“Well, really! Alderman Meggarty! I must say, we are learning something tonight.”
Although Mrs Birling appears shocked to learn of the commonly accepted truth about Joe Meggarty, it is credible that she can have been so ignorant of his reputation if at least three out of six people present thought it common knowledge?
Another way that the plays gives a social and political message with his characters is the fact that the play also shows how true it is that the usage of pride comes before a fall – especially the false pride shown by some of the characters. Pride is revealed as being often rooted in shallow soil, with no substantial base. Only by abandoning false pride can characters arrive at honest relationship with themselves and each other – but some are unwilling to do this there pride has become a self- perpetuating fantasy:
“Giving us the port Edna? That’s right. (He pushes it towards Eric) you ought to like this port, Gerald. As a matter of fact, Finchelly told me it’s, exactly the same port your got from him.”
Mr Birling is at pains to explain that the port is exactly the same as that bought by Gerald’s father. Birling sees Sir George Croft as his social superior, and his comment about the port shows his a social climber. He wishes to en-large his self-importance, but does so by going through the motions, rather than doing anything really worthwhile. He may no longer be an alderman, or Lord Mayor, but he makes sure that everyone knows that he used to be. It is almost the first thing he and his wife pint out to new acquaintances, along with the facts that he is a local magistrate and a ‘hard-headed’, successful businessman.
Priestly gives the political and social message by showing that some characters in the play attach great importance to social status. For them, it is so precious that nothing must threaten it. Social class defines the value of human beings. A high social class insulates these characters from the unpleasantness of the unpleasantness of reality. Birling panics at the prospect of having his son or his wife’s actions being made public. He is clearly terrified by a scandal, which would irretrievably damage the Birlings’ status.
“By jingo! A fake!”
“I’m going to make certain of this”
“Ring Up the chief constable – Colonel Roberts”
These three lines show that Birling is determined to treat the incident of the Inspector of revealing their secrets as a hoax, or as some sort of practical joke. By doing this, they can reduce everything which has happened to the level of a stunt or trick.
Some characters as having little value as a human being see Eva Smith, who is working-class. The play invites us to question the false reality generated by this attitude.
The play points out the need for a sense of personal responsibility in every member of the society: responsibility not only for individual actions, but also for the way actions affects other characters. The opposite vies is expressed by Arthur Birling, whose driving concern is self-interest:
“But this is the point. I don’t want to lecture you two young fellows again. But what so many of you don’t seem to understand now, when things are much easier, is that a man has to make his own way – has to look after himself”
Mr Birling expresses his philosophy that ‘a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own’. The events of the play show this to be unworkable.
Different characters react to their guilt in different ways, when it is revealed to them not all show remorse or shame, and some are so hardened that they refuse even to accept that remorse is appropriate. There is tendency for the younger people to be most likely to show remorse. Priestly suggests that wrongdoing is rather like a disease, eating away inside from inside. The characters must realise, accept and be responsible for the true results of what they have done, if they are to recover their humanity. Remorse is essential before healing can begin.
Mr Birling is a successful factory owner, ex Lord Mayor of Brumley and a local magistrate. He regards himself as reasonable and pays his employees no more and no less than the going rate. He does not punish workers who ask for more money, but simply turns them down on the grounds that it is his duty to keep costs low, and prices high.
Mr Birling has little or no imagination, and seems blind both to the consequences of his actions, and to events in the larger world. He makes prediction of the future – the invincibility of the Titanic:
“A friend of mine went over this new liner last week – the Titanic she sails next week – forty six thousand eight hundred tons - forty six thousand eight hundred tons – New York in five days – and every luxury – unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable”
The impossibility of war, and the promise of new technology-, which would have been by believed by many in 1912, but what would have seemed laughably optimistic to audiences in 1945. Mr Birling can see no reason why nations would go to war and upset the businessmen’s quest for profit. It never occurs to him that other people might value other things more highly. In many ways, he is a stereotype for his time, and this is true for other characters in the play. Mr Birling is a caricature of the callous heartlessness of a capitalistic businessman.
