Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in An Experiment with an Air Pump, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Morality
Human Industry and the Limitations of Knowledge
The Ideal vs. Lived Experience
Passion vs. Rationality
Summary
Analysis
Fenwick, Susannah, Maria, Roget, and Armstrong sit around a table. They’ve just finished supper and are now drinking and eating fruit. Isobel is clearing plates. Fenwick invites her to join them once she’s finished; Susannah snaps that Fenwick would rather talk to servants than to his wife. Also, she finds it insulting that Fenwick orders Isobel to serve him “on the one hand and join [them] for elevating conversation on the other.” She pours herself another glass of wine and orders Isobel to fetch more; Isobel obeys. Harriet enters wearing a bonnet with a chimney puffing out steam attached to the top. Susannah thinks Harriet’s invention is “singularly useless,” but Fenwick is impressed and tells Susannah to shut up.
Fenwick earlier claimed that scientists should put their heart and morals into their research, conducting work aimed at improving collective humanity’s quality of life—in other words, that real progress is rooted in a strong moral foundation. Yet there’s a huge disparity between Fenwick’s radical talk of progress, equality, and altruism and his actual actions. As Susannah points out, it’s hypocritical of Fenwick to claim to see Isobel as an equal—yet also to expect her to serve him.
Themes
Susannah asks Roget if he thinks Fenwick is “a saint.” Roget says Fenwick is a great man and scientist—but that “saint” is a bit of an exaggeration. Susannah says she can prove that Fenwick isn’t the principled man people think he is and accuses everyone of being “indifferent” to Fenwick’s negative traits. In reality, Fenwick excludes his wife from everything he works on and makes her into a joke for preferring Shakespeare to Newton. Though she had no formal education when she married Fenwick, she read, knew some Greek, and painted—“but obviously that counts for nothing.” Susannah laments being a passionate artist “wedded to a dried cod.” Then she sits down and weeps.
Susannah accuses Roget, Armstrong, and Fenwick’s other colleagues of letting their respect of Fenwick’s work cloud their vision of him. Just as Edward’s homesickness for England (initially, at least) caused him to idealize and romanticize his country and ignore all its negative characteristics, Fenwick’s peers’ enchantment with Fenwick’s research prevents them from seeing his human flaws. Susannah, meanwhile, in claiming that she’s “wedded to a dried cod,” gestures toward the unnuanced view that passion and rationality are mutually exclusive emotions—that a person can be a passionate artist, like Susannah, or a logical “dried cod” like Fenwick.
Themes
Isobel returns with the wine and then quietly leaves. Fenwick apologizes for his “overwrought” wife, which sends Susannah into a rage. Harriet, Maria, Armstrong, and Roget exit and head into the drawing-room. Susannah accuses them of abandoning her.
Once more, Fenwick’s actions fail to live up to his preached philosophy of progress and rationality. He repeatedly appeals to his emotions, calling his wife “overwrought” instead of approaching her anger logically and identifying the valid, logical reasons she acts the way she does.
Themes
Alone with Fenwick, Susannah continues to cry. She snaps that Fenwick is treating her like a child and orders him to take her seriously. Susannah’s anger disarms Fenwick, and he apologizes. They bicker some more. Susannah argues that Fenwick married her for her beauty alone and didn’t care about Susannah’s intellect—in fact, he found her “ignorance delightful, charming even.” She also thinks she had less choice in their marriage than Fenwick did: young women, Susannah argues, wait around for someone to love them—“to bestow his mysterious gift upon them.” She says that Fenwick “planted” his love in Susannah and then “abandoned it[.]”
Susannah suggests that society conditions women to see men’s love as a “mysterious gift.” In so doing, she (perhaps unintentionally) demonstrates that she and Fenwick have more in common than they think they do. She implies that society’s romanticization of mystery leads to negative consequences for young women who are led to believe that love should be strange and “mysterious.” This logic mirrors Fenwick’s earlier criticism of the monarchy, and the culture of superstition and romanticizing mystery that has tricked the lower classes the monarchy exploits into thinking they need the monarchy.
Themes
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Fenwick apologizes for not being affectionate enough and for being overly absorbed in his work. Susannah says Fenwick has passion and energy for every “injustice” and for “the misfortunes of strangers” but has never had any passion for his wife. Susannah wonders how Fenwick could have changed so much since they first married—she wonders if the woman he loved then never existed and was simply “a construct of [his] imagination[.]”
Susannah suggests that Fenwick doesn’t live out his progressive ideals—the disrespect he repeatedly shows Susannah is evidence of this. Fenwick, meanwhile, recognizes how his ideals inject bias into the way he views the world and the people in his life.
