In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)

“Thank you Dr. Givings. You have no idea what a source of anguish my wife’s illness has been to me. And to her, of course.”

Mr. Daldry brings his wife for a treatment that she will find personally intrusive and a breach of her privacy. When he first appears in the play, he makes it clear that he does not see his wife as a person who is suffering. He simply finds her emotional pain to be inconvenient and embarrassing. Mr. Daldry gaslights his wife and makes her feel insane instead of attempting to understand her pain and offering compassion.

“It is a kind of religious ecstasy to feel half blind, do you not think?”

To Sabrina, electricity is still a bit mysterious and frightening. She worries that the vibrator might electrocute her. When she stares into an electric lamp, it affects her vision for a few moments in a disorienting way. Her comment demonstrates her awe and respect for electricity but also the way her repression has made her numb and unable to acknowledge and understand her own suffering. She punishes her body for failing to give her a child by seeking out pain.

“Why, I don’t know. My husband has always held the umbrella. Isn’t that funny. I don’t know at all what kind of person I am.”

Catherine tells Mr. Daldry that there are three types of people: One carries an umbrella at all times, one never carries an umbrella, and one carries an umbrella only when it rains. She realizes that she has allowed her husband to direct and define her, and after years of marriage, she doesn’t know herself or what she wants.

“It’s only that they say morality goes right through the milk.”

Catherine is reluctant to allow another woman to breastfeed her baby because she feels that breastfeeding is more than a biologically necessary act to keep the child alive. Catherine doesn’t want to give up on believing that she can provide for her baby, but she also feels like she ought to be very particular about the type of person whom she allows to breastfeed in her stead. Catherine sees a wet nurse as someone who will steal her place as Lotty’s mother and help to shape who the child becomes.

“The body is blameless. Milk is without intention.”

Dr. Givings attempts to comfort his wife by telling her that breastfeeding is not a moral act, and neither is her inability to breastfeed a moral failing. His comment shows how little he understands Catherine’s emotions. The way she understands breastfeeding as part of her duty as a woman and a mother is emotional rather than logical. Catherine feels like a failure because she cannot fulfill the social expectations of her gender role. Dr. Givings does not know how to assuage her fears without invalidating them.

“Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song? What do you think?”

Catherine has a tendency to say whatever comes into her mind and to encourage others to do the same, regardless of propriety and social rules. When she hears Sabrina’s song, she processes the sadness it evokes aloud. Catherine’s husband criticizes her for being emotional instead of logical while lauding himself as an emotionless man of science, but Catherine constantly works through what she sees and experiences in the spirit of curiosity and scientific inquiry.

“Do you think our children’s children will be less solemn? A flick of the finger—and all is lit! A flick of the finger, and all is dark! On, off, on off! We could change our minds a dozen times a second! On, off, on off! We shall be like gods!”

Catherine wonders about the potential of electricity to change the world and empower humans to control their surroundings. This statement also comments on the way making something simpler with technology makes that process easier to take for granted. A person who can turn on and off a light with no effort is less likely to appreciate the light. Someone who must light a candle, however, understands the fragility of light and the limits of life without electricity. This comparison extends to the vibrator and supports the overarching idea that some things are worth the effort. 

“You are perhaps shocked, Doctor, that I kissed her before marriage. I am a devotee of nature and I wished to avoid the fate of my boyhood friend. On his wedding night he was repulsed by his wife’s body. He said, when she disrobed for the first time, he saw something monstrous. What, what? I asked. She had body hair, he said, down there! Like a beast! You see, he had seen the female form only in marble statues—no body hair!”

Leo fancies himself an experienced lover of women, but this passage calls into question whether he has as much experience with naked women as he projects. He tells the story as if it is from the perspective of a friend, but the surprise he expresses seems to be personal, as if he is trying to ask the doctor if pubic hair is normal. This statement shows how the idealized version of women, whether in art or shaped through social convention, is unrealistic. 

“What men do not observe because their intellect prevents them from seeing would fill many books.” 

Dr. Givings offers Leo a wry answer about the willing blindness of men toward the reality of women and their bodies, but he is unwittingly describing himself. As a scientist, Dr. Givings believes that he is a particularly enlightened person. However, he allows his belief in science to blind him to the less scientific understanding of his wife’s emotional needs.

