An Experiment with an Air Pump By Shelagh Stephenson - A Newsletter Guide

An Experiment with an Air Pump By Shelagh Stephenson
- A Newsletter Guide 

What is Ekphrasis? Classical and Modern Definitions

Before we can fully appreciate Stephenson’s play, we must understand its visual source and the literary tradition from which it springs. Ekphrasis – from the Greek ekphrasis, meaning “description” or “to speak out” – is the literary representation of a visual work of art. The term has its origins in ancient Greek rhetoric, where it was one of the Progymnasmata (the elementary rhetorical exercises that trained Greek and Roman students). In its classical form, ekphrasis was any vivid description that brought a scene before the listener’s eyes – not necessarily of art, but of battles, landscapes, festivals, or mythological events. The goal was to achieve enargeia (vividness, clarity) through phantasiai (mental images).

The most famous ekphrasis in Western literature is the description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad, Book XVIII – a passage that has inspired countless later writers. In that ekphrasis, the shield is forged by the god Hephaestus and depicts the cosmos, human civilisation, and the cycle of life – a microcosm of the world that Achilles will never see because his fate is to die young.

In modern literary criticism, ekphrasis has taken on additional meanings. The critic James Heffernan famously defined it as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1993). Later critics have emphasised the paragone (the competition) between word and image, the way ekphrasis attempts to make the silent painting speak, to fill in what the visual cannot show – narrative before and after the depicted moment, psychological interiority, ethical judgment, and the passage of time.

Roland Barthes (in Image, Music, Text) argued that a text describing an image “produces (invents) an entirely new signified which is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear denoted there.” In other words, the literary description does not merely report what is in the painting – it creates new meanings that then seem to have been there all along. This is exactly what Stephenson does: she looks at Wright’s painting and invents entire lives, desires, and conflicts for its figures.

Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump is an ekphrastic drama – a play that takes a painting as its inspiration and source. This is a relatively rare phenomenon (ekphrasis is more common in poetry; Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the classic English example) but it allows Stephenson to do something unique that film and television cannot easily replicate. She does not merely describe the painting; she stages it, animates it, gives voices to its silent figures, and extends its moment forward and backward in time.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797)

Joseph Wright, known as Wright of Derby, was an English painter famous for his dramatic use of light and shadow (tenebrism, derived from Caravaggio but also associated with Dutch painters such as Rembrandt) and his fascination with science and industry. Unlike his contemporaries who painted classical myths, biblical scenes, or aristocratic portraits, Wright painted the Industrial Revolution – the new machines, the scientific experiments, the factories and mines that were transforming England.

Wright belonged to the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a gathering of wealthy gentlemen intellectuals committed to the sharing and furthering of knowledge. The society’s members included:

• Matthew Boulton – industrialist and owner of the Soho Manufactory

• James Watt – inventor of the separate condenser steam engine

• Erasmus Darwin – physician, poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin

• Josiah Wedgwood – potter and industrialist who founded the Wedgwood company

• Joseph Priestley – chemist who discovered oxygen, also a radical theologian

The “Lunar” name came from their practice of meeting on the Monday nearest the full moon, to have light for their journeys home. This intellectual milieu shaped Wright’s artistic vision. He was fascinated by new breakthroughs in pneumatics, astronomy, chemistry, optics, and social theory. His paintings of scientific subjects – A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766), An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus (1771) – were unprecedented. For the first time in Western art, science occupied the central position that religion had traditionally held. The awe once reserved for the crucifixion or the resurrection is now directed at a mechanical device.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)

Wright’s painting, now in the National Gallery in London, measures 15 by 20 feet and is considered one of his most complex and vivid compositions. The painting shows a group of people gathered around a table in a candlelit room, watching an experiment. The central apparatus is an air pump (a pneumatic engine) – a device for removing air from a glass vessel. Inside the vessel is a white cockatoo.

The scene is a natural philosophy demonstration – the kind that travelling lecturers performed in town halls, assembly rooms, and the houses of wealthy patrons. The experiment was based on the work of Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the “Father of Modern Chemistry”. In his New Experiments Physico‑Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air (1660), Boyle described placing birds, mice, eels, snakes, and flies in the vacuum chamber to study their reactions when he extracted the air. “Experiment 41” – the one that demonstrated that animals cannot survive without air – became a standard feature of natural philosophy lectures.

