Bernard Shaw's Reconfiguration of Dramatic Genres as Force-fields in Socio-cultural and New Aesthetic Criticism

Bernard Shaw’s Reconfiguration of Dramatic Genres as Force-fields in Socio-cultural and New Aesthetic Criticism

Inaugural-Dissertation zur

Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie des Fachbereichs 05 (Sprache, Literatur, Kultur)

der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

vorgelegt von Gerald Niba Nforbin

aus Kamerun

2009

Dekan/in: 1. Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning (Gießen) 2. Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Herbert Grabes (Gießen) Tag der Disputation: 25/02/2010

A recent critic has shown that in England at least, Shaw is by far the most frequently performed dramatist after Shakespeare and yet a remarkable number of educated and literate people, even people with a remarkable interest in the drama, would receive with astonishment or dismiss with contempt the view that Shaw was Shakespeare’s nearest rival. For years it was commonplace to deny that he was a playwright at all, and still there remains a widespread feeling that his characters are little more than walking ideas manipulated by a preacher/ propagandist. His reputation in university departments of English or drama is extremely limited; his name appears very infrequently on course syllabuses and few academics would place him as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. While the standing of Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot becomes more assured with every year, Shaw continues to suffer from a disabling association with cranks and enthusiasts.

Nicolas Grene, Bernard Shaw A Critical View (1984: ix)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………........ i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT……………………………………………………........ ii

PREFACE........................................................................................................ iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………....... iv

I. INTRODUCTION: BERNARD SHAW IN BRITISH DRAMA

I.1. Shaw’s Formative Years as Artist……………………………………......... 1

I.2. Shaw: Defining Modern (20th Century) British Drama……………......... 3

I.3. The Mote in the Critics’ eye: Shaw in Mainstream Criticism………........ 7

I.4. Cultural Studies as Framework for Analyzing Shaw’s Drama……....... 18

II. APPROACHING SHAW TODAY: A NEW HISTORICIST FRAMEWORK……………………………………………………………….... 25

II.1. Setting the Scene………………………………………………………....... 25

II.2. New Historicism and the (Re)Construction of Cultural Knowledge…... 28 II.2.1. The Role of History as Cultural Knowledge in the New Historicist Framework……………………………………….. 28 II.2.2. Placing Shaw in the New Historicist Framework…………………. 31 II.2.3. The Role of Memory in New Historicism………………………… 38

II.3. An Analytical Framework: Socialist Aesthetics and Beyond…………... 40

II.3.1. Realism and Idealism in Shaw’s Socialist Aesthetics…………….. 40 II.3.2. Beyond Socialist Aesthetics: Shaw’s Creative Evolution………… 45

II.4.1. Shaw’s Historical Drama…………………………………………………. 50 II.4.2. Envisioned History: Narrative and Dramatic Modes……………... 50

II.5 Criteria for Analysing Shaw’s Drama........................................................55

II.5.1 Form and Content............................................................................. 55 II.5.2. Characterization: Shaw’s “Promethean” Heroes and Heroines....... 59 II.5.3. Figure Perspectives and Perspective structures………………… … 65

II.6. Criteria for analysing Genre Reconfiguration (concepts)………….......… 68

II.6.1. Genres, Repositories (Active Agents) of Cultural Memory……....... 69 II.6.2. Transtextuality.................................................…………………....... 70

II.7 Methods/Forms of Generic Transformation and Contamination……….. 72

II.7.1. Parodic transformation……………………………………………... 75 II.7.2. Generic Mixtures: Inclusions and Hybridity……………………….. 77

III. FABIAN CRITICAL ANTI-GENRES: WIDOWERS’ HOUSES (1885-92) & MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION (1893)…….….… 80

III.1. The Unpleasant Genre Label and the Respect for Realism…….............. 82

III.1.1. The Will, Ideals, and Social Evolution in The Unpleasant Plays….. 84

III.1.2. A Fabian Socialist interpretation of Laissez-Faire Capitalism…….. 86

III.1.3. Fabian strategies of Genre Permeation: Artistic means to ethical ends………………………………………………. 88 III.1.4. A comparative Summary of the plays............................................... 90 III.2. Widowers’ Houses: An anti-Romantic Comedy.......................................... 94

III.2.1. “Collaboration” or Co-Authorship as Intertextuality………………94 III.2.2. Plot and Counter-Plot in Widowers’ Houses…………………........ 98 III.2.3. The Counter-generic discourse: the biblical title and figure Perspectives…………………….................................................... 108 III.2.4. Widowers’ Houses as a Topical Comedy………………………... 113

III.3. Mrs Warren’s Profession: An Anti- Courtesan Melodrama................... 116

III.3.1. Victorian Reform discourses: Generic frame……........................ 117 III.3.2. Genre expectations & “the fallen Women” in Victorian Cultural memory............................................................................. 118 III.3.3. The dramatic Pretext: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray........................ 119 III.3.4. Performance as Intertextuality: Cross-Casting “the fallen

Woman” ………………………………………………………..... 121 III.3.5. Mrs Warren’s Profession and Yvette (1885)……………….......... 123 III.3.6. Plot and Counter-Plot in Mrs Warren’s Profession……………… 127

III.3.7. The Counter [Generic] discourse: “Giving the Devil his due”……133 III.3.8. Interfigural transpositions: Patterns of Analogy and Contrast........140

IV. MAN AND SUPERMAN (1901-3): AN EPIC-RELIGIOUS COMEDY......................................................................................143 IV.1. “The wicked half-century” and Shaw’s “scientific religion”………..143 IV.2. The intertextual status of Man and Superman: Bricolage...................147 IV.3. The metaphysics of sex and the ideological structure (Sources).........149 IV.4. The hybrid of Myth and comedy: the Religious proximity to Creative Evolution…………………………………………………..154

IV. 5. The Comic Plot structures: A dream framed in a classic comedy……..157

IV.5.1. An epic-dream symposium: Don leaves Hell for Heaven................ 166 IV.5.2. Self-Awakening and the Comic Resolution......................................173

IV.6. Literary traditions (Genres): Models and transformations………………..177

VI.6.1. Comic models and interfigural transformations………………….. 177 IV.6.2.The transmotivation of the archetypal hero: Shaw’s anti-Don Juan as socialist philosopher.......................................................... 178 IV.6.3. A comic rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy: The interfigural relations of Tanner/ Don Juan to Hamlet........................................ 181

IV.6.4. The cosmic morality structure: heavenly “Realists”, hellish “Idealists” and worldly “Philistines”............................................. 186 IV.6.5. Foreshadowing Science fiction: Utopian precedents to Shaw’s “Scientific Religion”…………………………………….196 IV.6.6.The dream structure(s): Man and Superman as a modern dream play…………………………………………… 199

V. “RIGHTING” HISTORY/RE-INVENTING HISTORICAL DRAMA: ST. JOAN (1923) AS A MODERN HISTORY PLAY…........................... 206

V.1. The Historical and literary contexts.....................................………….... 208

V.1.1.“The Hundred Years’ War” (1338-1453)…………………….......... 208 V.1.2. Saint Joan and the Victorian Tradition of Joan Plays...................... 208 V.1.3. The Historical perspective: Joan as World-historical-Individual or Promethean Hero......................................................................... 210

V.2. The Hybrid plot of History: Romance, Tragedy and Comedy.............. 212

V.2.1. The romance of Joan’s rise................................................………. 213 V.2.2. The tragedy of Joan’s Execution ................................................... 215 V.2.3. Beyond tragedy and verisimilitude: the comic dream Epilogue............................................................................... 221

V.3. Shaping History in Tragicomedy: Techniques of Genre Subversion and Transformation............................……………. 224 V.3.1. A Romance de-romanticized: De-mystifying the Saint.................. 225

V.3.2. High tragedy: Subverting tragedy/the tragedy of subversion…..... 229 V.3.2.1. The tragic conflict and tragic flaw.................................................. 229 V.3.2.2. Deconstructing hero/villain dichotomy...........................................236 V.3.3. Characterization in the interface of “facts” and fiction.................. 239 V.3.4. Victorian Pictorial historiography and Shaw’s Anachronism….... 242 V.3.5. Language as alienation technique................................................... 245 V.3.6. History on an open stage: text/audience relationship..................... 246 V.4. The tragicomic structure and historicist

implications of the epilogue......................................................... 249 V.5. The Poetic structure: Joan as metaphor for Imagination.............. 254

VI. FANNY’S FIRST PLAY (1910): SHAW’S SENSE OF HIS ART IN METATHEATRE......................................................................... 264

VI.1.The Theatrical and Historical Context: the Aesthetic-Ethical theme…..… 265 VI.2. A brief Summary of Fanny’s First play………………………………... 268

VI.3. Levels of Structural Dialogue................................................................ 270

VI.3.1 Language and discourse structures…………………………....... 273 VI.3.2. The dialogic genres…………………………………………….. 275

VI.3.3. The Narrative Structure (Plot): A-Play-within-a-Play…............. 277 VI.3.3.1. The Induction………………………………………... 278 VI.3.3.2. The Play Proper, the Inner play or Fanny’s Play……. 282 VI.3.3.3. The epilogue: Satire on Edwardian critics and criticism……………………………………………... 290

VI.4. Form and Dramatic Techniques........…………………………………. 293

VI.4.1. The offstage figure of Ruskin and the aesthetic-ethical dialectics……………………………………………………....... 293 VI.4.2. The author as guest: authorial identity and difference.………… 298 VI.4.3. Decontextualizing drama/Performance: Fanny’s First Play as a Pre- Barthesan critique of the “text”……………………..... 302 VI.4.4. Structure as Signification: self reflexivity...........................…..... 305 VI.4.5. Textual models/ generic traditions and self- reflexivity……....... 307

VII. CONCLUSION......................................................................................... 310

VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................... 324

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To my kids, Nforbin Clarissa and Nforbin Bill-Prince

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PREFACE

The Anglo-Irish dramatist, Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), was a devoted evolutionist who expressed his evolutionary creed in everything he wrote. He concluded the preface to one of his late plays, Back to Methuselah (1921) expressing the hope that the future of the theatre will remain modern through ceaseless change: “It is my wish that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring the curtain.” (Ixxxv). For Shaw, it is not important for writers to imitate, but to surpass their predecessors. Probably with the knowledge that he has transformed the British theatre, Shaw closed the preface to Three Plays for Puritans (1900) with a remarkable prophesy that strikes me as true. His predicted that his drama will orientate the future of the British theatre: “I shall perhaps enjoy a few years of immortality. But the whirligig of time will soon bring my audience to my own point of view; and then the next Shakespeare that comes along will turn these ‘petty tentatives’ of mine into masterpieces for his epoch”. This study contents that the “petty tentatives” that Shaw had in mind were certain innovations regarding dramatic themes, techniques and new approaches to art that he knew he has pioneered, but had not fully developed, and which were obviously to be developed by later generations of playwrights (Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett) and critics (Barthes, Derrida, Levi Strauss, White etc).

The study thus uses the issue of genres as a starting point in re-evaluating, re-reading or re-interpreting Shaw’s drama in the light of recent cultural theories. It explores the socio-cultural and aesthetic-critical functions of Shaw’s genre transformations with the aim of demonstrating that the transformatory use of genre conventions can serve strong socio-critical and revolutionary aesthetic purposes. This revolutionary impetus can be traced in the ways Shaw at times quite radically, reconfigures established genres through methods of “combination, “aggregation, inversion, change of function, `counterstatement` in order to challenge received or institutional opinions in the social, moral, religious, political and aesthetic spheres. Shaw was continually experimenting with theatrical forms throughout his career: inverting melodrama, reshaping the historical Chronicle-play, creating subliminal parallels in the outer and inner plays of Man and Superman, employing dreamlike structures in the realistic forms of historical drama, blurring the traditional dichotomy between writing, reading, fiction and criticism or, substituting lengthy “discussions” for dramatic dialogue. However, the real target of these transformations was not so much the outdated Victorian dramatic forms in themselves, which he drew on for so much of his material, but their political and socio-cultural dimensions. A devoted socialist and evolutionist, Shaw strongly held that all institutions, norms and values need to be constantly revised to keep pace with social or human development and, writing from the standpoint of a socialist and cultural critic, he not only insisted that literature must function to reinterpret society, but also that, the best means of attacking or destroying outmoded institutions and values was to attack, destroy or reshape the dramatic forms through which such cultural ideals, values and hierarchies were transmitted, affirmed or promoted. His general treatment of generic plots, situations and characters was conditioned by his attack on the fallacies of the sentimental and melodramatic Victorian imagination, which he stigmatized in the term, “Idealism”. His

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attack on the type of play that affirms conventional morality by judging outcasts from the standard social perspective, instead of underpinning clichés by presenting society from the outcast’s point of view has carried all before it. His dismissive comment that “in fact these so-called problem plays [of the 1890s GN] invariably depended for their dramatic interest on forgone conclusions of the most heart wearing conventionality concerning sexual morality” (Unpl. Pl., xxii-xxiii), not only led to their complete banishment from the English stage, but also to the implicit equation of any play that does not overtly challenge the status quo with conventional/outdated drama.

Of equal importance, then, politics is the vortex into which all issues in modern drama pull and to banish political content from the stage, as was the case in 19th century English drama was to deprive it of contemporary thought. As a Fabian socialist, Shaw not only vigorously campaigned against stage censorship in his non-dramatic writings. His “Drama of Ideas” stems from a strong political campaign against the nature and function of imaginative art on the English stage. Through his critical campaign against censorship and the political content of his own drama, Shaw gave English drama its political content and form by (re)defining realism and modernism in British drama in terms that have remained standard for mainstream British drama through out the 20th century.

The ancillary, but far more significant purpose of my study is to explore the modernist and postmodernist impulse in Shaw’s drama. In this regard, my study also contents that, while he has been treated with contempt by modern critics and relegated to the shadow of history, Shaw remains a prime textual exhibit for any demonstration of the transition from the Victorian to the modern and postmodern eras and almost all that is considered modern in British drama and cultural studies in general can be traced back to Shaw’s dramatic criticisms and plays. His works anticipated almost the entire late 20th century aesthetic thought, the French intertextualists, Deconstructionists and most especially, the New Historicists of the 1980s. In tracing the connection between his works and recent critical aesthetic thought, my study suggests depths in Shaw that might persuade modern critics to rethink Shaw’s entire dramatic corpus in modern and postmodern terms.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the course of this study, I have incurred a large number of tangible debts. I am

deeply indebted to my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning and Prof. Dr. Herbert Grabes. Their remarks and comments on my project and most of all, their meticulous emphasis on theory and methodology have greatly instilled the value of academic enterprise in me. Their encouragement and valuable proposals on my project has greatly helped me come to terms with the needs of my study. Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning not only read the work in its draft stages, but indicated areas that needed further attention as well as proposed guidelines for restructuring my topic and thesis. I would like to heartily thank him for his assistance.

My appreciations also go to the entire staff and hierarchy of the International PhD Programme (IPP), “Literary and Cultural Studies” of Justus Liebig University, Giessen, in Germany. I am thinking particularly of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet, Prof. Marion Gymnich of the University of Bonn (former Coordinator of the IPP) and Dr. Brigit Neumann of the University of Giessen. Their comments and remarks on my work within the forum of the IPP colloquium were immensely valuable in giving this study its present focus. My sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Sonja Altnöder (Coordinator of the IPP) for her administrative and editorial assistance in the final stages of this project. My sincere gratitude to Anna Rettberg and the present IPP team for their assistance in preparing this work for publication.

I had the opportunity of presenting my project to renowned visiting professors within the framework of the IPP organized Master classes where, like other participants, I was often given the opportunity to present my thesis, the structure or its chapters and listened to constructive criticisms and fruitful suggestions from IPP participants, post-doctoral candidates, Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning; Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet and Prof. Marion Gymnich who were always available as academic mentors. I greatly benefited from the constructive remarks of these learned men and women. The intellectually stimulating hours spent with classmates within IPP forums for instance, our two weekly colloquiums, IPP organized seminars in and out of Giessen, as well as coffee lounges were quite endearing and competitive. My stimulating discussions with fellow students in these forums served a valuable source of ideas as well as provided fresh orientation of an interdisciplinary potential.

I found source material and persons willing to help from the following libraries: The Departmental and Central Libraries of the University of Giessen, Bonn, Cologne and The Irish National Library in Dublin, Ireland. I am particularly grateful to Claire Waldecker and Kirsten Southworth of the English Departmental Library and Central Library of the University of Bonn respectively.

I owe many thanks to my friends who assisted me in times of need. They are: Collette Gwarmba, Jane Nangeng, Christopher Nde and most especially, Monique Achoachere. Irene Wanzie provided the motherly assistance my kids needed at the time I was away studying in Germany, and to her, I say thank you. My brothers and sister—Colonel. Nforbinson Martin Che, Nforbin Margaret Ngum, Nforbin Eric Ngwa, Nforbin Nivard

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Fuh— all encouraged me with their constant telephone calls and greetings throughout the process of writing the thesis.

I would never have completed this project without the financial and moral support of my sister, Nforbin Maureen Nehlum (Bonn), my brother, Nforbin Henry (Den Haag, Holland), my nephew, Manuel-Junior Vemba and most especially, my friend, Ulrike Schäfer. I am deeply indebted to them for their financial assistance and affection during my stay in Germany.

Special thanks to Dr. (med.) Heinrich Josef Plum for his medical assistance throughout my stay in Germany and after. I found more than a medic in him, a friend, who gave me hope and instilled courage, especially at times when my health was at its lowest ebb.

Finally, my special gratitude goes to my kids, Clarissa Bi Miyahnwi Nforbin and Bill-Prince Nforbin for their love and wonderful affection, but most of all, for their understanding and patience with my protracted stay away from them. They endured the physical, moral, and psychological challenges of living without their father.

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ABBRIVIATIONS

All citations are noted parenthetically in the main body text. In the case of Shaw’s primary texts, his name is omitted and only the volume numbers and page references are provided. Volume numbers and page references only, refer to Shaw’s seven volumes of Collected Plays with their Prefaces (1965). Citations from Shaw’s critical works, letters or from alternative editions of the plays are parenthetically cited in short forms of the titles with page references provided in the body text. The following are abbreviations for works by Shaw used in this study. Full information on these works is found in the bibliography.

Letters I Collected Letters: 1874-1897 Vol. 1 Letters II Collected Letters: 1898-1910 Vol. 2 Letters III Collected Letters: 1911-1925 Vol. 3 Letters IV Collected Letters: 1926-1950 Vol. 5 Non-Dramatic Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw (1965) Plays The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (1965) Pl. Pl. Plays Pleasant (1931) Pl. Pu. Three Plays for Puritans (1931) Pl. Unpl Plays Unpleasant (1931) Prefaces The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw (1965) Theatres Music 2 Music 3 The Quintessence Drama 2 Guide

Our Theatres in the Nineties, Vol. 1 (1932) Shaw’s Music: Complete Musical Criticism Vol.2, 1890-1893 Shaw’s Music: Complete Musical Criticism Vol.3.1893-1950 Major Critical Essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Perfect Wagnerite, The Sanity of Arts (1932) The Drama Observed vol. II 1895-1897 The intelligent woman’s Guide to socialism and Capitalism (1928)

I. INTRODUCTION: BERNARD SHAW IN BRITISH DRAMA

The Anglo-Irish dramatist, Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a devoted evolutionist and expressed his creed in everything he wrote. He concluded the preface of a late play, Back to Methuselah (1921), expressing the hope that the theatre will remain modern through ceaseless innovations: “It is my wish that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring the curtain.” (Ixxxv). For Shaw, it is important for writers to constantly surpass rather than imitate their predecessors. Perceiving himself as one such innovative writer whose works were to orientate the future of British theatre, Shaw closed an earlier preface with a remarkable prophesy that strikes me as true: “I shall perhaps enjoy a few years of immortality. But the whirligig of time will soon bring my audience to my own point of view; and then the next Shakespeare that comes along will turn these ‘petty tentatives’ of mine into masterpieces for his epoch” (II:47).

This study posits that the “petty tentatives” that Shaw had in mind were certain innovations, regarding dramatic themes, techniques and new aesthetic approaches that he knew he has pioneered and has not fully developed, but which were to be fully developed by later generations of playwrights (like Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett etc.) and critics (like Barthes, Derrida, White). These thematic and formal innovations in plays and criticial writings by which Shaw transformed English drama cannot be understood outside the socialist tradition that informed his intellectual and aesthetic perspectives.

I.1. Shaw’s Formative Years as Artist

Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland. He abandoned formal education at the age of fifteen, briefly worked as rent-collector1 and in 1876, left Ireland to pursue his artistic interest in London. His first nine years in London were difficult, but also his “formative years” as an artist (Harris, 1931:105). Though Shaw could not gain access even to the daily press, he opened up to the highly intellectual and scientific climate of London, educating himself informally through active participation in numerous London-based intellectual societies, most of which discussed the works of thinkers and writers of divergent intellectual backgrounds─ Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, John Stuarts Mills, Ibsen, Butler, Lamarck―and debated diverse subjects ranging from atheism, socialism, politics, economics, science etc. These influences are eminent in all of Shaw’s works for, his plays constitute a space in which a multiplicity of discourses intersect. Furthermore, the debating skills Shaw acquired from the above intellectual circles for instance, he formulated into the rhetorical convention of a “discussion” that pervades his drama. The discussion element of his drama “testifies”, not only to his outstanding debating skills and wide range of

1 Widowers Houses, Shaw’s first Play is a product of his experience as rent-collector.

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knowledge on a variety of subjects, but also to the overwhelming inclination to social and aesthetic criticism in his drama. Indeed, Socialism, the Fabian brand of socialism to be more precise, was most instrumental in shaping Shaw’s intellectual perspective since socialism gave his drama both a subject and form.

Of equal importance then, politics is the vortex into which all issues in modern drama pull and to banish political content from the stage, as was the case in 19th century English drama was to deprive it of contemporary thought.2 From the standpoint of a Fabian socialist, Shaw gave English drama its political content and form. He (re)defined realism and modernism in terms that became standard for mainstream British drama throughout the 20th century. His “Drama of Ideas” stems from a strong political campaign against the nature and function of art on the English stage. Shaw came to the drama from the background of a novelist and his power of expression was already sharpened in five novels― Immaturity (1879), The Irrational Knot (1880), Love Among the Artists (1881), Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882) and An Unsocial Socialist (1883)─, all of which were however, turned down for publication because of unconventionality in content and form. Even though he failed as novelist, by the time Shaw turned to the stage, he

Possessed to the highest degree inventiveness, wit, humour. He knew admirably how to animate ideas, make them live; and most of all, how to set them up one against the other, and conduit an intellectual debate. He has thus, invested the most serious thoughts with exuberant liveliness of form (Mishra, 1990:1).

Shaw’s novelistic skills are evident in the quantitative and descriptive nature of his subtexts. But his early novelistic career also foreshadowed his difficult struggle to gain public acceptance of his drama. His plays were rejected for publication and performance, censored or simply banned from the stage.

Shaw’s political campaign against the prevalent forms of English art began when he made his first breakthrough to the London press as critic of culture, serving as book reviewer, critic of the fine arts, music, pictures, paintings and drama in numerous journals from 1885 to 1898. But his most significant contribution to art is in drama. His weekly contributions to the Saturday Review from 1895-1898 are compiled in three volumes entitled, Our Theatres in the Nineties (1906). Added to these are his major critical essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), The Sanity of Art (1895) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Together with his Prefaces and letters, these critical writings constitute a new kind of dramatic criticism that redefined the nature and function of drama, repudiating the well defined rules of dramatic writing and calling for the replacement of the tightly plotted well-made play structure with a rhetorical convention for discussing intellectual and social problems on stage. Hence, there is always a shadowy relation in Shaw plays between fiction and criticism (socio-cultural and aesthetic). Shaw’s plays too, continue this criticism of the theatre in being critical

2 For a discussion of Shaw’s campaign against censorship, see, Hugo (1999: 197-230);

McDiarmid (1994: 26-44) and S. Hynes (1968: 212-53).

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or satirical responses to pretexts and prevailing forms of art. Hence, the dramatist, Shaw is a shadowy reflection of the socio-cultural and art critic or reformer, both inseparably writing together. In as much as the drama aims at assaulting prevalent cultural assumptions, beliefs, attitudes and forms of drama, Shaw remained a social critic in his fiction, and in as much as the artist, Shaw, is the critic who reads and whose writing is a critical response to his reading or, whose writing reflects both on, and of prior text (s), the dramatist, Shaw, was still always the cultural, art and social critic of the 1880s and 90s, criticizing in rewrites, the works of his predecessors as a way of challenging the dominant culture. The shadow of other writers and their works continue to loom in Shaw’s plays, as each play is inevitably a response or reaction to the cultural values affirmed in a prior text. This intense correspondence between cultural and aesthetic criticism gives the Shaw text a strangeness appropriate to the modern era and beyond the grasp of Victorian critics who often dismissed him as not being an artist. Although the ideas Shaw brought forth may now seem obscured by the shadow of history, his plays remain prime textual exhibits for any demonstration of the transition from the Victorian to the modern era. Hence, before discussing his drama, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at his theoretical writings and his attempts to (re)define modern British drama.

I.2. Shaw: Defining Modern (20th Century) British Drama

In his drama and critical writings, especially in The Quintessence, Shaw re-defined formal and thematic realism in drama in a way that remained standard for mainstream British drama. As Robbe-Grillet (1965:158) asserts, “All revolutions in literature are begun in the name of ‘realism’”:

When a form of writing has lost its initial vitality, its force, its violence, when it has become a vulgar recipe, an academic mannerism, when it followers respect only out of routine or laziness, without even questioning its necessity, then it is indeed a return to the real which constitutes the arraignment of the dead formulas and the search for new forms capable of continuing the effort. The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms.

The intellectual dynamism and artistic significance of the term Realism in 20th century drama is evident in the variety of trends by which the nature and function of theatre has been questioned, dismantled and redefined in a process of continual revolutions―in symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, “Epic theatre”, the absurd or existentialist theatres, etc. From these modernist perspectives, Britain hardly rates a mention. None of these continental trends has it roots in British theatre, and none has substantially influenced the development of British drama as a whole. Its evolution has been markedly different, the basis of which is Shaw’s dramatic criticism and plays.

In Shaw’s writings, realism generally appears as a synonym or derivative of Naturalism: a critical label describing the objective reproduction of ordinary contemporary life. The experimental forms of drama mentioned above have re-defined

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the nature and function of theatre in a series of reactions against Naturalism, rejecting logical structures and reason in matters of plot construction and form. Given the loosening and merging of stylistic divisions that characterize these experimental forms and which is one of the hallmarks of modernism, the term, realism only continuous to have relevance as a way of defining thematic focus rather than form, so that most modern works that make a claim to realism are said to be unconventional in the sense that they cut through traditional genres and their forms reflect the nature of the work

More than a stylistic term then, realism in modern British drama turns to be defined by thematic focus. The key qualities become types of subject and authorial intention, so that the term applies to all playwrights who describe their work as social/ socialist realism, even when it does not meet naturalistic criteria. They deal directly with political issues, typically addressing questions of justice or calling for revolutionary change in institutions. These forms of 20th century drama differ, but the aims of the drama and dramatists, differing only in degree, are comparable in range: from presenting ethical and cultural challenges to the dominant ideology to raising ideological consciousness or, from working to correct abuses within the system to inciting violent actions against it. The formal stance of such playwright became more extreme in the course of the century, and their approach less naturalistic. “Epic theatre” for instance, exposes stage illusion, separating actor from role; replaces cause and effect plot with montage structure and works predominantly to alienate the audience. Yet such stage forms are not opposite of “realism”, though Brecht defines his theatre by contrast to Ibsen and Stanislavski while Shaw defines his realistic “drama of ideas” by identification with Ibsen. Rather, these various approaches to themes are alternative modes of portraying society realistically in terms of politics. Episodic collage, songs and even historical subjects can all be considered in the framework of realism, as long as the social relevance is immediate and the perspective specifically political. While challenging the Aristotelian theory of plot construction, these anti-naturalistic forms engage in a search for new forms of presenting social problems and society realistically on stage. They typically subvert the old 19th century forms.

Shaw marks the beginning of the search for new 20th century forms of representing social problems on the British stage. As Innes (2002:14) asserts,

The year 1890 marks the beginning of modern drama in England, as the date of Bernard Shaw’s lecture on “The Quintessence of Ibsenism”. This can be seen as the watershed between traditionalism and modern perspectives, with its call to a revolution in the nature and function of the dramatic experience. Where the trend-setting landmarks of modernism in France were Maeterlinck’s La Princesse maligne in 1889 or Jerry’s Ubu roi in 1896, and in Germany Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening in 1892, the corresponding shift in British drama was represented by Shaw’s lecture on “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” (1890) and “Widowers’ Houses two years after”.

Picking up on Ibsen’s brand of Naturalism, and reinterpreting it to form the basis of a rational English drama dealing with socio-cultural and political issues, Shaw defined modernism for mainstream British theatre by redefining the term, “realism” in drama

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as a philosophical rather than a stylistic term ( C. f chapter, II). The artistic ethos he promoted by this definition was antithetical to the English tradition of well-made plays and gradually distinguished British drama from other European traditions.

In claiming a direct social function for theatre in the 1890s, Shaw gave British drama a strong political cast and defined the stylistic terms of realism for 20th-century British drama. Dramatists working in this line were faced with the choice of reforming society by depicting its evils in naturalistic details, or attacking its ethos through the representative nature of character. Galsworthy and Lawrence, Arnold Wesker, as well as the English followers of Brecht, John Arden and Edward Bond who came long after him, wrote with almost the same realistic and critical focus as Shaw, presenting moral or ideological analysis of society with immediacy and political aims. Undeniably, there is a tangible difference between Victorian attitudes and the modern aesthetic that defines artistic progress as a radical break with, or in opposition to the past. Shaw was already breaking the moulds of Victorian certainties with subjects like women’s rights, class justice and other major contemporary themes that have shaped the political forms of 20th century British drama. And it is a measure of the radical political implications he gave English drama that most of his plays were banished from the stage.

Although Shaw’s texts may now seem obscured in the shadow of history, the political critique he formulated for the drama represents the elements that are most quintessentially Shavian and modern in English theatre. The Quintessence was a kind of political manifesto and manual for new dramatic writing in the history of English drama. It served the same purpose for English drama of the last decade of the 19th century and the early 20th century as the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge did for English romantic poetry in the first half of the 19th century. His rational drama served as a blueprint for a line of experimental theatres from Grenville Barker and John Galsworthy in the early 20th century to Brecht and Edward Bond who, in the fifties and late 20th century respectively labelled their plays “rational drama”.

Citing Mamice Coulbourne, Mishra (1990:28) asserts, “...as a dramatist, Shaw is a law unto himself. He does not obey the rules, and can only be consigned to a class of one consisting of himself”. A fin de siècle writer, writing for change, Shaw’s works show the centennial consciousness of coming to the close of an era; of putting an end to the old and beginning the new. He opened his first dramatic criticism for the Saturday Review calling on authors, actors and directors to abandon the old Victorian forms of drama for the new forms he was advocating:

I must honestly warn the reader that what he is about to study is not a Series of judgements aiming at impartiality but a siege laid to the theatre of the XIXth century by an author who had to cut his way into it at the point of the pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat…I postulate as desirable a certain kind of play in which I was destined ten years later to make my mark as a playwright (as I very foreknew in the depth of my own unconsciousness); and I brought everybody, authors, actors, managers, to the one test: were they coming my way or staying in the old grooves? As a rule, I set up my own standard of what the drama should be and how it should be presented; and I used all my art to make every deviation in aiming at this standard, every recalcitrance in

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approaching it, every refusal to accept it seemed ridiculous and old fashion (Theatres, 5).

In 1890, even before his first play, Shaw identified what he considered the defining quality of a new, non-traditional drama. He also defined this rational “drama of ideas” in opposition to symbolic and generic representative figures and forms of drama from the past, Shakespeare, Pinero and his contemporary well-made playwrights. His dramatic theory singles out Pinero as an example of “Sardoodledom”, his term for the conventional morality embodied in the well-made play formula identified with the French playwrights, Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou. Shaw also singles out the most revered figure on the Victorian stage, Shakespeare, as an example of “Baldolatory”, a similar Shavian term for artistic beauty without substance. Not surprisingly, in his early play, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1903), Shaw uses The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Pinero’s most widely recognized social tragedy, one on which his lasting reputation as a realistic problem playwright was founded, as immediate pretext for a parodic transformation of the Courtesan play (C.f. III). His history play, St. Joan (Ch. V) is not only designed to contradict all previous representations of his heroine in dramatic and narrative history from Shakespeare to the Victorian era. Shaw’s conspicuous fictionalization of the medieval saint’s history is no doubt, a backwash against 19th and early 20th century efforts to turn historiography into an objective and predictable or even quantitative science. And so it is that each of his plays conjures up associations with moribund Victorian generic and cultural attitudes on their way out, as they hint on the modern aesthetic attitudes that would dominate the 20th century.

This study thus examines Shaw’s uses and transformations of dramatic genres with a view to exploring the functions of genres, regarding in particular his socio-cultural and aesthetic criticisms. It explores the socio-cultural and aesthetic-critical functions of genre transformations in Shaw’s drama with the aim of demonstrating that the transformatory use of genre conventions can serve strong socio-critical and revolutionary aesthetic purposes. This revolutionary impetus can be traced in the ways Shaw at times quite radically, reconfigures established genres through methods of combination, inversion, change of function, ‘counterstatement’, inclusion and hybridity in order to challenge received or institutional opinion in the social, moral, religious, political and aesthetic spheres. The study contends that Shaw was continually experimenting with theatrical forms throughout his career: inverting melodrama, reshaping the historical Chronicle-play, creating subliminal parallels in the outer and inner plays of Man and Superman, employing dreamlike structures in the realistic form of historical drama, blurring the traditional dichotomy between writing and reading, fiction and criticism or, adding lengthy “discussions” to the plays.

However, the real target of Shaw’s genre transformations was not so much the outdated dramatic forms in themselves, which he drew on for so much of his material, but their political and socio-cultural dimensions. His general treatment of plots, situations and characters was conditioned by his attack on the fallacies of sentimental and melodramatic Victorian imagination which he called, “Idealism”. Shaw wrote from the standpoint of society, insisting that literature must reform society by means of

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reinterpretation and for him; the best means of attacking outworn cultural values was to attack, destroy or reshape the dramatic forms through which they are affirmatively transmitted or promoted. His attack on the types of play that affirm conventional morality by judging outcast from the standard social perspective, instead of underpinning clichés by presenting society from the outcast’s point of view has carried all before it. His dismissive comment that “in fact these so-called problem plays [of the 1890s GN] invariably depended for their dramatic interest on foregone conclusions of the most heart wearing conventionality concerning sexual morality” (Unpl.Pl., xxii-xxiii), not only led to their complete banishment from the English stage, but also to the implicit equation of any play that does not overtly challenge the status quo with conventional/outdated drama. It also points to the inextricable relation of socio-cultural criticism to aesthetic transformation in Shaw’s drama.

As a study that combines the social critic, arts critic and dramatist in Shaw, my study uses the issue of genres as a starting point in re-evaluating, re-reading or re-interpreting Shaw’s drama in the light of recent cultural theories. To come to terms with an appropriate Cultural Studies framework for Shaw’s drama, and to further clarify the New Historicist approach to his work in this study, it is necessary to begin by scrutinizing the limitations of those mainstream approaches to his drama that have contributed to relegating his literature to the background in academic circles.

I.3. The Mote in the Critics’ Eye: Shaw in Mainstream Criticism

Although a few critics, R. A. Ohmann (1962), Jean Reynold (1999) and Peter Gahan (2004) for instance, have attempted a revival of Shaw’s work in modern critical theory, the playwright remains in the shadow. In 1995 for instance, The New York Times announced that Seamus Heaney was the “third Irish writer”, after Yeats and Beckett to win the Nobel Prize for literature, forgetting that Shaw achieved this distinction in 1925. The oversight is only a pointer to the highly unrecognized position Shaw holds in literary and cultural discourse. His plays have proved solidly durable in the theatre, as some were still being accorded major productions in the last quarter of the 20th century. But while Shaw’s wit is universally acknowledged, strong suspicions persist that his art and his understanding of it is for the most part, superficial. The theatre and general public acknowledge him as a major figure of comic wit, but there remain marked and unresolved differences of opinions about his standing as a literary figure, especially in the academic sphere where his position has remained less secure.

As the epigraph with which I opened this study shows, I am as much concerned with the critical aphasia that has blocked Shaw from the limelight as with the kind of drama he wrote. Shaw remains popular, but he is generally perceived as a propagandist, entertainer or socialist preacher and not as an artist. Shaw has suffered from a profound “neglect” in mainstream criticism. “Neglect” does not necessarily imply want of attention for Shaw has never ever suffered from want of critical attention. In Shaw’s case, the word implies the lack of proper critical evaluation and

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Grene (1984) is not the only perceptive critic to have noted the neglect of Shaw. Bentley (1947: ix) asserts that, although “infinitely more has been written about

Shaw than about James or any other modern writer, it is impossible to find a couple of dozen essays and excerpts on the level of the James and Kafka volumes” on Shaw. While critics felt obliged to render an opinion on Shaw, most of these opinions were “complacently shallow” (x). As Kronenberger (1953:236) more forcefully asserts,

What stands forth glaringly is the extent to which Shaw has not been written about-that is to say, by the most influential of our serious critics. The Riddle of Shaw is that he has scarcely been discussed by modern critics. The various essays devoted to him have been by enthusiasts of his biography and personality rather than of his work. Though often touching on Shaw, Mr. Eliot has made no attempt to traverse him; nor, so far as I know, has a Leavis, a Blackmur, a Tate, a Trilling, a Ransom, a Winters. Apart from one interesting essay by Edmund Wilson, I can think of no serious criticism of his many volumes [emphasis are mine]

Nigel (1968:8) reiterates the call for a serious re-reading of Shaw: He [Shaw] is responsible for bringing back to the stage a seriousness and sense of purpose that it had scarcely enjoyed in England since the theatres were closed in 1642 as a result of the civil war. Yet a critic who says that Bernard Shaw is a great dramatist cannot count on this statement being received with general agreement- the kind of general agreement that would be granted, for example, to the statement that Ibsen or Chekhov were great dramatists. There are still violently conflicting opinions about every aspect of Shaw, not only about the meaning and significance of his plays, but about his entire achievement as a man and a dramatist (8).

The title of the 1987 Shaw Review: the Neglected Plays clearly reiterates the gap in Shaw criticism. The result of this “neglect” as Elsie B. Adams (1991:54) puts it is that, “Bernard Shaw has sometimes been omitted from histories of the drama and more often relegated to a humble role besides Granville Barker and Arthur Pinero”.

The critical aphasia that has blocked Shaw from the limelight stems from the restrictive approaches hitherto used to value his highly sociological work. Curiously, the “neglect” of Shaw emanates from his favourable and unfavourable critics. Shaw has been either eulogized or treated with unparalleled hostility in mainstream criticism, but neither the vast favourable nor hostile writings on his works can be considered as criticism in a literary sense. Panegyrists and hostile critics of Shaw alike either value his work on extra-literary grounds; remained significantly silent on the theoretical perspectives by which they have valued his work, or simply employ narrow and restrictive approaches to his plays. At close examination, it is the object of criticism (Shaw) that mocks the critique. As Jacque Barzun writes, “there seems to be no name for his [Shaw’s] position which, nevertheless, he is not the first to occupy. Meanwhile, he eludes our grasp and measure like a man in the fog” (C.f. Kaufmann, 1965: 42).

Lacking our modern cultural theories, Victorian and mid 20th century critics whose views of art was restricted by their academic environments could not place Shaw. Such critics expressed their frustrations in hostile reviews of his works. As Weintraub (1970:350) holds, “sometimes the complaints about Shaw’s playcrafting were really

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expressions of frustrations at not finding conventional plots and predictable characters moving within them”. Yet, the narrow critical approaches applied to Shaw’s drama have had a wide impact on his artistic reputation for, they often led to misleading conclusions and assumptions about his works that have so often been repeated that they not only become stock labels for his drama, but continue to discourage modern critics from returning to his work with a free and open mind.

The mid-twentieth century was crucial for Shaw’s reputation and some of the negative criticism came from the most influential critics of the time. The criticisms of, among others, Ezra Pound, S.T. Eliot and Yeats who dominated the politics of the modern movement and the ascending cannons of aesthetic taste set the pace for the negative reception that had since defined Shaw’s drama. Pound simply dismissed Shaw with phrases like “an intellectual cheesemite”, a ninth-rate artist” (C.f. Bentley, 1947: x), but in 1924 and 1926, Eliot who was the single most important shaping influence on literary studies in the English speaking world, used his quarterly periodical, The Criterion, for two memorable attacks on Shaw’s St. Joan (1923).

Eliot (1924:4) conceded that Shaw has been “the intellectual stimulant and the dramatic delight of twenty years” in a London which had little enough of either”. But his St. Joan, Eliot judged, was the “greatest sacrilege”. Shaw had turned the newly canonized saint into “a great middle-class reformer” Eliot argued. On the publication of a critical book, Mr Shaw and the Maid by the Scottish historian and politician, J.M. Robertson, condemning the historicity of Shaw’s play, Eliot once more seized the occasion for a remarkable fierce attack on Shaw’s play. Robertson had condemned Shaw’s interpretation of the medieval saint’s history because it did not concur with the official view of the saint by the Catholic Church.3 Eliot’s emergent High Anglicanism was also clearly an influence on his criticism. Blandly endorsing Robertson’s arguments against the play, Eliot (1926:89-90) asserted the danger of Shaw

deluding the numberless crowd of sentimentally religious people who are incapable of following an argument to a conclusion. Such people will be misled until they can be made to understand that the potent ju-ju of the life force is a gross superstition and that (in particular) Mr. Shaw’s Saint Joan is one of the most superstitious of the effigies which have been erected to that remarkable woman.

Eliot’s characterization of Shaw’s ideas about religion and Creative Evolution as “the patent ju-ju of the life force”, and as “a gross superstition” are some of the most frequently quoted descriptions of Shaw’s art in mainstream criticism. Having just converted to Anglicanism, it becomes questionable as to whether it was Eliot or Shaw 3 Catholic feeling was sensitive to Shaw’s balanced portrayal of Joan’s trial and

sympathetic portrait of the church authorities who sentenced her. Robertson’s attack on the historicity of Saint Joan is only one in many. The Screen Version by the Catholic novelist Graham Greene in 1957 was altered to conform to the official church view of the trial. While Catholics and believers objected to Shaw’s demystification of the saint, atheist and materialist objected to the mystical elements in her presentation. Literary critics questioned the suitability of a saint for a tragic protagonist (C.f. Ch. V).

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who was promoting the more “Potent ju-ju” in English cultural life. But coming from a powerful authority, Eliot’s animadversions played their part in the fact that Shaw was largely locked out of the dominant critical discourse of the time.

Like Eliot, most commentators on Shaw value him on extra-literary grounds. Others employed restrictive mainstream approaches like New Criticism and psychoanalysis, with the same damaging effects on Shaw. When I first cited Kronenberger above, I emphasized his assertion that, “the various essays devoted to him [Shaw] have been by enthusiasts of his biography and personality rather than of his work”. The pre-eminently biographical and psychoanalytical approaches to Shaw are a case in sight. This brand of mainstream criticism has not helped Shaw’s artistic reputation in academic circles. Though full of praises, they greatly contributed to damaging the author’s artistic achievements by marginalizing his role as cultural critic. Volumes of biography by Archibald Henderson (1911, 1932, 1956), H. Pearson (1950), Harris (1931), St. John Ervine (1956), and Holroyd (1988-1992) have not advanced the author’s cause in academia. Their reliance on the author’s autobiographical writings as well as on narrative material (letters and words of mouth) provided by the author himself, imposed a serious limitation on the critics’ reading of the plays. The biographical works of Henderson, Pearson and Harris for instance, were carefully supervised by the author himself. Extremely careful about his biography, Shaw fed both Henderson and Pearson with vast quantities of material and even rewrote extensive portions of their works to his liking.4 It is well-known that Shaw also censored unauthorized biographies that did not march his taste (C.f. Gahan, 2004: 59-69) Those by Ervine (1956) and Holroyd escaped the ever-watchful and intrusive supervision of the author by virtue of being published after his death, but even then, they uncritically reflect the persuasive rhetoric about Shaw and his family that he created in unreliable memoirs5 and which all his biographers read and quoted.

What unites most biographical and psychoanalytical approaches to Shaw is the critics’ use of Shaw’s supposed personal history to explain his works and what is more, disapprove of them as proper approaches to his drama is the fact that their accounts of the author’s creative works, as indeed of all his achievements and interests, are strongly overshadowed by the biographers’ views of their subject as spending a life time of art making up for an emotionally depraved childhood. Not only is the evidence of Shaw’s emotional depravity in childhood purported by these biographies a slender,

4 Shaw suggested re-titling Henderson’s Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (1932) as,

“G.B.S.: Biography and Autobiography”, (C.f. Letters, 2: 480). Pearson’s biography too, contains large chunks of direct quotations from Shaw, which Pearson insists be put in quotations to make clear what his subject has written. Frank Harris’s biography can be read as an autobiography written in the third person, as to all intent and purpose. Shaw rewrote the book after Harris’s death. It is significant that it was published as “An unauthorized Biography based on Firsthand Information”. In fact it complemented Henderson’s “Official” biography published in 1932.

5 I am referring here to Shaw’s Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self-Sketches (1949).

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what knowledge the writers have of it stems directly from Shaw’s not necessarily trustworthy account. Worst of all, the interpretations of Shaw’s plays in biographies, especially with regards to such aesthetic aspects as the emotional content of his comedies, his portrayal of female characters, sexual relations and other aspects of his plays make no room for scepticism about the author’s narratives concerning his family and his supposedly depraved childhood. However accurate or otherwise these narratives upon which these interpretations are based may be, the heavily Freudian thesis on Shaw and the constant perceptions of his works as products of his psychological problems leads to reductive and oversimplified accounts of the artistic qualities of the plays. Holroyd’s biographies are a clear case in sight.

In Holroyd’s works, the playwright’s prodigious achievements as cultural critics and reformer in art, his views on moral, philosophical and religious issues, all tend to be treated as though they were symptoms of an underlying emotional problem and deprivation, rather than the product of an extraordinarily agile and fertile imagination consciously challenging established cultural institutions and values. The title of Holroyd’s first volume, Bernard Shaw: the Search for Love (1988), hits the thesis of his Freudian interpretation of the plays. His account of Shaw’s family background and childhood involves repeated manipulation and suppression of available information. Whenever information is lacking, Holroyd never sees this as problematic. Rather, he assumes the omniscient narrator in a novel. One of the childhood nicknames for Shaw was “Sonny”, and Holroyd (1988) treats “Sonny” in fictional style, as a creature of abject misery: “Sonny spent much of his solitary time in tears...” (22), “Sonny had... come to recognize that, as an unlovable boy, he could expect no help or happiness from other people” (9). Sonny’s emotions and thought on all subjects, such as childhood attendances at Theatre Royal are detailed with ludicrous authority: “He could feel his blood quickening during the performance, his mind beating, hurrying...” (57). The abject, lonely and tearful “Sonny” is eventually brought out of the cupboard to explain the artist, basically that Shaw’s “low self-esteem has led to his need of feeling useful. He saw his job as the practical one of helping audiences get value for money...” (343).

The most unfortunate view of Shaw in Holroyd’s work is his interpretation of Shaw’s conversion to socialism as a way of coming to terms with an unhappy past: “Socialism relieved his loneliness and grew into a weapon to be used against the society that had all but emasculated him” (121,128). Shaw’s entire commitment to his career as socio-cultural critic and aesthetic innovator in creative writing is reduced to emotional problems: “In his relation with women Holroyd asserts, Shaw was seeking a second childhood denied him by his mother, but since it was impossible for him to literally achieve this, he shifted his desires into literary life” (Ibid.108).

Like Holroyd’s, Arnold Silver’s biographical and psychoanalytical interpretation of Pygmalion in Bernard Shaw: The Darker side (1982) reduces the play to a personal history. In most biographies on Shaw, his supposedly numerous relations with women are interpreted as a “search for love”, while the unconventional pattern of sexual

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emotions in the comedies is reduced to his emotional deficiency in childhood. His socialist engagement and participation in the fin-de-Siècle search for “New women”; his role in redefining gender relations; his cordial dislike for love as culturally constructed in Victorian culture and fostered in 19th century comedies, and his fight against entrenched Victorian codes of conduct are purely marginalized in such interpretations. At a time when Shaw’s artistic achievement was coming under severe adverse scrutiny and attacks in the academic world, his widely read biographies could only do his reputation a disservice in the midst of writers like Eliot.

Perhaps the worst and most damaging approach to Shaw’s art is the purely formalist approach of Practical criticism, the most illustrative example being that by the founding father and much revered icon of British cultural materialism, Raymond Williams. Raymond included a chapter on Shaw in his widely read Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952), a work, which in its subsequently revised and expanded form as Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968) was still being re-issued in 1987. Both in his methodology and assumptions, William’s essay owes much to the Cambridge school of I.A Richards whose practical Criticism has just established itself as one of the most dominant forms of discursive practice about literature in England at the time when Drama from Ibsen to Eliot was being written. Raymond’s approach is the text-centred approaches to literary analysis which, as Volkmann (1996:328) holds, treats a text “as a hermetically sealed entity”. In this fashionable criticism of the day, Williams picks a highly selective way through Shaw’s works, pointing to a number of passages, which he finds “inadequate in their treatment of emotions”, a notion vaguely connected to the theoretical idea suggested by the term, “structure of feeling” in William’s introduction and which is apparently meant to draw the essays in the volume together.

Raymond chooses some Shavian plays, among them, Candida and St. Joan and extrapolating from slight and decontextualized references to such passages in Shaw’s works, concludes that “the emotional inadequacy of [Shaw’s work] is increasingly obvious” (Raymond, 1968:256). Besides the fact that he leaves out the entire body of work between these plays, he also takes Shaw out of his Victorian context and out of his role as cultural critic. His judgement of Shaw’s treatment of emotion in drama is solely in relation to the conventional pattern of emotions in comedy and, failing to consider Shaw as cultural critic, he fails to understand why Shaw inverts the pattern of emotions in comedy. Not surprisingly, Raymond (1968:256) concludes that, “Shaw’s dynamic as a dramatist has now largely weakened, and it is difficult to believe that it ought, as a major force, survive the period of which he was victim”.

In his Politics of Modernism (1989) published posthumously, Williams blandly dismisses Shaw in one chapter, “Theatre as a Political Forum”, as a playwright whose “drama of ideas lacks the leading edge of formal innovation” (91). Whatever Raymond might have meant by, “ought” and “the period of which he was a victim” is unclear. What is however clear is that, his weak analysis of the cultural dimension of Shaw’s drama enhanced the easily digested critique of Shaw as not genuinely an artist, a critique that has retained its appeal for so long.

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The loophole in Raymond’s approach, especially with regards to a writer like Shaw whose writings contain a multitude of disciplines is clear. Any discussion of aesthetic aspects like the treatment of emotions in Shaw’s comedies must take in to account his whole project of attack on Victorian value systems, hierarchies, cultural assumptions and their relation to aesthetic conventions. The generic character of comedy and the vision of women the genre projected for instance was one that Shaw was adamantly working to eliminate. Without considering the cultural facet of Shaw’s criticism, one is likely to miss the feminist implications of the inverted emotional patterns of his plays and to follow Raymond’s misleading clues on Shaw’s emotional inadequacy.

Shaw was a principal figure among those engaged in the struggle of rewriting Victorian gender relations and ideas of normality in relation to such emotionally charged subjects and institutions as marriage, the family, sexual roles, patriarchal authority, romantic love, religious conformity etc. His drama is part of a larger historical process of revision, social analysis and critique exemplified by fin de siècle figures like Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx etc. These socialists outside the theatre contributed to redefining masculinity and femininity, sexual roles and female stereotypes, subjects that were to have profound effects on the forms of 20th century literature and on feminist and psychoanalytical theories.

The subject of women, their emotional, economic and political situation was as much a central topic among socialists as they are in Shaw’s drama and these enlightened, but extra-literary socialist discourses inevitably found their way on the English stage through Shaw’s unique female/feminist characterization. Comedy and melodrama with their traditional focus on love relationship leading to marriage were for Shaw suitable vehicles for reconstructing the status of women in relation to love, marriage and sex as well as for attacking the cultural attitudes that locked up the woman in conventional discourses. In fact, it could be argued that Shaw’s choice of the comic genre as main mode of emplotment is precisely because it deals with the socio-cultural issues (Ideals) about women that he wished to redress, and comic humour was his best means of attacking such outdated values. Shaw’s socialism, and participation in women liberation movements had already fuelled his mind and he was refashioning comedy and melodrama in the light of the enlightened socialist discourses out of the theatre and using comic humour to attack outdated concepts of womanliness. Shaw’s plays cannot be effectively read out of the New Woman movement and socialist discourses on women which though were hot topics of discussion at the turn of the century, were completely kept out of the English theatre.

For Shaw then, the best way of attacking outmoded cultural thought was to attack and transform the dramatic genres through which they were transmitted or promoted. Thus, as John Gassner in Masters of the Drama (1940:595), states,

Shavian comedy, as has been proven can in many instances dispense with almost anything that has been regarded indispensable to a play-plot development, characterization and consistency. But one thing, Shavian comedy cannot dispense with-namely, the interplay of ideas. Moreover, the interplay must be delft and precise and the ideas must be abounding.

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Kronenberger (1953:ix) puts the interface of cultural ideas and creative writing in Shaw’s drama in better perspective when he insists that, “in an effort to understand what Shaw meant a whole battery of journalists, a whole army of pundits have sadly misunderstood what he was” (x). On how to approach Shaw, Kronenberger asserts,

Anyone who will write with some breath about Shaw should be a man of letters with an informed concern for ideas; should offer a literary man’s verdict of Shaw’s talent and a knowledgeable, however disputable, version of Shaw´s ‘thought’ because no one can write comprehensively of Shaw as just a literary or dramatic critic: for again and again one must stop and explain, or digress and coordinate, or go after the facts and compare (x)

Highly articulate, cerebral, and politically committed, it is always assumed that Shaw was not primarily committed to psychological and emotional subtleties in his drama. W.B. Yeats (1969:331) asserts that Shaw’s drama is not poetic: “Mr. Bernard Shaw….makes his comedies something less than life by never forgetting that he is a reformer…we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry”. An obvious corollary to this statement is that “A true poet is psychological and soulful”. Inasmuch as Yeats thought of literary writing as “warring with the trolls within” rather than as a means of social criticism, he, like many Victorian critics who held that the function of art was to entertain audience saw Shaw’s works as shallow. In short, the widespread prejudice against Shaw’s drama emanated from its highly sociological thrust and can be articulated in a syllogism: sociological writing is not art; Shaw’s art is sociological and therefore inferior.

Shaw’s plays are indeed vitally connected to his Victorian world and sometimes have topical references, but they are also highly emotional and psychological. It is thus not surprising that these misleading critical assumptions worked Shaw in to a rage:

My plays are no more economic treatise than Shakespeare’s plays are. Who on earth ever said that they were after the first moment when the critics announced that they were not plays at all, but Fabian tracts?.... would anyone but a buffle headed idiot of a University Professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers immediately shriek that all my plays were written as economic essays, and that I did not know they were plays of life, character and human destiny as much as Shakespeare’s or Euripedes’s (II: 629-30).

Nothing is more misleading than the view that Shaw’s plays as mere sociological treatise. Probably, the tag “drama of ideas” is quite misleading as a pointer to both the experimental character of the plays and their emotional content. Though deeply entrenched in sociology, Shaw’s plays are highly emotional and psychological. His anti-climaxes, especially when dealing with love are emotional in a way uncommon in the Victorians theatre. Shaw brought couples in comedy as close as possible to sex before parting them to emphasize his women’s individuality. Higgins and Eliza in Pygmalion; Lady Cicely and Captain Brassbound in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion are just two examples.

Shaw’s plays are also a good deal more psychological and emotional when examined from the perspective of his subtext, a perspective that is not commonly considered in criticism of Shaw. An examination of the subtext reveals that the

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emotional substance of the plays lies more in the subtext rather than in the surface rhetoric of Shaw’s characters. In Shaw’s dialogue, the mainstream of emotional action often runs underneath, and often contradicts the surface rhetoric of his characters. Opposed to the naturalistic convention of the “aside” that was used to enable the audience keep track of the character’s innermost thoughts and feelings, Shaw, even in his first and most sociological plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, (C.f. Ch. III.) was too good a dramatist not to be aware that the explicitly spoken dialogue in a naturalistic convention cannot convey the entirety of emotions in drama, and even openly contradicts it at times. The emotional climatic moments in his plays are often happening underneath the surface rhetoric, in the subtext and in implicit stage directions. I will thus pay as much attention to the verbal text as to the non-verbal texts of the plays in this study to show how the outwardly rhetoric of Shavian characters is undercut by deep emotions in the subtext, an emotional perspectives of Shaw’s plays that is not often examined in criticism.

From a thematic perspective, another problem that has plagued criticism of Shaw has to do with his ambivalent treatement of subject matter. This problem is closely linked to questions of style in Shaw’s drama. Shaw was most noted for his “contradictions”, one reason for which most Victorian critics dismissed him as an artist. Ivor Brown (1965) for instance, clearly perceives two trends in Shaw’s work: iconoclasm and inconsistency. Acknowledging that the dramatist is an iconoclast and “an unparalleled reformer who tore down lace curtains and exposed a new vista of social order” in Victorian England, Brown like many other critics fails to come to terms with contradiction as a characteristic, conscious and consistent technique or the source of dramatic energy in Shaw’s plays. Although he recognizes that Shaw’s work contains “multitudes”, Brown’s account of Shaw’s inconsistency falls short of justifying his contradictory attitude as one of the modernist trends he deliberately pioneered. Brown’s simplistic account of Shaw’s inconsistencies in that, “we cannot expect complete consistency in a man who lived for nearly a century with a restless, original, and unwearying mind, fluent, with his pen, voluble on the platform, and determined to teach the world how to behave itself over a wide field of morals and manners” (191). Unable contextualize contradiction in literary theory, he simply dismisses Shaw’s as a “Political Idealist”. Shaw’s contradiction as I argue in this study is not only a deliberate cultural reform strategy, but a conscious attempt towards a theory of deconstruction, one that has far reaching implications on his handling of generic themes and thus most instrumental in his genre transformations.

With the turn to linguistics however, a few literary critics regained interest in Shaw and approached his inconsistencies using modern literary theories. Richard A. Ohmann’s Shaw: the style and the Man (1962) was an early study that incorporated into its analysis of Shaw the influence of linguistic Structuralism. Analysing Shaw’s exaggeration and hyperbolic language in relation to the author’s “posture of revolt”, Ohmann argues that, in making himself “a critic of things as they are”, Shaw places himself in the position of an outsider”, especially with regards to language use (74)

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Shaw he adds, realized that “to be against the middle class is to be against everybody. Enemy of the people (for their own good) is therefore a role that merges naturally with Shaw’s ideas and language use”. (88). While Ohman’s focus is Shaw’s language in relation to his characteristic adversity to Victorian cultural thought, my focus will be on the relation of Shaw’s anti-Victorian thought to the generic forms of Victorian drama. In this regard, Richard Dietrich’s essay on Shaw will be more relevant.

In his essay, “Deconstruction as Devil’s Advocacy: A Shavain Alternative” (1986), Dietriech first noted that Shaw had an “instinctive grasp of modern linguistics” theories” and “practiced an earlier form of deconstruction”. Dietrich clearly links Shaw’s characteristic paradoxes and linguistic inversions with deconstruction. Although his focus is the language of Shaw’s critical writings, his essay provides valuable perspectives for re-reading the generic forms of Shaw’s drama in relation to his role as a cultural critic. His key statement that Shaw “dismantled the familiar linguistic structures people profess as creeds, revealing the contradiction within, and between creeds and actual human behaviour” (434) explains the cultural and aesthetic values of formal inversions and paradoxes in Shaw’s style.

Like Derrida, Shaw realized that thinking is inseparably bound to the rhetorical devices that support it and that Victorian cultural attitudes were inseparable from the generic structures that promoted them. Hence, he was more interested in the relation of formal devices (in his pretexts) to conventionally sanctioned meaning. His inversion of generic plot structures, characters, sexual roles and his perspective structures of pretexts and forms of drama were aimed at deconstructing the cultural significance of prior texts and their generic ideologies. Shaw plays were clearly written to confront singleness of thought in Victorian culture, especially as promoted in prior pretexts. As he asserts of his drama, “I…deal in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination” (III: 16). His typically paradoxical or ambivalent treatment of generic subjects, characters, plots etc. renders slippery the object-subject relation in his drama. Truth in his drama is difficult to locate, because it is embedded in a competing and opposing play of ideologies, values and hierarchies.

The play on meaning suggests that Shaw understood the way language uses people even more than people use it, forming their belief systems and world view. His drama sought to deconstruct such language use, especially as manifest in the formulaic structures of Victorian dramatic genres. He called his drama a “drama of unsettled Ideals” or “discussion drama” and, through these discussions, Shaw impartially handles generic themes as well as rejects the notion of heroes and villains in drama. Together with his use of open perspective structures, Shaw made deconstruction prevalent in his drama. His drama is characterized by a refusal to present any one cultural ideal, attitude or belief as the unquestionable truth or standard of life. A skilled debater, Shaw sought to restore balances in value hierarchies, sometimes by simply attacking established hierarchies, sometimes by providing a rival hierarchy that inverts the established one, and sometimes by simply maintaining opposing hierarchies in a dialectical tension; the objective was to create a cultural atmosphere in which no one

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would think of asserting the absolute truth of any single hierarchy of meaning. His inversions, paradoxes and rhetorical strategies are sanctioned as modern by, among others, Jonathan Culler who, commenting on Derrida’s deconstruction asserts,

Codes of meaning are of interest to deconstructionists as they form into, ´value-laden hierarchies´, in which one term is promoted at the expense of the other...on the assumption that all hierarchies are linguistic cover-ups of ideological power struggle, deconstruction, systematically demonstrates that all hierarchies can be inverted and should be, not for the sake of establishing new hierarchies but to contribute to the understanding that all hierarchies are arbitrary and relative (Culler, 1982:213).

No wonder then that Shaw’s plays came as a shock to Victorian audience and critics of the nineties, for the plays attacked conventional notions of reality and dismantled familiar structures that enabled Victorians to profess certain cultural creeds.

All in all, the “neglect” of Shaw can be accounted for by the absence of our more advanced cultural theories, but also by Shaw’s use of language. His typically strategic, polemical, overstated lingo, aimed at Victorian-Edwardian audience accustomed to logocentric writing gave no clue to poststructuralist intimations and sometimes even suggested the opposite. Shaw’s language misled many of his critics and drew the kind of criticism of his work that we have seen. Shaw often talked of his plays as though they were merely dramatized essays on social, political, religious or philosophical subjects; he referred to his theatre as “a factory of thought”, insisting that it “would be a very good thing if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an amory against despair and dullness, and a temple for the Ascent of Man” (Prefaces, 779); he labelled his first collection of plays as, Unpleasant Plays, referred to his art as “journalistic”, and overtly described Widowers Houses as “a propagandistic play…a play with a purpose… deliberately intended to induce people to vote on the progressive side in the next County election in London” (I: 669,670-71). In Fabian Tract No. 233 he declared, “Mr. Bernard Shaw ...substituted the theatre for the platform...as his chief means of propaganda”. Many of the “subjects” that Shaw treats in his early plays are listed in the preface to Back to Methuselah in seemingly unguarded statements―“slumlandordism, doctrinaire free love...Prostitution, militarism”… (IV: 337). These subjects, which he rattles off, are made the prime target of R. William’s criticism of the plays as purely sociological. “Shaw” he declares, “is able to tell us by naming a problem what each play is about; and the phrase is always an adequate explanation” (R. Williams, 1989:91).

As usual, Shaw’s remarks were exaggeratedly aimed at shocking audience and inviting critical attention to his work, but in their “Arts for art sake” context, Victorian critics misunderstood him. They took his assertions at face value and used them to argue that Shaw has condemned his art by his own words. Critics overlooked the careful artistry that goes into the plays and branded them as propaganda. While anti-Shavains quickly pounced on such overstatements, their contexts yield unexpectedly modern aesthetic implications. Shaw was separating trivial or frivolous art from the serious and culturally critical when he called his works, propaganda or history. And

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none of his critics remembered his well-stated principle of criticism, which implies that his assertions were aimed at attracting critical attention: “It is always necessary to overstate a case startlingly to make people sit up and react to it, and to frighten them into acting on it. I myself do this habitually and deliberately” (C.f. Bentley, 1947:49). Only the more semantically attuned reader realized that Shaw used words in ways that his critics did not understand. Especially valuable for a retrospective reading of Shaw then, is his language, which can yield nuggets of useful information in the most unlikely ways. Words and concepts must be tested for their Shavian gold, and care must be taken to avoid confusion by taking these statements out of context or by reading too much into isolated statements. Puzzling as this may seem, most of Shaw’s critics have proven themselves resistant in reading his play-text, a failure that, as we will see in chapter VI, Shaw himself dramatizes in Fanny’s First play (1910), which is indeed a satire on Victorian critics and criticism.

A few landmarks of high level salutations of Shaw’s artistic achievement stand out in a broad picture of neglect. Edmund Wilson (1938:265) penetrating commentary on Shaw’s art hints on my theoretical approach:

It is interesting to note―and it confirms my theory that it is the artist in Shaw that is the most authentic―that apparently, the last thing he is to lose is his gift of pure comic invention...and the integrity of the artist as a recorder of the process in which he finds himself involved has also survived in Shaw....his plays down to the very end have been a truthful and continually developing chronicle of a soul in relation to society....

“Recorder”or “interpreter” of the historical process is an appropriate description of Shaw. Shaw himself, who theorized the sociological thrust of his art in his theory of Creative evolution, and in his key aesthetic terms, “idealism” and “Realism”, perceived the artist as a recorder of the historical process. But like with many other Shavian concepts, his critics have expressed difficulties in grasping the respective meanings of these terms within Shaw’s philosophical framework. A re-reading of Shaw in modern theory will have to begin by contextualizing his terms, “Idealism” and “Realism” in cultural studies approaches.

I.4. Cultural Studies as Framework for Analyzing Shaw’s Drama

Shaw predicted his critics’ difficulty in understanding his philosophical terms, Idealism and realism when, formulating these terms in The Quintessence, he states that, “If the term realist is objected to on account of some of its modern associations, I can only recommend you, if you must associate it with something else than my own description of its meaning…to associate it, not with Zola and Maupassant, but with Plato (30).To understand how Shaw’s terms relate to modern cultural theories, one needs to remember that myth of illusions in Plato’s metaphor of the cave in The Republic, (Book vii), which has influence various attitudes to meaning in literature .

Men in Plato’s cave are trapped as if in a cinema, watching shadows of manipulated puppets and models of animals thrown on the cave wall by a fire from

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behind them. These illusions or shadows of simulacra are the source of all their knowledge and thus constitutes their reality. Even if they could turn their heads round to try and understand the mechanics of the show, they would not come to knowledge of reality, since the world of real things lies visibly outside the cave, where the source of light is not the fire, but the sun itself. Occasionally, someone―Plato’s philosopher― escapes to the outside world and then returns to the cave of illusions to tell of his knowledge of the real world outside, but he has great difficulty trying to explain this new reality to those who have never experienced it. This majority remain locked in their illusions and cannot understand Plato’s philosopher. This theory of acquiring knowledge governs Shaw’s Creative Evolution. He called the philosophical characters of his drama, Realists and the illusionists, Idealist. He also had a similar metaphor for Idealism and realism:

Nothing is more significant than the statement that ‘all the world’s a stage’. The whole world is ruled by theatrical illusion....The great critics are those who penetrate, and understand the illusion: the great men are those who, as dramatists planning the development of nations, or as actors carrying out the drama are behind the scenes of the world....Even the great metaphor is inaccurately expressed; for the world is a playhouse, not merely a stage (Drama 2, 714)

Plato’s metaphor has variously been used to (re) define realism in representational art. Conventionalised forms of visual, fictional and narrative representations have been mistaken for reality over the ages. A film projecting a series of coloured shadows on a theatre wall-screen is commonly taken to be real or realistic, as are conventionalised forms of fictional narratives with all their narrative strategies, especially when such conventional forms of representation mimic the already conventionalised forms of our knowledge of reality outside the theatre as was the case with 19th century forms of drama. The structuralist Marxist, Louis Althuser ascribes such visual or fictional representations or illusions of reality to an ideology of realism particularly, as manifest in rigidly codified forms of literature. The postructuralist psychoanalyst, Jacque Lacan suggests that the relation between reality and representation is problematic, rather than a simple visual correspondence. He refers to reality as usually understood, as the Imaginary and suggests that real knowledge can be derived only by exploring the by-ways of the Unconscious, or the Symbolic, which he insists, is structured like language. Jacque Derrida refers to all uncritical concept of reality as logocentric and insists that any concept of reality is derived from representations, particularly from writing rather than representations as derived from such putative reality. He also calls for all such representations to be deconstructed. The ontological, epistemological, and grammatological systems deriving from Plato’s metaphor of illusion and realism is not homogenous. Thus arises the troublesome relation between different systems of knowing and representing the world: for Plato, between appearance and reality, for Lacan, between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (language); for Althuser, between Ideology and science (historical materialism); for Roland Barthes, between the Image Repertoire and reading; for Derrida, between logocentricism and grammatology, for

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Shaw, between Idealism and realism. Shaw’s metaphor suggests that his approach to textuality and particularly, to the

problem of subjectivity and meaning as fractured and non-unitary is compatible with the postructuralist understanding of subjectivity. Metaphors of illusions, shadows, mask etc, litter his definition of idealism and his criticism of Victorian drama as Idealistic. Dramatist and critics figure among his idealist characters while his Idealist characters are mainly used as audience-surrogates of the ideals that the plays attack.

Seeking to encourage in the reader/critic an active engagement with the “text” instead of a passive consumption of the “work”, Shaw adopts Shakespeare’s metaphor of the world as stage to describe the relation of the writer and reader to the text as literally theatrical. His metaphor implies that the reader has to go behind the scenes of the text to engage it, to inspect the playhouse, to see what is there and what is not, or what is happening in the rest of the playhouse, rather than simply focus on the subjective illusion of the stage. Althuser’s ideology, Lacan’s Imaginary, Derrida, logocentricism, Barthes Image Repertoire and Plato’s shadows/appearances are synonyms for Shaw’s “Idealism”, whether in writing (authors) or reading (critics/ spectators). Like these writers, the problematic addressed in Shaw’s metaphor is one of legibility of the (Shaw) text, of how to read, not just meaning, but also the various textual strands and discourses in it. Different strands of writing and meanings can be traced in a Shaw text other than those immediately visible or present. A play by Shaw comprises different writings for different addressees: writers, critics and audience, so that what Shaw calls “a factory of thought” can also be “translated” as a factory of textuality. His metaphor thus implies that the reader reads his plays in an ensemble of other cultural and literary discourses. Shaw’s metaphor of the stage points to the act of reading, not just the various literary texts that are rewritten in his plays, but also the “cultural text” of the drama. It criticizes the spectators’ uncritical acceptance of any form of representation as true to experience and ridicules the illusionist representation of Victorian cultural life on the English stage as a major facet of Idealism.

Significantly, his metaphor relates to the subject-object relation in a text (meaning) in quite a modern way. Elaborating on Shakespeare’s metaphor of “all the world’s a stage”, Shaw uses the theatre itself to illustrate the subject-object relation. “Even the great metaphor itself is inaccurately expressed; for the world is a playhouse, not simply the stage”. The suggestion is that Shaw understands the way the subject relates to the world, not in a single relation of one to one correspondence or subject to object. The subject-spectator can chose either to be locked in the theatrical illusion (the conventional view of life on stage; a form of reading that Shaw like Barthes and Derrida, strongly discouraged). In the case where the reader/critic/audience uncritically accepts the theatrical illusion as a reality, he attends to the text (stage illusion) by way of Shaw’s “Idealism” or Barthes’s “readerly” text.

The readerly text leads the reader towards a meaning; it creates the illusion that it is produced by a singular voice and underplays the forces of the intertextual (Barthes, 1974:41). To call such a text “readerly”is to foreground the manner in which its reader

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is positioned as a relatively passive receiver; the reader’s task is to follow the linear development of the story until the truth, presumed to lie behind the narrated or represented events is finally unfolded before him/her. “Readerly” texts thus reinforce cultural myths and ideologies, which Barthes further symbolize as the doxa. Such are the notions that Shaw struggles to wrench out of his Victorian audience, especially in his criticism of the well-made play, which he constantly referred to as idealistic literature and as a bolster to Victorian cultural myths. Shaw emphasizes that the subject-object relation is not stable and that the subject-spectator should attend to the text or theatrical illusion by way of Realism, that is, relate it to experience, relate himself to the theatrical experience by reading it as a “text”, interpret it critically, go behind the scenes to write the “text” of the drama (like Shaw’s “Realist characters) rather than passively “consume” the “work” (like his Idealist characters). The subject can thus come to comprehend where and how it is positioned socially and culturally.

The metaphor relates to writing as well. The complexity of the Shaw text derives from its explication, analysis and from its author’s understanding of the flexibility of the subject-object relations within language, writing and reading, and even within the sentence where, neither subject nor object is abstract. Decades before Derrida and the deconstruction theory were dreamt of, Eric Bentley (1947:29) formulated what he called a “Both/And Approach” to the thematic of Shaw’s writings, asserting that, “Everything in Shaw leads to everything else: we have had many vaster and many more scientific thinkers but few whose thinking was at the same time so many-sided and so much of a piece”. This was followed by J.L. Wisenthal (1979: 46) who writes:

Shaw’s attitude towards art (like his attitude to most things) is a complicated subject because of his varying and apparently contradictory utterances on it. That is why it is important not to take any one statement as Shaw’s whole view on this or any other subject.

Significant pieces of deconstruction in Shaw’s prose writings show how the postructuralist argument against binary thinking manifests itself in his drama. In The Quintessence, Shaw sets out to discover the quintessence of Ibsen’s drama and, after demonstrating the dialectical basis of the drama, concludes that, “the quintessence is that there is no quintessence” (157). This statement, the basis of Shaw’s approach to generic subjects, plots characterization and perspective structure was later formulated in a fine aphorism in his Man and Superman: “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule” (VI: 781). Any of these two statements can be taken for Shaw’s stance on the subject-object relation in his plays and any of the two can serve as motto for Postructuralist relativity. As Shaw asserts in his Pen Portraits and Reviews:

Like all men, I play many parts; and none of them is more or less real than the another....I am, in short, not only what I can make of myself and, which varies greatly from hour to hour and emergency to non-emergency, but what you can see in me (82)

He strikes a decidedly Derridean note in relation to the possibility of truth, I learnt long ago that though there are several places from which the tourist may enjoy a

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view of the Primerose Hill, none of these can be called the view of the Primerose. Where ever I have been I have found and fervently uttered a true view of it, but as to the true view, believe me there is no such thing (Music 2, 664).

Elsewhere he declares, “a logical theory, with its assumption of cause and effect, time and space, and so on, is ...a mental handle and nothing else” (Non-Dramatic, 411).

For most critics, Shaw’s well-advertised didacticism, his emphasis on his teleological philosophy of “creative Evolution seem to imply a primary reading, one designed to lead the bourgeois audience towards a special Shavian political and religious doctrine of socialism, a reading that, by demanding precedence over any other, would be symptomatic of locentricism or the metaphysics of meaning. But the dialectical conflict between Shaw’s characters and the author’s fair-minded handling of protagonists and antagonist clearly shows that his theory of creative evolution is far from logocentric. Rather, it is clearly deconstructive for Shaw refuses to hierarchize any single point of view in his conflict. Shaw’s “Epistle Dedicatory” appended to Man and Superman contains his most famous postulation on this rhetorical strategy:

not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinion and those of all my characters, pleasant or unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle people who belief that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist or indeed anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind (II:177).

Shaw adds that, without such contradictory viewpoints, “Neither history no drama can go in my hands”. His ability to defend his villains as much as he does his heroes is what Dietrich calls “Devil Advocacy” and Grene (1984:84) refers to as “Giving the Devil more that his due”. The effect of this impartiality is most often the deconstruction of the generic subject/discourse. Refusing to hierachize any single point of view or value system, Shaw, in The Quintessence declares that his drama has “no heroes and villains” and its conflict is “not a conflict between clear right and wrong”. Rather, it is “a conflict of unsettled ideals” (139). It is this interplay of ideals or competing ideologies that Shaw symbolizes in the appellation, “drama of ideas”.

Even if one were to consider Shaw’s emphasis on creative evolution as a call to readers to read his plays in line with his philosophy/religion of creative evolution, he constantly reminded his readers that his text were not confined to a single reading. Notice how he encouraged a dexterity of interpretation irrespective of the author’s intention in his conclusion to the preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932): “And now, the story being written, I proceed to speculate on what it means, though I cannot too often repeat that I am as liable as anyone else to err in my interpretation” (Prefaces, 645). Repeatedly plagued with questions about the meaning of some of his plays, Shaw’s stock reply was, ‘How should I know? I am only the author’” (Weintraub, 1982:176). In such postulations, he anticipates Barthes elimination of the authorial context.

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Barthes (1977:148) dismissed the “godlike author” from the text. But Shaw was more radical in this direction when he declared that, “All autobiographies are lies”. And in case his readers did not understand him he added, “I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies. I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his life time, involving, as it must, the truth about his family”, (Non-Dramatic, 433). Shaw encouraged the kind of reader that Barthes calls for, even at the expense or demise of his own author-ity or reputation: “we must get rid of reputations: they are weeds in the soil of ignorance. If this preface will at all help to get rid of mine, the writing of it will have been well worth the pains” (IV: 753). In Fanny’s First play, he takes on textuality, authorship, language and meaning in creative writing.

Both Shaw and the later Postructuralist critics are unanimous in saying that the position of the subject is variable within a single text or discourse, as it is within a multiplicity of texts or discourses, or within a single dialogue between two subjects. A single unified subject can only be a metaphysical abstraction, an abstraction or singleness of viewpoint that Shaw stigmatizes as “Idealism”. But the most significant area of agreement between Shaw and our modern critics, and what is more, one that defines the Cultural studies orientation of this study is their emphasizes on Culture and history as text and of literature as a cultural text.

Postructuralism places the literary text in culture and society. Drawing on Bakhtin’s categories of dialogism and polyphony as characteristic of literary texts, Kristeva who predominantly shaped the postructuralist approach to literature, not only holds that “every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text, the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva, 1984:37), but goes on to “situate the texts within history and society, which are then seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts himself by rewriting them” “Diachrony is [thus] transformed into synchrony” (ibid.:36). The idea of the (Inter) textuality of history⎯ to modify the New historicist dictum, “the textuality of history and the historicity of text” (Ibid. :23) allows us to synchronically and diachronically correlate Shaw’s drama to the literary and non-literary discourse that appear in it and to the norms and values of his Victorian context. Due to its strong focus on the mutual correspondence between text and context (s), New Historicism is an adequate approach to Shaw’s drama.

New Historicism, which draws from postructuralist critics of history and literature, incorporates cultural memory, intertextuality, and most significantly, redefines the text-context relation, situating the literary text in culture, history and in society. Shaw hits this polysemous approach to literature in his emphasis that, “No frontier can be marked between drama, history, religion, or between acting and conduct....” (Pl. Pl.: xvi). His constant correlation of his drama to history, his description of his theatre as “a factory of thought” or his plays as “a genuine scientific natural History”, imply the New historicist interpretation of literature in an assemble of culture, history and society. In obliterating the traditional boundary between drama, history and culture in his “art for Art’s sake” Victorian context, Shaw preceded Montrose (1989:23) in postulating “the textuality of history and the historicity of text” or the view that

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literature is culturally produced and culturally productive, a view that has become a central dictum in New historicist thinking. The notion of the social productivity of literature as Gallagher & Greenblatt (2000: 15) assert, “unsettle [s] [...] the relation between [literary] background and foreground ...[and]...gives rise to a sense of archival and interpretive inexhaustibility” in the Shaw text.

Throughout his career, both as critic and dramatist, Shaw made no distinction between history and drama, just as he made no distinction between reading, writing and criticism. His understanding of history⎯ discussed in detail in chapter II⎯ was compatible with the New Historicist understanding of the genre as a fictional reconstruction in narrative and a re-interpretation relevant to the immediate cultural context. The New historicist notion that literature is culturally produced and productive of culture is inherent in the distinction Shaw makes between “realistic” and “idealistic” literatures. By idealistic literature or author, Shaw meant literature that was culturally produced, but which was not culturally productive, one that merely reflects, affirms, illustrates or promotes the dominant cultural ideology and the audience’s knowledge of social reality outside the theatre. Opposed to this is realistic literature, one that undertakes a reinterpretation of the norms and values of its socio-cultural context. Shaw was like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1989:217) postulating that literary texts are no longer, mere “function[s] or articulation[s] of [their] context”, but carry potential and are thus accorded real power, as agents in constructing a culture’s sense of reality rather than passively reflecting it. To Shaw as to Fox-Genovese (1989:222), literary texts contribute to cultural discourses and may enhance or subvert ideological stances. They are accorded “a privileged position in the continuing process of fashioning and refashioning consciousness, of defining possibilities of action, of shaping identities, and shaping visions of justice and order”. This view overwhelmingly governs Shaw’s transformations of pretexts and genres. The notion of culture as text or the idea of a mutual correspondence between various discourses and literary texts expands the range of objects available to be read and interpreted in Shaw’s plays.