Birling is proud of his status; he and his wife set great store by his public offices and privileges. So sensitive is Birling about such matters that he even feels a little uneasy about Gerald Croft marrying his daughter, sensing that Gerald’s parents may feel that their son is marrying ‘beneath himself’. At the end of the play the possibility that he may be deprived of his promised knighthood upsets him far more than anything else:
“Look for god’s sake. Well my dear, they’re so damned exasperating, they just won’t understand out position or too see the difference between a lot of stuff like this coming out in private and a down right public”
This shows that Mr Birling losses his patients with Sheila’s determination to reveal their hypocrisy. It is a sad reflection on Mrs Birling’s character that she is more upset by Birling’s swearing than by anything else she has been told during the evening.
Mr and Mrs Birling see themselves as upholders of all the ‘right’ values and as guardians of proper conduct. But both are exposed as self-centred and essentially heartless. They begin by trying to put the Inspector in his place, though emphasising their own position in society. Both try to hide, or hide from uncomfortable truths. As Eric points out, his father is useless in a real crisis. At the end of the play it is Gerald who does all the thinking, not Mr Birling.
It is plain that Mr Birling’s motives are not to save Eric from being found out, but to protect himself from social scandal. To do this, he is prepared to distort or ignore the truth. He is blind this hypocrisy, and indifferent when it is pointed out. Just before the end of the play he happily argues that:
“The whole thing’s different now. Come, come, you can see that can’t you. (Imitating inspector in his final speech) you all helped to kill her (pointing at Sheila and Eric and laughing) And I wish have seen the look on your faces when he said that”
He congratulates himself on having avoided a scandal. Provided their public reputation is safe, people like Mr and Mrs Birling will never change.
Mrs Birling is even more hard-faced and arrogant than her husband. She is introduced as his social superior and her manner indicates that she is very conscious of social position, especially her own. She is extremely ‘snobbish’, and expects others to show respect and to defer to her opinions. She resents being contradicted, even when caught out telling outright lies by the Inspector.
Mrs Birling seems genuinely shocked to hear about her son’s drink, although the information does not surprise Sheila and Gerald. Her concern – shared by her husband – that Sheila should not be exposed to ‘unpleasant’ things suggests that she regards as a child. Is Mrs Birling unaware to see what is going around her? No, she is deliberately blind to anything she does not want to see. When the news of Eva Smith’s death was bought to her, she could not see how a death of a ‘lower class’ person can be any interest to her or the rest of the Birlings:
“(Rebuking them) I’m talking to the Inspector now, if you don’t mind. (To Inspector, gladly) I realise that you may have to conduct some inquiry. ”
Mrs Birling ignores Sheila’s warnings and persists in trying to use her social class to intimidate the Inspector. She has already attempted discredit Eva as one of the ‘girls of the class’, and has criticised the Inspector as ‘impertinent’. She likes too seeing everyone else as children and considering herself as the ‘parent’.
When exposed to criticism Mrs Birling retreats behind words like ‘respectable’, ‘duty’, and ‘deserving’. She seems to feel that she is qualified to judge what such words mean. If she feels her own status has been suitably acknowledged she will be condescendingly generous, but, if not, she will take offence at what she see as ‘impertinence’. She thinks that people from ‘lower class’ have different feelings from her own: they are almost a different species. Eva Smith’s pleas for help Mrs Birling because the girl was ’giving a ridiculous airs’ and ‘claiming elaborate fine feelings’. Her vindictive attitude toward the father of the girl’s child changes dramatically when she learns that he is her own son, clearly illustrating her extreme hypocrisy.
Sheila, the Birling’ daughter, is impressionable, and deeply affected by the revelations of the Inspector. She and her brother Eric are the only characters who give any cause for optimism in the play. Sheila has an attractive and essentially honest character, and lacks the cold-blooded attitude of her parents:
“You see, I feel you’re beginning all wrong. And am afraid you’ll say something or do something that you’ll be sorry for afterwards”
Sheila tries to warn her mother that the more she puts on airs and graces, the worse it will be her for her eventually. Who is to believe when her mother says she does not know what her daughter is talking about?
