The Wayward Woman in the “Serious Plays”

of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

 

M. VENKATESWARA RAO

 

            “Frailty, thy name is woman”, said Prince Hamlet. This general invective against all womankind is based upon Hamlet’s experience with his mother, Gertrude. It expresses his disgust at his mother’s hasty and adulterous marriage with his father’s brother. Since the first decade of the seventeenth century, the wayward woman has been figuring in the English drama. The wayward woman has become a stock character in the modern English drama. Writing as he did in 1914, in his book Aspects of Modern Drama Frank D Chandler observes, “In the recent drama few types of character have been more frequently portray­ed than the wayward woman. Her waywardness has been represented as a matter of the past or of the present, as something repented of or persisted in. It has been represented also as trivial or grave, the result of passion or of principle. Among recent playwrights three have achieved special success in analysing this character”.1 Among these playwrights who depict the wayward heroine, the name of Pinero figures prominently. The wayward woman made her appearance in the plays of Oscar Wilde also – Mrs. Erlynne, Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Cheveley. But Pinero’s wayward women are superior to those of Wilde. For Pinero is a master analyst of the feminine heart. Four of Pinero’s heroines, figuring in his “serious plays”, are taken as types of the wayward – Mrs. Tanqueray, Mrs. Ebbamith, Iris and Letty.

 

            Thomas H. Dickson, in his The Contemporary Drama of England says, “A new era in modern English drama dates from the per­formance of ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ (1983)”.2 It is a serious play, a play of ideas, of Pinero’s mature period. It is Pinero’s masterpiece. The play shows that a woman with a past cannot shake off her past. Socially a woman with a past has no future. H. Hamilton Fyfe, in his book Sir Arthur Wing Pinero: Playwright: A Study says about Paula Ray, who later becomes the second Mrs. Tanqueray, “The past hangs its loathsome weight about her memory; the present leaves her unsatisfied and ill­-content; the future terrifies her with its long vistas of weariness and horror”.3

 

            The question posed by the play is: Can marriage clothe with respectability the woman who has sinned earlier? The drama points to the simple moral that no social regeneration or rehabili­tation is possible for a woman with a past. Twenty-seven-year old Miss Paula Ray, who was once Mrs. Jarman, becomes the second wife of the widower, Aubrey Tanqueray. Mr. Tanqueray knows that she is a woman with a past; he knows something about her past also, but not all of it. He feels that she has never met a man so far who has treated her well. He wants to mete out good treatment to her. Mr. Tanqueray has a daughter by his first wife, a nineteen-year-old girl, named Ellean. All these years she has been brought up in convents in France or Ireland. Unfortunately for the Taoquerays, she decides to come home and stay with her parents. Soon after the marriage of Paula Ray with Tanqueray, they shift to their country house. Because of Paula’s questionable past, they are socially ostracised. The step-daughter, Miss Ellean, also has been cold and hostile towards her step-mother. Mrs. Tanqueray. Paula hungers for the girl’s love and affection, but senses her hostility from the beginning. The husband feels ill at ease in exposing his daughter to the harmful influence of Patla’s light and careless nature. So, he permits his daughter to go to Paris with a neigh­bour, Mrs. Cortelyon. In Paris Ellean falls in love with a British soldier stationed in India. He is Captain Hugh Ardale. She brings him to their country house to introduce him to her parents. As Paula turns to receive him, the past, which she has thought forever banished, confronts her. He and she lived in London long ago as “lovers”. In fact, she was his mistress. So, she cannot allow her step-daughter, Ellean, to marry, him. She informs her husband, Aubrey, of her past relationship with Hugh Ardale. Peremptorily he bans all contacts between Ellean and Hugh Ardale. Ellean blames Paula for stopping her marriage with the man she has loved. Suddenly the truth dawns upon Ellean. She declares that right from the beginning she has always known what she is – a scarlet woman. Paula protests – “Ellean, I’m a good woman. I swear I am. I’ve always been a good woman.” The patient Tanqueray encourages her. They will begin life afresh elsewhere. But Paula now convinced that she cannot reconcile her present with her past. “I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate ... Tonight proves it.” So, Mrs. Tanqueray kills herself. As Clayton Hamilton puts it, “The reason why Paula Tanqueray is unable to escape from, or obliterate, her past is mercy that her past is still, and ever more, a part of her”.4