Applying these criteria, which might provide at least a heuristic frame for an investigation into the drama’s negotiations with its contexts, the various contextualizing analyses of the plays are supposed to reveal the different strategies and (possible) functions of rewriting or refashioning which are employed in Shaw’s drama, and by which the drama distinctly takes controversial stance on contemporary cultural and aesthetic discourses thereby actively participating in, and contributing to them in ways that only in the late 20th century would become customary. From Shaw’s foreknowledge of culturally theory, it becomes clear that, while New Historicism will serve as my main theoretical framework, it will not be shown as imposed from above, but generated from within the corpus of Shaw’s own criticism of history and literature.

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II. APPROACHING SHAW TODAY: A NEW HISTORICIST FRAMEWORK

II.1. Setting the Scene

The nineteenth century is known as a period remarkable for the richness of its poetry and prose; while – at least until the end of the century – drama was not accepted as medium for treating significant moral and political issues. Hudson (1947:9) holds,

Between Pinero whose first play was produced in 1879 and Sheridan whose last important play appeared in 1779, stretches a long gap, dramatically barren. Hardly a single play of this infertile interim has survived except as a literary curiosity. Playwrighting has never been at a lower ebb; never has the profession of playwrighting been so unrewarded or held in such contempt.

The absence of the great men of letters of the 19th century on the English stage marked the ailing state of its drama. In spite of the great strides being made in poetry and prose fiction, the conspicuous absence on stage of great novelist and poets signalled the isolation of this medium by the talents of the age. As Booth (1965:47) affirms, “in no other age of English literature are the main figures so remote from the stage”. After all, Addison, Steele, Gay, Fielding and Goldsmith were dramatists of stature in the 18th century in spite of their novelistic and poetic backgrounds, whereas not even one great novelist or poet of the 19th century gained a reputation in drama.

The decline in English drama in the 19th century was triggered by theatrical and legal factors. A legally sanctioned monopoly was enforced, which allowed only a few theatres to produce serious drama: the law divided theatres into “major” and “minor” theatres. The Royal patent (by the Licensing act of 1737) granted only a few theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Theatre Royal, the right to perform “legitimate drama” (comedies and tragedies). Minor theatres were restricted to mere spectacle and musical pieces. This had far-reaching influences on the dramatic landscape.

However, the minor theatres soon learned to evade this law by including music in all performances so that tragedies and comedies of previous periods were turned into melodramas by the addition of a few songs. Conscious that musical accompaniment and a certain number of songs in a piece satisfied the demands of the authorities, music was integrated in every play in the minor theatres. As J K. Jerome (1885:39) asserts,

Nearly all the performers had a bar to bring them on each time, and another to take them off; a bar when they sat down, and a bar when they got up again; while it took a small overture to get them across the stage. As for the leading lady, every mortal thing she did or said, from remarking that the snow was cold in the first act, to fancying she saw her mother and then dying in the last, was preceded by a regular concert.

On the other hand, these melodramatized performances in the minor theatres provided the thrills as well as escapist or unrealistic entertainment required by its audience, which usually consisted of underpaid and overworked urban proletariat who could not

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pay the fees in the major theatres. Here, Hirst (1984:69), quoting Dickens elaborates, Besides prowlers and idlers, we were mechanics, clock labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, staymakers, shoe-binders, slop workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byeways. Many of us- on the whole the majority-were not at all clean, and not at all choice in our lives or conversation.

It seems logical that the drama performed in these theatres had to be adapted to the literacy standards of its audience. The plays were simple in their approach to psychology and morality. Fertility of ideas, distinction of style and originality in technique were wanting. Far removed from the social and economic conditions of the society that watched it, they bore no relation to real life. Truth of characterization, probability of incidents and social relevance were sacrificed to entertainment. To Colborne (1949:39), Eugene Scribe, father of the well-made play in vogue, stressed the essentially entertainment functions of drama:

You go to the theatre, not for instruction or correction but for relaxation and amusement. Now, what amuses you most is not truth, but fiction. To represent what is before your eyes everyday is not the way to please you; but what does not come to you in your usual life, the extraordinary, the romantic, that is what charms you that is what one is eager to offer.

In both major and minor theatres, the Lord Chamberlain held the power to license all new drama prior to performance. This censorship operated as a restraint on the evolution of drama, denying writers the opportunity to honestly interpret the intellectual milieu or contemporary life. In this desolate situation, dramatists stuck to the tried formula of the well-made play to avoid censorship. In consequence, there was virtually no time for experimentation or inventiveness. Thousands of melodramas were ground out to satisfy public demand for escapism and entertainment and it was common for a dramatist to claim authorship of well over a hundred plays.6

This overall need for productivity was further met by translations of French plays into English. Many dramatists turned out quick translations, particularly from the French theatre where Eugene Scribe was the leading figure of the stage. Emphasizing that these French translations only increased public disdain of English drama as literature and made translators rather than dramatists popular on the English stage, Ganzel (1961:395) cites Jerrold Gouglas’s “Report to the parliamentary committee on dramatic Literature” in which he asserts that, “since translations…the public has ceased to look upon plays as part of the literature of the country. Many men have written plays, who if there were no translations, would never have been heard of at all…there is no premium held out for originality.” It is not surprising that many of the best English melodramas were originally French and all through the century, French fiction and drama provided sources of ideas, plots and characters for the English stage.

6 In 1833, William Moncrief at the age of thirty-six boasted of having written 200 plays,

many while under a yearly contract for Drury Lane to furnish pieces at short notice, sometimes within twenty-four hours. (C.f. Ganzel,1961:395) In France, Scribe manufactured 374 well-made plays (C.f. Pharand. 2000:57).

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Finally, the lack of copyright protection did not encourage the playwrights to strive for originality or excellence. Once performed, a published play could be reproduced without any compensation to the author7 and indeed, playwrights plundered each other’s work with impunity. Adaptations and straightforward theft generally passed unpunished. Besides, regardless of the number of successful performances and how much profit a play brought to the theatre manager, the playwright received a fixed and rather meagre payment.8 Considering the financial and artistic situation of drama, it is not surprising that many great writers of the century preferred to make a living from the far more lucrative fields of fiction, poetry and journalism. The result was a long divorce between theatre and serious literature. This separation was a major drawback to the evolution of British drama and dramatists remained unsuccessful in their literary endeavours. The situation contributed to what Watson (1926:147; 152) describes as the “undramatic character of the age” and the “third rate” talents of its writers.

Shaw transformed this scene dramatically and his political ambition made him a forerunner, laying the foundation for the political forms of British drama in the late 19th century and their development throughout the 20th century. The thrust of his transformation of English drama was thematic and stylistic and his influence on British modernism is evident in his (re)definition of ‘Realism’. In stark opposition to the prevalent forms of drama that were influenced by the French l’art pour l’art movement, he insists that “for Art’s sake alone [he, GN] would not face the toil of writing a single sentence” (Prefaces, 165). His poetics emphasized the need for realism, relying on his theory of Creative Evolution, which draws from various European discourses and traditions, socialist, romantic, philosophical and scientific.

Hence, a fundamental dialectics of literature and culture informs Shaw’s oeuvre. His work is deeply embedded in the socio-cultural and political circumstances of its making. It is striking to note how these contexts not only generated Shaw’s text, but were in turn animated, challenged or transformed by them. This study aims at reviving the socio-cultural and political dimensions of the plays by re-historicizing them in their Victorian cultural contexts. Shaw claimed to see no dividing line between the work of the literary artist and historian, insisting “No frontier can be marked between drama and history or religion or between acting and conduct....” (Pl. Pl., xvi) and that his dramas were “a genuine natural human history” (Pl. Pl.: vi). Along these veins, he obliterated the boundaries between history-writing and literature by reworking extra-literary discourses into the dramatic genres. It is significant to note that although he wrote both comedies and conventional history plays, he considered all his dramas as historical writing in as much as they deal with socio-cultural and moral transvaluation.

Comprising plays and theoretical essays, Shaw’s work transgresses the boundary

7 The general practice was for the playwright to sell his play outright at a cheap cost. Once

the transaction was over, the author had no further dividend from the management. 8 It was only around the 1860s that dramatists, led by Dion Boucicault, began asking for a

percentage of the earning from each performance (C. f. Booth, 1965: 48).

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lines of writing genres. As discussed in the last chapter and as would be substantiated here, an analysis of Shaw’s ensuing genre transformations requires an interdisciplinary approach which exceeds close reading and embeds the plays in a network of other discourses. Against this backdrop, this study takes a cultural studies approach shaped by New Historicism and memory culture. The following chapters will outline the new historicist framework within which the role of memory will be outlined before proceeding to a discussion of Shaw’s socialist aesthetics. These aspects will jointly provide a background of the categories for subsequent readings of Shaw’s plays.

II.2.New Historicism and the (Re) Construction of Cultural Knowledge

II. 2.1. The Role of History as Cultural Knowledge in the New Historicist Framework

New Historicism emerged in a cultural context much similar to Shaw’s historical situation in the late 19th century, as a challenge to the New Criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1960s, historiography, or rather, critics of history writing have focussed on the linguistic nature of historical discourse. Debunking the supposedly “factual” source material, Hayden White, clarifies history’s proximity to literature by showing the imagination intervening in history writing, if not in actually creating or reinventing it. White provides an exposition of the inconsistencies in the historian’s mode of emplotment and the dialectical tension between “historical facts” and “fiction”. His “explanation of emplotment” by which historical events or facts are selected, combined and structured to generate meaning shows that historical narratives are verbal artefacts relying as much as literature on the same narrative strategies. For White (1978:42), history is “verbal fiction, the content of which is as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those of the sciences. Genres function as meaning-making processes in history writing, since structure is not imminent in past events, but imposed by means of narrative devices or constructed from the demands of genre. History cannot faithfully represent an ordered reality outside the text:

Novelists might be dealing with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of representation, is a poetic process... in the unprocessed historical record the facts only exist as congeries of contiguously related fragments. These fragments have to be put together in the same way that novelists...put together figments of their imagination to display an ordered world, a cosmos, where only disorder or chaos might appear (White, 1976:28).

The New Critics regarded literary texts as artefacts to be interpreted without consideration of the social, historical and cultural context. The aim of New Historicism was to introduce the historicity of texts, reactivate their political potential and revive the social energy they possessed in a particular context. Its exponents insist that, only

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when literary scholars relocate the text within the complex cultural surrounding in which it was written and performed and in which it unfolded its political potential can they gain insight into the complexity of the culture reflected and (re)constructed in the text. This reorientation towards the extra-literary contexts was an affront, both to ‘Old Historicist/m’9 and the text-centred tradition of the New Critics, who often referred to the historical background as an interpretative crutch that would, whenever necessary, provide information for the hermeneutic deciphering of texts. The formulation by Montrose (1989:20) of the ‘historicity of texts’ and the ‘textuality of history’ becomes the most essential dictum in New Historicism and not only epitomizes a shift of attention, but a redefinition of the relation of literature to history or; text to context, which New Historicism adopts for literary studies from modern historiography.

History, to the New Historicist, is not a universally valid course of events which can be objectively analysed and reconstructed, but an intellectual construction rendered in narrative. It is not, as Jean E. Howard (1987:13-14) points out, “a realm of retrievable facts”, but, as he continues, “a construct made up of textualized traces assembled in various configurations by the historian/interpreter”. Thus, history is produced, not discovered, and its production, in any case, depends on the epistemological premises of the historian/interpreter, the theories and models he/she develops to analyse the historical data. Indeed, historical facts or, to speak in more general terms, historical reality, is something neither the historian nor literary scholar may have access to directly, as it is something that happened in the past and thus irretrievably lost. It is through texts then, that history becomes accessible. To ignore the ‘textuality of history is to reduce the text to a mimetic object and to deprive it of its signifying potential. As Greenblatt (1980:4) puts it,

if literature is seen only as a detached reflection upon the prevailing behavioral codes… we drastically diminish our grasp of art’s concrete functions in relation to individuals and to institutions, both of which shrink into an obligatory ‘historical background’ that adds little to our understanding. We drift back toward a conception of art as addressed to a

9 The term ‘Old Historicist/m’ is not an official denominator for a theoretical school, but a

label that the New Historicists used to distinguish themselves from more traditional literary scholarship. The attribute ‘Old’ was used by the New Historicists, accusing their opponents not only of pretending to write ‘objective’ history, which is impossible according to New Historicist, but also of serving the bourgeois society by exclusively dealing with canonical texts, thus leaving out any rejected texts. Yet, Volkmann (1996:329) critically points out that “in an effort to gain attention, New Historicists oversimplified preceding voices of literary criticism” for, there never really was such a notion of history as a background to literature, or of literature as a “mirror of its context” only. New Historicism developed, but did not ‘invent’ the incorporation of context into the analysis and interpretation of texts. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a number of approaches from the field of literary sociology considered extra-literary contexts important for the analysis of texts. Thus, its general criticism of ‘Old Historicism’ is an oversimplification, a mere “effort to gain attention” (Volkmann,1996: 330)

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timeless, cultureless, universal human essence or, alternatively, as a self-regarding, autonomous, closed system – in either case, art as opposed to social life.

New historicism thus re-defines the relationship between ‘art’and ‘social life’, or text and context as the binary distinction of a literary foreground and a historical metanarrative background loses its validity. From a New Historicist’s perspective, “the relative positions of text and context often shift, so that what has been the mere background makes a claim for the attention that has hitherto been given only to the foreground and privileged work of art (Gallagher & Greenblatt 2000:16). The “mere background” of a text is made up of another set of interrelated texts and thus is the object of interpretation as well; the boundary between text and context is blurred, as “literature is part of history, the literary text as much a context for other aspects of cultural and material life as they are for it” (Howard 1987: 15). Following from this, the concept of textuality in New Historicism is enlarged in that “both social and literary texts are opaque, self-divided, and porous, that is, open to the mutual intertextual influences of one another” (Ibid.15). No theoretical framework other than the New historicist re-definition of the text-context relation better explains Shaw’s postulation cited at the beginning of this chapter that “No frontier can be marked between drama and history or religion, or between acting and conduct...”

The notion of culture as text and the idea of a mutual correspondence between various discourses implies that (literary) texts are no longer, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1989:217) has it, mere “function[s] or articulation[s] of [their] context”, but carry potential and are thus accorded real power, as agents in constructing a culture’s sense of reality rather than passively reflecting it. To Montrose (1989:23), literary texts are not only a products of their socio-cultural circumstances, but at the same time createurs of the discourses through which they have been shaped: “Thus, to speak [...] of the social production of ‘literature’ or of any particular text is to signify that it is socially produced but also that it is socially productive – that it is the product of work and that it performs work in the process of being written, enacted, or read”. As evident in the concept of genres as the memory of culture, literary texts contribute to cultural discourses and may enhance or subvert ideological stances. They are accorded “a privileged position in the continuing process of fashioning and refashioning consciousness, of defining possibilities of action, of shaping identities, and of shaping visions of justice and order” (Fox-Genovese, 1989:222). Thus, Greenblatt (1988:5) insists we investigate “both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text”. Here, the relation to genres as cultural memory― to be discussed in more detail in II.6.1 ― becomes obvious.

Literary texts like historical texts employ certain established cultural patterns of discourse (genres) in order to construct their models of reality. In doing so, they neither merely reflect the socio-cultural milieu nor communicate the existing discourse structures (genres). As active agents in the process of socio-cultural change and transformations, in employing established discourse structures to construct their models of reality, texts also transform these discourse structures as well, exerting a

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certain power on the established patterns of discourse structures as on the extra-literary structures or culture. New Historicists demand that the social and institutional in all their forms be absorbed into the category of textuality and appear as “social texts” or “cultural scripts”; they insist that literature is the product of specific socio-cultural, and economic conditions and participates in reconstructing its context and culture. Commenting on this overall “reciprocal concern with the historicity of text and the textuality of history” Montrose (1989: 20) calls the New Historicist outlook “The Postructuralist orientation to history ... in literary studies”.

However, similar approaches can be found much earlier in Shaw’s work. Shaw’s career dates back to the last decades of 19th century, but like the postructuralist critics of history; he developed his historiography in competition with narrative historians and historical dramatists alike. It thus becomes necessary to trace the like-mindedness between Shaw and these critics, both, as a way of showing him as a forerunner of Postructuralist criticism, and as a way of highlighting his methods of transformation especially, of the 19th century history play. Neither the evolution of historiography nor Shaw’s contribution to it can be understood without a discussion of the 19th century historiography that he preceded the late critics of history in writing against.

II. 2.2. Placing Shaw in the New Historicist Framework

Until the end of the 18th century, history writing was conceived in terms of literary finesse, rhetoric and elegance of expression and even as a form of moral instruction, not factual accounting. It was not defined in opposition to literary writing.10 Ancient historians appreciated creativity and the fictive or narrative elements in history writing until romanticism emerged to upset the association of history and literature. Romantics glorified the imagination in literature, claiming poetry to be a domain reserved for the divine poet as agent of inspiration and separate from the empirical world of science.

Historians responded by dissociating history from literature and in reaction, to emphasize its closeness to science. They then claimed the superiority of history to imaginative writing on the basis of its supposed impersonality, neutrality and objectivity. Nineteenth-century historians began the claim that history was discovered, as the historian supposedly found his records in the historical “facts”. The obsession with empiricism, factuality and objectivity in representing history became a norm in history writing. As White (1976:25) puts it, as it became standard “in the early nineteenth century ... to identify truth with facts and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth, a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it”, historians set history over and against fiction (especially the novel), as factual,

10 Philosophers and rhetoricians in classical antiquity, as Gossman (1978: 4) asserts, never

had the “conception of the historian as an impersonal mirror of reality.” Rather, historiography was perceived as an art of presentation rather than empirical inquiry into the past or an accurate representation of the past. Also see, Southgate (1996: 12-13).

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accurate and thus a higher thing than fiction. In this field, Shaw’s stance on history may appear contradictory and ambiguous

because, as usual, he occupied both sides of the field. His early “paradoxical” postulations that history is “factual” and “fictional” may appear muddled and confused, but they reveal an intelligible argument in historiography consistent with the arguments of White. White explains that by insisting that its methods are those of the sciences, history “lost sight of its origin in the literary imagination” for, like imaginative writers, historians transform the unprocessed data of historical records by choosing and transforming events into narrative, and the operation requires the historian to fills in gaps, connects fragments and imposes explanatory narrative pattern on opaque past events. Historians have to ‘interpret’ a contingent set of historical material “by filling in the gaps in his information on inferential or speculative grounds”. Hence, “a historical narrative is … necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative (White, 1987:51; 81).

This, too, was the basis of Shaw’s dismissal of 19th century realistic historicism. He never denied that “facts” were important in historical writing, but maintained that “historical truth” was more important and historical “facts” must be subordinated to narrative structures and to the wider concern for “historical truth” or truth of interpretation, and by “historical truth”, he meant a convincing and relevant interpretation rather than factual accounting. “History” he asserts in his critical piece, Everybody’s political What’s What?, “is adulterated with lies and wishful guesses, yet it shifts and sheds them, leaving finally great blocks of facts” (366). Furthermore, Shaw allows his dramatic characters to voice this opinion: “History, sir will tell lies, as usual” says General Burgyne, in The Devil’s Disciple (act III), while the Judge in Geneva refers to “the falsehoods called History” (act III). While these statements asserting the fictiveness of history are widely interspersed in his criticism of realistic historiography, Shaw simultaneously claimed accuracy of historical facts and closeness to records, yet asserting at the same time in the prefaces of his history plays that existing historical works, usually comprising narrative records and Victorian dramas, were inadequate and that his aim as a dramatic historian was to “correct” the records.11

Shaw quickly evoked documentary records whenever the authenticity of his history was challenged. Caesar and Cleopatra, he claims, is a transcript of The History of Rome by the German historian, Theodor Mommsen. The Programme note to its first 11 One of Shaw’s aims as a historical dramatist was to set the records straight by (re)

interpreting rather than reflecting them. In the preface to Saint Joan for instance, he begins by demonstrating the errors and misconceptions of all previous literary treatments of Joan’s history and the play itself is offered as corrective to previous representations of Joan on stage: J` ai écrit cette piece comme un acte de justice et de piété envers Jeanne outrageusement traitée par Shakespeare, S[c]hiller, Voltaire, Anatole France, de même que Barbier et autres dramaturges de seconde zone” (Letters, III: 870).

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performance paraded consulted historical sources in ways that would impress Ranke: the play follows history as closely as stage exigencies permit. Critics should consult Manetho and the Egyptian Monuments, Herodorus, Diodorus, Strabo (Book 17), Plutarch, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, Tacitus, Appian of Alexandria, and, Perhaps, Ammianus Marcellinus. Ordinary spectators, if unfamiliar with the ancient tongues, may refer to Mommsen, Warde-Fowler, Mr. St. Geroge Stocks Introduction to the 1898 Clarendon Press edition of Caesar’s Gallic, and Murray’s Handbook for Egypt ( II:306).12

He goes on to add, “What they [the critics, G.N] were looking at is a chapter of Mommsen and a page of Plutarch furnished with scenery and dialogue and that a boy brought to see the play could pass an examination next day on the Alexandria expedition without losing a mark” (II:312). Of Saint Joan, he states, “My account is essentially correct and historical: “I have merely written a play based upon the facts as they exist” (Weintraub, 1973:14). Adrocles and the Lion, is an “authentic history”, “probably as true to history as is the nature of a good play to be” (IV: 650).Yet the underlying affirmation of the role of narrative structures and genre conventions in all these statements, implicitly reject the position of realistic historians: the plays “follow history [only, GN] as closely as stage exigencies permit”; they are “probably as true to history [only, GN] as is the nature of a good play to be”; “a chapter of Mommsen and a page of Plutarch [but, GN] furnished with scenery and dialogue” .

History for Shaw as for White means more than factual accounting. It is the “interpretative aspect of historiography” that leads both critics to doubt the objectivity of history writing. White’s term, “emplotment” implies the explanatory, interpretative, manipulating and structuring impact of narrative structures on “facts”. It denotes the configuration of events into certain types of [hi] story. To White (1976:62),

No given set of causally recorded events in themselves constitute a story; the most that they offer to the historian are story elements. The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motif repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like-in short, all the techniques that they would usually expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play.

White postulates that history is not “a realm of retrievable facts”, but “a construct made up of textualized traces assembled in various configurations by the historian. An earlier, but more radical version of the statement is in Shaw’s Everybody’s Political What’s What?, where he also maintains against Ranke’s notion of “the innocent eye” that historical reality is something the historian cannot have direct access to:

When the German so called Historical school in the nineteenth century repudiated classical, dramatized, apriori history, and called for masses of recorded facts and years of drydust searches through libraries for documents, they were overlooking the cardinal fact that their method is physically impossible, because such facts are hidden or out of reach,

12 Shaw’s autograph revision of this note for the 1906 Forbes-Robertson Production in New

York reads: “The Play follows history so closely that critics are respectfully recommended not to reject any incident as fictitious before consulting Manetho” etc.

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and such records as exists are mostly lies, or at best wishful guesses (365).

In fact, Shaw’s 1899 programme note for Caesar and Cleopatra parades an impressive list of source material, recommending critics and audience to consult them; yet, after references to Mommson, Fowler, St George Stocks, etc., Shaw adds: “Many of these authorities have consulted their imaginations, more or less. The author has done the same” (C.f. Wisenthal, 1988: 42). On the one hand he gives an impressive and imposing list of authorities to claim accuracy of facts and on the other, he parodies academic history by undercutting the list and revealing the whole concept of facts in historical writing as a spoof, yet still leaving the impression that he is aware of all respectable authorities in the field, but being an artist in history, he is equally as authentic (i.e., by virtue of dealing with interpretation rather than factual history) as realistic historians. Moreover, to suggest in the 19th century that authorities in history rely on their imagination as much as writers of fiction is to radically dissociate oneself from the prevailing trends of English academic history and historical drama.

Shaw’s indictment of Victorian historiography was like White’s based on the view that history is a matter of convincing interpretation, not factual accounting. For White (1978:47-8; 55), historical events can be structured in different stories:

Considered as potential elements of story, historical events are value neutral. Whether they find their place in a story that is tragic, comic or ironic― to use Frye’s categories―depend upon the historian’s decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot-structure rather than another.

Historians are not compelled by the records to “emplot” their stories in any particular way. Applying the terminology of Northrop Frye’s theory of the myths to history, White explains the dominant modes of emplotment used to generate meaning in history: “Tragedy and Satire are modes of emplotment consonant with the interest of those historians who perceive behind or within the welter of events contained in the chronicle, an ongoing structure of relationships or an internal return of the Same in Different (recurrence)”. Conversely, “Romance and comedy stress the emergence of new forces or conditions out of processes that appear at first glance either to be changeless in their essence or to be changing only in their phenomenal forms” (White, 1973:25-29). White explains his theory of history in a later document as follows:

no historical event is intrinsically tragic; it can only be conceived as such from a particular point of view or from within the context of a structured set of events of which it is an element enjoying a privileged place. For in history, what is tragic from one perspective is comic from another, just as in society, what appears to be “tragic” from the standpoint of one class may be, as Marx purported to show in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, only a “farce” from that of another class. Consider as potential elements of a story, historical events are value-neutral. Whether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic or ironic...depends on the historian´s decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot-structure or mythos rather than another (White, 1976: 47-8, 55).

When the above is compared to Shaw’s response to whether a historical play is

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bound to be substantially accurate to the facts, one realizes that Shaw had provided a version of White’s critique eighty years earlier, hitting his thesis that no given set of recorded event constitutes a story on its own and none is intrinsically tragic or comic in itself”, but only represented as such by the historian/interpreter:

Not more so than any other sort of play. Historical facts are not a bit more sacred than any other class of facts. In making a play out of them you must adapt them to the stage, and that alters them at once, more or less [Insisting that historical narratives necessarily follow the rules of narrative composition, Shaw continues] Why, you cannot even write history without adopting the facts to the conditions of literary narrative, which are in some respects much more distorting than the dramatic conditions of representation on the stage. Things do not happen in the form of stories or dramas; and since they must be told in some such form,[like White, he finds that all source material is already contaminated by the interests of the creators of original documentations themselves] all reports, even by eyewitnesses, all histories, all stories, all dramatic representations, are only attempts to arrange the facts in a thinkable, intelligible, interesting form- that is, when they are not more or less intentional efforts to hide the truth, as they often are.13

Here, Shaw gives voice to ideas that are currently associated with White. Tellingly, he recasts Ranke’s famous dictum that history reports the past ―as it really happened― with the suggestion that historical narratives themselves may not be trustworthy. Between what really happened and what “is said to have happened” opens up the gulf of historical narrative. White’s critique of history, like Shaw’s earlier, consists of an extensive study of nineteenth-century historians from which he argues that historical narratives follow the rules of literary genres even as they claim a higher responsibility to scienfitific facts than literature. Shaw precedes White in postulating that the category of historical “facts” itself is suspect and dependent upon narrative for intelligibility; that like literature, history never represents “what really happened”. Its meaning, like that of comedy, farce or tragedy is subject to the constraints of its narrative medium. This is what Shaw implies when in The Quintessence he asserts that, “a difference of opinion between husband and wife as to living in town or country might be the beginning of an appalling tragedy or a capital comedy” (47).

For both Shaw and White, meaning in history is determined by “pre-generic plot structures” or archetypal story forms. The historian’s interpretation is also shaped by his generic choice or mode. It is thus the pre-generic structures of literature that have been perpetuated by cultural heritage that endow unfamiliar historical events with meaning. These plots or generic structures predetermine the historian’s interpretation of the historical events, even before he/she considers what “facts” to select and connect; the selection and connections themselves, imaginative processes that only add to historical meaning or interpretation. Rather than the results of his selection of what to put in his story, the selection, interpretation and arrangement of story elements is governed by the choice of the specific pattern(s) or genre(s). In fact, both Shaw and White fall back to the ancient dialectics of history and literature where language and

13 Shaw’s 1894 interview (C.f. Wisenthal, 1988:49). Sentences in Italics are mine.

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structure are the creative forces behind history. But Shaw goes even further to stress the primacy of the imagination or the fictive in history writing and to grant greater authenticity to the artist over the professional historian in matters of history.

Accepting that history like literature is the product of imaginative interpretation, and given the emphatic role of the imagination in Shaw’s theory of Creative Evolution, the playwright insists that, in the imaginative reconstruction of history, the artist becomes a creator of that history and while such an imaginative history might not contain a trace of “fact”, it may be even more authentic as an interpretation than what is called “factual history”. In Everybody´s Political What’s What? he asserts,

At last I became a historian myself. I wrote a play entitled ‘In Good King Charles´s Golden Days’: For the actual occurrence of the incidents in it I cannot produce a scrap of evidence, being quite convinced that they never occurred: Yet one reading it will not only be pleasantly amused, but will come out with a knowledge of the dynamics of Charles´s reign: that is, of the political and personal forces at work in it, that ten years of digging up mere facts in the British Meseum or the Record office could not give (181).

To New historicists as to Shaw, a historical text is both an interpretation of events and an event of interpretation in itself. As Shaw makes clear, since history is creativity, the artist in history is even more of an authentic authority than the professional (factual) historian. Granting greater authority and authenticity to himself, Shaw declares,

In short, if you demand my authorities for this or that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority. Marshal Junot, reproached for having no respect for ancestry, said he was an ancestor himself. In the same spirit I point out that the authorities on the story of Adrocles and on the history of the early Christian martyrs are the people who have written about them: and now that I too, have written about them, I take my place as the latest authority on the subject and ask you to respect me accordingly (IV: 583-4).

While White focused on the narrativity of history, Shaw goes further in his oeuvre to anticipate and use dialogism in history. Shaw’s dialogism in St. Joan takes the form of relating three historical periods (medieval, renaissance, contemporary) to each other. His twofold aims are, to alienate his Victorian audience by debunking their notion of progress and to subvert the pictorial convention in Victorian history plays.

One of the commonest forms of inauthenticity in Victorian historical drama, Shaw held, was the superficial concern with accurate recreation of historical periods on stage through realistic stage designs, scrupulously faithful costumes, scenery and décor, carefully researched historical background and dogmatic adherence to historical “facts”. Shaw insisted that, such a sterile concern with the past for its own sake could do no more than make the audience aware that what it is watching is a shell of past action conspicuously empty of present reality. For Shaw, to be truly intelligible and relevant, historical drama must convey the essential forces of an age, the current of powerful ideas, the dynamics of an epoch by relating that period (or context) to others (past, present, future). History must open up dialogue between epochs by relating the

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past to contemporary political and socio-cultural issues relevant to the audience’s society. Hence, Shaw substitutes Victorian pictorial representation of the past in historical drama with language, employing anachronism of speech, style, characters and situations as his principal devices for dialogising history. In St. Joan Shaw conducts a dialogue between the medieval, renaissance and contemporary periods with quite mortifying effects on the audience who share the popular belief in the progress of civilization. Uniquely, he creates the reality of his history by relating periods in ways that deconstruct the notion of progress. Through anachronism, Shaw’s audience are forced to move forward and backward in search of what has changed over the years.

Shaw’s anachronistic parallels Dominick LaCapra’s critique of history. Drawing from Bakhtin, Capra applied the concept of dialogism to history. For him, historical narratives and the object of their investigation express internal tensions that challenge the search for coherence in history. Historical texts must show conflicting tendencies between texts and context that defy attempts to device a coherent, monological meaning (C.f.Kramer, 1989:102). LaCapra (1985:64) argues that, like artists, historians deal with texts and social realities of past societies that have evolved through constant dialogue: “The past has its own “voices” that must be respected, especially when they resist or qualify the interpretations we would like to place on them”. Historians must not reduce the “voices” of the text or narrow the plurality of meaning by privileging a single viewpoint: “A text is a network of resistances...” and must be dialogised:

In internal dialogization, there is a tense investment of a given utterance or text with different and even divergent perspectives (or voices) that suggest alternative possibilities in formulation and evaluation. Through the interaction of perspectives within the same utterance or text, language becomes a site on which contesting and contested discourses of different periods, groups or classes engage one another as sociolinguistic forces. Dialogized heteroglossia creates the space for critical and self-critical distance in language use, for it disrupts myth in the sense of an absolute fusion or bonding of a use of words to a concrete ideological meaning (LaCapra 1989: 312).

Dialogism in history opposes Victorian linear historiography. Perhaps Karl Popper (1964:3) better describes dialogism as manifest in Shaw’s history plays:

the fallacious claim of objectivity in history erroneously avoids the logical entanglements of “historicism- the assumption that historical prediction is attainable by “discovering the ‘rhythms’, the ‘patterns’ or ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history.

To discover the rhythms and trends underlying the evolution of history require the historian to relate that historical period to many others. The thorough encounter between historical periods as well as between genres (romance, tragedy and comedy) that we find in St. Joan exemplifies the tension in historical evolution as Shaw sees it. The dialogism of past, present and future forces his audience to participate critically in the history they are watching. The thought of what has changed and what has remained the same over time constantly goes on in the audience’s mind as they shuttle between periods. If “historical drama must create its own reality, which lives with us in the here and now, if it must enact the tension between literature and reality, present and past,

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theatrical immediacy and historical distance” as Lindenburger (1975:5) demands, then Shaw creates the reality of his history by making his audience think historically and he does so by emphasizing the artificiality and arbitrariness of the kind of historical narratives that creates their uncritical notion of progress. Like the extra-theatrical “discussions”, that accompanies the plays, Shaw’s anachronism forces audience into a debate and demands active thought about the historical vision expressed.

II.2.3. The Role of Memory in New Historicism

The idea in modern historiography that history is a fictional memory based on fragments of an obscure past that is remembered in genres has clearly influenced the concept of cultural and individual memory in literature, various facets of which expose the relation of literature and history to memory as well as of literature to other disciplines. The exposure of inner or individual acts of memory in history has also highly contributed to the concept of literature as a medium of cultural memory and to the view in cultural studies of genre conventions as a shaping force behind cultural memory. Historiography has illustrated functions, processes and problems of memory in the medium of fiction through aesthetic forms. While it still needs to be proven that Shaw was among the pioneers of the new theories of cultural memory, his critical exploration of the role of the imagination in history writing and his own dramatic histories have greatly contributed to redefining the relation of history to literature in Cultural studies, as well as help define modern historical drama as a “memory genre”. In line with modern historiographic findings, we can begin defining modern historical drama from a cultural memory perspective by agreeing with Schwartz (1982:374) that the [re] collection of the past is an active constructive process” and “not a simple matter of retrieving information”, and that, “to remember is to place a part of the past in the service of conceptions and needs of the present”.

Modern historical drama is an imaginative (re)construction resulting from a subtle interplay of past and present and between literature and memory. Memory in literature and in modern historical drama in particular, is necessarily a construct, something that, as Radstone (2000:7) put it, is “actively [and consciously] produced”. In the process of remembering the past, historical facts are altered and new ones are added to serve the author’s literary, but more significantly, political purposes. As Nora (1989:8-9) holds,

Memory is life [...] it remains in permanent evolution [...] History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually active phenomenon [...] history is a representation of the past [...] Memory insofar as it is effective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it[...] History [...] calls for analysis and criticism [...] memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual.

In line with modern historiographic findings that history is constructed from memory and in part no doubt, as a backwash against 19th and early 20th century attempts to turn historiography into an objective and predictive science, the most influential modern

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history plays of the last half of the 20th century conspicuously fictionalize history. It takes different sets of verbal strategies for the modern historian to fictionalize history and overtly show his readers his own imagination intervening or mediating the history. Whatever set of strategies modern dramatic historians choose to use, their goal is to expose to their readers their interpretative role in that history. History as historiography has thought them, show us far less How It Really happened than How It Shall Be Remembered. In the New historicist framework, all history, without pejorative connotations is subjective in being a product of the individual memory of its author. For Goethe’s Faust, history is the past that is constantly put in revised critical context:, “To us my friend, the ages of the past/Are like a book with seven seals protected/what you the spirit of the age call/Is but the scholar’s spirit after all/ In which the age is reflected”.14 The teachings of historiography that history is basically “translations” of past irretrievable events or the “sealed” book of How It Really happened or How it really Was, into the anthology―still incomplete, always to be revised ― of How It Shall be Remembered, have greatly influence the way modern historical dramatists perceive and re-present history. Shaw titles a section of the preface to St Joan as “History, always out of date”. And the play puts Joan’s history in a revised context.

As historiography has made modern historians aware, so long as it involves sequential orientation, choice of genre, systematic overview, interpretation, criticism and thematic additions, a historical text is both an interpretation of events and an event of interpretation in itself. It is generally by adding lyric, narrative, and/or thematic components to their primarily dramatic orientation that playwright’s moderate the demand of “strict” drama for unmediated interaction among characters with the retrospective compensatory demands of “subjective”, objective” historiography, and “pure” philosophy”. To the modern historical dramatist, since history is fiction, the author needs not conceal its fictiveness or his imaginative role in the history he writes.

The modern dramatist’s conscious exposure of the fictiveness of his history is perhaps the most defining aspect of modern historical drama. A striking aspect of this conscious fictiveness in modern historical drama has to do with the dramatist’s deliberate exposure of his use of memory to construct past-present-future bound visions of history. These past-present-future bound visions of history clearly distinguish the realism of modern historical drama from 19th and early 20th century history plays which simply delighted in the sterile representation of the past through realistic historicism (pictorial realism, elaborate stage designs and costumes etc).

Following from the lessons learned from modern historiography, dramatic historians of the later half of the 20th century refuse to conceal the editorial, retrospective aspect of the production and transmission of their histories. Rather than attempt and fail to conceal, they flaunt the parallels between storytelling and “historytelling”, stress the role of the “teller” and “listener” in the “tale” to deliberately 14 “Mein Freud, die Zieten der Vergangenheit/ Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Sieggeln,/ Was

ihr den Geist der Zieten hisst,/ Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,/ In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln“ Quoted and translated by Hernadi (1985:32).

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suggest to their readers that the events in their histories are not being represented, but re-presented as remembered re-constructions. Precisely because history as we can ever hope to know it is “reflected” in human minds, modern historical dramatists typically struggle to turn the untold events of history into intelligible tales by rechanneling them through the unifying consciousness of the narrator/interpreter and through the use of narrative structures. Rechanneled through a narrator’s unifying and more modern consciousness, past history tends to be reflected upon from many perspectives (past, present and sometimes, future). By enacting past-present-future bound visions of history, dramatists like historians tend to place received history in a new critical context of authorial hindsight concerning the present and future significance as they see it, of past words and deeds. Precisely because history can teach us important lessons about the mind’s method of critically translating the “sealed books” of How it Really was into How it Shall be remembered, modern historical playwrights tend to concentrate, not on representing past action on stage, but on enacting its presents and future significance for present and future audience. Such histories, which combine a retrospective vision with a prospective orientation of the represented characters, also explore new techniques of re-presentations on stage. Their reconstructions might necessitate that the dramatist transcends the realistic form of historical drama and obliterate our ordinary framework of time and space in modern expressionistic forms. Such psychological forms are for most modern dramatists a proper way of reflecting the process of memory in drama. It is by a complex mode of becoming by dint of being imaginatively re-called in a retrospective memory that Shaw in St. Joan transcends all verisimilitude in the dreamlike experimental mode of his epilogue.

For lack of a better phrase to describe the past-present-future vision of history hinted above, and discussed in detail below as a distinctive mark of the function of memory in modern historical drama, I will call such visions, “composite visions” or “envisioned history” (C.f. II.4.2). But it would be important to first examine the significant role Shaw gives the imagination in arts in his poetics, since envision history stems from the view that history writing is also an imaginative activity.

II.3. An Analytical Framework: Socialist Aesthetics and Beyond

II.3.1 Realism and Idealism in Shaw’s Socialist Aesthetics

Shaw’s aesthetics are intricately placed within the New Historicist framework outlined above and deeply influenced by socialist theory. Converted to socialism in 1882 after reading Marx´s Das Kapital, Shaw became a firebrand socialist:

Das Kapital had a tremendous effect on him and there is not the smallest doubt; it converted him to socialism, turned him into a revolutionary writer, made him a political agitator, changed his outlook, directed his energy, influenced his art, gave him a religion, and, as he claimed, made a man of him (Pearson, 1943:68)

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Thereafter, Shaw preached socialism from public platforms and street corners, delivered lectures on various social, political and economic topics before taking on the drama. One main concern of a socialist-influenced literary theory is the rejection of the superficial representation of reality propagated by Naturalism and the alternative conception of the function of literature as a revelation of “another” visible reality. This notion of “another” reality as opposed to the everyday phenomena, material, social and political and the resulting aesthetic consequences, represent a major theme in Shaw’s philosophy of art. The central theme and conflict in his drama, one that defines all other aspects of his art, is the opposition between “Realism” and “Idealism”. As complex theoretical terms in his aesthetics, the semantic range and functions of these terms in his drama depend on a contextual knowledge of the intellectual traditions that shaped his literary thought. Shaw draws on ancients like Plato; socialists like Hegel, Marx, Engel, Lukacs and from 19th century romanticism. His conceptualization of the terms, Realism and Idealism may prove terminologically and conceptually consistent with socialist thought, but he develops them in his theory of Creative Evolution and in his work, to the level of making them entirely his own.15

Shaw defines realism in profound opposition and rejection of stylistic principles of realism in 19th century naturalistic fiction, especially the novel. Rejecting Zolaistic naturalism, he shares strong similarities with the classical tradition emanating from Plato, Socialist aesthetics, and the post-romantic theories of Carlyle and Ruskin. Shaw in The Quintessence, demands that his term, “realist” be associated, not with naturalists like Zola or Maupassant, but with Plato. Shaw’s aesthetics exhibits the romantic concepts of imagination, visionary and utopian revelation, which spell out the intricate intersection of realism and idealism in his works.

Bearing in mind Pato’s metaphor of the cave discussed in my introduction, images of shadows and illusion characterize Shaw’s criticism of Victorian art as a description of the process of literary perception or construction of reality consonant with the term Idealism, as a superficial and outward detail reflection of what exists without a rational examination of inner essences. On the other hand, the philosophical urge to communicate the newly discovered truth by Plato’s philosopher corresponds to Shaw’s perception of Realists and Realistic art. The rejection of Plato’s philosopher by those in the cave who will not part with their beliefs corresponds to Shaw’s own philosophical association of Idealism with illusory conventions. Thus identifying Idealism as a negative semantic process of fabricating false believes to justify prevailing structures,

15 Some of the categories depicted here as socialist appear rather to be commonly known as

“romantic”. This however is prove of the tenable relationship between the socialist and romantic traditions. Though not identical in motivations and aims, the relation of the romantic literary tradition to socialist realism is curiously stated by the socialist realist, Maxim Gorki (1963: 487): “Revolutionary romanticism-this essentially a pseudonym for socialist realism, the purpose of which is not only to depict the past critically but chiefly to promote the consolidation of revolutionary achievement in the present and a clearer view of the lofty objectives of the socialist future”.

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Shaw, in The Quintessence associates Idealism with “mask”, “lies”, “hypocrisy” or the “imagination resolved to starve sooner than face…realities, pilling up illusions to hide them” (146). On the other hand, Shaw associates Realism with phrases like, “tearing the mask” and “truth”. As Gupta, (1965:177) holds, “Shaw calls himself one of the Realists who has the courage to face the truth, to declare that institutions are neither natural nor holy and that they are human inventions, which should not be allowed to outlast their earthly utility”. Realism challenges appearances in an effort to realize new possibilities. This distinction emphasizes the true meaning of Realism in Shaw’s work, as a state of existence beyond the distorted and accidental shapes of the moment and the constant imaginative groping for knowledge beyond concrete visible phenomena.

In Shaw’s poetics of Creative evolution, Realism and Idealism are engaged in a dialectical struggle to draw a synthesis between “what is” and “what ought to be”; between outward representation and inner essences. As Whitman (1977:40,162) asserts, “There is in Shaw an element of mysticism: he wants to come to grips intellectually and morally with larger realities he dimly perceived behind the veil of appearances” adding, “the ultimate synthesis we call ‘reality’ is really what Shaw tries to apprehend”. This dialectical process of thesis and antithesis is Hegelian. The Platonic- Hegelian element in Shaw’s thought combines with the socialist political-economic basis of his philosophy to puts in proper perspective his terms, Idealism and Realism as forms of interpretation that stem from the imagination.

Shaw’s discussion of imagination spells out the dialectics of realism and idealism. For him, the imagination functions in two distinct and yet complementary modes consonant with Idealism and Realism. The source of Idealistic and realistic thinking is the imagination. As one of his characters asserts, “imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will” (Methuselah, 69-70). But then, the imagination functions in two distinct and yet complementary modes⎯“the realistic imagination” and the “Romantic imaginations”. Each mode can degenerate into a pathological form of ideology. The “realistic imagination” is the source of Realism/realistic interpretation; the “romantic imagination” is the source of Idealism/idealistic interpretation. Alternatively, the “romantic imagination” is the source of “reproductive thinking” (Idealism) while the “realistic imagination” is the “productive mode of thinking” and the source of Realism.

As a reproductive mode of thinking, the “romantic imagination” is the source of conservative ideology; as a productive mode, the “realistic imagination” is our source of utopian thinking. For Shaw, conservative ideological thinking and utopian pursuits are fruitful ways of interpreting life, but each may degenerate into a pathological ideology when pursued to extreme. Unrestrained utopia thinking, like extreme conservatism might lead to tragic circumstances. Hence, in The Quintessence he asserts that, while “the spirit or will of man is constantly outgrowing the ideals... thoughtless conformity to them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow thoughtless violation of them” (61). The “romantic imagination” designates both extreme conservative and utopian psychologies designated in Shaw’s

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poetics as Idealism. The “Realistic imagination” designates the restrained fruitful utopian thought that mediates the extremities of utopia and idealism, and is Realism.

For Shaw then, Realism or “realistic imagination” is a passion for the possible while the “romantic imagination”, the source of idealism is the cause of socio-cultural stagnation. As a reproductive mode of thinking, the “romantic imagination” mirrors what exists in order to justify it. By giving a photographic snapshot of what is, or exists; by simply reflecting present socio-cultural and political situations uncritically, the idealist imagination strives to conserve. In labouring to perpetuate established institutions, it frequently succumbs to concealment, dissimulation, and distortion of reality as experienced. It becomes a mechanism for distorting or falsifying existing social conditions, however accurate or factual it may be. Thus, Shaw, declares that the “romantic imagination is the power to imagine things as they are not”.

Contrarily, the productive mode of the imagination, “the realistic imagination” functions as the source of our restrained utopian thinking. It is the creative force behind new socio-cultural possibilities and is generated by the creative will to change what exists for something better. This healthy productive mode labours to shatter what exists in order to reconstruct it, and in productively remaking socio-cultural life from a fictitious nowhere, it strives to revolutionize. In labouring to establish new socio-cultural and political arrangements the productive or realistic imagination gives us an utterly unconventional perspective from which to measure the difference between “what is” and “what ought to be”; between reality as socially experienced and the ideal world of our cultural representations; between society as culturally constructed and the hidden reality beneath ideals. Philosophically, realism consists of exposing the contradiction between our ideals creeds and the truth as experienced. The realistic imagination seeks to free us from the deceit spun by tainted ideologies.

However, like its counterpart, Idealism or the “romantic imagination” the “realistic imagination” which is the source of our utopian thinking can also degenerate into a pathological ideology. If a movement towards the new losses touch with the actual, if a would-be liberator fails to furnish concrete means of restructuring society, the wish to be somewhere else degenerates into futile escapism, wishful thinking and illusory visions of the millennium or utopia and thus, to another pathological form of idealism. Lacking a possible route from the present to the future, visionary utopians may remain trapped in an ideological wasteland they cannot traverse. Thus, “romantic” and “realistic” imaginations are dialectical processes with two planes of parallel meanings, but with similar risks. The romantic imagination legitimizes what exists and this Shaw insists, is good for the integrity of society, for law and order or cultural identity. The realistic imagination de-legitimatizes or subverts what exists and Shaw insists, this is good for the development (evolution) of all societies. But both have similar risks. In its pursuit of superficial realities, “The romantic imagination” sacrifices essences and inevitably leads to distortions of the real. But “the realistic imagination” can as well easily lead to escapism. Both forms: distortion and escapism are pathological forms of ideology that distort being. Realism is the ability to synthesize both imaginative

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modes, and to Shaw, only a few of humanity (1% according to The Quintessence), posses the “realistic imagination” in every society. Shaw defines the “realistic imagination” as the intelligent imagination that functions as catalyst in “conceiving something better” and “striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it” (165-66); “a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities yet inexperienced, and of testing the feasibility and desirability of serious utopias” (IV: 104-5).

Shaw’s dramatic conflict springs from these opposed types of imagination in his characters. His conflict presents what he considers the paradox of life. Society needs a common faith and culture ensured by rigorous coercive institutions, but social evolution depends on individual freedom for, the individual as bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, needs to be free. Hence, in his “realistic” drama every ideal is arguable from both sides, Shaw being so good a deconstructionist as to suppose that the good reasons are on one side. The drama struggles to reconcile both views of life.

Shaw’s criticism of Victorian drama and history as idealistic literature (i.e., in the sense of being photographic reflections of “facts” or conventional morality) correspond to his criticism of idealism as a false moral and intellectual standpoint on the philosophical-sociological and artistic levels. Realism for Shaw is thus, first and foremost, a philosophical and thematic rather than stylistic term. His genre transformations are handmaid to his critical attack on Idealism: false, clichéd or conventional moral positions hidden beneath aesthetic conventions. As early as 1887, in a lecture on “Fiction and Truth”, Shaw pointed out discrepancies between the imaginary world of English novels and the social reality of England. “Many of our worst habits are acquired in the imaginary world….When they have succeeded, bad novels will have made a bad nation…and hence, in the upshot, the fictitious reality will receive official sanction and gain greater authority than ever” (Non-Dramatic, 4). He insists that, by simply mirroring the external or existing state of affairs or merely respecting aesthetic conventions, well-made dramatists let pass the current state of affairs for realism: “my quarrel with the conventional drama” he declared “is that it is doctrinaire to the utmost extreme of dogmatism – that the dramatist is so straight-jacketed in theories of conduct that he cannot even state his conventional solutions clearly but leaves it to be vaguely understood…” (I: 462).

In Shaw’s poetics, the role of the artist is wholly one of interpretation as literature is the revelation of a hidden reality behind rudimentary detail and surface semblance of reality. This notion of literatures corresponds with continental socialist theories of art. When Hegel for instance, states that, “the incomplete, ‘as if hypothetical reality of the theatre is not simply a refinement or special case of extra theatrical reality; it is actually a negation of, in the sense of being entirely other than, the reality of what we loosely call ‘the real world’” (Whiteman,1977:186), he is making the same distinction that Shaw makes between the “romantic” and “realistic imaginations” or in his metaphor of the “world as stage”. Shaw’s inclusion of argumentative “discussions” and dreams in his plays is closely linked to his view that aspects of life’s reality cannot be presented in action on stage: “life has its realities behind the shadows: the theatre has

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nothing but its shows” Shaw declares (I: 741). The similarities between Shaw’s redefined content and form and contemporary

continental socialist aesthetic theories that share a rejection of Zolaistic naturalism becomes more striking when we examine their general assumptions about realism in relation to problems of content, genre conventions, Plot, characterization etc. (C. f II.5. below). But Shaw clearly develops the imagination in literary interpretation far beyond the socialist mould as evident in his idiosyncratic theory Creative Evolution.

II.3.2 Beyond Socialist Aesthetics: Shaw’s Creative Evolution

Shaw needed a larger framework than socialists aesthetics provides, one that gave expression to his sense of history in dramatic construction; a theory within which he could explain the conflict of Realism and Idealism as a creative force in the interest of historical development or progress. He needed a theory that explains contradiction as a cause for rejoicing rather mere anarchism; that explains literature in line with cultural history. Beyond this, he needed a theory that grants a sense of religious or spiritual inspiration and heroic commitment to social rebellion; that sanctions all provocative insights, ideas or challenges to the status quo by identifying them with the organic process; a theory that could serve as a source of dramatic metaphors for all his plays. His theory considers the role of the imagination in history, creative art and social life and takes evolution as an important concept for critical and creative writing.

Shaw picked up the naturalistic framework of evolution and although his version of evolution has a biological facet as seen in Man and Superman, the philosophy is mainly social, moral and aesthetic. In its biological sphere, Creative evolution opposes Darwin’s “natural selection”; in the spiritual/moral sphere, it opposes the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest” and the Christian concept of God. In the aesthetic and cultural spheres, it opposes tradition (artistic and cultural).

Shaw’s theory of Creative evolution is founded on the imagination, theorized as the mystical “life force”. In brief, the root of its ethical conviction in The Quintessence is that man must follow, not “abstract law but the living will” (122). He must cast off “artificial conscience” imposed by the misguided belief in the validity of moral codes and social institutions and replace it with a “real conscience” that springs from his aspirations/imagination. The overriding purpose of life is “world betterment” and social evolution is obstructed by abstract laws and institutions (ideals). Hence, “Social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones, and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must necessary involve the repudiation of duty at every step”(17) or the destruction of outmoded institutions and codes of conduct.

The positive, constructive side of this Shavian ethical conviction is grounded in “the living will”. In the biological sphere, Shaw’s “living will” seeks not to achieve sexual satisfaction or the material comfort of marriage for the wilful individual, but the collective good of society, the creation of a higher race for humanity ( as is the case

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with Tanner and Ann in Man and Superman) . In the social and aesthetic spheres, Shaw’s Will is not the restraining faculty (our will power), but man’s passionate desires to do what he wants to do. As such it becomes the immediate stimulant of all evolution, artistic, social and intellectual. According to this meliorist philosophy of the “Will”, human volition is the specific agent of a cosmic drive for World betterment. When neither inhibited nor misled by ideals, Shaw says, the will acts as “our old friend the soul and spirit of man”, hopefully doing the work of a power analogous to the Holy Spirit (20). The Shavian will is individual, but operates collectively, within an ever-growing “social organism” (25). There, it “serves as a final measure of the validity of institutions, since none can survive that is not constructed to fulfil man’s will” (20). In sum, the gradual fulfilment of the individual will constitutes the growth of the social organism and makes possible the mental, spiritual and biological evolution of man.

Shaw’s Creative evolution begins as a reaction to, and rejection of the biological determinism and anti-teleological vision of life in Darwinism and in the orthodox religious doctrine of the original sin, which preaches man’s depravity. At the core of evolution is the belief in “the life force” or “the will” which is the energizing force behind Shaw’s Realist protagonists who work towards higher and higher levels of achievement. For Shaw, the life force is God. As he insists, God is not a transcendent being capable of interfering in the process of nature.16 Contrary to Darwinian evolution, Shaw insists that human existence is neither deterministic nor is man a mere accidental occurrence, but a divine agent of “the will”, working towards evolution.

While Darwin represents evolution as the product of blind and impersonal natural forces, Shaw, borrowing from Samuel Butler claims that Darwinism “banished mind from the universe” (C.f. Warren S Smith.1963: 13, 48, 75) and thus, deprived men of a metaphysical purpose, which alone can lead them to heroic undertakings. For Shaw, Darwinism as a theory of life is irreligious and fundamentally immoral in its identification of competition as the sole source of evolutionary development; an identification that encourages the competitive spirit of capitalism against ethical idealism. As he argues in the preface to St. Joan, contrary to the mere survival of the fittest purpose that Darwin attributes to life, many otherwise promising members of the species (e.g., Joan ) are subject to an “appetite of evolution” that is not consistent with their selfish will to survive and often even brings them to an early and violent death. The very existence of such an appetite, Shaw soundly reasons, is inexplicable in Darwinian terms, indeed in any terms whatsoever that are not frankly metaphysical and religious. Such an evolutionary purpose being neither material not selfishly personal stems from, and “testifies” to, the pressure upon the human psyche of forces that are not only immaterial but impersonal (II:275-6). Borrowing from Bergson’s

16 In Back To Methuselah, Shaw argues that, “God has neither body parts, nor passion, and is

therefore not a person but an incorporeal purpose, unable to do anything directly, but mysteriously able to create corporeal organs and agents to accomplish that purpose, which… is the attainment of infinite wisdom and infinite power” (267).

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“élan Vitale”, Shaw symbolizes this immaterial force as the “life force” behind historical evolution.

Evolutionary discourses were no doubt, central in Victorian intellectual thought, but conspicuously, the term, evolution in Shaw’s theory is used as a generic term covering the historical and natural progress as well as the process of artistic creativity. Evolution in Shaw’s theory comes to take on a peculiar meaning deeply intertwined with historical and cultural development and history and literary writing. As an artistic theory, it significantly opposes Victorian realistic historiography in history and drama.

Victorian realistic historiography was based on technological development and stressed the progress of man from past periods. Although his teleological philosophy of evolution is also predominantly progressive, Shaw opposed this realistic historicism as misleading because it gave Victorians the satisfaction of having progressed and thus precluded the imaginative will to continuously work towards better future goals. Criticizing this realistic historiography, Shaw particularly draws a distinction between mechanical improvement which the popular Victorian conception of progress implies and his own understanding of real progress in terms of moral and intellectual evolution, which he finds absent in human Civilization. As he argues in another history play, Caesar and Cleopatra, there is no reason to suppose that any progress has taken place since the Roman (Caesar’s) times and the reason for ignoring the popular conception of progress is that, improvement does not mean increase command over Nature, but development in the moral and intellectual quality of the species, in man’s attitude to Ideals. In his evolutionary vision of history, human evolution takes a long time for even its traces to be noticed and evolution never ends. For Shaw, the period of time covered by history is far too small for any perceptible progress to be noticed and the popular belief in progress is only the result of “the ordinary citizen’s ignorance of the past combined with his idealization of the present”:

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery… The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P … And in truth, the period of time covered by history is far too short for any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human species (II: 294-7).

A chapter of his “Revolutionist Handbook” appended to Man and superman and entitled, The “Verdict of History” accentuates the author’s anti-progressive bend in his Victorian context. Responding to Macaulay’s view that there has been “progressive moral evolution operating from grandfather to grandson”, Shaw’s hero, Tanner writes,

a thousand years of such evolution would have produced enormous social changes, of which the historical evidence would have been overwhelming. But not Macaulay himself, the most confident of Whig meliorist, can produce any such evidence that would bear cross-examination. Compare our conduct and our codes with those mentioned contemporarily in such ancient scriptures and classics as have come down to us, and you will find no jot of ground for the belief that any progress what so ever has been made in

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historic time, in spite of all the romantic attempts of historians to reconstruct the past on that assumption. (II: 773)

Victorian Realistic historicism, which stressed that society has improved, was based on technological evidence, the industrial “facts” of its 19th century context., but for Shaw, it was just as Idealistic as the drama of the time in photographically reflecting the scientific facts or cultural norms. Realistic historicism for Shaw implied (re)interpretation and this requires relating one period to others. In his histories (e.g. St. Joan) Shaw relates past, present and future to show sameness or even decline in history with the aim of alienating his audience by debunking their ideal of progress or their satisfaction of a superior civilization. While Victorian historians compared the past to the present in order to emphasize progress and development, Shaw’s compares past and present to show sameness and at times decline in civilization.

However, Shaw’s attitude to history and evolution, like his attitude to all subjects is quite contradictory. His belief in the life force; his espousal of Lamarck’s and Butler’s theories of evolution, and his rejection of Darwin’s determinism are reminders that his vision of history is not exclusively pessimistic toward progress. When we take the relation of past to present in Shaw’s history, his attitude to the historical design is cyclical and pessimistic. But if we see and accept the future, which Shaw adds to history plays (like St. Joan) as part of the artist’s historical material, we inevitably get a new perspective of his historicism that ironically comes close to the Victorian positivist tradition in historiography. Although he debunked the notion of progress, Shaw had a strong faith in, and deep commitment to the idea that although there has been no progress in history so far, there is the possibility and feasibility of future progress in the long term, in the far distant future. In the short term then, Shaw sees, no progress in history, but in the distant future realm of history, he sees ascent or progress. Hence, his history plays present a paradoxical vision of history as cyclical and progressive; pessimistic and optimistic, in short, as tragi-comic. Generally, historians tend to think teleologically― i.e., of history as moving towards a goal― or pessimistically― i.e., of history as consisting of repetition and decline―, but Shaw’s historiography presents both patterns at once. His historiography is in the short term pessimistic and in the long run optimist. This dual pattern of Shaw’s history reflects the struggle of the life force to evolve something better, a struggle he symbolizes in his dramatic conflict as a struggle between “realists” and “Idealists”.

The “life force” theory by which Shaw explains the historical process of evolution branches into a thoroughgoing artistic theory by which he explains artistic creativity in terms of history. The life force is the inspirational or imaginative force for realistic interpretation. Hence, just as Shaw argues that history is not as his contemporary historians think, a matter of adherence to statistical facts, he insists that drama is not what his contemporary dramatists think, a matter of adherence to scientific (generic) rules of literary writing like the well-made structure, neither is it a mirror held up to the socio-cultural norms. As a product of a fertile interpretation that stems from “the “realistic imagination”), Shaw argues that his own drama is the product of imaginative

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hallucination, qualified as “sane hallucination” (C.f. Theatres, I: 116). Such imaginative creativity he insists is even more organic than dramatic purists may think.

On how the irrational life force can turn out to be “sane”, rational and organic, Shaw turned to Bergson who, distinguishing between geometry and vital phenomena asserts that “Of a free action or a work of art, we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event. Life in its entirety, regarded as creative evolution, is something analogous (Bergson, 1911: 223-24). As Bergson holds, scientific attempts to explain vital phenomena, to the extent that they rely upon mathematical abstraction necessarily leads to distortion, but vital phenomena, not being imprisoned or governed by scientific reason ends up even more organic. Applying this to artistic creativity, Shaw claims he is not governed by the rules of dramatic writing (Theatres, I: 116), but by the life force and that, although his writings are inspired, the end product is organic; the result of “sane hallucination” or the product of convincing interpretation rather than photographic reflection of historical “facts” or social and aesthetic conventions.

Adhering to strict reason, scientific data, rules of conduct or aesthetic conventions, whether in history or drama is for Shaw, Idealism because, the methods of the artist are the methods of nature. Spontaneity takes precedence over scientific art and the end product of spontaneous creation is even more organic and scientific. As seen in Man and superman where he takes eugenic sex as subject, Shaw’s rejects the biological “facts” of genetic evolution for moral, intellectual and spiritual interpretation of sex. The result is as always, a radical transformation of the subject and form of comedy.

Shaw’s argument for the irrational or inspirational life force in artistic creativity is like Bergson’s, not a negation of rationality but a synthesis of the two. Shaw holds that inspiration is in general a more reliable source of new scientific data and a clearer means of attaining reality than rationality and that inspiration should normally precedes rationality, but also insists that realism is the unity of thought (reason) and instinct. Besides, Shaw argues that the use of the methods of inspiration is not a guarantee for good art because, “the instrument on which the inspiring force plays may be a very faulty one, and may even end up making the most ridiculous nonsense of its message” (Plays,163). In stressing that good art is “sane hallucination”, Shaw clarifies his distinction of organic art that is the result of inspiration and organic art that is the result of convention or idealism. He obviously found this distinction in Schopenhauer, (1966:186-87) who argues that “imagination has rightly been recognized as an essential element of genius” since it “extends the mental horizon of the genius beyond the objects that actually present themselves to his person….” But it does not follow he adds, that “the “strength of imagination”, is evidence of genius for, just as a real object can be perceived in two ways- idealistically as it is in itself, or practically as it relates to other objects and to the will of the individual thinker- so too can an imaginary one. Such a distinction parallels that which Shaw makes between “realistic” and “romantic” imaginations as well as accentuates his socialist definition of realism in literature as a (re)interpretative and philosophical rather than a stylistic term.

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Shaw saw no distinction between realism in history and drama. For him, realism is not a mirror reflections of facts or existing cultural values, but a reinterpretation:

A mirror reflects what is before it. Hold it up to any street at noonday and it shews a crowd of people and vehicles and tells you nothing about them. A photograph of them has no meaning. They may be in love with one another. They may be husbands and wives, parents and children, or doctors and patients, in the most comic or tragic relations to one another, but the mirror or photograph tells you nothing of all this, and cannot give the playwright any material whatever. Shakespeare’s mirror was for the actor, to teach not to saw the air and look like nothing on earth. The playwright has more to do than to watch and wave: the policeman does that much; but the playwright must interpret the passing show by parables (C.f. Meisel, (1963:93).

In “The Author’s apology” to Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw reiterates that “…drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem” (162). If literature is a reinterpretation of its immediate socio-cultural context, then, as Shaw puts it, new ideas, not conventions are the determinants of form: “A true original style is never achieved for its own sake…. (The Prefaces,165-6), because, “new ideas make their technique as water makes its channel; and the technician without ideas is as useless as the canal-constructor without water, though he may do very skilfully what the Mississippi does very roughly” (Prefaces,751). Shaw insists that, “effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none. He who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as it momentousness and his conviction will carry him” (Prefaces, 165-6). The generic implications are that, literature is not a reflection of context or of its bygone forms. New literary styles and genres are the results of new ways of interpreting social realities. New forms are not necessarily the result of an eminent dialectics of historical forms. Although they always refer to bygone forms, they are a matter of historical and social necessity for every new genre has its roots in a new thought and thus, in evolution. New genres are the necessary products of social development. And in his plays, Shaw senses in a workmanlike manner this complicated aesthetic truth of the dependence of literary development on the general social and historical evolution.

II.4.1 Shaw’s Historical Drama

II.4.2 Envisioned History: Narrative and Dramatic Modes

Following the role of memory in history outline in New Historicism above, modern historical playwrights like narrative historians enact present, future-bound visions of history by always placing past or received history in a new critical context of authorial hindsight concerning the present and future significance, as they see it, of past words and deeds. The modern historian, concerned with a retrospective (re)interpretation of events no longer pretends to directly present unmediated past

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action. Rather, he overtly makes us aware that he is engaged in envisioned history, one that exploits the present and future significance of the past. The distinction between envisioned history and Victorian realistic historicism can best be illustrated by juxtaposing the narrative and dramatic modes of history writing. Such a distinction is not only important for delineating the criteria for analysing Shaw’s dramatic histories, but also for illustrating my argument for St. Joan as a modern history play (chapter, V).

A skilful historian for instance, will convey a sense of how certain men and women of the past understood themselves and their relationships to each other. Yet, he will also suggest certain cause, purposes and implications of their interaction of which the participants in the events could not have been fully aware, but of which the audience are. In short, the historian will try to see the past from both within and from without, from different perspectives or different historical periods―as evolving drama and as the fixed target of retrospection. Such a historian constructs a past-present-future bound vision of history, conflating his interpretations with what should be “strictly” the factual, unmediated discipline of history or purely a dramatic representation of the past through characters.

By using the narrative rather than the dramatic mode in writing history, modern historians easily and conspicuously refrain from pretending to mirror what they in fact mediate. When they indulge in the mimetic luxury of direct quotation, they usually quote written documents postdating the events under consideration and such documentations themselves are verbal mediations of largely irretrievable nonverbal events. The narrative medium provides a variety of techniques that allow the reader to perceive the fictive in history, to see that the narrated events have been re-channelled through the narrator’s unifying consciousness. I am speaking here of nothing more than the opportunities that narrative has over drama. “Transfocalization” or change of viewpoint for instance, will immediately draw the reader’s attention to profound alterations in history. The narrator can even stop to address or appeal to the “dear reader” or even use the first person pronoun. These explicit interventions which make evident the fictive in narrative history are almost entirely absent in drama. Although an old play can be re-enacted with new costumes, new stage designs, music etc., the author’s re-interpretation of history in such staging cannot emerge in full force as the narrative historian’s verbal intervention. The constraints to interpretation laid on the dramatist are closely associated with his medium-the dramatic medium.

On the contrary, the relatively stark simplicity of the dramatic mode affords few occasions for making the fictional quality of history explicit. Its most explicitly fictional qualities, stage directions, prefaces, postscripts etc., which are perceivable reminders of narrativity are done away with in performance. Its direct dialogue form implies the absence of a narrator, since action on stage comes through direct interaction between characters in speech. Even the role of the commentator assigned to the chorus in Greek drama has been eliminated in modern drama, though some of the most modern dramatists have chosen, not to renounce, but to modernize the chorus’s

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role and mode of utterance.17 Unlike narrative history, the dramatic medium of history does not allow the dramatist the same privilege of addressing his readers. Hence, drama impresses us as directly presenting [past] action on stage. Except for the “side text” of stage directions, the playwright is typically absent from the linguistic surface of his play. The illusion of reality or objectivity that his absence implies is colourfully summed up in Stephen Didalus’s words that, the dramatist remains “like the God of the Creation, within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisibly, refined out of existence, paring his finger-nails” (Joyce, 1916:252). In performance, the illusion of reality is more effective in the absence of subtexts and such clear authorial views of the history in prefaces. From stage historical drama then, an obvious, but concealed imaginative version of what happened in the past can emerge without indication of intervention by the author’s modern consciousness.18

The dramatic medium was effective in the 19th century and before as a medium by which the dramatic historians concealed his imaginative roles in history. Generally speaking, serious historical drama before the late 19th century attempted to conceal rather than betray, let alone flaunt, the playwright’s imaginative role in re-presenting the past. Coupled with the convention of pictorial realism, 19th century historical dramas gave readers the semblance of unmediated facts by claiming to represent past action. In other words, the dialogue form impresses the reader as directly representing past action or what actually happened instead of how it is subsequently remembered.

While historical drama in the 19th century and before aligned with documentary plays in appearing to represent past action as if directly from the point of view of the unmediated interacting stage “players”, Shaw conspicuously makes explicit the fictiveness of his history by overtly revealing his own narrative strategies. We are thus explicitly made aware that Shaw’s history is mediated by a more modern (20th century) consciousness. The result is, as modern historiography shows, the flagrant exposure by modern dramatists like Shaw, of the fleeting interaction between what actually happened or what is contained in the historical records and their subsequent memory of the events in their plays. Through various techniques, Shaw, like late 20th century dramatists, conspicuously fictionalizes history as re-presentation.

Shaw’s is not concerned with history as it actually happened, but with the memory of history in his play. In the preface to St. Joan, he makes explicit his intention to fall

17 The partial return to ancient Greek conventions is one form of the modern rejection of

dramatic illusion, a convention that reached its heyday in neo-classical tragedy, with its “rules” aiming at “verisimilitude” or maximum potential of illusion. The renunciation of the norm in modern theatre has unavoidably entailed some degree of narrativization of the dramatic mode. This partial return to narrative material Brecht termed “epic theatre”.

18 Shakespeare, Henry IV, which Shaw criticizes as debasing or romanticizing Joan is not devoid of fictive interpretation, but Shakespeare does not directly give the impression that his history is an imagined reconstruction. One can therefore only discern his imaginative role from the dialogue. The iambic pentameter of his Joan strikes us as pointing to a authorial stance outside the imaginative world evoked in King Henry IV.

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back to his imagination to fill-in gaps in the saint’s history: as far as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers of divination as I possess, the things I represent these three exponents of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing. And beyond this, neither drama nor history can go in my hands” (V: 74).

Modern historiography and memory culture doubt the reliability of historians presenting verbatim reports of what was actually said or thought on a given occasion or actually happened in the distant past, a practice for which the Greek historian, Thucydides felt compelled to offer a somewhat apologetic justification:

As for the speeches that were made by different men… it has been difficult to record with strict accuracy the words actually spoken, both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and for those who from various other sources have brought me reports. Therefore the speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion (C.f. Hernadi, 1985:18).

In much the same words and with the same purpose,― to highlight the dialectical tension between history’s past “text” and his own subsequent memory or “reading” of it in St. Joan19, Shaw introduces the authorial hindsight involved in his re-presentation of the medieval Maid’s history by stating that,

it is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can they be made intelligible to the audience….The play would be unintelligible if I have not endowed them with enough of this consciousness to enable them to explain their attitude to the twentieth century [with/by] an inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude” (V: 73-74).

This line of thought has far-reaching implication for modern historical drama. While the dialogue form of historical drama as a whole and the pictorial conventions of Victorian histories in particular claimed to offer realistic unmediated insights into what really happened, Shaw typically acknowledges that the events of his play have been re-presented or re-produced, if not from his own mind, at least from the mind of his stage figures. Because presenting a past-present-future-bound vision of history on stage requires the inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude (details of facts and pictorial historicity), Shaw claims to make his characters, Cauchon, Lamaitre, and Warwick more articulate and intellectually self-conscious than their historical originals would have been. To render his history more intelligible to an audience in a far distant period 19 The quotation marks around the key words are required by the historiographic

circumstance that history (“the text“) is largely fleeting and nonverbal while its imaginative reconstruction (the “reading”) is made permanent by being verbalized continuously in memory over different periods by different writers as historians, historical playwrights and their dramatic figures expressing the unspoken attitudes of their historical prototypes (as Thucydides illustrates) all translate, so to speak, from the shadowy “original versions”― the world of events for ever past― into the idiom of a continually present discourse.

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than that in which the history is set, that is, in order to secure “sufficient veracity”(interpretation), Shaw claims he must incur the inevitable “sacrifice of verisimilitude” (the appearance of being factual) of that history and portray his characters as “saying the things they actually would have said if they had known what [in the playwright’s retrospective vision of the events, GN], they were really doing” (52-53). To introduce the political implication of the linguistic anachronism that Shaw’s inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude entails is to cite a dialogue in this medieval history: “Well, if you burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist”, says Warwick to Bishop Cauchon about the eponymous heroine of Shaw’s history. During the entire conversation (Sc.iv), Joan’s historical opponents express their misgiving in clearly anachronistic language. In the summer of 1429 when the historical events are said to have taken place, no language had words for “protestant” and “nationalist”. Nor is it likely that Joan’s medieval contemporaries perceived her as representing what Warwick describes as “the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest and peers with the private person’s relationship to God and the state” (107). Only through overt anachronism can Shaw relate Joan’s prioritization of her individual Will against Church and State to the contemporary political, cultural and social issues of his audience’s 20th century context in which the issues postulated by his medieval figures (Nationalist and feminism) were actually current.

The issues postulated by Shaw’s medieval figures were not understood as such in the medieval age by their prototypes whom they represent in the play, but by re-interpreting the events and actions of his medieval characters in these modern terms, Shaw is able to relate the issues of this medieval history to 20th century historical events in order to allow his audience draw important and immediately relevant lessons from this far past. The main lessons are that Joan represented, not an individual, but the emerging Zeitgeist, new socio-cultural and political forces, an epoch, which by virtue of its newness is often rejected by the idealistic majority of society in all epochs, but which Shaw emphasizes as necessary for social evolution. His preface rigorously defends the conceptual anachronism of his dialogue as a literary device for re-presenting the past in contemporary terms, that is, in a past-present-future bound vision for contemporary audience for whom knowledge of the medieval past might have been lost. His argument is one in favour of a dialogised interpretation of history.

The authorial voice in Shaw’s history is strong, for the characters express what is strictly speaking, the playwright’s rather than their own psychological insights or interpretation of the historical events. With Shaw’s “sacrifice of verisimilitude” his characters speak in anachronistic language and the audience are allowed to perceive clairvoyant figures of historical drama capable of penetrating (rather than embodying) the historical characters (the prototypes) whose lives are being re-presented on stage. The preface justifies the device as a healthy way with historical drama with the claim that the author’s characters are intended to make intelligible, not only “themselves”―, that is to say, their historical prototypes―, but also the institutional imperatives of the medieval period governing their way of thinking and their manifest behaviour.

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“Obviously”, Shaw adds, “the real Cauchon, Lemaître, and Warwick could not have done this for, “they were part of the Middle Ages themselves, and therefore as unconscious of its peculiarities as of the atomic formula of the air they breath” (74). The play, the preface goes on, is intended to make us see, “not just the visible and human puppets [individual characters], but the church, the Inquisition, the Feudal System”. Emphasizing further the need to dramatize characters in historical drama as historical forces, Shaw overtly makes clear that he would play the puppet master with his characters. Shaw asserts that it is the institutional forces of his play that are “more terrible in their dramatic force than any of the little mortal figures clanking about in plated armor or moving silently in the order of St: Dominic” (71), and pulling the strings behind the stage of puppet show, Shaw, the puppet master re-interprets medieval characters as those terrible institutional forces that crush World-historical individuals in all epochs and bring about the tragedies of civilization. Instead of saying what the real Joan, Warwick, and Cauchon would have said or thought in their medieval context, the dramatic figures in St Joan express the playwright’s (retrospective) memory of the persons they are invoked to represent.

Shaw criticized Victorian dramatic historiography which relied entirely on elaborate spectacle, realistic stage design and carefully researched background of historical figures as a sterile representation that can only make audience aware that they are watching a past unrelated to their own time. He insists that historical drama like any other drama uses the past to comment on the present. By insisting that drama is history, Shaw is like the New Historicist after him asserting that the talents recquired to write and appreciate history are the same for historians and literary artists. It is thus important to briefly examine Shaw’s theory with regards to plot construction, handling of subject, characterization and perspective structure. Such an examination will provide analytical tools for a close reading of the plays in subsequent chapters.

II.5 Criteria for Analysing Shaw’s Drama

II.5.1 Form and Content

Shaw’s historical cast of mind, his conception of drama as history and of cultural history as evolving is clearly manifested in the content and form of his drama. From his socialist interpretation of realism and his own evolutionary theory of drama, Shaw redefined subject, plot, conflict, characterization and perspective structure in the light of his theory of evolution and mainly in contrast to the prevalent romantic and melodramatic forms of the 19th century theatre. These socialist-inspired definitions of aspects of drama parallel the new historicist view of literature and history as (re) interpretations and, the view in cultural and memory theories that literary texts and genres are repositories of cultural memory.

The starting point for Shaw as a socialist realist is the rejection of the application of the term realism to stylistic features of 19th century naturalism: the view of literature

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as the reflection of outward tangible objects (verisimilitude). Maintaining as principles of art and life terms as “revelation” and “inspiration” against detailed and minute description of contemporary society, Shaw insists that the correct definition of art is “not a mirror held up to nature”, but an interpretation. Agreeing with Shaw’s view in The Quintessence that “truth is revealed by parables and falsehood supported by facts” (148), socialist critics insist that realism is not simply a literary term, but a political and philosophical term. They generally insist that the role of the artist is to look for, and contradict those aesthetic conventions that consciously blur reality as socially experienced. For socialist, the demand for a work that mirrors the total range of reality is a philosophical, not an aesthetic demand. Shaw’s affirmative critique of Ibsen’s drama as paradigmatic in unveiling realities underneath surface conventions not only reveals this view, but exemplifies his own art.20

On the stylistic and thematic consequences of realism, Engel (1956:36) illuminates this socialist view: “Realism, to my mind implies besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances”. His comment implies one of the contradictions of socialist literary theory: the use and rejection of topicality (facts and details). Engel’s demand for truth of detail, of course, meets Shaw’s demand for a close study of economics and facts: “indeed in all the plays, my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michelangelo” (Letters, I:425). Elsewhere he adds, “It is impossible for any fictionist, dramatic or other, to make true pictures of modern society without some knowledge of the economic anatomy of it” (Prefaces, 708). Yet the use of topical details and “facts” to Shaw as to Engel is neither sufficient nor imply “a mirror held up to Nature”, but the interpretation of outward reality, leading to a second and more philosophical reality.

As Brecht (1964:110) holds, “… Indignation at inhuman conditions can be stimulated in many ways, by direct description of a pathetic matter-of-fact kind, by narrating stories and parables, by jokes, by over and under-statement. In a socialist theatre, reality can be represented in a factual or fantastic form”. The predominance of such interpretative forms as the fable, parable, joke, dreams, overstatement (exaggeration) and under-statement and most especially, the “discussion” element in Shaw’s drama are forms of expressing realism. These fantastic forms correspond to Shaw’s dictum that truth is revealed by parables and falsehood, by facts or verisimilitude. As in Brecht’s “Epic theatre”, elements of fable, dream insets and “discussions” in Shaw’s forms should be seen as alternative modes of portraying and interpreting society in terms of politics. For socialists, these forms, parables, dreams and fables are not a negation of realism but metaphorical forms of interpreting or expressing social realities that cannot be expressed in concrete ordinary language or conventional forms of literature. While these forms oppose Naturalistic realism, the 20 Shaw’s quintessential description of Ibsen’s techniques of unveiling conventions

exemplifies his own approach to genre conventions: “...a terrible art of sharpshooting at the audience, aiming always at the sorest spot in their consciences… a forensic technique of recrimination, disillusion, and penetrating through ideals to the truth…” (145,146).

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works remain realistic. As Nicoll (1953:435) holds “Shaw was in the eighteen-nineties, one of those who called back drama to the ways of realism, yet throughout the whole of his career he displayed a strange love of the fantastic and the absurd”. This is because, as Gupta (1960:4-5) adds, “Other realists are the painters of phenomenon, while Shaw is a seeker of reality behind phenomena”.