“She is the soul of tact and reserve.” 

Dr. Givings is describing Annie, but he says this just as Elizabeth enters the living room with the baby. As a man who adheres to social convention, these are the two highest compliments he can offer a woman who is not his wife. However, although Annie is highly professional and keeps her emotions to herself in front of Dr. Givings, she is much more open when she is alone with Sabrina. Elizabeth is also tactful and reserved in front of Dr. Givings, but she cries openly in front of Catherine and speaks very truthfully to her. Dr. Givings only believes that women are reserved—especially his wife—because he turns a blind eye when they are not.

“I think that babies are angels when they drink only milk that first year. They could fly right back to where they came from, to the milk in the clouds. When they get teeth it is the beginning of the end, they become animals and there’s no going back.” 

Elizabeth’s baby was a year old when he died, and she was still breastfeeding, as evident by the fact that she is still able to be a wet nurse. Since she has begun nursing Lotty, she has started to feel a growing affection for her. Elizabeth is comforting herself about her own child’s soul and drawing a connection between her son and Catherine’s daughter. To Catherine, this statement is painful because it suggests that Catherine is going to miss connecting with her child during the year that she is pure and angelic.

“I’m afraid everyone goes around these days saying: I am a modern man, I am a modern woman, it’s the modern age after all. But I detest modernity.” 

Leo romanticizes that which is old-fashioned as if progress and change are destructive forces. This romantic notion is simply Leo’s aesthetic, however, which Catherine notes when he kisses her hand. Leo admits that after his treatment, which was conducted with a very modern electrical appliance, he is less bothered by the bright light of the electric lamp. Leo believes that it is more conducive to romance when both parties can only see and know each other in partial light rather than having their flaws fully illuminated.

“Well, then light without flame is like having relations with a prostitute. No flame of love or desire, only the outer trappings of—the act. And without love—without the mental quickening—the eyes—the blood—without the heart—or intellect—bodies are meat. Meat and bones and levers and technicalities.” 

Leo stops himself from saying this to Catherine as it would be indelicate to discuss prostitution with a proper woman, but Catherine insists because she is curious and unwilling to allow anything to remain unknown if it is within her power to know it. Leo’s statement describes the dispassionate nature of electric light, but he is also, knowingly or not, describing his experiences with the vibrator. The treatments he receives from Dr. Givings are exactly what he explains. They are purely physical and involve the autonomous responses of his body. However, Leo does not seem to find the treatments to be as empty or worthless as he seems to view electric light.

“A woman who is two-thirds done is nearer to God! A young woman on the verge of knowing herself is the most attractive thing on this earth to a man for this very reason.”

Leo’s desire for a woman who doesn’t know herself reflects a need for superiority and control. He finds inexperienced women attractive because he wants to shape a woman into the partner he wants. Catherine doesn’t interest him because when she declares her love to Leo, she has a much more developed sense of self and her own wants than a woman whom Leo can mold and influence. Catherine has already demonstrated that she asks questions and does not blindly obey her husband. Leo reimagines Elizabeth as the Virgin Mary and then falls under the illusion that she is guileless and innocent, but Elizabeth understands herself even better than Catherine, and she is not easily led.

“We talk, we talk, and we surround ourselves with plants, with teapots, with little statuettes to give ourselves a feeling of home, of permanency, as if with enough heavy objects, perhaps the world won’t shatter into a million pieces, perhaps the house will not fly away, but I experienced something the other day, Mr. Irving, something to shatter a statuette, to shatter an elephant. Here is my riddle: what is a thing that can put a man to death and also bring him back to life again. Will you answer?”

Catherine’s world and perspective changed when she experimented with the vibrator. She discovers that what she believed to be true about life, sexuality, and her own body are false and that her husband has been withholding this truth from her. Her riddle, from her newly changed understanding of the world, seems to point to electricity, but Leo is certain that the answer is love. For Catherine, love has not changed her entire universe, and she isn’t living or dying by the power of love. Electricity is a legitimately dangerous force, but it also has awakened her and begun to change her reality.

“I am still leaking bits of gray milk. It is as though my body is crying.”

