Shaw and Automata

Automata are machines that can operate on their own without human control. By analogy, automations refer to persons who acts like machines without thinking or feeling.(Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/automaton ) Automata are also moving mechanical devices in the shape of a person, or small robots performing a particular range of functions.(Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/automaton ) Automata are featured prominently in Back to Methuselah (1921). Ozymandias and Cleopatra-Semiramis are automata created by Pygmalion the scientist. This is the second time Pygmalion appears in a major Shaw play. The Greek myth of Pygmalion is the inspiration behind Shaw’s most popular play, Pygmalion (1912), based on the original myth in which Pygmalion the talented Greek sculptor from Cyprus created the beautiful statue of Galatea and fell in love with her. In Shaw’s play, Henry Higgins the professor of phonetics taught Eliza Doolittle the flower girl upper-class English and manners so that she may pass as a duchess at the ambassador’s garden party. In typical Shavian manner, instead of Eliza marrying Higgins (as do Galatea and Pygmalion) at the end of the play, Eliza becomes a real human being, asserting her independence from Higgins; she plans to open her own flower shop using the skills she learned from him. However, in Back to Methuselah, Shaw drastically alters the Pygmalion myth: instead of the artistic sculptor creating the beautiful statue of Galatea who came to life and married the sculptor, the scientist creating the automata quickly destroy their creator and themselves. To understand the complex forces at work behind the male and female automata in Back to Methuselah, one must examine how Shaw lived and wrote his major plays during the golden age of the automata.