The search for reality behind phenomena is integral to socialist realism. When Brecht (1964:110) speaks of reality as being deliberately falsified and of the artist’s task as one of laying bare the stratagems of falsification, he recalls Shaw’s criticism of idealistic literature. Brecht’s demand for the unmasking of conventions and customs of an age as those of the ruling classes and his call for a demonstration of the possibility and necessity of change, imply the same Shavian criticism of an artificial reality, which had been made to appear harmonious and natural by use. For socialist realists, the concern of literature as a mode of mirroring objective reality is the perception of reality as it is actually constituted, and not to depict the immediate appearance. For writers aiming at the perception or representation of reality, the problem of the objective totality of reality is the crucial point and the form in which such reality is reveal does not matter. The real problem is the perception of the dialectical unity or coherence of appearance and essence in the given section of life. Realism can be reveal using even the most unrealistic forms: parables, dreams and fables as in Shaw’s drama.

For Shaw as to Brecht and later socialists realist, “the poet’s task is not to reflect, but to select from the unmeaning mass of events which he can record by cinematographing a crowded city street…a set of imaginary but possible actions which make life intelligible and suggest some interpretation of it” (Henderson, 1926:617-18). Whether the socialist realist is dealing with past history as in Shaw’s St. Joan, or with biological evolution as in his Man and Superman, the historical or scientific “facts” were not in themselves as important as the reality that can be deduced from them. Shaw’s makes this point in his definition of Literature in “Literature and art”, as the rearrangement of significant facts to create a “spiritual, political, social or religious consciousness” (Dan H. Lawrence, 1961:44). Such a definition also accounts for Shaw’s choice of parables, dreams and “discussions” as essential literary forms for communicating hidden truth or reality. Shaw thus stresses that, “the playwright’s role is not merely to depict the chaos around us, but to interpret life, see significant relations, and transform us from bewildered spectators into men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies” (Prefaces, 205); to use the facts to interpret human life; to seek the “essential” or “historical truth” behind records and details rather than reflecting the “facts” or cultural values themselves.

The above socialist interpretation of literature and realism bolstered Shaw’s attack on idealism and transformation of genres. In The Quintessence, Shaw asserts that,

an interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed…the drama arises through a conflict of unsettle ideals rather than through vulgar attachments…to which no moral question is raised. The conflict is not

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between clear right and wrong... (139, my italics).

A modern play Shaw further insists must deal with problems of conduct relevant to its audience and must do so in ways that alienate them. A modern play must make its audience “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (146) by “sharpshooting” their revered Ideals. This, Shaw claims can only be done through a suggestive discussion of cultural ideals and by this he implies the treatment of cultural subjects in a relativity or without subjectivity. In The Quintessence he thus argues that,

In the new plays [Ibsen’s and his] the conflict is not between clear right and wrong: the villain is as conscientious as the hero, if not more so: in fact the question which makes the play interesting (when it is interesting) is, which is the villain and which is the hero; or to put it differently, there are no heroes and no villains” (139).

Conscious that the cultural ideals were the “givens” of the standard Well-made structure designed to promote the ideals, Shaw refigured the structure to accommodate the kind of suggestive discussion he wanted his plays to deal with. Shaw introduced a rhetorical convention in the drama, which he called “the discussion”. In the chapter of The Quintessence entitled, “The Technical Novelty” of Ibsen’s drama he asserts that, Ibsen revolutionized the drama by replacing the action plot and dénouement of the well-made play with a rhetorical convention, a “discussion”:

The technical factor in the play is the discussion. Formally you had in... a well-made play an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, and unravelling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation and discussion; and the discussion is the real test of the playwright….[who] recognizes in the discussion not only the main test of his highest powers, but also the real center of his play’s interest…This was inevitable if the drama was ever to be raised above the childish demands for fables without morals (135).

Shaw’s “exposition-situation-discussion” structure provides him with a formula for rewriting conventional well-made plays into parodies. In practice he simulated the well-made structure in the first half of his own play and introduced a “discussion” exactly where a traditional denouement should come and the discussion indeed, constitute a “parodic continuation” to a supposed well-made play. In other words, Shaw’s Ibsenite structure consisted of what I may say is, “using and losing the well-made plot”. With the “discussion”, Shaw was always ready to stop the action-plot and to harangue the audience on a relevant philosophical or socio-cultural issue in a way that is antithetical to the illusion achieved through scenic realism in well-made plays.

The discussion begins where a well-made play should end and it ends in inconclusiveness. Considering it as his unique contribution to dramatic theory, Shaw called his plays “interludes”, advising critics to begin interpretation of them with the view that, “Mr Shaw’s plays begin where they end and end where they begin”:

My plays are interludes, as it were, between two greater realities. And the meaning of them lies in what has preceded them and in what follows them. The beginning of one of my plays takes place exactly where an unwritten [Well-Made] play ended. And the ending of my written plays concludes where another play begins. It is the two unwritten plays that they should consider in order to get light upon the one that lies between”

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(Green, 1956: 125-26).

The most significant function of “the discussion” is however, to create a critical distance from which the audience can judge for themselves the cultural validity of the ideals discussed on stage without any control signals from the author. Through this rhetorical convention, Shaw thus redefined the function of the dramatic text in a text/audience relationship. The main value of the “discussion” element⎯ of which more will be said below (C.f. II.5.3) ⎯, lies in its ability to probe into, and deconstruct cultural hierarchies, norms, values as well as encourage relativity. With the discussion, rhetoric enters Shaw’s drama as a subsidiary communicating art with far reaching implications on generic themes and cultural ideals, norms and perspective structures. The “discussion” allows characters to analyse, dissect and represent a prolific body of ideals and attitudes enshrined in received opinion or cultural memory. In the discussion, Shaw creates rhetorical situations on stage: a persuasive speech, a debate, or a group discussion between Realist and Idealist characters in which opposing cultural ideas are juxtaposed and debated in front of a little model audience who as critics, are expected to react to the rhetoric. Characteristically, Shaw’s Realists and Idealists possess the gift of eloquence and know how to explain their motives so convincingly that the audience is always on the side of both speakers and their persuasiveness gives the plays a dialectical effect. In other words, opposing characters are employed in Shaw’s drama to investigate the truth of cultural ideals. Uniquely, Shaw’s sympathy is impartially divided to force his audience to identify with both protagonists and antagonists. Shaw himself summarizes the functions of this rhetorical convention when in The Quintessence he describes the discussion as “a forensic technique of recrimination, disillusion, and penetration through false ideals to the truth, with a free use on the part of the playwright of all the rhetorical and lyrical art of the orator, the preacher, the pleader and the rhapsodist (146).

II.5.2. Characterization: Shaw’s “Promethean” Heroes and Heroines

Whitman (1977:120) who has studied Shaw’s relation to Hegel asserts that Shaw has read Hegel’s Philosophy of History. There is a strong Hegelian element in Shaw’s thinking about dramatic characterization. For Hegel (1953:39-40), history is a dialectical process; a constant opposition and negotiation between the poles of Freedom and Necessity and as the human spirit struggles towards freedom and greater self-knowledge; as it moves from one epoch to another, it generates contradiction and opposition. Only the “world-historical-individual” can intuit the next phase of history and act “instinctively” to bring to pass that which the time requires. Such individuals derive their “purpose, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order, but from a secret source whose content is still hidden:

It was not…his private gain merely, but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe....Such individuals have no consciousness of the general Idea they are unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of

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theirs, on the contrary, they are practical political men… men, who have an insight into the requirements of the time⎯ what was ripe for development... for their world, the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time.... World-Historical men- the heroes of an epoch- must, therefore, be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds; their words are the best of that time (Hegel, 1956: 284).

Shaw admired Hegel’s celebration of iconoclasm and endorsed his philosophy of history in his characterization, especially in his history plays, where he depicts protagonists who challenge received opinions in conformity with Hegel’s contention that the authors of new ideas, the proposers of new contrivances, and the originators of new heresies are benefactors of their species. For Shaw too, drama like history is the struggle of new socio-cultural and political ideas to emerge. Hence, his protagonists are prophetic men and women, inspired sages or visionaries in the grip of the “life force”, working against outmoded institutions and struggling to bring forth new conceptions of life. As an incarnation of the emerging Zeitgeist, the protagonist of Shaw’s history, St. Joan is exemplary in this regard.

However, in place of Hegel’s “World individual”, Shaw substitutes terms like “Realists”, “Promethean heroes” or “Promethean foes of the gods”21 for his iconoclastic protagonists, the gods in his drama being the institutional ideologies that they spun. And although he draws much from Hegel’s socialist notion of characterization, Shaw main dramatic model was Ibsen. He admired the Hegelian notion of characterization in Ibsen’s drama and theorized it in The Quintessence as the basis for his own rational or realistic drama. Applying his own evolutionary framework to Ibsen’s characters, Shaw illuminates his own notion of drama as history.

The initial chapters of The Quintessence, “The two Pioneers”, “Ideals and Idealists” and “The unwomanly Woman” explain Ibsen’s characterization in terms of what Shaw calls the “crablike progress of evolution” (Non-Dramatic, 212), consisting of succeeding waves of orthodoxies (idealisms) and heresies (revolts), where each new heresy becomes the next orthodoxy that needs to be overturned in an ongoing process of evolution. Shaw appreciates Ibsen as a “Heretic first pioneer” in conceiving a drama that was opposed to the “ready-made morality” of conventional drama. Ibsen he argues, is a “First Pioneer dramatist”, the type “who declares it is right to do something hitherto infamous” or, in contrast, declares, it is wrong to do something considered heretofore right with the result that he is “stoned and shrieked at” and considered a corrupter of public morals and family life” (Non-Dramatic,209). On the contrary, Clement Scott, a London dramatic critic for The Daily Telegraph when Ibsen’s Ghost was first performed in London and who so adversely criticized the play, is Shaw’s example of the idealist critic/writer/audience and thus, the direct opposite of Ibsen as a Realist author. As Shaw explains, Ibsen was hysterical shrieked at in print by critics like Scott.22 And Shaw refers to Scott’s newspaper as “the English newspaper which 21 Shaw refers to Saint Joan as “a tragedy as great as Prometheus” (C. f. Henderson, 1932:

543) and to his hero, John Tanner, as a “Promethean foe of the gods” (III: 493). 22 Referring to Scotts’s, review of Ibsen’s Ghost which triggered the writing of The

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best represents the guilty conscience of the middle-class or dominant fact in society today” (Ibid.: 210). It reflected the conventional critics’ and audiences’ adversity or resistance to new art and ideas. For Shaw, the outcry against the play indicates that Ibsen was a heretical first Pioneer and realist.

In the “crablike progress of evolution” in Ibsen’s drama, Shaw discerns three categories of human character: “Realists”, “Idealist” and “Philistines”. However, it is mainly the interaction between Shaw’s Realists and Idealists that propels the dramatic action in his plays. Like Ibsen, Realists in Shaw’s drama are the heretic “Pioneers” in the socio-cultural sphere in that, their task is to attack socio-cultural ideals. Like Clement Scott, his “Idealists” are defenders and upholders of orthodox ideals ( the status quo). Philistines are the easy-going comfort-lovers who do the Idealists’ bidding for the sake of convenience, and because they cannot think out an original moral for themselves. They are the silent majority in the middle.

Idealists are the cultural bulwarks of society’s ideals, the conventional “Good men” of society and the idealist hero of conventional melodrama, as stoic in their defence of ideals as the Realist is fierce in his attack on ideals. The “Realist, always in the minority of one is considered the cultural “bad man” “hated like the devil” by society, though working for society’s evolutionary interest (Ibid.: 209). As the most evolved of the species, Realists do not respond to situations as institutional Ideals dictate, but in accordance with the inner “will” or life force. Seeing beyond the mask of ideals that ideology lurks behind institutions, Realists unmask the ideals, revealing the contradiction between Ideals and experience and demonstrating that institutions are man-made, temporal and must be changed continuously to keep pace with the growth or development of society. Shaw draws the contrast with Idealists as follows:

The Realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us…. The Idealist, who has taken refuge with the ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks that all this is so much for the better. The Realist, who has come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the validity of his own will, thinks it is so much the worse. To the Idealist, human nature, naturally corrupt, is held back from ruinous excesses only by self-denying conformity to the ideals. To the Realist these ideals are only swaddling clothes which man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his progress. No wonder the two cannot agree. The Idealist says, ‘Realism means egoism; and egoism means

Quintessence, Shaw claims that Scott represents the English critics that he and Ibsen were writing against. It is thus not surprising that Scott serves as model Critic-Character in two of Shaw’s plays: The Philanderer and Fanny’s First play. Scott exemplifies idealism in the aesthetic spheres: i.e., in writing, reading and criticism. As Shaw notes, like most Victorian critics, Scott’s judgment of good art is based on a conception of life that was largely literary and artificially founded on stage conventions and idealized existence: “It is a striking and melancholy example of the preoccupation of the critics with literary phrases and formulas to which they have given life by taking them into the tissue of their own living minds, and which therefore seem vital and important to them whilst they are to everyone else the deadest and dreariest rubbish…” (171).

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depravity’. The Realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and to be free in a world of the living and the free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but ‘a good man’, then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be left unheeded (31).

While the Realist attacks cultural illusions, the idealist desperately defends illusions and enforce belief in the Ideals as “a point of ‘public decency’”, thus barring the play of signification between value hierarchies that propels the growth of civilizations.

Shaw’s character catergories thus invert the Marxist hierarchical class structure of Victorian society: upper class, middle class and lower classes. The Idealists, the conventional “good man” is placed at the lowest position in the evolutionary ladder; Philistines, the “silent majority” are placed in the middle and, Realists (whom Victorians would call trouble-makers) are the most evolved of society’s species for Shaw. The inversion served Shaw’s attacks on cultural ideals as well as his transformation of genres. Shaw’s “realist” is the Barthesan reader of the cultural “text” or the Platonic philosopher of the cave. He interprets the ideology behind cultural institutions, refusing to accept the ideals at face value. Contrarily, his idealist counterpart responds uncritically to the cultural text by accepting the ideals or stage illusions as the reality of life.

Uniquely, Shaw’s iconoclastic Realists are heroes and heroines who refuse to act, or behave as society demands. Realists attack ideals. Male realists refuse to play even their manly roles in Shaw’s comedies. But even more significant is Shaw’s characterization of his female Realists. Shaw’s female heroines also reject the female roles ascribed to them in society and in melodrama. It is indeed in Shaw’s defeminised or transexed wilful heroines that we most clearly perceive the influence of socialist feminist discourses out of the 19th century theatre on the author’s drama.

The conceptual roots of Shaw’s radical female characterization can be traced in his earlier fiction and prose writings notably, in his first and very brief essay, My Dear Dorothea: A Practical System of Moral Education for Females Embodied in a Letter to a Young Person of that sex (1878). Written when Shaw was still twenty-one, this exercise in witty polemics reveals an already distinctive focus on the Will, thought and ideals, that was later to be developed as central to social evolution in The Quintenssence. Shaw instructs an imaginary Dorothea that her “Individuality”—the manifestation of her unique will—is her most valuable possession: “Let your rule of conduct always be to do whatever is best for yourself,” he recommends. In fact, “be as selfish as you can.” Shaw however, cautions that genuine selfishness must involve careful thought: “When you make up your mind to be very selfish, you must be quite sure that you know how to be so.” You do not learn how by asking a supposed authority for a code of behavior (Shaw has accused the girl of “idolatry” toward her relatives); you find out “by thinking, without asking anybody.” Dorothea should also collect ideas wherever she can, Shaw counsels. “If you are told that any book is not fit for you to read, get it and read it when nobody is looking.” He concludes: “Remember constantly this rule: the more you think for yourself, the more marked will your

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Individuality be.” Most Shavian dramatic heroines take to this advice. However, for his female characterization, Shaw also draws extensively from

socialist discourses on the social, economic and political situation of the 19th century woman. Stereotypes of womanliness and manliness are perhaps the strongest facet of idealism in Shaw’s drama. In The Quintessence he calls them “a mask for reality” and argues that “Until his[Ibsen’s] warfare against vulgar idealism is accomplished and a new phase entered upon in the Master builder, all his really vivid and solar figures are women” (71-2). “Ibsen’s women” he goes on, “are all in revolt against capitalist morality” (503). Shaw’s criticism of female sexual stereotypes and his transformation of the traditional heroine of comedy and melodrama cannot be understood outside the wider context of the 19th century socialist tradition that influenced his literary thought.

In the chapter, “the Unwomanly woman”, Shaw argues that patriarchal society depends on the sale of women between men. Analogues to this chapter are to be found in socialist discourses on the moral, social, economic and political conditions of the 19th century woman. Shaw admitted reading The Subjugation of the Women and his heroines encapsulate for the first time on the English stage the discourses of Mills, the thesis being that “woman’s nature”, a principle on which capitalist society bases its moral codes is an artificial construction. As Mills (1966:162) puts it,

All women are brought up in the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite of man; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them it is the duty of the woman, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegations of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections

Mill’s key terms, “ideals of character”, “not self-will”, “submission”, duty, “sentimentalities”, “abnegation of themselves” are echoed in “The unwomanly woman” as defining qualities of woman in Victorian culture and Shaw’s call on women to resist these traditional roles (“duty”) is startling:

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that the cage is the natural sphere of the parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else…Still, the only parrot a free-souled person can sympathize with is the one that insist on being let out as the first condition of making itself agreeable....The sum of the matter is... unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself (148)

Like most socialists, Shaw perceives the so-called “natural characteristics” of the woman as the product of processes of cultural education that have subjected the woman for generations: “Hence arises the idealist illusion that a vocation for domestic management and the care of children is natural to women…the domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men” (Getting Married, 38-9). In The Quintessence, Shaw goes even further to assert that,

Our society…comes to regard woman not as an end in herself like man, but solely as a means of ministering to his appetite. The ideal wife is one who does everything that the

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ideal husband likes, and nothing else. Now, to treat a person as a means instead of an end is to deny that person’s right to live (The Quintessence 36-7).

Socialists generally equate the plight of the woman to that of the proletariat working class. For Engel (1882:9), female emancipation is the natural measure of general emancipation. Engel equates women to labourers in a capitalist system. He also sees marriage as a capitalist form of enslavement equal to prostitution. “Marriage itself”, he asserts, “remained, as before, the legally recognized form of, and the official cloak of prostitution”. August Babel makes the same equation when he asserts that, “occasionally the prostitute, being forced into this profession by misery, is a specimen of decency and virtue in comparison with those who are searching for a husband” (C.f. Greiner, 1975:13).23 Babel insists that capitalist Society promotes prostitution yet, hypocritically frowns on its practitioners. Of this hypocrisy, he asserts, “the participants strive to make marriage appear better than it actually is. We here have a degree of hypocrisy not to be found in any other period of society” (Ibid.: 14).

Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession is a dramatic translation of the above socialist discourses. Shaw’s fine aphorism in Getting Married ⎯ “the difference between marriage and prostitution (is) the difference between trade Unionism and unorganized casual labour” (220) summarizes socialist discourses on the woman above. In analogy to Babel’s and Engel’s equation of marriage to prostitution, the eponymous character of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession stresses the artificiality and hypocritical character of marriage and questions the naturalness and the moral hierarchy of marriage over prostitution. In profound contrast to the Courtesan melodrama which denigrates the prostitute and edified marriage, Shaw’s prostitute figure provides a counter generic discourse to the “fallen women” play. She defends prostitution as the only means of survival that society offers women. Whether in marriage or in prostitution his heroine argues, the woman has only a sex function assigned to her. Like all 19th century socialist critics, Shaw treats prostitution on the socialist political-economic and moral levels, with the effect that his play entirely inverts the genre of courtesan melodrama.

An early and vigorous exponent of female/male equality, Shaw developed in his heroines that evolutionary principle of self-will and a total egoism to do their own wills rather than the collective will of society. As The Quintessence asserts, “progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step” (17); “Woman must repudiate her duty altogether: in that repudiation lie her freedom” (40). And his heroines reject their duties as mothers, sisters, wives or lovers.

Shaw’s female heroines either exaggeratedly chase the men they desire; entirely reject marriage as a form of enslavement or get engaged on their own terms. His comedies deal pre-eminently with the conflict between the individual woman’s humanity and the rigid sex roles assigned to her. And none of the weddings at the end 23 Shaw’s Fabian Tract No. 4, What is Socialism reveals the influence of Bebel’s Woman in

the Past, Present, and Future on his female characterization. His chapter on “Collectivism” is subtitled, “Summarized from Babel’s Woman in the Past, present, and Future” and it reveals his knowledge of Babel’s discourse on women.

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of his comedies is the ritual resolution of comedy. To each, the Shavian comedy of ideas impacts meaningful significance that gives comfort to the woman in rebellion.

Shaw’s feminist critique and female representation in comedy is far from dated. Psychoanalytical theorists have rephrased Shaw’s critique of the “womanly woman” and “manly man” in today’s, “gender constructions”. Lacan (1985:28) talks of gender being as much a construction as subjectivity: “woman does not exist” he asserts. Shaw refers to gender constructions in similar terms: “Woman as masquerade”, a “socially assumed mask”, and like Lacan he insists “that a woman is really only a man in petticoats, or, if you like, that a man is a woman without petticoats” (C.f. Dan H. Laurence, 1961:174). The Quintessence thoroughly deconstructs the Victorian Ideal of “womanly woman” and this critique is continued in Shaw’s female characterization and structural inversions of the comic pattern.

Shaw’s characterization as a whole posits a social psychology that opposes Freudian psychology. Shaw’s evolutionary psychology stresses the Id and posits “maladjustment” rather than personal adjustment to society’s ideals as the fruitful way with society: “the reasonable man [Idealists G.N] adopts himself to the world: the unreasonable man [Realists G.N] adopts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” Shaw asserts. (II: 792). Realist and Idealist are political moulds for Shaw’s socio-cultural criticism, but they are also aesthetic moulds for extricating and recontextualizing literary figures from different pretexts and forms of drama by means of an inverse re-semantization. This method of transformation discussed below as “interfigurality” (C.f. II. 7) is most strategic in his genre transformation. It allows him to “retell” generic discourses from the perspective of the oppressed, outcasts or villains and thus, to re-evaluate cultural norms, collapse moral boundaries and balance gender inequalities maintained through generic pretexts.

II.5.3. Figure Perspectives and Perspective structures

Although Shaw seems to grant preference to his realist characters in his prose writings, in his drama, he treats both realists and Idealists with impartiality. In The Quintessence, Shaw claims that Ibsen dissolves the traditional dichotomy of hero and villain and the singleness of viewpoint on moral subjects, which is characteristic of Shakespearean and well-made dramas:

In the new plays [Ibsen’s and his NG], the conflict is not between clear right and wrong: the villain is as conscientious as the hero, if not more so: in fact the question which makes the play interesting (when it is interesting) is, which is the villain and which is the hero; or to put it differently, there are no heroes and no villains” (139).

Dismissing the hierarchical use of heroes and villains in conventional dramas, Shaw argues that the obligation it imposes on the playwright is the use of the unrealistic convention of denouement. The denouement further obliges the author to grant moral favour to the conventional viewpoint of the subjects. In Shakespearean drama Shaw asserts, “If the villain does not tell them [the audience] for five solid minutes that he is

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the villain and glories in his views, someone else in the play does. Everything is cut and dried” (Prefaces, 200). Shaw claims he cannot conceive of men as villains: “men who consciously say to themselves, ‘Evil be thou my good’”. The division of human beings into heroes and villains inevitably leads to the denouement, which Shaw insists, is merely an easy method of bringing the moral problems of the plot to a conventional resolution. The denouement forces on the author other unrealistic conventions, such as, the numerous unrealistic deaths at the end of conventional dramas, which Shaw variously refers to as “stage murders”, “instruments of dénouement” and “the vulgar substitute for tragedy”. Questioning whether the number of characters who die in the last acts of Shakespearean dramas “die dramatically natural deaths” or are “slaughtered in the classic and Shakespearean manner.” (180-81), Shaw emphasizes that, “A villain in a play can never be anything more than a diabolus ex machina, possibly a more exciting expedient than a deux ex machina, but more equally mechanical, and therefore interesting only as mechanism…” for moral conventionalism (II:312). With the dénouement Shaw asserts, Shakespeare’s plays are “…presented with the moral judgment hurled at the audience’s head” (The Quintessence, 189). Vowing to steer clear of melodramatic characters as well as closed perspectives, Shaw declares,

But the obvious conflict of unmistakable good with unmistakable evil can only supply the crude drama of villain and hero, in which some absolute point of view is taken, and the dissentients are treated by the dramatists as enemies to be piously glorified or indignantly vilified. In such cheap wares I do not deal. (Theatres, I: 509).

Ridiculing the popular conceptions of tragedy and comedy as based on the convention of denouement Shaw states, “Every drama must present conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction”, but the dramatic resolution in realistic drama must reflect history or life itself. Hence, “as in real life itself, there may be no ending”:

The curtains no longer come down on a hero, slain or married. It comes down when the audience has seen enough of life presented to it to draw a moral. The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and catastrophes, and take `slices of life` as his material, he finds himself committed to plays that have no endings (Prefaces, 200).

Thus in his criticism, Shaw argues that, “the realistic play constructions or settings were invalidated unless each of the figures: hero and Villain were presented objectively and from their own viewpoints, independent of moral stereotypes or moral conventions (Pl. Pu, xxxvi). The dramatic conflict is not between clear right and wrong; but between two rights and the villain is as “conscientious as the hero, if not more so”. Alternatively, “there are no villains and no heroes” in a modern play.

Shaw’s postulations signal the value he places on “the discussion” in his drama. Its value lies in the necessity to impartially present opposing viewpoints, a precondition for any real argumentative analysis of social questions that precludes the simplistic moral judgments of the closed perspective structures of well-made plays. Paralleling Hegel’s view that contradiction is the power that moves history, Shaw claims “full responsibility for the opinions of all [his] characters, pleasant or unpleasant” (II: 177),

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and his dynamic audience-engaging strategy of “discussion” avoids tendentiousness by carefully showing sympathy for his Realist heroes and Idealists villains, so that audience are forced to identify with both perspectives on his subject. And by rejecting subjectivity in this way, Shaw often ends up deconstructing moral positions and value hierarchies in ways that Pfister claims are characteristic of modern drama.

Analysing the techniques by which dramatists control and coordinate intended reception perspectives, Pfister (1988) provides three idealized models of perspective structures― the A-perspectival structure, the closed perspective and the open perspective structure ―, which illustrate the historical and typological transformation of drama from the morality play to modern 20th century forms. The aperspectival and closed perspective endings are clearly marked by the resolution of all moral conflicts, usually through the conventions of “poetic justice”, the ex machina or denouement that Shaw condemns. According to these conventions, the ethical conflict is resolved in favour of characters that conform to the norm and punishment meted out to deviants; thereby clarifying the author’s intended reception perspective.

Modern drama on the other hand is characterized by “the absence of any preprogrammed solution to the drama. The reception perspective remains unclear or ambivalent either because all control signals are omitted or because the author uses contradictory signals”. The aim is to deconstruct values and encourage relativity:

The absence of any clearly implied reception-perspective has the effect of challenging the sensibilities and critical faculties of the audience and leaving it to choose between accepting the perspectival ambiguity of the text or creating its own ‘unofficial’ reception-perspective that has not been sanctioned by the author, in the awareness that its judgement is always going to be relative in perspectival terms. Plays with an open perspective structure therefore simply do not transmit any specific value norms�either directly or indirectly. All that is conveyed to the receiver is the perspectival relativity of all norms. Thus its structure cannot function as the mediator of unquestioned norms but serves to deconstruct norms that have become problematic or questionable (Pfister, 1988:68).

Shaw’s open-ended plots express his belief that the audience of drama should not be provided with easy judgments, but should be forced to exercise their critical powers of judgment on the moral issues discussed. Hence, contrary to the well-made plots that he was working with or working against in his drama, the threads are never tied together at the end of Shaw’s plays. The spectators are often left with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the play’s close because the discords have not been harmoniously resolved. As an evolutionist, it is dramatically appropriate that Shaw’s endings should look to history, to the future and to impose a responsibility on the audience to think critically of the subject. His endings implicitly state Brecht’s conclusion to the Epilogue of The Good Person of Szechwan which, alienating the audience reads: “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t feel let down;/We know this ending makes some people frown./We had in mind a sort of golden myth/Then found the finish had been tampered with./ Indeed it is a curious way of coping:/To close the play, leaving the issue open….” (311).

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II.6. Criteria for Analysing Genre Reconfiguration (Concepts)

To draw from Shaw’s socialist theory of drama to the New historicist framework, both Shaw and New historicists agree that literature is culturally produced and productive. Shaw’s emphasizes the dialectical relation of text to context and his plays are interdiscoursive frameworks in which elements of the economic, political, cultural and scientific discourses are combined, configured, reinterpreted and communicated to his audience. Opposed to New criticism which approaches the text as an autonomous literary artefacts, or, as a “hermetically sealed entity” (Laurenz Volkmann, 1996:328), Shaw, like the New historicist critics demands that the critic embeds the text in a network of other textual manifestation in order to fathom its social and cultural energy. And since the plays’ cultural productivity is partly derived from their references to both dramatic and non-dramatic works, all analytical chapters will explore the manifold synchronic (and diachronic) intertextual references in the selected plays in order to illustrate both their cultural embeddedness and productivity.

However, although New Historicism emphasis the dialectical relationship of text to context, it does not provide appropriate methods to examine this relation. The thesis that literary texts are culturally produced and productive or actively participate in reshaping contemporary discourses and patterns of cultural knowledge has remained a mere theoretical dictum. Unfortunately enough, New Historicism seem to evade any further operationalizations which would make this dictum applicable to literary analysis. Stephen Greenblatt for instance, states that New Historicism is “a practice – a practice rather than a doctrine” (Greenblatt, 1989:1) and that a theoretical conceptualization of the approach, which might turn it into a “repeatable methodology or a literary critical program” has not been worked out, and will most probably, never be (Gallagher & Greenblatt 2000: 19). Thus, though New Historicism certainly qualifies as an appropriate theoretical framework for Shaw, it has its theoretical defects which will be supplemented in my study with other culture-related concepts like the concept of genres as the memory of culture and concepts of intertextuality.

Despite the absence of theoretical models for literary analysis in New Historicism, we are encouraged by its semiotic (re) definition of the text to employ concepts of intertextuality as analytical tools. The New historicist semiotic definition of text (also endorsed by cultural memory and genre theorists) denies the binary opposition of ‘art’ and ‘social life’ or text and context. It insists that context is only accessible via texts, which not only employ certain established cultural patterns of discourses (genres) to construct their models of reality, but also actively transform these discourses in the process. New Historicism, memory and genre theories thus hit a remarkable meeting point in intertextuality and I will resort to the concept of genres as repositories of cultural memory and to structuralist and postructuralist concepts of intertextuality to make the New Historicist framework applicable to Shaw’s genre transformations.

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II.6.1. Genres, Repositories (Active Agents) of Cultural Memory

It is generally agreed in cultural studies that genres constitute force-fields of tradition and innovation and are therefore “the meeting place between a systematic account of structure and accounts of historical change” (Todorov 1990:19-20). Recent memory theories reconceptualise genres as “repertoires of cultural memory” (Van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder, 2000), insisting that the formal characteristics, expectations and conventions of genres are closely related or belong to, “the common knowledge of societies that individuals acquire by socialization and culturalization”. As Erll and Nünning (2006:17) assert, “authors, texts and genres function in establishing, maintaining, subverting or undermining concepts of collective identity, values and norms”, through a “continual process of ‘desemiotisation and re-semiotisation’ (the de-ascribing and re-ascribing of meaning to signs” by“recharging old texts with meaning)”. Genres function in the formation and transformation of cultural memory by (re)interpretating our life experiences. They transmit and transform shared values and are in turn transformed in the process. To Dubrow (1982:34), they function by means of “familiarization and defamiliarization”.

Athough Shaw’s genre transformation was aimed at defamiliarizing Victorian cultural memory, defamiliarization is stressed as a counterpoise (not a denial) of the sometimes argued view of Shaw as the last of the great Victorians. His drama was inspired by the Victorian generic tradition that he challenges and while it is testimony to the complexity of his drama that modern theories, historiography, intertextuality and deconstruction can be applied to his plays, for theoretical and practical reasons, genre theory denies an uncritical dichotomy between the Victorian and modern periods.

William Raymond (1968:244) for instance asserts, “Shaw self-evidently was modern: indeed ‘modern’ as the description stuck quite generally, and has continued to stick, in that self-conscious and very local transition from a Victorian to post 1918 world”. Recent theoretical discussion of genre and textuality however, militates against any uncritical acceptance of the Victorian/modern dichotomy. Like any writer who mediates two periods, it is difficult to detect a “logical transition” in Shaw from the Victorian to the modern era. As force-fields between tradition and innovation, his plays were constructed out of components of Victorian generic traditions, while he was transforming these Victorian genres into more modern forms. Hence, while the concept of “transformation” and the term “modern” are particularly significant for Shaw, a division that marks his plays as Victorian or modern is uncritical. This study uncovers in the plays two authors: a 19th century artist and a self-evident modern.

Underlying my dissatisfaction with any exclusive “Victorian” or “modern” designation of the plays resides the conviction of, among others, Fowler (1982:156) that “in literature there is no creation ex nihilo….Either the new kind is a transformation on an existing one”, or else it is “assembled” out of “existing generic material”. Of course, the simple labelling of some of the plays in this study as “modern” does not deny the existence of intrinsic Victorian generic materials; on the

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contrary, both adjectives (“Victorian” and “modern”) locate the plays chosen for this study within the context of specific 19th century conventions, practices or theatrical kinds. Nor does the term, “modern” elevate the plays to a “new” kind. Nevertheless, regarding Shaw as a late Victorian dramatist conjures up association with a moribund tradition on its way out, just as viewing his plays as “modern” hints on the transformative value of leading in a new tradition. To maintain, as I do that the plays effect generic transformations is to agree with Todorov (1990:10-15; 20) that, a new genre “is always a transformation of one or several genres”; to maintain anything less is to accept at the very least, the view by Fowler (1982:20) that “every work of literature belongs at least to one genre”. If some of the plays in this study are said to be “modern”, this description must account for the play’s dialogic relation with one or more antecedent kinds for, the generic “dialogue” in each play is conducted largely, though not exclusively, with Victorian generic traditions in mind.24 For the generic dialogue in Shaw’s plays, Genette’s concept of trantextuality becomes significant.

II.6.2. Transtextuality

The concept of the bricoleur developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss is the basis for Genette’s two main concepts of generic-formation: “transtextuality” and “hypertextuality”. To put Strauss’s concept simply, as a conceptual bricoleur, the artist undertakes a literary activity, “bricolage” whose specificity lies in taking bits and pieces of “whatever” from “wherever” and reassembling them instead of creating new things out of nothing. Every sentence we utter or write Strauss holds, uses old words learned from other people’s use to create new meaning and as bricoleurs, artists constantly re-use and rearrange old texts, words or concepts in fresh and new ways.

Elaborating on Strauss’s bicoleur in order to flash out a structuralist account of textual transformation and to explain the practice of literary critics, Genette (1992 3-4) asserts that the bricoleur, whether he be one of Strauss’s primitive myth-maker or a Western literary critic, creates a structure out of a previous structure by rearranging elements already arranged within the object of his/her study. By this rearrangement of generic components, the new structure is no longer identical to the old. To Gennette, the bricoleur-critic breaks down a literary work into themes, motifs, key-words, obsessive metaphors, quotations, index cards and references (Ibid.:5) and arranges the work in terms of criticism by displaying the work’s relation to the system of “themes” “motifs”, key-words, etc. which make up the literary system out of which the bricoleur-author’s work is constructed. Texts then, are not unique wholes but particular

24 In his notes to Bakhtin (1981:427), Holdquist maintains that in the Bakhtinian sense,

dialogue is when a “word, discourse, language, or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’, when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things”. One way of viewing this deprivileging is through the “parodying and travestying double” of a genre. Shaw's plays are such doubles to the Victorian genres that he transforms.

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articulations (selections and combinations) of a closed generic system, but the function of criticism is to rearrange the work, which might not display its relation to the system, back into its relation to the closed system. As Genette asserts, “Literary production” is parole (a series of partially autonomous and unpredictable acts) while its “consumption” by society is langue” and critics and readers tend to order texts “into coherent systems (Ibid.: 18-19). The critic and author are bricoleurs, but the author rearranges elements of the system into a new work, obscuring its relation to the system while the critic takes the work back to the system, illuminating its relation to system.

In Palimpsest (1997), an improvement on his Architext (1992), Genette employs the term, “hypertextuality” in his analysis of the relation of texts to genre systems. Hypertextuality is “any relationship uniting a text, B, (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call hypotext], upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette, 1997:5). Hypertextuality entails “the porosity of partitions between genres” (Ibid. 399), the re-use of existing structures “in an unforeseen and ‘unlawful manner’” (Ibid.: 398).

It is however, important to not that Genette’s concept of transtextuality is not only a more circumscript rendition of intertextuality as defined and used by Poststructuralist theorists like Krestiva and Barthes25, but also a reductivist “translation” of Strauss’s more general concept of “bricolage”. While Genette’s transtextuality is very useful for genre analysis, his re-employment in “Structuralism and Literary Criticism” of the term, bricolage and of “intertextuality” in Palempsest tames the the broader perspective of “literary production”. Genette also lays so much emphasis on the relation of a work to a single genre system and thus makes it sound as though a text must belong to a single genre. For purposes of illuminating the broader perspective of genres from which Shaw extracts material for plays like Man and Superman (1903), I will use Struass’s more general and non-directional term, bricolage and restrict Genette’s “hypertextuality” for those Shavian plays whose relations I can only trace to one or two pretexts or to a single genre.

Throughout his career, Shaw described his art as original only in the sense that he re-used texts, characters and plots in fresh applications: “all is fish that comes to my hook. My Plays are full of pillage” he declared (IV: 799). On originality he asserts,

It is a dangerous thing to be hailed at once, as a few rash admirers have hailed me, as above all things original; what the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it. Meyerbeer seemed prodigiously original to the Parisians when he first burst on to them. Today, he is only the cow that followed Beethoven’s plough. I am a crow that has followed many ploughs (Prefaces, 35)

In re-using , re-arranging and assigning new meanings and functions to old textual elements and patterns, the writer re-moulds the genre’s make-up, bringing in new 25 Genette’s reductivist approach to intertextuality is clearly marked by the replacement of

the original concept, “Intertextuality” with” transtextuality”. He even subsumes Intertextuality under transtextuality. Also notice his replacement of the original “intertext” with more specific terms like “pretext” and “hypotext”

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elements, sometimes formal but most commonly thematic. The processes by which genres are transformed in Shaw’s drama can also be identified in the cartography of methods designed by Fowler (1982): topical invention, combinations, change of scale and function, counterstatement and generic mixture (Inclusion and hybridity).

II.7. Methods/Forms of Generic Transformation and Contamination

Change of scale and topical invention are similar procedures. “Change of Scale” is the result of magnification (macrologia) or reduction (brachylogia) and Shaw’s enlarged paratext, one method by which he transforms the written dramatic text is an outstanding example of magnification in accordance with Fowler’s analysis of genre transformation (Fowler,1982:172). The subtexts of his plays overwhelms the primary text. The preface to Adrocle and the Lion (1916) is twice the length of the play and its connection to the play is tenuous. Man and Superman (1903) contain more than a preface, “An Epistle Dedicatory”, a “Revolutionist Handbook”, a “Pocket Companion” etc. and has stage directions of up to four pages. This practice as Pfister (1988:14-15) asserts, not only “reveals a highly developed distrust of stage producers and actors”, but “elevates the printed dramatic text to an autonomous entity in itself” (14) and amount to “a mediating communication system in its own right” that “undermines the criteria essential for differentiating between the dramatic and narrative text” (15). There is no doubt that this innovation stems from Shaw’s novelistic background.

However, “macrologia” in Shaw’s works extends beyond his vast paratextual writings to the subject matter of his drama. Applied to recognized generic topics, Fowler calls magnification a “topical invention”. “Topical invention” makes room for fuller development of the generic topoi or the introduction of new topics. Authors can bring in new topics that “have a decisive role in generic change” (Fowler, 1982.173), and Shaw’s diverse background learnings (novelist, playwright, Fabian socialist public speaker and economic writer, letter writer, auto-biographer, prose stylist, music and drama critic, preeminent cultural critic etc.) proved useful. “Topical invention” offers a wealth of sources of generic change for Shaw as evident in most of the plays.

Genres change when new topics are added to generic repertoires. Sometimes the topics are entirely new; sometimes they are imported from other genres or literatures, but more often, topical invention is a matter of specialization: of developing a topic already within the repertoire. The Unpleasant plays (ch. III) offer an in-depth analysis of the economic moral of capitalistic systems and are products of the author’s experience as writer and editor of the Fabian tracts. In the specialized economic content of the plays, Shaw produces two anti-genre types of 19th century forms.

“Invented” topics may also take the forms of importing subjects from other genres. Shaw’s Man and Superman for instance, deals with the biological reproduction of a higher human species (supermen), through willed acquisition of inherited characteristics and as a romantic comedy, it thematically dialogues with Darwin’s evolutionary theory as well as with utopian novelistic precedents like Edward

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Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891). The play thus shares the English utopian tradition that not only employed Darwin’s scientific discourses on genetic mutability in a utopian context, but helped forged paths into the new genre that was ultimately to take the name of Science fiction in 1929. In importing the theme of human biological and intellectual evolution in comedy, Shaw reshaped the scientific discourses in his own religious philosophy of creative evolution. But more significantly, by his very theme, “superman with a super brain, which in itself qualifies as a staple in Science fiction, Shaw became part of the movement that helped forged the new Science fiction genre. In this play, Shaw forays into the Science fiction by using devices such as the latest automobile, a driver who masters modern motor mechanics and by contriving a whole night long’s dream in which his hero wakes up in a new world. The hero thus impresses us as a time-traveller in Science Fiction.

Besides its thematic scope, Man and Superman combines a variety of literary and nonliterary texts and discourses. The subtitle, A comedy and a philosophy hits the interdiscoursive structure of the play. The play itself consists of an epic dream framed in a social romantic comedy, but the title word, “Superman” (the antithesis of man) alludes to leading figures in two musical texts adapted from literary texts that have haunted the European imagination: the rake as social anarchist in Mozart-Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, which is an adaptation of the old Spanish Don Juan story; Moliere’s play, Le Festin de Pierre and the overreaching intellectual world-bettering scholar in league with the devil in Gounoud’s Faust, whose most famous previous incarnation was Goethe’s two part play. Shaw knew both operas intimately from his childhood: his opera singing mother and her musical associate George Lee, rehearsed them in the family home; he painted a mural of Mephistopheles from Ganoud’s opera in his bedroom in Dalkey, and taught himself to play the piano by practicing the overture to Don Giovanni (Morgan, 1972: 100). In “the Hell Scene” of Man and Superman, these supermen of his childhood imagination are brought together in text and on stage for the first time in comedy.

The term, “Superman” clearly suggests that Shaw’s play should not be confined within the strain of literary genres for, by this term, Shaw is also alluding to Nietzsche’s “Übermenschen” (overman) as the latest manifestation of 19th century voluntarism with a conceptual core in the Will to power”. But Nietzsche’s concept of the Will is parodied in Shaw’s dramatic action which depicts a rather artful (super) woman dominating her man in the duel of sex. In fact, in Man and superman Shaw plays with texts, narratives, philosophy, psychology, science, linguistic and textual devices to suggest that his title, “Superman” has several quite distinct and overlapping meanings. As analyzed in chapter, IV, the play’s intertextual credentials allows it to be read, not just as a rewrite in Shavian religious terms of several key texts in European culture. The religious quality of the play is underscored by Shaw’s transformatory use of the Christian morality, Everyman, but unlike the medieval morality, Shaw describes Man and Superman as “a dramatic parable of Creative evolution” and the play not

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only provides a counterstatement to the various discourses and texts it alludes to (such as the Don Juan legend, Nietzsche’s discourse and the emotional pattern of comedy itself), but also counters Christian theological concepts of Heaven, Hell and salvation.

A “Counterstatement” consists of a rhetorical inversion whereby, “dispraise is modelled on inverted praise, malediction on valediction, and so forth” (Fowler, 1982:175) and, as already discussed in this chapter, Shaw deliberately constructs his play to contradict the dominant cultural ideologies transmitted or promoted in his pretext(s). For Shaw, the best way to counter outmoded ideals is to invert the forms through which they are transmitted and this indeed, is where Shaw is at his best. The cultural myth of manliness handed down in cultural memory in discourses like Nietzsche’s and the Don Juan legend is inverted in Shaw’s Man and Superman where the legendary pursuer of women, Don Juan is pursued and domesticated by the seduced victim of the prior text. In fact, almost all of Shaw’s plays invert a major generic ideology by means of inverse resemantization of the generic figures (heroes and heroines), plot and perspective structures so that the plays amount to counter-generic statements as illustrated in the analytical chapters of this study.

Shaw’s counterstatements are mainly obtained by means of inverse resemantization of generic figures and as already discussed; “Realist” and “Idealist” are political-aesthetic moulds for such inverse resemantization of generic figures in Shaw’s drama. Authors generally assign to events or characters from pretexts, causes that are different from those given in the hypotexts.Analysing character transformation under the more general phrase, “Semantic transformation”, Genette (1997:324-259) charts out various procedures by which characters are transformed from one text or genre to another through “motivation”, “demotivation”, “transmotivation” or “transexuation”. “Motivation” in its simplest sense consists of the introduction of a motive where the hypotext offered, or at least states none. Demotivaion on the other hand consists of supressing or eliding an original motivation for a character’s action(s). Transmotivation operates by double substitution― i.e., by a process of demotivation and (re)motivation: the suppression of an old motive and the provision of a new one.

Genette analysis characterization in transtextuality, but subsumes the device under “semantic transformation”. Referring to the device as “figures on loan”, Ziolkowski (1983:133) asserts, “We are amused because the ‘figure on loan’ deviates so greatly from our expectations”. I will examine character transformations in this study using Müller’s more specific term, “interfigurality”. Stressing the transtextual and intergeneric value of characters in literary writing, Müller holds that characters extricated and recontextualized in different texts and genres are equivalent to quotations. As derived segments, they are subject to transformations in the hypotexts, and that interfigurality is common to all forms of transformations: parodies, continuations, series, and is used in all genres.

Gibbs (1994:115) asserts that, “Of all writers, Shaw presents himself as one of the least perturbed by ‘the anxiety of influence´”. This anxiety of influence is most evident in the way he openly parades his recycling of literary figures: “I was finding that the

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surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was …to stick closely to the methods of Moliére; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Dickens” (Letters, V: 258). In The Devil’s Disciple he adds, “Let those who have praised my originality in conceiving Dick Dudgeon’s strange religion read Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; and I shall be fortunate if they do not rail at me for a plagiarist” (x). In Back to Methuselah, his character, Savvy asserts “the old people are the new people reincarnated …I suspect I am Eve. I am very fond of apples; and they always disagree with me” while another character, Conrad replies, “You are Eve in a sense. The Eternal life persists; only it wears out its bodies and minds and gets new ones, like new clothes. You are only a new hat and frock on Eve” (V: 423). But the interaction of Shaw’s characters with others is more complicated than the unmediated piracy that these statements suggest. The dialogue between characters in Shaw’s plays is creative, active and counter-directional. To evoke the Bakhtinian model of the generation of meaning, his characters create a dialogic and often oppositional relation with the literary figures with which they relate.

II.7.1. Parodic transformation

Engaged in rewriting “cultural scripts” (“Idealisms”) and contradicting cultural concepts of normality, parody becames Shaw’s main mode of socio-cultural criticism. His plays generally bear an ironic and somewhat, parodic relation to the cultural and aesthetic values of the pretexts and the generic motifs they echo.

The structuralist, Margaret A. Rose (1993:6) argues that parody is not only the unrecognized primary form of intertextuality, but also the most adaptable form to ever new forms and concepts of literature and that most theories of literature now deemed modern and Postmodern, especially intertextuality are founded on the dialectical play with devices, pretexts and traditions contained in the “dual-plane structure” of parody.26 Parody she asserts, has an essentially “comic aspect”, but its “comic humour” is not a “mocking laughing at” but “a comic laughing with” (Ibid.: 52). In its playfulness, parody defamiliarizes existing forms or texts: “if a parody of tragedy becomes a comedy, a comedy parodied may be a tragedy” or any other combination of genres (Ibid.121). Thus she insists, any comprehensive theory of parody must consider the essentially “comic character of parody”, its intertextual status, the peculiarity of its dialogic structure, the reader’s reception, its socio-cultural function and the ambivalent attitude of the parodists towards the parodied work.

If imitation and transformation are simultaneous procedures in parody, then, parody functions to destroy and recreate; to oppose a literary author or group of

26 In Parody: Ancient; Modern, And Post-Modern, Margaret Rose analyses the significant,

but “unrecognized” role of parody in Russian formalism and Structuralist and Poststructuralist forms of “intertextuality”, insisting that all modern theories that make Krestiva’s intertextual focus a key element draw on the dual-plane structure of parody.

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authors by means of comic humour or, an aesthetic system by exposing it, yet, it is also a device for renovating the old texts that it criticizes. Ambiguously, parody does both: destroy and recreate, imitate and transform; criticize and renovate. In the process of giving new function and meaning to old texts the parody also renews old literary devices. Such renovations are also intertextually comparable to the re-use of a quotation, character, plot etc. from an old author, text or genre in a new application. In refashioning old texts, parody also re-employs old devices “for purposes foreign to its original uses” as Genette would say. The view that parody destroys and recreates; criticize and renovate suggests the ambivalence of parodic works and authors.

If parody needs not only be viewed as a negative or destructive attack (a mocking ridicule) on the parodied texts, but also as a re-constructive re-employment of that text as well, then, great parody is characterized by ambiguity towards its parodied text. Two main theories of the parodist’s attitude towards his target are included in Margaret Rose’s theory to accentuate the ambivalence of parody: the first maintains that the parodist chooses to imitate his target for the purpose of mocking it and the motivation is contempt. A second holds that, the parodist imitates in order to write in the style of the pretext and is motivated by sympathy towards the imitated text or love of its style. The first view sees parody as an unambivalent form of “ridiculing imitation” equal to travesty and mock-heroic. The second holds that the parodist has admiration of some kind for his “target” that he makes it part of his own text by means of imitation.

As Margaret Rose asserts, the view that one can only parody what one loves is only partially true. Parody is frequently the symptom of satiation and satiation with the stale unburdens itself through laughter. Parodies are inspired by a negative tendency towards the transmitted text. Yet the view that the parodist’s attitude towards his target is sympathetic is also partially true. As seen above, Parody is not only destructive but also re-constructive. To Margaret Rose, “parodistic changes of pre-given traditions need not only be viewed negatively as the destruction of that which has been ‘sung’ or ‘spoken’, as they reveal at the same time a process of linguistic reformation and new-formation” (46). The suggestion is that the mockery of an object need not exclude the desire to change and modernize it. The desire to change or modernize may as well emanate from the love to preserve/ conserve as parodists often turn to reproduce their targets even better in their parodies. Thus, Margaret Rose defines Parody as “the comic refunctioning of performed linguistic or artistic material” of a pretext or genre (52).

The newness of Shaw’s hypertextual and parodic transformations lies, not so much in the new forms that he assigns to old texts as in his ambivalent or paradoxical treatment of the subject of his hypertext(s) as well as recognized generic topoi. Shaw clearly saw that ideology lurks behind conventional texts, which mainly sanction institutional or culturally accepted “truths” and so he treats as “text”, not just the written words, but some “construct” of meaning in the hypotext or genre. He constructed his plays with the deliberate intension of problematizing the subjects inscribed or affirmed in his audience minds by his pretext(s). As Fergusson (1965:109) holds, the perspective of Shaw’s plays is “romantic irony” and the basis of his thesis,

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his rationalized characters, and the movement of his dialogue the “unresolved paradoxes”.

II.7.2. Generic Mixtures: Inclusions and Hybridity

To turn from single genre transformations to transformations, involving generic combinations or mixtures, the main procedures are “inclusion” and hybridity. Like in the ordinary process of embedding in syntax, inclusion is when a literary work encloses another within it as in the- play-within-the-play structure.

“Inclusions” like a play-within-a-play are generally governed by restrictive conventions. They are either explicitly or implicitly announced through transitional passages introducing the inset. The arrival of the actors in Hamlet is announced by Rosencrantz and Polonius (II, ii, 312-71) and even before actually getting round to performing the “The murder of Gonzago”, the actors appear in dialogue with Hamlet, discussing their repertoire and the play that they are to perform (II, ii. 416-539).

The insets can also be introduced through framing devices: Inductions, prologues and epilogues as in Shaw’s Fanny’s first play. Attention must be paid to the relation of the super-ordinate level to subordinate plot. Actors in an inset may function in a variety of ways. They may remain separate from the figures on the primary dramatic level. In this case, the connection is restricted to their function as troupe of actors. However, they may also appear among, and interact with characters at the super-ordinate level or with the fictional audience in the course of the inserted performance.

Traditionally, the inset and metrical genre are likely to be closely related. The main value of the play-within-the play lies in giving drama a self-referential quality, since in it, one group of dramatic figures from within or without the super-ordinate sequences performs a play (the inner play) to another group of figures. By inserting a second fictional level into the text, the dramatist duplicates the performance situation of the external communication system on the internal level. Drama becomes self embedded in the dramatic medium. The fictional audience corresponds to the real audience in the auditorium and the fictional authors, actors and directors to their real-life counterparts as drama is becomes mirrored in its own medium. Such is the case in Shaw’s Man and superman, St. Joan and Fanny’s first play.

As is the case with “the play-within-the play”, analysis of these Shavain plays will pay particular attention to the form of the inset and the quantitative and qualitative relationship of the inset to the primary action. Such a relation becomes tenuous when the inset is performed by a separate set of figures or, when the fictional actors representing the figures in the play-with-the-play never appear in the super-ordinate plot at all as in Fanny’s First play. Even when the figures on both levels are identical, the connections of Shaw’s insets to the main plots are never direct and often create generic controversies. The scenically enacted dream insets in Man and Superman and St. Joan seem to thematically and formally separate them from the super-ordinate plot.

An analysis of the structural relations between the two levels of the plot and sets of

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actors must be complemented by an analysis of the role played by real and fictional spectators. The spectators may participate in the play-within-the-play in a variety of ways. In the most reduced form, the fictional audience is simply present on stage and their physical presence signals the double fictionality of the dramatic presentation. Spectators of the inset may also act as commentators on the poetological implications of the inserted play as in Every Man out of His Humour, Hamlet or Fanny’s First Play.

Dream inclusions are more conspicuous than the realistic play inset. Dreams in drama present sequences of actions or events that are imagined by one of the figures of the play. Dream insets can either be presented scenically as in Shaw’s Man and Superman and Saint Joan, but they can also be mediated narratively. Mediated narrative dream insets are common in traditional drama, probably because they are easy to realize on stage and do not require any additional conventions of presentation. The scenically enacted dream inset is staged multimedially as the stage may be transformed into the inner chambers of the dreamer’s mind as in Man and Superman or St. Joan. Of course, when this happens, it is crucial that the transition from the super-ordinate primary dramatic level to the inserted dream also be signaled to the audience. Separate codes or conventions have been developed to do so. Although internal frames like prologues can be used to mark the transition into the dream, there are other iconic signals used on such occasion that can even be understood by an audience that is unfamiliar with the dramatic conventions of such a transition. The transition from the social comedy into the psychological world of a dream in Man and superman for instance, is prepared for through actual allusions to “sleep”, “night” and “dream”.

The “Inclusion” of dreams in drama serves a variety of functions. Like “the Play-within-the-play”, the dream inset underscores the potential to expose the medium of drama by referring to it implicitly. Its imaginative quality serves as a metaphorical model for the fictionality of dramatic presentation because what fantasy and fiction share is an element of non-reality or illusion. But more significant is the fact that, the dream inset is an anti-realist convention that eliminates — or at least weakens — the restrictions imposed by the dramatic medium on the presentation of psychological processes. As psychodrama, the dream enables the dramatist to present an extreme form of psychologization on stage. More psychological in form, the dream has the potential of exposing the inner minds of dramatic figures to audience by going beyond the information articulated verbally or non-verbally. The valuable functions of dreams in drama can be further emphasized by a comparison of drama to narrative fiction.

While in the narrative texts, the development of characters, their psychological dispositions and ideological orientations may be unfolded in as much exhaustive detail as is desired and the inner workings of characters’ sub-consciousness can be exposed by the author at will, the restricted nature of the dramatic text lacks these stream of consciousness techniques. The absence of a narrator or a mediating communication system in drama means that the possibility of presenting the biographical or inner consciousness of dramatic figures is greatly reduced. In the dramatic text, the emphasis on what is consciously articulated— and in classical drama at least, this primarily

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means what is articulated verbally — reflects a certain one-sidedness. Dramatic figures appear predominantly as people who portray themselves rather than exist in their own right. They appear in interaction with others as conscious speakers, not solitary individuals in novels. The attempt to add a deeper psychological dimension to dramatic figures by introducing new conventions of scenic dreams confirms the limitations of the dramatic text and can be evaluated as an attempt to find a functional equivalence to the methods of portraying the inner consciousness as developed in the modern novel through interior monologues and stream of consciousness.

“Inclusion” need not occasion full-blown generic transformations. Hybridity on the other hand is an outright mixture that opens up a much wider possibility of genre change. It is the point at which theoretical interests in genre sudden increases as genre critics and authors themselves find difficulties ascribing genre labels to hybrids. Generic terminology becomes slippery because the cross-breeding is proportionate.

Hybridity is where two or more complete repertoires are present in such proportions that no one of them dominates the other. As the most obvious sort of generic mixture, the component genres of a hybrid will necessarily be of the same scale. They are neighbouring or contrasting kinds that have some external forms in common and cooperate with each other. But corporation between hybrid forms is a matter of the hybrid keeping the forms distinct by playing off two or more generic styles against one another, sometimes in concert, sometimes in opposition. In this regard, much will be said in chapter V about St. Joan as a hybrid play par excellence. Shaw describes the dramatic action as “a romance, a tragedy and a comedy”, and this hybridized form reflects the many-sidedness of his historiographic attitudes.

All of the above theoretical and methodological design will substantiate my analysis of Shaw’s generic transformation as a means of aesthetic and socio-cultural criticism. As a general theoretical framework, I opt for Cultural Studies, the major value of which lies in its interdisciplinarity. Among the approaches found in the wide field of Cultural Studies, I have resorted to New Historicism because its emphasis on the dialectical relation of literary texts and genres to context and thus, best assists my argument that Shaw’s plays are culturally produced and productive in being aesthetically and culturally critical of their Victorian context. At the level of genre analysis, I will resort to Structuralist and postructuralist concepts of intertextuality in order to correlate the plays with other textual manifestations or forms of writing.

Applying the above criteria, which might provide at least, a heuristic framework for an investigation into the plays’ negotiations with both their genres and their cultural contexts, the various contextualizing analyses in subsequent chapters are supposed to reveal the different strategies and (possible) functions of rewriting or refashioning culture and dramatic forms that are employed in Shaw’s dramatic corpus, and by which the plays distinctly take controversial stances on contemporary cultural discourses, thereby actively participating in and contributing to shaping them.

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III. FABIAN CRITICAL ANTI-GENRES:WIDOWERS’HOUSES (1885-92) AND MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION (1893-94)

In The Quintessence other critical writings on on 19th century drama, Shaw stressed the utilitarian functions of drama and the contemporary relevance of the subject. In The Quintessence he asserts, “an interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed (139). Elsewhere he insists that, “it is impossible for any fictionist, dramatic or other, to make true pictures of modern society without some knowledge of the economic anatomy of it” (Prefaces, 708). With the title of his first collection of three plays (in which the two title plays appear) as well as in the topicality of the plays and their emotive effect on audience, Shaw sounded the funeral knell for the trivial forms of 19th English drama. With the title, The unpleasant plays, Shaw further signalled a break with 19th century comedy and melodrama. The plays differ from their generic precedent in their explicit concern with, and realistic treatment of, contemporary social and economic crimes of capitalism (slum landlordism in Widowers’ Houses and prostitution in Mrs Warren). And Shaw’s essay, “The Problem Play — A Symposium” (1895) offers a rationale for these “topical inventions” in traditional comedy and melodrama.

Until the late 19th century, he wrote, great dramatists were never social reformers. Aristophanes, Jonson, and Moliere knew all the burning issues of their times and reflected them in their plays; “but their theme finally was not this social question or that social question, this reform or that reform, but humanity as a whole.” They avoided making social questions necessary to the conflict in their plays because they realized that a drama with an essentially economic or legal problem for the motive cannot outlive the solution of that problem. But every dramatist, past or present, realizes that. What made the difference in the past was that such problems were “too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce great poetry.” Since the industrial revolution however, the growth of population in the cities and the wide publicity given to the plight of the working class has brought about “a steady intensification in the hold of social questions on the larger poetic imagination.” We therefore see the greatest modern dramatist, Ibsen, turning from dramatic poems on the grandest scale (e.g. Emperor and Galilean) “to comparatively prosaic topical plays on the most obviously transitory social questions, finding in their immense magnitude under modern conditions the stimulus which, a hundred years ago, or four thousand, he would only have received from the eternal strife of man with his own spirit.” These problems will continue to attract the great dramatist, since “the highest genius . . . is always intensely utilitarian.”27 27 Shaw, in “The Problem Play — A Symposium”, reprinted in Shaw on Theatre, pp. 58-66.

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The Unpleasant plays are designed to force specific social problems into the limelight in order to encourage satisfactory solutions and Shaw’s objective is the “utilitarian” one of improving society through the destruction of impeding economic and sociological ideals. The plays convey a distressingly accurate idea of the tenement life of the poor in capitalist societies that was the common lot of industrial London. The immediate issue is not love, as in comedy and melodrama, but the housing and prostitution problems of poor labourers. As Shaw himself makes clear, The Unpleasant plays were directly inspired by his socialist activities and personal experience of life in the industrial city:

My life has been passed mostly in big modern towns, where my sense of beauty has been starved whilst my intellect has been gorged with problems like that of the slums in this play, until at last I have come, in a horrible sort of way, to relish them enough to make them the subjects of my essays as an artist (Plays, 45).

For Widowers’ Houses, Shaw drew upon his own rent-collecting experiences in Dublin and upon records of official investigations into the London housing situation called the “bluebooks”, one of which appears as stage prop in Act III.28 Mrs Warren’s profession analyses the causes of the rising rate of prostitution among working class women and the play has background reference in the discourses of Victorian reform movements. Equally important as a background context for the plays are Shaw’s socialism and his idiosyncratic belief in the will and social evolution. Their techniques are directly inspired by the political strategies of the London Fabian society in which Shaw was a leading figure. His personal belief in the will and evolution against Ideals converges with the Fabian ideal of gradual political reform to shape the dramatic techniques of these first plays.

Shaw’s dramatic techniques of the Unpleasant plays converge perfectly with the objective and methods of the Fabian society that influenced his outlook on life. Like Shaw’s, the objective of the Fabians was the utilitarian one of forcing specific social problems into the light in order to encourage satisfactory solutions; of improve society through the destruction of impeding economic and sociological ideals. The Fabians, a splitter group of intellectual socialists with Shaw as their main theorist, heretically favoured constitutional measures and a gradualist approach to social reform rather than a Marxist revolt against them. Their chief method was that of “permeation”. The ideal-destroyer infiltrated a domain where ideals were upheld and sought acceptance by working, contributing funds, or even entertaining. He then systematically chipped away at the vulnerable ideals using arguments backed by facts and ridicule tempered with amiability. The Fabians permeated capitalist associations, political parties, and newspapers in this manner. Noting the effectiveness of the Fabian strategy, Shaw employed his artistic talents to permeating another stronghold of capitalism, the English theatre. In the two plays, he employs his artistic talent to exposing the reality

28 Shaw speaks of Widowers’ Houses as a bluebook play” (C.f. Preface, 676). On his rent-

collecting experiences, see Letters I, 371

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behind the conventions of romantic comedy in Widowers’ Houses and and against melodrama in Mrs Warren’s.... Though Shaw realized that the genres were laden with ideals, he also recognized that they could be refashioned into a useful weapon in that broader Fabian campaign against idealism. The techniques of the plays are highly specialized techniques that defy comprehension except when seen against the background of Shaw’s belief in the Will and social evolution as well as the Fabians’ methods of reforming idealistic institutions (genres included). It is in this context that I call the plays “Fabian critical anti-genres”. The precise ethical purposes and techniques of genre reconfiguration in the Unpleasant plays will therefore remain obscure until they are set against the background of the gradual political strategies of the Fabians and Shaw’s idiosyncratic belief in evolution.

To further define the generic transformations in The unpleasant Plays is to distinguish them from their generic prototypes and from the typical 19th century problem play in which realism depended on the logic of well-made plot construction. Shaw appropriately works within the outlines of “the problem play” form, usually designated at the time (but not justifiably) by the term, “realistic play.” Shaw subtitles Widowers’ Houses, an “original didactic realistic play” and the play has tenuous connections with the pseudo-realistic well-made romantic comedies of Sardou and Augier. If Mrs. Warren’s.... had reached the stage in the nineties, it would have reminded playgoers of a specific series of plays, from La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils to Henry Jones’s Mrs Dane’s Defence and Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray which all belong to the Courtesan problem melodrama in which the heroine was known on the Victorian stage as a “fallen woman”. Yet, as problem plays, the realism and techniques of the unpleasant plays distinguish them from the typical 19th century problem play based on the logic of well-made plotting. The unconventional genre label therefore underscores not just difference in content, form and techniques of the plays but also their emotive effect on the audience.

III.1.The Unpleasant Genre Label and the Respect for Realism

As aforementioned the main objective of the Unpleasant plays was to educate the audience on the problems of capitalism and to induce critical thought on the possibility of reforming the system. The plays convey a distressingly accurate idea of the audience’s capitalist society and as the genre label indicates, the plays are unpleasant, not only in their subject matter (crime), but also in their dramatic techniques and emotional effect on the audience. Principally calculated to aesthetically and emotionally alienate Victorian audience by characteristically assaulting their socio-cultural and political ideals, the Unpleasant Plays proved a first testing ground for the techniques of a “drama of Ideas” that Shaw fathers on Ibsen in The Quintessence and describes as “a terrible art of sharpshooting at the audience, trapping them, fencing with them, aiming always at the sorest spot in their conscience”. Contrary to the

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entertainment functions of the 19th century well-made theatre, Shaw asserts that Ibsen’s plays do not please audience: “in the theatre of Ibsen, we are “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (146). The “Unpleasant” label asserts this emotive and critical relation of work to audience instead of traditional genre nomenclature (e.g. melodrama, comedy or tragedy). And in each play, a retrospective technique is employed by which a genre is inverted and its cultural orthodoxies are shocked.

The preface to the Unpleasant plays continues the dramatic critic’s crusade against the shortcomings of “our theatres in the nineties” and significantly articulates its own the unpleasant strategies. Contrary to the neo-classical dictum that comedy should “sport with human follies not with crimes”, the “Unpleasant” label asserts that the subject of these comedies is “the crimes of society”. And Shaw elucidates the realism of the plays thus, “I created nothing; I invented nothing; I imagined nothing; I perverted nothing; I simply discovered drama in real life” (Plays, 508). This was his defence as a “dramatic realist to his critics” against critical charges of extravagance, moral perversity or whimsical distortion in the plays. It is remarkable how early Shaw conceived this “realistic” tactic as the object of his first novel, Immaturity:

to write a novel scrupulously true to nature, with no incident in it to which everyday experience might not afford a parallel, and yet which should constantly provoke in [a] reader full of the emotional ethics of the conventional novel, a sense of oddity and unexpectedness (Letters, 1: 27).

This too, is Shaw’s aim in The Unpleasant plays: “to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts” (Pl. Unpl., xxix)29 he declares. Since Shaw perceives reality inverse from the commonly accepted visible or concrete reality, generic conventions and cultural ideals are his target. As he declares, “I…deal in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination” (III: 16).The title further asserts this antithetical relation of the plays to 19th century theatrical forms.

“Unpleasant”, a critical term in Victoria reviews, suggested unspecified, but mainly “unacceptable”, “indecent” or “negative” subjects and qualities of art. The Victorian critic, William Archer who failed to co-author Widowers’ Houses with Shaw asserts that,

A drama which opens the slightest intellectual, moral or political question is certain to fail. The public would accept open vice, but it will have nothing to do with a moral problem….especially, it would have nothing to do with a piece to whose theme the word ‘unpleasant’ can be applied. This epithet is of undefined and elastic signification, but once

29 A few months before his Unpleasant Plays, Shaw, in a debate on realism in fiction

declared the time ripe “for the emergence of an extremely unpleasant and unpalatable author, one who will tackle the large number of sham representations, sentimentalities, insincerities and ideals of which the English were so proud” (Winsten, 1956: 71). In Widowers’ Houses he writes, “I have opened fire from the depths of my innermost soul against [the] confounded ideals of Truth, Duty, Self-sacrifice, Virtue, Reason and so on.” (Letters, I: 254). In Mrs Warren he claims, a “cold bloodedly appalling subject is treated in such a way as to make the audience thoroughly uncomfortable” (Letters, I: 566).

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attached to a play and all chances of it are past (Archer, 1882: 9).

Archer’s denunciation of the “unpleasant” label and Shaw’s appropriation of the term for his generic label, not only asserts the extent to which his concept of realism in dramatic writing differed from that of his contemporary critics and dramatists, but foreshadows the “failed” Archer-Shaw “collaboration” on Widowers’ Houses.

Like Archer, the majority of critics, playwrights and audience that Shaw had in mind when he wrote The Quintessence and The Unpleasant Plays assumed that a play was designed primarily to entertain and affirm the audience’s cultural ideals. Among the leading critics of London, all but Shaw were in accord with this view. Crucial to the entertainment function of drama was the attendant maxim that drama should uphold and defend or affirm society’s revered institutions. The ideals were not to be subjected to indignities or genuinely shaken and the inextricable relation of the well-made structure to the ideals ensured this. The structure accredited the genres with ideals: Ideals of womanliness and manliness, marriage and family, heroism in war etc. These ideals were the “givens” of the dramatic plot and challenging them inevitably implied challenging the aesthetic norms and could cost the writer his dramatic career.

Even avant-garde problem playwrights, Pinero and Henry Jones for instance, who shared Shaw’s doubts about the validity of moral absolutes drew the line at a serious attack on the ideals. Shaw, who sought to expose the ideals as “abstract laws” selected the “unacceptable” or “indecent” as his special claim to realism. The corollary to this unpleasantness is the disregard for aesthetic conventions. And as Shaw asserts,

The Unpleasant plays assert, I ignore Art because I am concerned with Reality, persuasion and society. And in this assertion it reflects and affronts the critical confusion of art with ennobling ideality and theatre with comfortable entertainment, and the disqualification of certain kinds of subject. It declares itself in the end, a genre with specific sociological concerns (I: 27).

In subject matter and techniques, the unpleasant plays have little to do with pleasing the audience. Rather, they embody what Shaw calls “a general onslaught on idealism” (Pl.Pl. xviii) and warns his audience that, “my attacks are directed against themselves and not against my stage figures” (28). However, the newness of the plays lies in their techniques, which are deeply entrenched in Shaw’s evolutionary ideas and Fabian strategies of reformation through gradual permeation of social institutions.

III.1.1. The Will, Ideals and Social Evolution in the Unpleasant plays.

In Shaw’s social theory of Creative evolution, evolution is a generic term for history or the design of history. In this evolutionary framework, Shaw presents everything as a passing phase of history that needs to be destroyed for something new to emerge. What is required to destroy ideals is the moral will to evolve. As Shaw variously asserts, the progress of civilization “depends on the critical people who do not believe everything they are told: that is, on scepticism” (Guide, 501). “If the

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energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higher levels, then the more the young people shock their elders and deride and discard their pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the apparent growth of anarchy is only a measure of the rate of improvement (Music, 3: 482). Shaw’s reference to the plays as “criticism of a special phase, the capitalist phase of modern social organization” clearly indicates that the plays put the present condition of industrial England on the centre stage. The process of shattering creeds and demolishing idols is the necessary preliminary to the more constructive stage of Shaw’s total evolutionary program. For Shaw, society would improve largely of its own accord if idealized institutions that obstructed it were removed. In the Unpleasant plays, he seeks to destroy the socio-economic and cultural ideals of capitalism that obstruct social evolution.

The above is not to say that Shaw’s Unpleasant plays amount to little more than social, moral, and economic bulldozers. In fact, in attacking the ideals encoded in the genres, Shaw was also remoulding the genres into new forms. Shaw was indirectly recommending something every time he was undercutting something else, so that his genre transformations in these plays involve a two-fold destruction/construction approach that amounts to Margaret Rose’s theory of parody outlined in the previous chanper. But Shaw also draws extensively from the Fabian strategy of permeation, especially as contained for instance, in Fabian Essays in Socialism which he edited. Here, Shaw’s well-established belief in the primacy of the Will and his habitual contempt for ideals converges with his Fabian awareness that the best way to promote the evolution of society is to eliminate existing economic and social codes of capitalism. One of the greatest illusions that stand in the way of socio-economic evolution as both this essay and the plays shows is pessimism, another is optimism.

In Fabian Essays, Shaw points out that pessimism assumes that the will to improve society is hopelessly gratuitous, since the make-up of the world is beyond man’s power to change. This essentially is the ideology to which the capitalist characters of his plays respond. They all act and talk on the basis of the pessimistic assumption that the capitalist system is beyond their power to repair and as such they let pass for reality the immoralities of the system. But no less damaging than pessimism as Shaw asserts in Fabian essays, is blind optimism: “the folly of believing anything for no better reason than that it is pleasant to believe”. Optimism shifts the burden of active benevolence from man to a supernatural Ideal: either the Christian image of God, a kind of father figure “overruling all evil appearances for good; and making poverty here the earnest of a great blessedness and reward hereafter” or, the Marxist concept of history, a self-proclaimed mechanism driving society through relentless class struggle towards a final Elysium on earth. Until recently, Shaw concludes in his Fabian Essay, the stifling forces of pessimism and optimism generally held sway. But providentially, the Fabian meliorist stepped in with “the discovery that though the evil is enormously worse than we knew, yet it is not eternal, not even very long lived, if we only bestir ourselves to make an end of it” (27-29). The vital component of the meliorist stand, he explains, is “the inevitability of gradualness”. But Shaw warns that, “the benefits of

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such a change as this are so obvious to all except the existing private proprietors and their parasites, that it is very necessary to insists on the impossibility of effecting sudden change” (Ibid.: 182-83). Finally, Shaw postulates that the welfare state desired by socialist Fabians will gradually materialize as their concerted campaign of permeation takes its toll among existing institutions.

In fact, Shaw’s ambivalent, anti-pessimistic, anti-optimistic stance is also expressed in another postulation. Setting the theoretical foundations of modern drama in The Quintessence, he wrote about the necessity of the playwright devoting himself to showing that the spirit of man is constantly outgrowing the ideals and thoughtless violation of them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those that follow thoughtless comformity to them” thus, it was crucial for the playwright “to keep before the public the importance of being always prepared to act immorally”. This meant theatrical shock treatment of subject Shaw realized, and concluded: “the plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they be shocked pretty often” (146-7).

The both-sidedness of Shaw’s argument in The Fabian essays and his anti-conformist and anti-radical stance in the Quintessence reflects the Fabian policy of transformation by means of gradual permeation. This method is alos fully reflected in the structure of The unpleasant plays. In these plays, he rejects both capitalist ideology and radical socialist so that, his stance on capitalism is impartially socialistic. This impartiality becomes the basis for both Shaw’s parodic techniques as well as the inconclusiveness that characterizes the Unpleasant Plays.

III.1.2.A Fabian Socialist interpretation of laissez-faire Capitalism

The real matter of the plays is the economic morality of capitalism and while in their dramatic conflicts, Shaw’s contemporary socialist dramatists basically juxtaposed poor and virtuous heroes with vicious capitalist villains or oppressors in their comedies and melodramas, Shaw who rejected heroes and villains in his dramatic theory refused to blame the immoralities of capitalism on the capitalist class.

The plays explore the moral ramifications of an overriding ideology in laisser-faire capitalist systems: the pessimism towards the possibility and feasibility of social evolution. For Shaw, the greatest illusions (ideals) that stand in the way of social and economic evolution are those that ignore or preclude “the will” to reform society. As the dominant ideology of capitalism then, pessimism is the source of all socio-cultural, economic and political immorality and stagnation. But Shaw shows socialist and capitalists alike participating in, and promoting the immorality of the capitalist system. This is because, as already mentioned, Shaw was a Fabian and not a Marxist socialist. Like Bertolt Brecht after him, he was adverse to propaganda. As he once wrote to Ellen Terry, “your great dramatic poet is never a socialist, nor an individualist, nor a positivist, nor a materialist, nor any other sort of –ist, though he comprehends all the

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‘isms’, and is generally quoted by all sections as an adherent” (West, 1958:62). In Everybody’s Political what’s what? he adds, “My method of examining any proposition is to take its two extremes, both of them impracticable; make a scale between them and try to determine at what point on the scale it can best be put it in practice” (365).

Although Shaw was a socialist in his treatises, he realized that neither socialism nor any other “-ism” can be the basis of art. As a Fabian, he sought balances. Hence, his viewpoint on capitalism in the unpleasant plays is impartially socialistic. Unlike the socialist realists of his time, he refused to present the struggles of socialists and capitalists as a crusade of right against wrong or good against evil. For Shaw, the human comedy consisted too obviously of such facts as socialists are not angels and capitalists are not devils. His interest as an artist was always in the human situation as he found it and not simply as he desired it. While he presents capitalism as a wholly “rigged” system with artificial codes, and demonstrates the pessimism that the system promotes, Shaw shows capitalist and socialists consciously or unconsciously promoting the capitalist ideology. He does so by refusing to treat his capitalist antagonists as villains or his socialist protagonists as heroes. In his polemic anti-socialist, anti-capitalist stance, he incriminates his capitalists villains and socialists protagonists yet, he also frees them from guilt on the basis of the defective socio-economic structures of society. This, for Shaw does not imply that no one is guilty, but that everyone is. His preface asserts that,

The guilt of a defective social organization does not lie alone on the people who actually work the commercial makeshifts which the defects make inevitable, but with the whole body of citizens whose public opinion, public action, and public contributions as ratepayers alone can replace Sartorius’s slums with decent dwellings (Prefaces, 28-29).

Shaw predicted the confusion of “either/or” Victorian critics to his “both/and approach” to capitalism. His preface castigates playwrights and critics

Who are in the habit of accepting as socialism that spirit of sympathy with the poor and indignant protest against suffering and injustice…This ‘stage socialism’ is represented in my play by the good-natured compunction of my hero, who conceives the horror of the slums as merely the result of atrocious individual delinquency on the part of the slum landlord (Prefaces, xv.)

The Unpleasant Plays attack capitalism and reject “stage socialism”. Yet, in adapting Fabian political strategies and refusing to cite with capitalists or socialists, Shaw permits his own evolutionary aspiration to sound out without any explicit mention. Shaw’s Fabian approach to capitalism is fully reflected in the structure as well as in the techniques of transformation used in the plays.

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III.1.3. Fabian strategies of Genre Permeation: Artistic means to ethical ends

Shaw postulates that the welfare state desired by socialist Fabians will gradually materialize as their concerted campaign of permeation takes its toll among existing institutions. As discussed above, Fabians were known for their eminently gradualist strategy of permeations and following his intention to “go uncompromisingly for permeation” (Letters, I: 377), Shaw extended this Fabian policy to the English theatre.30 Adapted to existing genres, Fabian permeation works well with cultural and aesthetic ideals, so that Shaw’s act of “sharpshooting ideals” involves a modernization of certain classic forms and the creation of original forms. The plays are anti-genres types of currently popular genres, but they are also examples in their own right of other genres as far as their techniques are concerned.

Shaw’s main strategy in the plays is to adopt prevailing popular forms of drama to his own ethical purposes and in this endeavour, Shaw draws upon parody, which simulates its target before distorting it. This process of simulation or imitation and inversion is temperamentally appropriate to the Fabian policy of permeation. The two plays are strategic mouldings of recognized dramatic genres that were comfortably familiar to playgoers of the nineties: the Courtesan melodrama in Mrs Warren’s.... and romantic comedy in Widowers’ Houses. The connection between Shaw’s artistic tactics and his ideal-destroying aims is evident. Each popular 19th century form carried with it a set of cultural expectations, so that spectators would anticipate certain types of characters, certain lines of action; a certain atmosphere, a particular treatment of subject and resolution of conflict etc. This made Shaw’s targets (the ideals) readily at hand when he used (and abused) a popular genre.

At the root of the ethical ideals that Shaw wished to destroy in the popular forms of problem plays: romantic comedy and Courtesan melodrama was an even stronger aesthetic ideal — the standard well-made structure— which, as he insisted, bolstered ideals and was therefore a formula that enhanced conventional codes of conduct in drama. Shaw maintains against the Well-made structure that, as (re) interpreters of life,

No writer of the first order needs the formula any more than a sound man needs a crutch... for a playwright who has taken on his supreme function as interpreter of life.... Not only has he no need for it; but he must attack and destroy it; for one of the first lessons he must teach his play-ridden public is that, the romantic conventions on which the formula proceeded were all false... (C. f. Brandt, 1999: 104).