 

            Pinero made one more attempt at the play of ideas in “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” (1895) It was a period of abnormal interest in Ibsen. Pinero had discovered that he could throw ideas on the table for the wise to wag their heads over, and that it is possible for a story to carry deeply-concealed meanings. He discovered that woman and sex are problems. H. Hamilton Fyfe has observed,” The Notorious Ebbsmith shows more than any other of the plays the influence of Ibsen, and especially the influence of Ibsen’s studies in femininity”. It enforces the lesson that a platonic relation between a man and a woman is impossible for nine out of every ten women. It is more thought ­provoking than any other of Pinero’s plays.

 

            The heroine of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith differs from Letty and Iris in that she is always a thinker, a rational radical whose waywardness is due to her strength. Agnes Ebbsmith is a woman of revolutionary ideas, caught from her father, and deepened by her own unhappy experience of wedded life. After eight years of married life, one year of youthful indulgence and seven as his mistress, her husband dies and gives her freedom. As a nurse she becomes enamoured of her patient, Lucas Cleeve, who too has been unhappy in marriage. They decide to work together, and their relations are to be completely free from physical passion. But Lucas fails to keep his promise. The man in him betrays himself. He presents her with a beautiful gown. Bit by bit she comes to love him and complacently dons the beautiful dress he has bought for her. As Fyfe says, “Her head resents the intrusion of the flesh-and-blood element, but her heart holds her back from any attempt at renunciation”. Lucas, to set at rest all scandal, wants to return to his wife and yet maintain in secret his relations with Agnes. Then she rebels. After she had “only one hour in a woman’s life”, she leaves a card for Lucas: “My hour is over”. Agnes Ebbsmith learns the futility of defying a social institution. She learns the weakness of human nature that renders such institutions essential.

 

            In “Iris” (1901) Pinero had a serious purpose to indicate. But as soon as one enquires what that purpose is, agreement vanishes among the critics. Some ask that Mrs. Bellamy (Iris) be considered as the victim of circumstances. Some maintain that Iris is merely weak, not wicked, and that Pinero meant to show how wrong it is to let oneself drift or to be too fond of soft cushions and the sunny side of the Street of Human Life. A third suggestion is that Iris is a thoroughly bad woman. A fourth is, that she is at heart a thoroughly good woman, sorely sinned against, and so on. Iris Bellamy alternates all the time between two men. She loves Laurence Trenwith truly, but she does not want to marry him, because he is poor and because her late husband’s will says that she will lose her fortune if she marries again. She is selfish and her selfishness colours every act of her life. She will not have a poor man for a husband, but she has no reluctance to become his mistress. But Trenwith declines to live upon her money. Iris knows her own weakness. “Poor, weak, sordid Iris”, she calls herself “who must lie in the sun in summer, before the fire in winter, who must wear the choicest laces, the richest furs, whose eyes must never encounter any but the most beautiful objects.” Accustomed as she is to a life of luxury, she will not go to Canada to live ranch in British Columbia. But she promises Trenwith that she will wait for him to come back and marry her. When she loses her fortune through the embezzlement of the lawyer she trusted, Mr. Archie Kane, she succumbs to the temptations offered by her millionaire admirer, Maldonado. She uses his cheque book and lives in the flat that he has provided for her. When Lawrence Trenwith returns to England after four years, she confesses to him what she was forced to do, and gives excuses for so doing. But Tren­with will have none of her, after this. He leaves her. Maldonado, who overhears her talk with Trenwith, is enraged by what he thinks her treachery-enjoying his money and loving his rival. He turns her out into the night. Thus, Iris falls between two stools from her weakness. In the opinion of Frank Chandler, Iris is the weakest of the three – the other two being Paula Ray and Agnes Ebbsmith. Hamilton Fyfe, whom I have quoted earlier, has this to say of her, “She deceives herself, she deceives her lover, she deceives her friends”. 5 He points out that Dante would have placed the soul of Iris Bellamy in the worst part of Inferno, reserved for those who think of their own selfish interests alone. As W. D. Dunkel remarks, the reaction of the audience to her fall is “a matter of horror rather than pity, revulsion of the emotion rather than catharsis through awe and admiration”. 6