Themes
Fenwick says they just have different definitions of love. Susannah’s version of love is about “devotion” and “tenderness.” Fenwick then goes into explicit, steamy details about his desirous love for her. He says he now realizes that he once assumed Susannah would be wise because she was beautiful, but now he sees that these two things aren’t linked. He also admits to seeing what he wanted to see in Susannah; for instance, whenever Susannah’s face would remain blank as Fenwick discussed politics, he assumed that she was being deep and contemplative.
Fenwick’s subjective ideas about the relationship between intelligence and beauty clouded his perception and caused him to see Susannah as his idealized version of her—not as the woman she really was and is.
Themes
Harriet and Maria enter, embroiled in a bitter fight. Harriet snaps that Edward is a fool—and Maria is a fool, too, for not realizing that he was involved with Miss Cholmondely. Susannah and Fenwick beg their daughters to stop. Fenwick orders Harriet to “listen to [her] mother,” which shocks Harriet into silence. Fenwick and Susannah carry their daughters offstage.
When Fenwick orders Harriet to “listen to [her] mother,” it shows that his and Susannah’s conversation has had a positive effect on their relationship. He now recognizes how projecting his own ideals onto Susannah has prevented him from really knowing and understanding her, and how this, in turn, has harmed their relationship.
Themes
Isobel enters and starts to clear the table. Armstrong enters, sneaks up behind Isobel, and grabs her by the waist. Isobel gasps as he kisses her and pushes her onto the table. Then he gives her a small, silk-wrapped package, explaining that it belonged to his mother. He wants Isobel to have it—and to say that she loves him. Isobel begins to say that she might love Armstrong, but she falls silent when Roget enters the room and demands to know what Armstrong is doing to Isobel. Isobel runs from the room.
Armstrong’s attempts to seduce Isobel have become increasingly more violent and forceful. Perhaps this foreshadows his eventual murder of her and dissection of her corpse (though the play hasn’t confirmed that Armstrong does either of these things). Regardless, Isobel seems more willing than ever to believe in the (probable) lies that Armstrong tells her. Like many other characters, Isobel has let her own desires and ideals skew her perception of reality.
Themes
Roget tells Armstrong it’s wrong to mess with Isobel, but Armstrong says that Isobel isn’t a fool and knows what he’s after. Roget says that Armstrong should know that Isobel doesn’t have any experience with romantic relationships. When Roget asks Armstrong what he really wants from Isobel, Armstrong insists that he loves her. Roget presses Armstrong some more. Isobel appears in the doorway but remains hidden in the shadows and eavesdrops on their conversation.
Armstrong seems to think that he and Isobel are on the same page about where he stands. The audience (and Roget), meanwhile, recognizes that this isn’t the case. Isobel’s desire to be loved has deluded her into abandoning her suspicions about Armstrong and believing that his love for her is genuine. Of course, it seems like that Isobel’s delusions will soon shatter—she’s eavesdropping on Armstrong and Roget’s conversation from the doorway, so if Armstrong finally comes clean to Roget about what he really wants with Isobel, she’ll find out.
Themes
Armstrong giggles as he talks about how “indefinable” love is. Then he shifts gears, bluntly admitting that he doesn’t love Isobel—though his actions aren’t sinister, either. He plans to woo Isobel until she agrees to have sex with him. Then, she’ll remove her clothes—revealing her naked, twisted back. Isobel’s back gave him an erection the first time he saw it; it arouses him deeply, much like he “find[s] electricity exciting, or the isolation of oxygen, or the dissection of a human heart.” Roget can only stare. Armstrong continues, explaining how Farleigh showed a similar malformation in one of his demonstrations, though it wasn’t nearly as extreme as Isobel’s. Hearing all this, Isobel flees, sobbing.
At long last, Armstrong reveals his true intentions for seducing Isobel. Armstrong’s fascination with Isobel’s back blurs the line between passion and scientific curiosity—he admits that her back excites him much in the same way that he “find[s] electricity exciting, or the isolation of oxygen, or the dissection of a human heart.” In other words, Armstrong’s erotic desires and thirst for knowledge are both driven by passion. This challenges views that Roget has previously expressed—that human curiosity can be totally neutral and exist separately of things like human morality, emotions, or passions.
Themes
Maria walks onstage and reads from her letter to Edward, sarcastically thanking him for his half-hearted apology letter. She briefly recounts her violent fight with Harriet, insisting that she’d like to do the same to him. She orders him not to write her again.
Maria puts on a show of pride in her breakup letter, but the audience has seen her earlier tears and anguish—the revelation of Edward’s infidelity was heartbreaking for her. The discrepancy between how Edward’s actions have actually affected Maria and how she claims to feel in her letter to Edward further develops the idea that it’s impossible for people to really know everything about the world, especially where other people are concerned; people frequently lie and manipulate the truth to adhere to whatever narrative makes them feel most comfortable.
Themes