In spite of this rhetoric, Shaw knew he could not gain a footing on the 19th century stage without using the well-made structure. But he also realized that the structure could be used to attack the ideals it promotes. He thus, sugar-coated his attack on the ideals by first simulating the well-made structure and its genre expectations in the first half of his play and debunking its normally assumed illusions in the second half, so

30 In a letter to Harley Granville Barker, Shaw equates the “higher drama”, “Propagandist

Repository” and “Permeation” (C.f. Purdom, 1957:164).

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that his focus and, in a sense, the subject” of the plays is the discrepancy between the “stage world” of his deluded spectators and the “real world” of experience. Inasmuch as this approach simulates before criticizing its targeted dramatic form, it illuminates the definition by Margaret Rose (1993: 52), of parody as “the comic refunctioning of performed linguistic or artistic material” of a pretext or genre. But this parodic approach also adumbrates the Fabian policy of gradual permeation. As ideal-destroyers Fabians infiltrated a domain where ideals were upheld and sought acceptance by working for such domains. They then gradually or systematically chipped away at the vulnerable ideals, using arguments, backed by facts and ridicule tempered with amiability or even entertainment. This Fabian procedure in the Unpleasant plays is equivalent to Margaret’s Rose’s theory of parody in which she asserts that, “parodistic changes of pre-given traditions need not only be viewed negatively as the destruction of that which is sung, as they reveal at the same time a process of linguistic reformation and new-formation” (46). While the parody mocks its target, it also changes or modernizes it. The desire to change or modernize does not only stem from satiation with the stale, but may also emanate from the love to preserve/ conserve. Parody is thus one of the most ambiguous hypertextual forms of rewriting since it destroys and recreates, imitates and transforms; criticizes and renovate its target. This parodic process of simulation and inversion conforms, not just to the Fabian policy of permeation, or to Margaret Rose’s theory of parody but also to Shaw’s idiosyncratic structure of “exposition-situation-discussion” in which the “discussion” element constitutes a turning point in the structure.

In practice, Shaw constructs the Unpleasant plays in a thesis structure, that is, as an argument or a demonstration. Each plot constitutes “a case for an ideology (Ideals)” and “a case against”. In part to cater for the entertainment needs of his Victorian audience and to capture their interest, a well-made play structure is first simulated in the “exposition-situation” half of each Unpleasant play and parodied in the “discussion”. The first half of each play raises genre expectations and the second frustrates them. The Quintessence summarizes Shaw’s parodic strategy thus:

Never mislead an audience was an old rule, a theatrical bylaw. But the new school will trick the spectator into forming a meanly false judgement and then convict him of it in the next act, often to his grievous mortification…he is never occupied in the old work of manufacturing interest and expectation with material that have neither novelty, significance nor prospects to the spectators (145).

In the first halves of each Unpleasant Play the spectators forms “a meanly false judgement” because they hold certain preconceptions and automatically apply them to the case in hand. These preconceptions are evoked for the express purpose of shattering them in the second half as a means of pressuring the playgoers into realizing that their cultural, economic and aesthetic assumptions may be invalid, ridiculous or even repugnant. To the extent that each play simulates its generic structure and norms in the first half and counters it in the second, each of the Unpleasant plays consists of a generic discourse and a counter-discourse; each encodes the generic discourse and its

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antithesis. It is not simply a question of parody, but also one of balances. Each play is a dialogue between two discourses or, between opposed but equally valid views on a single generic subject/discourse. Central to the Shavian strategy of simulation and transformation is that of trapping his audience into mistaking the hero for the villain or the Idealist for the Realist. As Shaw asserts in The Quintessence, in the post-Ibsenite drama, the conflict is not between clear right or wrong: “the villain is as conscientious as the hero, if not more so: in fact the question which makes the plays interesting... is which is the villain and which is the hero or, to put it another way, there are not heroes and no villains” (139). A villain exists only in the minds of his misguided Victorian audience who rely on ideal standards to form their moral judgements and these judgements are shown to be “meanly false”.

Shaw’s structure is didactic rather than the mimetic theory of well-made construction. His dramaturgy diverges from the standard cannons of playwriting at the time for, in attacking the cultural assumptions of the well-made play, Shaw was violating the quasi-Aristotelian doctrine that the plot or system of actions in a play should be its “soul” – at once the determinant of its structure and the essential source of its effect. This long-ascendant ideal of drama as an “imitation of an action” had almost universal support from critics and dramatists of the day. But in countering this theory, Shaw was also advocating his own discussion mode of drama.

Generically, each unpleasant play dialogues with its hypotext and generic conventions in counter-directional ways. Each play bears an ironic or parodic relation to the generic motifs, characters and plots that it echoes. Central to the techniques of inversion is Shaw’s pedagogical purpose of alienating his audience who share the ideals under attack. Shaw’s rhetorical techniques are pivotal to the unpleasant effects of the plays. Central to the techniques of the plays is the technique of interfigurality which consists of inverting recognized generic characters. Shaw creates his anti-genres by means of inverse motivations, remotivation, transmotivation and transexuation of the generic figures.

III.1.4. A comparative Summary of the Plays

In Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren...., Shaw aggressively utilizes the conventions of 19th century romantic comedy and Courtesan melodrama respectively. Both genres shared the same generic motif, “tainted wealth”. As the industrial revolution gathered momentum and a new middle emerged in the class structures, the romantic comic motif of misalliance between classes, persons and generations came to involve a barter of rank and money. The disdainful pride of the stage aristocrat took the form of scrupulosity about the origin or sources of middle class money. The aristocratic father in Tom Taylor’s New Men and Old Acres (1869) for instance, makes a point of the “stigma” of trade, of the “taint” on money made in vulgar commerce. The rising rate of prostitution among working class women also became the subject of

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the Courtesan melodrama and prostitution was treated in the genre as a vulgar trade closely linked to tainted money.

However, in Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren...., Shaw employs the generic motif only as a theatrical point of departure for his socialist critique of capitalism. In the two plays, he seizes on this generic motif in sexual relations to point out the social, economic and psychological realities of a capitalist market system. Shaw uses “tainted wealth” as a metaphor for society under capitalism where everyone has to prostitute in one way or another in order to survive. It is not just some money, but all money that is tainted and all hands that touch money receive the taint. In his socialist analysis of capitalist society, the pernicious alternatives are to receive the taint or perish because society is structured to make honest living almost impossible. As a topical invention in comedy and melodrama, the plays provide an in-depth socialist analysis of the interdependence of sex and economics in capitalist societies. In intricately linking love, sex and marriage to capitalist corruption, Shaw clearly illustrates his view that, in a capitalist system, even the most revered social institution is tainted with corruption. Love and sex whether without or within marriage, are represented in the plays as vehicles for the inescapable spread of moral and economic corruption.

From a Victorian point of view then, the basic subject matter of the Unpleasant plays makes them unpleasant. All two are concerned more or less with sex and deal most explicitly with sex and social economics. But Shaw’s objective is also to make his audience “guilty creatures sitting at a play”, and while his anti-genres depend on interfigural transformations precisely, on strategic inversions of the generic protagonists and antagonists of both plays, his main strategy of obtaining the unpleasant effects of his plays is also to use his main characters as audience-surrogates of the capitalist ideals that the plays attack. Shaw’s describes the plays as “dramatic pictures of middle class society from the point of view of a socialist who regards the basis of that society as thoroughly rotten economically and morally” (Letters,1:632). His preface assert that, in the unpleasant plays, “dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts” (Pl. Unpl., xxix) and further warns his audience that his attack is directed against them: “my attacks are directed against themselves and not against my stage figures” (28). Shaw’s alienating strategy is to take his audience along with the naive protagonists from ignorance and naiveté through disillusionment to recognition of complicity in the crime of capitalism: “the author’s indignation and disapproval embodied in the plays pass over the characters on the stage and hit the audience.31

Now the didactic object of my play is to bring the conviction of sin―to make the Pharisee [audience] who repudiates Sartorius as a Harpagon or a diseased dream of mine, and thanks God that such persons do not represent his class, recognize that Sartorius is his own photograph (Pl., Unpl.,117-18).

To convict his audience of complicity in the capitalist crimes; to make them see that

31 “Mr. Bernard Shaw on the Drama”, Times (London) March 8, 1906, 10.

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his capitalist villains are their own photographs, Shaw incriminates his protagonists in the crimes of his villains.

In view of the above abjectives, the love-plot between Trench and Blanche in Widowers’ Houses is nothing more than a peg on which to hang all the economic analysis of capitalism. This plot, the relic of Emile Augier’s and William Archer’s well-made plot with which Widowers’ Houses began, gave Shaw the conventional structure for comedy: Act I, exposition, boy meets girl; Act II, complication, boy loses girl; Act III, the dénouement, boy gets girl back after all. Yet, not only are all the stock scenes of 19th century romantic comedy inverted in Shaw’s plot, but the romantic plot is set in ironic counterpoint to the pattern of social and economic analysis, so that the final marriage of Trench and Blanche at the end of Shaw’s comedy is made to represent, not the rebirth of a new society as in romantic comedy, but a final acceptance and surrender to the pre-existing corruption that reigns in the capitalist system. The marriage underscores Trench’s final surrender to the capitalist status quo and his involvement in the corruption and pessimism that reigns in the system. Such a pattern by which the protagonist begins as a champion of “stage socialism” and ends up learning of his own complicity is indeed, not only Shaw’s most forceful, lucid and polemic demonstrations of the inescapable corruption that reigns in capitalist systems, but also an interfigural inversion of the traditional hero of romantic comedy. This interfgural inversion of the generic protagonist also depends on an inversion of the standard well-made structure and its moral values.

In Widowers’ Houses, Harry Trench’s shock at Sartorius’s revelation that he (Trench) is a sleeping partner in his (Sartorius’s) slum business, which the hero has just indignantly spurned, makes for a very effective dramatic moment. The climatctic revelation is a turning point in the well-made structure, the beginning of a genre parody that takes the form of Shaw’s “discussion”. As a turning point in the structure, the stage directions record the hero’s disillusionment: “morally beggared”. There is therefore a case for calling Widowers’ Houses the most unpleasant play Shaw ever wrote. “Nobody”, Shaw’s preface states, “will find it a beautiful or lovable work”.

It is saturated with the vulgarity of the life it represents: the people do not speak nobly, live gracefully, or sincerely face their own position: the author is not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the underlying beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the smooth surface of ‘respectability’ a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure against your shudder at its blackness (Plays, 45)

For all his prefatory rhetoric, Shaw makes good his claim for the vulgarity and the unpleasant effects of Widowers’ Houses. It has no single character inviting admiration or sympathy. Although Sartorius is given much eloquence in the vein to be exploited afterwards by Mrs Warren, he has all the bullying insecurity of the self-made man without the genuine dignity and sympathy we feel for Mrs Warren. Thus, Mrs Warren, supposedly the more unpleasant of the two plays because of its immediate subject, prostitution is less repulsive because the prostitute earns our admiration and sympathy.

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It is curious that it should be so, since Shaw adopts very much the same interfigural strategy and uses it even more powerfully in Mrs Warren. Vivie Warren takes the place of Harry Trench as the young person to be disillusioned and educated by an elderly antagonist in the economic ways of the capitalist world. She, like Trench, is forced to see that there is no moral barrier between her and the capitalists, Sir George Crofts and Mrs Warren whom she despises. Vivie’s line of appalled discovery (of her own complicity in the crime of prostitution) to Crofts is Trench’s line to Sartorius — “I believe I am just as bad as you”. The point is made all the more powerful in Mrs Warren as Shaw is using a more devastating metaphor, prostitution for his diagnosis of the malaise of capitalist society. The working-man may have nothing to sell but his labour; the working woman has nothing to sell, but herself: “The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her” (Plays, 314). Shaw’s indictment of society in Mrs Warren is a far-reaching one. He is not only attacking the level of women’s wages, which forces them into prostitution. He is making the socialist equation between disreputable prostitution and its respectable counterpart in marriage with a similar economic dependence of women on men. Beyond that, he is arguing polemically that the normal activity of capitalism is prostitution: the money-making, exploitation of human bodies and talents on the one hand, and the surrender of human conscience and self esteem for the sake of survival on the other hand. Prostitution is a metaphor for all professions in capitalist societies:

We not only condemn women as a sex to attach themselves to breadwinners, licitly or illicitly, on pain of heavy privation and disadvantage; but we have great prostitute classes of men: for instance, the playwrights and journalists, to whom I myself belong, not to mention the legions of lawyers, doctors clergymen, and platform politicians who are daily using their highest faculties to belie their real sentiments (Plays, 33-4).

Whether or not we agree with this analysis, it is cogently and dramatically argued in Mrs Warren. What gives Mrs Warren greater depth and interest than Widowers’ Houses is the relationship between daughter (Vivie) and mother (Kitty Warren) which constitutes the emotional dynamics of the play. In Mrs Warren, Shaw is developing what is only hinted in the scene between Blanche (daughter) and Sartorius (father) in Widowers’ Houses. When Sartorius realizes how completely his daughter despises the working-classes from which he stems, he comments “[coldly and a little wistfully] I see I have made a real lady of you, Blanche” (Plays, 110). Similarly, the gap between Mrs Warren and Vivie is a gap Mrs Warren has created: “I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I was a leper” (Plays, 355). Where it is only a passing observation in the first play, Shaw gives his full attention in Mrs Warren to the effect on human relationships of the upward drive in a class-conscious society.

The most striking difference between the two plays is that Mrs Warren is so much more characteristically Shavian is its characterization and Widowers’s Houses more Shavian in its topicality. What characterizes Mrs Warren is the great impartially with

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which Shaw treats his protagonist and antagonist. In Mrs Warren as in many of Shaw’s plays, we are asked to sympathise equally with Vivie and her mother, to engage emotionally with both their attitudes and decisions, and the same measure of sympathy is extended to all the other characters as well. The genial tolerance and general sympathy that Shaw shows towards his protagonist and antagonist in these plays, especially Mrs Warren, can be seen as evidence of his fair-mindedness and comprehensive creative understanding of human character (hero and Villain). In his polemics, Shaw makes true his claim to steer clear of melodramatic characterization by deconstructing the traditional notion of hero and villain. Yet, while Mrs Warren is more Shavian in its ambivalent characterization, Widowers’ Houses is more Shavian it its topicality and, as I argue below, it is Shaw’s artistry that gives the subject of Widowers’ Houses a sense of timelessness.

III.2. Widowers’ Houses: An anti- Romantic Comedy

III.2.1. “Collaboration” or Co-authorship as intertextuality

Widowers’ Houses emerged from a “failed collaboration” between Shaw and William Archer in 1884 on a play that was to be called Rhinegold. Archer was to provide the plot and scenario while Shaw writes the dialogue. But the two critics were also borrowing the plot of Rhinegold from Èmile Augier Ceinture Dorée (1855).

Augier’s comedy is constructed in perfect well-made play fashion and affirms conventional bourgeois morality. Briefly, his play is build around a central moral situation: a young man is in love with a girl whose father has acquired his fortune by dubious means. When the young man discovers that his bride’s dowry comes from a tainted source, his reaction is to show his disdain for such immoral wealth. In Augier’s play, the marriage is thus a social impossibility until the ruin of the heroine’s father removes the obstacle. To preserve his honour, the hero simply had to give up the pleasure of marrying the lady, had Augier not employed a convenient accident to resolve the moral dilemma of marrying with “tainted wealth”. The dilemma is resolved by the outbreak of war, which functions as “the deux ex machina” to ruin the heroine’s father. The aim is to bring back his heroine to honourable poverty so that the hero can make an honourable proposal and marriage, untainted by ill-gotten wealth. This conventionally moral view representation in comedy is what Shaw calls “stage socialism”, and Augier’s plot represented the recognized pattern of 19th century well-made comedy and melodrama in the English theatre which was predominantly influenced by the French theatre. In English comedy and melodrama, the hero and heroine remain morally pure in conformity with societal ideals (out of the theatre), regarding love and marriage. Playwrights employed the deux ex machina device to bring their lovers to unexpected wealth thus, making the couple eligible for life independent of tainted inheritance. Widowers’ Houses rejects this “stage socialism” as

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evident in the events leading up to the failed collaboration. Archer’s sketch of scenario for the intended play clearly indicates that Rhinegold

was to follow the pattern of 19th century well-made romantic comedy: I drew out, scene by scene, the scheme of a twaddling cup and-saucer comedy vaguely suggested by Augier´s Ceinture Doreé. The details I forget, but I know it was to be called Rhinegold, and was to open as Widowers’ Houses actually does, in a hotel-garden on the Rhine, and was to have two heroines, a sentimental and a comic one, according to the accepted Robertson-Byron-Carton formula. I fancy the hero was to propose to the sentimental heroine, believing her to be the poor niece instead of the rich daughter of the sweater, or slum-landlord, or whatever he may have been; and I know he was to carry on in the most heroic fashion, and was ultimately to succeed in throwing the tainted treasure of his father-in-law, metaphorically speaking into the Rhine. All this I gravely propounded to Mr. Shaw, who listened with no less admirable gravity (Prefaces, xii).

Archer’s original plot and scenario point to Augier’s central moral situation in which a “socialist hero” renounces his lady’s dowry on learning that it is ill-gotten or “tainted wealth”. His title, Rhinegold implicitly alludes to the moral theme of “tainted wealth” in Augier’s play.” The central dramatic situation in Augier’s play evolves around a moral question: when a young man discovers that his lady’s dowry is inherited wealth acquired by his father in an immoral way, what does he do? Archer’s scenario (a garden scene overlooking the river Rhine) presupposes the dramatic action. It is a suitable height from which to pitch disdainful or rejected objects into the Rhine. Ηis title, Rhinegold “metaphorically” implies the moral action of the comic hero. How should a young man behave when he realizes that his intended wife’s dowry is “tainted wealth”? Archer’s scenario indicates unmistakably that the hero will metaphorically pitch such wealth into the river Rhine by refusing to marry a woman with the “stigma of money”. While Widowers’ Houses takes this generic situation and moral question as starting point, Shaw refused to be held hostage to the well-made pattern and thus, rejects the conventional moral viewpoint on the subject.

Shaw began writing the agreed play but stopped after one act. According to Holroyd (1989:274-5), Shaw was having trouble “marching the contrived well-made structure to the analysis of contemporary landlordism”. The collaboration broke when Shaw, after writing only the first act went back to Archer for more plot, “Look here, I’ve written half of the first act of that comedy, I’ve used up your entire plot. Now I want some more to go on with”. But Archer responded that by his “…calculation, the renunciation [of tainted wealth] ought to have landed” Shaw “at the end of the play”. Shaw however, told him his “calculation did not work out, and that he must supply further plot material” (Prefaces, xxi).32 Since Archer could not supply more plot, the collaboration on Rhinegold ended. The unfinished play was abandoned until 1892 when Shaw single-handedly rewrote Rhinegold as Widowers’ Houses. 32 Citing Archer’s 1892 Newspaper interview, quoted in Shaw’s preface to Widowers’

Houses. Shaw also insists that he was in the middle of his composition (act II) when he needed more plot. For a discussion of this collaboration, see Jerald E. Bringle (1981).

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When Shaw finally sent his finished play to Archer, he warned him of the transformations: “The central notion is quite perfect; but the hallucinations with which you surrounded it are absent….You will perceive that my genius has brought the romantic notion which possessed you, into vivid contact with real life” (Letters, I: 176). Archer was shocked by what he said was, “my sentimental heroine…. transmuted into a termagant who boxed the ears of her maid-servant.” “Still”, he went on, “it is possible to discern in the play fragments of my idea and to trace its relationship to Ceinture Dorée” (C.f. Gibbs, 1990:120-121). But it is not only the figure of the comic heroine, but also the comic hero that is inverted in Shaw’s plot and this interfigural transformation depends on a larger inversion of the well-made structure, stock situations and ideals of romantic comedy.

When the two decided to co-author a play, they scarcely realized how far their conceptions of realism in dramatic construction differed. Archer belonged to the French school of Scribe and Sardou and his disapproval of realistic subjects in drama as evident in his denunciation of the label, Unpleasant as well as Archer’s model prescription on well-made playwriting, are testimonies to his conventional notion of realism.33 But Shaw’s dramatic conception was guided by his overriding faith in realism of viewpoint achieved through the impartial handling of hero/ villain and throught the kind of rhetorical argumentative dialogue that The Quintessence calls “a forensic technique of recrimination, discussion and penetration through ideals to the truth”.

In Widowers’ Houses, Shaw poses himself the same moral question as Augier and Archer, but inverts the traditional heroine, hero and villain of the genre by allowing each to react differently and in contrast to the requirements of romantic comedy. Hence, while at the climactic revelation of the source of tainted wealth, Augier’s and Archer’s heroes would not consider marrying a woman with a tainted dowry, Shaw’s hero, accepting the nature of capitalism and the corrupting influence of wealth, and reacting to the logic of the capitalist economic situation instead of the logic of “stage socialism”, stoops to marry the heroine in spite of the stigma of “tainted wealth”. Shaw’s heroine too, turns down her fiancé’s request that they do without her father’s “tainted” wealth. She will not forgo all and marry poor Trench for love alone. In allowing his hero and heroine to react according to the economic constraints of capitalism, and by incriminating them in the corruption, Shaw illustrates the inescapable spread of capitalist corruption and the pessimism towards social transformation. His key decision is to reject Algiers’s edifying moral ending and to refuse to have incidence (masquerading as fate or deux ex machina) intervene to solve 33 Archer’s Playmaking: a Manual of Craftsmanship analysis the requirements of dramatic

construction in technical terms, charting out methodological guidelines for well-made playwrights (85-110; 225-259; 260-174). The text attests to his conventional understanding of dramatic realism and illustrates the inextricable relation of aesthetic conventions to moral conventionalism. Archer’s renunciation of the association of “unpleasant” shows the moral prudery that governed Victorian artistic taste as well.

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the moral dilemma of marrying a woman with tainted wealth. The reversal of custom results in a travesty of the conventions and significance of marriage in a well-made romantic comedy.

Shaw simulates the entire well- made structure and its values in the first half of his play and parodies them in the second half. The second half of his plot (the discussion) focuses on the villain’s perspective and eloquently reveals the illusion that governs the hero’s conventional perspective, so that Widowers’ Houses is actually constructed on the exposition-situation-discussion structure of a post-Ibsen drama. Shaw uses up the entire well-made structure in the first half of his play and introduces a discussion just where a denouement should be introduced in a well-made play. This structural principle, which I described in the preceding chapter as “using and losing the well-made plot” is fully illustrated in the collaboration with Archer. When Shaw told Archer that he had written just part of the proposed play and had used the entire plot, he was indeed enunciating his central structural principle of using and then losing the well-made plot” in the “discussion”. Archer had expected the revelation and renunciation of “tainted wealth” to bring the new play to a conventional end. At the climatic revelation of the withheld withheld secret in a well-made plot (which in Shaw’s play is the father in law’s source of income), the playwright rapidly brought the play to a conventional end (the denouement), most probably with the use of the deux ex machina as in Augier’s plot. Archer had expected Shaw to bring the supposed Rhinegold to an end with the hero’s renunciation of his engagement to the heroine, which is the traditional romantic moral gesture of discarding “tainted wealth” or metaphorically pitching it into the Rhine. Archer’s expectation of such an ending is evident in his claim that, by his calculation the renunciation should have landed Shaw at the end of his play. This also explains why he had no more plot to furnish Shaw with.

For Shaw on the other hand, the revelation is only the beginning of the discussion of “problems of conduct” in realistic drama. The revelation marks the point at which a realistic playwright begins to convict his audience of a “meanly false judgment”. In other words, Shaw refused to be held hostage by the quasi-Aristotelian principle of well-made plot construction. As he asserts, “it was my deliberate and unaccountable disregard of the rules of the art of play construction that revolted him [Archer]”. Elsewhere, he insists that Archer “did not agree with me that the form of drama which was perfected in the middle of the nineteenth century in the French theatre was essentially mechanistic and therefore incapable of producing vital drama...I held...that a play is a vital growth and not a mechanical construction” (Pen Portraits, 722).

Shaw clearly adopted Archer’s scheme, but used the plot in a way that made a mockery of the kind of well-made play Archer and his Victorian audience had in mind as well as rejected the falsely romantic content of the comic plot. The result is a deliberate and revoltingly incongruous inversion of Archer’s dramatic situation, characters, structure and familiar conventions of a well made romantic comedy. This inversion is designed to manipulate and ultimately invalidate the standard assumptions and responses of the complacent Victorian spectators of a well-made play.

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III.2.2. Plot and Counter-Plot in Widowers’ Houses

The three act play begins with a familiar courtship romance. The hero, Harry Trench is taking a holiday tour of Germany with a friend, Cokane. While the two are sitting in the garden restaurant of a tourist hotel on the Rhine (reminiscence of Archer’s scenario), a young girl, Blanche Sartorius with whom Harry has flirted on the cruise, and her seemingly inaccessible business tycoon of a father, Sartorius join them. In anticipation that the father will play the blocking character, Cokane engages him in a conversation and draws him away from the couple, clearing the way for the first love scene, one of Shaw’s richest with regards to the the scale and psychological subtlety of the subtext.

Shaw’s Blanche Sartorius is the antithesis of the fragile sentimental heroines of Victorian comedy mentioned in Archer’s scenario. “His [Sartorius’s] daughter is a ... strong-minded young woman, presentably ladylike, but still her father’s daughter..., and none the worse for being vital and energetic rather than delicate and refined (I:18). Blanche is the first of Shaw’s strong-willed women. She provides the ineffectual hero with the courage and words to propose to her in this encounter: Blanche: (giving him up as hopeless) I don’t think theres much danger of your making up

your mind, Dr. Trench. Trench: (stammering) I only thought (he stops and looks at her piteously. She hesitates a

moment, and then puts her hands into his with calculated impulsiveness. He snatches her into his arms with a cry of relief). Dear Blanche! I thought I should never have said it.... I should have stood stuttering all day if you hadn’t helped me out with it.

Banche: (indignantly trying to break loose from him) I didn’t help you out with it. Trench: (holding her) I dont mean that you did it on purpose, of course. Only instinctively. Blanche: (still a little anxious) But you havent said anything. Trench: What more can I say but this? (he kisses her again.) Blanche: (overcome by the kiss, but holding on to her point) But Harry- Trench: (delighted at the name) Yes. Blanche: When shall we be married? (Pl. Unpl., 11).

Shaw derives humour from the discrepancy in Blanche between the Victorian demands of etiquette or lady-like propriety, and the realism of her emotions for Trench. While she lures her man, she must not betray her wooing and the psychological realism of the situation is seen in the interplay of sincerity and pose. Instead of waiting demurely for Trench to propose to her, Blanche cunningly drives Trench to a confession, “Pouting a little”, she first replies “contemptuously” and “sharply” to his questions and then, realizing that she may frighten her prey, she changes to a tender and kind approach: “she looks round at him for a moment with a reproachful feeling on her eyes….she bristles instantly; overdoes it; and frightens him…she corrects her mistake by softening her expression eloquently” (Ibid.:10). But when Blanche realizes that Trench will not come to a marriage proposal, she cast aside her feminine trappings and displays her feelings freely. In contrast to the self-willed heroine, the subtext present the “unmanly” travesty of a romantic hero, his feeble-mindedness: “suddenly

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“becoming shy”;” alarmed”; “he responds with a gush”; “terrified”; “stupidly”; “totally unnerved”; “his nervousness deprives him of the power of speech” (Ibid.:11)

Shaw’s revolutionary depiction for late Victorian times, of feminine psychology, particularly its sexual aspect reveals one aspect of the play’s modernity. Blanche is sexually aggressive and has a tempestuous disposition. By her forward nature, she elicits a marriage proposal from the maladroit hero. When in act II she suspects Trench of wanting to break the engagement, she faces him, “white with anger” and shouts the bitterest reproaches to his face, “too angry to care whether she is overheard or not” (Ibid.: 36) and rejects the hero’s proposal that they do without her father’s money after their marriage. There is nothing of the sweet, yielding sentimental heroines of Victorian literature in Blanche. She is indeed, Archer’s “sentimental heroine” transformed into a Shavian “termagant”. Her ability to unleash pain makes her a figure of awe and terror as when she later physically tortures her maid.

This first love encounter is generically significant in pinpointing the moment in the dramatic action when the play begins to gravitate from romantic comedy to something else. With Trench finally proposing to Blanche the audiences expect a romantic comedy based on “misalliance” between classes. Trench comes from an aristocratic family. Blanches father’s ill-gotten wealth places her in the middle class, but her birth places her even lower. But this misalliance motif begins to be dismissed almost immediately after it has been evoked as Sartorius refuses to play the blocking figure. He readily agrees to make the match (the “transaction”, as he calls it), though on condition that Harry provides a written guarantee from his aunt, Mrs Roxdale that his aristocratic family will fully accept his daughter into their social class (a complication). Sartorius carefully lays down the conditions of the engagement and even dictates the wordings of the letter to Mrs Roxdale. With this bargain between Trench and Sartorius and a letter to Trench’s aristocratic aunt (whose prudish attitudes we learn from Cokane) drafted, the audience’s attention is turned from Sartorius as blocking figure to Lady Roxdale who seems, as the letter implies, to threaten an objection to the match from the background.

Shaw was intensely sensitive to the structure of expectations in the 19th century theatre and to the educative consequences of disrupting such expectations. The play thus illustrates ways by which Shaw consciously establishes fundamental patterns of a romantic comedy which he later counters or refuses to satisfy. Among early Victorian dramatists, there is probably no better master of suspended expectation. All the conventions of nineteenth century romantic comedy are evoked in act I: the young lovers, the social class barrier and the blocking figure in the person of the domineering Lady Roxdale. Significant in this Shavian strategy of raising generic expectations is the conversation between hero and heroine after the letter has been sent. Trench tells Blanche, “I had to promise him [Sartorius, GN] not to regard anything as settled until I hear from my people at home”. Blanche replies, “Oh I see. Your family may object to me; and then it will be all over between us. They are almost sure to.” (57). She goes on to propose that if Trench’s family would be an obstacle, they should break the

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engagement at once. Trench’s response evokes a romantic comedy in which an old generation of parents and social class function as obstacles to young lovers. To Blanche’s half-hearted proposal that they break the engagement, Trench’s reply, though interrupted midway, signals the traditional determination of the romantic hero to overcome the obstacle to his love: “(intoxicated with affection) Blanche, on my most sacred honor, family or no family, promise or no promise―”

As Northrop Frye (1957) points out, in a romantic comedy a young man desires a young woman who is under some constraint from an elderly person, usually a father (Sartorius), but sometimes a guardian, or a maiden-aunt (Mrs Roxdale) as to the choice of a mate. The young man devises a scheme to defeat the older blocking figure and win the hand of the young woman. The carrying out of the scheme is usually the plot of romantic comedy. And the defeat of the older figure(s) usually means the defeat of his (their) values or ideals in favour of the young couple’s new set of values around which a new community is formed. In having Trench refer to his determination to go ahead with his engagement to Blanche, “family or no family, promise or no promise”, Shaw points to this mythic pattern underlying the genre of romantic comedy, the archetype of the young man who must symbolically slay the father figure in order to obtain the young woman and become a father himself.

After indicating unmistakably that he is playing the romantic game in a Scribean well-made structure, Shaw proceeds almost immediately to break all the rules. In readily agreeing to the match and in many ways eagerly furthering the union of the young lovers, Sartorius amazingly refuses to play the role of the blocking character. The expectation of opposition from Mrs Roxdale is also frustrated as she readily sends the required guarantee that Blanche will be accepted in her class and family. The suspense-oriented function of the blocking character in Shaw’s play is internalized or psychologised in one of the lovers, the socialist idealist hero, who on the basis of his own socialistic moral ideals, objects to the tainted source of the father-in-law’s wealth when it is revealed. Trench is the youthful idealist, the attractive hero of melodrama or popular fiction. He epitomizes the ideals of society as embodied in romantic comedy. His idealist conscience is eventually subverted by the economic realities of the capitalist society. The hero’s very name, Trench suggest an individual “entrenched” in the realities and ideals of his society and who, because of his entrenchment becomes a “blocking character” to his own love and eventually a blocking character to social progress.

Shaw suddenly releases the “secret” in act II, bringing forward the climactic confrontation of protagonist and antagonist. In a well-made plot, the “operative secret” was withheld and released only at the end, so that the revelation is immediately followed by a denouement. The secret in the comedy is the source of Sartorius’s wealth: “tainted wealth” derived from the expensive rental of a slum estate in London.

Act II moves from Archer’s green romantic garden atmosphere of the Rhine hotel to the chilly opulence of Sartorius’s summer house in Surrey, where he conducts his business. In this business-like setting, courtship love and marriage, the subject of

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comedy is transposed to an analysis of the moral ramification of capitalism. We are introduced to Lickcheese, Sartorius’s rent-collector, charged with collecting

the master’s rents with the most ruthless methods. The purpose is to reveal Sartorius’s source of income to the hero. When the unfortunate rack-rent collector admits to using twenty shillings of Sartorius’s rents to repair a dangerous staircase in his squalid tenement, he is instantly sacked. Lickcheese takes his revenge by revealing the master’s heinous practices as slum proprietor to his prospective son-in-law who has just arrived with the promised guarantee of Blanche’s acceptance into his family.

With the well-made secret revealed so early, what follows is not the traditional denouement, but the natural reaction of the characters (in a Shavian “discussion”) to the new situation. In substituting a discussion for the traditional denouement, Shaw continues his play by one more act, making the well-made structure only a submerged plot in his own play. In Archer’s original scheme the play was suppose to end at this climactic situation with the confrontation of hero and villain and the hero’s rejection of “tainted wealth”. By Archer’s calculation, Shaw was to introduce the denouement at this point and resolve the deadlock by device of the deux ex machine. But Shaw rather asked Archer for more plot, having revealed the secret and therefore used up the entire well-made plot, but with his story still in the middle. From this point, Shaw’s play can be seen as a parodic “continuation” or a counter-discourse to a well-made play.

The English audience of Widowers’ Houses might not know Archer’s or Augier´s original plot, but any Victorian audience in 1892 was certainly to know the conventions of well-made plotting, which is the stuff of romantic comedy and demanded an ending in conformity to social ideals after the climactic revelation. At the revelation of the father-in-law’s source of wealth, Widowers’ Houses sufficiently arouse expectations that the conflict between the slum landlord’s money and the prospective son-in-law’s conscience will be resolved by some external device of plot (ex deux machina), which typically resolved marriage issues without dishonour to the comic couple. Shaw makes the expected generic ending far remote from his play.

After the revelation in act II, the social idealist, Trench can no longer honourably marry Blanche with the stigma of “tainted money”. On discovering that his intended wife’s dowry is “tainted wealth”, Trench makes the expected generic gesture of refusing to accept the dowry. But this act which belongs to the world of fiction or melodrama is only the beginning of Shaw’s inversions of Archer’s romantic plot. Shaw’s Blanche too, refuses to play the generic heroine. She does not undertake to give up all for love and marry poor Harry penniless. But the ultimate Shavian inversion is that the young man himself, finding that his own unearned income is derived from the same source as his prospective father-in-law’s, reverses his moral gesture, makes love again to the lady and thus provides Shaw, not with an “unhappy” ending, but a transformed romantic comic ending that reflects the capitalist theme.

When Trench is informed of the source of Sartorius’s wealth, he informs Blanche (but without explaining why) that they must renounce her father’s wealth after their marriage. But Shaw’s heroine, appealing to commonsense or reason rather than genre

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conventions, spontaneously rejects the proposal. She confronts the hero “white with anger” and shouts the bitterest reproaches to his face” (Pl. Unpl: 36) and in anger, calls off the engagement. Later, in a “transferred aggression”, the heroine vents her anger on the maid. Her unrestrained demonstration of anger shocked Victorian audience. According to Gibbs (1990:123), J.T Grein the first producer of the play expressed fears that the play may not go down well with Victorians: “I was impressed by the housing question, but a little afraid of the scene in which Blanche assaults the housemaid. Would the audience stand that in the ‘lady-like’ Victorian days of 1892?”

Having quarrelled and taken their stance on the engagement, the lovers themselves and not any external force bring about the ‘deadlock’ in the comic plot. But the crucial scene in Shaw’s reconstituted version of Archer’s play is not even the quarrel between the lovers over money but the ensuing confrontation between the socialist ideals of the naïve hero, Trench and the economic realism of the capitalist villain, Sartorius. Sartorius so eloquently justifies his iron-handed treatment of the tenants that, to the utter shock of Shaw’s Victorian audience, he convinces the hero to the capitalist viewpoint. This “discussion” scene in Shaw’s plot amounts to a counter generic discourse. For the first time in comedy a capitalist villain is given the opportunity to defend his actions and to fully present his views on capitalism.

At the climactic scene, the romantic plot is suspended and Shaw’s “reality principle” of a “discussion” takes over. Having vowed in his dramatic theory to avoid melodramatic characterization by objectively presenting opposing points of view (i.e. hero and villain), Shaw allows his villain, Sartorius to present his case more eloquently than any capitalist has ever done in a 19th century comedy or melodrama. The Idealist hero, Trench is first overwhelmed by the revelation of the source of Sartorius’s wealth and acts the “stage socialist” or idealist of melodrama by refusing to accept slum profits as dowry. His initial assumption that Sartorius and his capitalist class are vile oppressors of the downtrodden is the melodramatic ideal that Shaw wishes to debunk. In Widowers’ Houses “the meanly false judgement” is the conventional opinion in romantic comedy and melodrama that capitalists are villains responsible for the economic woes of society. The exposure of this view as a delusion is pivotal to Shaw’s climax and constitutes the disillusionment of the audience who share this view and have identified their values in the hero throughout the play. Like the hero, the audience must be made to see Sartorius as “his own photograph”. He must be brought to a “conviction of sin”; to the realization of his own complicity in the crimes of capitalism.

As an audience surrogate, Trench is an embodiment of the moral ideals of the prudes of society who see the likes of Sartorius as villains. With Trench’s disdain of Sartorius’s wealth and refusal to accept it as dowry, the playwright has effectively raised his spectators’ expectations that their ideals will triumph, that Trench will champion their moral ideals as embodied in the genre. By keeping the audience ignorant of Trench’s own source of income in the first half of his play, Shaw artistically prepares the anti-climactic led-down that follows.

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In the course of Sartorius’s lengthy justification of his iron-handed treatment of his tenants, he reveals that, like himself, the hero and his aunt, Lady Roxdale are shareholders in his slum housing business. Worse still is the insinuation that Trench is even worse than Sartorius, for while Sartorius labours to collects the rents, Trench merely receives the interest. Trench contributes nothing to what he actually consumes: Sartorius: When I….screw, and bully, and drive these people to pay….I cannot touch one

penny of the money they give me until I have first paid you your 700 pounds out of it. What Lickcheese does for me, I do for you. He and I are alike intermediaries: you are the principal (Act I, 82).

Trench: (dazed) Do you mean to say that I am just as bad as you are? Sartorius: …If… when you say you are just as bad as I am, you mean that you are just as

powerless to alter the state of society, then you are unfortunately quite right (Trench does not at once reply. He stares at Sartorius, and then hangs his head and gazes stupidly at the floor, morally beggared, with his clasped knuckles between his knees, a living picture of disillusion) (42).

Sartorius’s sin is not so much the exploitation of the poor which the play presents as the general law of capitalism, but his pessimism to the possibility and feasibility of changing the system: “if…when you say you are just as bad as I am, you mean that you are just as powerless to alter the state of society, then you are unfortunately right”. As Shaw seeks to show in the unpleasant plays, pessimism is the governing ideology in a capitalist system and the greatest obstacle to the will to transform society.

Sartorius’s pessimistic defence marks a turning point in the structure of the play. Although the climax reveals the villain’s activities, it mainly incriminates the hero and this, in order to show how engulfing and pervading capitalist corruption is. The parodic turn in the plot is emotionally disturbing. During this illuminating clash, Shaw manipulates the hero’s changing mood in telling stage directions: The “morally haggard” Trench is further reduced to “a living picture of disillusionments” and to commonplace humanity in the context of widespread capitalism. “Still stupefied, he “slowly unlaces his fingers, puts his hands on his knees, and lifts himself upright; pulls his waistcoat straight with tug; and tries to take his disenchantment philosophically”.

When Trench learns that he is just as corrupt as his antagonist, his dazed acknowledgment of the fact first makes him a pathetic figure in the eyes of the audience. In his unconscious villainy, he earns the audience’s sympathy. But by the time the play enters act III, Trench himself has begun to reveal the influence of Sartorius’s pessimistic argument and thus, to participate actively and consciously in the capitalist exploitation of society. Logically too, he entirely surrenders the audience’s sympathy. Thus, although the disillusionment of Shaw’s hero educates him on the realities of capitalism, Trench learns nothing except his own guilt and complicity in the social and economic crimes of capitalism. But what is worse, the hero converts to the capitalist pessimism that pervades the play. He is finally convinced that he is like the villain and all other members of society powerless to change society or the social system and must “shut his eyes to the most villainous abuses” of capitalism if he must

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himself survive. When in act III he joins ranks with the capitalist exploiters in a new housing swindle, he becomes himself, a villainous source of real discomfort to the audience that has seen him as the champion of their ideals and values.

The final movement of the play (act III) returns to the conventional courtship plot to provide a conventional marriage resolution for the romantic comedy. Although Trench allows himself to be persuaded to join the capitalist exploiters, his fiancé, still chucked with anger at his stupidity refuses “to marry a fool”. In act III, Blanche and Sartorius are sitting before a winter fire in Sartorius’s London apartment when Lickcheese, his former rent-collector turns up in full evening dress. Lickcheese has been melodramatically transformed from penury to opulence, allowing the audience to further perceive the pervading spread of capitalist corruption. His transfiguration is the result of a corrupt housing speculation in which slums like Sartorius’, known to a few capitalist insiders to be scheduled for demolition are hurriedly bought, superficially renovated and made eligible for exorbitant compensations from the municipal authorities. The “Royal commission of Inquiry” has noted Sartorius’s rent-gouging activities and Lickcheese has come to propose the new scheme to his old master.

Lickcheese’s visit coincides with Trench’s return to seek his love. Meanwhile, Blanche has discovered the truth about the source of her father’s wealth from a parliamentary report, a “bluebook” report on his slum activities. She therefore comes to understand the reason why Harry objected to the dowry. When she learns of the source of her father’s income and the disreputable report on his slum activities, “she covers her face with her hands, and sinks shuddering into the chair” (Pl. Unpl., 54). But this gesture is once more part of Shaw’s process of raising and frustrating generic expectations. To the audiences’ horror and shock, when Blanche raises her head, she expresses her sympathy for her father and not for the poor victims of his slums. Blanche is not affected by the misery of the slum dwellers, but angered by the dishonour to which the existence of the poor exposes her family. Her “ladylike” revulsion is directed against her father’s unsavoury tenants:

oh, I hate the poor. At least, I hate those dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live like pigs. If they must be provided for, let other people look after them. How do you expect anyone to think well of us when such things are written about us?” (Pl. Unpl, 55).

In the meantime, Lickcheese has convinced Trench to join the new swindle that he and Sartorius are about to undertake. Trench is to serve as the mortgagee of Sartorius’s slum property and to receive his fair share of the profits. Having settled this, Lickcheese realizes that the business contract between Sartorius and Trench can only be sealed by restoring the marital alliance of Trench and Blanche who now deserve each other: “I know miss Blanche. She has her father’s eye for business. Explain this Job to her; and she’ll make it up with Dr. Trench. Why not have a bit of romance in business when it cost nothing?” Lickcheese contrives a scheme to win back Blanche for Trench. Blanche is to discover Trench alone about to kiss her portrait.

As earlier mentioned, the psychological and emotional depth of Shaw’s plays is to be found in in the subtext and not in the surface rhetoric of his characters. The final

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love encounter between Trench and Blanche reinforces the first in illustrating this. The most moving moments in Shaw’s comedy are those in which climactic collisions occurs between comic humour and deep emotional energies. In this last encounter between Trench and Blanche, the mainstream of emotional action runs underneath and even contradicts the surface dialogue. Critics are generally agreed that Chekhov first articulated the anti-naturalistic and modern notion that human beings hardly ever speak explicitly with each other about their deepest emotions; that great tragic and emotionally climactic moments in drama happen beneath outwardly trivial conversations (C.f. Esslin, 1994:100). Widowers’ Houses indicates that Shaw precedes Chekov in illustrating this.

The audience of Widowers’ Houses has to devote a lot more attention to decoding the subtext in order to perceive the emotions beneath the seemingly trivial dialogue of the primary text. In the last scene, Shaw’s sense of comic humour emanating from a clash of contradictory impulses as well as his sense of irony led him to anticipate Chekov’s use of irony in the subtext. Twice in the play, Shaw shows Blanche unwilling to admit her feelings and disguising them in aggressive hostile remarks.

On finding Trench alone in her father’s sitting room about to kiss her photograph, Blanche lunges into a seemingly angry uninterrupted harangue, the best that reveals the contradiction between text and subtext in this play. When she discovers Trench about to kiss her portrait, Blanche and Trench “face each other” as Blanche furiously invites him to leave: “So you have come back here. You have had the meanness to come into this house again….what a poor spirited creature you must be! Why don’t you go?” Trench makes for the door while Blanche tells him once more, “I don’t want you to stay”. But then, follows a long stage direction which shows that Blanche’s surface dialogue is in direct contradiction to the emotions it covers up:

For a moment they stand face to face, quite close to one another, she provocative, taunting, half defying, half inviting him to advance, in a flash of undisguised animal excitement, it suddenly flashes on him that all this ferocity is erotic: that she is making love to him. His eyes light up, a cunning expression comes into the corner of his mouth: with a heavy assumption of indifference he walks back to his chair, and plants himself in it with his hands folded (Pl.Unpl.,63).

These extensive stage directions are indeed the author’s instructions on how to act Blanche’s role. They provide the actress with great insight into the true nature of female sexual psychology. As Meier (1967:213) holds, “the creation of Blanche and particularly of this last scene represents a mile-stone in the history of 19th century English drama. For the first time an author dares to lay bare the secret fire of the human soul”. The newness of Blanche as a comic heroine lies in the psychological realism of her sexual passions. The interplay of sincerity and pose, her capitulation to love and protestation to the contrary represent a transition to touching sincerity in the depiction of human emotions and female sexual psychology in Victorian theatre: Blanche: (Earnestly, stooping over him) Look me in the face. (No reply). Do you hear?

(Seizing his cheeks and twisting his head round) Look-me-in-the-face. (He shuts his

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eyes tight and grins. She suddenly kneels down beside him with her breast against his shoulder). Harry: what were you doing with my photograph just now, when you thought you were alone? (He opens his eyes: they are full of delight. She flings her arms round him, and crushing him in an ecstatic embrace as she adds, with furious tenderness) How dare you touch anything belonging to me? (Pl. Unpl, 108).

Blanche distinguishes herself from the stage-heroines of romantic comedy by the undaunted realization of her emotional self. While her actions violate the restraint of Victorian ladylike refinement, Shaw strikes new directions in psychological realism at this very poetic moment in the stage directions. Contrary to critics who see Shaw’s stage directions as prosy rather than theatrical, anyone inclined to think genuinely of the emotional and psychological content of Shaw’s comedies will not only see the sexual sensitivity of this scene, but also how the incisively dramatic movement of the scene deepens the psychological underpinning of the rather economic theme of Shaw’s comedy. Blanche is made more dominant in the relationship with Trench from the start, forthright and direct in their first interview instead of indulging in elaborate lovers’ charades. This second scene forcefully puts the economic matter of the play in better focus for, immediately thereafter, the relationship snaps into place as a marriage that seals the shady deal to be engineered by Sartorius, Lickcheese and Trench. This marriage completes Trench’s assimilation into the corrupt capitalist system.

Shaw goes beyond showing the interdependence of love, marriage and money. Like the scene in which Blanche boxes her maid, in this scene of sexual ferocity, Shaw is suggesting an aggressiveness and rapacity in the sexual and personal lives of his middle-class characters that matches the reality of their money-making. Romance is not Shaw’s main subject. The Unpleasant Plays deal with the inextricable relation of money to morality in capitalist societies. “The moral basis of [Shaw’] socialism”, as stated in The Irrational Knot is, “money controls morals” (23). This too, is the thesis of the two plays. The contrived reconciliation between the lovers is meant to underscore the relation of money to moral, sex and marriage in a capitalist system.

As the conspirators of this unholy union (Lickcheese and Sartorius) return to join the reconciled lovers, the commercial union of sex and money is symbolically emphasized in the hero’s salutary statement to his father-in-law: “I’ll stand in, compensation or no compensation” (he shakes Sartorius’s hand”[Pl. Unpl., 65]). These lines spoken just immediately before the fall of the curtain put Trench in a completely new light in the audience’s view. He has given in to capitalism and all his previous gestures of moral indignation assume an undertone of falsity. The transformation of the stage-gentleman of romantic comedy into an unscrupulous businessman is complete. The spectators are forced to wonder how many of the heroes they have admired on the Victorian stage merely displayed Trench’s sham virtue or “stage socialism”. As the three men go in for a celebratory feast at supper, Lickcheese “jocosely” and symbolically takes to supper on either arm, Trench and Sartorius, now economic allies, not adversaries (protagonist and antagonist).

Having quarrelled, the lovers have to be reconciled and marry. This conventional

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imperative holds in Widowers’ Houses. But what a marriage! The usual atmosphere of marriage and courtship reconciliation is strangely transformed. Sartorius, Mrs Roxdale and Lickcheese, all give their blessings to a marriage across class barriers for reasons other than love and romance. Their reasons are purely economic and by choosing to level down the hero in a corrupt marriage, Shaw realistically reflects the pervading corruption in capitalist society. Shaw uses the comic motif of “tainted wealth” as metaphor for “tainted currency” to illustrate the inescapable spread of the “taint” of corruption in capitalist market systems. This is the implication of the comic marriage as well. Without implicating his characters, especially the hero in this corruption, Shaw’s marriage resolution would have been the pivot of a conventional drama. But by implicating the hero, the marriage assumes an “unpleasant” symbolic significance for the audience. Business consideration, not human instincts determine even human relationships in a capitalist society. Trench’s final condescension is conducted on the bases of personal business interests. Although the conflict is resolved in the traditional manner of romantic comedy, Trench’s reconciliatory moves are only accepted by Blanche after she learns that he would no longer permit sentimental notions about “tainted money” to delay their wedding or lower their standard of living (Blanche, it should be remembered never really cared whether the money is tainted or not).

Trench’s agreement to go along with Sartorius and the other conspirators’ plan also seem to be a precondition for real reconciliation with Blanche and the money baron, her father. Finally, in making his audience see the final reconciliation and comic resolution in marriage as one of the numerous business deals or bonds in the play, Shaw further alienates his audience. Besides, the marriage is meant to be seen as a fulfilment of Blanche’s sexual and materialistic desires. When we realize in the last love encounter that Blanche’s desires consist of “erotic ferocity” towards the hero and a “ladylike” inclination to escape the “disgrace of harboring such wretches” as the poor, we begin to perceive how much unpleasantness the play’s resolution offered the Victorian audience of the 1890s. Material interest precipitates and controls the reconciliation and marriage while subverting its spiritual significance in comedy.

The play no doubt ends in a renewed engagement between Trench and Blanche and a celebratory feast befitting of comedy follows, but the renewed engagement is intended to seal the business deal with Sartorius. In comedy, once all obstacles to the union of the couple have been overcome, what follows is usually the solemnization of a betrothal. Such a betrothal is always a confirmation of a new dispensation in romantic comedy. But this is not the significance of the betrothal in Widowers’ Houses. This final union is in the main an ironic inversion, even a travesty or devaluation of the ritual of comedy, since it is not so much a new society that will come into existence but a confirmation or rather, a fortified re-emergence of a pre-existent corrupt regime in which a jaded protagonist and a self-willed termagant come together to mock the harmonious reconciliation that a ritualistic union in comedy would ordinarily support. Trench’s decision to marry Blanche despite the tainted source of her dowry is only a culmination of his surrender to the pessimistic ideology of the capitalist system. The

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marriage symbolizes his acquiescence to the status quo rather than revolt or change. In no other romantic comedy is to be found such a devaluation of marriage.

With this ending, Shaw makes good his claim to disturb his audiences’ sensibility and provoke their intellect and conscience through their feelings. They must go home with the dissatisfying knowledge that the lovers are sealing, not the symbolic communal union and rebirth in marriage, but the mutual economic interest of their social classes intended to plunder society. With such a feeling, begins the general contemplation of social transformation.

III.2.3. The Counter-generic discourse: The biblical title and figure Perspectives

Shaw understood the stage tricks of the well-made romantic comedy and could have written a conventional comedy in Widowers’ Houses if he so desired. This is evident in his ridiculous review of how his play would have turned out in the hands of a more conventional author. Trench, Shaw holds, would have renounced his income when he learned that it comes from slum property and then,

go to the goldfield to dig out nuggets with his strong right arm, so that he might return to wed his Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that Lickcheese, her father’s rent collector has turned out to be the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius who had dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the faithful Cokane (Prefaces, 202).

In another critical piece in which Shaw reviews a play by A. W. Gattie that tried to imitate the methods of Widowers’ Houses without noticing its alienation techniques and subversion of the audience’s ideals, Shaw advises the author,

Take Widowers Houses, cut out the passages, which convict the audience of being just as responsible for the slums as the landlord, make the hero into a ranting socialist instead of a commonplace young gentleman; make the heroine an angel instead of her father’s daughter only one generation removed from the wash rub; and have the successful melodrama of tomorrow (Theatres, II: 193).

In his generic parody, Shaw depends on a strategic handling of hero to deceptively simulate the generic discourse or the generic perspective of the subject in the first half and to counter it with the Villain’s perspective in the second half. The hero carries the audience along in his righteous indignation towards the capitalist class in the first half where he is given all the attractiveness of the melodramatic hero. Shaw consciously encourages his audience to identify with, and share his hero’s righteous despise of capitalists. The audience identify more and more with the hero’s response to the social and economic corruption that pervades the comedy until the climax. The more they identify or commit themselves to the hero’s conventional viewpoint, the more they look forward to the ensuing plot sequence with expectations and anticipation of a genre-type resolution in which the hero will champion their values.

At first Trench is attractive to the Victorian audience. His comfortable manners and

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genial spontaneity contrast so sharply and favourably with the affectation of his “constitutionally ridiculous” friend, Cokane that he gains considerable admiration from the audience in this early part of the play. When before the climactic scene, he expresses his sensational disturbance at the sight of poverty and misery, the audience is bound to endorse this “stage socialism” of melodrama. When the source of Sartorius’s income is revealed in act II, Trench erroneously concludes that Sartorius is a vile oppressor of the masses. Here the hero’s attractiveness is at its peak. The audience has been led to expect a showdown at this point in which the hero, acting the Marxist champion of the social and moral values of the poor will maintain his purity by turning his back to such a marriage with “tainted wealth”. Up to this climax, Trench appears the enraptured lover of romantic comedy and a gentleman of strong moral conviction. Shaw has capitalized on his Victorian audience’s decent sentiment to raise admiration for Trench and suspicion about Sartorius while at the same time, keeping the audience ignorant of Trench’s own source of income and therefore, of his own complicity in the general guilt. Trench’s noble refusal to accept slum money as the dowry for his marriage to Blanche marks the height of conventional expectations in any melodrama or romantic comedy. Significant here are the stage directions on Trench as he listens to Lickcheese’s revelation of Sartorius’s profession: “aghast”, “overwhelmed, has to sit down”. He then “recoils” from Sartorius and when Blanche comes to meet him, he breaks away from her “with a convulsive start and exclamation”.

But then, Shaw immediately begins to expose the illusions that shape his heroes perspective and to overturn the pleasant effects of the play’s first half into the unpleasant effects of the second half. The focus of the play shifts radically from the protagonist’s to the antagonist’s perspective, which is no less a falsely oriented perspective. What is more is that, in the second half of his play, the villain’s perspective is semantically over-coded by the Bible, which is clearly another textual background for the play. In Sartorius’s defence, Shaw re-writes the Bible in his parody.

Shaw referred to his title as a “farfetched” scriptural title”34 and the scriptural parable of “widows’ houses” constitutes a textual background for the play. Sartorius, a widower evokes the titular allusion to the biblical scribes who “devour widows’ houses” (Matthew 23.14, Mark 12. 40 and Luke 20. 47). The play alludes to the parable as a Christian version of hypocrisy and “tainted wealth” to elucidate capitalist greed as a human vice in all ages. It thus, re-contextualizes the biblical discourse in contemporary society.

Christ’s attack launched two thousand years ago against sanctimonious members of a group of legal experts (a class of people) for Shaw, highlights social hypocrisy as a general human weakness that belongs to all ages and to all classes. The scribes, represented in the Bible as specimens of a smooth villainy are no less repulsive than Shaw’s main capitalist character, Sartorius, a rack-rent landlord, who at the end of the 34 In his Preface, “Mainly about Myself”, Shaw describes the genesis of this play as follows:

“so I completed it by a third act; gave it the Farfetched scriptural title of Widowers Houses; and handed it over to Mr. Grein” (Pl. Pl. and Unpl., x).

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play is also a houseknacker involved in dubious housing speculation. Like the biblical scribes, Sartorius is outwardly considerate and well-mannered but callous and hardened in the handling of the tenants of his London slums. However, Shaw’s use of the biblical discourse is quite ambiguous.

The introduction of similarity between the Scribes and Shaw’s capitalist is only the beginning of an inversion of the biblical passage, the first being that, while the biblical “widows” are victims of the scribes, Shaw’s “widower” is the chief economic offender. More significant is the fact that Shaw employs the biblical discourse more in defence of his villain than in his condemnation. He does not wish to particularize the guilt of corruption in a class as is the case in the Bible or in 19th century melodrama or comedy. Rather, Shaw wishes to universal the guilt. Hence Sartorius is only the first to get his fair share of the social indictment encoded in the biblical metaphor.

First, Shaw’s intention in using the biblical passage is to suggest a combination of heartlessness and the hypocritical anxiety to please, which make those in high places (like Sartorius) privately repugnant and outwardly admirable. In this regard, Sartorius comes in for his fair share of Shaw’s satire on capitalism. Christ speaking to his disciples lashes out at the hypocrisy of people who assume the position of respectable members of society, but secretly snatch away the property of the helpless (widows):

Beware of the Scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts; which devour widows’ houses, and for a shew make long prayers: the same shall receive greater damnation (Matthew 23.14)

As a moral replica of the biblical scribes, Sartorius is careful to remain outwardly irreproachable “in the eye of the law”. Once the source of his income is revealed and his reputation as a tenement squeezer exposed to his prospective son-in-law, Sartorius, eager to restore his reputation argues that though it is truly not proper to leave a tenement staircase without rails so that the slum dwellers risk breaking their limbs, repairing the staircase Sartorius argues, would only mean providing free firewood for the poor who, unable even to afford their rents, cannot afford wood or coal to warm up their houses and would therefore help themselves to “banisters, handrails, cistern lids and dusthole tops”, all of which he assures the bewildered hero, is of no use replacing: “you will find them again in less than three days burnt sir, every stick of them” (Pl.,Unpl.,41). When the dismissed Lickcheese accuses Sartorius of tainted wealth and of forcing him to soil his hands, Shaw’s Scribe, solicitous of reputation replies,

What do you mean by dirtying your hands? If I find that you have stepped an inch outside the letter of the law, Mr. Lickcheese, I will prosecute you myself. The way to keep your hands clean is to gain the confidence of your employer. You will do well to bear that in mind in your next situation (27).

One would think that Sartorius is a law abiding citizen, but as his statement implies, a law abiding citizen is one who does his employer’s bidding. Like Christ, who ruthlessly places side by side the ambition of the Scribes to secure status symbols

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and their cupidity in dealing with defenceless women, Shaw uses shrewd irony to expose similar duplicities in Sartorius. Listening to Sartorius’s self-righteous dialectics, one may think he built his tenement houses for charitable purposes:

As to my business, it is simply to provide homes suited to the small means of the poor people, who require roofs to shelter them just like other people. Do you suppose I can keep up those roofs for nothing? No gentleman, when people are very poor, you cannot help them, no matter how much you may sympathizes with them. It does them more harm than good in the long run. I prefer to save my money in order to provide additional houses for the homeless (41).

Sartorius pretends to provide houses for people with small means, but he does not care about the quality of the commodity he provides or the welfare of his tenants.

The biblical parable also appealed to Shaw for its exploration of hypocrisy, creed and pride. Central to the biblical parable is the metaphor of clothes on which Christ draws for his analysis of affectation in the biblical Scribes. The Scribes are ridiculed for their respectable clothing that contrasts their innate morals. They wear “long clothing” as Mark has it, and “make long prayers” to impress people or earn respect (“greetings in market places” as the Bible puts it). Sartorius is made the target of innuendos almost as damaging. When we first meet him, he is excellently dressed, but his dress only symbolizes his outward appearance, which conceals and contrasts sharply with his innate character. His name “Sartorius,” suggests “dress” tailored of conventional ideals of respectability and symbolize the maintenance of the status quo. “Sartorius” suggests a man whose “sartorial” values are “tailored” to the social conventions that envelop his being. For Sartorius, it is the appearance rather than elemental realism that matters. Like the biblical Scribes, he is not only well-spoken, but accepts the prestigious pattern of Victorian snobbery. Twice in the play (pp.6, 28) the subtext describes his thrill at the prospect of establishing family connection with English aristocracy through his daughter’s marriage, and even though he knows Harry is naïve and scarcely a match for his shrewd daughter, Sartorius insists that Blanche has the education and breeding to ensure her “fitness for the best society” (15-16). He thus eagerly makes the match despite class and character incompatibilities. To this extent, Shaw encodes the generic view of capitalist as villains in Sartorius.

In spite of the similarities between the capitalist villain and the biblical Scribes, there is a marked contrast in tone between Christ’s passage and Shaw's play. Although Shaw satirizes his capitalist, his satire is not as tongue-lashing as Christ’s and the reason is because Shaw wishes to universalize the guilt that Christ, like Shaw’s contemporary socialist dramatists attribute only to a class of capitalists. Shaw was fully aware of the mood and general bearing of the scriptural context and definitely knew that Christ directed his satire to a particular class that exploits society. Having explained in his preface that “the guilt of a defective system” cannot be laid on individual culprits, the moral philosophy of Shaw’s play differs from the biblical parable: it is not just the capitalist class that practices corruption, but everyone in a capitalist system. Shaw wishes to place the responsibility for capitalist immorality on

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the structures of society and not on individuals who practice it. And placing the blame on the defective system does not imply that no one is guilty, but that everyone is, and that, unless we all change the social system, vice will continue to be rewarded and justified. Thus, re-employing the parable to a specific frame of reference in contemporary socio-economic and political conditions that, as a socialist he knew thoroughly because he himself has collected rents in the slums of Dublin and because of his deep education in socialist politics, Shaw generalizes the parable to show the taint of corruption spreading in socialist and capitalists alike.

Sartorius argument is eloquent, sometimes rational and quite convincing. Shaw definitely realized that, if he must disturb his audience’s feeling, if he must force them to critically think about the possibility and feasibility of transformation, he must not lay the guilt of corruption on his capitalist alone, but on society at large. To do so, he must not make Sartorius an out- and-out melodramatic villain, anti-social and malevolent in temperament. If he were to lay the blame squarely on Sartorius or create a melodramatic villain in him, he would make him the villainous scapegoat and thus free his audience from complicity and from the responsibility of mending the system. Thus, Shaw also refuses to let his protagonist play the hero or the melodramatic emblem of social purity. He must show his protagonist and antagonist as guilty and yet innocent on the basis of the fact that it is the system (the economic structures) of capitalism that force corruption on its citizens. Hence, although the pivotal “discussion” incriminates his capitalist, for all the rhetoric on Sartorius as a biblical Scribe, the climax reveals the hero as a greater Scribe than the Villain. While Sartorius rips the benefits of the crime, he at least does the ugly work of collecting the rents. Trench does nothing for his profits and even when he comes to know where his monthly seven hundred pounds comes from, he does not reject the income.

As far as figure perspectives are concerned, Shaw pits two falsely oriented perspectives in conflict, forcing his audience to choose the golden mean. This principle of the golden mean ties accurately with the author’s Fabianism. His satire on stage socialism and capitalism is marked by the “cool temper of English Fabianism”, to borrow the phrase from Crompton (1971:2). Trench and Sartorius are products of their environment, the capitalist market economy. On the basis of environmental restraints, they are shown to be innocent. The implication is not that no one is guilty, but that everyone is. The spectators, compelled to censure the characters’ actions and yet unable to blame the villain or hero are driven to seek the object of their condemnation in the capitalist structures that they like Trench, have consciously or unconsciously promoted. With such a conviction of complicity, the audience is provoked into thinking of the possibility of transforming the structures. By making the audience understand that there is no one to blame but themselves, Shaw goads them into thinking about the possibility and feasibility of transformation. The unmelodramatic reaction of characters is of primary importance in Shaw’s dramaturgy because it contributes to the unpleasant dramatic effects that force audience to critically think about the subject.

All in all, Trench provides the generic discourse and Sartorius the counter-

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discourse. These opposed perspectives on the subject allows for a dialogue on the generic topoi that clearly deconstructs it. Thus, in Shaw’s very first play, the firebrand socialist and self proclaimed propagandist who subtitles this play “propaganda drama” refuses to write a socialist propaganda. More than this, Widowers’ Houses has political implications beyond its immediate English capitalist context of the 1890s. It still appeals to the modern reader because of its topicality.

III.2.4. Widowers’ House as a Topical Comedy

In Widowers’ Houses, Shaw transforms a sentimental romantic comedy into a topical comedy with contemporary relevance. The play treats an ongoing socio-economic, political and moral problem of Shaw’s time and ours―the need for decent affordable houses for the urban poor in capitalist societies. The surge of homelessness among the urban population has emerged with greater urgency in our time. The play focuses on how an individual ought to react to a recognized―and perhaps baffling ― social injustice that stifles conscience. The obligations of society to provide shelter for the disadvantaged and the failure of government and private enterprise to meet this challenge becomes a metaphor for the whole problem of implementing social justice and overcoming the difficulties that impede moral and social reformation.

However, it is not Shaw’s subject matter in itself, but his artistry that renders his subject appealingly topical. Shaw’s in-depth knowledge and analysis of capitalism in the housing domain as a pressing social, cultural and ethical problem and his illustration of its moral ramifications renders the subject particularly relevant to the 20th century. Strikingly, the modern reader will still find the issues raised by Sartorius’s housing enterprise relevant to the housing politics of today’s more advanced societies.

Though a hypocrite and profiteer in the play, Sartorius shows a realistic understanding of society’s obligations to the oppressed when he defines his role as landlord: “as to my business, it is simply to provide homes suited to the small means of the very poor people who require roofs to shelter them, just as other people” (Pl., Unpl., 41). The homelessness of the poor in England of the 1890s is still a relevant problem among our urban population and Sartorius's response too, is just as manipulative as our present house owners’ and housing firms. Though Sartorius claims to be helping in supplying the needed commodity (houses for the poor), he neither cares about its quality nor the welfare of the tenants. He however, knows the contemporary realities of his business, especially when he declares that improvement in tenement housing only invites vandalism from the occupants who would use as fuel any material available to them. Sartorius’s chief defect is pessimism, his acquiescence in “things as they are” (Shaw’s “romantic imagination”) or, his complacent assumption that society cannot change for the better. This view for Shaw is the greatest barricade to social transformation. Sartorius’s pessimism however, does not invalidate the reality of the housing problem as he understands and presents it in the play.

Sartorius does realize that without some sense of responsibility for their own

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situation, poverty-stricken tenants will all too often convert renovated or new rental houses to slums, a reality of his time as well as ours. One only needs to think of the many houses constructed by American authorities in the post world war II era which became, just after a few years less desirable as living quarters than the tenements they replaced and are now centres, not only of vandalism, but of violent crimes.35 Sartorius’s defence is sound and rational, but no less disturbingly pessimistic. However, much of the meaning of the play as an exploration of the socio-economic, moral and political implications of slums and capitalism also revolve around Sartorius rent collector, Lickcheese, who is not so minor a character as he appears to be.

Lickcheese, Sartorius’s unscrupulous rent collector at first, has some sympathy for the plight of his employer’s clients and his moral scruples actually cost him his job in the materialistic jungle of industrial London. What is more, he becomes after leaving service, even more unscrupulous than his former boss. In the materialistic jungle of the city, Lickcheese not only comes to survive, but to survive with profit. His animal energy in the capitalistic jungle of gains and profits represent “social Darwinism in action” (Gibbs, 1983:42): social power acquired by cunning, unscrupulousness and a successful struggle against one’s adversaries. Lickcheese turns out to surpass his employer in the housing corruption and is even more knowledgeable in the trade. His conversation in act III clearly shows that it is not only the private entrepreneurs that the play indicts with respect to low-cost housing but government at all levels.

In the old days Lickcheese maintains when he turns up a rich man in act III, local government was more or less corrupt, although he and Sartorius appear to be satisfied that it was so. The local vestries consisted of interest parties―slum landlords and other capitalists― who put their interests first and blocked any interference by others in their activities. The game is up now Lickcheese adds, because the vestries have reform-minded members in them now. This has made life hard for landlords who must either improve their houses or have them torn down by the authorities. But big loopholes still exists in the system which landlords exploit on daily basis and Lickcheese himself has become rich after his dismissal by exploiting some of these loopholes in the system.

Beside the fact that houses scheduled for demolition can be superficially improved in exchange for high compensation from the authorities, Lickcheese has actually risen to the rank of a landlord himself by manipulating the “Housing Commission” charged with bringing unscrupulous landlords under control and making sure that houses respect some standards. Good enough, the commission has reported on Sartorius’s slums as we hear in the Parliamentary report that Blanche reads. This has forced Sartorius into mortgaging his slums. But he gives up his slums only to join Lickcheese in a bigger housing speculation on exploiting the “Housing Committee”. Although “Housing Committees” have been created by the state to check unscrupulous landlords and improve the housing problem, a lot of loopholes remain in the new government 35 Edward Masiniak’s accounts of Cabrini Green in Chicago constructed by the Housing

Authority in conjunction with the United States Government in the Post World war II era is a contemporary illustration of the subject of Widowers’ Houses. See Masiniak (1986).

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structures that make them inefficient in checking the corruption in the housing domain and the consistent exploitation of poor tenants by landlords.

Though the central government has at last recognized the need to regulate the activities of estate owners, it is prone, despite its pretensions, to inefficacy, inaction and corruption. The “Royal Commission on Housing” for the working class before which Lickcheese testified after his dismissal from Sartorius’s service, apparently did not press him hard enough for the truth of his employment. Moreover, he made friends with a landlord member of the commission against whom he refrained from testifying, as we are told in the play. The agent in turn endorsed a bill that enabled Lickcheese to become a tenement owner himself in a business whose fraudulent ways he masters. Thus Lickcheese uses his familiarity to penetrate the proceedings of the commission for his own personal ends. The remedy to these manipulations, though unstated in the play is that the local vestries, town councils and governments need vigilant members and people with acute sense of their responsibility to society than they have had in the past; had in the 1890s or have today in our own contemporary capitalist societies.

Lickcheese’s unethical utilization of the report and the failure of the Commission to guard against such abuses have their parallels in many of our 20th century societies. One thinks once more of the fraudulent activities of the “Housing and Urban Development Department” (HUDD) in the United states which resulted in a scandal when it came to light in 1989 that former members of the Reagan Administration had been paid exorbitant “consultant’s” fees36, abused or mismanaged their offices by misapplying funds designed to build middle-class houses and projects like golf courses or, even outrightly stolen federal money for housing as a result of faulty bookkeeping. The recent Bernard Madoff alleged $ 60 billion investment scandal, perhaps the largest investor fraud ever perpetrated by a single person, and having taken so long before American authorities could realize and bring Madoff to justice, is only a reminder that Sartorius and Lickcheese would still feel comfortable and operate smoothly and secured in our present societies.37 Undeniably, Lickcheese and Sartorius would still be at home in our contemporary capitalist democracies that make claims to an advance civilization, good governance, social justices, human rights and improved welfare for the poor. Their creation exemplifies Shaw the artist as interpreter of the historical processes in which he finds himself. Recontextualizing the parable of “Widows’ Houses” in his own contemporary context, Shaw shows how the ancient parable on corruption relates to the realities of his society of the 1890s and beyond. Christ’s attack launched two thousand years ago is universalized to highlight social and economic hypocrisy as a human weakness that belongs to all ages, classes and periods 36 Reviews on the United States Housing Department scandals are in newsweeklies: Trevor,

“Sam Pierces ´Turkey Farm”, In: Time 134 (18 Sept., 1989): 20-23; Waldman, The HUD Ripoff, In: Newsweek 114 (7 August 1989): 16-22; Gleckman, “Cleaning House at HUD― and then some”, In: Business Week (10 July 1989:73-74; S. V. Robert, “The Undoing of Silent Sam Pierce”, U.S. News And World Report 107 (18 Sept 1989:29-32).

37 For the Bernard Madoff scandal see, http://www.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff

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It is indeed; through his artistry that Shaw renders the economic realities of his time appealing to us today. Through its unsavoury characters, unpleasant techniques, its squalid subject material, it fatalistic implications, its objective and full depiction of depressed segments of society, its exposé of feminine passions, its attempt to shock its audience and its radically opposed political sympathies for capitalists and socialists alike, Shaw alienates the 19th century audience accustomed to the less thought provoking plays of his time and renders his subject relevant to generations to come.

The poverty underlying the misery of the urban poor in Shaw’s play has re-emerged in our time to become a matter of great urgency. The injustices and hegemony of capitalist ideology in a “laissez faire economic system”, its stifling effect on the human spirit, conscience and morality, its pessimism and the need for mankind to overcome pessimism as a first step in social evolution; all these issues are well illustrated to render the subject current. The subject of Shaw’s play speaks to us through all the ages, from the biblical times to the 21th century and indeed, Shaw might have spoken more truly than he realized, when in his 1892 preface to the play he asserted that, the play belongs to no particular genre but, “To Humanity solely” as “the only genre I recognize” (24). Widowers’ Houses speaks to us today as it sought to speak unpleasantly to its largely complacent Victorian audience in 1892.

III.3. Mrs Warren’s Profession: An Anti-Courtesan Melodrama

The Courtesan problem melodrama was part of the repository of literary and non-literary texts in late-Victorian England that served to define and stabilize the identity of the woman, restricting female sexual intercourse to marriage and fostering cultural assumptions about female purity and sexual misconduct. Hence, the context of Shaw’s Mrs Warren extends to the activities and writings of the late-Victorian purity and vigilance movements of the 1880s and 90s, which provide an external frame of reference for the generic expectations of the Courtesan problem melodrama. By contextualizing Mrs Warren within the Victorian climate that inspired it, I also demonstrate that Shaw’s early battle with censorship and the purity movements lingered in the play. More significantly, I argue that Shaw’s, plot construction, characterization and casting choice powerfully influenced the reception of Mrs Warren as an anti- Courtesan play by audience of the 1890s that might otherwise have identified his play with the moral myth of purity in the genre and in extra-theatrical narratives on sexual misconduct.

The Purity movements have largely disappeared from cultural memory, making it hard to see how they shaped the expectations of the Courtesan melodrama and how boldly Shaw affronted the Victorian values of the genre. Recalling these discourses allows us to see how Shaw’s play dialogues antithetically with the “fallen women” myth in Victorian cultural memory.

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III.3.1. Victorian Reform discourses: Generic frame

The seeds of the play were planted as Shaw saw the power of social purity movement turned against the theatre and failed to address the economic causes of prostitution among young working class women.

In July 1885 S.T. Stead who championed the reform movement in the 80s shocked the British public and opened a debate on female sexual misconduct. In a series of articles entitled, “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, he asserted that “the most imperious sense of duty” impelled his pen and documented how working women were

Snared, trapped and outraged, either when under the influence of drugs or after prolonged struggle in a locked room, in which the weaker succumbs to sheer downright force. Others are regularly procured; bought at so much per head in some cases, or enticed under various promises into the fatal chamber (S.T. Stead, 1885:3).

Stead interviewed prostitutes, “madams”, police etc. to unveil systematic efforts in the nation’s capital to deprive vulnerable females of their virginity, which he asserts, a “woman ought to value more than life” (3). His exposition marked a high point in British public attention to, and sentiments against sexual exploitation of working-class women. His series led to mass rallies and calls for government intervention. The outcry led to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Still not satisfied, Stead organized conferences on the subject and created vigilance movements to ensure that government implemented additional moral laws to ensure the purity of working class women. His conferences as Shults (1973:171) holds, were intended to find a “practical program” of organizing “the Vigilance Association of London” (NVA). But the NVA gradually developed into an instrument of state censorship, working in collaboration with the office of the Lord Chamberlain and pressuring it to apply ever more stringent guidelines for plays that violate sexual morality. Its hope was to prohibit any works that “violate the conscience of the bishop or any other descent citizen” (T. Philips, 1910: 195).

Shaw was not only scandalized to find the NVA assisting Licensing authorities as a way of attaining social reform, but more by their lame interpretation of prostitution. While he strongly shared the reform initiatives of the movement, Shaw was strongly opposed to their view of the causes of prostitution as well as their methods. Like in Widowers’ Houses Shaw’s position on prostitution in Mrs Warren is that the social malaise is neither caused by, nor can be blamed on the practitioners of prostitution. For Shaw too, neither the marriage Act nor any amount of moral laws can remedy prostitution. In Shaw’s play, prostitution is not simply conceived as a moral problem, but as a political and mainly economic problem. The responsibility for the crime lies with society and not with individuals. While Shaw felt that the theatre was a useful tool of social reform, Stead’s NVA was extremely suspicious of the moral impact of theatre on audience.

Berating the NVA’s lame interpretation of prostitution, Shaw held that, “in artistic matters” the Secretary of the NVA was “a most intensely stupid man” who was “on

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sexual questions something of a monomaniac. For Shaw, “the paid officials of [Purity and Vigilance] societies...combine a narrow but terribly sincere sectarian bigotry with a complete ignorance of art and history”. Stead he insisted, was “an abyss of ignorance” and “made a round of theatres as if they were brothels” (III: 733; Letters, I: 448). Shaw had harder criticism of the Courtesan play, which he saw as the dramatic analogue of the purity discourses. For Shaw, prostitution was a matter of economic morality to be analysed in consideration of the political and economic context.

On the question of prostitution, the purity reform movement, like the Courtesan playwrights took the ideals as the unquestionable standard of moral judgment and blamed prostitutes for moral infamy or the upper classes for sexual corruption. In Mrs Warren, Shaw takes the Fabian socialist orientation that environment determines character and the capitalist structures were responsible for prostitution. Hence, the reform of the political structure is the necessary first step to moral reformation.

III.3.2. Genre expectations & “the Fallen Woman” in Victorian cultural memory

The Courtesan genre merely translated into stage action the Victorian purity discourses on female sexual transgression. Stead asserts that a “woman ought to value [her virginity] more than life”. Owen Davis (1931:102) has earlier stated this as the moral of the Courtesan play: “Our heroine must be pure at any cost, or she must die”. The Courtesan genre was basically intended to inculcate the fear of sexual misconduct in young women. It warned of the severe misery that accompanied violation of the sexual norm and a cardinal convention of the genre was that the prostitute transgressor of sexual mores died at the end of the play.38 Though the courtesan plays challenged the ‘double standard’ by encouraging audience to sympathize with the ‘fallen woman’, they inevitably ended up killing, or at least, ostracising the troublesome, erotically charged protagonist. B. Howard (1914:27-8) sketches the generic expectations thus:

In England and America, the death of the pure woman on the stage is not ‘satisfactory’, except when the play rises to the dignity of a tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as in the case of ‘Frou-Frou’, is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the inevitable…The wife who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman (27-28).

38 Few playwrights could dare reconcile “the fallen woman” to society — Kotzebue’s

Strangers (1898) and Wilkie Collins’ New Magdalen (1873) —, but such reconciliation was not without a strong dramatization of a deep and unreserved sense of regret in the heroines and even then, reconciliation without death was scarce to come by in the genre. Although in Mrs Dane’s Defense, Arthur Jones does not kill his heroine, she walks off her engagement and simply disappears from society. The reader is given the impression that the only sanctuary for the prostitute lies in extricating herself from her society.

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In short, in its various stage representations in the well-made structure, the late-Victorian “woman with a past play” addressed the question of whether a woman could leave sexual license behind and re-enter respectable society as wife, mother, or friend. All plays in the genre concluded that she could not as dramatists linked lost virginity with dire consequences, depicting women as culprits destined to suffer for the sexual liberties of upper-class men. The plays merely reflected Victorian cultural discourses that held marriage as the ideal for women and prostitution as the antithesis of the ideal.