When Catherine’s breastmilk starts to dry up, she experiences an emotional loss that her husband cannot understand. From a logical perspective, Catherine was not going to return to breastfeeding her baby. She wasn’t producing enough to keep Lotty fed, and once she stopped trying altogether, her body naturally slowed its milk production even further. Like Catherine’s emotions, however, this decision and her body are messy. When Elizabeth talks about her dead son, she says that she wanted her milk to disappear because it was a constant reminder that she could no longer feed him. Catherine’s remnants of milk force her to repeatedly confront her grief over the way she believes she has already failed her child.

“Milk is comfort, milk is love. How will she learn to love me?”

Catherine sees her baby smile at Elizabeth and becomes convinced that the baby is bonding with her wet nurse rather than her mother. Breastfeeding isn’t simply food to Catherine. It is a form of protection, love, and affection. Catherine’s understanding of her child’s responses is more visceral than scientific, as are most of Catherine’s observations that baffle her husband. As Dr. Givings repeatedly dismisses Catherine’s emotions, she becomes increasingly frustrated with him. 

“[B]ut how can it be absolute when there are so many shades and degrees of love? Lady novelists like for it to be a tragedy—because it means that the affair mattered, mattered terribly—but it doesn’t, it needn’t.” 

Dr. Hastings considers emotionality to be a feminine quality and rationalizes away instances in which the source of the emotion is male. He considers Leo to be an anomaly because he is an artist. When he compares Catherine to Madame Bovary, she reminds him that the novelist who created her was a man, and he comments that being French is similar to being a woman. Although he is not wrong to be upset after catching his wife touching another man’s cheek, Dr. Hastings feels the need to convince himself and Catherine that he is not having an emotional response. However, his dismissal and refusal to care are insulting and trivialize Catherine’s feelings.

“We are to think of Him feeding us, I suppose. Not the other way round.” 

Leo wonders why more painters haven’t depicted the Virgin Mary breastfeeding, and Catherine responds by minimizing the act. Catherine is jealous of Elizabeth for both the ability to breastfeed Lotty and the fact that Leo is giving her so much attention. By treating breastfeeding as a divine act, Leo obliviously hurts Catherine’s pride as Catherine places a lot of importance on her inability to breastfeed her baby.

“It’s all right. As you see, he is a man of science. Nothing upsets or shocks him.” 

After Dr. Givings catches Leo painting Elizabeth, Catherine responds sardonically because her husband’s scientific commitment to coldness has made her feel as if he doesn’t value her or care if he loses her. Of course, Dr. Givings is surprised and affected by the impropriety of what is happening in his living room, just as he is truly upset and affected by his wife giving attention to another man. He has simply convinced himself that stoicism is a necessary masculine trait.

“You prefer grand passions over toast? My God, woman, we are married, a man needs to be quiet at least once a day.”

Dr. Givings has difficulty processing and responding to Catherine’s emotions, so he tries to avoid or suppress them, but Catherine tries to impress upon him that her feelings are substantial and real. Dr. Givings responds by accusing her of histrionics. Emotions make Dr. Givings uncomfortable, and his only defense is to ask his wife to be quiet since he is incapable of comforting her.

“One day, I woke up, and it was too late.”

When Sabrina and Annie are left alone for a treatment session, Annie becomes much less reticent than when the doctor is present. They discuss Greek philosophers and Thales who, according to Annie, claimed that he did not marry because it became too late. Sabrina asks why Annie never married, and she gives the same reply. Annie speaks very guardedly about her personal life and the fact that she does not have a husband or children. The two women are probing each other to determine if their attraction is mutual. Annie probably did not marry because she is attracted to women, but homosexuality would be taboo in the late 19th century. 

“There have been moments of rest. But as it turns out, the earth rests on air, not on water, and the air can feel very—insubstantial—at times. Even though it is holding you up, invisibly.”

Sabrina responds to Catherine about her experience of love and marriage. Like Catherine, Sabrina once dreamed of being in love, but both women admit that love feels less solid and real than they had expected. The love of Sabrina’s husband may sometimes feel nonexistent, but her marriage is a structure that is always there, even when she can’t feel it.