 

            In “Letty”, (1903) Pinero has drawn a heroine tempted like Iris to follow the line of least resistance. As Walter Lazenby remarks, “Letty is a comedy of manners which with subtle irony demonstrates the gradual disillusionment of its heroine, leading to a healthy, realistic adjustment of her life in an epilogue”.7 Her real name is Elizabeth Shell. She is a clerk in a bucket­shop. Attracted by her good looks, her employer Bernard Mandeville offers to marry her, in spite of the gap in their social status. But she cares nothing for him, but is tempted by the comforts that he can give her. Meanwhile, she has been fasci­nated by Nevill Letchmere, a customer of the firm; who wishes to save her from the unwelcome overtures of her employer. At first Nevill does not tell her that he is a married man with a child, and that he has been separated from his wife. When Letty learns the truth, she returns his presents and wants to break with him. But the other alternative of marrying her employer who is aggressive, vulgar and bullying, throws her back into the arms of Nevill Letchmere. She surrenders to his proposal of being his mistress, not for money he offers her, but for the love she has felt for him. When she is on the brink of this social gaffe, she receives news that Nevill’s sister, Florence, mismated, has eloped with her admirer, Coppinger Drake. Letty recognises in Mrs. Ivor Crosbie’s (Florence) mistake a forecast of their own proposed action. The good in Letty recoils. She begs Letchmere to save her as the only reparation he can make for having neglected to save his sister. He lets her go. Abandoning her social ambitions, she marries the photographer, Richard, who belongs to her own social status and sphere. In the Epilogue, the events of which happen two and half years later, we see Letty happily settled in life, with a baby daughter. Says Frank D. Chandler “Letty is quite natural – a well-meaning, weak, affectionate, vacillating creature, who by a narrow chance avoids the shoals and rocks that threaten her, and slips into the smooth waters of a bourgeois marriage.”

 

            One can take comfort from the thought that these wayward women portrayed atonement for their deeds in one way or an­other. Those who are wayward from malice or weakness pay with anguish and death. Those who are wayward from principle fare a little better. The moralists need not entertain apprehensions that the modern drama which has dealt so freely with sex relations will corrupt its devotees. Neither need the women who attend these plays resent their over-frequent exhibition of feminine way­wardness. With few exceptions, the men in such dramas (Wilde’s and Pinero’s) are even more to be condemned than their wayward sisters.

 

REFERENCES

 

1 Frank D. Chandler, Aspects of Modem Drama (London. Macmillan, 1914) p. 121.

2 Thomas H. Dickinson, The Contemporary Drama of England (London. John Murray, 1920)

3 Hamilton Fyfe, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero: Playwright; A Study (London. Greening Co. 1902) p. 143.

4 Clayton Hamilton, Critical Preface to The Critical Plays of Arthur Wing Pinero. Vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1967) p. 46.

5 Hamilton Fyfe, Sir Arthm’ Pinero’s Plays and Players (London: Ernest Benn. 1930) p. 216.

6 Wilbur Dwight Dunkel, Sir Arthur Pinero (New York: Kennikat Press, 1941) p. 70.

7 Walter Lazenby, Arthur Wing Pinero (New York. Twayne Publishers, 1972) P 103.

 

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