For Shaw as for Fox-Genovese (1989:217) literary texts are not mere “functional articulation of [their] context”, but active agents in reshaping the discourses in which they participate. Shaw’s prefatory sketch of the expectations of the Courtesan play, make clear that his play was to make these genre expectations its target: As he asserts, “Nothing will please the sanctimonious British public more than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs Warren’s Profession on Mrs Warren herself….” (xi). To Shaw, the Courtesan play simply affirmed the cultural stereotypes about prostitution:

A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now conflicts of individuals with the law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial… (Pl., Pu., 11-12).

By “judiciousness”, Shaw means “impartiality” in the handling of the subject and dramatic conflict as we have seen in Widowers’ Houses. But unlike Widowers’ Houses, Mrs Warren makes no direct allusion to its dramatic pretext, The Second Mrs Tanqueray , but Shaw’s reviews of the play unmistakeably indicate that Mrs Warren was to function as a parodic quotation, so to speak, of the “fallen woman” myth in Pinero’s play in particular and the Courtesan genre in general. Shaw’s heroine is not simply a counter-portrait of the prostitute heroine in general and of the “Paula Tanqueray persona” in particular.

III.3.3. The dramatic Pretext: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

While virtually every one in England was crowning Pinero as the laureate of dramatic realism on the strength of The Second Mrs. Tangueray and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, Shaw was firing at Pinero pretensions to realism.39 For Shaw, the restriction of the well-made structure censored any proper interpretation of prostitution. Amusingly Shaw provides dismissive accounts of the purported realism of Pinero’s social tragedy and of the well-made structure on which it was based, as a formula for bolstering moral conventionalism and melodramatic codes of conduct: “in fact these so-called problem plays [of the 1890s GN] invariably depended for their

39 In his A Manual of Craftsmanship, Archer, particularly hails The second Mrs. Tanqueray

as “courageously virile, an astonishing dramatic advance both in philosophical insight and technical skill” (121) and constantly makes reference to it as a model of playwriting.

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dramatic interest on foregone conclusions of the most heart wearing conventionality concerning sexual morality” (Pl., Unpl., 118). Contrary to dramatists and critics of the time, Shaw was not impressed by Pinero’s realistic dialogue, realistic setting and realistic play construction or respect for theatrical conventions. His philosophical concept of realism demands realism of viewpoint on the subject, which implies a balanced presentation of figure perspectives as seen in Widowers’ Houses rather than the logic of plot construction.

Shaw’s review of Pinero’s play emphasize the limitations imposed by the well-made structure on Pinero’s interpretation of prostitution as well as make clear that Mrs Warren will function as a parodic quotation of the much cherished Victorian stereotypes about “fallen women” in the Courtesan genre. Reviewing particular scenes in The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Shaw asserts that when Aubrey and Paula quarrel over the former’s attempts to keep his child out of the latter’s way, the aim is simply to give Paula a sense of guilt as the genre requires. And in keeping his heroine silent at that climactic revelation when her sexual past is revealed, Pinero suppresses the unconventional point of view on the subject. Paula Tanqueray offers no defence for her choice of profession. Referring to the moment in Act III where Paula suddenly breaks into tears, Shaw dismisses Pinero’s realism in words that clearly accentuate the ant-climatic technique and parodic structure on which Mrs Warren’s profession is based:

The moment the point is reached at which the comparative common gift of ‘an eye for a character’ has to be supplemented by the higher dramatic gift of sympathy with character― with the power of seeing the world from the point of view of others instead of merely describing them or judging them from one’s own point of view in terms of the conventional system of morals, Mr. Pinero breaks down (Theatres, 1: 47-48).

Shaw argues that Pinero fails to examine prostitution from the heroine’s viewpoint because he is more interested in providing a comfortable moral resolution to Victorian audience who expect his play to conform to the ideal codes of coduct rather than provide a realistic analysis of prostitution: “Paula is an astonishingly well-drawn figure as stage figures go nowadays, but no more than that, a purely theatrical construction drawn from Pinero's own point of view in terms of the conventional systems of morals”:

One can imagine how in a play by a master-hand, Paula’s reply would have opened Tanqueray’s foolish eyes to the fact that a woman of that sort is already the same at three as she is at thirty-three, and that however she may have found by experience that her nature is in conflict with the ideals of differently constituted people, she remains perfectly valid to herself, and despises herself, if she sincerely does so at all, for the hypocrisy that the world forces on her instead of for her being what she is…..[Paula] makes her reply from the Tanqeray-Ellean-Pinero point of view and thus betrays the fact that she is a work of prejudiced observation instead of comprehension ( Theatre, 45-47).

The most unrealistic aspect of this “prejudice observation” in Pinero’s play as Shaw sees it, is the melodramatic death of the heroine. Paula’s death is nothing but a model of what the well-made play formula with it emphasis on edifying moral closures

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demands at the denouement. Pinero kills his heroine to uphold the conventional norm and satisfy audience expectations. As Shaw argues, having choosen prostitution as the only alternative to starvation, Paula makes a more decent choice, a preference for life rather than starvation and death. Moreover, Paula informs Tanqueray even before their marriage that she has had a past. It is thus, illogical and unrealistic that she should kill herself at the mere revelation of that past. Because Pinero wishes to uphold the ideals, he subordinates characterization to the ethical requirements of the well-made plot and the conventions of Courtesan melodrama. Shaw finds no rational psychological explanation for why Paula Tanqueray commits suicide. For him, Paula’s death can only be accounted for on grounds of Pinero’s eagerness to bolster Victorian norms of sexual conduct and the need to observe the aesthetic requirements of well-made plotting.

Although in his plot construction and characterization, Shaw provides a counter discourse to Pinero’s play, he was prepared to foster his parody of Pinero and his attack on the stereotypes of prostitution in Victorian cultural memory in his stage performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession as well. This is evident in his choice of cast for the first performance of Mrs Warren.

III.3.4. Performance as Intertextuality: Cross-Casting “the fallen Woman”

Theatre remains the most powerful medium for transmitting or challenging Cultural memory and it is the theatre’s potential to influence mental dispositions, attitude and norms that has made it the object of suspicion among political authorities throughout the ages. Shaw fully exploits the multimediality of drama for his attack on cultural memory and parody of Pinero’s play. From a performance perspective, it is obvious that he conceived the cast of Wrs Warren as a parody of the “fallen woman” stereotypes in cultural memory with precisely, the “Paula Tanqueray Persona” in mind.

When in 1894 Shaw handed the play to J. T. Grein for performance, Grein discerned its unmistakable relation to Pinero’s play as he intimated to the public that his Independent theatre was preparing to perform “Mrs Jarman’s Profession”. Shaw protested against Grein’s association of the play with Pinero’s,40 but his biographer, Henderson (1911:301) also holds that “in the first draft, the play was entitled, Mrs Jarman’s Profession”. In Pinero’s play, before Paula married Aubrey Tanqueray, one of her numerous social aliases was “Mrs. Jarman”. Shaw himself unconsciously confirmed a relation between the two plays when, responding to Grein’s request for a proposed cast, he listed the characters as follows: “an amiable old bachelor, Praed, who could be played by anybody who can play Cayley in ‘The Second Mrs

40 Protesting the association of Mrs Warren to Paula Tanqueray, Shaw insisted that, “The

title ‘Mrs Jarman’s Profession’ is a curious illustration of the influence of Paula Tanqueray. The real title is Mrs Warren’s Profession. The name, Jarman never came to my head, nor is there any authority for it except some association of ideas in Grein’s head which led him to give the wrong name to his interviewer” (C.f. E. J West, 1955: 9).

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Tanqueray’.… The great difficulty is Mrs. Warren…. I should be content myself, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell” (C. f. Peters, 1984:106).

The correlation of Praed’s role with Pinero’s Cayley’s was not unconscious. Both characters share an intimate relation with the prostitute figures of their respective texts and possess knowledge of their heroines’ secret sexual past. But it was really Shaw’s choice of Mrs. Campbell for the role of his principal character that effectively indicates that he intended to provide a counter-generic discourse to the myth of prostitution.

On May 24th 1893 the Victorian actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell appeared in the central role of La Dame aux Camélias (1852), a play by which the French playwright, Dumas Fils had lastingly defined the Courtesan Play as a genre on “fallen Women”. Three days later, 27th May 1893, Campbell once more created wide sensation in the eponymous role of Pinero’s Mrs. Tanqueray. Shaw began writing Mrs Warren in 1893 and his choice of cast makes clear that his play was intended to counter the moral myth of the genre and the sensational reception of Pinero’s play. His choice of cast was therefore not coincidental and could not be better for his parodic purpose.

As an actress, Campbell was too desirable on the Victorian stage and too strongly associated with narratives of sexual consummation.41 Shaw’s choice of Campbell was essentially intended to exploit the actress’s public persona and her profound sex appeal against the clichés of prostitution. As a long time dramatic critic and reviewer, Shaw was undoubtedly aware that an entire stage history is likely to accompany an actor or actress on the stage when he or she assumes a new role and this was no doubt a key factor in his choice of Campbell. He also knew that Campbell’s popularity was firmly cemented on her reputation as an actress who would bring “fallen women” to life on stage in unparalleled ways. Her first portrayal of the title character of Pinero’s play, a formal mistress and prostitute who attempts to reform but is finally unable to escape her past, was most acclaimed by the public. Paula Tanqueray was enormously popular and gave Campbell her popularity as the best performer of plays in the genre. Her acting, or rather, her ability to “be” Mrs. Tanqueray was widely remarked on the English stage and in critical reviews. Her naturalistic acting style encouraged association of the actress and her role and audience and critics alike claimed she “was Paula Tanqueray” (Sos, 1998:4). Campbell herself was startled to discover that she was identified with her role. A few people called her “Mrs Tanqueray” by accident and one woman investigated her background to see whether she was not a demi-mondaine (Campbell, 1922:83). As Aston and Savona (1991:103) maintain, “the image of the “fallen woman” was henceforth encoded in Mrs. Pat’s on and offstage identity”.

It is thus clear that Shaw’s cross-casting of Campbell was a deliberate strategy to 41 In her 25 years as actress, Campbell played many roles, but was strongly associated with

ethereal sex objects. In 1904, Shaw wrote that her presence imbued the drama with an “overpowering odor di femmina” that was most apparent when she acted in the “woman with a past” play. (Letters II: 219). Campbell’s 1895 performance of Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith created similar sensation as Tanqueray. For Archer (1896:179), the applause was induced by Campbell’s “extraordinary beauty and elegance”.

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ensure that an audience that has previously associated the actress with her prostitute role will understand the actress’s new role against the background of her previous roles and performances and perceive the contrast in meaning. Even for the spectator who has not read Shaw’s play, Mrs. Campbell’s presence in the performance of the new play would ultimately raise and undermine expectations for the kind of play for which she is known. The cross-cast was intended to allow the audience negotiate the meaning of the new play in contrast with the actress’s previous performances and thus, to reconsider their generic and cultural assumptions about the “fallen woman”.

The unpopularity of Shaw’s parody at the time of its publication demonstrates the extent to which the play confronted contemporary cultural taste and attitudes toward prostitution. While Pinero’s play received great applauds, public outcries of immorality greeted Shaw’s play in England and America. Public performance of the play was banned until 1925.42 However, it was much more Shaw’s ambivalent interpretation of prostitution rather than the subject itself that drew cries of immorality from his critics.

Significantly Shaw was borrowing from a narrative text―a French novel, Yvette by Guy De Maupassant to confront his dramatic pretext and its cultural myth. The rational psychology with which Shaw confronts the representation of prostitution in the Courtesan genre was inspired by Maupassant’s Yvette. The novel meets all the requirements of realism that Shaw attributes to Ibsen in The Quintessence. Reworking the central situation of the novel, Shaw pits Maupassant’s/Ibsen’s realism of viewpoint against Pinero’s conventional psychology. Thus, while the intertextual relation of Mrs Warren to its generic representative or dramatic pretext is one of contrast, its relation to Maupassant’s novel is one of analogy and extension.

III.3.5. Mrs Warren’s Profession and Yvette (1885)

Pharand (2000) has discussed the influence of French writers and their works on Shaw. While Widowers’ House was inspired by a French play, Mrs Warren was inspired by a French novel. But the initial appearance of the novel in Shaw’s dramatic works can be traced back to the second “unpleasant play, The Philanderer, which makes reference to a “yellow black French novel” that the enraged Julia seizes to show her contempt for Grace: Julia: Oh, look at that! Look, look what the creature reads―filthy, vile French stuff, that no

decent woman would touch. And you, you have been reading it with her.

The “French novel” was probably Yvette and was more forcefully to emerge as the

42 Following Arnold Daly’s, first performance of the play in the New York Garrick Theatre

(October 30th 1905), the trope was arrested and jailed by “The Vice Squad” for participating in an immoral work and subsequent performances in New Havens were banned. The Mirror (11 Nov) reported that “Its presentation amount simply to offending good taste by clownish methods of telling disagreeable facts”. William Winter called Shaw “a crack- brained mischief-making English-Irish Socialist...” (C. f. Innes, 1998:66).

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germinal source of Mrs Warren. Shaw admired and championed “heretical” writers like Brieux, Zola as well as mocked Julia’s kind of moral outcry against Ibsen in Clement Scott’s review of Ghost. He developed his dramatic theory from such heretical writers. In content, Maupassant’s novel follows Shaw’s Ibsenite theory of drama in being “an onslaught” on the kind of Victorian sentimentality in art that Julia expresses. Shaw however, denied borrowing from Maupassant and Pinero and instead pointed to an orally narrated French story as the pretext of his play:

Miss Janet Archurch mentioned to me a novel by some French writer as having a dramatisable story in it. It being hopeless to get me to read anything, she told me the story, which was ultra-romantic. I said, ‘Oh I will work out the truth about that mother some day.’ In the following autumn I was the guest of a lady of very distinguished ability…She suggested that I should put on stage a real modern lady of the governing class― not the sort of thing that theatrical and critical authorities imagine such a lady to be. I did so; and the result was Vivie Warren…I finally persuaded Miss Archurch, who is clever with her pen, to dramatize her story herself on its original romantic lines. Her version is called ‘Mrs Daintry’s Profession’. I never dreamed of Ibsen or De Maupassant, any more than a blacksmith shoeing a horse thinks of the blacksmith in the next county.43 [italics are mine].

Shaw also asserts that his earlier novel is actually the pretext for Mrs Warren: the tremendously effective scene... in which she [Mrs Warren] justifies herself, is only a paragraph of a scene in a novel of my own, Cashel Byron’s Profession (hence the title, Mrs Warren’s profession) in which a prize fighter shows how he was driven into the ring exactly as Mrs Warren was driven to the streets .

One finds it difficult to deny Shaw’s claim that Mrs Warren is indeed, a textual junior sister to Cashel Byron who like her, strongly defends his unpopular calling. Like Mrs Warren, Shaw’s novel contains several passages defending the hero’s immoral profession of prize-fighter. When one of the characters, Lydia refers to the hero’s profession as “these fierce and horrible encounters by which you condescend to earn a living”, Byron responds, “What can I do but take my bread as it comes to me. Even if I had been able to write a good hand and keep accounts, I couldn’t have brought myself to think that quill-driving and counting other peoples’ money was a fit employment for a man” (134). This is the thesis of Kitty Warren’s climactic defence of her profession. Given the dependence of woman on marriage in the 1890s, Mrs, Warren claims that the Victorian woman has only a sex function to perform, whether she performs it in marriage or out of it makes no difference: “The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her” (Plays, 314).

Given the dependence of Shaw’s arts on his reformist zeal too, the thematic relation of his novel to his play is quite perceptible, but the tone of the two works is 43 “Mr. Shaw’s Method and secret” In: Daily Chronicle, (30 April 1898), 3. Critics have

identified Beatrice Webb as the “lady of very distinguished ability” who requested from Shaw, “a real modern lady of the governing class” (C.f. Meisel, 1963:144).

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markedly different. Shaw’s representation of the textual junior sister to Byron is a complex mixture of comprehension, repulsion and sympathy, and the moral perversity that runs through Mrs Warren brings the play closer to Maupassant’s novel than to Shaw’s own novel. Besides, there are unmistakable patterns of analogy between Shaw’s play and the French novel regarding in particular, characterization, structure and the interpretation of prostitution. Maupassant’s novel appealed to Shaw because it seems to conform to the Shavian theory of realistic literature. Shaw admired and consciously reworked the unconventional trend in Maupassant’s treatment of prostitution, extending the sociological and economic-moral elements to foster his assault on the stereotypes of “fallen women” in his generic precedents.

In Yvette, two young men of Paris, Servigny and Saval visit “Marquise Obardi”, also known as Octavie Bardin, a courtesan like Mrs Warren who also has a daughter of unknown paternity, Yvette. Like Mrs Warren, who has developed her prostitution trade to the level of manager of an international chain of brothels, Maupassant’s “kept woman”, Bardin has developed her trade to the extent that she now owns and manages a house for sexual pleasure-seekers. Although one cannot say for sure whether Shaw’s first title, Mrs Jarman’s Profession is his transformation of Maupassant’s “Bardin” or a direct borrowing from Pinero’s Jarman, his eponymous title, “Mrs Warren” suggests “Bardin”. His prostitute’s daughter, Vivie suggests a similar transformation of Yvette.

Servigny, has a sexual obsession for Bardin’s daughter, Yvette, but also wishes to match Saval, with the mother. Servigny desires Yvette for nothing but sensual pleasure and would never think of marrying her because of the stigma of her mother’s trade. When Servigny tells Yvette he loves her, she requests that he speaks formally to her mother about it before she can accept him. Astonished that Yvette is mistaking his request to have sex for marriage, Servigny tells Yvette, there can be no question of marriage between them. Yvette is a reader of romantic novels and in her fantasy, she misinterprets Servigny’s response. The girl believes there must be some Cinderella kind of romantic obstacle about her. Could she be the daughter of a prince? To get to the truth, she tells her mother that Servigny requests her hand in marriage. Bardin, who knows more about the stigma of her trade― the “fallen woman myth”―, tells the daughter that a marriage with Servigny is impossible but does not explain further.

Although Yvette has lived with her mother throughout her life (for eighteen years), like Trench and Blanche in the first play or Vivie in Shaw’s Mrs Warren, Yvette has no knowledge of her mother’s Profession. Maupassant’s protagonist’s ignorance of her source of livelihood provides Shaw with a well-made secret withheld to the climax and a disillusioning pattern by which his own heroine comes to a mortifying knowledge of her passive participation in prostitution. Vivie thus replaces Trench in the disillusioning pattern of Shaw’s third unpleasant play and like Trench in the first play or Yvette in Maupassant’s novel she remains ignorant of her own sources of livelihood and has to learn of it as part of the unpleasant disillusioning pattern of Shaw’s parody.

However, due to the economic restraints of dramatic writing, Shaw borrows only the central situation of Maupassant’s novel, extending it with socialist discourses

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which, as a leading socialist he understood better than his counterparts in the Courtesan genre and even better than Maupassant. Yvette has never bothered to know how she and her mother survive. When she finally discovers that her mother is a “kept woman”, Yvette naively thinks she can save her mother from her wayward life and herself from the stigma of prostitution by persuading the mother to leave the city for the countryside where she can live “like peasants, like good women”. She tells her mother she does not care where they both move to, provided they can live like “good women”. Her ignorance of the crushing economic circumstances that drove her mother into prostitution and the mother’s rational response provide the germinal situation for the climactic reversal of the courtesan melodrama in Shaw’s play. Bardin’s response provides the dynamics of capitalist economics and morality in Shaw’s play:

The repetition of the words ‘good women’ stirred the marquise to a street-walker’s fury and she cried: ‘shut up! I don’t allow myself to be spoken to like that. I am as good as anyone, do you hear? I am a courtesan, that is true and I am proud of it; your ‘good women’ aren’t as good as me’. Yvette, astounded, looked at her. ‘O mama!’ she stammered. But the Marquise fully roused and exciting herself went on: Indeed yes. I am a courtesan. And what of it? If I were not a courtesan, today you’d be a kitchen-maid− you would, as I was at one time, and you’d work for thirty sous a day, and you’d wash dirty dishes, and your mistress would send you to the butcher’s, do you hear? − and she’d throw you out if you were idle, whereas now you’re idle all day long, because I am a courtesan. See here, when one’s only a servant, a poor girl with fifty francs saved up, one must know how to arrange matters if one doesn’t want to waste away like a half-starved wretch. And there aren’t two ways out for us, you understand, when one’s only a servant. We can’t make a fortune with jobs, or tricky dealings on the stock Exchange. We have only our bodies, only our bodies’. She struck herself on her chest, like a penitent at confession, and scarlet in the face, over-excited, advancing towards the bed, she continued: ‘So much the worse! When one’s a good-looking girl, one must live by that, or else endure wretchedness all one’s life…all one’s life there’s no other choice.’ Then returning sharply to her theme: `Besides, what do they go without, those ‘good women’? They’re the bad ones, I tell you; because nothing drives them to it. They have money, enough to live on and play with, and they take men out of viciousness. They, not we, are the bad women! (Bullough, 1962: 342)

Appalled, Yvette sentimentally weeps and her mother weeps with her. Mother and child embrace each other. Like Sartorius who perceives the social order as fix, and justifies himself only in terms of the system as it is, Bardin tries to make her daughter see prostitution in this pessimistic light: “that is how it is, and what can be done about it? Its too late to change anything”. But Yvette is still determined to escape the stigma and the predicament of a “kept woman”. After a dilemma of living with a stigma or dying, she takes poison, but is saved. When she recovers she is lying in a pleasant half-dream in which everything seems possible and she seems to realize that all is peaceful and charming in life. When Servigny chides her for her suicidal attempt, ― “My dear girl, we must resign ourselves to the most painful situations” ―, Yvette, who has accepted this pessimism tells him she now wishes to live and be loved by him. She thus accepts a relation with Servigny on his (courtesan) terms.

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Maupassant’s psychological analysis of prostitution must have appealed to Shaw, who clearly drew on Bardin for his counter-generic portrait of the prostitute heroine. By including a failed attempt at suicide and by the serious moral dilemma of dying or living that his heroine suffers and finally, by keeping her alive in spite of her worries of a stigma, Maupassant rejects the romantic tragedy that constituted the denouement in a Courtesan melodrama. Shaw, who rejected deaths and suicides as “stage murders”, instruments of the denouement or cheap contrivances to bring the dramatic plot to a conventional moral close found the novel’s resolution appealing.

The unexpectedness with which Bardin’s defence bursts on her readers, reversing the structure at exactly the climactic revelation and occasioning a complete change in viewpoint is what Shaw stresses as essentially lacking in the realism of The Second Mrs Tangueray. Criticizing Pinero’s realism, Shaw talks of the “moment” in drama when “a comparative common gift of “an eye for character” has to be supplemented by the higher dramatic gift of sympathy with character” or “the power of seeing the world from the point of view of others instead of merely describing them or judging them from one’s own point of view in terms of the conventional system of morals”. Bardin’s spontaneous defense and its thematic and structural effects must have appealed to Shaw’s contra-suggestive mind and endorsing its rationality, Shaw worked over the material afresh to produce his anti-Courtesan play.

Structurally, Maupassant’s novel had a particularly Ibsenite appeal to Shaw. Shaw described the story by Mrs Archurch as “eminently dramatizable” and Maupassant’s structure consists of an exposition and first movement, leading to a revelation of an ugly past for the main character. This revelation involves what Shaw says constitutes “problems of conduct”: a moral dilemma to which the main character, Bardin, like Kitty Warren responds realistically and spontaneously in a “discussion”. At the climax of Maupassant plot, the point of view gravitates from the conventional to the unconventional. Such a structure is consonant with Shaw’s “exposition-situation-discussion” structure of an Ibsenite drama. The utility of such an “unexpected” turn in Shaw’s structure often lies in the need to expose a conventional ideal or received opinion in “a conflict of “unsettled ideals”. The interplay of idealism and realism, appearance and truth, knowledge and ignorance, morality and money, realism and illusions that characterize the mother/daughter confrontation in Maupassant’s novel provides the economic-moral dynamics of Shaw’s climatic defence of Mrs Warren.

III.3.6. Plot and Counter-Plot in Mrs Warren’s Profession

Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray like Maupassant’s Yvette revolves around the confrontation of innocence and experience or the judgment of daughter (Ellean/ Yvette) upon the mother (Paula Tanqueray/Bardin). This too, is the central situation of Mrs Warren. The first half misleadingly encodes the conventional generic expectations of a Courtesan problem melodrama in which, for reasons of satisfying the ideals, the audience expect the virtuous daughter to emerge victorious over the prostitute mother.

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Act I of the four act play is a well-made exposition that introduces the major characters. As Vivie lounges in a hammock in a garden setting in Surrey, she impresses us as the self-possessed “New Woman”. Shaw has dramatizes female emotional self-realization in Blanche Sartorius in the first Unpleasant play. In this third Unpleasant Play, he presents in Vivie Warren, a woman who fully realizes her intellectual potentials. Vivie has first-class honours in mathematics from Cambridge. Her costume suggests her sober, intellectual character: “Plain business-like dress, but not dowdy. She wears a chatelaine at her belt, with a fountain pen and a paper knife among its pendants” (Pl. Unpl. 178). Her ambitions exceed those of the ordinary Victorian woman as she tells Praed, an admiring visitor and old friend of her mother’s: Vivie: I shall set up chambers in the city, and work actuarial calculations and coveyancing.

Undercover of that I shall do some law, with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the time. I’ve come down here all by myself to read law: not for a holiday, as my mother imagines. I hate holidays.

Praed: You make my blood run cold. Are you to have no romance, no beauty in your life. Vivie: I don’t care for either, I assure you. Praed: You cant mean that. Vivie: ...I like working and getting paid for it. When I’m tired of working, I like a comfortable

chair, a cigar, a little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story (act I, 180).

This is a caricature of course, and Shaw makes Frank Gardner spot it as such with his Comment on Vivie’s cigar-smoking― “Nasty womanly habit. Nice men don’t do it any longer” (336). But Vivie’s no-nonsense efficiency, her intolerance of shibboleths and sentimentality mark her for Shavian approval throughout the play and her strong-willed character provides the turn-around in the plot at the climactic situation.

Everything about Vivie, her gestures and diction are resolute and her occasional roughness reflects the personality of a girl who is used to taking care of herself. When Praed comes in, Vivie, who significantly enough likes hard chairs fetches one for her guest and brings her own “with one swing”. Later on, she replaces her chair “with the same vigorous swing as before” (Pl., Unpl. 179; 184,185). Throughout the play, Vivie is presented as resolute, “prompt, strong, confident and “self-possessed”. In fact, when she acquaints Praed of her desires and of her aversion to “all that makes womanhood beautiful”, Praed immediately remarks that Vivie is as far from Mrs Warren’s ideal as she is from his. Conscious of this, Vivie anticipates a serious conflict with her mother over her ambitions; a “battle royal” as she calls it. Praed has given Vivie hints that her mother is an authoritative sort of woman although he says nothing about her claims to such authority (complication). Vivie whose faint suspicion is awakened is determined to win the battle. To prevent her from hitting harder than necessary in her ignorance, Praed decides to tell her all she needs to know about her mother, but he is interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Warren in company of the vulgar, Sir George Crofts.

Shaw’s exposition act hints on the well-made secret, but withholds a lot of information so as to sustain audience’s interest. Like Yvette, Vivie is ignorant of her mother’s profession. We are also told that she has never lived with her mother and has

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never heard her father mentioned. The reasons are not provided. Praed, who knows is about telling her when he is interrupted. Effectively, the audience is left in doubt as to who Mrs Warren really is or what her profession is. Only Praed’s hint of her overbearing character has led Vivie to anticipate battle.

However, the hint of an authoritative mother and Shaw’s presentation of Vivie’s foreshadows a conflict, especially as we are made to see Vivie’s youthful feminism and disdain for authority, conventions or idealisms. In fact, after her feminist freethinking exposé to Praed in which she presents herself in anti-romantic masculinity, Vivie provides the feminist prism for her personality: “Now you know the sort of perfectly splendid modern young lady I am” (180). Against her freethinking and rebellious spirit, Shaw pits the authoritative mother figure of Mrs Warren who, although practically unconventional in her economic endeavours, is like Sartorius, conventionally eager to maintain the outward appearance of respectability. The attribute, “Mrs” tacitly raises suspicion since no mention is made of Mr. Warren. The looming shadow of a mysterious Mr. Warren further cast doubts on Mrs Warren’s personality. When she finally appears on stage in the company of the disreputable Sir George Crofts, “a callous looking man around town”, the implications for the audience and Vivie are clearer and the expectations of a “battle royal” is heightened.

George Crofts is “brutish” but fashionably dressed in the style of a young man… bull-dog jaws, large flat ears, and thick neck”. Frank Gardner crowns this despicable character in an amusing description, “sort of chap that would take a prize at a dog show, ain't he?” (197). Crofts immediately shows interest in Vivie’s good looks and though she is thirty years younger, he finally proposes marriage. A close associate of Mrs Warren, Crofts’s presence is meant to raise sensitive repugnance towards the prostitute, a generic sentiment that Shaw is simulating in this first part of his play.

Shaw accelerates the incrimination of the prostitute as the genre requires, but his aim as usual is to “implant a meanly false judgment” before beginning his disillusioning pattern. Praed has given hint of Mrs Warren’s authoritative and overbearing personality. On entrance, she bolsters the probability of conflict with her daughter, as she greets Vivie with a passing command: “put your hat on, dear: you’ll get sun burnt”. Perceiving this childlike treatment, Praed warns her that Vivie is a grown-up and needs to be treated with respect, but the authoritative mother is shocked by the advice: “Respect! Treat my own daughter with respect” what next, pray!” (187). In well-made play fashion, the opposing forces have been sharply aligned against each other. A secret hinted, but enough information withheld to make it less intelligible until the climax. The rest of act I focus on the related issue of Vivie’s father.

A brief conversation between Crofts, Praed and the Rev. Gardner continues the incrimination of the prostitute and further raises the audience’s suspicion and expectations of revolt. Crofts asks Praed if he knows who Vivie’s father is. While Pread’s reply is negative, the Rev. Gardner horrifies the audience with the suspicion that he is himself likely to be the father of the girl whom his own son wants for a wife. This incest theme, a staple of melodrama is brought up to further cast doubts on Mrs

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Warren’s character and to heighten the audience’s moral disapproval of “the woman with a past”. While the incest theme is still being considered, Shaw introduces two more developments to remind the audience of the climactic confrontation and to mislead them into anticipating victory for the righteous heroine.

There is a sub-plot which functions to heighten the audience’s anticipation of revolt and victory for the conventional view on sexual misconduct. In it, Frank triumphs over his father, Rev. Gardner, who is just as assertive as Vivie’s mother, but Frank is demonstrably a “good for nothing”, opposed to Vivie who exudes purposefulness and parades qualifications and gigantic ambitions. The Rev. Gardner has exhorted his son to work his own way into the profession “and live on it and “not upon me”. This is what Vivie plans to do in the face of opposition from her mother. The difference in the two parent-child conflicts is that Frank has already learned the crucial truth about his father’s hypocrisy mainly that, though a Rev., his father is a man with a “past” and this past coincides with Mrs Warren’s. In a brief encounter with the father, Frank uses this knowledge with levity and self-assurance, reducing the father to silence. The spectators still await Vivie’s shock and reaction at the discovery that her mother is a “fallen woman” and hopes she will use the information in the same way as Frank. The father-son encounter anticipates the main mother/ daughter encounter.

Shaw’s act II is actually the conventional climax of a Courtesan play. The audience has been carefully guided to form a conventional condemnation of the prostitute figure, “a meanly false judgment” as Shaw would say. The underlying tension between mother and child rapidly rises to the surface. Concurrently, the audience has been encouraged to approve of, and identify with Vivie’s perspective although they too, object to her unwomanliness. Shortly before mother and daughter are left alone in a heart-to-heart confrontation (in a “discussion”), Shaw gives his audience another incriminating view of Mrs Warren’s character. Frank declares his intension to propose marriage to Vivie and Mrs Warren presumes her word― at first, an approval― will be final. But on a second thought, she objects to the match, not because Frank is a “good-for-nothing” lazy and thoroughly immoral young man as the audience have been led to know, but because he has no money. Such a practical economic reason will repulse the audience of the romantically oriented Victorian theatre. Like Sartorius who treats the Trench-Blanche engagement as a business “transaction”, Mrs Warren treats Frank’s proposal in purely economic terms: “Your love’s a pretty cheap commodity…If you have no means of keeping a wife, that settles it: you can’t have Vivie” (Pl.,Unpl., 204).

On the contrary Frank’s confident retort would attract applause from the romantic audience of the 19th century theatre. Like Trench’s, Frank’s response gives hints of a romantic melodrama: “Mrs Warren: I cannot give my Vivie up even for your sake…I shall lose no time in placing my case before her” (204). Shaw also raises this expectation of romance between Vivie and Frank only to frustrate it at the end of the play with Vivie’s dismissal of Frank. Warren’s rejection of Frank as marital choice on purely economic reasons further alienates her from the audience, but what makes her appear downrightly repulsive to the audience is her seeming willingness to acquiesce

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in what the audience think is an incestuous relationship between her own children. The audience has already heard Gardner admit that he might be the father of Mrs

Warren’s daughter. Although Shaw does not develop the subject further but deliberately leaves his audience unclear on this incest theme, Mrs Warren’s first response to Frank’s proposal ( which is positive) is meant to further draw the audience’s repulsive sentiment towards the prostitute. Gardner had remonstrated to his son about the proposal, hoping Kitty will do the same: “Once and for all, it’s out of the question. Mrs Warren will tell you that it’s not to be thought of” (205). But Kitty fails the last face-saving test. Her indifference to the Frank-Vivie match shocks the audience: “well Sam, I don’t know. If the girl wants to get married, no good can come of keeping her unmarried”. Rev. S.: (astounded). But married to him! - your daughter to my son? Only think: it’s

impossible. Crofts: Of course it’s impossible. Don’t be a fool, Kitty. Mrs Warren (nettled) Why not? Isn’t my daughter good enough for your son? Rev. S. But surely, my dear Mrs. Warren, you know the reason− Mrs Warren: (defiantly). I know no reasons. If you know any, you can tell them to the lad, or to the girl, or to your congregation, if you like (Ibid.:205).

This dialogue is the climax of the appalling and incriminating process of implanting a meanly false judgment in the audience. The gradual incrimination of Mrs Warren is almost complete and the play proceeds in well-made fashion to the collision of protagonist and antagonist in the scène á faire. As in Widowers’ Houses, the material of the well-made play has been compressed into only the first act so as to make the conventional ending the beginning of a parodic “discussion”.

The confrontation scene comes up in act II when the mother fusses again over Vivie “with an affection of maternal patronage even more forced than usual” (206). When Mrs Warren informs Vivie that, since she will not be going back to college, they will be seeing each other a great deal, Vivie’s retorts: “Do you think my way of life would suit you? I doubt it” (206). To this, Mrs Warren sets herself up for the kill: Mrs Warren: (puzzled, then angry) Don’t you keep on asking me questions like that.

(Violently) Hold your tongue (Vivie works on losing no time, and saying nothing). You and your way of life, indeed! What next? (She looks at Vivie again. No reply). Your way of life will be what I please, so it will... (206).

Vivie is “quite unmoved” as the stage directions tell us, but her mother mistakes this defiant attitude for a sign of submission and works her daughter into a rage: Mrs Warren : (Again raising her voice angrily) Do you know who you’re speaking to, Miss? Vivie: (Looking across at her without raising her head from her book) No. Who are you? What are you? (206). Vivie’s strong mindedness, fearless self-assertiveness and determination throw Mrs Warren back to conventional motherly sentimentality. Mrs Warren: (Piteously). Oh my darling, how can you be so hard on me? Have I no rights over you as your mother?

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Vivie: Are you my mother? Mrs Warren: (appalled). Am I your mother! Oh Vivie!

Being a profound extension of the confrontation between Yvette and Bardin, Vivie in this scene proceeds to spell out the moral issues that constitute a turning point in a Courtesan play: Vivie: Then where are our relatives−my father−our family friends? You claim the right of a

mother: the right to call me fool and child; to speak to me as no woman in authority over me at college dare speak to me; to dictate my way of life; and to force on me the acquaintance of a brute whom anyone can see to be the most vicious sort of London man about town. Before I give myself the trouble to resist such claims, I may as well find out whether they have any real existence.

Discerning that her mother has been too promiscuous to know her father, Vivie presses on as the mother “buries her face in her hands” (206). At this stage, Shaw has fully encoded the Courtesan genre in the first half of his play. Traditionally, at this point of climactic revelation in the Courtesan play “the woman with a past” invariably puts the Victorian audience at ease sooner or later by deploring her past, confessing her guilt and expressing regrets. Crucial to the Scène á faire in a Courtesan play are two attendant maxims that rule the uncritical audience: it is assumed that a repentant courtesan is a reformed one and although penitent, the former courtesan’s discomforting presence will not have to be endured for very long. After her confession of shame, guilt and submission to the norms as the unquestioned standard of moral judgment, the final step in her atonement is death by suicide. Paula and all generic heroines conform perfectly to this pattern.

Shaw claims that Pinero’s realism “breaks down” at the climactic “moment” when he should have begun examining his subject from his heroine’s viewpoint. Such a climactic confrontation marks the beginning of a counter-generic discourse in Shaw’s own play. The second half is an eloquently presentation of the outcast’s viewpoint. When Kitty soulfully “buries her face in her hands”, she acts out the very last tip-offs of the generic pattern, the death of the despicable heroine. But her gesture is only a final step in Shaw’s deceptive evocation of genre expectations. Vivie appears to have spotted the theatricality when she tells her mother: “Don’t do that mother: you know you don’t feel it a bit” (206). Dismissing her show of remorse, Vivie asks her mother at what time she would like to have breakfast in the morning; a clear indication that she is through with the subject and has satisfactorily established her prostitute- mother’s guilt as the genre requires. The audience expects a final sequel, the heroine’s death.

While Paula gives-in to sorrow, guilt and tragic death at exactly this point, Shaw, true to his criticism of Pinero’s realism, deserts the conventional generic point of view and like Maupassant, begins to examine prostitution from the heroine’s viewpoint. Significantly, he also focuses on the economic factors that drive prostitutes to the streets, a perspective that his contemporaries in the genre entirely suppress.

When Vivie asks her mother at what time she would like to have breakfast the next day, it is a signal that its time to go to bed. Like the conventional audience of the play,

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she assumes that the “battle royal” is over and that she has reduced the prostitute-mother to final submission, but in Shaw’s plot, this is only an effective simulation of the well-made climactic ending. Vivie can now suggest going to bed while the conventional spectator, encouraged by Mrs Warren’s reaction (burying her face in her hands) and knowing the genre from plays like Pinero’s, duely expects the mandatory sequel to her exposure− simply, a confession and a suicidal death. Every line and action in the climax has hinted on the prostitute’s confession, repentance and death. Mrs Warren’s tone deceptively signals this mandatory pattern that the audience expect: Mrs Warren (querulously). You’re very rough on me Vivie. Vivie. Nonsense. What about bed? Its past ten. Mrs Warren (passionately). What’s the use of my going to bed? Do you think I could sleep? Vivie. Why not? I shall. Mrs Warren. You! You’ve no heart.

Shaw neither permits Vivie to go to bed nor gratifies his spectators’ expectation of a denouement by “stage murder”. A sequel does follow the climactic revelation, but what a sequel!? Like in the first Unpleasant play, Shaw proceeds almost immediately after the climax to defend the character he has stripped of respectability in the first half and to convict his audience of a “meanly false judgment”. Unexpected by audience and by Vivie, Mrs Warren (like Bardin and unlike Paula), suddenly bursts out in a forceful justification of her choice of profession. As the stage directions have it, [She suddenly breaks out vehemently in her natural tongue, the dialect of a woman of the people — with all her affectations of maternal authority and conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of true conviction and scorn in her]. Mrs Warren: Oh, I wont bear it: I wont put up with the injustice of it. What right have you to

set yourself up above me like this? You boast of what you are to me — to me, who gave you the chance of being what you are. What chance had I! Shame on you for a bad daughter and a stuck-up prude!

Shaw makes a counter-generic and class representative of his prostitute. She speaks for a class and kind; for all low class women, for prostitutes under capitalism and her defence is actually the beginning of Shaw’s counter-generic discourse that follows: “that’s what you don’t understand”, she tells her daughter, “your head is full of ignorant ideas about me. What do the people that thought you know about me? When did they ever meet me, or let anyone tell them about me? The fools!” (208).

III.3.7. The Counter [Generic] discourse: “Giving the Devil his due”

Mrs Warren’s discourse exemplifies what Grene (1984) refers to in Shaw’s dramatic works as “Giving the devil his due”. Her discourse and her entire character are impeccably constructed to counter the cultural memory of prostitution and the “Paula Persona” of the Courtesan genre. Shaw’s prostitute functions as an eye-opener to the conventional delusions of the heroine and her Victorian audience. Far from the

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generic figure’s plea for forgiveness, regrets and shame, Mrs Warren argument at the moment of climactic revelation in the genre provides sound justifications for her profession. With her discourse, Shaw’s play takes a turn towards autobiography. Kitty Warren opens up her personal history to Vivie as a way of justifying her profession.

Mrs Warren tells Vivie how she attempted ‘honest work’ and how the capitalist economic system denies her class the right to any form of honest living. Kitty has worked in the factory with two half-sisters, “undersized, ugly, starved looking, hard working, honest poor creatures....” “One of them” she goes on, “worked in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week until she died of lead poisoning” (208). Another married a labourer and kept house on his eighteen shilling wage until he too became frustrated and took to drinking. Kitty herself worked fourteen hours in a kitchen and restaurant bar but remained in penury until a friend who has prospered in prostitution “rescued” her by introducing her to the life-saving trade. She goes on to compare and in effect, to dissolve the binary opposition between prostitution and marriage, and even to compare prostitution with casual labour.

In Mrs Warren’s discourse, we witness the collapse of the hierarchies of honest labour to prostitution and the obliteration of the dichotomy of marriage and prostitution. The courtesan genre held marriage as the ideal and prostitution as its opposite. In allowing his prostitute to level marriage to prostitution, Shaw makes good his claim that “nobody’s conscience is smitten [by his play] except, I hope, the conscience of the audience. My intention is that they shall go home thoroughly uncomfortable” (West, 1955: 41). The audience feel uncomfortable because they share the ideals that Kitty destroys. Mrs Warren’s defence is highly over-coded with socialist discourses on the socio-economic condition of the women. Mrs Warren’s argument for her choice of prostitution is summed up in Shaw’s socialist discourse on women’s position in capitalist societies. Here, Shaw accuses the capitalist structures as being responsible for moral depravity among women:,

It is easy to ask a woman to be virtuous; but it is not reasonable if the penalty of virtue be starvation, and the reward of vice immediate relief. If you offer a pretty girl twopence half penny in a factory, with a chance of contracting necrosis of the jawbone from phosphorus poisoning on the one hand, and on the other a jolly and pampered time under the protection of a wealthy bachelor, which was what Victorian employers did… you are loading the dice in favour of the devil so monstrously as not only to make it certain that he will win, but raising the question whether the girl does not owe it to her own self respect... to sell herself to a gentleman for pleasure rather than to an employer for profit (Guide, 199)....In short, Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money, whether in or out of marriage; and against these bribes there stand nothing beyond the traditional respectability which capitalism ruthlessly destroys by poverty.... (Ibid.: 201).

Mrs Warren argues that, what society calls honest labour is not different from prostitution. Why should a young woman sell her good looks in a bar for the owner’s profit when she can sell them for her own profit? Why should society consider it honest work when a young woman sells her good looks behind the counter for the

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proprietor’s money, and frown at her when she does same for her own money? Mrs Warren also clearly extends Bardin’s exposure of the binary opposition

between marriage and prostitution as illusory. Like Bardin when she speaks of “good women” and “courtesans”, Mrs Warren’s discourse holds marriage and prostitution in a dialectical tension and sometimes inverting the hierarchical positions. Marriage, as socialist critics argued “remained as before, the legally recognized form of, and the official cloak of prostitution” (C. f chapter II. 5.2). Socialist critics equate prostitution to capitalist labour and Shaw’s fine aphorism in the preface to Getting Married, “the difference between marriage and prostitution is the difference between trade Unionism and unorganized casual labor” (220), is clearly expanded in his heroine’s discourse. As Mrs Warren argues, the capitalist economic structures allow the woman to perform only a sexual function within or without marriage and contrary to the view of Victorian reform movements and Courtesan melodramatists that marriage is the antithesis of prostitution, Mrs Warren insists that it is indeed, part of prostitution. More specifically, she argues that prostitution is the necessary “supplement” to marriage: “The only way for a woman to provide decently for herself is to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. If she is in his station of life, let her make him marry her; but if she is far beneath him she cant expect it” (Pl., Unpl., 212). What difference does marriage make with prostitution when middle class parents groom their middle class girls to marry well-to-do men within or above their social classes, Mrs Warren asks. Is it not unfair for society to sanction the one (marriage) as virtuous and discountenance the other (prostitution) as vicious: “What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and to get the benefit of his money by marrying him?, as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!” (212). The unvarnished truth about prostitution and marriage as Mrs Warren sees them is that, both are means of survival for women and the legalization of cohabitation does not purify unchastity or change the dependence of the woman on men. Worse still, she insists, far from promoting morality, the marital ideal fosters the very sexual corruption it pretends to erase: “The truth is that prostitution is commonly spoken of as an offense against our marriage morality…. It is, on the contrary, a necessary part of that morality [a necessary “supplement” to quote Derrida] and must stand or fall with it” (213). By denying women the right to live by their labour, society offers them nothing but two immoral alternatives: marriage of convenience or prostitution. For the woman who cannot ensnare a man into marriage, the alternative that society offers is prostitution or starvation and it is only natural and wise that Mrs Warren who, by virtue of her class cannot marry a well-to do man should choose prostitution rather than starvation. Marriage and prostitution as Mrs Warren presents them, mean the same thing except for the fact that, people use the one when they want to be complimentary and the other when they want to be abusive.

Shaw’s play was branded as immoral. Mrs Warren’s argument confused Victorian “either/or” critics of time. If he is not attacking the prostitute, must he not be defending her? If he is not setting marriage over prostitution, must he not be setting prostitution

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over marriage? For Shaw, drama like history seeks truth through contradiction and the important thing for a realistic dramatist to do is not to take sides, but to decnstruct hierarchies. As Culler (1982:213) asserts,

Codes of meaning are of interest to deconstructionists as they form into, ´value-laden hierarchies, in which one term is promoted at the expense of the other.... On the assumption that all hierarchies are linguistic cover-ups of ideological power struggle, deconstruction, systematically demonstrates that all hierarchies can be inverted and should be, not for the sake of establishing new hierarchies but to contribute to the understanding that all hierarchies are arbitrary and relative.

Shaw’s aim no doubt, is to deconstruct marriage and prostitution as culturally constructed in Victorian memory. In the preface to Mrs Warren, he explains his purpose for his rhetorical handling of prostitution in the genre :

Her [Mrs Warren’s] defense of herself …is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defense for the vice which she organizes.... the alternative offered by society collectively to the poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and right for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality but two kinds of immorality (xi).

For Shaw, “Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable daughter who cannot endure her…” (xi). As Bermel (2000: 9) holds, the play “explains; it does not justify. It proclaims not what should have been but what was, and is.” As Shaw himself puts it in his prefatory statement,

I believe that any society which desires to found itself on a high standard of integrity of character in its units should organize itself in such a fashion as to make it possible too for all men and all women to maintain themselves in reasonable comfort by their industry without selling their affections and their convictions. At present, we not only condemn women as a sex to attach themselves to ‘breadwinners’, licitly or illicitly, on pain of heavy privation and disadvantage... (xxx-xxxi).

The thematic and structural implications of Mrs Warren’s discourse for the Courtesan genre are far-reaching. The cold logic of the economic choices for the English woman of the 1890s obliged Mrs Warren to choose prostitution as a better alternative to starvation and having chosen life instead of death, she cannot like Pinero’s or any other conventional heroine of the genre, take her own life. She chooses prostitution, not out of weakness, but from strength of mind and succeeds because of her shrewd native abilities which society could have put to proper use. If society is not organized to make women capable of earning an honest living, its moral ideals can only remain abstractly dissociated from experience and vice will remain more rewarding that honest labour. Hence, Mrs Warren’s apology is a justification, not for the vice, but for her choice.

In all the plays in the genre, the prostitute sought to “get back” to society, but failed. Paula Tanqueray marries Umbrey to escape from her past and though marriage

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seems to open the door of respectability to her, it closes many avenues to her and her husband as the thought of isolation looms over them. At the end, “getting back” for Paula proves impossible and she kills herself. One can say Pinero’s play seeks to demonstrate the generic point of view: that a man can never successfully say as Aubrey (to Paula) that “we’ll make our calculations solely for the future, talk about the future, think about the future” (190) because the past must be paid for in the Courtesan play. At the climactic revelation, Paula, like all generic heroines merely asserts the norm by suddenly breaking into tears and finally taking her own life. Mrs Warren rejects all the generic motifs that cause Paula’s pain and death.

Unlike Paula or any of the prostitute-heroines who seek to “get back” to society, Mrs Warren is free from the desperate pathetic effort of “getting back” because she has suffered greater indignities in respectable society while prostitution has offered her a refuge. Through her sound argument, Shaw transfers the tormenting guilt and shame of the courtesan-heroine on to society at large which offers women no better alternative for survival. Mrs Warren feels no guilt because she tests her conduct by “the world as it is” rather than by the world as it pretends to be; by experience and not by the ideals or “abstract laws”. Shaw thus refuses to present prostitution as a forbidden fruit or as the myth of personal temptation and fall, but as a socio-economic-political and moral problem that society promotes and hypocritically blames on its practitioners. Strikingly, Mrs Warren does not see prostitution as a pleasurable activity, but as a means of livelihood. By its emotional force, Mrs Warren’s discourse knocks us backward, just as it does Vivie. The structural turn in the well-made plot is registered in Vivie’s momentary conversion. As the subtext has it, Vivie is “no longer confident; for her replies, which have sounded convincingly sensible and strong to her so far, now begin to ring rather woodenly and even priggishly against the new tone of her mother’s”. (208). Vivie listens “thoughtfully attentive”, “intensely interested” and “beginning to understand”, becomes “more and more deeply moved”, “fascinated, gazing at her”, and by the end of Mrs warren’s discourse, Vivie has moved from her false judgment of her mother as “a waster” to appreciating and embracing her with the exclamation, “My dear mother, you are a wonderful woman: you are stronger than all England” (209).

The scene works so powerfully because it represents a wholly unexpected explosion of feeling for which we, like Vivie, are unprepared and which shatters the complacency of our earlier attitude. Thus, contrary to the genre, when the secret is revealed in Shaw’s play, there is ironically no horrified rejection but reconciliation between erring mother and judging daughter. But Shaw’s harmonious reconciliation is only a deceptive evocation of expectation for a well-made denouement.

In a well-made play, the heroine would have rejected her mother on discovering that she is “a fallen woman” and would have come to accept her at the end of the play because she was a good mother to her after all. Reconciliations brought the plot to an edifying moral end. But in Shaw’s play, Vivie reconciles with her mother as a former brothel keeper only to reject her at the end, a nice reversal of a traditional ending.

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Although Mrs Warren has explained the crushing poverty that took her to the streets, she has not informed her daughter that she still flourishes in the trade as manager of an international chain of brothels in Brussels, Vienna, Ostend and Budapest, a revelation that she learns later from George Crofts and which completes the disillusioning process of education for the heroine.

In act III, Vivie and Frank are joined in the Rectory garden by Crofts who has come to propose marriage to her. Crofts’s proposal is linked to a cynical reminder that Vivie can only escape the stigma of prostitution if she marries a man of status like himself. When she rebukes Crofts, the cynic defends himself like Sartorius with the pessimistic argument that they are all powerless to change the state of affairs and that he is no worse than others in the system, the archbishop who receives rents for his prostitution business; Vivie’s mother who manages the chain of brothels with him; the MP who is a shareholder in the business or Vivie herself, who has benefited from the Crofts scholarship and whose education has been paid for with money from the trade: Crofts: Do you remember your Crofts scholarship at Newnham? Well, that was found by my

brother the M.P. He gets his 22 per cent from a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on. How d’ye suppose they manage when they have no family to fall back on? Ask your mother…If you are going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society.

Vivie (conscience stricken) You might go on to point out that I myself never asked where the money I spent came from. I believe I am just as bad as you. (Act III, 226).

Like the rental situation in Widowers’ Houses, prostitution becomes a metaphor for society under capitalism as it spreads and engulfs everyone in the system: “it [prostitution] paid for your education and the dress you have on your back. Don’t turn your nose at business, Miss Vivie; where would your Newnhams and Girtons be without it?” ask Crofts (215). Like Sartorius, Croft’s precludes the human “will” to improve society. When like Trench, Vivie tells Crofts “I believe I am just as bad as you”, Croft assures her “the world is like that; bad or good, it is simply the state of affairs and one can do just nothing to change it” (215). His advice to Vivie is, “If you are going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all descent society”. With the exception of Vivie, all the characters use this pessimistic defence and thus acquiesce in the status quo. Mrs Warren’s discourse sounds convincing only in the sense that she too is powerless to change the system.

As Crofts is about to be driven out of the garden at gun point, he takes his final revenge by informing Vivie and Frank that Sam Gardner, the clergyman is Vivie’s real father. This makes Vivie and Frank siblings. But Shaw evokes this situation potential to melodrama only to make a bigger reversal: to provide a false generic ending. At Crofts’s vindictive declaration, Frank raises his rifle and “takes aim at the retreating figure of Crofts”, but Vivie, “seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast” and orders Frank: “Fire now, you may” (act III: 228). The episode which would make

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an excellent suicidal closure for the heroine of the Courtesan play points rather mockingly to the suicidal action that Mrs Warren refuses to perform. Shaw took pride in the fact that the consequences of his play’s dramatic revelation, “though cruel enough, are all quite sensible & sober, no suicide or sensational tragedy of any sort” (Letters, I: 566). The business with the rifle is intended to deny the audience even this last dramatics of Pinero’s social tragedy. In this mocking evocation of the action and resolution of rudimentary melodrama, Shaw translates Pinero’s ending into Maupassant’s (Yvette’s unsuccessful attempt at suicide). Through Vivie’s action, Shaw teases his audience once more by raising and frustrating their expectations of a “stage murder”. Instead of allowing Vivie to use Frank’s rifle on herself; she is made to flee to 67 Chancery Lane for the rest of my life.

Act IV takes place in Vivie’s office in Chancery Lane where she has escaped to begin life all over. Having passed through various disillusioning processes, Vivie neither believes in Praed’s poetic vagaries about “the beauty and romance of life” nor in Franks notion of “love’s young dream”, all of which she rejects in the interest of hard work. In the final encounter with her mother, Praed and Frank, representatives of the ideals of romance, marriage and parental authority respectively, Vivie categorically states her independent feminist position: “If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business, permanently single (to Frank) and permanently unromantic (to Praed)”. Her rejection of marriage proposals, especially from the rich George Croft in preference for hard work is a demonstration against the purity discourses and Couresan dramas that, once women are provided with the means of sustaining themselves independedtly, society needs not worry about their moral choices for, such women will definitely make proper decisions of their own free will.

In this last encounter, Vivie also declares that she is parting ways with her mother, not because of her immoral past, but because of the hypocrisy with which she has operated. A new anarchist of social idealism, Vivie demands an uncompromising union of action and belief. She rejects her mother, not because she choses prostitution or lacks character, but because she lives two lives and is thus conventional:

Yes: it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did: but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am I not? (220).

It would make sense to interpret Vivie’s escape to chancery Lane as the action of someone emotionally maimed, determined to escape from the horror of self-analysis and the vulnerability of relationship. But Shaw refuses to allow us see Vivie’s deliberate stripping of herself of attachments, friend, lover and mother in tragic terms. Rather, his presentation of Vivie in this last scene is most contradictory.

Vivie has managed to slay the ideals of womanhood with all the attributes given to it by Virginia Woolf (1979:59): “sympathetic, charming, unselfish, devoted to her family and self-sacrificing.” Shaw asserts in The Quintessence that, “unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the

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law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.” (40). Like Ibsen’s Nora as wife, Vivie, as daughter abandons her mother under a profound conviction of her duties to herself as a human being. Yet this is not an unmitigated triumph.

The scene ends with Vivie delving into the papers on her desk and pursuing her new profession of actuarial accountancy. We admire her manliness and dedication to purposeful activity, yet we are also made to see her new occupation as a sign of frustration. After dismissing her mother Vivie “sternly sits down to work at the table, with her back to the glass door, and begins turning over the papers” as “she waits secretly hoping that the combat is over.” (242). Vivie struggles under a double consciousness, her stern resolution conflicting with the demands of her heart as she struggles to part ways with her mother. A life-time of actuarial accountancy can also be seen as a self-denying cloister. This explains why Carpenter (1969:58) is doubtful of Vivie’s victory:

Vivie’s final actions convey an almost palpable sense of wasted vitality. After her dismissals of Praed, Frank and Mrs Warren, her vigorous plunge into actuarial calculations leaves a marked residue of frustration. Two Feelings are evoked: admiration for her energy and distaste for its specific application.

The stage directions on Vivie are of great importance in understanding the problematic involved in her moral choice. The actress of her role must endeavour to convey the tragedy and comedy involved, the bitterness of her renunciation of her mother and the labour-pains of female self realization expressed in the subtext. There is a certain peaceful ring about Vivie’s demeanour, but one also has the feeling that it is the peace of exile and sterility. The stage directions are Chekhovian in the contrariness of their signals: despair and contentment, disillusionment and hope for the future.

What is most significant from the generic perspective is Shaw’s refusal to resolve the conflict at the end of the play. Mrs Warren refuses to quit her trade and Vivie refuses to accept her as mother. The unresolved conflict is consonant with Shaw’s view that drama should deal with a conflict of “unsettled ideals”. The audience is once more directed to see the object of its scorn in the structures of capitalist society that make Mrs Warren’s defence impeccable and not in the social offender. Unable to lay responsibility for the immorality of prostitution on the prostitute herself, the audience must direct their attention to the social structures that need reform.

III.3.8. Interfigural transpositions: Patterns of Analogy and Contrast

In transferring the central situation of the French novel to English middle class life, Shaw transforms Maupassant’s novel in two main ways, first, he allows the sociological element in the novel to grow in importance in his play and second, he re-contextualizes Maupassant’s characters in his own English context, enriching both his characters and the sociological element of the novel with socialist discourses on capitalism. Maupasssant’s material is more passionately realized as Shaw. As he seeks

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to tell “the [historical] truth about that mother,” and to fulfil his fellow Fabian, Beatrice Webb’s request for a “real modern lady of the governing class, Shaw expanded on the moral-economic and political complexity of the mother’s context on the one hand, and the anti-romantic feminism of the daughter on the other.

In Shaw’s first objective, “to tell the truth about that mother”, he expands on Maupassant’s mother to create a counter-generic portrait of the prostitute- heroine in Victorian Courtesan melodrama. Mrs Warren and Bardin have suffered the same crushing economic oppression as Kitchen servants and waitresses before taking on prostitution. Warren tells Vivie that she served,

As scullery maid in a temperance restaurant where they sent you for anything they liked. There I was a waitress; and then I went to bar at waterloo Station− fourteen hours a day serving drinks and washing glasses for four shillings a week and my board. That was considered a great promotion for me (208).

Like Bardin, Warren considers herself more honest than most married women. She is even more aggressive in collapsing the hierarchical opposition of marriage to prostitution. She roughly states the moral economy of both works:

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her….Can it be right, Vivie, that there shouldn’t be no better opportunities for women. I stick to that; It’s wrong. But it’s so. Right or wrong; and a girl must make the best of it (213).

While the interfigural relation of Mrs Warren to Maupassant’s Bardi is one of extension and development, her relation to Pinero’s heroine and all the prostitute- heroines of the Courtesan genre is one of contrast. However, Shaw’s daughter contrasts both Maupassant’s and Pinero’s daughters and this transformation satisfies both Beatrice Webb’s request for a young woman of the governing class, as well as functions to illustrate Shaw’s own assault on the Victorian notion of “manly man and womanly women”, especially as asserted in The Quintessence. Vivie’s modern consciousness and adversity to female roles contrasts sharply with Yvette and Ellean.

Maupassant’s heroine combines a passion for sentimental romantic novels with a childish liking for Zoology. Shaw’s Vivie is a “Third Wrangler in Mathematics” with a passion for detective novels, cigars and whisky. Her ambition is actuarial accountancy with an eye to the stock Exchange.44 While Yvette has a frank ardour and welcoming handshake, Vivie is rough and has a masculine casualness. She is also neither susceptible to sentimentality nor filial love. Yvette emotionally surrenders to eroticism and pessimism, throwing herself into Servigny’s arms at the end of the novel. Vivie ends Shaw’s play getting rid of her suitors, Frank and Crofts. Vivie is a staunch feminist who thinks of life entirely in terms of her own freedom and independence. Yvette like Ellean on the other hand, is a romanticist who sees a woman’s future as exclusively tied to love and marriage. Vivie therefore reacts differently to all the motifs

44 The idea of Stock Exchange that Vivie includes in her list of ambitions was obviously

suggested to Shaw by Bardin’s juggling on the stock Exchange above.

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that occasion Yvette’s agonies, just as the mother reacts differently to all the motifs that occasion the agonies of the prostitute figures of Courtesan melodrama. Vivie rejects love, romance, marriage (to Frank and George Crofts) and suicide or despair. Like her mother, she is a social rebel in a way that neither Paula Tanqueray nor her step-daughter is. Vivie adumbrates all the qualities Shaw associates with feminine genius: devotion, vitality, courage, rigorous discipline, rational intelligence, masculinity, celibacy, a strong instinct for self-direction and an aversion to convention. In response to Beatrice Webb request, Shaw presents a woman a generation ahead of her time and, in doing so, greatly revolutionize the Courtesan melodrama:

I have sought to put on stage for the first time (as far as I know) the highly educated capable, independent young woman of the governing class as we know her today, working, smoking, preferring the society of men to that of women simply because men talk about the questions that interest her and not about servants and babies, making no pretense of caring much about art or romance, respectable through sheer usefulness and strength (West, 1955,42

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IV. MAN AND SUPERMAN (1901-3): AN EPIC-RELIGIOUS COMEDY

Although Shaw never really abandoned his attack on the fallacies of Victorian sentimental imagination after 1900, his focus, which had been immediate, specific and political, broadened into the metaphysical and religious. While his ideal-destroying aim survives, Shaw was more concerned with testing a wide range of metaphysical and religious solutions to human problems. In Man and Superman, he thus turns against the thesis of the argument that has served the serious political drama of The Unpleasant plays; that social structures reflect the nature of people or that environment determines character, so that the reformation of the political and social structures is a precondition for moral or ethical reformation. Man and Superman advances the counter proposition that, unless mankind himself is reformed, i.e., evolves spiritually intellectually and biologically, there can be no valid transformation of the socio-political structures. Shaw has begun with a typical socialist orientation according to which you must change society in order to change man, but he realized that unless you change man, he refuses to change society. His new play proposes the evolution of the human population into “Supermen” through eugenic breeding as a shortcut to socio-political change. Yet, as a comedy that takes on the subject of genetic or biological evolution, the subject of Man and Superman is first and foremost a topical invention in drama. In this play, Shaw gives sex and romance or love and marriage a scientific and religious interpretation. What is more, Shaw’s theme of biological, intellectual and moral evolution of the human species is an extrapolation from the scientific discourses of the 19th century to which he gives a spiritual, metaphysical and religious interpretation. In order to understand Shaw’s historiographic approach to the sciences and the generic transformations he introduces to romantic comedy in this play, one needs to understand the socio-historical context for, the 19th century scientific and philosophical discourses inspired and are reworked in Shaw’s “scientific religion” of Creative evolution in this comedy.

IV. I. “The wicked half-century” and Shaw’s “Scientific religion”

The last 50years of the 19th century was a period of immense upheaval in social and intellectual life. Leading scientific and philosophical discourses challenged the Christian creeds that have served the source of religious and spiritual values for ages. In Heart Break House, Shaw asserts that Darwin’s scientific materialism created an atmosphere of indifference, pessimism and the “false doctrine” of the “Wicked half century” as well as led to the “banishment of conscience from human affairs” (18, 20). Darwin’s theories set forth in The origin of Species (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871) constituted a profound unsettling of religious faith and provided the philosophical underpinning of the ruthlessly exploitative system of capitalist enterprise

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and the cynical acceptance of the law of the “survival of the fittest” as the principle of human conduct. Darwinism Shaw argues, fostered a ruthless new “religion” in which ethics, human purpose and moral choices were marginalized or exiled in favor of a type of secular Calvinism that deemed human destiny incapable of being influenced by the human will. His theories validated aggressive attitudes of predatory competition and elevated the struggle for survival to the plane of a religion as well as inspired the frightening pessimism that loomed the air. As Shaw asserts,

when its [i.e. Darwinism’s GN] whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain. We must either embrace Creative Evolution or fall into the bottomless pit of an utter destroying pessimism…Discouragement does in fact mean death; and it is better to cling to the hoariest of the old savage-creator than to abandon all hope of life in a world of ‘angry apes’, and perish in despair like Shakespeare’s Timon (V: 294)

Shaw no doubt held that the deterministic concept of God and the belief in human imperfectability had to go, but he also felt the urgent need for a new source of spiritual myths that could inspire humanity to strive towards nobler goals. While subjecting Christianity to a hermeneutics of suspicion, Shaw emphasized the need for a religion: “a civilization needs a religion as a matter of life and death” (Methuselah, 61) and, “If anything is to be done to get our civilization out of the horrible mess in which it is now, it must be done by men who have a religion” (Smith, 1963:38). By “religion” he asserts, “I mean a common faith that binds people together” (Letters, I, 269), a faith that unites us “in a common ideal of what is right and true” (Smith, 1963: 71). And a faith, “Creative evolution” that Shaw calls a “scientific religion” anchors his utopian critique of society perceived as ideologically ill. Man and Superman re-channels the scientific and philosophical discourses of “the wicked half-century” into this religion.

In his own socialist reinterpretation of the theme of genetic evolution, Shaw not only introduces radical thematic and formal innovations to 19th century romantic comedy, but allows his comedy to radiate into a variety of other literary genres. First, in giving love, sex and marriage a religious metaphysical interpretation, Shaw transforms what should otherwise be an ordinary romantic comedy into a religious drama on his own creative evolutionary terms. But in engaging the subject of genetic transmission in comedy, Shaw also helped construct the path for the new genre that was ultimately to take the name of Science fiction in 1929. Although Man and superman cannot be described as work of Science fiction and is even in no way comparable to Shaw’s quintessential Science fiction work, Back to Methuselah, the play forays into Science fiction. Besides his genetic theme and the use of an automobile, Shaw surreal dream in act III presents a future world that can be attained only through the mind. All these are what Science Fiction (SF) writers refer to as futuristic gadgets and themes, and Shaw employs such literary devices to carry forward his drama of religious ideas as well as to outline a “possible future” for

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mankind. His approach to the discourses of evolution is in many respects comparable to those of the science fictionist.

Shaw’s approach to science is that of a fictionists and not a scientist. His religious interpretation of genetic science is consonant with his critique of history writing. As Frederic James (1991: 283) holds, Science fiction is “a historically new and original form” that “offers analogies with the emergence of the historical novel in the early nineteenth century”. A far too early precursor of modern historiography, Shaw insists that history is basically an interpretation rather than factual accounting. He emphasized the role of the imagination in history and his description of creative evolution as a “scientific religion” underscores the role of his imagination in his interpretation of the science of evolution. Shaw was like Einstein (1949:678) asserting that, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”. Shaw’s theme, “Superman with a Super brain” can be considered a stable in SF; in terms of character, the driver and engineer, Henry Straker, a graduate from polytechnic who not only masters modern mechanics but knows that a new industrial culture would emerge to supercede the aristocratic culture belong to the SF genre. Shaw’s hero, John Tanner who wakes up in a new world also resembles a time traveller in SF; as a stage prop, the automobile in Man and Superman and even the contrivance of a whole night’s dream in act III are SF conventions. Shaw sparingly utilizes SF conventions to drive home his drama of religious ideas and his approach to the facts of scientific evolution is closely that of a science fictionist or that of the historian to historical facts.

Shaw knew that like historians, scientists formulate principles that enhance our abilities to predict the future and the future was a time about which he cared greatly. He knew that SF like history will extrapolate from what is known to pursue possible outcomes. He therefore never required an academic lens to discuss the science of evolution, just as he rejected documentary facts in history writing. For Shaw, ideas were the essence of history not mere facts and scientific truth like historical truth was a matter of interpretation. For history or science to come alive, facts had to be imaginatively interpreted. Hence, he asserts in Man and superman that, life is based on hope and if the future was to avoid Darwin’s boot-stamping pessimism on the human spirit, science would have to appeal to human transcendence, to that which evokes the human Will for man’s well-being. In Man and Superman, Shaw speculates about what mankind might do and what it might become. Whether his speculations are true or false is immaterial. As Poul Anderson (1989:8) remarks of science fiction,

... I do not mean that absolute scientific accuracy is a sine qua non of good imaginative literature. For one thing, the scientific picture is always changing. We can still enjoy C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for instance, in spite of what our space probes have since told us about Mars. Much of the cosmology in Olaf Stapledon’s The Star Maker is now obsolete, but his magnificent cosmic vision has lost nothing thereby. Yet I do invite you, to note how solidly timbered these works are.

And I would say the same for Shaw’s Man and Superman. In this play, Shaw goes as far as the imagination can go, and much further than scientific facts could go. Insisting

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on the role of the imagination in artistic writing, Einstein (1954:42) asserts, “Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is, does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduce from that what should be the goal of our aspirations”. For Shaw too, the “realistic imagination” that drives a fruitful interpretation is “the power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them… [to] see through inaccurate images to the underlying reality without objectively experiencing the phenomenon falsely depicted”; it is “a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities yet inexperienced, and of testing the feasibility and desirability of serious utopias” (IV:104-5). As a play based on science, Man and Superman is a product of such an imaginative interpretation. As Shaw asserts, "I had published my own views of evolution in a play called Man and Superman; and I found that most people were unable to understand why I could be an Evolutionist and not a Neo-Darwinian or why I habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as a ghastly idiocy” (ix-x). And, it is a little confusing he goes on, to read in “The Revolutionist Handbook” a very un-socialist denunciation of the efficacy of academic science, which Shaw describes as “quackeries, political, scientific, educational, religious, or artistic” that are proposed there as the agents of progress to improve humanity. Yet, while dismissing documentary facts of science Shaw was at the same time asserting that, “our only hope…is in evolution. We must replace the man by the superman” (II: 723). For Shaw, although the evidence (facts) of science might teach us to be pessimists, the human spirit demands optimism and, since our hopes lie in the future, an “instinctively trained eye” is needed to recognize the tiny shoots and buds sent out by the spiritual Life Force and to see that the human “biological barrier” (imposed by science) could be, if not overcome, at least pushed back. He reiterated this anti-Darwinian bend in Everybody’s political what’s What? Under the sub-heading, “Is human Nature incurably Depraved?” Shaw explains,

If it is, reading this book will be a waste of time…[But] If this book is worth reading, I must assume that all the pessimism and cynicism is a delusion caused, not by the ignorance of contemporary facts but, in so far as they are known, by drawing wrong conclusions from them (1).

For Shaw, the cynicism about evolution is not caused by ignorance of the scientific facts, but by drawing wrong conclusions from the fact. The “facts” of evolution in themselves do not matter and in his spiritual interpretation of evolution in Man and Superman, the facts are almost immaterial. As he asserts, “the [Darwinian] revelation of a method by which all the appearances of intelligent design in the universe may have been produced by pure accident practically destroyed religion in cultured Europe for a whole generation”. Shaw called his play “a dramatic parable of creative evolution” and “a careful attempt to [re]write a new Book of Genesis for the Bible of Evolutionists” (II: 531-32). Off course, he also realized that, “if Creative evolution were to become a popular religion it must be embellished with the legends, parables and miracles of such religions” (Ixxvii). In short, Shaw’s metaphysical interpretation

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of the evolution of the human species through willed acquisition is a hopeful metaphor for Faustian strivings to which he grants religious sanctity. Yet, Darwin’s scientific discourse is not the only “inter-text”.To turn from the socio-historical to the literary and theatrical context, the intertextual content of Man and Superman is just as daring as its thematic scope.

IV.2. The intertextual Status of Man and Superman: “bricolage”

Striking first of all, is the remarkable consciousness and clarity with which Shaw conceived the thematic and formal break from the 19th century theatre, long before it was realized. Having written ten plays in the last decade, Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry,

And now, no more plays ― at least no more practical ones. None at all for some time to come: it is time to do something more in Shaw-philosophy, in politics and sociology. Your author dear Ellen, must be more than a common dramatist. My next play will be a Don Juan play- an immense play, but not for the stage of this generation (Letters, I: 96).

And Man and Superman was obviously uncommon, impracticable, immensely philosophical and political. Because of the radical formal innovations Shaw introduced in the comedy, it remained unactable for some time. As Gordon (1990:112) holds, it “was the first play to be published before the consideration of a performance and it included accordingly, extensive non-dramatic commentary and a ‘philosophy’ along with a comedy, a synthesis of two kinds of drama and several kinds of discursive material”. Subtitled “A comedy and a Philosophy”, Shaw claims the play is not directed to an actual audience, but to a ‘pit of philosophers’ (Plays, 308). The purely actionless, argumentative and philosophical dream (act III) represents a turning point in Shaw’s artistic progress and in English drama. It marks the beginning of 20th century expressionistic forms. Not surprisingly, the play was not only greeted with hostile reviews, but also further confirmed Victorian critics in their opinion that Shaw was not a dramatist.45

Uniquely, a multiplicity of texts and discourses are re-written in this work which Shaw himself claims is “not a play but a volume containing a play” (II: 798). Nonchalantly the author ridicules the ingrained notions of originality, uniqueness, singularity; autonomy of authorship; of reading and of meaning, by openly acknowledging that his play draws from a vast plethora of authors, thinkers and from different generic repertoires: “I should make formal acknowledgement to the authors whom I have pillaged in these pages if I could recollect them all….whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own: Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner, Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, 45 Max Beerbohm for instance, referred to the third act as, “a platonic dialogue

masquerading as a play” adding, “This particular article is of course, not a play at all. It is “as good as a play ― infinitely better to my peculiar taste than any play I have ever read or seen enacted. But a play it is not” (C.f. T. F. Evans, 1976: 103).

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Shakespeare, Nietzsche” (II: 520). In fact, no other play better illustrates Shaw’s conception of his artistry in the metaphor of “a crow that has followed many ploughs, hopping, hungry and curious, across the fields of philosophy, politics and art” (Letters, II: 47). Added to the mix plethora of sources are the old Don Juan legend, Everyman and several prose appendixes; an “Epistle Dedicatory”, a “Revolutionist Handbook” “Maxims for Revolutionists” and “Pocket Companion” supposedly written by the hero.

Remarkably, Shaw plays with language and texts, narratives and drama, linguistic and textual devices as well as philosophical discourses to suggest that his play and particularly his title, Superman” has distinct and yet overlapping meanings. The assumption of multiple authorships allows for a multiplicity of generic readings in the main text. Striking first of all, is the number and variety of texts and discourses, but more admirable is the homogeneity with which Shaw weaves these heterogeneous textual materials; the ingenuity with which he cross-circulates one genre with another in a fluid, generative process of contrast, compromise, qualification, definition and mutual enrichment to spin his “scientific religion”. The play’s generic repertoires are many: farce, romance, melodrama, epic, tragedy, dream etc. This allusive transformation presents Shaw as a paradigm of the modern writer as bricoleur or master of different types of discourses and thus renders his play readable over different genres and discourses.

Shaw’s play is in the main, a comedy. Courtship leading to marriage with its accompany theme of rebirth is a staple of classical comedy, but considering the vast number of texts and discourses that generate the play, and the homogeneity with which they are weaved into Shaw’s genetic theme of evolution, the marriage in the play is not simply that of its leading characters, but also of modes, of discourse and their regeneration in texts. As Bertolini (1991:28-29) asserts, “the structure of Man and Superman embodies the concept of generation in a kind of genetic chain of texts....”, so that its “...very bigness repels categorical analysis….[and] eludes both comprehensive understanding and simple generic analysis”. The challenge to reading Man and Superman is how to interpret/translate/read in the text of this comedy, what is written and presented there as the religious philosophy of the life force (creative Evolution) or a “scientific religion” albeit, in several distinct discourses and in several literary genres: the play can be read as a hybrid of social comedy and dream, a morality play or as a modern (frameless) dream play. Shaw’s play is readable over different genres and, an analysis of its literary traditions must begin with Shaw’s genetic theme which, not only provides insights into its ideological structure and uniquely, meta-conscious quality of the comedy, but also puts in perspective the play’s inter-discursive subtitle, “A comedy and a Philosophy”. In being a comedy on the philosophy of comedy, Man and Superman is first of all a meta-conscious comedy.

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IV.3. The metaphysics of sex” and the ideological structure (Sources)

Distinctively, Man and Superman is a meta-conscious comedy. As a social comedy that also serves as frame to a scenically enactable dream, Shaw’s play is a-play within-a-play and is thus self-reflexive of its own dramatic medium. But in its genetic theme, it also becomes meta-conscious of its own generic ideology. In Man and Superman, Shaw sets out to harness and philosophize the energies of comedy; to identify and explicitly define or discuss them albeit, in religious terms within comedy itself. The result as Grene (1984: 55) asserts is that, “Shaw gives us not a comedy plus a philosophy [as his subtitle suggests], but a comedy philosophized”.

The major ideological sources of Shaw’s comedy are, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Lamarck. Shaw’s interpretation of evolution follows Lamarck’s vitalist theory of evolution, but the main ideological source of the play is a chapter entitled “The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes” appended to Schopenhauer’s The World as will and Idea”. From this chapter, Shaw derived the notion that individual sexual attraction was a manifestation of an instinctive impulse of the race:

The ultimate aim of all love affairs, whether played in sock or buskin is actually more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation....The growing attachment of two lovers is in itself in reality the will-to-live of the new individual, an individual they can, and want to be produced. Thus the fundamental theme of almost all comedies is the appearance of the genius of the species with its aims. These aims run counter to the personal interests of the individuals who are presented in the comedy, and threaten to undermine their happiness. As a rule, the genius of the species achieves its object; and, as this is in accordance with poetic justice, it satisfies the spectator, because he feels that the aims of the species take precedence over all those of individuals. Therefore at the conclusion he quite confidently leaves the lovers crown with victory, since he shares with them the delusion that they have established their own happiness, whereas they have rather sacrificed it [i.e. their own happiness] to the welfare of the species... (Schopenhauer, 1966: 534, 536, 553)

Schopenhauer’s explains that the theme of human evolution is implicit in all comedies. His language shows his reliance on comedy matter and makes apparent why Shaw chooses comedy to dramatize his philosophy of eugenic reproduction. Comedy celebrates fertility, sex, love, marriage, and Schopenhauer links sexual relations to acquired characteristics or the improvement of the race. Comedy’s defining principle is the conflict between the personal and evolutionary aims of the species and revolves around an evolutionary appetite as the one thing needed to develop the race: “the fundamental theme of almost all comedies [is] the appearance of the genius of the species with its aims, which run counter to the personal interests of the individuals who are presented in the comedy, and even threaten to undermine their happiness”.

The unromantic view of comedy in Schopenhauer’s discourse accounts for the unromantic sexual relation in Shaw’s play. From Schopenhauer, Shaw derived his own notion that eugenics deserved strong claims to a religion of the future for, eugenics co-

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operates with the working of Nature in ensuring that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races: “there is no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but eugenic religion can save our civilization” he declared (C.f. Armytage, 70-71).

Schopenhauer’s essay provides the ideological underpinning of Shaw’s play and creates the link between the vast paratextual prose, the drama, the philosophy and other non-dramatic writings that are rewritten in the play. Shaw tells use in his preface that his hero, John Tanner is a keen reader of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and there is no doubt that Tanner has read Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysics of sex” on which he theorizes throughout in a comedy that he is himself a principal participant. Tanner’s “Revolutionist Handbook” marks him as a meta-conscious character (one that is conscious of his role in the generic ideology in which he is himself a participant). Tanner’s “Handbook” glosses over the Schopenhauerean metaphysics of sex dramatized in the play. In his “Handbook”, Tanner asserts that, “the need for the Superman is in its most imperative aspect, a political one” (II: 693). The “great matter of life” is the breeding of the superman through eugenic, which for Tanner/Shaw “is shorthand for the necessity of changing the world for the better” (II: 635).

Shaw followed Schopenhauer not only in the specific concept of love, but also in the object of supplying a metaphysics for sexual relationship in comedy. Schopenhauer introduces his chapter by asserting that, love, the overwhelming concern of poets and dramatists for ages has never been seriously considered by philosophers. He claims to establish a metaphysics of sexuality for the first time. Shaw wishes to supply comedy with a metaphysics as well; to explicitly reveal in comedy itself, the philosophical underpinning detected in the traditional treatment of love, sex and marriage. It is this purpose of providing comedy with a theory and rendering it self-conscious of its own generic ideology that is the outstanding original feature of his play as a love comedy.