In Wright’s painting, the scientist (often described as a “philosopher”) controls the air pump’s valve. His right hand hovers over the stopcock, and we do not know whether he is about to let air back into the chamber (saving the bird) or to remove more (killing it). The fate of the bird hangs in the balance. This uncertainty is central to the painting’s drama.

The Spectrum of Responses – The Sublime

The painting’s genius lies in its representation of the varied responses of the onlookers. Wright captures a microcosm of human reactions to the Sublime – the eighteenth‑century term (developed by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) for the awe, wonder, and fear that people experience when confronted with the power of nature or with moments of extremity.

The figures in the painting represent a spectrum from emotional involvement to detached objectivity:

• The two young girls (centre) react with visible distress. One covers her face; the other is being comforted by their father. They represent the unmediated emotional response – fear, pity, horror. In Stephenson’s play, they become Maria and Harriet.

• The scientist (centre, illuminated by the candle) looks directly at the viewer, as if inviting us to participate in the experiment. His face is impassive, focused, “scientific” – yet there is also something unsettling about his direct gaze. Is he proud? Defiant? Indifferent to the bird’s suffering? He becomes Fenwick in the play.

• The young man next to the scientist watches with intense interest, his hand on his chin, his expression thoughtful. He is the rational observer – curious, engaged, but not emotionally involved. He becomes Roget.

• The older man at the left watches a pocket watch. He is timing the experiment – reducing a living creature’s suffering to a data point. He becomes Armstrong (or a composite).

• The couple at the right are absorbed in each other, indifferent to the experiment. They represent those who are untouched by science or ethics – concerned only with their own private world.

• The maid (background) looks away, perhaps disturbed but powerless to intervene. She becomes Isobel.

• The boy pulling up the cage – his role is ambiguous. Is he saving the bird (putting the cage under it to catch it when the scientist releases it) or removing the cage (accepting that the bird will die)? This ambiguity mirrors the play’s ethical ambivalence.

The art critic Judy Egerton has noted that, in making the figures observe the physical death of the bird, Wright places them within his contemporary framework of the Sublime. The viewer is also implicated: we watch the watchers, and the scientist looks out at us, challenging us to decide whether we would save the bird or let it die.

Science in the Place of God – The Overlooked Skull

A recent interpretation by art critic William Schupbach has pointed out a detail often overlooked: the glass jar on the table contains a skull, and the philosopher’s right index finger is pointing at it in a warning about the inevitability of death despite scientific progress. This undermines and contrasts with the inner illumination, or “Enlightenment”, of the rational pneumatic demonstration. Science may give us power, but it cannot save us from mortality.

Stephenson’s Ellen, in the prologue, does not mention the skull – but her foreboding about the motives of genetic therapy echoes Wright’s warning. The Human Genome Project, she implies, is the “grail” – the ultimate response to the commandment “know thyself” – but what will we do with that knowledge?

The Air Pump as Dramatic Symbol and Sign

For Stephenson, the air pump is not merely a historical curiosity – it is a didactic symbol of the vacuum of ethics. Wright’s air pump experiment provides the characters and the central debate, but Stephenson turns it into a sign with a clear message.

In the 1799 narrative, the bird survives. The experiment is controlled; the air is let back in; the dove lives. But in the 1999 narrative, the more powerful “vacuum” is the social environment of Isobel’s existence – one in which a deformed Scottish servant girl will inevitably asphyxiate. The message seems clear: the socially vulnerable will be sacrificed as science advances.

At the end of the play, Isobel takes the place of the dove in the staged tableau. In the stage directions, Stephenson emphasises that Isobel should be positioned where the bird was in Wright’s painting. The air pump vacuum symbolises the social and ethical vacuum in which the vulnerable are left to die.

The Experience of the Sublime – Ellen’s Critique

In the prologue, Ellen deconstructs the painting in detail. She notes that the composition, placement, and character of the philosopher‑lecturer is reminiscent of the Christ figure in religious paintings. With personal insight, she realises that she has wanted to be “God the scientist”. At that moment, she sees what sociologist Dorothy Nelkin exposed in her book The DNA Mystique: the religious language with which corporate science cloaks its activities.

Stephenson clearly wants her audience to join Ellen in questioning it. On closer examination of the painting, it appears that Wright’s philosopher might also be in a divided state of mind. The painting is not a simple celebration of science – it is a meditation on its costs.