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8 Heartbreak House “A Long Garden Seat on the West” Toward the end of Heartbreak House, Hector Hushabye asks the unfathomable question, “how is all this going to end?”1 Unbeknownst even to himself, he had already anticipated the answer when, at the beginning of act 3, his wife, Hesione, asks him, in response to the “splendid drumming in the sky,” “what can it have been Hector?” to which he replies, “Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely] I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creationwillcometosupplantusaswehavesupplantedtheanimals,orthe heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.”2 Nature, invention, human vileness, and creative evolution all conjoin in the speech: It is uttered in the garden, toward which the whole play has been moving, with the backdrop of nature (“heavens”), the theme of invention (“some new creation”), the revelation of the vileness of human invention when cut off from nature (“us useless futile creatures”), and the suggestion of creative evolution (“will supplant us as we have supplanted the animals”). In brief, the passage summarizes one of the play’s themes: the baseness of human invention when alienated from, and contrasted with, nature’s creativeness, as symbolized by the garden and nature. Shaw’s first words in the opening stage directions in act 1 focus on nature , of which the garden is a part. “The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September .” He continues, “the windows are ship built with heavy timbering and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows.”3 In other words, in performance, it would be seen that nature forms the visual backdrop of the play and is given emphasis by being framed, with •· 102 · Heartbreak House: “A Long Garden Seat on the West” · 103 little obstruction, by the windows. On through the play, whenever Shaw gives stage directions, of which there are many, involving interaction between characters and the windows, the reader must keep in mind that the audience and the characters are gazing at the garden and the nature scene beyond. But nature, along with the garden, is also endowed with metaphorical suggestiveness, as will be seen. Other critics have noted the symbolic richness of the play. A. M. Gibbs points out that at “the beginning of the play the setting may seem no more than a whimsical piece of interior domestic design . . . [but] by the end it has become a powerful symbol of national destiny.”4 Stanley Weintraub states that Shaw intended to “keep the action on the symbolic level”5 and that Shaw “charged” the play with symbolism, while Louis Crompton says that the play is “unsurpassed” for “the subtlety of its art, its depth of poetic feeling, and the fascination of its symbolism.”6 After describing the interior of the house, Shaw returns to the view through the windows. “The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the landscape rises again to the hills.”7 He mentions an observatory and then gives a detailed description of what will be the setting for act 3: “Between the observatory and the house is a flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a long garden seat on the west.”8 This scene is held before the audience’s eyes in act 1 and becomes the location for the onstage action for the climactic scene. Shaw’s stress on the garden and nature could not be more emphatic. In fact, nature is described and referred to often, sometimes uncharacteristically of Shaw, in passages of startling beauty. Shotover tells Mangan, “you are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of God [ . . . ]. Go out on the seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys”;9 he also tells Mangan, “the wide earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside”; and when Mangan is threatening to leave, Ellie tells him, “It is a heavenly night: you can sleep on the heath.”10 Shotover, who has spent his life out in nature on the seas, seems most affected by his experiences; he says, “I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen into Arctic ice for months in darkness,”11 and, in his most eloquent articulation of his feelings about nature, he poeticizes: “at sea nothing...

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