Shaw’s philosophy is implicit in all comedies. For all the iconoclasm of his Don Juan hero who is the pursued rather than the pursuer, the comic action is in itself not unorthodox except in the sense that, Shaw was reviving the classic comic motif of a duel of sex which had entirely disappeared from the repertoire of 19th century comedies (Meisel, 1963:163-77). It can be argued that in almost all love-comedies, even the most romantic is to be found the anti-romantic strain that Shaw magnifies in his play. More than this, love is seen in comedy as a blind force controlling its participants and the comedian exploits the ironic disparity between the apparent individuality of feeling expressed by the lovers and the sense that such feelings are universal and impersonal. Love, sex and marriage in comedy are part of a more or less cynically viewed social ritual in which individual impulse always works towards ends which are none of its own. What Shaw identifies as “the Life Force” in the biological sphere of creative evolution then, may be said to be no more than the shaping natural providence implicit in the probable and improbable multiple marriages at the end of so many traditional comedies. Yet, to explicitly thematize and philosophized such a force in comedy is new. Besides, Shaw appropriates Schopenhauer’s metaphysics to the extent of making the sexual philosophy expressed in the comedy entirely his own.

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If the idea of a metaphysics of sexual attraction is derived from Schopenhauer, the theory developed in the play is not. Shaw’s eugenic philosophy inverts key clauses and ideas in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. For Schopenhauer, the highest love is expressed in the most fully mutual passion, though that passion when consummated was likely to end in unhappy marriage. For Shaw, fruitful eugenic selection is the result of cross-breeding and cross-breeding does not require compatible partners or the individual happiness of its participants. As Tanner/Shaw’s “Handbook” posits,

there is no evidence to suggest that the best citizens are the products of congenial marriages or that a conflict of temperament is not a highly important part of what breeders call crossing….In conjugation, two complementary people will supply one another´s deficiencies (II:744).

As a proposal for a eugenically beneficial union, Tanner/Shaw argues that, contrary to the conventional believe that love and compatibility between partners is the basis of marriage, it is quite probable that good human results will be obtained from parents who are extremely unsuitable companions and partners (745). In order to take sex seriously as a means of breeding the superman, the present institution of marriage, which has reduced sex to mere gratification of the self must be destroyed: “Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic, monogamy is fatal to the large States because it puts a ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal” (746). Tanner expresses Shaw’s eugenic proposal in religious phraseology, describing the breeding of the “Superman” as improving the “Temple of the Holy Ghost” (694). The play itself dramatizes the marriage of two incompatible characters as resulting from an evolutionary appetite to improve the race rather than from any personal pleasure.

For Schopenhauer, it is the instinctive Will of the man that meets the intellect of the woman, for Shaw, it is the instinctive will of the woman that meets the intellect of the man. The “Handbook” asserts that, “Sexually, man is woman’s contrivance for fulfilling Nature’s behest in the most economical way” (III: 659); she is the instinctive genius of the life force while man is the “intellectual genius, selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of its own instinctive purpose” (III: 660). While the biological role of the woman makes her the aggressor in sexual relations, the male agent of the life force, committed to working for the development of greater intellectual consciousness for the species (new brains) must shone women and the domesticity to which marriage confines genius in order to develop the philosophic consciousness that the race requires. His intellectual function undercuts the woman’s procreative role and even his own intellectual role for, since he must shone women, he undermines the woman’s procreative role which is to mate with a genius, but he also undercuts his own intellectual role since the intellect he cultivates cannot be conferred to future generations without his sexual contribution. Shaw thus surrounds his heroine with new predatory instinct and wild chases of her man. It is the woman who must exercise the will, her own and that of the Life Force while the man, the intellectual agent of the life force escapes from love and marriage.

Once more, it is not the battle of the sexes in Man and superman that differentiates it from other comedies but Tanner/Shaw’s continuous theoretical commentary upon it,

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as well as the sense of religious commitment that Shaw grants to sex and to the dominance of the willful woman over the man. In Shaw’s heroine, we witness, amused, a moral, unmarried woman, afraid to openly flout social conventions, yet determined to usurp the male prerogatives of choice, chase and capture. But, Shaw had other purposes for this inversion. He wanted to inject the duel of sex with a socialist feminist agenda, to counter the chauvinist cultural discourses of his time notably; Nietzsche’s discourse on the “Will to power” with its famous concept of the Übermenschen (overman) alluded to in the title, “Superman”. Shaw inverts Nietzsche’s discourse by inverting the sex roles of his male and female. In doing so, he also inverts the roles of hero and heroine in comedy and thus, the traditional structure of emotions in a genre in which the hero is the pursuer and the heroine the pursued.

The above inversions for Shaw reflect the 20th context feminist movement. Shaw asserts that his comic couple are children of their age and not of tradition. His preface talks of his play as a “trumpery story” of London men and women at the turn of the 19th century, a period in which the “emancipation of women” movement in Europe visualizes the secret ambitions of women”: “The sex” has become “aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged, they do not group themselves pathetically to sing….they grasp formidable legal and social weapons to retaliate”. In this feminist context, Nietzsche’s chauvinist discourse becomes outdated: “man is no longer like Don, a victor in the duel of sex” (II: 501). Shaw’s heroine exposes as illusory the gender inequalities transmitted by the Don Juan Legend, comedy and Nietzsche’s discourse on the Will to power.

Nietzsche thus takes over from Schopenhauer in the ideological structure. As Bloom (1987:128) asserts, “If the English language owes the word ‘superman’ to Shaw, Shaw owes the concept to Nietzsche”. But while Shaw’s title, “Superman” alludes to Nietzsche’s concept, the dramatic action semantically inverts the conceptual core of the “Will to power” which edifies man and denigrates woman. The play thus, draws attention to Nietzsche who cautions men “never to approach a woman without a whip” (Gahan, 2004:9) yet, mischievously makes fun of Nietzsche by “translating” “Übermenchen” as woman in the dramatic action.

Although Nietzsche acknowledged that women have the power to use the “force of the will” and “that the most influential women of the world...owed their power and ascendency over men to the power of their will” (Betty and Roszaks, 1969: 9), the philosopher viewed this as an unacceptable exception to the general rule of male dominance. Nietzsche thus, proposed fear of man as a feminine virtue and necessity: “the woman who ‘unlearns fear’ surrenders her most womanly instincts” (Ibid.7). Shaw introduces fear in his comedy, but locates it in the man. The frightened hero battles an inner fear of the heroine, Ann who confidently exerts her dominance over him. Shaw’s reverence for female predatory opposes Nietzsche’s attitude to women and what is more, Shaw gives female dominance a religious sanctity. As Watson (1964:63) asserts, Ann’s “Will is centred around something more noble than her own pleasure, either the pleasure of physical sensation or the vanity which is so largely a

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sexual motive. Ann’s desire is for a suitable father who can sire the superman, the first step towards empowering humanity”. For Tharcher (1970:199), “Shaw differs from Nietzsche in the reason why the superman should be bred” for, “Shaw’s purpose is poetically motivated, the desire for an invigorated form of socialism”. Shaw’s ennoblement of the woman is at odds with Nietzsche’s misogyny and his play can be seen as a reassessment in dramatic form of at least, this portion of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The charge by Bloom (1987:2) that Shaw is “a bad Nietzschean who has misread rather weakly the sage of Zarathustra” (Ibid., 2) shows the extent to which Shaw’s dramatic (re)interpretation of the ‘superman’ concept drifts from Nietzsche’s.

In inverting Nietzsche’s outdated discourse, Shaw drew from the writings of his fellow Fabian, Ellis Havellock who, like Schopenhauer, depended on comedy for his analysis of sexual relations. Nineteenth-century constructions of love and ideals of femininity Ellis (1913:129) argues, depended upon medieval Christian codes of Chivalry, which have outlived their initial practical function of providing a protection for women and have become instead, instruments of condescension and “the assertion of male power over women instead of a power on their behalf”:

The romantic emotions based on medieval ideas gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses....A civilised society in which women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism....The ideal of the weak, ignorant, inexperience woman- the cross between an angel and an idiot...no longer fulfilled any useful purpose (V).

Out of the altered conditions of civilization, Ellis predicted a new form of love: Romance is essential to all romantic love. To bring down the Madonna and the virgin from their pedestals to share with men the common responsibilities and duties of love is not to divest them of their claim to reverence. It is merely the sign of a change in the form of that reverence, a change which heralds a new romantic love (129).

Shaw was a sharp observer of the cultural changes charted by Ellis. His inversions of “romantic emotions” and of the seduction theme of Don Juan as well as his endowment of Ann with wild predatory instincts and reverence for her reproductive role represent the new pattern of love that Ellis predicted. For Shaw, Ellis sounded the funeral knell, not only for the old forms of romantic love in comedy, but also for chauvinist cultural discourses like Nietzsche’s.

By appropriating Schopenhauer’s Wille Zu Leben and Nietzsche’s “will to Power”, Shaw derives his concerpt of human biological evolution with the life force striving to create the “superman”. For Schopenhauer the human species itself was infinite; anything beyond it was unthinkable and the perpetuation of the species as the object of the cosmic will manifested in sexual attraction was for him a source of despair. Shaw’s cosmic “Life Force” has a positive evolutionary character shaped by Lamarck’s theory of willed acquisition, but its ultimate goal is a spiritual sort of Nietzsche’s “superman”.

While the metaphysics of sexual relations is dramatized in the frame comedy, the revelation of the revolutionary religious doctrine of the superman in the epic-dream interlude is the final philosophic plane which it is the function of the comedy to reach.

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Clearly, there is no connection between the idea of the “Life Force” as the motive power of sexual attraction, the duel of the sexes, Nietzsche’s superman and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Yet, Shaw wields them into a single ideological pattern in Man and Superman. Both man and woman, Tanner and Ann must serve the life force in distinct and complementary ways. Ann must serve evolution in the reproductive sphere and Tanner in an intellectual sphere. As agents of the Life force their goal is metaphorically the biological birth of the “Superman”. Tanner’s reluctance to enter sex and marriage, Ann’s aggressive determination get him as father of her children are essential attributes of their several roles as agents of the life force. As the intellectual genius of life, he is an independent mind that strives to escape the tyranny of love and the subjection of marriage; she, as the vital or instinctive genius of the life force must use him to fulfill her creative purpose. The individuality and intellectual aspiration that make Tanner resist marriage is precisely what attracts Ann to him as ‘father. Shaw not only creates an ideological unity out of the most disparate strands of thought, but uses all his dramatic gifts to integrate his religious philosophy with his comedy in the inner dream and give his comedy an epic scope.

Yet, the play is not simply a social comedy plus a dream. It is a combination of comedy and the Don Juan legend that appropriately serves the metaphysical, religious, scientific and feminist goals of Creative evolution.

IV.4. The hybrid of myth and comedy: the Religious proximity to Creative evolution

While Shaw called his philosophy a “Scientific religion”, he was not only aware of the need for clearly defined dramatic structures that would support his religious philosophy without reducing the text to a lecture and the audience to lecture goers. Shaw was particularly aware of the affinity of myths to religion: “If Creative evolution were to become a popular religion” he asserts, “it must be embellished with the legends, parables and miracles of such religions” (Ixxvii). Shaw exploits the close affinity of myths, utopia and religion. His “combination” of the Don Juan legend and comedy harmonizes with his religion of Creative evolution which preaches salvation on earth. The hope for a “superman” is a messianic vision that characterizes myths and religions. Like most religions, Creative Evolution looks to future generations and perfection. This messianic vision of the “superman” also correlates Shaw’s socialist fervour and Marxist’s philosophy of history at the end of which lies the golden age of a classless society. The “age of gold”, the world of supermen that Shaw envisions is only possible in a distant future suggested by the dream-like “Heaven” of Act III.

In order to make Creative evolution dramatically viable, Shaw combines the classic comic duel of sex with the Don Juan legend which also deals with sex, as preeminent vehicle for his religious philosophy. Frequently occurring in musical and literary treatments, the legend has been raised to the level of a myth through its reappearance in all periods of literary history. Though our popular culture bears

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witness to the degeneration of many mythic patterns, these same patterns may revivify and function creatively for man. The changing character of the Don Juan legend in treatments subsequent to Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador or The Trickster of Seville attest to the vigour of the myth. The reason the myth has retained its vigour is clear; the myth expresses man’s perennial longing for an earthly paradise. The mundane form of the Don Juan Myth does not disguise its similarity to Shaw’s myth of Creative Evolution, which not only also has an earthy paradise as goal, but shows the dependence of this earthy paradise on sexual energies of the Don Juan type in its female. Both Creative evolution and the Don Juan myth express the same basic human desire; though they differ in form, refinement and level of spirituality. The appropriateness of the myth to Shaw’s dramatic needs lie in its protean nature, evident in the multiple transformations it has undergone in succeeding works of art. But more important than the specific transformations the unfolding legend provides is the very fact of change in sexual norms itself to which Don’s free sexual behavior draws attention.

Re-using the myth enhanced Shaw’s project of redefining concepts of masculinity and femininity. The mythical background of the legend in which the man dominates women makes Shaw’s woman-dominated action profoundly necessary. Consequently, in Shaw’s combination, the comic surface revolves around a comic inversion of the pursuit of the heroine by the hero in comedy and the inner dream symposium revolves around the comic inversion of the seduction theme of the myth. These inversions enable Shaw to deconstruct the male/female hierarchy in Victorian cultural memory.

The combined form of myth and comedy serves Shaw’s scientific case. Darwin has attributed the development of acquired characteristic to “natural selection” and the need for survival. But Scientists have still not answered the question why compared to the brains of our primate relatives ours has evolved so much more than we need for mere survival. In his prescience in connecting the development of the power of the brain with sexual selection, Shaw offers provocative answers to these questions.

Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind: How sexual choices Shape the Evolution of Human Nature (2001) for instance, teaches us that genes seek to reproduce themselves, and that consciously or unconsciously, the male sex will drive for excellence to win his female and will try to impregnate as many females as possible to ensure the survival of his genes while the female would seek to reproduce with the male who offers the most attractive genes for survival. As Tanner/Shaw’s “Handbook”, opines, “the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate man” (V: 785). The combination of myth and the comic duel of sex served Shaw’s Neo-Lamarckian idea of willed acquisition.

Tirso's Don Juan is a figure of formidable sexual energies who refuses to be reminded of his spiritual mortality. Shaw probably perceived in Tirso’s Don Juan’s sensual desire to have sex with as many women as possible, a male personal quest for genetic immortality. Following his attribution of a fundamental procreative responsibility to women in his philosophy, Shaw undertakes a two-way transformation

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of Tirso’s myth. In his own Don Juan (i.e. his comic hero, John Tanner)), Shaw converts the Don’s sexual drive for personal genetic immortality into a metaphysical and spiritual drive to improve the human race through moral and intellectual evolution. As a second step, he transfers the sexual urges of Tirso’s Don Juan to his own female, Ann (Tirso’s Doña Ana) whose sexual drive is to give birth to the best species of man. Thus, at the end of the Hell scene, Shaw’s evangelist of evolution, Tanner/Don Juan makes the divine choice of leaving Hell, the place of illusions to seek Heaven, the home of reality and hard work, while Ann leaves to seek a father for the superman.

Shaw “translation” of Don Juan’s desires to have sex with as many women as possible into a eugenic drive to improve the race makes evolutionary sense in the way Miller and Tanner describe. Tirso’s Don who should have appeared morally repugnant to most women because of his contemptuous treatment of them (his seduction and abandonment of them) did not appear so to most of the women he seduced because of their instinctive recognition that his formidable sexual energy and absolute physical courage made him the bearer of desirable genes. In his tongue-lashing theories of women predatory, Tanner too would in normal circumstances appear repugnant to the women he taunts with insults, but this is not the case for Ann who, in spite of her recognition that Tanner is the most unpleasant personality in her circle, also instinctively realizes that he offers the necessary intellectual genes she needs for her offspring or to improve the race. Ann prefers this first rate intellectual despite his unpleasantness to the exclusive possession of Octavius who, although the most suitable character for comic hero, has nothing to offer by way of improving the race.

Tanner is superior in his prodigious energy, courageous political stance and quick-witted attack on outmoded mores. Instinctively, Ann recognizes the desired genes for the race in Tanner and has chosen him as father for her children long before the play begins. Tirso’s Don feels highly attracted to women but abandons them after seducing them. Shaw’s Tanner participates in this pattern in a way that imitates the acts of his ancestor as we are made to see Tanner’s simultaneous fascination for, and flight from Ann. Though adverse to sex on the surface, Tanner unconsciously attracts Ann by his display of intellectual wit. He impresses us more as an unreliable narrator of his feelings for Ann, and Ann’s victory in having him as husband is meant to be seen as the result of her willful determination to perpetrate his intellect in the race to come.

Thus, the evolving form of the sexually based Don Juan myth which has evolved and will evolve in yet uncreated works becomes a favorable vehicle for Creative evolution and intimately associated with Shaw’s religion, which itself depends on the power of sexual energies for its triumph. Through various processes of character “motivation” “remotivation” “transmotivation” and “transexuation”, Shaw employs the myth as vehicle to communicate his cosmic “scientific religion”.

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IV. 5. The Comic Plot Structures: A Dream framed in a classic comedy

Man and superman dramatize the biological creation of “new minds” through eugenic breeding in a combination of myth and comedy. As Shaw asserts, “I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative evolution” (V: 338). Rewriting the myth of seduction and rape into a romantic comedy on evolution, Shaw transforms the hypotext in a variety of ways. First, he anglicizes the Spanish characters, Don Juan Tenerio, Dona Ana and Don Octavio into his own English John Tanner, Ann Whitefield and Octavius Robinson respectively. He also transforms the character constellation. Where the hypotext pairs Dona Ana with Don Octavius as husband, Shaw pairs the Don’s seduced victim, Doña Ana (Ann) with Don Juan (Tanner) as husband and rather keeps Don Octavio (Octavius) as Ann’s deliberately rejected suitor. Shaw’s Octavius is the type of man whose seeds need to wither and fall out. Shaw also inverts their sexes or sex roles of his main couple. This “transexuation” (Genette, 1997: 324) suits his eugenic thesis that the woman is the fundamental principle of evolution and the aggressor in the eugenic duel of sex. Thus, where the hypotext pairs Don Juan with women as the object of his attention, Shaw pairs a seductress with a guileless Don as the object of her attention and as such, gives both the classic comic duel of sex and the legend his own philosophical interpretation. He does so by giving his duel and duellists motives not found in any comedy or text of the Don Juan tradition. Ann’s unromantic pursuit of Tanner is grounded on her instinctive belief that he possesses suitable genes for better offspring. Both her pursuit and his escape are re-interpreted as the working of the mysterious life force driving incompatible couples together to engender a higher species (supermen).

The comic plot however, runs into various genres. Acts I and IV consist of a classic comedy. Act II is a farce as the pursuit of the man by the woman is physically liberalized in a motorized race across Europe. The farce runs into melodrama in Act III. This world of melodrama prepares us for the epic dream that is the main concern of act III. Shaw’s detachable dream dangles elements of myth and epic, as the playwright gives his subject (the destiny of the species) a moment of epic grandeur in a cosmic setting with allegorical characters. All in all, the action has an epic scope as it moves from the earth (acts I and II), to Hell and Heaven (act III) and back to earth in act IV.

Yet, it is a mark of Shaw’s genius to have selected comedy, a genre that opposes forces inimical to life and celebrates health, generosity, love, sex, marriage and (re)birth, to illustrate his teleological view of human biological evolution. In its optimism, comedy rejects death, war, sickness, hatred and virginity. It teaches us that what matters is life, that male unites with female to produce children, so that life can endure in spite of death. Individuals die but the species continues. That is why classic comedies begin after an individual’s death, a natural disaster or a truce (e.g. Much Ado About Nothing). This too, is where Man and Superman begins.

The play begins after the death of the heroine’s father, Mr. Whitefield and is thematically structured on “the search for a new father”, a man to replace Whitefield as

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guardian to Ann and father to a new generation of supermen. Act I also introduces a sub-plot that complements the main plot. Violet is pregnant. The disgrace of her pre-marital pregnancy and the question of who the illegitimate father of her baby is, complement the question of who would inherit Whitefield’s orphan.

However, the dramatic actions of both plots focus on the secret desires and determination of Shaw’s women to acquire husbands of their choices. Ann admires Tanner’s prodigious intellect and courageous political stance against society and thus is secretly determined to have him as husband and father to her children, but Tanner believes that marriage and sex enslave the intellect. Ann must bring him to realize and publicly accept his suitability for fatherhood. Where is a father for the new generation to be found, the main plot inferentially asks, just as it inferentially answers in favour of the hero. But Ann must overcome Tanner’s psychic blocks to marriage and fatherhood. Hence Ann is practically manipulative and on the surface quite conventional. She must not betray her chase. The nature of the obstacle in Shaw’s comedy is different. It is the psychic barriers against marriage and women that Tanner has build in his mind. Thus, when he finally overcomes his resistance to marriage and concedes to fatherhood or realizes “a father’s heart”, Shaw brings the plot to an end. Tanner’s acceptance of fatherhood completes “the search for a father” for what sets the plot in motion is the death of a father and what closes it is the hero’s discovery of “a father’s heart”.

Unconsciously too, Tanner has to defeat or de-father a series of mock father-figures (idealists fathers) to prove his suitability to father the new generation. Shaw’s mock-fathers are defined by their conventionality. Act I, a well-made expository act opens in Ramsden’s study and the stage directions introduce him as the first idealist father. He has “four tufts of iron-grey hair” growing “in two symmetrical pairs above his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws”. His “polished bald head” can “heliograph orders to distant camps, “he is marked out as president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alder among councillors, a mayor among aldermen” (II: 533). His study is crowded with images of outdated political idols whose ideas have long ceased to inspire the young: Spencer, Bright, Copden etc. and from his very representation, Shaw wants his audience to reject Ramsden’s conventional credentials as father in favour of his young challenger, Tanner.

Ramsden, an old friend of the Whitefield is receiving Octavius who is also in grief over Mr. Whitefield’s death. Whitefield had served as father to Octavius and his sister, Violet after their father’s death. In an attempt to uplift Octavius’s mood, Ramsden tells him that the late Mr. Whitefield had hoped that Octavius would marry his daughter, Ann. While Octavius is just too pleased that his desire will soon be realized, Ramsden warns him that the only obstacle is his relation to the radical author of “The Revolutionist Handbook”, Tanner, where upon, by the inexorable law of comedy that whenever a character is ill-spoken of out of his presence he suddenly enters, Tanner enters with Whitefield’s Will in hand, furiously advancing towards Ramsden and protesting against his appointment as co-guardian over Ann with Ramsden.

Tanner opposes co-guardianship with Ramsden because of Ramsden’s outmoded

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political and moral thought and because of Ann’s willfulness. We learn from him that Ramsden’s reasoning process is mechanical and one always knows before hand his views on any subject. More intelligent and quick witted, Tanner’s brief quarrel with Ramsden establishes the latter as an idealist or conventionalist. Tanner himself emerges as an original thinker discarding Ideals and quickly reduces Ramsden to a sputtering display of temper and lack of self control. Whereas Tirso’s Don Juan rebels primarily against social constraints on sex, Shaw’s Don is a social critic and rebel of mechanical thinking in general whether in politics, philosophy or sex.

Tanner also rejects his guardianship because of Ann’s willfulness: “All she wants with me is to load up all her moral responsibilities on me and do as she likes at the expense of my character: I cant control her and she can compromise me as much as she likes. I might just as well be her husband” (II: 543). Tanner’s statement foreshadows his final surrender and marriage to Ann. By rejecting the guardianship conferred on him, he is symbolically resisting his destiny to father the “Superman”.

As she comes in with her mother, Mrs. Whitefield, Ann is introduced as the instinctual genius of the species, “one of the vital geniuses” who exudes a life affirming aura that makes “men dream” (II: 549). While Shaw’s talk of Ann as “mother woman” may look like a male chauvinist talk and indeed, like the well-know material of classical comedy, the difference lies in Shaw’s vigorous inclusion of the woman’s (Ann’s) point of view in the sexual relation. It is Ann’s instinctive choice and action, not the hero’s that triggers the dramatic action, complicates the plot and transforms the emotional pattern of Shaw’s comedy. Octavius would be the man destined to marry Ann in an ordinary comedy and as we know, the original Don Octavio in Mozart's Don Giovanni is paired with Ann. As Shaw describes him, “Mr. Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must one thinks, be the jeune premiere; for it is not in reason to suppose that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story (II:535). But the expectation of a match with Ann is frustrated by Ann who desires in sex something more than mere romance.

Ann is no longer the woman of the Don Juan myth or the sentimental heroine of Victorian melodrama, but Shaw’s “New Woman”. Having set her mind on Tanner, it is her choice and actions that distort the pattern of romantic love in the comedy. Ann creates the complication without which there would be no play by rejecting the romantic lover who strongly desires her. She does so because she is no longer the heroine of all female flesh, but a person with ideas and conscious choices, a modern woman. She prevails over the man who is not her choice but wants to marry her (Octavius) and the man who is her choice but refuses to marry her (Tanner). The shift from traditional comic pattern is that, Octavius woes Ann who woes Tanner, who regards marriage as “apostasy”. Tanner’s resistance to sex is inexplicable, except by his theories, but the peculiar nature of the obstacle is really Ann’s rejection of Octavius and pursuit of Tanner which are less explainable and more significant.

Ann quickly manipulates Tanner into accepting his co-guardianship. This responsibility brings Tanner closer to Ann and to his divine destiny. Ann scores another

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victory over Tanner when Mrs. Whitefield asks Ramsden to advice Ann about her habit of addressing men by nicknames (which is of course, part of her strategy to manipulate and control them). At this, Ann quickly outmanoeuvres Octavius and Ramsden by feigning ignorance of any wrong doing and gains sympathy from both men who reciprocate by insisting she continues calling them “Ricky-ticky-tavy” and “Granny” respectively. But Tanner who knows more about women dryly opines (over his shoulder, from the bookcase), “I think you ought to call me Mr. Tanner” and not Jack. Ann knows she must be subtle with Tanner and jokingly suggests calling Tanner by his ancestor’s name, “Don Juan” (II: 555). Ramsden remonstrates against the impropriety of the name and Tanner, weary of the subject asks Ann to call him any name.

Tanner’s request for formality is an attempt to protect himself against Ann’s intimacy but in this request, he replicates Ann’s gesture preceding her earlier reference to him as “Jack the Giant Killer” whereupon, “she cast a glance at Tanner over her shoulder” (II: 554). The replication of stage gesture signals to the audience that the two are destined to be paired. The unconscious is central to Shaw’s life force theory46 and throughout, Shaw shows Tanner as unconsciously attracting Ann by his display of intellect and wit so that, he becomes an unreliable narrator of his feelings for Ann.

Left with Octavius, Tanner lectures him on women’s predatory and warns him of Ann’s desires towards him (Octavius). Drawing from his theoretical “Handbook”, he explains that, “Women are driven by the blind fury of creation” and they would sacrifice any man for their purpose because, their purpose is not theirs but the purpose of the universe, a man is nothing but an instrument of that purpose (II: 556):

Have you read Maeterlinck’s book about the bee...? Its an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann’s suitor?...Fool: it is you who are the pursuit, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shots behind you forever (II: 564).

The artist he insists is always the mother-woman’s target, but the true artist “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot...sooner than work at any other thing but his art” (II: 557). Octavius is a romanticist and quarrels with Jack over his blunt talk about Ann as a huntress of men. While we are amused by the truth of Tanner’s view of Ann, we are even more amused by the comic irony involved. In warning Octavius about Ann’s predatory, Tanner is unaware that he is himself the object of Ann’s predatory and not Octavius. His claim that the artist is a more likely victim or prey of female predatory has a similar irony for, to Tanner, the function of art is to attack and destroy established ideals: “To shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves, and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as sure as any woman creates new man” (II: 558). First, Tanner is unconsciously drawing an analogy between the act of procreation that Ann represents

46 Shaw is explicit, both in the play and in the “Maxims for Revolutionist” about the rule of

the unconscious. He has Ann say to octavius in act IV, “But I doubt if we ever know why we do things”. And one of Tanner’s maxims is : “the unconscious self is the real genius”.

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and literary creation. Secondly, the real artist in the play is Tanner whose political writings are appended to the play and who has a profounder philosophy of life, not Octavius who thinks of art only as an expression of romantic emotions. Octavius is only an idealist or pseudo-artists. Tanner generates new writing (new thought) in the same way as Ann generates new life (chidren). His definition of an artist thus foreshadows his final acceptance of his role as procreator and final surrender to Ann.

The ironies hint on Shaw’s presentation of Tanner in the frame comedy. Tanner is the tradition fool of comedy albeit, in a more sophisticated guise. Shaw’s strategy with his hero/ spokesman of Creative evolution is to make him a comic figure that is always right in his ideas yet, always contrives to get everything wrong in the practical sphere. His identification of Ann as husband-huntress and agent of the Life force, are of course correct; it is his idea that Octavius is her quarry that is most mistaken.

The sub-plot on Violet’s illegitimate pregnancy complements the main plot. It allows us see to Ann’s predatory in a spiritual light by contrasting it with Violet’s materialistic marriage pursuits. It also allows us to see the contrast between Tanner, the unconventional hero as “Realist” and the Idealist majority that surrounds him. As “Idealists”, Ramsden and Octavius operate on the conventional plane and Shaw puts all the characters of act I to the test with the news of Violet’s pre-marital pregnancy. When the news is broken, everyone suggests that Violet be sent abroad to have her baby there and spare the family the disgrace of pre-marital pregnancy. Shaw creates the episode in order to demonstrate by means of Tanner’s reaction his adversity to conventions (idealism) and his ironic suitability for fatherhood. While others express sympathy for Octavius over the embarrassment, Tanner insists the sympathy should go to “the woman who is going to risk her life to create another life” (II: 565). Tanner: The need of the present hour is a happy mother and a healthy baby. Bend your

energies on that; and you will see your way clearly enough (Octavius, much perplexed, goes out).

Ramsden. [facing Tanner impressively] And Morality; Sir? What is to become of that? Tanner. Meaning a weeping Magdalen and an innocent child branded with her shame. Not in

our circle.... Morality can go to its father the devil (II: 565).

Conventionalists (Octavius and Ramsden) “police” or restrict language to conventional use while Tanner, the critic, exposes the reality underneath such language usage. The term, “Scoundrel” has been reduced to stock usage as Tanner makes us aware. Octavius. But who is the man? He can make reparation by marrying her; and he shall, or he

shall answer for it to me. Ramsden. He shall, Octavius. There you speak like a man. Tanner. Then you don’t think him a scoundrel, after all? Octavius. Not a scoundrel! He is a heartless scoundrel Ramsden: A damned scoundrel. I beg your pardon, Annie; but I can say no less. Tanner. So we are to marry your sister to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her

character! Oh my soul. I think you are all mad (II: 562).

Tanner’s admiration of motherhood, his respect for Violet’s pre-marital pregnancy;

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his proclamation of this act as a heroic risking of “her life to create another life”: “the fulfilment of Nature’s purpose and greatest function”― to increase, multiply and replenish the earth with healthy children―”, clearly contradict his own resistance to fatherhood and thus presents him as an unreliable narrator of his feelings for women. But all this is meant to demonstrate that Tanner embodies the impulse of life and the values of parenthood despite his denials or adversity to love and marriage.

When in his anger Ramsden actually suggests that Tanner may be the illegitimate father of Violet’s baby, Shaw further allows his audience to contemplate the suitability of Tanner for father. To gain public denunciation of Tanner, Ramsden more or less nominates Tanner as a suitable replacement for Whitefield. Although Tanner denies Ramsden’s accusation, he also does so in a way that establishes his suitability for fatherhood and his unreliability as narrator of his feeling for Ann: “If I had the honour of being the father of Violet’s child, I would boast of it instead of denying” (II:563). Like Ramsden who thinks he is gaining public denunciation of the hero, Tanner thinks he is attacking idealism in its own clichés, but he is unwittingly letting the audience see his suitability for exactly what he thinks he is not suitable for and does not want to become, a father. Finally, Ramsden insinuation that Tanner may be a libertine enables them to see the extent to which Shaw, in his play has transformed the traditional Don Juan, stripping him entirely of his libertinism.

As the other characters withdraw to persuade Violet to travel abroad, the idealist Ramsden stays behind to protect Ann from Tanner, but being an idealist, he is ignorant of obstructing Ann (who has desires for Tanner) and not Tanner himself. However, Ann quickly manoeuvres him out of the way and what follows is the most explicit representation of female predatory in any Victorian-Edwardian courtship comedy. In this sexiest of scenes, Ann, the instinctive principle of the life force is the aggressor, initiating the sexual action while Tanner, the intellectual agent uses insults as shield to protect himself from Ann. Beginning by speaking “almost into his ears”, Ann soon finds herself slipping her arm into his and walking about with him” (II: 567). Tanner, seeking to protect himself calls Ann names, “a boa constrictor”, spider, Mephistopheles etc. When Ann tells him she does not mind his views, Tanner reinforces his metaphor: “off course the ‘boa constrictor’ does not mind the opinion of the stag in his coils”, but Ann literalizes the metaphor by throwing her arms round Tanner’s neck, referring to them as her “boa” and inviting him to notice how soft and nice they are. In the animal force at work in Ann, Shaw allows the lovers’ sexuality to glow under their Edwardian garb. The tactile imagery, the incongruity of behaviour, the amorous language, all incite a transgression of the Victorian context and contribute to heating the sexual tension before the physical love-chase of act II.

As the other characters joined them, we are once more shown the failure of Tanner’s theories in the material world of this comedy. He once more salutes Violet’s “bravery and vitality” in becoming a mother and ridicules the conventional discountenance of pre-marital sex. At the height of his defence of Violet, Violet herself cuts him short, annoyed by Tanner’s association of his “vile” and “abominable

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opinions” with her person. To everyone’s surprise, she reveals that she is legally married though secretly so. The stage directions tell us Jack is once more left “in ruins.

Violet’s revelation of her secret marriage establishes the secondary couple of the sub-plot who function both to parody and complement the main couple. Each couple has what the other lacks and desires. Like Ann, Violet has determination and strength to get what she desires from a man, marriage, but her presence besides Ann is meant to allow us see the purity of Ann’s predatory against her materialism. Named after a flower that symbolizes feminine modesty, Violet has actually grown into a wild weed. She wants Hector for his father’s money and will insist against all odds that they keep their marriage secret until Hector Jr. inherits his father’s wealth. Violet thus begins from having a husband and proceeds to contrive a marriage for money. Ann on her part comes upon her inheritance and then, contrives to have a suitable father for her children. Both women are enterprising, audacious, aggressively daring and self-assured in securing their desires. Both finally relegate their men to the background.

The male couple too contrast each other. By virtue of being a hidden father, Malone Jr. mirrors Tanner’s situation. Malone is worried about his hidden identity as father to Violet’s unborn child and eager to publicly declare his identity while Violet wants to keep it hidden. In contrast, by playing the fugitive father, Tanner wishes to keep his own father status hidden while Ann struggles to bring him to public recognition of his own suitability for fatherhood and to acceptance of marriage.

Shaw claimed he learnt more from Mozart about writing plays than from dramatists. Mozart’s music, Don Giovanni with Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte was his favourite (Music, 2: 181-82). As W.H. Auden (1953:156) holds, Shaw’s “writing has an effect nearer to that of music than the work of any of the so-called pure writers”. Mozart’s music structures act ons of Man and Superman as seen in Shaw’s arrangement of his characters’ speeches and scenes as if they were recitatives and ensembles in an opera. The Act has a clear pattern of emphasis: four dialogues of increasing thematic and dramatic interest between two characters alternating with increasing larger ensemble scenes.

The four dialogues occur between Ramsden and Octavius; Ramsden and Tanner, Tanner and Octavius and, Ann and Tanner. The first three are permutations of pairs borrowed from the male characters. The last dialogue between Ann and Tanner is the longest and most consequential to Shaw’s eugenic theme. Each duet is followed by an ensemble: a trio for the three male characters, a quintet which adds Ann and Mrs. Whitefield to the three males, a quartet which subtracts Mrs. Whitefield and, to provide the act with a grand finale, a septet with Violet and Ramsden’s sister added to the previous quartet. Observers of Mozart’s opera will recognize this pattern of beginning an act with solos and duets and then alternating them with larger ensembles while building to a concerted finale involving all the characters. Shaw’s intension to meticulously give act one a musical structure with regards to this sequencing of dialogues in duets and ensembles is confirmed by the publication in 1996 of his original scenario for the play initially entitled, “Superman or Don Juan’s Great

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Grandson’s Grandson” (1901) in which he outlined the play’s structure scene by scene. Shaw plays with proportion, scale and genres. While act one is the longest and set

indoors, act two is the shortest and set outdoors. In act one, the love-chase remains within the refinement of romantic comedy though with some transgressions of the sexual propriety of Victorian comedy. Act two moves into farce and melodrama, as the love-chase is physically literalized in a motorized race. The farcical and melodramatic world prepares us for the epic dream of act three. But before this, Shaw again punctures the comic philosopher in a situation that triggers the farcical love-chase.

Fully aware of Tanner’s adversity to convention, Ann contrives to get a ride with Tanner by pretending to suffer under the tyranny of her mother’s authority. Her hypocrisy works Tanner into a high spirited tirade on the intolerant domination of the young by the old and a vehement denunciation of the fashionable marriage market:

Oh, I protest against the vile abjection of youth to age! Look at the fashionable society as you know it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a cynical, cunning, avaricious, ignorantly experienced, foul-minded old woman who she calls mother, and whose duty it is to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder (II:598-9).

Tanner asserts that mankind must break from all enslaving past, children must become independent of parental authority in order to become themselves; the man who pleads his father’s authority is no man; the woman who pleads her mother’s authority is unfit to bear citizens to a free people. Tanner is so carried away by his lecture on Creative evolution and his indignation toward ideas that he issues what is intended merely as a rhetorical invitation to Ann to defy ideals by riding with him across Europe and, to his great surprise, his proposal is promptly and devastatingly accepted. Also, at the end of his long harangue, Ann’s response is another puncture of his intellectual discourse:

Ann: [ watching him with quiet curiosity] I suppose you will go in seriously for politics some day, Jack.

Tanner: [heavily led down] Eh? What? Wh--? [Collecting his scattered wits] What has that got to do with what I have been saying?

Ann: You talk so well. Tanner: Talk! Talk! Talk! It means nothing to you but talk (II: 599)

Without realizing, Tanner has been attracting Ann by this display of intellect. Ann has been watching him with quiet curiosity. The invitation too, is what Ann has hoped to obtain. After the incident, Tanner’s driver informs him that he is Ann’s target, not Octavius. Informed of his position in the love triangle, Tanner orders Straker to drive him out of Ann’s reach. Realizing that Tanner has disappeared, Ann sets out in pursuit.

Shaw claims to update the Don Juan Legend and the new automobile is a significant indication of the scientific age in which Shaw situates his Don Juan. Even in the Victorian theatrical context, an automobile on stage was an innovation that can only be compared to placing a space shuttle on stage today, since a ride in a car in 1901-3 would have been almost as outside the experience of the audience as a ride in space shuttle is to us now. Secondly, by virtue of the fact that Henry Straker, the driver

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of the car functions as servant to Tanner, the Don Juan of the piece, Shaw creates a modern counterpart to the various servants in the Don Juan tradition, Catalinon in Tirso’s play, Siganarelle in Moliére’s, Leporello in Mozart’s; all function to expose their employers’ shortcomings. They possess practical knowledge that their employers lack. Straker is a modern equivalent of these servants. He not only has a polytechnic degree in engineering, he is a master of mechanics and knows more, not only about Tanner’s car than Tanner. He possesses practical knowledge of sexual relations than Tanner who masters the theory. It is Straker who informs Tanner of his position as Ann’s target in the love triangle of Ann, Octavius and Tanner.

More significant than modernizing the legend, Shaw uses the automobile for symbolic and spectacular effects. In his letter to Granville Barker on the 1907 performance of the play in which Robert Loraine and Lillah McCarthy played Tanner and Ann respectively, Shaw hits the thematic significance of the automobile:

[Loraine] wanted to deliver the great speech about the tyranny of mothers, enthroned in the motor car, with Lillah somewhere under the wheels with her back to the audience. I immediately saw the value of the idea and put Lillah in the car in a fascinating attitude with her breast on the driving wheel, and Loraine ranting about on the gravel (Letters, II:690).

The automobile symbolizes Ann’s instinctual drives. Shaw recognized that, as the instinctive agent of the life force, Ann should be in the driver’s seat, as she observes Tanner’s courting display of wit so that, her puncturing responds to his speech would also make clear to the audience that she is in control of the direction and development of the sexual relation. Notice the position of Ann’s breast, “on the driving wheel”. The automobile underscore the evolutionary thesis that woman is the aggressor.

Informed of Ann’s desires for him, Tanner flees through a melodramatic world of dangerous forests, hills and rough roads into the magical evening landscape of the Sierra Nevada and, as in the improbable world of melodrama, he and his driver encounter improbable creatures. They are captured by Mendoza and his frightful group of bandits.

Shaw often joked that in the distant future, people would confuse the British writers whose names begin with “Sh”: Shakespeare, Shelley, Sheridan and Shaw―, and indeed would conflate them into one, shoddy.47 Mendoza is an interfigural conflation of literary figures from Shakespeare and Sheridan. Shaw took the name from Sheridan’s Isaac Mendoza in The Duenna (1775) and while Sheridan’s character is a cunning Jew, a fortune hunter and an opportunist who converts to Christianity, Shaw transforms him into an English urbane thinker, a Zionist and a love-sick brigand. But Mendoza is also a quotation from two of Shakespeare’s heroes. As a love-sick 47 A version of the joke is found in Back to Methuselah, where Shaw’s Zoo, tells the Elderly

Gentleman about “an ancient writer whose name has come down to us in several forms, such as Shakespeare, Shelly, Sheridan, and Shoddy” (“Shoddy” just where the rhythm demanded “Shaw”). In Farfetched Fables too, the Commissioner refers to “a Prophet whose name has come down to us in various forms as Shelley, Shakespear, and Shavius”.

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poetaster, pinning away for unrequited love of, coincidentally Henry Straker’s sister, Louisa, Mendoza is an elderly quotation of Shakespeare’s Orlando in As You like It. Recounting his love for Louisa, Mendoza states, “I am like a boy: I cut her name on the trees and her initials on the sod” (act II), but it is Orlando who, in his psychosexual development performs the actions of this statement. Mendoza also relates to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his pessimism towards evolution (C.f. IV. 6.3). However, Shaw uses Mendoza to create psychological parallels and contrasts with his hero.

Psychologically, Mendoza who stakes all for love is a stage projection of the hero’s split self resulting from Ann’s relentless sexual pursuits of him. Mendoza reflects Tanner’s repressed sexual psyche, the sexual urge that he consciously struggles to suppress or thinks he has effectively suppressed and which repression accounts for his resistance to sex and marriage. Tanner must confront this romantic side of his personality before he can accept to marry Ann. Symbolically, as Mendoza reads his love poems to Tanner he warns the later that the Sierras “make one dream of women with magnificent hair”. But Tanner erroneously thinks himself a wholesome personality, since he believes he has suppressed his romantic instinct: “they would not make me dream of women my friend, I am heartwhole”. Of course, he is not “heartwhole” and thus, must dream.

Interfigurally, Mendoza also relates to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. When Tanner and Straker meet him and his bandits, they are engaged in a heated debate on which group of bandits has greater personal courage, the French or English anarchists? Their debate functions as a parodic quotation of the great debate between the Devil and his followers in Book II of Paradise Lost. When after this scene, Mendoza transforms into the Devil and Tanner into Don Juan, the relation to Milton’s epic becomes clearer. In the Hell scene in which both debate the issue of human evolution Mendoza functions as tempter, persuasively rejecting the “the will to serve the life force”. In this debate, Mendoza/Devil’s maintains a strong pessimism towards the possibility of progress. His refusal to serve the “life force” and his preference to be his own master rather than serve some “blundering universal force” impress us as a Shavian version of the “Non “Serviam” motto” of Milton’s Satan.

IV.5.1. An Epic-dream symposium: Don Juan leaves Hell for Heaven

Shaw claims to be, “a realist [only] in the platonic sense” and, Plato features in the plethora of writers whom Shaw claims have inspired his play. He also describes the Hell-dream Scene of Act III as a “Shavio-Socratic dialogue” (II: 503) to imply that it is formally modelled on Plato’s dialogues or Plato’s symposium. Shaw’s Don maintains here that the only sort of man who can be happy is the “philosophic man”, and the Shavian “superman” is closer to Plato’s philosopher-king than Nietzsche’s Übermenschen. Like Plato too, Shaw believed in the technique of dialectics in the simple sense of argument through interlocutors as the basic method of truth-seeking, and although the act is what Shaw calls a “discussion”, this appellation does not

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conceal the relation of such an extensive “talk” to Plato’s rhetorical discourses. Act III has much of the Platonic pattern. For Plato, there were dimensions of truth,

that could not be adequately expressed through the debate of Socrates and his companions and for such “truths” Plato took recourse in myth and parables. The change of mode from argument to myth in Plato’s dialogue suggests that beyond a certain point, it is not possible to convey ultimate realities directly, but only by metaphoric discourse. Like Plato, Shaw’s and socialist critics like Brecht argue that truth or reality is revealed in parables and in such fantastic forms like dreams. Act III stands in the same relation to the rest of Man and Superman as say, the myth of Er to The Republic or Diotima’s parable of the origin and nature of love to The Symposium. Like these metaphorical discourses, act III is conceived as a level of reality outside the representational interplay of character and action. It is a purer and more intense form of argumentative debate with Don Juan taking over from Tanner in the Socratic role. The issues of the frame comedy are made abstract, more philosophic and symbolic. In this Hell setting, the comic characters acquire symbolic and philosophical depths and the scene develops a cosmic religious significance for the whole play.

Blake is cited in the prefatory list of authors who inspired the play. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was a favourite work with Shaw. Blake was for him the founding father of the Devil’s party, the tradition of 19th century literary iconoclasm in which Shaw included Ibsen, Nietzsche and himself. The “Maxims for Revolutionist” and the epigrammatic language of the Hell scene echo Blake’s “Proverbs in Hell”.

The Hell scene stands apart from the rest of the comedy. The love plot is entirely halted for a night long debate on the future of civilization. With the exception of the last line ―Doña Ana’s exclamation, “A Father, a Father for the superman” (II: 689) ―, act III seems to have almost no connection with the frame comedy. In form, act III is august to English drama. It is Shaw’s most extreme stylistic experiment in fantasy. The scene is not bound by any specific time and place. Hell is simply a dark void. In this transient region, Shaw raises his character to allegorical voices and the scene dangles imaginative strings from epics and myths. The setting is existentialist as the comedy swings into a purely psychological register without a dropping of the curtains:

...stillness settles on the Sierra and darkness deepens. The fire has again buried itself in white ash and ceased to glow. The peak shows unfathomable dark against starry firmament; but now the stars deem and vanish, and the sky seems to steal away out of the universe. Instead of the Sierra there is nothing: omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks, no light, no sound, no time no space: utter void.... (II: 631).

The stage directions on Tanner’s magical transformation are startling: ...The man’s costume explains itself as that of a Spanish nobleman of the XV-XVI century. Don Juan of course; but where? Why? Besides, in the brief lifting of his face, now hidden by his hat brim, there was a curious suggestion of Tanner. A more critical fastidious, handsome face, paler and cooler without Tanner’s impetuous credulity and enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but still a resemblance, even an identity. The name too, Don Juan Tenerio... (II: 632).

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Ann undergoes a similar magical transformation first, into an old woman of sixty and then, Doña Ana at twenty seven.

In its intertextual relation to the Legend, this dream inset is an after-death “parodic continuation” of Don Juan’s mythical history. Doña Ana meets her death father, the Statue of the Commander who renounces his claim to fatherhood and becomes in effect, a second defective or self-defeated father, another mock-father figure de-fathered in preparation for Tanner assuming the role. As he tells Doña Ana, “in this place the farce of parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me I beg, as a fellow creature, not as a father” (II: 642). The Commander thus reiterates the vacant position of father that is not yet occupied. Ana’s account of his statue on earth is more humorous but also significant in pointing to the vacant father-position in the play:

It [the statue] has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years and fingers without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is shockingly mutilated. My poor father! (II: 640).

The account links Tanner to the new children. The new generation of children like the new generation of fathers-to-be is bent on destroying the old established order. The symbolic castration of the Commander however obscured by humour, was one of the main activities of the boy, Tanner, as we learn from Ann in act one: “Oh Jack, You were very destructive. You ruined all the young trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all the cucumber frames with your catapult”; you set fire to the bands and the police arrested Tavy for it” (II: 572). Tanner’s actions in the play jibe accurately with the “posture of revolt” that creative evolution attributes to the man of genius. The equivalence of Tanner’s phallic violence is the “mischievous boys” who disfigured the Commander’s statue. Doña Ana’s account of the statue also introduces the theme of the debate on whether man is by nature destructive or creative; diabolic or divine, and whether human civilization (history) is progressing or retrogressing?

While Shaw uses Mozart’s Don Giovanni to structure act one, in act three, it is used almost wholly for purposes of parody, diversion and comic relief. The Hell scene is characterized by a series of anti-climatic inversions of Mozart’s characters’. Tirso’s Commander turns out to be the very urbane statue who excuses himself for singing the part Mozart wrote for him, explaining that he is unfortunately a counter-tenor rather than a bass. But the most significant inversion is in the ascebic character of Shaw’s Don Juan who denounces the sensuality of Hell. Contrary to the legend too, Shaw’s Commander and Don Juan, much to Doña Ana’s fury are very good friends in this after life scene. Don’s murder of the Commander is reduced to farce by the latter’s insistence that he was the better swordsman and would have killed Don but for an accident. Such jokes also punctuate the long speeches of Don and the Devil in the debate and serve as comic counterpoints to the “discussion” drama of the act. In this series of jokes, Shaw also comically disposes of the Christian notions of the hereafter, clearing the way for his own evolutionary conceptions of salvation and damnation.

The comic surface of the dream act is characterized by irreverence at the expense

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of the Christian notions of God, the Devil, and especially of Heaven and Hell as places of reward and retribution. There are also mischievous cracks at the great literary image of the underworld in Christian epics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy as the Devil mocks the misconceptions of Hell derived from these epics:

Two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and Englishman. The Italian described it [Hell] as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he is not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gun powder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible (II: 655).

The Devil cites the book of Job as evidence of the fact that, far from being irrevocably banished from Heaven, he can visit it as often as he wants. His ability to shuttle between Heaven and hell blurs the Christian dichotomy of Heaven and Hell. Like the Devil, we are told that the Commander has first been in heaven and life there was so boring to him that he decided to leave heaven to spend his eternity with the Devil in Hell, just as Don Juan finally decides to leave Hell for heaven. The characters’ ability to shuttle between heaven and Hell prepares the way for the distinction in creative evolutionary termsbetween Heaven and Hell that Shaw wishes to make in this transient portion of his play.

The debate between the Devil and the Don is the pivot of the play, the point of convergence between comedy and philosophy. With it, Shaw has actually arrived where he was leading his audience when he called his play “a comedy and a philosophy”. By his subtitle, Shaw intended to use a small scale genre (comedy) to grapple with epic metaphysical questions; to ask questions reserved for tragedy and epics; discuss essential questions about human nature and destiny, the meaning and purpose of life, mankind’s metaphysical position and role in the universe. What does it mean to make life go on by producing children? Does life itself have a purpose and direction? Is human civilization in general progressing or retrogressing? Has life a moral value? Are human beings by nature creative or destructive? How can the Christian concepts of Heaven or Hell be applied to daily life? These are the questions provoked in Tanner’s mind by Ann’s relentless pursuits and his dream is an invocation of his ancestor, the arch pursuer of women, Don Juan for answers.

The metaphysical questions raised here, not being the traditional concerns of comedy, Shaw in his setting and characterization gives his comedy a moment of epic grandeur in act three. The cosmic setting and allegorical characters in part, place his comedy in the Epic tradition, with Dante’s Divine comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh etc., which all seek to teach us that the way to achieve salvation lies in never surrendering to the forces of complacency and ease, but in striving with all one’s strength of mind and heart; to do, to live; to imagine, to create. When in Act three Tanner dozes off and makes a symbolic descent into Hell, he is following in the footsteps of traditional epic heroes: Odysseus, Gilgamesh or Beowulf.

The dream is devised to allow Tanner asks himself the metaphysical questions

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above in the form of a night long debate. It is an attempt to give stage representation to opposing facets of the hero’s mind through a quartet of speakers: Don Juan who corresponds to his notion of philosophic consciousness (realism), the Devil who corresponds to Mendoza and represents the anti-thesis of Don’s philosophy of progress, Doña Ana corresponds to Ann Whitefield while the Commander corresponds to Ramsden in the frame. The four debate the purpose and direction of human civilization or history. Mendoza/Devil, the espouser of aestheticism and pessimism is that part of Tanner that doubts if life has a direction; a purpose or meaning. Mendoza is the biblical tempter in Shaw’s parable. Don is Tanner’s optimistic psychic on historical evolution. The four voices debate ideas about happiness and fulfilment, purposefulness and drifting, life and death, sex and women, the progress and retrogression of civilization, all in symbolic terms of existence as hellish or heavenly.

Don Juan intellectualizes Tanner’s theories in the dream. When the debate turns to sex, he illustrates Tanner’s conception of sex using his own relation to women while on earth and his discourse constitutes a “Counterstatement” (Fowler, 1982) to works in the Don Juan tradition. Like Tanner, he claims women are driven by the life force to entrap and ensnare men for Natures reproductive purposes. While acknowledging the spiritual significance of the woman’s reproductive purpose, his example of his sexual career runs counter all representations of him as seducer in precedent Don Juan works. Don insists that he never pursued women, rather, he was often pursued by them and that it was not love or sexual pleasure that delivered him into their hands but fatigue from escape and the “life force”. This discourse is actualized by Tanner in the final act.

Like Tanner, Shaw’s Don is stripped of sensuality and is rather imbued with a thoroughgoing philosophy of evolution, has forward-looking ideas that are able to change the society of England at the start of the 20th century. Don is up to date on all the ways of 1903; knows a lot about a lot― politics, economics, social questions, family problems, morality, poetry, insect life, sex, etc. His ideas are genuinely interesting but his opponent, the Devil, is just as witty and thus ready to debunk each of Don’s evolutionary ideas. Both men debate a wide range of subjects regarding the destiny of civilization, but hold antithetical and equally valid views on evolution or the direction of history.

Don Juan posits the optimistic thesis of Creative Evolution for debate: that “the life force is the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself”:

Are we agreed that life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself;…to build up that raw force in to higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious….Life was driving at brains-as its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self- understanding….Life, the force behind the man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving today a mind’s eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of Life (II: 661).

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The Devil counters this optimism with evidence of man’s destructiveness. He sees no evidence of mankind’s use of brains to create new life. The Devil is the spokesman for historical cycles or pessimism towards progress. For him, the power that governs the world is the power of destruction and Death and in its hands, man is a depraved being:

man measures his strength in his destructiveness: man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair...the gun and poison gas; above all, of justice, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers (II:654).

To Juan’s insistence that the “joy of life” is the joy of serving the life force and the duty of mankind “is the work of helping life in its struggle upwards”, we have the Devil’s eloquent articulations of man’s destructiveness and his praise of sensuality as the essence of life. Significantly, he provides vital evidence of man’s destructiveness (man’s unquenchable thirst for sophisticated weapons of mass destruction) and almost overwhelms Don with concrete “facts” of man’s murderous nature. For him, it is not the instinct of life but the instinct of death and destruction that is paramount in man’s make-up. The events of W.W.I were soon to give weight to the Devil’s argument. His argument on man’s destructiveness is a mark of Shaw’s foresight, his ability to use drama to predict the events leading up to W.W.I. The play warns of the disaster to civilization if man refuses to evolve in tandem with the life force. Shaw’s Devil insists,

In the art of life man invents nothing; but in the art of death he outdoes Nature itself…his heart is his weapons…This marvellous force of life of which you boast is a force of Death: man measures his strength by his destructiveness… the inner need that has nerved life to the effort of organizing itself in the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destructiveness…something...more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of sword and gun and poison gas ( II: 653).

Like 19th century objective or “scientific” historicism the “truth” of the Devil’s argument is based on “factual” evidence, but for Don Juan, evolution is a matter of faith in the “will” to improve. His positivist faith is simply founded on the assumption that if we desire and try to evolve as a species in a positive direction we will. Don does not disagree with the Devil’s view of man’s destructiveness. What he vehemently rejects is his determinism: the view that progress is impossible. To the Devil, history “is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world” between the same extremes:

An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving… Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continued ascent by man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion (II:683).

In this debate, Shaw maintains his vow to steer clear of melodramatic characterization by arming both protagonist and antagonist with great eloquence. In treating their opposing views on evolution with impartiality, Shaw makes their ideas alone the drama in this philosophical discussion. The Devil’s pessimism and Don’s

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optimism toward history are equally convincing and valid as compelling approaches to Shaw’s history and point to the paradoxical historiography of St. Joan (Ch. V).

More striking though is the formal innovations that this act brings to the drama. Though modelled on Plato’s dialogues, it is uniquely a Shavian experiment in the “discussion” mode of drama. Shaw criticized 19th century well-made plays for subordinating dialogue and character to action and plot construction. Contrarily, he advocated “the discussion” as the appropriate medium for discussing social and moral problems on stage, insisting that language and ideas rather than action and plot can be the source of pleasure in the theatre. The diverse range of issues discussed in this act is made possible by the fact that the scene is free from the constraints of plot, time and space. The Hell scene is a covert advocacy for Shaw’s “discussion” mode of drama. In its unique dream-like “discussion”, language or “talk” functions as form and content. As Gordon (1990:112) holds, “one might say that act III shows us language as action whereas the other acts, like most drama, show us action as language”.

The Hell scene is concerned with what it is that our world lacks and needs: intellect or thoughtfulness and the positive Will to evolve. It asserts language and argument are the means of taking thought and, while thought or thoughtfulness is being discussed as subject, it is fully given expression in its own form; the discussion mode itself. We experience the free play of the mind on all ideas while the need to acquire the critical mind is being discussed. The word “contemplation” for instance, rings throughout the debate and what goes on in the mind of the spectators is the contemplation of the ideas discussed. Our experience as spectators is “contemplation” rather than action, so too is the experience of the stage characters engaged in the discussion. Shaw’s characters frequently remind the audience that the subject of this act is “talk” as opposed to the action drama they are use to: “Whew! How he does talk!” exclaims the Statue as Don Juan departs: “They’ll never stand it in Heaven”. The Statue admires the Don’s “talk”: “Your flow of words is simply amazing, Juan. How I wish I could have talked like that to my soldiers.” Shaw’s stage character constantly reminded us of our involvement in “talk”. Responding to Don’s philosophy of evolution, The Devil insists, “It is mere talk, though. It has all been said before, but what change has it ever made? What notice has the world ever taken of it?” And Don responds, “Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk?” As the Don departs, the Devil tells him, “I shall often think of our interesting chats about things in general” (II: 686).

The characters share the love of talk and want the audience to share in the pleasure by constantly referring to the verbal medium: “I begin to doubt whether you ever will finish my friend”, says the Statue to Juan, “You are extremely fond of hearing yourself talk” (II: 674). Attention is drawn to the possibility of talking indefinitely: The Devil: …You always come back to my point, in spite of your wriggling and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches. Don Juan: Oh, come! Who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax your intellect,

you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty and the rest of your favourite boredoms.

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The Devil: (much offended) This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, successfully refuting you. Let us go on for another hour if you like.

Don Juan: Good: let us. The Statue: Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in particular, Juan. Still,

since in this place, instead of merely killing time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means (II: 661).

The vision of life incorporated in the Devil’s argument and the Statue’s postulation that life is “merely killing time” are forerunners to the absurdist theatre.48

Act three ends in a similar magical transformation as it began. Hell disappears and the void and darkness suddenly dissolve in the Sierras at day break. Tanner and Mendoza again appear in 20th century dress. The discussion on the future of civilization has taken a whole night and the issues debated on an abstract level without a resolution. The courtship comedy may now resume. Tanner wakes up to discover that Ann has mysteriously tracked him down and the action moves back to the world of reality to resolve the comic questions of fatherhood and marriage.

IV.5.2. Self- Awakening and the Comic Resolution

Act IV is the scene of “self-awakening”. It is concerned with the hero’s discovery of “a father’s heart” in himself. Tanner has displaced three mock-fathers: Mr. Whitefield from whom he has inherited Ann, Ramsden with whom his alter ego, Don Juan has taken opposite directions in the dream and, the Commander who has renounced paternity over Ann on meeting her. In act IV, Shaw contrives a dispute between Hector Malone Sr. and his son, Hector Malone Jr. that foreshadows Tanner’s surrender to Ann. Malone has just discovered his son’s secret engagement to Violet and has vowed to break it on grounds that no social advantage accrues to his son from such a marriage. He gets to know of it from Violet’s love note, inviting her husband to visit her. Malone has unsealed his son’s mail on the pretext that it is addressed to him, Hector Malone. The melodramatic motif of mistaken identity is used to reinforce the oedipal theme of the play and to prepare us for Tanner’s surrender to fatherhood.

In the context of the generational theme, the old fathers must be replaced by new and vital fathers to ensure the development of the species. Inverting the role of parent as blocking character in romantic comedy, Shaw shows us a son, Malone Jr., furious at his father for reading his mail and for objecting to his marriage. Like Tanner in act I, who in fury confronts the elderly Ramsden over the question of guardianship, Hector Jr. furiously makes for his father when he learns of the incident. The son succeeds in completely humiliating the father and in his anger disowns him―“He is no father of

48 As Kaufman (1965:11) asserts, “one of the still to be digested facts about Shaw is this: he

is godfather, if not actually funicky paterfamilias, to the theatre of the absurd, enthusiasts of which scornfully disowned him”.

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mine”. He thus, declares his total independence. Finding himself about to lose his only son’s love and company, the terrified father renounces his claim to an opinion in his son’s marriage and apologizes for mingling in his affairs. The father loses the oedipal battle as his son imposes himself as the new Malone. The scene shows a father’s doting heart in action as preparation for Tanner discovering one in himself and becoming a father. Malone’s surrender to his son prefigures Tanner’s surrender to Ann.

Shaw claimed his “Don Juan play” was “a careful attempt to [re]write a new Book of Genesis for the Bible of Evolutionists” (II: 531-32). The last scene takes place in the garden of a Spanish Villa. This garden scene symbolizes Eden and the beginning of man’s mythological journey. Symbolically, it is here that Tanner stops resisting Ann and accepts to serve the life force and to father the superman. In the Hell dream, Don claimed he neither pursued women nor enjoyed the pleasures of sex, but merely succumbed to the “life force” that aids women’s procreative responsibility: “whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the lady, life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a scrap of meat into the mouth of a seabird” (II: 679). His discourse is actualized in this final scene and encounter between Tanner and Ann.

In a last attempt to win Tanner, Ann pursues him at the gate of the hotel as he tries to leave. And while Tanner is still questioning whether marriage would not imprison his intellect and cause him his freedom, Ann wins him over by referring to her own cosmic destiny as mother: her fears over childbearing. Marriage she tells Tanner, will not be happiness for her but possibly death, as she labours to bring forth the new generation (II: 729). At this, Tanner is suddenly struck by a force and he unexpectedly declares his love for Ann: “He makes an irresolute movement towards the gate; but some magnetism in her [Ann] draws him to her, a broken man (II: 680). Tanner. I love you. The life force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I

grasp you. But I am fighting for my freedom, for my honor, for myself, one and indivisible.

Ann. Your happiness will be worth them all. Tanner. You would sell freedom and honor and self for happiness? Ann. It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death. Tanner: [groaning] Oh, that clutch holds and hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a

father’s heart as well as a mother’s? Ann. Take care, Jack: if anyone comes while we are like this, you will have to marry me. Tanner. If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you tight and jump. Ann: [panting, fainting more and more under the strain] Jack; let me go. I have dared so

frightfully-it is lasting longer than I thought. Let me go: I can’t bear it. Tanner. Nor I. Let it kill us. Ann. Yes: I don’t care. I am at the end of my forces.... I think I am going to die (II: 729).

Tanner’s moment of self-discovery is not only the climax of his dramatic development. It is the culminating moment of drama and philosophy in the play. The evolution of the human race is placed above the personal sexual happiness of the lovers and the final union is credited to the working of an impersonal force in line with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexual love. The scene “translates” Schopenhauer’s

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explicit analysis of comedy’s defining principle as the conflict between the evolutionary aims of the species and the personal desires of the individuals concerned. His assertion that “the ultimate aim of all love affairs” is “nothing less than the composition of the next generation” and “the growing attachment of two lovers” is “in reality the will-to-live of the new individual ... they can and want to produce”, is given stage form. Thus, the resolution is played out for Shaw’s higher evolutionary purpose.

Remarkably, Shaw give his comic resolution contradictory emotional signals to illustrate Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and to cast a final look on the destruction-creation theme of the epic-dream: is man by nature destructive or creative? Tanner’s feeling of “the clutch that holds and hurts” reflects Schopenhauer’s baby taking life from him, even as he generously wants to give it―destruction and creation. Ann also mimes the mother’s birth pangs after expressing her anxiety about motherhood and the possibility of death in child bearing ― “It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps Death” (creation/ destruction). “The clutch that holds and hurts, that grasps Tanner’s “father’s heart”, that warns Ann that she will have to risk death, belong to that Schopenhauer’s new baby (Shaw’s Superman) willing itself in to existence and driving the two lovers together to create a new life, even to their own destruction. The erotic communion of the new creation climaxes in mutual death wishes or a longing for death, so that Ann and Tanner also translate Wagner’s work as they become transfigured as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, each crying “let me die” at the height of their erotic communion in the act II love duet of that work. But this same trance by which Shaw’s couple allude to Wagner’s is also an allusion to Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Tanner’s reversal when he acknowledges that he does love Ann is a parody of the scene in Don Giovanni where the Statue exhorts the Don to repent thrice and Don Giovanni refuses thrice. The final sexual struggle between Ann and Tanner is patterned on the struggle between Mozart’s Statue and Don Giovanni. The Statue, holding Giovanni’s hand in his strong grip demands that he repents before it is too late. Three times the Statue urges the Don to say “Yes”, and three times the Don defies the divine agent with an ever louder “No”. Three times Ann urges Tanner to say “yes” to marrying her “before it is too late for repentance” and three times Tanner refuses to accept. Adapted to the eugenic theme, Mozart’s ending concludes Shaw’s play: Tanner: I will not marry you. I will not marry you. Ann: Oh, you will, you will. Tanner: I tell you, no, no, no. Ann: I tell you yes, yes, yes. Tanner: No. Ann:[coaxing―imploring―almost exhausted]:yes: before it is too late for repentance. Yes. Tanner [struck by echoes from the past] when did all this happen to me before? Are we two

dreaming? (II: 728).

Shaw’s Tanner feels he is about to be damned if he gives in to Ann’s desires and just then, he is struck by echoes from the past and gratifies her desire moments later in a sudden and unexpected turnabout by which Shaw credits the move to the working of

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the life force. Shaw’s parody of Don Giovanni here fits the emotional intensity of Ann and Tanner in a way that incorporates the death of Don Giovanni into their marriage and points to the creation-destruction theme of the Hell debate.

This final scene is Shaw’s most successful re-enactment of the dialectical structure and the themes of his epic-comedy. The play opens in a funeral, amidst rumour of pregnancy (birth and death), there is the dialectics of emotion and intellect in frame and inner plays and the destruction-creation theme of the Hell debate. The summary of these dialectics lies in the overlaying of Ann and Tanner’s final duet with contradictory signals of death and life on the one hand, and of the pains of birth and orgasmic loss. Shaw deliberately renders the language and rhythm ambiguous so that, we are left in doubt as to whether Ann is having an orgasm or pains of childbearing. The dual significance of the stage directions, “panting” conflates pains of childbirth with orgasmic loss. The conflation of orgasmic loss with painful death looks back to the Hell debate, to the question of man’s creativity and destructiveness.

In his essay, “An Unusual Case of Dying Together”, Ernest Jones (1951:16-21) interprets the case of a married couple who died at Nicaragua Falls in one another’s arms as having an unconscious significance: “the desire to beget a child with a loved one”. In Tanner’s lines, “If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you tight and jump”, Jones’s interpretation becomes remarkably indicative of Shaw’s uncanny sense of the confluence of different desires: the wish to die together instancing the natural sublime translates the unconscious desire to beget a child. Shaw’s interweaving of love and hate, birth and death, creation and destruction, in one emotional climax re-enacts the dialectics of man as destroyer and creator.

Shaw’s final marriage has symbolic implications beyond the comic genre. Ann and Tanner do not share “the delusion” in traditional comedy that the comic lovers “have established their own happiness”. Tanner tells Ann, “We do the world’s will, not our own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married because it is the world’s will that you should have a husband” (II: 725). The possibility of a “happy ever after” is defeated by the view that their marriage is an act of self-sacrifice antithetical to the pleasure of sexual consumption in comedy. As Tanner’s declares at the end,

I solemnly say that I am not a happy man. Ann looks happy; but she is only triumphant, successful, victorious. That is not happiness. What we have done here this afternoon is to renounce happiness, renounce freedom...tranquillity; above all, renounce the romantic possibility of an unknown future for the cares of household and a family (II:732). Remarkable, the play on human biological evolution that is generated by so many

texts and discourses ends generating another text. Tanner concludes the play with a vow to make his marriage work in the service of his political writings: “the copies of Patmore’s Angel in the House in extra morocco and the other [conventional] articles that you are preparing to heap upon us [i.e. as presents], will be instantly sold and the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the “Revolutionist Handbook”. The generational and marriage themes become entangled in the generation of texts.

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IV.6. Literary traditions (Genres): Models and transformations

VI.6.1. Comic models and interfigural transformations

In Man and Superman, Shaw comes to a vital sense of himself as author and writer in the genre of comedy, not only in his attempt to examine human nature from an evolutionary and cosmic perspective (the metaphysics of sex and marriage), but also in the play’s intense self consciousness: its allusive awareness of the two dramatic traditions to which it belongs. Shaw’s characterization shows a remarkably complex convergence of creative impulse and influence and, through his comic couple, Shaw allows his play to dialogue with generic motifs, characters and texts in the comic and Don Juan traditions in very creative, active and counter-dimensional ways.

Tanner and Ann not only belong to a type of battling “guy couple” in classical comedy, but are drawn from a wide spectrum of heroes and heroines in the classical duel of sex tradition. In his preface, Shaw suggests Shakespeare as model for his witty battling couple. Shakespeare’s women, he argues, are pursuers, contrivers, who take upon themselves to go after the males they desire: “In Shakespeare’s play the woman always takes the initiative” (II: 506). Shaw cites Rosalind in As you like it as model for Ann Whitefield and although one may add Julia in The Gentleman of Verona or Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing appear to be Shaw’s chief models for Ann and Tanner. Like them, Tanner and Ann give everyone the impression of not caring for each other and spend a lot of energy taunting each other. In a surpassing display of hostility, Tanner calls Ann names: “a boa constrictor”, “a vampire”, “Devil”, “liar”, “spider” etc., while we owe it to Ann that Tanner is “a gasbag of mere talk”. Just as Benedick flies from Beatrice’s quick tongue, so does coy Tanner flee from Ann’s dogged pursuits. At the climax of both plays, both pair of lovers embrace each other in public and agree to marry after struggling mightily against their sexual attraction.

Fragmentary traits of Congreve’s Restoration comedy, The Way of the World (1700) are echoed in Shaw’s couple and the climactic situation of Shaw’s play is a rewrite of Congreve’s “Proviso scene”. In Congreve’s battling couple, Millamant and Mirabell, mistrust of the male counterpart’s capacity for commitment leads the heroine to resort to extreme coyness as a means of concealing her feelings and delaying consent to marriage. Until Millamant is fully assured of Mirabell’s commitment, love and respect, she continues to mock her suitor teasingly till the “proviso scene”. Congreve’s scene takes the form of a bargain with conditions or provisos which each lover presents to the other as prerequisite for marriage. Millamant’s provisos suggest that her chief anxiety is that the intimacy of marriage will diminish her husband’s regard for her rights to privacy and independence while Mirabell expresses his fears that Millamant’s hypocritical hiding behind poses will continue after their marriage. The worries of each with regards to the other expressed, the lovers agree to marry.

In Shaw’s play, there are also no external blocking characters except the inner

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anxieties of his lovers. Ann and Tanner have to overcome a number of anxieties attendant upon the prospect of marriage. Millamant’s hypocrisy is extended in Ann. “Mask” and “hypocrisy” too, are Tanner’s standard descriptions of Ann and Ann actually conceals her ferocious pursuits of him under the veneer of social conventions. However, Shaw inverts Congreve’s proviso scene by inverting the provisos of Congreve’s male and female duellists or, if you like, their sex roles. It is Shaw’s hero who fears the loss of his freedom: “Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of the soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birth right, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat” (Act IV).

Shaw obviously saw his model of the comic hero as social critic in the battling couples of Molière’s Misanthrope (1666). Like Moliére’s male lover, Alcaste, Shaw’s hero is a maladroit social critic and self-declared enemy of falsehood (ideals). Tanner is bent on changing the world, but ironically he is placed in a relationship with a woman whose ties to society’s idealisms, though seemingly on the superficial level contradict his anti-idealistic stance. Like Alceste’s, Tanner’s woman embodies the deceptions and artificiality on which society is founded and both heroes regularly suffer humiliation in their attempts to apply their principles to practical situations.

However, the duel of sex was basically used in the classical era for purposes of comic entertainment, but Shaw imbues it with strong reformist zeal and a eugenic philosophy. Shaw was a Fabian feminist and key figure in the struggle for “new” women. In his comedy, the woman changes from being primarily an element in the comic plot to being an element in the thought of the play. Her part in the action is more a matter of her own personality and volition, more internal and psychological. But this inversion of the structure of comic emotion is made most pronounce by Shaw’s inversion of the Don Juan Legend in his comedy.

The material of the Don Juan legend attracted Shaw because of the ways reworking it allowed him to raise the issues of sexual hypocrisy and inequalities in Victorian England that he wanted his play to deal with. He thus needed a bigger reversal of the love-chase than the classical duel of sex offers. Hence, Shaw’s male lover, the quarry, is none other than Don Juan, the arch-pursuer of women and hunter par excellence in Western cultural memory. In combining the duel and the Legend, Shaw brings back both traditions to his audience in the form of an abundantly energetic, provocative and thought-turning comedy on a profound and complex meditation on love, sex and marriage in the evolutionary destiny of the species.

IV.6.2. The transmotivation of the archetypal hero: Shaw’s anti-Don Juan as socialist philosopher

The Don Juan myth found its first complete dramatic embodiment in Tirso de Molina’s morality play, El Burlador de Servilla or the Trickster of Servile around 1630. It employed stock dramatic devices of Spanish Golden age― disguises, seduction, mistaken identities and the chivalric code of honour.

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Tirso’s Juan is presented as an exemplar of masculine courage, a man with vital sexual urges, proud sense of honour, noble and arrogant, yet dignified in bearing. The myth captured the popular imagination and has since defined concepts of masculinity and femininity in Western cultural memory. Don’s excess sexual appetite is associated in Western cultural memory with the male ideal of indefatigable sexual energy and speedy enjoyment of women with no subsequent obligations.

In various literary periods in which the myth has been rewritten, Don represents the triumph of male sensuality and the pursuit of women as the appointed task of the man. In the Renaissance period, Don Juan was represented as the triumph of male aggression and sensuality while the Romantics represented him as the woman’s dream of the perfect lover―fugitive, bold and passionate, Don gave the 19th century woman the moment of sexual fulfilment she desired. Of no less significance is Juan’s physical power. He was potent in his tricks and acrobatic with his sword.

However, Shaw subverts all the qualities ascribed to Don in literary history. Shaw maintains in his preface that the true Don Juan is not as his predecessors present him, a simple “vagabond libertine”; his true significance lies in his role as a critic of society; enemy of convention and a defier of God (152). The preface also makes clear that Shaw is adopting the Don Juan myth and comedy to his own 20th century feminist context of women’s “emancipation” struggles. In such a feminist context Shaw asserts, man is relegated to a secondary position in the battle of the sexes. Hence, Shaw’s Don Juan and Ann are children of their age and not of tradition.

Interfigurally, Shaw imbues his Don, not with sensuality but with a moral responsibility. His traditional thousand and three mistresses become “unworthy of his “philosophic dignity” and are effaced. Shaw’s Don is rather a follower and reader of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and turns from sex to concern for the future of the race (II: 502). Significant in Shaw’s transformation of the Don is the Don’s customary accoutrements- the cap, sword, and sombrero― which are superseded by the red tie, revolutionary pamphlet, the bowler hat of the socialist and the latest automobile. Stripped of sensuality he is marked by his genius in puncturing all sanctimony and perceiving the truth stripped of hypocrisy. Paired with a new woman, the typical male contention that man initiates sexual advances is debunked as Shaw’s heroine is sexually forward yet, like Shaw’s Don, her instinctive purpose is sublimated by the knowledge that she is Nature’s agent working for a “higher purpose”.

Shaw cast his Don as a meditative heroic rebel in the mould of Prometheus and Faust; more completely absorbed in nature, consciously or otherwise perceiving the objective of the “life force” and more able to contribute to its ends. As the intellectual agent of the life force, he lacks the bravura, even the inherent Joie de vivre of the traditional Don Juan as his sexuality is superseded by a flow of printed and verbal words. Marriage for him becomes a “mantrap” or “chain”, “a contrivance of [the Life force] to secure the greatest number of children and the closest care of them”. Though armed with verbal assaults on societal “–isms” and knowledge of women, the woman ensnares the helpless philosopher because it is the will of the life force that he

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conserves his intellectual consciousness in generation to come. The Commander remarkably notes the death of the old Don Juan and the rise of the comic philosopher in the play: “Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound thinker” (II: 658).

It is not incongruous to depict Don Juan as chased by women if he has possessed and discarded them, perhaps after promises of marriage. But when a Don Juan runs from woman he has not possessed, he loses his raison d’être and becomes an anti-Don Juan. Shaw creates his anti-Don Juan figure in a dialogue with major texts in the legendary tradition. Besides Mozart, the play dialogues with Moliere’s Dom Juan or Le Festin de Pierre and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In Dom Juan or Le Festin de Pierre (1665), Moliere maintains Tirso’s seduction theme and the Don’s final damnation, but adds a spiritual element to the legend which Shaw profoundly exploits for its metaphysical significance to his own spiritual theme of evolution. Moliere credits his Don Juan with a strong sense of religious atheism and his exploration of the relation of ephemeral human existence to the metaphysical clearly attracted Shaw who wanted to give Creative evolution a sense of religion.

In Moliere’s work, Don meets the representative of divine order in the person of a poor man in the forest who offers him direction. But Don tries to convert the poor man to atheism, tempting him with a piece of Louis d’or to blaspheme, but the poor man stands his grounds, eschewing self interest by refusing to blaspheme. The Don however, pays him the money, but stresses that it is for the love of humanity and not of God. The love of humanity is at the centre of Tanner/Shaw’s creative evolution and explains why Shaw felt attracted to Moliere’s temptation episode. Shaw reworks Molière’s temptation scene into two encounters that suit his evolutionary theme.

Escaping from Ann, Tanner is captured by Mendoza, the brigand chief in the Sierra Nevada. In this first encounter, Mendoza (Moliere’s Poor man) is incongruously a brigand and a lovelorn, spinning away for the love of Louisa. In meeting Mendoza, Tanner, who has stifled the sexual instinct in himself is indirectly confronting that romantic side of his personality that he has suppressed and which suppression makes him fear Ann’s love and marriage. In fleeing from Ann, Tanner is symbolically fleeing from his spiritual destiny to father the superman and in meeting the romantist, Mendoza, he is confronting the sexual reality of his own evolutionary destiny to father the race. At the end of this first encounter, Tanner has a chance of turning Mendoza over to the police, but in a gesture matching the gratuitous generosity of Moliere’s Don (his donation of money to the Poor man), Tanner tells the security forces that Mendoza and his men are his escorts, not his captives and thus saves them from arrest.

In a second transformation, Shaw turns the encounter between Moliere’s Poor man and Don Juan into his own Hell scene debate, but inverts the roles of Moliere’s Poor man and Don Juan. In Shaw’s Hell scene, Moliere’s divine agent, the Poor man is transformed into the Devil and tempter. In meeting the Devil in the Hell scene Tanner/Don Juan is again confronting his spiritual (evolutionary) destiny. His fear of marriage comes in part, from his doubts about evolutionary progress: is human history and civilization actually progressing or retrogressing? Does bearing children really

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help the work of the life force? These are some of the questions raised in his mind by Ann’s pursuit and the dream is basically devised to help him resolve these questions. In the heated dream-debate with Mendoza turned Devil and tempter, Mendoza eloquently tempts Don into abandoning his optimistic faith in evolution. In meeting Mendoza then, Tanner is meeting his deep-rooted existentialist fear or doubts that life might have no purpose or meaning beyond the ephemeral; that evolution is going nowhere in particular; that the direction of human history is one of recurrence and repetition and that it is needless to strive for world betterment, all of which the Devil eloquently articulates in what he says is Tanner/Don Juan’s “comedy of illusions”. In place of the material temptations of Moliere’s hero, Shaw substitutes the Devil’s tempting sensuality and pessimism towards evolution.

