George Bernard Shaw is guilty of hit­ting one of my pet peeves in “an ini­tialled review” he wrote of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1897. Yeah, I’m still not over it.¹

His review is, in all other respects, per­fectly fine. I’d argue over the seman­tic appro­pri­ate­ness of describ­ing it as a “review”, for it seems more a belated crit­i­cism, focussing more on society’s response to the play than on the play itself, but I digress. Write about the annoy­ing bit already! Okay, okay.

The woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her hus­band left star­ing at her, help­less, bound thence­forth either to do with­out her (an alter­na­tive which makes short work of his fan­cied inde­pen­dence) or else treat her as a human being like him­self, fully rec­og­niz­ing that he is not a crea­ture of one supe­rior species, Man, liv­ing with a crea­ture of another and infe­rior species, Woman, but that Mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and that the inequal­ity of the sexes is lit­er­ally a cock and bull story, cer­tain to end in such unbear­able humil­i­a­tion as that which our sub­ur­ban King Arthurs suf­fer at the hands of Ibsen.

No, my com­plaint is not with multiple-run-on sen­tences (for I myself am often guilty of that, though per­haps less spec­tac­u­larly than his rather-admirable effor there), but rather with his abuse of the term “lit­er­ally”. No, GBS, A Doll’s House’s rejec­tion of the notion of the inequal­ity of the sexes is not achieved through lit­er­ally pre­sent­ing this as a story about a cock and a bull. You may use that as a metaphor, but not lit­er­ally. Declar­ing some­thing to be lit­eral does not serve to empha­sise the point. In fact, in this instance, it serves only to ridicule it.

*pulls faces*

The end.

¹ I’m the first to admit I was born in the wrong cen­tury. Love of the Inter­net and tech­nol­ogy in gen­eral aside, I could quite hap­pily have spent my days as a fringe-Romantic intel­lec­tual argu­ing with var­i­ous fig­ures of sim­i­lar stand­ing in the late nine­teenth cen­tury. So call me an élitist, or some­thing. I enabled dead keys on my key­board just so I could type élitist prop­erly, you know? I’m that bad. It makes typ­ing apos­tro­phes hellish…