong bodies and adventurous souls who desire risk, and takes her place as one of the forerunners of later characters in Shaw’s 1930s plays and on the world stage, for whom the notions of purity and hygiene are taken to terrifying extremes.
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