All in all, Shaw transforms the Don Juan tradition in a two-fold process of “transmotivation”. As the intellectual agent of the life force, the sexual urges of the original Don Juan become illusory and are first re-channelled into a metaphysical reformist zeal or the instinctive “Will” to improve the world and a dedication to new ideas. As a second step, the legendary hero’s sexual urges are transferred to the heroine who is the reproductive agent of the life force in Shaw’s comedy.

Shaw’s comedy thus abandons the sensual mould of the Don Juan tradition, casting the traditional libertine as an asexual socialist philosopher, a critic of convention, a Shavian “Realist”, but also as an anti-Don Juan. The effect is not simply a generic “change of function” but a “counterstatement” as Shaw’s Don Juan play is “diametrically opposed to the masterpiece” (Fowler, 1982:174). Tanner/Don Juan is no longer the embodiment of the virile lover and seducer, but the prey of women― an anti-Don Juan� but a genuine socialist-critic and Philosopher, embodying the author’s humanistic faith in Evolution. He is a personification of the ideal moral and socio-critical intellect that humanity requires to progress. And it is essentially in creating an anti-Don Juan of his evolutionary philosopher that Shaw’s comedy dialogues with Shakespeare’s tragic Hamlet. Shaw considered Shakespeare’s tragedy as an earlier attempt to philosophize Don Juan and his comedy is clearly a extension of Shakespeare’s tragic version of a Don Juan philosopher.

IV.6.3. A comic rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy: the Interfigural relation of Tanner/Don Juan to Hamlet

Creative evolution is an interesting theory of comedy, admittedly often extravagantly expressed, but one that has inspired all great comedies. Shaw’s faith that man is capable of infinite improvement is a comic ideology that plays an important role in all great comedies. Breaking through limits is for Shaw, the use and joy of comedy and the destructive power of creative evolution arise from this joyous bursting through inhibitions and inadequate boundaries. W. Knight (1962) provides an insightful account of the relation of the “life force” to the imaginative world of comedy: “Comedy” he asserts, “is often our best approach to the mysteries” (342):

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What he [Shaw] likes best is to show a false and backward-looking valuation rendered ridiculous by the ever new and up-bubbling Life force. True humour derives from the overthrowing of superficialities by the orgiastic, or some derivative in the realm of facts and forces; sex, its usual theme, is as 'sex' only part of Shaw's concern, but his humour obeys the same law, with the Life Force as feminine and cosmic agent (350).

Throughout his career, Shaw criticized Shakespeare for his conventionalism and pessimism. He called his own protagonists “promethean heroes” when compared to Shakespeare’s. As a Promethean hero, John Tanner is a comic rewrite of Hamlet. Shaw asserts that, his “modern Don Juan” “is now more Hamlet than Don Juan…. Hamlet is a philosopher” and “a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which [Shaw’s] Don Juan is now driven” yet, Shaw concludes that, “From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespeare palmed off as a reputable man....” (Letter, III: 493). For Shaw, Hamlet and Tanner are versions of Tirso’s Don Juan’s, the one conventional in being pessimist about human evolution and the other, modern in being rebellious. However, the real difference between Hamlet and Tanner, which Shaw was less incline to admit, lies in the ideologies of the genres in which their respective creators emplot their works. Shakespeare writes in tragedy and Shaw in comedy.

Shaw’s review of Hamlet provides the “promethean” qualities for assessing the interfigural relation of Hamlet and Tanner to Tirso’s Don. Asserting that Hamlet would have emerged as a modern Don Juan and a real Promethean hero if Shakespeare had not “palmed” him with pessimism, Shaw compares the two heroes as follows:

... he [Hamlet] is a man in whom the common personal passions are so superseded by wider and rarer interests, and so discouraged by a degree of critical self-consciousness which makes the practical efficiency of the instinctive man on the lower plane impossible to him, that he finds the duty dictated by conventional revenge and ambition as disagreeable a burden as commerce is to a poet. Even his instinctive sexual impulse offends his intellect; so that when he meets the woman who excites them he invites her to join him in a bitter and scornful criticism of their joint absurdity, demanding ‘what should such fellows as I do crawling between Heaven and earth?’ ‘Why wouldst thou be breeder of sinners?’ and so forth....(E. Wilson, 1961:86-87).

For Shaw, the three qualities of a Promethean hero are; an absorption in “wider and rarer interests” which supersede “common passions”; a degree of critical self-awareness which makes the practical efficiency of the instinctive man on the lower plane impossible” and, a “dislike of his instinctive sexual impulse” which leads the intellectual hero into conflict with women.

Like Tanner/ Don Juan, Hamlet is so interested in intellectual activities that he drifts from action. As Shaw puts it in his review, Hamlet seizes “deliberately on every occasion for a bit of philosophic discussion or artistic recreation to escape from ‘the cursed spite of revenge, love and other common troubles”: “he brightens up when the players come”, “he tries to talk philosophy with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the moment they come into the room” and, “even his fits of excitement find expression in declaiming scraps of poetry” (Ibid.:87-88). Tanner profoundly extends this

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philosophical consciousness in Hamlet. In Shaw’s play, Ramsden insinuates that Tanner thinks he is Hamlet (act I). Left alone with Octavius, Tanner discusses women philosophically and Ann’s predatory designs for Octavius and even digresses into the relation of sex to literary creativity. Left alone with Ann, Tanner drifts into a discourse on the development of “the moral passion” in the soul of the youth (Act I); kidnapped by Mendoza, he engages the bandit in a discussion on socialism, women and love. His act III dream is also an extended philosophical discussion.

When it comes to action however, Tanner like Hamlet is ineffective. Ever since Coleridge (1951:457-58) analysed Hamlet’s character as a person suffering from “an overbalance in the contemplative faculty” so that he “ vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve”, the characteristic has been widely accepted by critics as an explanation for Hamlet’s delay in avenging his father’s death. It is indeed, an explanation for Tanner’s inefficiency in practical matters as well. Contrary to Tirso’s Don Juan, both Shaw’s Tanner/Don Juan and Shakespeare’s Hamlet flee from women. Like Hamlet’s, Tanner’s impracticality is the result of his total absorption in theoretical speculations, which turns to overwhelms practical action. As Irving (1949:239) asserts, Man and Superman is “the comedy of a modern Hamlet who goes on talking and philosophizing in the face of modern imperatives....” Crompton (1969:80) also holds that Tanner “wins all the intellectual battles, but makes a hopeless fool of himself in matters of practical judgment”. While he is absolutely right in his discourse on female predatory, he is absolute blind to the practical fact that it is him and not Octavius who is Ann sexual target, a truth so clear to his more practical driver, Henry Straker. His praise of Violet’s premarital pregnancy also ends in the revelation of her marriage. Although Tanner possesses a wide theoretical knowledge of women’s predatory, he fails in the practice as he cannot even effectively escape Ann’s pursuits. Modelled on Hamlet, his absorption in contemplative thought prevents efficient and practical action.

The Promethean hero dislikes the “instinctive sexual impulse” and Hamlet’s hostility towards women is expressed in his abusive attitude to Ophelia and to his own mother. Tanner is even more hostile towards Ann. Tanner: Ann says things that are not strictly true....In short....she is a liar. And since she has

plunged Tavy head over ears in love with her without the intension of marrying him, she is a coquette.... so she habitually and unscrupulously uses her personal fascination to make men give her whatever she wants. That makes her almost something for which I know no other polite name...She will be just what she likes herself whilst insisting on everybody else doing what the conventional code prescribes. In short, I can stand everything except her confounded hypocrisy (II: 773).

These qualities, which Tanner insists are radiations of a single defining trait in women: hypocrisy, are summed up in Hamlet’s generalization of his mother’s unfaithfulness: “frailty, thy name is woman” (I: ii). Tanner’s alter ego, Don Juan continues this bitterness towards women in Shaw’s dream scene. To be sure, the sexual impulse offends the higher philosophical intellect in Hamlet and Tanner /Don Juan, both of

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whom Shaw considers “modern” antithesis of their sensual original, Don Juan. To the disdain for sexual impulse in the promethean philosopher is added a general

dislike for other kinds of fleshy indulgence. For Shaw, Hamlet “hates Ophelia for having reduced him to concupiscence”; “loathes the king’s drunkenness as he hates his general sensuality (witness ‘Hamlet’s little temperance lecture on the battlement when he is waiting for the ghost’); hates women painting themselves” and, “hates his mother for being as sensual as the king” (E. Wilson, 1961:83). Tanner/Don Juan’s disdain for sensual pleasures in Shaw’s Hell scene is the pivot of his inversion of the Spanish sexual myth. His Don refers to sensual pleasures as “the tyranny of the flesh”, and defines Hell only in sensual metaphors, which he sees as deterrents to evolution. Heaven, “the home of the masters of reality”, which Shaw’s Don desires could never be a choice for his lecherous Spanish prototype. When the Devil calls on the world “to sympathize with joy, love, happiness, and beauty”, Don immediately takes his leave from Hell: “Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand this” (686) Like Hamlet, Shaw’s hero is asexual, philosophical and even more adverse to sensuality. To these promethean qualities, Shaw adds hatred for cants and social hypocrisy, and his Tanner surpasses Hamlet in his criticism of cants and hypocrisy.

As promethean heroes, Hamlet and Tanner share a strong philosophic interest which supersedes their personal passions; a critical faculty so active that it prevents them from effectiveness on the practical plane; a strong repugnance for sexual and all sensual pleasures and, a hatred for hypocrisy and cants. But there is one main philosophical difference between Hamlet and Tanner, which is also the difference between their creators and the respective generic forms in which they write. This difference leads Shaw to disqualify Hamlet as a promethean hero. Hamlet is a tragic pessimist who clearly lacks Tanner/Don Juan’s optimism towards human evolution. And as mentioned, comic optimism is at the core of Creative Evolution.

Hamlet’s tragic vision is opposed to Tanner/ Don Juan’s comic evolutionary vision. Inspired by watching Fortinbras and his son march off to war for instance, Hamlet soliloquizes over the human predicament: “what is man/If his chief good and market of his time/Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more/ Sure, He that made us with such large discourse /Looking before and after, gave us not /That capability and godlike reasonable /To fust in us unused” (IV. iv). But the possibility of man acquiring this godlike capacity is exactly what Man and Superman is about and what Shaw’s Tanner/Don Juan most affirms. In the Hell scene, Don Juan alludes to Hamlet’s speech in his discussion of the life force’s struggle to improve man and life: “What a piece of work is man!” adding, “yes; but what a blunderer!” because man needs to “develop better brains” (II.652). While Don like Hamlet maintains that man does not yet have a “godlike reason”, he strongly holds that man can attain it by throwing himself in the path of the “life force”. By identifying with the purpose of the life force, man can develop a brain and critical faculty worthy of the description “godlike” or “superman”.

Hamlet sees the world “as it is” while Tanner sees the world as it can possibly be. Hamlet fully accepts the religious belief of his time, which posits a finished creation in

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man and a perfect and complete God. In contrast, Don Juan believes that God is inactive except through man’s aid, in fact, that god is man still in the process of evolution and this gives hope of progress. When Hamlet thus discovers that the world and man himself are not what they ought to be, he can only fall into pessimism and despair. In contrast, Don Juan, who also acknowledges that neither man nor the world are what they odd to be, strongly holds the belief that man and the world can be transformed into what they odd to be, if man “wills” them so. The philosophical contrast between Tanner and Hamlet is that which Shaw makes between the “romantic” and “realistic” imaginations. Tanner/Don Juan sees man in a constant state of “becoming” while Hamlet sees man as he is, a finished being. Thus, when Hamlet sees this “goodly frame, the earth” as a “sterile promontory”, and “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”, and “man, who ought to be noble in reason”, infinite in faculty like an angel in action and like a god in apprehension”, as but a “quintessence of dust”, a base fellow, “cowling between heaven and earth”, he despairingly concludes that, “the uses of this world” are “weary stale, flat and unprofitable” (II. ii; III. i; I. ii). On the contrary, Tanner/Don Juan perceives the “true joy of life” as the joy of cooperation with the mystical life force to attain the best ends for the world, “...as long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. This is the law of my life”. (II: 679-80). And indeed, this optimism is the law of comedy and a counter to what Shaw considers to be Shakespeare’s Darwinian philosophy of art.

However, in rewriting Shakespeare’s play in comedy, Shaw splits Hamlet into two characters. While Shaw transfers Hamlet’s philosophic consciousness to his own hero, Tanner/Don Juan, he also replaces Hamlet’s tragic perception of the human predicament with his comic philosophy of Creative optimism. Strikingly too, Shaw transfers Hamlet’s Darwinian pessimism to Mendoza/Devil in the philosophical dream scene. Besides his overwhelming criticism of Shakespeare pessimism, Shaw insisted that Shakespearean art was basically sensual and stigmatized Victorian admiration for the Elizabethan’s work as “Baldolatory”. Shaw insists that the value of Shakespeare’s art lies exclusively in his “word music”. Shaw’s Mendoza/ Devil, not only encodes the tragic pessimism of Hamlet/Shakespeare and the “text” of Darwin’s determinism with which Shaw associated Shakespearean drama. The Devil is before all things else, a hedonist who has substituted Tanner/Shaw’s religion of struggle and reform for a religion of love and beauty, and the eloquent speeches that Shaw puts in the mouth of the Devil are a compliment to the literary distinction he often granted Shakespeare whose majestic rhetoric and seductive poetry he recognized at the same time that he deplores his will-sapping tragic conclusions about the human predicament.

Shaw’s Tanner/Don has a strong sense of purpose and because of his optimism, the disappointment of his personal wishes and his disillusionment with others cannot, as is the case with Hamlet, reduce him to pessimism. For Shaw and his hero, life is a promethean adventure to be borne with promethean fortitude. His Don is a Promethean philosopher of comic temperament. Crompton (1969:81) sums the transformation thus,

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Shaw’s originality lies in his having created in Jack Tanner a comic Prometheus. Ordinarily, Promethean types in literature have been singularly humourless, but Tanner, who to begin with, looks like Jove and hurls Jovian thunderbolts with wild exuberance, is a fighting Prometheus, not a suffering one. The high-spirited tirades in which he denounces the cruelties, injustices, and stupidities of society not only delight us with their gloriously impassioned rhetoric, but inspirit us at the same time we smile at the mad-bull element in the speaker’s character.

As versions of Don Juan, Tanner and Hamlet belong to opposed literary genres. While Shakespeare’s Hamlet/Don Juan is tragic, Shaw, whose comic evolutionary vision stresses the emergence of new historical conditions, keeps his Don’s vitalist optimism in the realm of comedy, identifying him with, and distancing him from Hamlet. As Shaw claims, both heroes constitute attempts to philosophize Tirso’s Don Juan, and while they differ from their mythical prototype in their philosophic consciousness and adversity to sensuality, they are distinguished from each other by the pessimism and optimism of their respective generic ideologies. Opposed to Tirso’s vibrant hedonist who thoroughly enjoys life, Tanner and Hamlet nauseate empty pleasures. Hamlet is like Tanner, a meditative philosopher who “take [s] refuge…in solitude” and desires the contemplative life and, as Shaw’s Devil asserts, he has “no capacity for enjoyment” (II: 672). Tanner views beauty and pleasure as “romantic mirage”. However, Tanner/Don’s optimistic exhilaration of “Life� the force that ever strives to attain greater and greater power of contemplating itself”�, contrasts Hamlet’s pessimistic soliloquies. Shaw and his hero thus maintain that, “the work of helping life in its struggle upward” is achievable and important because the life force needs brain to save civilization from destruction. Hence, each man has the responsibility to live more productively than Hamlet and more contemplatively.

This moral philosophy of fustian striving that Shaw’s hero preaches is given material form in the deep structure, which transforms the sexual comedy into a religious drama. Shaw called the play “a dramatic parable of creative evolution” and cited Everyman as one of his intertexts. The play rewrites the Christian morality.

IV.6.4. The cosmic morality structure: heavenly “Realists”, hellish “Idealists” and worldly “Philistines”

Man and Superman expresses an inverse sense of spiritual and political reality that is not evident in the comic surface. Shaw referred to the play as his “first major attempt to contribute towards a modern religion” and regretted that this attempt failed because the new religion was so confined to the inner dream and obscured by the comedy that it went unnoticed.

I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative evolution. But being then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was a dream which did not

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affect the action of the piece) that the comedy will be detached and played by itself... nobody noticed the new religion in the centre of the intellectual whirlpool (V: 338).

The location of the dramatic action in two generic structures is no doubt problematic. In formal differences, act III is exceptional. The setting, “omnipresent nothing…utter Void” and its sense of timelessness are forerunners of expressionist theatre and, in some aspects the act is a digression; it operates in a different mode from the rest of the play and delays the immediate well-made story line. It can be dispensed with, and usually is, on grounds that it is too long to include in an already full-length play. Yet, to cut out the Hell scene is to strip the play of its religious significance, to miss the moral structure of the whole and the epic cosmology of its religion.

The drama which unfolds first in the immediate comic dramatic surface reveals the familiar action of comic romance with its stereotypic pursuing and pursued characters and thus blurs the conceptual deep mythic and moral structure of the inner play which, though only an inset, directs the surface action of the comedy. The dream structure appears to fracture and separate the plot. The dream thus, poses problems to understanding the religion encoded in the drama. In acts I, II and IV, the romantic comedy of Ann’s pursuit of Tanner is so much to the fore that the deep religious structure of act III that propels the action of the frame is, if not entirely eliminated, largely submerged. Conversely, in the crucial third act, the deeply religious structure surfaces with starling clarity, while the comedy is held in abeyance.

In spite of Shaw’s claim, the religious parable is not lost. Read from the cosmic world of the dream symposium and using Shaw’s character categories, Realists, Idealist and philistines, the play emerges in its totality as a genuine morality with the woman dominated comedy and dream, complementing each other in expressing Shaw’s vision of salvation for mankind on earth. Act III has a spiritual greatness that contributes strongly to the understanding of creative evolution as a religion. It functions as a variation on the sexual theme, an intellectualization of issues pertinent to the frame and to the total religious context; it points up to the morality structure and relates the play to myth and cosmology. In brief, the two structures do not merely coexist; they are hierarchically related, with the dream as the pivot of the religion.

The crux of the moral structure is the dream, which discusses metaphysical issues: heaven versus hell, reality versus illusion, optimism versus pessimism, the place of man in the universe and the functions of sex, all in the moral metaphors of Heaven and Hell as states of being consonant with “steering” or “drifting”. The principal function of the idea in the play that we can will ourselves into supermen is not so much to say we can, as to provide the basis for the related satirical point that we live like children, and the moral cosmology of the play, Heaven, Hell and Earth attest to this.

The inhabitants of Heaven, Hell and earth correspond to Shaw’s “Realists”, “Idealists” and “Philistines” respectively and these categories correspond to attitudes towards life and evolution. A view of this cosmic world and how the character groups operate in it propels the entire dramatic action and gives the frame and dream a morality structure. The major distinction between Heaven, Hell and Earth lies in their

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inhabitants’ attitudes to life. Residents of Hell are those who pursue “short-sighted personal aims” and residents of heaven are those who seek to develop “the mind’s eye” as Don Juan postulates. This distinction parallels that between Idealist and Realists, Idealism and Realism or, the “romantic” and “realistic” imaginations in Shaw’s dramatic theory. Although in Man and Superman, Shaw for the first time employs the new nomenclatures “superman” and “Devil” for his Realist attacker of Ideals and his Idealist defender of the status quo respectively, their defining traits remain those of Realist and Idealist. Heaven and Hell are parallel metaphors for Realist and Idealist respectively. They are not places but psychological states of being. When Don decides to leave Hell for Heaven, he asks directions from the commander: “Senor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of Hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me”, to which the Statue replies, “Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. Any road will take you across if you really want to get there” (II: 687). Heaven and Hell are psychic states that symbolize two sets of values for two types of people: Realists, who serve evolution and Idealist retractors of evolution.

The frontier of Heaven and Hell is “only the difference between two ways of looking at things”, the Statue tells Juan. The Devil puts the difference in biblical terms: “the ‘great gulf fixed’ between Heaven and Hell is the difference between the angelic and diabolic temperament” (II: 647). Diabolic and angelic temperaments correspond to oppose attitudes towards life on earth: a life of world-bettering and of stagnation. Shaw’s program note for the first production of the play explains that,

the ‘higher theology’ [of the play] rejects the hell of popular religion, holding instead that the world itself may be made a hell by a society in a state of damnation: that is, a society so lacking in higher orders of energy that it is given wholly to the pursuit of immediate individual pleasure, and cannot even conceive the passion of the divine Will (II: 342).

The diabolic temperament is symbolized by sensuality, but the core of the diabolic disposition is pessimism: the view that evolution or world betterment is futile. Hell dwellers are those who have lost hope of a better future. As the Commander tells Don:

Written over the gate here [i.e. of Hell] are the words ‘Leave every hope behind, ye who enter’. Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gain by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself (II: 642-3).

The hellish inhabitants pursue “short-sighted personal” and sensual pleasures as seen in the Devil’s celebrations of joy, love, happiness, beauty etc. They refuse to face the sordid facts and real problems of the world. Even their pleasures are illusory: “sheer imaginative debauchery” (Plays, 91) that offer an escape from the real. As a reflection of life on earth, these are the illusions that sentimentalists long for. In Hell, romantic ideals are not mocked by reality and conventions go unchallenged as Juan tells us,

You are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions, no political questions, no religious questions best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here, you call your appearances beauty, your

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emotions love, your sentiments heroism..., just as you did on earth; but here, there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama (99-100).

Shaw’s Hell is a sentimentalist’s Heaven, but for an evolutionist with the angelic temperament, it is truly Hell. Heaven is the home of “the masters of reality” where its dwellers spend time contemplating the best possible purposes of the “life force” and seeking the long term goals of evolution. That is why Don finds the pleasures of Hell unspeakably boring and distasteful. His instinct desires something higher and nobler than the sensual joy of Hell. Juan finds personal pleasures only in working for universal goals. His instinctive zeal to serve the “Life force” is “the joy of life”,

The working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to...wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self understanding...the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved... It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you the strange monster called the Devil (641-42).

In short, men with the heavenly temperament work incessantly in the direction of society as it may yet be, instead of as it is. As Don puts it, “To be in Hell is to drift: to be in Heaven is to steer” (II: 680). Shaw’s Hell is thus not the home of thieves, murderers or ravishers as in Christian theology, but of pleasure-seekers, despairing cynics or the self-indulgent artists obsessed with glamour, youth, beauty and love.

In this transient region of Shaw’s play, everything, art and social life are conceived within the moral evolutionary framework in terms of whether they advance or retard cultural and human evolution. The Hell scene thus, becomes an intellectualization of the issues discussed in the comedy and the first thing that significantly links it in religious terms with the frame play is its aesthetic criticism of art.

Shaw’s criticism of sensuality in the Hell scene embodies his critical animosity towards the sensual art of the 19th century theatre. The sensuality is also represented as a form of art. Hell is a world of sensual or idealistic art. The Hellish spirit is also the spirit that fosters connoisseurship in art, dilettantism and sentimental amorism in literature and personal relations. The Hell scene is thus, both a statement of Shaw’s theology and a covert continuation of his non-dramatic criticism of 19th century theatre. In the preface to three plays for Puritans, Shaw indicts the stage for attempting to substitute “sensuous ecstasy” for “intellectual and honest” activity. This, he denounce as “the very devil”, and Shaw’s Devil in the Hell scene is before all things, a hedonist who has substituted Shaw’s religion of struggle and reform for a religion of love and beauty. Hell therefore smacks of the nineteenth century theatre, and this theatrical criticism integrates the frame comedy in the moral debate.

Shaw considered the theatre and arts as a whole, an instrument of “public work” and the major male characters of his frame comedy, Tanner, Octavius and Mendoza are artists, but of opposed attitudes to art. In the frame play, Tanner, talking to Octavius defines the function of art in Shavian terms, as one of attacking and destroying ideals: “To Shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves, and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as sure as any

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woman creates new man” (II: 558). Not only does this definition link the sexual theme of the comedy (where Ann is struggling to create a new being) with intellectual creativity (art), it points to the nature of Tanner’s art and foreshadows the union of the mother-artist and the artist-man in Shaw’s comedy. Of course, Tanner’s “Revolutionist Handbook”, “Pocket Companion” and “Maxims for Revolutionists” are radical political works that support his definition of art. He is the intellectual genius that Ann recquires to take the species a step ahead. On the contrary, Tavy and Mendoza are sensualist, both in the nature of their art (doggerel love poetry dedicated to women) and in their personal romantic relations to women. Tavy’s love for Ann like Mendoza’s for Louisa is not like Ann’s love for Tanner, aimed at a higher purpose. In their art and personal lives, Tavy and Mendoza replicate the sensual “Art for art’s sake” of the well-made playwrights and the sensuality of Hell. It is thus, not surprising that their parallel in the Hell scene is the Devil while Tanner’s counterpart is Don Juan who embodies Shaw’s animosity for sensuality.

From an autobiographical perspective, if Don’s scorn of hell embodies Shaw’s animus for the sensual theatre of his time, Don’s joy of escaping the sensuality of Hell to the hard work of Heaven expresses the feeling with which Shaw gave up play-reviewing in 1898 to devote himself to work on the St. Pancras Borough council. There he laboured on the health, electric, housing and drainage committees, even relishing the garbage problems when he recalled his enforced theatre going: “I love the reality of the Vestry and its dustcarts after the silly visionary fashion-ridden theatre” Shaw wrote (Crompton, 1969: 86). There is thus no doubt that Shaw who called himself a “realist” artist also considered himself one of the angelic inhabitants of Heaven. Throughout his writings, he perceives art in the service of human evolution. In Man and Superman, the way to heaven or Hell for the artist lies in the nature of work; on whether his art is re-evaluative of the norms and thus, advances the course of evolution or merely affirmative of the dominant culture and thus, retards evolution. The frame and inner plays present artists as either working towards Hell or Heaven.

Rembrandt we are told, came to Heaven when he could draw an old woman with as much pleasure as a young girl. Mozart came to Heaven, probably not by writing Don Giovanni which Shaw rewrites, but preferable by writing the Magic Flute, which Shaw regarded as a philosophical prelude to Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner’s The Ring is a text that Shaw strongly appreciated and recommended in his non-dramatic criticisms. In The Sanity of Art, Wagner is his example of the artist. He argues for Wagner’s music long and hard, explains The Ring allegorically and arranges its characters in socio-political categories similar to his arrangement of Ibsen’s in The Quintessence. However, Wagner goes to Hell. Shaw appears to share Nietzsche’s view in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner that, having passed through an earlier triumphant phase of literature in Siegfried, where he showed the world liberated by the free spirit of an immoralist, Wagner then fell into decadence, going over to the Devil’s side by preaching, not affirmation of the Will, but Schopenhauerian negation in Parsifal. As mentioned, Shakespeare is also represented in Hell by Mendoza.

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However, what really links the frame and inner plays and what is more, gives the entire play the status of a morality is the way Shaw integrates the genetic theme of the comedy in the moral parable of Hell. The debate, the philosophical pivot of the play is mainly between Don Juan and the Devil who hold opposite views about sensuality and the purpose of life. But there is a third perspective that extends the religious cosmology of the play to the material world of the comedy and involves the genetic theme explicitly in the moral conflict of the dream.

Although Ann is almost an observer in the dream discussion, when she intervenes, she represents a third perspective, which shows how the comedy is integrated in the moral parable. Ann’s viewpoint is that of the earthly Philistine, different from Don’s heavenly or “Realist” perspective and the Devil’s hellish or “idealist” perspectives.

When Don speaks of his phase of woman worship on earth, Ann response, “Well, was it her fault that you attributed all these perfections to her” (111) and, addressing the three men (Juan, the Devil and the Commander) adds,

I dare say you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music and painting and poetry. Well, you can’t have them because they don’t exist. If flesh and blood are not good enough for you, you must go without: thats all. Women have to put up with flesh-and- blood husbands- and little enough of that too, sometimes, and you will have to put up with flesh-and-blood wives (133).

This is the point of view of prosaic common sense. While Juan and the Devil are spokespersons of the angelic and diabolic temperaments, Ann, although she says little is the spokesperson for the earthly, tangible or factual. Hers is the concrete material world that the sensual Devil cannot face and while Juan accepts its importance, he belongs to the world of the mind (of ideas). The distinction between Heaven, Hell and Earth unites and propels the dramatic action of the dream and frame comedy.

The main characters of the comedy are Tanner, Ann, Ramsden, Octavius and Mendoza. Octavius’s counterpart in Hell is Mendoza/The Devil. Although Octavius does not appear in Hell, he is mentioned by Juan and the Statue in terms that make clear that he is in Hell and of course, as the sentimental counterpart of Mendoza/Devil, Octavius could be nowhere else. In the comedy, he is one of the diabolic temperaments of Hell. An amorist and sentimental worshipper of love, he tells Tanner, “If we [men] were only good enough for love! There is nothing like Love: there is nothing else but love: without it, the world will be a dream of sordid horror” (Plays, 52-53). His love has no “higher purpose” of improving the race like Ann’s, but the mere glorification of romance that Shaw criticized in Shakespeare and well-made playwrights. In the context of the parable, Octavius’s speech like Mendoza’s art (doggerel love poetry) can only be understood as hellish against the background of Juan’s plea to Doña Ana in the Hell scene “not to begin talking about love. Here they talk of nothing else but love. Its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its devil knows what!” (Plays, 63). Octavius’s love like Mendoza’s has the unreality of hellish sensuality. Both spend their lives as rejected sensual lovers. It is not surprising that their surrogate in Hell is the Devil.

Both Tavy and Mendoza are in Hell, but so too is Ramsden whose counterpart in

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Hell is the Statue of the Commander. Ramsden’s hellish temperament is however, slightly different. He incarnates conventionality. On the issue of Violet’s pregnancy which puts all the characters of the frame to the test, Ramsden like Octavius places moral abstraction above practical human consideration. It is thus, only appropriate that Ramsden/Commander announces his decision to leave Heaven, the place of reality to spend his life in Hell, just as Tanner/Don Juan takes his leave from Hell to Heaven. As Don Juan tells us, Hell “is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues” and the Devil’s friends are “not moral: They are only conventional” (Plays, 87-124). Ramsden/Commander also tells Don in the Hell scene that, while they were on earth, he tried to kill Don in order to vindicate Ana’s honor because “I was not a social reformer; and always did what it was customary for a gentleman to do” (Plays, 123). He felt obliges to protect Ana from the outrages of Don, just as Ramsden, in the comedy tries to protect Ann from Tanner, thereby frustrating the Life force working to bring them together. It is thus appropriate that Ramsden/Commander should be in Hell.

The one angelic character in the comedy is Tanner who like his counterpart, Don, wants to bring a better world into being and finds the sentimental gratifications sought by Octavius, Mendoza and the conventional Ramsden inadequate as a basis for life. In act I, Tanner tells Octavius that he had set his heart to saving him from Ann: Octavius: Oh Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness. Tanner: Yes, a life time of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness Tavy, I

would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! no man alive could bear....

Tavy’s voluptuousness replicates the sensual happiness of Hell. But while in this exchange, Tanner is able to make Octavius and other diabolic characters like Ramsden look foolish, one’s final impression of Tanner in the comedy is that he himself looks somewhat foolish. This impression is largely derived from his encounters with the third group of characters in the Comedy that Ann represents: the worldly Philistines.

In the “crablike process of evolution” Realists struggle to evolve into (supermen); redeemable Philistines struggle to evolve into Realists and redeemable Idealists evolve into Philistines. Of Philistines, Shaw, in his “Epistle Dedicatory” writes, “the two chief concerns of prosaic people are money, which means nourishment and marriage, which means children” (xvi), the two most necessary conditions for man’s physical comfort and survival. In the comedy, the desire for money is represented by Violet and the desire for marriage by Ann. As Philistines, Ann and Violet are unscrupulous, highly efficient and utterly unromantic in their practical worldly goals, but their aims are different. Violet’s aim is purely materialistic. She will not allow Hector to make public their marriage lest his millionaire father should cut him off: “You can be as romantic as you please about love Hector, but you musnt be romantic about money” (Plays, 64)”. As a redeemable Philistine, Ann is the most evolve of the philistines. Her struggle is aimed at producing something better. Her pursuit of marriage, though equally unscrupulous is far from Violet’s materialistic comfort. Her most candid moment comes in the final act precisely, in the scene where Octavius asks her, incredulously,

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“Would you marry an unwilling man?” Her reply is, “What a queer creature you are, Tavy! Theres no such thing as a willing man when you really go for him;” and a few lines later she tells him, “the only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want and grab it.” (152, 153).This is what both Ann and Violet do; and they are the only characters in the Comedy who have everything their own way because they master their material world and operate perfectly in it.

Hence, while Tanner is victorious over the diabolic idealist characters, Octavius and Ramsden, he is powerless against the two worldly women and is constantly debunked and humiliated by them. The venue of the frame comedy is the earthly world of philistines, and this gives the advantage to Philistines whose realm is the material and not the world of minds or ideas. Both diabolic and angelic characters are separated from the earth as the immateriality of Hell and Heaven implies and this means that Tanner, like Octavius and Ramsden, is unable to cope with practical matters and practical people. While Octavius for instance cannot get what he wants in this world: Ann’s love, Ramsden displays great lack of understanding of Ann’s character and Tanner cannot escape her determined pursuit despite all his efforts. The Realist and Idealist characters are constantly debunked in the comedy. It is an indication of the neatness of the moral structure that while Tanner humiliates the Idealists Octavius and Ramsden, each act of the comedy also ends in his humiliation by someone more of the world than himself. Ann neatly deflates Tanner lengthy bombasts in act I: “I am so glad you understand politics, Jack: it will be most useful to you if you go into parliament” (575); “I suppose you will go in seriously for politics some day, Jack” (599). At the end of Act I, Violet reacts angrily to his congratulations and humiliates him with the information that she is in fact married. At the end of act II, Straker, another of the earthly characters exposes Tanner’s ignorance with the revelation that Ann is after him and not Octavius. The comedy also ends with universal laughter at Tanner’s expense.

To Ann, Violet and Straker, Tanner’s speeches are just talk. Tanner’s intellect is of no use to him in the struggle against the Philistines of the comedy because philistines pay no attention to ideas. Only when dealing with Idealists to whom ideas mean something (although their ideas are idealistic ones), is Tanner’s mind a useful weapon.

If one takes the Comedy part of the play by itself then, the play appears to be about the victory of the earthly forces (Ann) over the heavenly (Tanner). But let us go back to the Hell scene and to the biblical conception of Ann in the “Epistle Dedicatory”. We are told that Shaw conceived the character of Ann Whitefield as he watched a performance of Everyman: “I said to myself why not Everywoman?” (xxviii). In the dream scene, Doña Ana relates the play directly to the moralities. The Hell scene is a trial and temptation scene. The question here is whether Ana, who represents earthly humanity (Philistines) will choose heaven or Hell. Will Ana, who is the targeted soul in the Don/Devil debate choose to serve the life force and produce a higher species (the superman) or pursue in sex the hellish but enticing sensual pleasures of the Devil?

Curiously, in Shaw’s morality, the way to Heaven or Hell is not determined by past

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deeds as in Everyman, but by present choices and actions. Besides, there are many ways of serving the life force and thus many ways to Heaven: arts, life and sex. Ana’s route to salvation is different from Juan’s which is through ideas. Ann’s route lies in reproduction. Ana thus chooses Heaven; that is, Shaw’s “everywoman” chooses the life of world-betterment, the procreation of the superman rather than sensual personal pleasures. When in response to Juan’s request for directives the Statue tells him, “Any road will take you across if you really want to get there”, the Don salutes to leave: Don Juan:. Good. [Saluting Doña Ana] Señora: your servant. Ana: But I am going with you. Don Juan: I can find my way to heaven Ana; not yours.

At Juan’s responds, Ana says nothing for a few minutes while the Devil talks to the Statue about the “Superman”. Then, at the very end of the Hell Scene comes the moment in which Ana recognizes her life’s work is not yet done. It is this moment of re-creation by a flash of religion that is so central to Shaw’s morality. Ana. . . . Tell me: where can I find the Superman? The Devil: He is not yet created, Señora. The Statue:. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me

sneeze. [They descend]. Ana: Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [crossing herself devoutly] I believe in

the Life to come [Crying to the universe] A father! a father for the Superman (131).

Ana recognizes that her way to heaven lies through the earth, through flesh and blood. Her role is neither that of the diabolic Devil to dissuade men from evolution nor the angelic philosopher, Juan who educates others on evolution. Ann’s role is to practice the evolutionary philosophy. Shaw discusses this question in the note he wrote in 1907 for the first production of the Hell Scene at the Court Theatre:

Doña Ana, being a woman, is incapable both of the devil’s utter damnation and of Don Juan’s complete super-sensuality. As the mother of many children she has shared in the divine travail and with care and labor and suffering renewed the harvest of eternal life. . . . She cannot, like the male devil, use love as mere sentiment and pleasure; nor can she, like the male saint, put love aside when it has once done its work as a developing and enlightening experience. Love is neither her pleasure [the diabolic position] nor her study [the angelic position]: it is her business [the earthly position]. So she, in the end, neither goes with Don Juan to heaven nor with the devil and her father to the place of pleasure, but declares that her work is not yet finished. For though by her death she is done with the bearing of men to mortal fathers, she may yet, as Woman Immortal, bear the Superman to the Eternal Father.

By “Woman immortal” and “the Eternal Father”, Shaw means simply “Woman and Man”, the two leading characters of the comedy, just as, by the phrase “eternal life” he simply means a better life to which he wishes to give an evolutionary sense and a religious significance as seen in Ana’s consecrated devotedness to her reproductive role as mother and Tanner’s devotedness to philosophical thought.

Ana’s work is what is begun in the last part of the play (act IV). She returns to

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earth as Ann Whitefield to find a father (Tanner) for the Superman and, shortly after her cry (of a father) to the universe, Ann tracks down Tanner in the Sierra and then in the fourth act captures him as husband. Where her circumscribed intellect cannot save her, her womanly procreative instinct can, since she is determined to procure Tanner’s superior intellect for her offspring and is thus working to improve the human race. Symbolically, it is as “woman Immortal” that Dona Ana pursues Don Juan to Heaven, demanding with the compelling urgency of someone who realizes that her heavenly responsibility to the race is not yet done: “a father, a father for the superman”.

Just as Ana in the Hell scene chooses heaven, so Ann in the comedy chooses the angelic Tanner rather than the diabolic Octavius (who has the support, as Ann’s suitor, of the diabolic Ramsden). Significantly, her desire for a husband is not the desire for the hellish sentimental bliss sought by Octavius or Mendoza. It is the unconscious life force working towards the best possible children. Besides her cry of “a father”, Ann’s statement about her procreative role in act IV so sanctifies her sexual pursuits and so affects Tanner that he surrenders to her. Ann tells him that “marriage will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death”. In the background of this reverence for procreation is Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, which has a eugenic rather than romantic basis.

When one takes the whole play together, it becomes apparent that more is involved in the play than a simple romantic comedy about the snapping-up of a clever young man by a shrewd young woman as some critics think.49 Shaw’s play has a stronger relation to the morality play, Everyman. It is a play about the serious purpose of life. It is a professed way of life, a profession of faith, a call to action, intended to summon us from the art gallery, the concert hall, cocktail parties, the sensual and trivial, to deal with the awkward realities and difficulties of our real world. Whether one accepts Shaw’s ideas about evolution as scientific and religious, will depend on one’s attitude towards evolution, revolution and marriage. It is not likely that Shaw will change the minds of pessimists who think that efforts at social reform are useless or hold the Darwinian view that biological change is a matter of absolute predestination. But anyone who thinks open-mindedly about the issue of willed acquisition of inherited characteristics will find himself challenged by Shaw’s Neo- Lamarck version.

Shaw called creative evolution a “scientific religion” and a twentieth century morality. His theme, genetic evolution is indeed, a “topical invention” in comedy and the morality play but not in literature. The play is deeply entrenched in the English utopian novelistic tradition of 1880s that preceded Shaw in employing Darwin’s evolutionary framework for a critique of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of society. These utopian fictions paved the way for the science fiction genre. Precedents to Shaw’s world betterment religion include among others, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887).

49 Eric Bentley (1947:154) for instance holds that, “for all that Shaw tells us, Man and

Superman is a Victorian farce”.

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IV.6.5. Foreshadowing Science fiction: Utopian precedents to Shaw’s “Scientific Religion”

Shaw’s idea of genetic evolution by willed acquisition may sound very fanciful and his “scientific religion” is indeed, a utopian philosophy. The heaven that Don Juan seeks is indeed, a socialist utopia and Don himself a spokesperson of this utopian philosophy. But despite the utopian nature of this philosophy, Creative evolution is not unscientific. Shaw’s “scientific religion” with its conceptual core in the will to evolve may only appear unscientific to scoffers of Lamarck’s assertion that the giraffe acquired its long neck through a Willful drive, with each generation handing down its acquired fraction of an inch to its progeny who added a further increment to the accumulated length and so on. Shaw referred primarily to Lamarck’s “fundamental proposition that living organisms change because they wanted to…if you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes” (Methuselah, xvii). Although Shaw’s ideas about evolution may appear very fanciful, he argues for this vitalist version of evolution so strenuously and with such ingenious analogies and metaphors that one is forced to reconsider the possibility of this seemingly fanciful theory: “If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an athletic competition, can put up a muscle, it seems reasonable to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could ‘put up a brain’” he declares (Methuselah ,xvii-xviii).

Shaw’s evolutionary theme is rooted in the utopian fictions of Lytton and Bellammy. These novelists tried to show against Darwin just how the human animal can be improved through some sort of willful biological, intellectual and moral evolution. Shaw once cited Bulwer-Lytton’s utopian romance as a Fabian model on social reformation: “Bulwer-Lytton anticipated the Fabians by a Utopia, called The coming race, in which….Man had been forced to become political…The attainment of this power, Bulwer Lytton saw, was the only hope of human civilization” (239).

Bulwer-Lytton’s presents a powerful instinctive Will to develop new physiognomy and, although Lytton’s evolutionary ideas are more effectively developed in Shaw’s quintessential SF work, Back to Methuselah, it is no doubt a prescient suggestion for Man and Superman. For Shaw, The Coming Race provides a blueprint for achieving socialist Utopias by cultivating the instinctive Will to evolve. This is clear in the scene where Bulwer’s narrator visits a museum with his host’s daughter, Zee. When his narrator expresses surprise at the power Zee wields through her manipulation of the mysterious force called Vril, she compares her hand with his to point out the crucial difference, a well-developed nerve in her larger thumb, which she explains as the effects of evolution. Shocked, the narrator responds, “there is almost in this, as great a difference as there is between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla”. Zee’s explanation of how her power has developed suggests Lamarck’s theory, not Darwin’s “natural selection”. Zee’s finger is the result of willed acquisition transmitted hereditarily from each of her generations. As she tells the narrator,

So far as the nerve is concerned, that is not found in the hands of our earliest

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progenitors…It has been slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in the early achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise of the vril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of your race who devote themselves to the paramount science through which is attained the command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril (Bulwer-Lytton, 376).

Bulwer’s paramount science, to which higher beings of the race devote themselves, sounds like the Shavian Will to evolve biologically and intellectually. Bulwer’s Vril power has striking similarities with Shaw’s “Life force” theory. When Bulwer’s narrator who is not yet evolved attempts to manage the Vril-ya artificial wings on which they soar like eagles, Zee further consoles him for the inferiority of his race in terms that like Shaw’s life force point to Lamarck’s theory.

Learn that the connection between the will and the agencies of the fluid which has been subjected to the control of the Vril-ya was never established by the first discoverer, never achieved by a single generation; it has gone on increasing, like other properties of the race, in proportion as it has been uniformly transmitted from parent to child, so that, at last, it has become an instinct; and an infant An of our race wills to fly as intuitively and unconsciously as he wills to walk. He thus plies his invented or artificial wings with as much safety as a bird plies those with which it is born (Bulwer-Lytton, 407).

Don’s desire to acquire a “mind’s eye” sounds much like Bulwer’s vril power. Ann’s sexual pursuit is also inspired by the instinctive will to produce a superior being. Her union with Tanner is conceived as one that will slightly take the species a step higher.

In Bellammy’s Looking Backward, the narrator, Julian West, a Rip van Winkle-like time traveler from the nineteenth century, like Shaw’s Tanner/Don Juan wakes up in a utopian future and is told by his host, Dr. Leete that, “some persons nowadays… hold that we have entered upon the millennium, and the theory from their point of view does not lack plausibility” (Bellamy, 1926: 203). Yet, when Leete informs him that the society in which he has arrived has managed to eradicate strife and corruption from politics, that all citizens work their hardest for the common good (though all receive the same income) and that crime and even everyday lying have completely disappeared from this millennial society, West keeps insisting that “human nature itself must have changed very much…”. Bellammy’s narrator also develops the Shavian idea of improving the human race through eugenic or freer selection of sexual partners.

Dr. Leete explains that “for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation” (Bellamy, 267). Like in Shaw’s play, Bellamy sanctifies the notion of selective breeding. In his Utopia, love becomes “one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race” (268). Leetes asserts, “I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people, you will find in them not only the physical, but a mental and moral improvement” (268), a quality Shaw stresses as most needed to turn men into supermen, who would not only “see beyond the short-sighted personal aims that misdirected their ancestors”

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as Don puts it, but would transform our earthly hell into a heaven. Dr. Leetes explains that, “individualism, which in your days was the animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living and for the generation to follow” (268). This sense of moral responsibility for the race and future generations sounds exactly like Shaw’s life force or will. For Bellammy as for Shaw, this sense of moral responsibility is sought in parents or sexual partners. Leete comments on this,

Today, this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction of duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex...Our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come...Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to the a sense of religious consecration (268-69).

This is the rationale behind Ann Whitefield’s sexual pursuit of Tanner. Shaw imbues her sexual instinct with the consecration that Bellamy describes in this passage. Inspired by the Life force in the frame play and by Don Juan’s sermon about the Life force in the inner play, Dona Ana dedicates herself to producing the Superman with the feeling of “religious consecration” described here. When she hears that the superman is not yet created she cries, “Then my work is not yet done (crossing herself devoutedly). I believe in the Life to come...A father! A father for the superman”, and she vanishes to seek him (II: 649). In the Hell scene, Shaw’s Don Juan like Bellammy’s narrator above predicts that sex will have an apotheosis:

The great central purpose of breeding the race: ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance… will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys’ and girls’ dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money (119).

Shaw’s play dramatizes the need to raise earth to heaven through sex instead of dragging it down to hell. He emphasizes the need to make sex a means of improving the human race instead of using it in a mephitic spirit of love and romance and Shaw presents this procreative responsibility as shortcut to a political utopia and as a religion. It is thus clear that in this early parable, Shaw was taking ideas common to Socialist utopians and working them up to spiritual and metaphysical levels.

In fact, the generic affiliations of Shaw’s play are vast. As seen above, it falls within the utopian novelistic tradition, but as drama, it is a dream framed in a social comedy and a religious morality play. But the play can also be read, not just as a dream inset, but as a dream play consisting of two dreams, one framed in another.

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IV. 6.6. The dream structure (s): Man and Superman as a modern dream play

A number of 20th century critics have pointed out that although the dream device has been used in medieval and renasissance periods, it is only modern drama that uses dream structures and dream imagery significantly. In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin asserts, “the first to put on stage a dream world in the spirit of modern psychological thinking was August Strindberg” (C.f. Wientraub, 1970:352). Esslin was obviously thinking of Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902), which is not only a masterly transcription of dream and obsession, but also the direct source of the theatre of the absurd. Esslin’s view of Strindberg as the pioneer of modern dramatic dream structures is supported with the argument that Strindberg was the first to experiment in a frameless dream on stage. Esslin however, overlooks Man and Superman (1901-1903) written almost at the same time as A Dream play and which, though structured in a-play-within-a-play, can actually be read as a frameless dream play.

Shaw’s play is not simply a comedy with a dream inset. Rather, one can read the play as a frameless dream, consisting of two dreams, one framed in another. There are all indications that Shaw had in mind a dream play when he wrote Man and Superman. In his preface to A Dream Play, Strindberg (1963:521) states that in his dream play, he has attempted to imitate “the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream”. It is not just Shaw’s Hell scene that attempts to imitate such a disconnected form of dream. The frame comedy, which appears realistic, replicates the randomness of the inner dream in its imagery, language, characterization and sequencing of events.

Striking first of all, is the kind of images Shaw employs even in the realistic frame to indicate that both frame and inner dream sequence were a conscious attempt at a dream play. The word, “dream” litters both frame and inner plays. Shaw’s employs the term more profoundly in the part of the play most recognized as a realistic social comedy. Here, he uses the word, “dream” even when other terms could have done just as well. On her entrance in act I we are told, “Ann would still make men dream” (549). Tanner claims the artist knows “women can make him see visions and dream dreams (557). He tells Straker in act I, “I am the slave of that car. I dream of the accursed thing at night” (586). He also tells Tavy that if he (Tavy) marries Ann, “she would cease to be a poet’s dream ...Youll be forced to dream about somebody else”, to which Tavy responds, “There is nothing like Love: there is nothing else but Love: without it the world would be a dream of sordid horror” (593). In act IV, Ann tells Tavy, “Then you must keep away from them [women], and only dream about them” (717). When Tanner gives in to Ann, he recalls their legendary origin in the image of a dream: “When did this all happen to us before? Are we dreaming? (728). In act III, Don tells Dona Ana she is welcome to his dreams” (655). “I had been prepared for…. love’s young dream” (667). “I had never dreamt...” (677). “Never in my worst moments.... did I dream... (682). Mendoza tells Tanner, “I went to America so that she [Louisa] could sleep without dreaming” (627). He then tells Tanner just before their dream, “these Mountains make you dream of women with magnificent hair”, and Tanner

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answers, “they would not make me dream of women. I am heartwhole” (629).When Mendoza wakes up, he asks Tanner, “Did you dream?” to which Tanner responds, “Damnably. Did you?” And Mendoza answers, “Yes. I have forgotten what. You were in it. And Tanner, “So were you. Amazing” (690).

Clearly, Shaw could not have used these images without intending to communicate something of a dream structure by them. The original manuscript of Man and Superman provides clues to a Freudian interpretation of the whole play as a dream. On July 2, 1901, Shaw drafted a cast list for the play with and early title, “The Superman or Don Juan’s great grandson’s grandson”. Among the characters omitted from the final text are John Tanner’s parents: George Whitefield Tenario and Mrs Whitefield Tenario (C.f. Berst, 1996: 201-2). Although there is no suggestion in the published version that Tanner is also a Whitefield or is related to Ann biologically, yet in these intriguing preliminaries, it is obvious that Shaw was considering, even if unconsciously to suggest an incestuous relation between Ann Whitefield and Tanner; a relationship which Tanner finds repulsive and which thus accounts for the psychic block that makes him resists love and marriage to Ann. Although the published play does not suggest that Tanner and Ann are blood relations, it explicitly makes us understand that, Ann, Tanner and Tavy were brought up together with Ann by Mr. Whitefield in a brother-sister relation. Tanner’s reminiscence with Ann in act I over their childhood attests to this relationship and thus suggests that, not only does Tanner emotionally feel he is Ann’s brother; he has in effect also become her father by right of the guardianship conferred on him by the Will. Strikingly, when in act I Tanner and Ann recall their childhood, he tells her, “love played a part in my earliest dreams....Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an unconscious love compact....Oh dont be alarmed”, and to Ann’s “I am not alarmed”, Tanner, conscious of the incest taboo that has not affected Ann’s sexual responses towards him adds, “then you ought to be. Where are your principles?” (573). Tanner must therefore overcome the incest taboo of sex with a sister in order to become the mate of the woman to whom he is both brother and father. That he is not actually related to her by blood does not in any way affect his repulsive feeling, as the taboo can occur even in children who are not related but have been raised together like Tanner and Ann were.

It is thus clear that the incest taboo in Tanner’s mind and Ann’s persistent pursuits of him trigger the inner dream in which Tanner finds himself pursued once more and he escapes into the Sierra Nevada where he meets the improbable figure of Mendoza and dreams himself again into a Don Juan (act III). Tanner has to overcome the taboo of being a brother and father to Ann so as to marry her, and in Freudian psychology, such deep-rooted emotional problems can only be resolved in a dream.

To his prefatory remark that his play attempts to imitate “the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream”, Strindberg adds that “a single consciousness holds sway over them all, that of the dreamer” (521). There is no doubt that Shaw’s frame and inner dreams are held together by the single consciousness of his dreaming hero, Tanner. Shaw presents his hero as a great writer and reader, and the play actually

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opens in a library (Ramsden’s study). Many of us do take some bed time readings to our pillows. Tanner might have read himself into sleep and dreamt himself into the hero of the outer dream in which Henry Straker attempts to help him escape out of Ann’s reach by smuggling him into the Sierras where, on meeting Mendoza, he again dreams himself into the Don Juan of the Hell scene. The suggested text Tanner might have taken to bed is The Memoires of Shylock Homes (1894), which is alluded to in the play. Reading The Memoires of Shylock Homes (1894), Tanner might have found in the story the character of “Silver Blazes”, a retired Jockey named, John Straker and in his dream (the frame), Sir John Straker might have metamorphosed into his driver, Henry Straker to inform him of Ann’s sexual desires and thus, precipitates his escape into the Sierra Nevada from where he experiences a second dream.

That the frame and inner plays are dreams is supported by the non-linear plot structures, the incoherent language and the psychological pairing of characters, which suggests that the major male characters of both plays are stage representations of the conflicting psychic aspects of the hero in an unconscious state of dream.

The non-related events of the frame reflect the non-organized functioning of the human mind in a dream as well as replicate the non-linear structure of the inner dream. Although the plot of the frame appears chronological, we are not given any realistic reasons for certain illogical happenings in the plot. Ann tracks down Tanner at every stop without any idea of the direction that he has taken. The third act ends with her arrival. Not knowing the direction Tanner has taken, it is unimaginable that Ann traces him with such precision. The improbability of her success is echoed in Hector Malone’s description of her when she arrives, as “the regular Sherlock Holmes”. The final act (still part of the frame) takes place in Granada (Spain) and Ann’s party now includes her mother who had no idea that Ann has embarked on a chase of Tanner, much less that both have headed for Grenada. Hector Malone Sr. also turns up in this final scene and in the same Hotel in which his son is lugging and we are not informed of what business the American businessman has in Granada. The disconnected events of the frame can only be accounted for if we see the frame as part of the hero’s dream and the entire play as consisting of a dream in which a dreamer dreams again.

Strindberg’s definition of a dream can be applied to Shaw’s characterization and language as well. Strindberg asserts that,

in this dream play….the author has sought to reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream. Anything can happen; everything is probable. Time and space do not exist….imagination spins and weaves new patterns made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The characters are split, double and multiple; they evaporate, crystallize, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds sway over them all-that of the dreamer (Strindberg, 1963:521).

Shaw provides numerous clues in the splitting of characters to suggest that the improbable events of both frame and inner plays are held together by the single consciousness of the dreaming hero. The characters are split and double in both frame and inner plays, so that they only become effective as complementary and contrastive

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psychic states of the dreaming hero. If dreams present and reflect split personalities in a psychological conflict, then this structure is quite explicit in Shaw's characterization. Characters of the frame parallel and contrast those of the inner dream in ways that make clear that the debate in Hell is not an actual conversation, but a psychological debate between the conflicting factions of Tanner’s psychic in a state of dream.

In the inner play, night falls and Tanner and Mendoza simultaneously dream themselves into Hell as Don Juan and the Devil respectively, Ann Whitefield is Dona Ana and Ramsden, so protective of Ann in the frame becomes the statue of the Commander father of Ann. Don is Tanner’s idealized vision of realism while Mendoza, a senior substitute for Tavy represents that romantic psychic that Tanner feels he has suppressed. The Commander/Ramsden represents Tanner’s conservative psychic. The major males of the frame and inner dreams are stage personifications of the hero’s psychic states in conflict. The splitting of Tanner’s psychic is replicated in the frame.

The major males of the frame are presented as split personalities of the hero. This is seen in the language of mistaken identities in the frame. Faced with making a choice of guardian, Ann’s relates Ramsden and Octavius to Tanner in a way that makes clear that they are different psychic states rather than individuals. Ann would have “my dear Granny to help out and advice me. And Jack the Giant killer. And Jack’s inseparable friend Ricky Tivy-Tavy (II: 554). Each of them is related to Tanner in a special way.

Both Tanner and Octavius were treated as sons by Ann's father, having had unlimited access to his house. Both love Ann. But Octavius represents the youthful Tanner who had entertained a youthful sexual relation with Ann while Tanner represents the mature self that has outgrown this youthful incest love. Tanner and Ann had probably entertained sexual desires for each other in their youth, but Tanner has come to realize that this is wrong, as we learn from Tanner's conversation with Ann in act I where they recall their childhood. As Tanner tells Ann, “the old childish compact between us was an unconscious love compact....Oh dont be alarmed” and Ann responds, “The love compact is over, then? I supposed you grew tired of me” (573). Following from this, Octavius who strongly desires Ann’s love personifies the youthful Tanner who desires love with Ann while the mature Tanner who has outgrown that love resists it. This view is evident in Tanner’s simultaneous fascination for and flight from Ann in the plot. While the grown up Tanner resists Ann’s love, feeling that whatever took place between them was wrong or that it would be inappropriate for Ann and himself to mate, Tavy who is Tanner’s youthful or romantic psychic desires nothing short of the consummation of that love. Shaw provides clues to the interpretation of Tavy as Tanner’s youthful psychic. While Tavy thinks he is a poet or an artist, it is actually Tanner, the author of the political “Handbook”, who is the creative artist and intellectual genius. To say that Tanner and Octavius are the psychic states of a single personality implies that Tavy’s desire for sex with Ann and Tanner’s resistance to sex with Ann reflect the psychological struggle within the hero of the Id and Super ego. Tanner is divided on whether or not to continue the incestuous relation with Ann. This psychic struggle occasioned the outer dream in which he tries to escape

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from Ann. The romantic Tavy is substituted in the inner play by Mendoza who continues to

energize Tanner’s psychic struggle with the self. In the inner dream, Tanner/Don Juan regards sex as hellish while Mendoza/Devil regards sex as bliss. Tavy and Mendoza represent the romantic sexual urge that Tanner struggles to suppress. But Ransden also represents a slightly different aspect of Tanner’s psychic. “Granny”, as Ann calls Ramsden is said to have been a liberal, even a radical like Tanner some twenty years ago. But with the slit of evolution, Ramsden has been replaced at the cutting edge of ideas by the younger Tanner. As a young radical turned conventionalist, Ramsden is a mirror image of what Tanner will become as he grows old while Tavy represents what Tanner was in his youth. Ramsden and Tavy are not married and the main question confronting Tanner in the play is whether to concede to marriage or to remain single. Tavy is the youthful romanticist that Tanner has been and Ramsden is the old conventional bachelor that Tanner will become if he does not marry Ann.

The language of the play makes evident that Octavius is the immature or youthful self of Tanner. Ramsden (the matured Tanner) tells Octavius (the immature Tanner) at the beginning of the play to reject the friendship of “your schoolfellow to who you feel bound to stand by because there was a boyish friendship between you. Jack could not be turned out of Whitefield’s house because you lived there” (538). Ramsden, even if unconsciously, is referring to Tanner and Octavius as psychic aspects of a single individual. Although he tells Octavius that Whitefield had hoped he would marry Ann, it is actually Tanner who marries Ann. In Tanner's warning to Octavius about Ann's predatory too, we find the elder Tanner advising his own youthful self or speaking to divergent appetites within himself. Act II ends with Straker informing Tanner that Ann is after him and not after Tavy. Elsewhere, Tanner tells Octavius, “You must marry her [Ann] after all and take her off my hands. And I have set my heart on saving you from her!” (545). The language of conflated identities only make sense when understood as the voice of a single character advising divergent appetites, desires or anxieties within himself in a dream. In the list of childhood pranks that Ann describes as the activities of the youthful Tanner is included, “You set fire to the common; the police arrested Tavy for it” (572). The distinction between Tanner and Tavy is fluid. Rejected by Ann, Tavy tells Tanner; “you don’t understand: you have never been in love” to which Tanner, who has been escaping from love replies, “I! I have never been out of it, why; I am in love even with Ann”, and to this, Tavy says; “I believe we were changed in our cradles.... she has marked you out for her own; and nothing can stop her now” (593).

Like Tavy, Mendoza parallels and contrasts Tanner’s psychic. He is the romantic psychic that Tanner struggles to suppress. But he also reflects Tanner’s inner doubts about evolution. Tanner must resolve these doubts before he can concede to marry Ann, and in his first encounter with Mendoza, he is actually confronting his romantic psychic while in the second encounter, the inner dream, he is confronting his existentialist doubts about evolution. Both men sharing the same dream and this improbability shows that Mendoza is only Tanner’s Psychic state.

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Both men do not have parents or any relations mentioned in the play. Mendoza’s romanticism contrast Tanner’s asexuality. Like Tavy, Mendoza swoons to love while Tanner flees from love. While Tavy, Tanner and Mendoza are also writers, Tanner’s writings are political while Tavy’s and Mendoza’s are romantic. Like Tanner, Mendoza is a great orator and rebel against the existing order. Like Tanner, he believes that society misdistributes wealth, but both men lack the practical means of redressing society’s problems. Notice their symmetrical greeting when they meet in the Sierra: Mendoza: I am a brigand. I live by robbing the rich. Tanner: I am a gentleman. I live by robbing the poor (Act, III).

The exchange between Mendoza and Tanner as they wake from their dream also shows that Shaw intends Mendoza to be seen as Tanner’s antithetical psychic.

Shaw emphasizes the psychological relation of Octavius, Ramsden and Mendoza to Tanner when at the end of the play, Ann asks Octavius to congratulate her on the occasion of her engagement to Jack. It is Ramsden who replies, “Jack Tanner, I envy you”, and Mendoza adds: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. Mine and yours sir” (II: 731-32). Mendoza, Octavius and Ramsden lose their heart’s desire (love and marriage) and all three see love in conventional terms opposed to the hero who though regards love and marriage as apostasy, gains marriage, even when it is not his heart’s desire.

Like the males, the major female characteras in the frame reflect a split personality. Violet, represents opposed psychic aspects of Ann’s personality. Both women must contrive marriages to the men they desire. Ann has already inherited her father’s wealth and needs a husband while Violet is already married but must contrive to inherit wealth. Ann aspires for what Violet already has, marriage, and Violet aspires for what Ann already has, inheritance. But Ann’s predatory is spiritual and Violet’s is material.

The conflict of identity between Ann and Violet is also reflected in language. Once it is revealed that Violet is secretly married, we learn that Ann has been aware of the secret marriage all along. We are left in the dark as to how Ann got to know. When Ann also tells Octavius, “I have great respect for Violet. She gets her own way always”, Octavius replies, “so do you” (717). In act IV, Mrs. Whitefield regrets, “How I wish you were my daughter, Violet”, but Violet replies, “there, there: so I am” (pointing to Ann). In much of the dialogue, Ann and Violet echo and reflect each other.

Freudian sexual images litter Shaw’s play. There are many images in the play that can be interpreted in psychoanalytical terms as Freudian sexual symbols. Tanner calls Ann a variety of names, spider, bee, a boa constrictor etc. All these images can be interpreted as Freudian symbols. The automobile for instance, symbolizes Ann’s instinctual drives. When Tanner also calls Ann “a boa constrictor”, Ann throws her arms round Tanner's neck, referring to them as her boa and inviting him to notice how soft. Tanner’s reaction emphasizes the Freudian significance of the metaphor: “I feel the coils tightening round my very self” (576). This reversal of the Freudian phallus in which Jack should be the penis in the Virginia during intercourse reflects Shaw’s thesis

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that woman is the active sexual aggressor in eugenic sex. These sexual images indicate that the frame play is not just intended to prepare us for the erotic problem-solving inner dream in which the dreamer overcomes the incest taboo and the emotional castration it has imposed on him, but that Shaw as a whole was working towards a dream play.

The split characters, the language of mistaken identities, the randomness of events and the sexual symbols indicate that the inner dream is only the pivot of a larger attempt to represent a dream on stage and no matter how imperfect Shaw’s dream play might be, there is no doubt that it set the pace for the new form on the English stage. Within Shaw’s dramatic corpus, Man and Superman is the play in which he first turned from the 19th century realistic well-made structures that have inspired his drama and began to develop the dream forms that would sustain his later plays. The dream transforms the comedy of Man and Superman in several ways. A similar addition of a dream in the realistic form of historical drama in St Joan transforms the genre and alters the historical “facts” of the medieval saint’s life as seen in the next chapter.

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V. “RIGHTING” HISTORY/RE-INVENTING HISTORICAL DRAMA: Saint Joan (1923) AS A MODERN HISTORY PLAY

It has often been noted how eagerly playwrights go to historical or memorable events and figures for their plots. They do so for good (if widely different reasons). One reason is advanced by Aristotle in the Ninth book of his Poetics: dramatic works need an air of plausibility, and what better indication that a series of events is possible than the fact that they actually occurred? A no less valid reason can be advanced from a historiographic point of view: historical works need an air of authenticity, and what better indication that a series of events occurred than that they can be enacted without the palpable presence of a narrator’s mediating consciousness? And a third reason is that, depending on the way it is handled, historical subjects will elicit admiration, scorn, resignation, nationalistic or revolutionary fervour and a variety of other emotions that may be in demand at particular times with particular audiences.

Understandably then, history has served the source of many plays before and after the 20th century.50 Yet, the mid and late 20th century has witnessed the emergence, not without a few earlier instances, of a new kind of historical drama motivated of course, by the historian’s ambition to do better than simply reproduce the past, to mingle with the actors on the plain stage of printed pages and minister to the needs of the audience more or less directly. Modern historical dramatists re-present history with hindsights, disclosing patterns of cause and purpose of which the participants in the event could not have been fully aware. The modern dramatist turns the dramas of history into enacted tales without pretending that the tales are unmediated. He does so through narrative strategies which allow the audience to see the past from within and without at the same time –– as evolving drama and as the fixed target of distanced retrospection.

The present chapter is an attempt to explore this relatively recent development in St. Joan. Shaw’s detached, ironic, paradoxical, and mainly tragicomic re-presentation of history in St. Joan reveals basic historiographic trends in mid and late 20th century historical dramas and fundamentally distinguishes it from the typical attitudes of 19th century historical melodramatists. In part no doubt as a backwash against 19th and early 20th century efforts to turn historiography into an objective or even quantifiable science, St. Joan, like some of the best history plays of the late 20th century conspicuously fictionalizes history. Although like many Victorian dramatists of the time, Shaw claims documentary archives as source text–– Murray’s transcript of Joan’s trial –– an overtly imaginative version of the medieval saint’s life emerges from the play that distance it from the historical records as well as from Victorian historical melodrama and even from the classical tragic mould in which he claims to have cast his play. Shaw’s main objective in St. Joan was to write a play in which what he took to be the significance of the fifteenth-century saint would be manifest in the lives of

50 The “natural affinity between trials and drama as “Lindenberger (1975:21) points out has

appealed to many modern playwrights in the twentieth-century.

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his 20th century audience. This objective immediately points to the main technique by which he fictionalizes Joan’s history in St. Joan, i.e., the use of anachronism.

Shaw’s interpretation of Joan history may be challenged with respect to his representation of the saint as an emergent nationalist, Protestant and feminist. However, it is useful to remember that in dealing with the past; Shaw’s focus was always the present. As he asserts of 19th century historiography, “political science, the science by which civilization must live or die, is busy explaining the past while we have to grapple with the present: it leaves the ground before our feet in black darkness whilst it lights up every corner of the landscape behind us” (IV: 324). In taking up Joan’s history, Shaw was looking both backwards to the middle Ages and around him. Hence, through anachronism, he relates the 15th and 20th centuries. A proper response to the play must not forget that it was written just five years after W. W I and that the Irish national struggle and early 20th century feminist struggles were the burning issues in British politics at the time. These contemporary events are implicitly commented upon in the play. St. Joan is thus a memory of past events in relation to his present political and historical context in which, historical “facts” are altered to serve the author’s purpose of changing the present and constructing the future.

Underlying Shaw’s objectives is his interpretation of the historical design: his vision of the historical process –– as pessimistic and optimistic, cyclical and progressive ––, which propels his narrative structures so that, although he called his play a tragedy and subtitled it as “chronicle” history, the dramatic (generic) reality he gives Joan’s history is mainly tragicomic and the generic tension is meant to reflect his paradoxical vision of the historical process or the dynamics of the historical design as he sees it. If Shaw called St. Joan a history play, he meant this in three senses. St. Joan is a play that represents actual persons and events of the past. It is a play that rivals Shakespeare’s chronicle histories (based as they were on 16th century chronicles), particularly Henry IV, Part One which has so maligned Joan that Shaw appears to be rewriting Shakespeare for the sake of doing justice to her. But St. Joan also rivals Victorian historical melodramas on Joan that have so maligned her historical opponents that Shaw seems to rewrite them for the sake of going justice to Joan’s historical opponents. In responding to these genres, Shaw transforms what should be tragic history or historical melodrama into a hybrid text–– of romance, tragedy and a comic–– for which, for want of a proper genre label he also call “high tragedy”.

St. Joan is thus, an elaborate work on memory, including, not just the memory of past events in relation to contemporary historical issues, but also a memory of the literary genres it evokes and transforms. It integrates in particular, the memory of tragedy by using Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in a rather poetic and inquisitive way and challenging the genre as defined by Aristotle and his followers over the ages. In its deep structure, St. Joan is also as Pirandello describes it, “a work of poetry from beginning to end”51. Beneath it tragicomic surface is a deep poetic structure designed

51 Luigi Pirandello, “Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan” In: Warren S. Smith (ed.) Bernard Shaw’s

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to evoke, not a sequence of events in Joan’s life, but her imagined presence in memory ––, be it in the playwright’s memory and the spectators or the memory of his stage figures. The poetic nature of the play lies in its artful illustration of Joan as a metaphor for the working of the imagination (C. f. V. 5.). In fact, defining the quality of the play requires that I begin with the socio-political and literary contexts.

V.1. The Historical and literary contexts

V.1.1. “The Hundred Years’ War” (1338-1453)

Joan’s dramatic history is generally focused on her role in the “Hundred Years War”, the period of great conflict between England and France. St. Joan focus on the political causes of the conflict: England’s claim to larger areas of French territory, and the disputed sovereignty of France. England under has claimed the French throne on various occasions. In 1428, King Henry VI occupied Orleans. The Dauphin, heir to the French throne remained uncrowned six years after his father’s death and Rheims, the traditional place of French coronation remained under English siege. A mysterious Maid, Joan of Arc is said to have delivered the French town.

Born in 1412 in Domrémy, Christians believe that Joan of Arc began to hear voices from God at the age of thirteen and to see visions of St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret. Led by these voices, she travelled in 1428 and 1429 to Vauculeiurs, where she obtained the local captain’s permission to see the Dauphin in Chinon. After convincing the uncrowned king to provide her with troops, she then marched to Orléans and after successive victories over the English, delivered Orleans from siege. The Dauphin was legitimately crowned as King Charles in 1429 in Rheims Cathedral. In May 1430 however, Joan of Arc was captured while leading a military campaign in Compiègne and upon charges of witchcraft and heresy, was tried by the Ecclesiastical court (the Inquisition) presided over by the bishop of Beauvais, Cauchon, and burnt on the stake in 1431. In 1450 king Charles VII ordered an inquiry into her trial which revoked or annulled her sentence. She was canonized as St. Joan by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920 and her feast is traditionally celebrated on May 30th. In June 1920 the French parliament also decreed a national festival in her honour.

V.1.2. Saint Joan and the Victorian Tradition of Joan Plays

Like plays concerning Charles I and Beckett, Joan of Arc was a commonplace subject in Victorian historical melodrama. From Tom Taylor’s Jeanne D’ Arc (1871) to Shaw’s St. Joan (1923), over a dozen plays and operas on Joan were produced in

Plays (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 446-451, 450.

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London, some of which claimed the same historical source as Shaw’s.52 Many of the plays show a close resemblance in form and content as well as repeat many of the simplifications of 19th century historical melodrama that Shaw criticized: lavish pictorial stage effects, romantic “love interest” and melodramatic characterization. Shaw strips St. Joan of these melodramatic conventions and conspicuously adds a future realm to tragic history in the form of an epilogue, which not only takes the tragic plot beyond the death of the tragic hero, but also openly flaunts the realistic form of historical drama. Most remarkable is Shaw’s socialist interpretation of historical figures as historical forces in conflict. In this interpretation, Shaw entirely deconstructs the traditional dichotomy of hero and villain in Victorian Joan melodrama and tragedy. Shaw’s dramatization of Joan as a Hegelian World-individual or as his own “Promethean hero” rather than a Catholic saint has far-reaching generic implications on historical melodrama and tragedy

Declaring his intension to reconstruct the memory of the saint in narratives and dramatic histories, Shaw asserts in his preface that, St. Joan depends for its transformation on the public belief in “the melodramatic legend of the wicked bishop and the entrapped maiden” (24). Generally speaking, narrative histories on Joan edified Joan and vilified her historical opponents and in their claim to objectivity in history writing, Victorian dramatists followed suit to represent Joan’s historical opponents as villains. The dramatic conflict in Victorian Joan plays thus juxtaposed her innocence with the villainy of King Charles’s court and the church clerics who judged and executed her. The opposition of good and evil was perfectly in accord with the requirements of melodrama and allowed dramatists on Joan’s history to present the pathetic situation of an innocent girl fighting sycophantic noblemen and jealous cleric. To this extent, Victorian histories on Joan were basically historical melodramas.

In contrast to narrative and dramatic historians, Shaw emphasizes “veracity”, historical truth or interpretation in history writing and posits “the inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude” (facts and details) as a means of achieving historical truth. Having vowed in his dramatic theory to steer clear of melodramatic characterization, Shaw dissolves the dichotomy of hero and villain in Joan’s histories through a humanizing rationalization of the motives and motivations of his protagonist and antagonists. In so doing, he strips historical drama of its melodramatic form.

But St. Joan was designed to contradict from a historical perspective; all previous presentations of Joan in drama as reminiscent of what Shaw says are Shakespeare’s “romantic” or “melodramatic” histories. A proper response to its genre transformations must therefore consider Shaw’s Hegelian philosophy of history, especially with regards to characterization which is a major intertextual criterion in reading St. Joan. 52 Precedents to St. Joan include, Tom Taylor’s Jeanne D’ Arc (Called The Maid) a

Chronicle Play, in Five Acts (1871); Percy MacKaye’s Jeanne D’ Arc (1906) (these two also claim Murray’s account of Joan’s trial as source material); Edwin Villier’s Joan of Arc; an anonymous Joan of Arc licensed to the Garrick Theatre (1871), and John Henderson’s Joan of Arc (1896).

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V.1.3. The Historical Perspective: Joan as World-individual or Promethean hero

Shaw insists that all previous dramas on Joan were the end products of the Shakespearean melodramatic ethos in historical writing, which St. Joan was designed to “correct”: “J’ai écrit cette pièce comme un acte de justice et de piété envers Jeanne outrageusement traitée par Shakespeare, S[c]hiller, Voltaire, Anatole France, de même que Barbier et autres dramaturges de seconde zone” (Letters, III: 870).

Demonstrating the errors, misconceptions and historical deficiencies of previous treatments of the medieval Maid in drama, Shaw’s preface emphasizes the sociological premise of St. Joan. It alludes to Victorian Joan histories as mere “historical romances” founded on spectacle and dismisses Schiller’s Die Jung frau von Orleans with the comment, “...it is not about Joan at all, and can hardly be said to pretend to be so” (II: 285-89). Similar references are made to the Joan of Voltaire’s mock-epic, La Pucelle and Mark Twain’s Joan, but Shaw particularly draws an analogy between Joan’s representation by the Victorian man of letters, Andrew Lang and what he calls Shakespeare’s “hostile representation of Joan” in Henry VI where the Maid is portrayed as sexually promiscuous [V.iii; V. iv]. This prefatory analogy emphasize that the 19th century inherited the melodramatic form of its histories from Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Shaw claims, presents Joan as “a beautiful and romantic figure”, a “wholly scurrilous” version, which consisted of “shedding fictitious glamour on the figure of the Maid”. Like him, Lang, “enjoyed medieval history as a string of border romances rather than as a record of high European civilization based on a catholic faith.” (II: 244). For Shaw, Victorian Joan plays and particularly Shakespearean histories lack a sociological or historical perspective as well as contemporary relevance. As he asserts, “Shakespeare’s weakness lies in a complete deficiency in […] sociology”; his “characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no conviction of any sort”. They are basically concerned with their individual, private or domestic problems rather than their public responsibilities as historical leaders.53

53 Shaw claims that Shakespearean tragedies are melodramas because they deal with the

“private life” of his heroes. In Anthony and Cleopatra he argues that, Shakespeare glorifies “Anthony’s self-absorbing passion for Cleopatra to the exclusion of all other social interest and responsibility. His protagonists are not motivated by purposes that transcend themselves, but are “all completely satisfied that if they would only to their own selves be true, they could not then be false to any other man…as if they were beings in the air without public responsibilities of any kind” (VI:312). However, Shaw’s view that Shakespeare never attempted an imaginative interpretation of history that transcends his period is only half true and illustrates his habitual overstatements aimed at drawing critical attention to his own dramatic innovations. Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies are plays of their own times, but also represent a vision of Roman history that is not merely a projection of the Renaissance age. There is in Coriolanus a vivid evocation of the atmosphere of the emergent Republic, in Julius Caesar a compelling view of the power politics through which the Empire is turned into a Republic. Whether this represents “historical truth” in Shaw’s view or not, the plays show Shakespeare’s imagination

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These criticism indicate that Shaw was to focus on the broader historical perspective and significance of Joan as a world-individual in line with his Hegelian dialectical concept of history as a conflict of ideas. Significant in this historiography is Shaw emphasis that historical drama must open up dialogue between periods (past, present and future) and show new ideas emerging in collision with old idealisms. The uniqueness of St. Joan as history then, lies in Shaw’s re-presentation of the Joan as the harbinger of new ideas. Like Hegel, Shaw believed in the primacy of ideas over action, in thought rather than events themselves as the force behind historical change. Transformations begin in the minds of prophetic people, when great thought is incarnated in great men/women to enable them stand up against their societies and bring forth new ideas, religions or cultures. St. Joan is unique in this regard.

In sharp contrast to previous historical dramas on Joan, Shaw presents his protagonist on the threshold of different historical epochs, as the harbinger of new ideas. Joan is the incarnation of the emerging Zeitgeist, her mind, in the minority of one constitutes the new Renaissance and 20th century intellectual currents from within the medieval age. Her tragedy is determined by the ideas she anticipates. As Cauchon asserts in Sc. iii, Joan “sets up private judgment of the single erring mortal against the considered wisdom and experience of the church”. In Sc. ii, the Archbishop of Rheims notes the inspiring force of her Will: “there is a new spirit rising in men: we are in the dawning of a wider epoch” (VI: 107). In Sc. iv, Cauchon and Warwick note with shock the new forces of “Protestantism” and “Nationalism” that Joan represents. In sc. VI, Cauchon also notes the transcending force of ideas that Joan represents: “we are confronted today throughout Europe with a heresy that is spreading” among strong-minded people (VI: 167-8). Joan is a historical force rather than an individual. She is trans-historic, standing above history and making possible new historical conditions. She senses what is ripe for the development of her epoch and Shaw like Hegel, sees the hero in the context of her epoch and beyond, as the unwelcome sage of society in touch with the “secret source” of the future and able to intuit the next phase of history.

This is the socio-political vacuum Shaw notes in previous histories. Thus, when he sets up his St. Joan for contrast in the prefatory section entitled, “The Void in Elizabethan drama”, he establishes a contrast with none other than Shakespeare whom he regarded as progenitor of Victorian historical melodrama:

inhabiting a milieu which is identifiably not his own. But Shaw also had a point. Shakespeare’s histories, Richard II, Macbeth, Hamlet etc. explore the depths of humanity in kings, princes, generals and stresses the reality of individual character. Shaw’s histories stress the reality of abstractions (Idealisms). Though problems of power are also his concern, Shaw is more concerned with the conflict of the vital individual against artificial systems (a conflict of socio-cultural and political ideas). The overwhelming perspective in St. Joan is a social psychological struggle to transform the values of an age. Thus, while in Shakespeare’s histories the individual psychological context prevails more, in Shaw’s, the socio-cultural contexts prevails more. As he asserts, St. Joan presents, “not just the human puppets [characters], but the church, the Inquisition and the feudal system”.

