Literally annoying

09 Oct 2005

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…