"True of Voice": Shaw, Florence Farr, and George J. Lee's The Voice

abstract:This article investigates the origins of Bernard Shaw's interest in the voice and traces the effects on his work. Conducting a contextual analysis of The Voice (1870), a singer's handbook issued by his surrogate father George J. Lee, it finds its ideas resurfacing throughout Shaw's writing life and describes how Shaw's early attention to what Barthes calls "the grain of the voice" thus became an obsession. Shaw's conception of the voice in practice and his portrayal of communication, presence, and truth are illuminated by dialogue with actress Florence Farr, not only played out in Pygmalion, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Saint Joan, but answered by the ritual vocalizations of Farr's Egyptian plays. Tracing Pygmalion's connection with Lee's musical exhortations allows space, potentially, for Eliza as female vocalist to move from mechanized automaton to the singer's gendered semiautonomy, elucidating nineteenth-century origins of contemporary anxieties around media, gender, and technology.