During the play she sees her father exposed as a hard-hearted employer, her fiancé as a liar who has had a ‘kept woman’, her brother as the father of an illegitimate unborn child, her mother as callous and unforgiving, and herself as a vain and spiteful girl.
Sheila seems at times an accomplice of the Inspector, in that she tends to take up his criticism of the other characters, even when he has left the stage. Her parents see this as disloyalty, but Sheila sees no pint in concealing either Eric’s drinking problem or Alderman Meggarty’s unpleasant reputation, for it would make the situation that the household are in worse.
Gerald out look of life is similar to that of Mr Birling view of life. He aggress with the way Birling handled Eva Smith’s dismissal:
“You couldn’t have done anything else”.
Like Mr and Mrs Birling, Gerald’s first impulse is to conceal his involvement with Eva; but unlike them, he shows genuine remorse when the news of her death finally sinks in. moreover, it becomes clear that Gerald helped Eva out genuine sympathy for her situation and did not take an advantage of her violent and drunken way in which Eric did. Gerald did make Eva happy for a time, and in many ways is the least to blame for her death.
At the end of the play, Gerald shows the clearest head in thinking about the identity of the Inspector, is the first to begin devising a way out, and shows initiative in telephoning the infirmary to check if a dead girl has actually been admitted. He also suggests the possibility of there being more than one girl.
Gerald may have felt some remorse at the end of the play; he seems to expect Sheila to accept the engagement ring again and asserts that all is now well. The final lines confirm the foolishness of this assumption.
During the play Eric is exposed as a drunkard, the father of a illegitimate unborn child, a liar and a thief and an embezzler.
During the first two Acts, Eric functions, Mainly as an irritant to Mr Birling’s complacency, continually asking what his father regards as silly questions. Mr Birling clearly thinks that his son has not befitted from the expensive education he has given him, perhaps because it was calculated to improve his son’s status, rather than develop a critical approach to life.
Eric arouses curiosity with his sodden guffaw in Act 1. This is possibly an indication that he knows something about Gerald, because Sheila has been scolding Gerald for neglecting her favour of his work. Curiosity about Eric turns to suspicion later, when he breaks off in mid-comment- he was about to say that he remembered that woman find clothes important. We begin to think that Eric has something to conceal.
The inspector is an enigmatic figure. We never learn from his first name. He neither changes nor develops, but frequently repeats:
“I haven’t much time”
This shows that he is eager to get to the truth out of the characters and wants to show their misdoings and the fact that they should feel guilt.
Inspector Goole’s name is an obvious pun or ‘ghoul’, a malevolent spirit or ghost. He could have been a spirit, sent on behalf of the dead girl to torment the consciences of the characters in the play, or as a sort of cosmic policeman conducting an inquiry as a preliminary to the Day of Judgement, or simply as a forewarning of things to come. Certainly it seems that Priestly did not want to promote a ingle interpretation of who the Inspector ‘really’ is. His dramatic power lies in this. To reveal his identity as a hoaxer or as some kind of ‘spirit’ would have spoilt the unresolved tension that is effective at the end of play.
The stage directions for the Inspector talk ‘an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness’ and indicate he that ‘He speaks carefully, weightily, and has a disconcerting habit of looking hard at the person he addresses before actually speaking’. There is an air of menace around him and unlike the other characters he does not deviate from his moral position. He is single-minded in pursuing his chosen line of investigation. He alone is certain of his facts. The other characters question these facts only after he has left. Whilst the Inspector is present, nobody challenges his version of events.
Those characters that resist telling the Inspector the truth suffer more than those who are open. The Inspector says to Gerald:
“…If you’re easy with me, I’m easy with you’.
Notice that he deliberately tries to stop Sheila from blaming herself too much. How ever, he begins to lose patients with Mr Birling:
“Don’t stammer and yammer at me again, man. I’m losing all the patience with you people’.
The Inspector is harshest with Mrs Birling because she resists the truth:
“I think you did something terribly wrong…”
He does not do this because of prejudice, as you see he persuaded all the characters to reveal things, which they would have rather not known, or the truth but some of the characters took this for granted so they got what they gave.
By Abubakar Hatimy
