The Doctor's Dilemma: Adulterating a Muse

In the act of a friendly fate, Jennifer Dubedat offers beauty to the great Dr. Ridgeon if he will save her artist/husband's life. This Hegelian gesture extends the possibility of reconciliation between art and science. She offers Dr. Ridgeon a "birth of the spirit," an opportunity to transform his science by healing the artist Dubedat's body. ¹ Ridgeon, however, sees the opportunity to appropriate the artist's Muse, and thereby appropriate the source of the artist's Beauty.

Into the conventional structure of unconsummated adultery, Shaw embeds an argument for the efficacy of art over science, blending the kind of paradoxical argument he so favored with the psychology of the popular theater. The usefulness of the art over science argument, as Francis Fergusson suggests of the thesis behind Major Barbara, "is in its theatrical fertility: it is a paradox which may be endlessly debated." ² Once Jennifer Dubedat disrupts the bachelor world of Dr. Ridgeon, the Shavian game of naming and then rationalizing anything ensues. ³ The fact that both the scientist (Dr. Ridgeon) and the artist (Louis Dubedat) are so compromised by personal interest prevents the debate from ever coming to a conclusion.

The Doctor's Dilemma, like Candida, notes Martin Meisel, "is preoccupied with the artist's relation to common life," as well as its conventional connection to the comedy of "unconsummated adultery." ⁴ In Candida, writes Meisel, Shaw examines the romantic concept of the "artist as alien creature," and "intruder into domesticity, while in The Doctor's Dilemma he places the artist in the domestic situation and makes the lover the respectable man." Meisel suggests that "a conventional rascally artist-intruder and a respectable physician-husband would have called up an automatic response." ⁵ However, it should be noted here that the automatic response would have also been determined by the conventional relationship of those male characters to the wife/female character, just as Shaw's inversion of those characters balances on the character of Jennifer Dubedat.

Stanley Weintraub writes that Shaw's "scamp of a hero, who dies operatically with an artist's credo on his lips, must evoke the tensions of ambiguity about his supposed genius in order to leave the weight of guilt at his death unresolved." ⁶ Both tensions about his genius and the unresolved weight of guilt at his death are encompassed in the central question Meisel identifies as the framework of the character Louis Dubedat. Dubedat, writes Meisel, "is a problem which extends beyond the question of what a society should do with a man who is valuable in one respect and intolerable in another, to the question of what a society should do with its heretics." ⁷ The same question can be asked of Dr. Ridgeon, whose knighthood places him in the dramatic realm of purity of character, but whose behavior makes him at least as intolerable as Louis Dubedat. A simple injection is all that is involved in his cure, and though he refuses Dubedat because he cannot take on an eleventh patient, he does take on Blenkinsop as an additional patient.

Meisel's explanation of Shaw's inversion and treatment of the conventions of Domestic Comedy provides an excellent context for situating the role of the Muse into a reading of The Doctor's Dilemma. He defines the dilemma of heretics and heresies as knowing how to distinguish between beneficial and/or "pernicious" heresies when "both were equally subversive of orthodoxy and order." ⁸ Shaw's inversion of the triangle of unconsummated adultery is already subversive of orthodoxy and order. In fact, it is the inversion of the triangle that places Jennifer Dubedat at its apex. As the Muse, the force of her presence demands the subversion of orthodoxy and order. Her presence unmasks both the doctor/knight and the scoundrel/artist, though she maintains her allegiance to the artist. In the psychology of the parlor-game played by...