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Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespeare’s histories…his figures are all intensely protestant, individualist, sceptical, self-centred in everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish even in them. His kings are not statesmen: his cardinals have no religion: a novice can read his plays from one end to the other without learning that the world is finally governed by forces expressing themselves in religion and laws which make epochs rather than by vulgar ambitious individuals who make rows. The divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, is mentioned fatalistically only to be forgotten immediately like a passing vague apprehension. To Shakespeare as to Mark Twain, Cauchon would have been a tyrant and a bully instead of a catholic, and the inquisitor, Lamaître would have been a sadist instead of a lawyer. Warwick would have no more feudal quality than his successor the King Maker has in the play of Henry VI…Nature abhors this vacuum in Shakespeare; and I have taken care to let the medieval atmosphere blow through my play freely (VI:70-17).

As the antithesis of Shakespearean and Victorian historical protagonists whom he claims are unmotivated by ideas beyond their personal ambitions, Joan is stripped of womanhood and “love interest” (central conventions in Victorian historical drama), and imbued with a dedication to new socio-cultural and political ideas. Shaw points to the larger dimension of his conflict in this play when he emphasizes that, “those who watch it [St. Joan] performed would not make a mistake about the startling result it produces. They would see.

before them not[just] the visible and human puppets, but the Church, the Inquisition, the Feudal system, with divine inspiration always beating against their too inelastic limits: all more terrible in their dramatic force than any of the little mortal figures clanking about in platted armour or moving silently in the frocks and hoods of the order of St Dominic.

It is clear from the above that St. Joan was to be much more than a Shakespearean clash of character and much more than the conventional 19th century costume history of romance. But having rejected tragedy for its pessimism and melodrama as proper modes for history, what dramatic reality does Shaw give Joan’s history?

V.2. The Hybrid plot of History: Romance, Tragedy and Comedy

Shaw’s claim that his play is cast in classical tragedy is intended to draw attention to his own definition of tragedy in St. Joan. In his preface, he rather declares his intension to genre-alize Joan’s history in “The Romance of her rise, the tragedy of her execution and the comedy of the attempts of prosperity to make amends for that execution” (VI: 66). The romance of Joan’s rise is followed by the tragedy of her fall and execution; the rise and fall of the hero is a classic tragic pattern, but Joan’s tragedy is followed by the comedy of attempts to restore her honour, and even the comedy is qualified as tragic by the repeated rejection of the saint so that, at the end, we cannot say exactly if the play is a romance, a tragedy or a comedy. However, considering the movement of the dramatic action and the paradoxical perspectives of the historical design that propels the dramatic action, the generic reality Shaw gives Joan’s history is tragicomic and this pattern reflects the tragicomic plot of history as Shaw sees it. For

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Shaw, the design of history is optimistic and pessimistic, progressive and cyclical, and this historical pattern reflects the tension between historical epochs: the struggle of new ideas to emerge in an old epoch. The generic tension in St. Joan is therefore meant to reflect the many sidedness of Shaw’s historiography. To separate the romance from the tragedy or the tragedy from the comedy is to ignore the interpretation of the historical design that the generic tension symbolize. To consider the play as a whole is to recognize Shaw’s tragicomic vision of history in his historiography. Such a tragicomic pattern also serves Shaw’s pedagogical purpose of alienating his audience by debunking their positivist notion of a linear or upward progression in history.

Each of the three generic movements of the plot is built on a major historical event. The romance (scene I, II and III) is based on Joan’s historical “voices” and “miracles” as well as on the siege of Orleans; the tragedy (scenes IV, V and VI) is based on the coronation of King Charles and the trial and execution of Joan. The Epilogue is based on the rehabilitation and canonization of the saint in 1920. In each movement of the plot, Shaw’s imputes his own interpretation on the historical records so that, there is as well a tension between Shaw’s play and the recorded “facts”.

The overall generic tension (romance, tragedy and comedy) is also replicated in each generic movement of the plot as well. Each genre undertakes a jarring reversals of its conventions so that, there is a contrast between what the playwright promises in each movement of the play and what he actually offers. Each movement of the plot is characterized by reversals of genre conventions and expectations.

In what follows, I will focus on the three modes of the dramatic action― the romance of Joan’s rise, the tragedy of her execution and the comedy of her canonization in the epilogue. Thereafter, I will analyse the techniques of genre subversion and transformation in each mode in a bid to show how in St. Joan, Shaw produces history that is both genuinely Shavian and a play about the historical Joan.

V.2.1. The Romance of Joan’s Rise

The first scene opens in 1429 in the castle of Vaucouleurs with Baudricourt scolding his steward because there are no eggs. We learn from the steward that the hens will not lay and the cows produce less milk because they have been bewitched by the Maid from Domrémy whose request to see Baudricourt has been rejected, but who is determined to stay until her request is granted. The squire is scornful of the steward’s superstition and angry that the girl has not left in spite of his orders. Meanwhile the Maid has gained fame among the soldiers in the courtyard.

When Bautricourt finally calls her in, she immediately demands horses, amour, soldiers and permission to see the uncrowned king. She claims she receives orders from God who speaks to her through the “voices” of St. Catherine, St. Margaret and the Blessed Michael. She also claims she already has the support of some officers: Bertrand de Poulengey and John of Metz, both of whom she simply calls “Polly” and

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“Jack” respectively. Amazed, Bautricourt verifies from Polly who affirms his support for the Maid’s mission and informs the squire that all the soldiers respect her. With France in captivity and with no hope of victory, Polly thinks the Maid’s mission is worth a try. The episode shows Joan’s ability to inspire those around her with the “will” and nationalist ideas. Joan informs Baudricourt of her mission to raise the siege of Orleans, crown the Dauphin in the Cathedral at Rheims and send the English out of France. Her directness and determination also inspires Bautricourt to give the gamble a try. He thinks she might inspire French troops to fight after all. As Joan’s request is granted, the steward runs in to inform that the hens have started “laying like mad”. This sudden turn of events convinces Bautricourt of Joan’s divine powers.

Scene II opens in the castle of Chinon with a conversation between the Archbishop of Rheims and de la Trémouille as they await the Dauphin. We learn that the Dauphin is habitually in debts to his Lords and nobles; selfishly concerned with his own petty needs, comfort and survival, rather than with his public responsibility (the occupation of France). When he finally appears, he is unimpressively dressed, has a selfish disposition and earns no respect from his nobles. He is excited about a letter from Beautricourt in which the latter claims to have sent him a holy personage.

Although all the courtiers and the Archbishop are unwilling to admit a simple Maid into the king’s presence, their interest is arrested by the suggestion that she possess the power of miracles and intends to raise the siege of Orleans. Puzzled however that a simple country girl should be God’s messenger, the court decides to put her supernatural powers to a test. Gilles de Rais, also known as Bluebeard is to impersonate the king while the real king mingles inconspicuously among his courtiers. Detecting the true king will be proof of Joan’s miraculous powers. While the lord Chamberlain thinks this will be difficult for a village Maid, the archbishop thinks she will succeed by a straight forward deduction because miracles are a mixture of commonsense and simple contrivance and the difference between the two men concerned is well known.

When the curtains rise on the throne room, Bluebeard is pretending to be king in an assembled court. However, Joan quickly sees through the trick and recognizing Bluebeard and the true king, calls them by name. She announces her mission to the king and kneels in reverence to the archbishop. They are pleased with the respect, but the archbishop expresses fear of the danger that Joan’s excessive religious fervour poses to the Church and its authority, a fear that eventually matures in Joan’s Nationalism and Protestantism and thus, necessitates her execution.

Left with the Dauphin, Joan exalts him to assume his responsibility as king and lead the French against English occupation. But the Philistine king has neither the courage nor determination and his reaction to her request accentuates the difference between the Shavian Realist and Philistine.54 However, like all who come in contact 54 Charles expresses the philistine instinct: “I don’t want to bother with children. I don’t

want to be a father; and I don’t want to be son: especially the son of St. Louis. I don’t want to be any of these fine things you all have your heads full of: I want to be just what I

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with Joan, the King is finally inspired and hands command of the army to Joan. Scene III is the shortest of the six scenes and takes place on the bank of the river

Loire, close to Orleans. While waiting for Joan, the Commander of the French forces, Dunois laments the absence of a West Wind. The Maid appears dressed in amour and impatient to attack the English, but Dunois tells her to pray for a West wind if she must reach the English because they are trapped downstream by the East wind and cannot move upstream. As the two are about to visit a nearby church, Dunois’ Page realizes that the wind has suddenly changed direction in their favour and, interpreting this as a sign from God that Joan is favoured, both men pledge their loyalty to the Maid.

V. 2.2. The Tragedy of Joan’s Execution

After presenting the full force and rise of the inspiring World-individual in the first three scenes, Shaw begins in sc.iv to presents the full energy and sincerity of the medieval institutional forces that destroyed her. Logically too, he employs a mechanistic emplotment. Scene IV is the scene of “tragic intrigue” to unseat Joan from power. It prepares the spectators for the gradual darkening mood of the Romance into tragedy. The action plot gives way to a “discussion”, the essence of which is to present a generalized interpretation of Joan’s rise and fall in the light of broader contemporary issues confronting the 20th century audience.

Shaw claims to strive for poetic or “essential truth”; for a balanced philosophical (and somewhat Shavian) comprehension of the medieval past rather than for detailed verisimilitude and accuracy of facts; for “veracity” (interpretation), not pictorial and documentary facts. As earlier mentioned, readers of St. Joan must bear in mind that Shaw’s objective was to write a play in which what he took to be the significance of the life of the 15th century saint would be manifest in the lives of his 20th century audience� “the whole value of Joan to us is how you can bring her circumstances into contact with our life and our circumstances”� Shaw asserts (VI: 226-7, 229). Hence, he “endowed” his characters in scene IV with enough self-consciousness to enable them explain their roles, attitudes and sentiments to the 20th century (V: 73-74). Instead of saying what Joan’s historical opponents (the prototypes) would have said or thought in their actual medieval context, the characters (or actors) of sc. iv are clairvoyant figures who give verbal expression to the playwright’s retrospective memory of the events and persons they are invoked to represent and in a conversation that is ideologically out of the compass of their medieval context.

Shaw’s scene iv focus on the villains of Joan’s tragedy and although they are fully contextualized in their medieval context by their costumes, the author’s interest and

am. Why can’t you mind your own business, and let me mind mine?” Like Tanner, Joan asserts her role as agent of the life force: I tell thee it is God’s business we are here to do…not our own. I have a message to thee from God; and thou must listen to it, though thy heart break with terror of it” (VI: 114).

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focus is less on a string of specialized human individuals and personal encounters than on characters as great historical “idealist” forces. There is no effort to pretend that the characters are “period” characters yet, they self-consciously expound themselves and their institutional views in a conversation that transcends their historical time. Scene IV, set in a tent in the English Camp is a brilliant and wholly Shavian invention of history which, though inexistent in the records, is crucial to the playwright’s (re) interpretation of the saint as an evolutionist or World-historical individual.

As a dramatic strategy, Shaw gives the heroine a break from the stage so that in her absence, the villains can provide the audience with a generalized interpretation of her rise to power and signal her fall. The interlocutors in the scene conform to the historical records. The Earl of Warwick, commander of the English forces at the time of Joan’s capture and Bishop Cauchon who presided over her trial. But these characters are meant to represent institutional rather than individual viewpoints. They are in a symbolic sense, abstractions or historical allegories with universal and timeless implications. Cauchon speaks for the Church and Warwick for the feudal nobility. Shaw wants his audience to see them as the two great historical forces that crushed Joan. The third interlocutor is the chaplain, De Stogumber who represents British imperialism. He provides the comic counterpoint to the tragic debate.

The “tent scene” opens in a conversation between Warwick and De Stogumber. As they await the visit of Cauchon, they discuss the seriousness of the English position vis-à-vis Joan's activities. We learn from them that Joan has already raised the Siege of Orléans and the captured the English commander, Sir John Tolbat after serious English defeats at Jargean, Meung and Beangency. De Stogumber immediate attributes Joan’s victories to witchcraft and expresses his anxiety to have her destroyed. Warwick who is just as anxious is more diplomatic. He believes Joan can only be stopped through a deal with the French, the reason for which he has invited bishop Cauchon, who also fears for the security of the church in the face of Joan’s fame and activities.

When the archbishop arrives, Warwick proposes that the church burns Joan as a heretic and a witch. While strongly condemning Joan’s conduct as a threat to the church, Cauchon refuses to give guarantee of Joan’s execution. As a spiritual leader, he feels the Church’s role is first to try to save Joan’s soul from damnation. For a second reason, the church would not execute Joan but hand her to a secular court for punishment if found guilty. De Stogumber, impatient at what he calls mere excuses, accuses the bishop of not treating the Maid’s threats seriously.

Although there is at first a fundamental clash of interest among Joan’s opponents, each struggling to grant priority to the threat she posses to his institution, they soon agree that Joan is a common enemy who, to protect their different institutions must be destroyed. Cauchon equates her activities to the spread of heresy, the heresy of making claims to divine inspiration, which lead men to set their individual judgments against the authority of church. For Warwick, Joan’s fight for greater authority for the king would create a despot of him instead of just one among the nobility as the case is.

In startling anachronistic language, both men give voice to the author’s

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retrospective reinterpretation of the Maid’s activities. Warwick calls her religious rebellion “Protestantism” while the equally inventive Cauchon calls her political rebellion “Nationalism”. While the chaplain cannot understand these words which are in essence, out of the compass of medieval English, he nevertheless recognizes that Joan is a rebel who stands against all he holds sacred, the church and England’s imperial right. In fact, Stogumber voices the Victorian positivist view of civilization that the play in part, attacks: “this woman denies England her legitimate conquest, given to her by God because of her peculiar fitness to rule over less civilized races for their own good” (sc. iv). As the Chaplain continues, “I do not understand what your lordships mean by Protestant and Nationalist. You are too learned and subtle for a poor clerk like myself. But I know as a matter of plain commonsense that the woman is a rebel; and that is enough for me.” (VI: 139-40). The chaplain voices what Shaw sees as the historical truth about Joan. She represents a historical force emerging in rebellion against the status quo. Scene IV ends with the medieval institutional characters united in a plot to destroy the maid: “Well, if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist” conclude Warwick and Cauchon.

Scene V follows the tragic pattern in giving an equivalent tragic picture of alienation or isolation of the tragic protagonist. By showing how little support Joan can expect from those around her, scene V heightens the tragic confrontation between Joan and her authoritative opponents, leading to her capture and trial in Sc. VI. She has just crowned the Dauphin in the Cathedral in Rheims and we fine her praying in solitude in the Cathedral. Shaw builds up naturally and effectively the sense of tragic alienation and isolation of Joan. In a conversation with Dunois, Joan expresses her surprise at the hatred towards her from all the quarters of the court: the courtiers, the knights and the churchmen. As Dunois and Joan are joined outside the cathedral by the other major characters, Joan makes a rather half-hearted offer to return to her village now that her mission to crown the king has been accomplished. In their various responses to this proposal, Shaw allows us to perceive the gradual alienation of the heroine by the institutional representatives around her. Joan is visibly shocked and emotionally hurt by the alacrity with which the king accepts her offer. Her proposal is seen by the authorities as a welcome relief. She is also surprised by the talk of treaties with the English from the king and the unwillingness of her countrymen to press home the advantages she has gained for France. In a sudden change of mind, Joan decides to stay back, attack and clear out the remnants of English troops in Paris. In her headstrong determination to go ahead in spite of all warning to the contrary, she registers the total alienation of all the authorities concerned.

Like in scene, IV, the individual characters that distance themselves from the heroine stand for something larger than themselves; for institutions or historical forces. The king whom Joan has just crowed promises he would not ransom her if she is captured in battle. The archbishop of Rheims promises not to use the authority of the Church on her behalf. In the arch-bishop’s reiteration that Joan stands “alone and unsupported,” we see the characteristic Shavian alienation of the Realist as a world-

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individual. Dunois, her closest friend in arms also speaks firmly for the army. He would not risk the life of a single soldier to save Joan if she is captured.

Scene V presents a picture of the heroine’s tragic alienation, and Shaw creates out of the above representative voices, a formal chorus of Joan’s renunciation. The effect is to foreshadow her tragic fall, but important too, is the scene’s clear delineation of Joan in the peculiar Shavian sense of isolation characteristic of his Realist characters. Although she registers the full force of animosity, it is out of her horrifying loneliness that Joan draws the strength characteristic of Shaw’s historical individuals who often stand alone against a predominantly idealists society. As Joan puts it,

Yes: I am alone on earth: I have always been alone. My father told my brothers to drown me if I would not stay to mind his sheep while France was bleeding to death: France might perish if only our lambs were safe. I thought France would have friends at the court of the king of France; and I find only wolves fighting for pieces of her poor torn body. I thought God would have friends everywhere; and in my innocence I believed that you who now cast me out would be like strong towers to keep harm from me. But I am wiser now and nobody is ever the worse for being wiser. Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: What would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God: His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out now to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours. You will all be glad to see me burnt; but if I go through the fire I shall go through it to their hearts forever and ever. And so, God be with me (Plays, 154).

The scriptural echoes in the speech converge with the pastoral images to accentuate the unconventional divinity that Shaw attributes to the heroic commitment of his promethean protagonists as they struggles to destroy the status quo. As Brian Tyson (1982:46) points out, Joan’s speech draws upon the first lines of Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone”. There is a tone of absolute individualism in Ibsen’s heroes on which Shaw draws for his Realist protagonists. Joan’s statement that, “it is better to be alone with God [The life force]” strikes the Ibsenite note of heroic alienation and loneliness.

While Joan’s statement highlights the tragic picture of alienation, the archbishop’s responds to Joan most overtly encodes the classic convention of tragic flaw that Shaw’s play redefines. In responds to Joan’s headstrong determination to go ahead and attack Paris, the archbishop reprimands her for being hubristic.

If I am not so glib with the name of God as you are, it is because I interpret his will with the authority of the church and of my secret office. When you first came here, you respected it, and would not have dared to speak as you are now speaking. You came clothed with the virtue of humility; and because God blessed your enterprises accordingly, you have stained yourself with the sin of pride. The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris.

Through the archbishop’s speech, Shaw points in a rather poetic and inquisitive

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way to the Aristotelian concept of tragedy and to his own ambivalent handling of the tragic flaw in the play. The play challenges the tragic genre as defined by Aristotle and his followers over the centuries and I will return to the archbishop’s speech in my analysis of Shaw’s genre subversion and transformations below.

Scene VI, the final scene of the play proper presents the catastrophe. The Scene opens with Joan’s trial and ends in her execution. It is morning of May 30, 1431 and the action is set in a castle in Rouen arranged as a courtroom for the trial of Joan, now a captive. In an opening conversation, Warwick expresses his impatience at the delay in the court proceedings and his wish to see the trial concluded. We learn that it is nineteen months since Joan was captured and her trial has dragged on for eleven weeks. She has now been formally charged with heresy and the trial is about to begin.

The most striking aspect of the trial scene is Shaw’s re-presentation of the Inquisition’s role in Joan’s execution. Shaw defends her judges against the charge of villainy, ignoring the stated “facts” of their villainy and malice. Shaw’s judges are presented as sincerely concerned with giving the victim a fair trial rather than hastening her execution. When the proceedings begin, Courcelles, a young French priest and Chaplain de Stogumber protest that the charges against Joan have been drastically reduced. But Cauchon and the Inquisitor intervene to stress that the main charge is heresy and that the lighter charges are irrelevant to the trial. Brother Martin Ladvenu’s question about the seriousness of the charge of heresy offers Shaw the opportunity to re-present in an entirely new light, the ecclesiastical court prelates who judged and executed Joan. In response to Ladvenu, the Inquisitor delivers a lengthy speech on the judiciousness and competence of the ecclesiastical court in handling heresy, which he claims is one of the greatest spiritual dangers. He urges the court to guard against natural compassion for heretics, yet also warns against any form of unjust harshness. He then invites his colleagues to proceed in fairness towards the accused and to give justice a first consideration.

Joan, chained on the ankles is brought in and led to the prisoner’s stool. On her refusal to take the oath, Courcelles interjects with calls of torture. But again, against the documentary records which stress the cruelty and malice of Joan’s judges, Shaw’s church officials, Ladevenu, Cauchon, and the Inquisitor intervene to advocate careful questioning instead of torture.

Shaw stresses in his preface and non-dramatic writings that in writing St Joan, he has done no more than dramatize a transcript of the trial and the later 15th century inquiry that reversed the verdict. St. Joan he asserts, is “a drama already made, only needing to be brought within the limits of time and space to be a thrilling play” (VI: 77). Putting Murray’s transcript within the dramatic limits of time and space, Shaw compresses the trial which took several months into a single episode (scene vi). Although he effectively does in Scene VI, what he claims to have done throughout Saint Joan ― dramatize history by merely (re)arranging the events of the trial for the stage ―, he also shapes the “facts” of this tragic event (the trial) into a tragicomedy.

One of Shaw’s greatest comic gifts was to show the inevitably clash of

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impenetrable argumentative attitudes in “a discussion”. In the trial scene, he effectively puts this comic gift at the service of tragedy. Many of the trial questions and many of the heroine’s responses seem taken word verbatim from Murray’s transcript of the trial. Cauchon: ….Joan: I am going to put a most solemn question to you. Take care how you

answer; for your life and salvation are at stake on it. Will you for all you have said and done, be it good or bad, accept the judgment of God’s Church on earth? More especially as to the act and words that are imputed on you in this trial by the Promoter here, will you submit your case to the inspired interpretation of the Church Militant?

Joan: I am a faithful child of the church, I will obey the church― Cauchon : (hopefully leaning forward) You will? Joan: Provided it does not command anything impossible. Cauchon sinks back on his chair with a heavy sigh. The Inquisition purses his lips and frowns. Ladvenu shakes his head pitifully (VI: 173).

Joan’s answer is also taken directly from the Murray’s transcript: “On all that I am asked I will refer to the Church Militant, provided they do not command anything impossible” (Murray, 1902:15). But in building up the solemnity of Cauchon’s question and in breaking Joan’s reply, Shaw employs an anti-climax, which is basically a comic technique in order to create humour of this particularly tragic moment or event. The church authorities are alarmed by the implication of Joan’s answer that the church could possibly go against God’s will. Joan too, cannot understand what seems so appallingly heretical (to her judges) about her response. Caught in complicated issues she cannot understand, Joan is wholly unaware of ridiculing church authority in her response. Her judges too cannot for a moment enter into Joan’s view of things to see that she is not essentially against the church. On the one hand, the audience would laugh at Joan’s innocence and on the other, feel pity and fear, for the gap in understanding between Joan and the Inquisition is too wide, the consequences too tragic for Joan to allow the audience a free laughter.

At Joan’s response, the Inquisition then presses Joan to accept that her visions and voices are visitations from the devil aimed at tempting her. But Joan insists that she has simply followed the commands of God and firmly persists on placing God, her voices or her own judgment first. In so doing, she convinces the court that she is a heretic. Informed however, that preparations have been made to burn her at the stake, and persuaded by Cauchon and Brother Martin that she has been deceived and should recant in exchange for her life, Joan accepts to recant. In the meantime Ladvenu has prepared a solemn recantation for her to sign by which she is to admit that she has pretended to have divine visitations; has blasphemed by dressing immodestly (unwomanly) and has committed the sins of sedition, idolatry, disobedience, pride and heresy. Hence, she is to renounce her sins and remain obedient to the church. After signing the recantation, the Inquisitor declares her free from excommunication, but as atonement, sentences her to a solitary life in confinement. Shocked and disappointed, Joan ceases and tears the signed recantation and calls on her judges to light their fires.

The Promoter immediately declares her a relapsed heretic and calls for her

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excommunication while the Executioner hurries out to light the fire. Cauchon and the Inquisitor intone a solemn decree of excommunication and are about to sentence and relinquish Joan to the secular authorities for punishment when De Stogumber rushes her to the stake even before she is officially sentenced and handed to the English. Cauchon attempts to stop the execution on grounds that the English have breached the court proceedings, but the Inquisitor stops him and explains that a flaw in the proceedings might even be useful later. The stage darkens at the end of the scene and the audience sees the glow of the burning fire high in the courtyard.

Although Shaw’s tragedy has virtually come to an end, his play must continue. In his forward-looking evolutionary theory, he criticized the death of the protagonist in Shakespearean and Victorian dramas as “stage murders” “vulgar substitutes for tragedy” and denouement or, “slaughters in the classical or Shakespearean manner” (Prefaces, 200). He insisted that the moral problems of a play are not resolved by the death of the protagonist or in the denouement and that the dramatic plot must follow history or reflect the historical process rather than follow generic conventions: “Every drama must present conflict”, he wrote, but, “as in real life itself, there may be no ending….The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and catastrophes, and takes ‘slices of life’ as his material, he finds himself committed to plays that have no endings” (Prefaces, 200). The Epilogue clearly illustrates Shaw’s structural principle of “using and losing” the conventional plot or of beginning his play (the discussion) where the conventional dramatist usually brings his play to an end. In contrast to mainstream thinking about tragedy, Shaw continues his play after the heroine’s death, in “the comedy of the attempts of prosperity to make amends for that execution”.

V. 2. 3. Beyond tragedy and Verisimilitude: the comic dream Epilogue

The rise and fall of the hero is the classic pattern of tragedy. With the execution in Scene VI, the tragedy seems to have come to end, but being an evolutionist, Shaw’s tragedy must go beyond the limited view of tragic dramatists who belief that tragedy ends with the death of the protagonists. In continuing his play after the death of the protagonists, and in dealing with an afterlife situation in the epilogue, Shaw makes the preceding tragedy only a submerged plot in his history. Illustrating his structural principle of “using and losing the well-made plot” Shaw wrote, “the second rate dramatist always begins at the beginning of his play; the first rate begins in the middle; and the genius, Ibsen for instance, begins at the end” (Our Theatres, I: 284). Eleven years before he wrote St. Joan, Shaw toyed with the idea that a play about Joan really begins at the end: “I shall do a Joan play some day, beginning with the sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after her martyrdom, and going on with Joan’s arrival in heaven” (Dent, 1952:162). While the epilogue conforms to this structural principle in beginning after Joan’s death, it ambivalently violates and affirms the tragic implication (C.f. V.4 below). In its purely psychological form, the epilogue also violates the

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verisimilar conventions of historical drama, especially the pictorial convention of the 19th century (C. f., V. 3.4. below). It has ghost-like characters and seems more a fairy tale than history, but it is highly significant in Shaw’s reinterpretation of Joan’s history.

Like Scene IV, the purpose of the epilogue is to provide a generalized interpretation of the present and future significance of Joan's death to the audience, to make clear that Joan's “history in the world” did not end with her death, but began with it. As Shaw asserts, “I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan’s history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crooks to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one” (VI: 315).

Having declared that a real Joan play begins rather than end with her death, and that his own plays virtually begin at the end of a conventional plot, immediately after her tragic death, Shaw begins to turn his play smoothly towards the comic “discussion” mode of the epilogue and towards the future significance of Joan’s death. As part of this transition Shaw begins to introduce comic elements in the tragedy. He registers the execution of Joan and the effects of the burning through the buffoon-like figure of De Stogumber whose hysterical and somewhat humorous eye-witness account provides part of the comedy of the epilogue. De Stogumber who declared his intention and willingness to burn Joan with his own hands in sc IV, is utterly moved and horrified by the burning: “Some of the people laughed at her. They would have laughed at Christ. They were French people, my lord: I know they were French” he declares (VI: 188). His hysterical reaction to the burning in incongruous with his role in it and although the audience pity him, they cannot help laughing at him as well.

Thematically too, Shaw begins to turn the audience’s attention towards the future significance of Joan’s history. Towards the end of Scene VI, Ladvenu tells Warwick, “This is not the end for her, but the beginning.” Explaining to Warwick that the execution has been accomplished except for the fact that Joan’s heart will not burn, the Executioner asserts, “you have heard the last of her;” to which Warwick responds, “with a wry smile, thinking of what Ladvenu said”: “the last of her? Hm! I wonder.” (VI: 190). Even before De Stogumber, Ladvenu and the Executioner, Shaw has been turning the reader’s attention towards a future memory of Joan and arousing expectation of a “continuation” of the tragedy.

In the trial scene, when Cauchon tried to stop the English dragging Joan to the stake without formal sentence, the Inquisitor told him, “a flaw in the procedure may be useful later on: one never knows” (VI: 185-6). Like De Stogumber’s, Ladvenu’s or the Executioner’s, the Inquisitor’s statement prepares us for Joan’s reappearance and for the discussion of the future significance of her history. But the comic quality of these statements weakens the tragic implication of the preceding tragedy. The knowingness of the lines, particularly those spoken by the Inquisition seem a real indecorum in the tragic context. The force of the trial has been built on the assumption that Joan’s judges are men of probity. The suggestion that the Inquisitor has one eye on the future when a technical loophole might be desirable almost sabotages the integrity and fairness of the

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trial. These and other aspects of the epilogue threaten the tragic impetus of St. Joan. In the epilogue, Joan returns twenty five years after her execution to discuss good

humouredly the significance of her trial, execution and recent rehabilitation with her executioners. The epilogue thus marks the beginning of the strange and supernatural events of the play. Logically too, the action moves out of the scenic realism of historical drama into a dream. The epilogue is King Charles’s dream and with it, we discover that we have entered both the world of Joan’s triumphant comedy and into the 20th century, five hundred years after her death. It begins with the king “reading in bed or rather looking at the pictures in Fouquet´s Boccaccio with his knees doubled up to make a reading desk”. While the king is reading in his dream, Ladvenu enters, carrying a cross and informs Charles that the requested inquiry into Joan’s trial twenty-five years ago has been completed. She has been cleared of the charge of witchcraft and heresy and her judges pronounced malicious and corrupt. As Ladvenu leaves, a sudden rush of wind fills the room and the spirit of Joan appears. Charles tells Joan’s apparition all that has happened since her death. He is now a brave king who leads his army. Her sentence has also been reverted and her memory is now held sacred.

The next ghostly apparition to appear in this fairy tale is bishop Cauchon. He too is death. After his death, he was excommunicated and his body exhumed and flung into a sewer by an angry mob as a sign of their repudiation of his role in Joan’s execution. Upon appearance, his ghost strongly protests the dishonour done to his remains, considering it a blow struck against the church. Cauchon reiterates Shaw’s view that, although remembered as a figure of evil and cruelty, he acted sincerely and faithfully according to his conscience and in accord with Church laws. Jack Dunois, Joan’s comrade in arms also comes in through the tapestry. He is not death, but his spirit is temporarily separated from his sleeping body. He reports to Joan that since her death he has employed her tactics to battle the English out of France. The English soldier who made a cross of sticks for Joan when she was on the stake appears. He is traditionally released from hell for one day annually because of this single good deed, but is only free until midnight. Like the Statue of the Commander in the hell scene of Man and Superman, Shaw’s dead soldier is surprisingly cheerful and reports that hell is not after all a place of torment and boredom. In hell, he has good company of all sorts, emperors, popes and other great men. Chaplain De Stogumber appears, now, a white-haired old priest and rector of a village parish. The shock of witnessing Joan’s burning at the stake has never really left him. He does not even recognize Joan’s spirit, but the Executioner, stepping from behind the bed curtains sees that Joan’s spirit lives on. The Earl of Warwick, steps out from behind the curtains, congratulates Joan and apologizes for his part in the execution, but humorously adds that by his role in her execution he contributed to making her a saint.

Shaw continues to bring fantastic and comic elements into his tragedy and to defeat the tragic implication of Joan’s execution. A “Gentleman” comes in, dressed in the fashion of the 1920s and is made the object of much laughter from the other medieval characters who find his attire strange and ridiculous. The Gentleman reads

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the official pronouncement of the Maid’s canonization as Saint Joan. Visions of statues erected in Joan’s honour are seen outside. Then, the Inquisitor appears and all the characters kneel and recite a catalogue of praise to Joan for providing them with “inspiration”, and exposing their “limitation”. Humbled by her canonization and overwhelmed with praises, Joan asks if she should return “a living woman” to live with them again. Everybody is frightened and one by one they rise to excused themselves and vanish. Only the soldier remains. He thinks their behaviour typical of rulers or men of authority, but as he prepares to elaborate further, a distant bell strikes midnight and he must return to hell. Left alone on stage, Joan wonders when the world will ever be ready to accept its higher species, God’s saints or geniuses of Evolution.

V. 3. Shaping History in Tragicomedy: Techniques of Genre Subversion and Transformation

Perhaps one of the most often repeated definitions of modern drama emphasizes the playwright’s search for new dramatic forms to replace the popular forms of the19th century. Shaw had long recognized this when he declared his criticism a “siege laid on the theatre of the nineteenth century by an author who had to cut his way into it at the point of a pen and throw some of its defenders into the moat… ” (5 ). I wish to focus on each of the generic modes and labels Shaw ascribes to his play in order to show how his disappoints his audience’s generic expectations. My focus will also be on showing that, Shaw’s particular vision of history and his conception of the “art of literature” are inseparable from his innovations in dramatic form― the generic structures, techniques, language and staging of St. Joan.

The narrative structures of St.Joan reveal Shaw’s tragicomic view of history. The play no doubt follows a tragic emplotment before the Epilogue and Shaw employs a mechanistic construction to this part of the plot. But Shaw’s conception of history is larger than the tragic form. The play adumbrates the historical hero’s ineluctable fate and reveals how the very constitution of society determines the destruction of it genius. Individual freedom is the provenience of danger for the society’s superstructure― in this case represented by the Church pedagogues and the spokesmen of feudal economy― which must be opposed. But it is also the fervent duty of the authoritative voices of society’s superstructure to defend the social order. The largeness of this political subject leads inevitably to Shaw’s transformation of tragic conventions: characters (hero and villain), conflict and the tragic flaw. But then, follows Shaw’s epilogue which explodes the formal expectation of tragic drama and thrusts the whole play into the realm of Irony and Satire. As tragedy, St. Joan negates the specific ideological implications of tragic narrative or adds to them, by intimating that at its deepest level the play represents the historical process in total as Shaw sees it, that is, as tragicomic. In this way, St. Joan broadens Shaw’s negation of Victorian conventions to an analysis of the nature of history itself.

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As early mentioned, each of the generic modes Shaw ascribes to his play repeats the overall tension between the romance, tragedy and comic epilogue. It is thus necessary to begin examining Shaw’s historiographic techniques of genre transformations by examining the techniques of each generic modes of the play.

V. 3.1. A Romance de-romanticized: De-mystifying the Saint

As critic, Shaw strongly objected to the statuesque figures of Shakespearean and Victorian tragic history as unrealistic, romantic and mainly melodramatic:

We want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast, inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off; and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognize our own humanity and who, instead of walking, talking, eating, drinking, sleeping, making love and fighting single combats in a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion: touching the summit only at rare moments, and finding the proper level of all occasions, condescending with humour and good sense to the prosaic ones as well as rising to the noble ones, instead of ridiculously persisting in rising to them all on the principle that a hero must always soar, in season and out of season (II:117).

In writing St. Joan Shaw not only remembered to debunk the statuesque figures of these histories and to strips his heroine of “romantic love interest” which was a central convention in Victorian historical melodramas on Saint Joan.

The romance plot thus begins the general pattern of subverting generic expectations that characterizes the play. Shaw’s Joan is not only an ordinary protagonist of low birth, but also a contrast to romantic heroines of 19th century melodrama. Shaw maintains that domestic melodrama has reduced Joan’s character to absurd thinness: “And she was not a melodramatic heroine: that is, a physically beautiful forlorn parasite on an equally beautiful hero, but a genius and a saint, about as completely the opposite of the melodramatic heroine as it is possible for a human being to be.” (VI: 19).

In contrast to Shakespeare’s, Schiller’s Mark Twain or Victorian Joan plays, Shaw stress, Joan’s lack of beauty and sexual attraction, while emphasizing her imaginative qualities. His Joan has “an uncommon face: eyes very wide apart and bulging as they often do in very “imaginative people” (I: 15). Her manly behaviour and dress is expected to shock the audience as it does other characters on stage. Shaw also gives the Catholic saint the mannerism of his young female characters; that of calling the other characters by nicknames. Just as Octavius Robinson, Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner in Man and Superman are Ann’s “Tavy”, “Granny” and “Jack” respectively, and as Adolphus Cusins and Charles Lomax become Barbara’s “Dolly” and “Cholly” in Major Barbara, so too does Joan make a “Jack” of Jean de Metz, a “Polly” of Bertrand de Poulengy, and a “Charlie” of the Dauphin (the king). This reduction of historical names to nursery-like familiarity bespeak the effortless and

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humiliating control she exercises over those around her and the egalitarian spirit in her that emerges in the political themes―Nationalism, Protestantism and feminism― of the tragic movement of the plot.

Throughout the romance plot, Shaw de-romanticizes the figure of the saint, with the result that, his Romance is in essence an anti-romantic. Like Pygmalion which Shaw subtitles, “A Romance” yet, frustrates expectations of a Higgins-Eliza romance while maintaining that the “romance” label only explains the mystical transformation of a flower girl into a lady, the romance plot of St. Joan frustrates the expectations of a romantic heroine. Shaw’s romance label is retained only in the sense of the unexpectedness with which a country girl suddenly rises to the rank of a holy personage in public eye.

Shakespeare, Schiller and Victorian melodramatists romanticized Joan by pairing her with a lover, particularly her fellow soldier, La Hire. In Shaw’s play, Joan’s fellow soldiers testify to her lack of sexual attraction. Baudricourt evokes the melodramatic convention of “love interest” when he assumes that Polly’s support for Joan has a sexual interest, but Polly’s response points to the stripping of this romantic convention in St. Joan. Polly tells Bautricourt, “I should as soon think of the Blessed Virgin herself in that way, as of this girl”. Since Joan’s arrival he goes on, the “foulmouthed and foul-minded” soldiers in the guardroom “have stopped swearing before her” and “there hasn’t been a word that has anything to do with her being a woman” he explains (VI: 89). Rather, he stresses Joan’s ability to inspire those around her: “There is something about her” (VI: 89). Joan herself overtly rejects romance:

I will never take a husband…I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care about the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge, and of placing the big guns (VI: 120).

Shaw also emphatically de-romanticize his romance by demystifying his historical protagonist. Through a significant re-interpretation of Joan’s miracles and voices, Shaw demystifies the aura of supernatural power associated with Joan in historical documentation. Writing St. Joan from a more informed era of scientific reasoning (the 20th century), Shaw subjects medieval belief in “miracles” to a rational psychological scrutiny and creates humour from the discrepancies between faith and reason. Shaw’s preface implicit admits that Joan's voices were a problem for him as a 20th century author and also for 20th century audience:

I cannot believe, nor if I could, could I expect all my readers to believe, as Joan did, that three jocularly visible well dressed persons, named respectively Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret and saint Michael, came down from heaven and gave her certain instructions with which they were charged by God for her. Not that such a believe would be more improbable or fantastic than some modern beliefs which we all swallow; but there are fashions and family habits in belief, and it happens that, my fashion being Victorian and my family habit Protestant, I find myself unable to attach any such objective validity to the form of Joan’s visions (Plays, 27).

Clearly, Shaw’s heroine is not the Catholic saint in narratives and Victorian Joan

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plays, but the playwright's retrospective rendition of her, intended to make the historical Joan more intelligible to his 20th century audience who belong to a different historical context. Shaw’s main method of character transformation involves what Genette (1997) calls “remotivation”: the eliding of an old [religious] motive and its replacement with a new and more rational motive. Shaw is as much concerned with the ordinary in Joan’s physical appearance as he is with the super-powerful “will” within her. In stripping Joan of her miracles then, he credits her with something Shavian and rational, “the life force”. In his modern scepticism towards medieval belief in “voices”, “miracles” and “revelation”, Shaw strips Joan of the mysterious by providing a rather rational psychological account of her miracles. Shaw presents Joan’s supposed miracles as merely her commonsense. As Shaw asserts in the preface, her voices were merely “the dramatization by Joan’s imagination of the pressure upon her of the driving force behind evolution” (VI: 28). This interpretation appears in scene I: Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God. Robert: They come from your imagination. Joan: of course. That is how the messages of God comes to us (VI: 92).

Scene V also echoes this interpretation. When Joan tells Dunois that may be her voices are “only echoes of my own commonsense” (152). The historical records are however in no doubt that Joan possessed and believed in her voices, in her communication with the saints and in her divine mission from God at a much more literal level. Shaw even admits to entirely inventing some of the miracles. This is the case with the miracle that converted Baudricourt:

The apparent miracle which impressed him was the news of the Battle of Herrings. Joan learnt this from the mouth to mouth wireless of the peasantry. Joan was therefore able to tell him what has happened several days before the news reached him by the official routine of mounted messenger. This seemed to him miraculous. A much simpler form of miracle has been substituted in the play to save tedious and unnecessary explanations (VI: 212-213)

In giving a sceptical account of the miracle, the playwright humanizes his heroine, but interestingly too, he credits the medieval saint with something unorthodoxly religious and Shavian: the life force. Strikingly, in dealing with Joan’s miracles and voices in a rational fashion, Shaw obfuscates his own attitude towards miracles by his ambivalence and as such, renders Joan’s miracles less defensible in the Catholic sense.

In Scene II of the romance, Shaw arranges dramatically an illustration of Joan’s “supernatural” powers as emanating from her common sense. After Gilles de Rais (Bluebeard) has assumed the throne in King Charles’ place to test Joan’s ability to discern the true king, the possibility that she will accomplish something miraculous in discovering the Dauphin is dispelled in one of the most sceptical dialogues on miracles between La Trémouille and the Arch bishop of Rheims in which the later dismisses any assumption of the miraculous in Joan’s action with a commonsense explanation for why Joan’s success is obvious. The Arch bishop tells La Trémouille in advance that Joan will spot the substitution because “she will know what everybody in Chinon

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knows: that the Dauphin is the meanest-looking and worst-dressed figure in the court, and that the man with the blue beard is Gilles de Rais.” (VI: 105). Such an explanation imputes Joan’s choice to commonsense rather that spiritual power.

Also, when Joan meets Dunois in scene III and the wind changes direction, he bows to Joan in acknowledgment of her spiritual power. Yet, Shaw tacitly leaves us in doubt as to whether Dunois believes the natural occurrence is the effect of supernatural power. When in scene V Joan insists against Dunois’ advice to attack the English in Paris, Dunois’ warning leaves doubt as to whether he believes in Joan’s spirituality: “I tell you that your little hour of miracles is over. From this time on, he who plays the war game best will win―if the luck is on his side”. He later tells Joan, “God is no man’s daily drudge and no Maid’s either…For he has to be fair to your enemy too― don’t forget that (114-15). The implication is that her miracles are simply good luck.

These, the “voices”, the hens laying again, the identification of the Dauphin and the changing of the wind’s direction constitute the historical miracles of Joan that Shaw wishes to dramatize in the romance plot. In each scene Shaw shows the tension between history’s past “text” and his own subsequent memory of it by introducing speeches that cast doubts on the supernatural quality of the recorded events. The commonsense account of miracles as faith conjecturing tricks may all rightly be said to be Shaw’s (re)interpretations for, the people of the medieval age strongly believed in miracles and revelation. While Shaw claims to have allowed the medieval atmosphere to blow over his play as Shakespeare never did in his, he does not allow us to take Joan’s miracles at face value. Rather, he subjects the miracles attributed to her to rational explanation, insisting that they are the force of her imaginative will or mere coincidences. By interpreting miracles an imaginative will, Shaw puts these historical “facts” to the service of his own theory of creative evolution. He wishes to present Joan as a Shavian genius, an evolutionist and a World- Individual.

Romance in Shaw’s plot is a description of Joan’s rapid rise to power. Notice how Joan steadily imposes her will on social superiors: Metz, Polly, Bautricourt and all the soldiers in Beautricourts yard. She also breaks the resistance of the king, the archbishop and the king’s courtiers. In scene II, Joan’s success is all the more remarkable because it is the King with his selfish philistine instinct that must be inspired. The reversal of roles by which it is the adolescent girl who teaches or inspires her superiors makes Joan’s achievement all the more striking. It re-enforces Shaw’s point that the vital genius or agent of the life force and even the tragic protagonist might just be a person of anyone else’s status, even a Maid.

However, Shaw employs Joan’s miracles as romance elements in his plot, exploiting, not their religious dimensions, but their theatrical and spectacular effects. Joan’s miracles have a fundamental appeal to Shaw because they function to create entertainment for an audience accustomed to romance and thus help sustain interest in the subject. Shaw exploits the miracles to create emotional high points that punctuate the climactic ends of each of the first three scenes hóf his play. Each scene ends in an emotional high-point as the Maid inspires faith in those around her:

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Steward: Sir, sir- Robert: what now? Steward: the hens are laying like mad, sir. five dozen eggs! Robert: (stiffens convulsively; crosses himself; and forms with his pale lips the words): Christ

in heaven! (aloud but breathless) she did come from God (Sc. I).

The changing of the wind in scene III serves the same theatrical effect: Dunois: (looking at the pennon). The wind has changed (He crosses himself) God has spoken. (Kneeling and handing his baton to Joan) You command the king’s army. I am your soldier.

There is no doubt that this is theatrical ham intended to send shivers of excitement in the theatre. One cannot help laughing at the sudden conversion of Baudricourt and Dunois; at their naivety in imputing supernatural significance to otherwise natural events. Shaw is in part satirizing the “popular religious psychology” of the medieval age. The belief in miracles typifies the simplistic explanation of the phenomenal world by the medieval age. Shaw wants us to see how ironically such simplifications led to serious contradictory conclusions in the medieval times about such things as miracles, voices, revelations, all positive terms which could not be logically distinguished from their negative connotation: witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. After all, if propitious events can be attributed to providential designs, those unfavourable to institutional ideals and authorities could so easily be attributed to demonic sources like the Church authority’s charges of witchcraft and heresy against Joan in the tragic plot.

There is no doubt that Shaw’s comic-romance was only intended to provide the theatrical entertainment necessary to sustain interest in his high tragedy, which actually begins with the second movement of the plot. In his first reading of the play to Sybil Thorndike, who played Joan in the first production, Shaw, realizing how spell-bound Thorndike listened to the three opening scenes (the Romance) remarked: “That’s all flapdoodle up to there ― just ‘theatre’ to get you interested―now the play begins”,55 and Joan’s tragedy actually begins in the second movement.

V. 3. 2. High tragedy: subverting tragedy/the tragedy of subversion

V. 3. 2.1. The tragic Conflict and tragic flaw

In suppressing the romantic and mystical elements of Joan’s character in the romance, Shaw wished to focus on Joan’s ideas alone; on her significance as a World-individual and on her tragic fall. Hence, in scene IV, Joan’s personal history takes on

55 “It was a great experience hearing G.B.S. read Saint Joan for the first time, to me, Lewis

Casson and Cherry-Garrard (of the Antarctic). The first scene took one’s breath away by its audacity…Three scenes followed, crammed full of thought, of daring imagination, until the wind changed on the Loire and we all gasped. G.B.S. said: ‘That’s flapdoodle up to there- just ‘theatre’ to get you interested ― now the play begins” (C.f. Sybil Thorndike, “Thanks to Bernard Shaw”, repr. in Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, 1954:14).

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the dimensions of Hegel’s World-Historical-individual who intuits spectacularly new visions of society. In the generalized interpretation of Joan that her opponents provide in Sc. IV, Cauchon and Warwick postulate that Joan represents the new ideas of Protestantism and nationalism while the ignorant chaplain calls her “a rebel”. For Shaw, what St. Joan required to be history― and here, Shaw’s view of characterization foreshadows George Lukàc’s― was a genuinely “individual” hero in whom all the “characteristics factors of the time” must be thoroughly assimilated” (Lukàcs, 1926:118). For two authors Shaw admired― Hegel and Ibsen―, the figure of the rebel embodies the challenges of the future to the past. The audience of St. Joan must see Joan’s individualism in the light of Renaissance Reformation as protestant rebellion. Shaw had earlier linked heroic individualism with renaissance reformation when he talked of Protestantism as “that great self-assertion of the growing spirit of man” (Theatres, I: 130-1). The subtitle he suggested to his publisher for The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898, “the New Protestantism”, and a chapter of this prose work, “Siegfried as Protestant” reads like his interpretation of Joan’s self-assertiveness in terms of Protestantism and nationalism in this scene. For Shaw, Joan’s individualism symbolizes renaissance protestant revolt against the fundamental assumptions of the Middle Ages. While this is the spirit Joan represents in the play, neither Joan nor her medieval opponents saw her in the light of anachronistic ideas like Nationalism, Protestantism and feminism.

However, the most outstanding feature of the play as tragedy is Shaw balance re-presentation of his protagonist and antagonist in accordance with his understanding of history and the historical process. Joan’s antagonists are just as large as Joan. The result is that, like the romance movement, Shaw’s tragedy is characterized by subversions of the tragic conventions, especially the tragic conflict and tragic flaw. Shaw’s aim in St. Joan was to dramatize character as historical forces. While Joan is a world-individual or promethean evolutionist with an unconscious mission to destroy medieval civilization and usher a new vision of society, Shaw held that, the force of the “promethean hero” or Realist is measured as much by the strength of his/her individual will, as by the power or nature of the obstacles confronting him/her. Moreover, in his philosophy of history (creative evolution), change is just as necessary as the ideals that block change. Change is important for evolution as ideals are important for law and order to reign. Faced with this contradiction, Shaw dramatizes his heroine and villains with fairness as impersonal historical forces in collusion. His sympathy is equally divided to both sides in the conflict and in this ambivalence, Shaw entirely deconstructs the traditional notion of hero and villain in tragedy.

Scene IV can all rightly be called the scene of “tragic intrigue” against the tragic protagonist as its shows us important medieval men uniting their forces to unseat the Maid from power: “Well, if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist” conclude Warwick and Cauchon. But uniquely, Shaw refuses to present Joan’s historical opponents as villains or Joan as solely a positive force. Shaw’s attitude toward his heroine and villains is quite ambiguous. While Joan’s rebellion towards the

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institutions of the medieval ages represents a positive step towards evolution, Shaw was not interested in showing his heroine in an exclusively positive light. A production of St. Joan must not allow the spectators to see Joan only as a positive force, but also as a heedless destructive force confronting a civilization that has values in spite of its blindness and rigidity. The middle ages must die Shaw's ambivalent characterization insinuates, but the epoch also has its dignity and beauty; the new epoch must be born, but like the old epoch that it destroys, it also has its evils. Though idealistic, Joan’s opponents are presented as trouble shooters in conformity with their roles as guardians of the medieval institutions.

In scene IV, Cauchon warns of “blood, of fury, of devastation”, and predicts that “the world would perish in a welter of war” if everyone sets his/her individual judgment against authority (VI: 135, 139-40). Shaw does not in any way intend Cauchon’s view of Joan as Protestant, Nationalist or, his argument for why Joan should be stopped as ironic. Strikingly, Shaw evokes sympathy for his historical villains by endowing them with a sincerity of heart and by allowing them to eloquently and rationally support their arguments for why Joan must be stopped with analogies in contemporary European wars. Cauchon’s prediction of social disintegration in the face of Joan’s fanatic nationalism and protestant challenge to authority allows the audience to genuinely recall the disasters effects of contemporary wars. Cauchon’s apocalyptic vision embodies Shaw’s animosity for the disastrous effects of W.W.I on human civilization and is thus intended to justify Joan’s villains in the eyes of the audience.

In fact, to read or watch St. Joan without having in mind the nationalist territorial disputes that plagued Europe in the early 20th century is to miss the sincerity of his villains and the ironic perspectives of his characterization of both protagonist and antagonists in this tragedy. In setting his play in “The Hundred years War” and in asserting that the medieval Joan represents Protestantism and Nationalism, Shaw was evoking memory of recent wars in Europe. The Irish national struggle and the first World War were the burning issues in British politics at the time. These wars were caused by similar territorial issues that caused “the Hundred Years war” and in evoking them, Shaw wants his audience to draw the analogy between this past history and contemporary events. Cauchon’s loud fear of an apocalypse makes the analogy.

Shaw’s preface cites Sir Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who was hanged as a traitor by the British in 1916 and Patrick Pearse who was executed following the Easter uprising as contemporary equivalences of Joan. It also pays tribute to Edith Cavell, the English nurse who was shot by the Germans in Belgium during W.W I for sheltering allied soldiers. The “hundred Years War” suggests an analogy for Shaw, with the conflicts over political independence and autonomous government in Ireland and during W. W. I. Cauchon’s argument allows the audience to understand the implication of Joan’s Nationalism and Protestantism against the background of a full recollection of the consequences of these events which they have just recently experienced. A full response to the play and, particularly to Cauchon’s fear of chaos in sc. iv involves an awareness that the play was written just five years after W.W. I and that this war was

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the greatest disillusioning experience for Shaw. Cauchon’s fear of the chaos that Joan represents encodes Shaw’s own wartime experience of W.W. I as recorded in his prose writings. In other words, Shaw’s war experience inevitably provide another socio-historical context for play.

At the outbreak of the war, Shaw, in a letter to his German translator, Trebitsch exclaimed with despair, “what a hideous situation civilization tearing itself to pieces...can absurdity go further?” (Letters, III: 243). In 1914, as war fever, jingoism, and anti-German feeling mounted in Britain, as massive campaigns of voluntary recruitment got on the way, as women were exhorted to encourage their sons to serve king and country and, as thousands of young men were already being slaughtered at the war front, Shaw again wrote “Common sense about the war”, an essay that went completely against the grain of national mood and sentiment and thus provoked hostility towards Shaw from all quarters of the British public. Shaw’s essay accused the British public and government of fanatic exultation to war. In his 1919 preface to Heartbreak House he asserts that, W.W.I was cause by nationalist fanaticism and that during the war, “there was a frivolous exultation in death for its own sake which was at bottom, an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage deaths (V: 33). As a character in Shaw’s Geneva states, “The organisation of nations is the organization of World War” (VIII: 83). Nationalism and the frivolous exultation in death that Shaw talks of is seen in the play in Joan’s constant urge that the French army sacrifice life for country or “give up their lives out of their own hand... when they go into battle...” for France (V: 149). The drift of the world into a war of “civilization tearing itself into pieces” and the fanaticism of war expressed by Shaw above have a major influence on the mood and foreboding expressed in Cauchon’s argument against Joan’s Nationalism and Protestantism in sc. IV. His warnings of the horrors of war supply an analogy to Joan’s nationalism and Protestantism and his argument is authenticated by the audience whose fresh memory of the disastrous effects of W.W.I cannot allow them to see Joan activities as entirely beneficial. With the “holy wars” of the Reformation and counter-Reformation; with the Irish nationalist wars to look back on, not to mention the nationalist conflicts which had culminated in Shaw’s day in World War I, the interpretation of Joan as Proto-Protestant and Proto-nationalist is no doubt intended to give the audience a pause. Like the “Hundred Years War”, W.W.I was a war fought over territorial issues.

In various ways, Shaw requests that the audience relate Joan to these territorial wars in order to perceive the sincerity of Cauchon’s endeavours to stop Joan. The national and territorial issues that Joan represents create the link between the “Hundred Years War” and the post-medieval developments in Europe. Shaw's preface discusses Joan’s fighting strategies in terms of Napoleonic warfare and in the play, Joan herself repeatedly ridicules the ancient fighting strategies of the medieval French army. Her modern warfare also creates the link in that, although the play is set in the “Hundred Years War”, Joan’s modern methods of warfare are in the service of nationalist objectives. And Joan herself is presented as the incarnation of that spirit of

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Nationalism that led to World War I and as a symbol of the modern warfare that made the horrors of the 1914-18 possible. Such a view grants integrity to Cauchon’s fear of an apocalypse. Yet, we are also made to feel that the attitude of Cauchon and Warwick, however understandable, is a reactionary (Idealist) one and that the spirit of Joan, however terrible its consequences, must be supported against them.

Shaw thus allows us to see Joan’s ideas as progressive and yet as progressive ideas that carry with them the threat of international anarchy. He allows us as well to see her opponents as forces of stability or peace yet, as stability that ties down progress and development. This Shavian impartiality or ambivalence toward his protagonist and antagonist has far-reaching effects on the tragic genre in which Shaw casts his play and indeed, has been a source of worry to many genre critics of St. Joan.

In his prefatory commentary on the play, Shaw not only claims to have cast his play in the classic tragic mould. In the cathedral scene (Sc. V), he reiterates his tragic label by choosing the archbishop of Rheims, a man of classical learning to declare his play a classical tragedy―“the old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris (VI: 146)― in which the down fall of the hero is the inevitable outcome of overwhelming pride and ambition which offends the gods. The archbishop thus establishes the heroine as a tragic protagonist in the Aristotelian or classical sense. Shaw could not have put the lengthy speech on tragedy in the archbishop’s mouth or used Aristotle’s word, “hubris” unintentionally or without intending to communicate something generic by it. He wanted to draw critical attention to his own definition of tragic conflict as manifest in the dramatic plot of St. Joan and indeed, the archbishop’s statement has drawn criticism of the play’s tragic impetus.

Critics were quick to take the archbishop’s assertion that Joan is hubristic56 as starting point for dismissing St. Joan as tragedy. Can a Saint be a tragic protagonist? Does the play depict Joan’s tragic execution as the result of a tragic flaw as prophesied by the archbishop? What is Joan’s tragic flaw? Attempts to judge the plays by the standards of classical tragedy have not only led to critical dismissals of its tragic status, but also of Shaw as tragic dramatists. In wish to argue here that Joan’s destiny is not wrecked by a tragic flaw, by hubris as the archbishop statement imply. Shaw no doubt fails to create a tragic protagonist along Aristotelian ideas of a tragic hero because he never establishes the responsibility of Joan’s fall as primarily her own, but this does no as his most vocal critic, Sylvan Barnet claims, disqualify his play as tragedy. Rather, Shaw’s ambivalence is one aspect that qualifies the play as modern tragedy.

The most vocal of Shaw’s critics so far was Sylvan Barnet (1956) who not only claims that Joan fails as tragic protagonists, but emphatically asserts that Shaw was “incapable of writing tragedy” because he subscribes to an essentially optimistic or “teleological principle, believing that the universe is not a chaos of discrete phenomena but an evolving purposeful organism.... (889). Like many other critics,

56 One remembers here too, the Inquisitor’s stern warning in the trial scene (sc. vi): “This is

not the time for vanity Joan. You stand in great peril”.

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Barnet’s denial of the tragic status of St Joan is based on a “misreading” that imputes on Shaw’s creative evolution or life force, an entirely optimistic vision of life animus to tragedy. According to Barnet, Shaw’s teleological philosophy leads him to present his protagonist as merely a tool in the hands of external supernatural forces.

The fact that Shaw calls his tragic protagonist a saint and presents her as governed by an outward or external force working in her (I think), has nothing to do with her failure as a tragic protagonist. On the contrary, some “divinity that shapes our ends” as Shakespeare calls it, is not adverse to tragedy. Rather, it is the prime requisites of classical tragedy. Shaw’s representation of Joan in the grip of the life force should be seen as falling in line with the demands of classic tragedy. Joan would only fail as a tragic protagonist if she were presented as Barnet claims, as an agent wholly in the hands of supernatural forces.57 Shaw does not base his conception of the Maid on Christian notions of sainthood.58 And, he does not depict Joan as a perfectly virtuous person (a saint) whom Aristotle thought unsatisfactory as tragic protagonist. Contrary to Barnet, Shaw intends us to feel that although some extra-personal force (the life force) was urging Joan on, so far as her actions and choices were concerned, she was a free agent. There was no doubt something extra-personal urging Joan to do that which must be done to advance her society. This force surging through her influenced her choices and actions, but never really precludes them. Nothing could be more antagonistic to Shaw’s Creative evolution than the proposition that the individual cannot will his destiny to a considerable extent. Shaw’s Fabianism, his repudiation of Darwin’s determinism; his articulation of Lamarck’s vitalist evolution, his criticism of Shakespeare’s pessimism and his adamant defence of the individual will, communicate an adversity to any interpretation of human action as entirely predestined.

By implication then, Shaw’s heroine, being in communion with some actual or imaginary forces (the life force or her instinctive imagination) as Barnet argues, does not in any way diminish her standing as a tragic protagonist. In classical, Renaissance and Elizabeth tragedy, the noting of omens and signs, the consultation of oracles and gods, the heeding to admonitions, all remained major elements of tragedy and are indeed, the well known material of Greek tragedy. Like Hamlet or Oedipus, driven to find the unknown murderer, or like Macbeth driven to find out the truth about the witches’ prophesies, Joan is driven by the life force (or if you like, fate) to accomplish

57 There is no evidence in Shaw's teleological philosophy of Creative evolution that the life

force has a clear understanding of its intention or that it can perfectly perform what it wishes to do. Certain conclusions adverse to Shaw's creed may be drawn from too summary an account of creative evolution. One is that there is no freedom of choice for man. This is the mistake Barnet makes by his argument that Joan is merely a tool in the hands of forces she cannot control, a view, which dismisses her as a tragic heroine.

58 Nowhere does Shaw indicate that he is dealing with a saint in the catholic sense. His preface asks that Joan’s “voices” be considered only “technically” supernatural, as productions of her imagination (xviv), since “they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton” (xv).

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her heroic mission of liberating her country from bondage and while hers takes the form of voices, these spiritual forces do not preclude her choices and actions. No one has yet claimed that the supernatural forces that in part control the heroes of Shakespearean tragedies (e.g., the ghost of Prince Hamlet's father) preclude their actions and choices as human beings and none has denied them the status of tragic protagonists. It is the choices and actions taken by these not yet perfect characters that leads to their deaths; choices made in the shadow of urgings and hovering fate, and Shaw’s Joan makes choices and takes decisions freely in the exaltation of what she thinks is right in the light of her imagination against institutional ideologies.

What distinguishes the play as tragedy is the nature of his conflict. The main thrust of Shaw’s drama is socio-political and, the main perspective of St. Joan as a history play is the forces of Joan’s Nationalism and Protestantism that are pitted against the repressive socio-cultural and political institutions (idealisms) of the medieval age, forces that stay the advance of civilization. Shaw presents neither Joan nor her antagonists as individuals but as impersonal historical forces in conflict, both profoundly human, both eminently necessary. He therefore does not create his protagonist and antagonists long Aristotelian lines. Faced with impartially dramatizing characters as historical forces, Shaw’s ambivalence renders the tragic flaw superfluous.

Commenting on the tragedy, Myers (1956:101) asserts that, “the two sides of everything” [is] “…the well-known material of modern tragedy, which must end, if the artist fails to see the pattern of justice in ‘the two sides of everything’…on a note of futility and hopelessness”. Eric Bentley (1947:116) illustrates this view in Shaw’s play when he asserts that “in St. Joan, Shaw essays what in his discussion of Man and Superman he called a tragic conflict― that is, an irreconcilable conflict” or, “the clash of the irresistible force of Joan’s genius meeting the immovable object of social order”.

In such a conflict, the tragic flaw simply becomes a superfluous because Shaw’s sympathies are equally divided and this ambivalence reflects his tragicomic vision of the historical design. The contradictory movement of the historical design accentuates the conflict between the need for change (evolution) on the one hand, and the need to stability and order (institutions or ideals) on the other. Shaw polemically puts this tragicomic perspective of history in the preface to St. Joan thus, “The law of God is the law of evolution and the figure of the rebel embodies the challenges of the future to the present” and, “although all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of change” (VI: 73). The implication for history is that, the frequent frustration of “progressive” saints (evolutionists) like Joan entails as a corollary, the temporary fulfilment of some of mankind’s more conservative, less aspiring, but by no means less human and necessary aims: social stability or the rule of law and order.

In accordance with this dialectical understanding of history, Shaw renders the tragic flaw irrelevant. His preface claims that Joan was burnt “by normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness”. Her death resulted from one of those “pious murders” and this inherent contradiction “brings an element of comedy into the

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tragedy: the angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers” (52). In this tragicomic philosophy of history, Shaw redefines tragedy.

For Shaw, tragedy is not caused by a tragic flaw and is not even a conflict between right and wrong, but between two rights because, “the villain is just as conscientious as the hero, if not more so” or to put it another way, “there are no heroes and villains”. In this “conflict of unsettled ideals”, the villains in St. Joan are as innocent, convincing and convinced of their sense of right as the heroine is, and this sense of their own innocence makes their crime all the more tragic. Thus as the Preface to adds,

It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find they must do and will do in spite of their intentions that really concern us. It is, I repeat, what normally innocent people do that concerns us; and if Joan had not been burned by normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness, her death at their hands would have no more significance than the Tokyo earthquake, which burnt a great many maidens. The tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murderers; and the contradiction at once brings an element of comedy in the tragedy (Prefaces, 630).

It is the unconscious evils to life that men do with the full backing of institutional ideals; in the full conviction of doing the right thing and with the best intention that are most pathetic and tragic for Shaw. In this light, the archbishop’s statement becomes ironic. He sees a flaw where there is none. The flaw is neither Joan’s nor that of her antagonists who, as representatives of society’s ideals are only audience-surrogates. They are personifications of man’s institutional ideals. The flaw is thus that of the audience who holds the ideals that the authorities defend. The tragedy is thus the tragedy of mankind’s enslavement to ideals. Martz (1955) spots the irony in the archbishop’s claim that Joan is hubristic. Cautiously placing the play on the threshold of modern tragedy he asserts, St. Joan “hangs by its hands on the very rim of tragedy”:

Thus Joan’s apparent resemblance to the Aristotelian hero: her extreme self- confidence, her brashness, her appearance of rash impetuosity- all this become in the end a piece of Shavian irony, for her only real error in the play is the one point where her superb self-confidence breaks down in the panic of recantation. And so the hubris is not Joan’s but everyone’s (Martz, 1955:160)

Following from his tragicomic vision of history defined above, Shaw deconstructs the traditional hero/villain dichotomy in tragedy and in Victorian Joan melodramas.

V.3.2.2. Deconstructing Hero/Villain Dichotomy

Shaw argued throughout his career that the central source of melodrama in Victorian and Shakespearean histories was the division of characters into heroes/ villains or good and bad characters. Shaw abhorred melodrama’s tendency to substitute villains and heroes for what he called, “genuine human characters” or “genuine natural history”. Ridiculing these melodramatic forms of characterization he asserts,

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Men are not real mean to us; they are heroes and villains, respectable persons and criminals. Their qualities are virtues and vices, the natural laws that govern them are gods and devils; their destinies are rewards and expiations; their conditions are innocence and guilt―there is no end to the amazing transubstantiations and childish imaging which delight and terrify us because we have not grown up enough to be capable of genuine natural history. And then people come to you with their heads full of these figments, which they call, if you please, the ‘World’ and ask you what is the meaning of them. The answer is that they have not even an existence, much less a meaning (Non Dramatic, 454).

In the preface to St. Joan, Shaw also claims that all prior Joan histories were based on “the melodramatic legend of the wicked bishop and the entrapped maiden” (124). In St. Joan, he adds, “there are no villains” (VI: 74). Contrary to his contemporaries who vilified Joan’s historical opponents, Shaw argues that, if Joan’s executioners were really cheap and vicious judges or politicians, her story had best been left alone as a cheap melodrama. If there is drama and history in it, it lies in the collision of two historical forces both, profoundly human, eminently defensible and perfectly necessary. Thus, when in the prefatory section entitled, “tragedy, not melodrama” he holds up St. Joan for comparison, he calls it high tragedy and defends the label only in the sense that the play is not constructed on the melodramatic formula of heroes/ villains: “The writer of high tragedy and comedy, aiming at the innermost attainable truth, must need flatter Cauchon nearly as much as the melodramatist vilifies him” (VI: 73). Elsewhere he adds, “To me, it is not the victory of any one of them over the others that will bring peace and the reign of the Saints in the Kingdom of God, but their fruitful interaction in a costly but noble state of tension” (VI: 55).

Having rejected an “absolutely right point of view” in drama in general and on historical subjects in particular as well as assuming “fullest responsibility for the opinions of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant”, Shaw shows Joan and her antagonists as credible human being. Warwick as representatives of the English feudal system; de Stogumber as representative of British imperialism, Cauchon and the Inquisition as symbols of church authority, are all not presented as in historical melodrama or Shakespearean tragedies as villains, but as “judicious murderers” or genuine defenders of the institutional ideologies that they stand for and must protect. The “tent scene” for instance is characterized by a remarkable detachment in the presentation of conflicting arguments by which Shaw credits the motives and motivations of Joan’s opponents by means of an illuminating historicity of the institutions and ideologies they represent. The motives of Cauchon and Warwick are quite credible even if wrong, and Joan’s execution is performed out of a profound conviction of the necessity to preserve the state.

When Shaw’s Cauchon meets Warwick, it is to discuss Joan’s fate in a surprisingly rational, humane and un-melodramatic way. To their greatest credit, they refuse to betray their professional consciousness and Shaw allows the fairness of their actions to be seen against the background of the institutions that they must defend for the sake of social stability. Neither Joan nor her opponents harbour personal grievances against

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each other. Rather, their grievances are social concerns. Cauchon and Warwick have nothing personal against the protagonist, except their fear of social and political instability. Cauchon’s consciousness of his role as spiritual leader charged with the responsibility of saving souls is the greatest Shavian challenge to the historical facts of Joan’s history. In spite of his strong conviction that Joan is an anarchist, a heretic, and a social danger, Cauchon emphasizes the dangers of neglecting the spiritual needs of his opponent. As a product of the dominant medieval institution or ideology (the church), he vows to “uphold the justice of the Church” and to “strive to the utmost”, not for Joan’s execution but for the “salvation” of her soul and this need stems from his profound conviction that the heroine is bewitched. Only when he fails to obtain a recantation from Joan does he find it necessary to execute her in order to curb further instability. Against Warwick’s later pressures, Cauchon refuses to act the stooge for the English: “I am no mere political bishop: my faith is to me what your honor is to you; and if there be a mere loophole through which this baptized child of God can creep to her salvation, I shall guide her to it”, he tells Warwick (VI: 132). Warwick’s worries are also not personal but social: the destabilising effects of Joan’s activities on the feudal economy. He promises to “spare her” if she desists from her activities.

In all precedent Joan histories, her opponents are either dissolute French courtiers envious of Joan’s favour with king Charles (e.g. La Tremouille, Flavy, and Des Chartes in MacKaye’s version and L'Oislleurs in Taylor’s) or, power hungry clerics like the Bishop of Winchester and Pierre Cauchon. Great emphasis is laid on Cauchon’s machination and the prelate is vilified in all Joan histories as an emblem of melodramatic cruelty and sadism. In Henderson’s Joan of Arc, we find Cauchon asking his henchman, Loysoteur about Joan’s forced confession in the manner of a melodramatic sadist: Cauchon: Did she in your presence sign the parchment? Loysoteur: (suavely) She did-(with point)-or something like it. Cauchon: (with point also) substantially the same, in fact-eh?

Did she know and understand of what she was required to sign? Loysoteaur: She cannot read or write, but I made her understand and she signed. Cauchon: Loysoteur, you are a gem!59

Mark Twain’s characterizes the cleric as “born a devil”, and Cauchon’s unnatural cruelty as he joyfully hallucinates over Joan’s eventual execution is exemplary:

Cauchon raged and cursed over his defeat and his impotence during the seven days; then he conceived a new scheme…The picture of Joan rose before me stretched upon the rack, her feet tied to one end of it, her wrists to the other, and those red giants turning the windlass and pulling her limbs out of their sockets (224).

Even Murray’s transcript, the historical source of Shaw’s play took the melodramatic view in asserting that, “the worst of these servile churchmen was the

59 The manuscript of Henderson’s Joan of Arc, is located in the Lord Chamberlain’s

Collection, British Library, MS. 53,607L.

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wretched Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon. Many other prelates were Caesar’s friends, but he sits exalted in solitary infamy” (xv).

Unlike any history play on the Victorian stage in general (e.g., ‘Twixt Axe and Crown, Jane Shore, The Armada, Becket), and all tragic histories since Shakespeare, Shaw’s St. Joan circumvent the melodramatic excesses of dramatic and narrative histories on Joan by means of a humanizing characterization of her opponents. His humane re-presentation of Joan’s villains constitutes the first real attempt on the English stage to rationalize the motives of melodramatic villains.

V. 3.3. Characterization in the interface of “facts” and imagination

Shaw claims to strive for “historical truth” or truth of interpretation in history. In doing so, he makes no secret of his imagination intervening in Joan’s history. In his preface he asserts that he has “flattered the character of Cauchon, virtually invent[ed] the character of the Inquisition, who is a very shadowy figure in the historical accounts of the trial” and adds that, “such are the inevitable flatteries of tragedy” (VI: 74). Regarding this reinvention of historical characters, Shaw measures himself with Shakespeare, not as obtrusively and aggressively as in Caesar and Cleopatra, but without diffidence either. As for his procedure in conceiving the characters he asserts,

I really knew no more about these men and their circle than Shakespeare knew about Falconbridge and Duke of Austria or about Macbeth and Macduff. In view of the things they did in history, and have to do in this play, I can only invent appropriate characters for them in Shakespeare’s manner (VI: 70)

But he goes on to claim that he was in a position to understand the medieval period as Shakespeare, living still close to it in time never could. That understanding was the understanding of the current significance of historical events, which he claims Shakespeare never attempted. The historical significance or the historical truth of Joan’s history lies in the modern ideas that his medieval characters express and which can only be said to be Shaw’s retrospective interpretation of Joan’s history. Emphasizing the role of his imagination in Joan’s history, Shaw states that,

as far as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers of divination as I possess, the things I represent these three exponents of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing. And beyond this, neither drama nor history can go in my hands (VI: 73-4).

Shaw’s procedure of character creation, especially in sc. iv illuminates the assertion by White (1978: 62) that in history writing,

The [“facts” or]events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motif repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like-in short, all the techniques that they would usually expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play.

Most documentations on Joan’s trial hold that, as supporter of the English, Cauchon

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was under pressure to convict Joan at any cost. To this extent he was at least bias or villainous. But there is also anecdotal evidence in the documents on which Shaw draws to refute the accusation of villainy levied against Joan’s opponents. Shaw highlights the marginal “facts” in his historical source while suppressing the expressly stated “facts” of Murray’s transcript. In so doing, his play emerges as the product of critical reading and objective interpretation (“veracity”) rather than factual accounting.

Murray transcript of the trial records that Joan’s trial lasted over three months. It also includes clauses to the effect that, Cauchon occasionally exalted Joan to repent. While Shaw’s contemporaries might have seen this as evidence of the prelate role in pressurizing Joan and thus as proof of his bias and corruption, Shaw probably saw these repeated exaltations to repentance as perfectly in accord with Cauchon’s role as an anointed in an age of great spiritualism. He thus reinterpreted this as evidence of Cauchon’s professional consciousness rather than villainy. Hence, overlooking the expressly stated documentary “facts” of malice and villainy, Shaw “translated” the suppressed or marginal “facts” of the transcript with full force and fairness in order to justify the actions of Joan’s enemies. It is therefore not surprising that while he consciously deviated from the main historical “facts”, Shaw claimed closeness to “historical truth” and even to historical “facts”.

Probably, Shaw also found clues for (re)interpreting Joan as Pro-Nationalist and Pro-protestant from Murray (1902:82-86). The transcript of the trail records that, when Joan was asked: “Will you submit your actions and words to the decision of the Church”?, her reply was, “My words and deeds are all in God’s hands: in all I wait upon him”. Elsewhere Joan was asked: “Will you refer yourself to the decision of the Church?” and she replied: “I refer myself to God who sent me, to our Lady, and to all the saints in Paradise. And in my opinion it is all one. God and the Church; and one should make no difficulty about it”. Shaw probably inferred from her responds that Joan was unwilling to accept any authority that denied the truth of her personal inspiration as coming from God. He thus interprets her resistance to church authority as “Protestantism”. Protestantism is therefore implied in Murray’s trial transcript, since Joan allegedly refused to concede to the Church as a higher authority to her voices, although Shaw also “translates” Protestantism as “the life force”.

The apparent ambiguities running through Murray’s trail transcript are effectively put to dramatic use in Shaw’s re-presentation of historical characters. Purists or 19th century academic historians may object to Shaw’s view of the historical figures above with good cause. It was argued that Shaw’s re-presentation is not “truth” because such fairness does not adhere to the historical “facts” of the characters, but purists may be missing a greater truth of Shaw’s history since for him, involvement in details and facts, the preoccupation of the 19th century historian can so frequently obscure the underlying principles of truth, which is impartiality. For Shaw, while Cauchon may have played the role of villain in Joan’s execution, placing him in the category of villain distorts the cleric because it is no doubt at odds with both Cauchon’s estimate of himself and of his role as representative of the religious institution, especially in the

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medieval context. Hence such a view as villain stereotypes the cleric in a melodramatic pattern which emotionally obscures his historical position as defender of the church. To Shaw, historical characters in historical drama must be presented both as individuals and as types. Cauchon must be presented as an individual and an institution, not melodramatized. In so doing, Shaw makes good his claim that St. Joan was written to correct the many melodramas born out of frantic efforts to represent the “facts” of narrative history on stage rather than interpret them. His approach contrasts Tom Taylor’s for instance who declared that his Jeanne D’ Arc (1871) is the “only treatment in play or poem”, of Joan’s life “in which the facts of history have been, in all important particulars adhered to” (C.f. Tom Taylor, 1877: 61). While such claims to facts were the norm, Shaw was firing at this realistic historiography:

They [the standard works of reference on Saint Joan’s life] give accurately enough the facts… but they all break down on the melodramatic legend of the wicked bishop and the entrapped maiden and the rest of it. It would be far less misleading if they were wrong as to the facts and right on their view of the facts ( II:66).

The trial scene (Sc. VI) of St. Joan also illustrates Shaw’s characteristic suppression of certain “facts” in Murray’s transcript. Murray’s transcript of the trial contains occasional references by the inquisition to the possibility of an appeal to the pope. It also posits that Joan’s trial took about three months. From the hint of an appeal and the duration of the trial, Shaw probably inferred that Joan was judiciously examined and exhaustively listened to. Hence, he reinterprets the Inquisition’s role with fairness. It is thus, not surprising that while he highlights inferred “facts” and consciously suppressed the expressed “facts” of the historical records, Shaw still claimed closeness to “historical truth” and to “facts”.

There are other aspects of the trial that Shaw could not engage imaginatively because they did not help his reinterpretation of the saint as an evolutionist. Consequently, Shaw omits such “facts” in his representation. One of the most poignant features of the trial transcript is Joan’s repeated plea to be allowed to hear mass, a plea that was repeatedly turned down except on condition that she abandons her masculine dress. Although Shaw alludes so much to her devotedness in the preface, this very Catholic need to participate in the ritual of mass did not appeal to Shaw who emphasized the individual will in opposition to the Christian belief in God as the driving force behind creative evolution. The kind of religious devotion that Shaw stresses in Joan has nothing Catholic in it. Creative evolution perceives Protestantism in all its forms (political and socio-cultural) as religious. Having decided to present Joan as a protestant rebel, her participation in mass did not help this interpretation and so could not therefore be made part of her history in Shaw’s play. Joan's certainty about her faith was no doubt central to Shaw as it was to Joan herself and to 19th century dramatists of her history. While her historians represented her as a fervent Catholic, Shaw saw Joan’s religiousness in her rebellion against church and state. In suppressing her requests for mass and in stripping her of any miraculous powers in the

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catholic sense, Shaw’s imagination did get out to Joan and out of the catholic mould. He dramatized something extraordinary and unorthodox in her life, the life force.

V.3.4. Victorian Pictorial historiography and Shaw’s Anachronism

As the use of heroes and villain or romantic love interest invariable reduced 19th century histories to melodrama in Shaw’s view, so too did the pictorial convention, which was at the heart of Victorian historiography in drama. Analogous to his opposition to melodrama, Shaw reviled the inordinate emphasis on pictorial realism as a sterile celebration of a remote past for its own sake. Reviewing the first production of St. Joan however, Brown (1924:349) maintains that those who saw the playbills thought Shaw had conceded to the popular taste for pictorial realism:

The true disciples [of Shaw] must be expecting to visit a very bad play of which so much has been said....The fact that she [Joan] fears no foe in shining amour has tricked the injudicious romantics into believing that Mr. Shaw has capitulated to the British theatre and given us the usual Victorian twaddling romantic heroine.

The pictorial trappings in St. Joan constitute part of Shaw’s characteristic method of raising and frustrating generic expectations.

Huizinga Johan (1959:214-15) however, holds a contrary opinion of the play. Review its first production, he attributed its popularity and success to its pictorial quality and saw this pictorial quality as most respected in scene IV. He praised Charles Rickett, the 1924 producer of the play for his “realistic design”: “I must admit that I have never seen a more convincing historical staging than this work of Ricketts. I have in mind in particular the first court entry and the tent scene….” Huizinga saw the New Theatre production as having adhered to the historiographic convention of the Victorian theatre which demanded historical accuracy in the costumes of characters and elaborate stage design in historical drama.

The first movement of the play is marked by the conspicuous absence of these clumsy stage apparatuses and elaborate spectacle. But the height of Shaw’s subversion of the pictorial convention in the first movement is scene III. Here, he subverts the convention where it was most respected. A critic of theatre, Shaw undoubtedly knew that the Orleans scene in which Joan makes her climatic victory was the sensational climax to which all other scenes and actions in Victorian historical drama led up to. The scene was constructed of a few lines of dialogue while producers employed elaborate stage manoeuvres to paint intricately detailed and enormous stage pictures of war and victory. In Taylor’s Jeanne D’ Arc for instance, a fierce battle dominates the scene, cannons on wheeled carriages and crossbowmen continuously fire from the wings and French troops raise ladders against the towers of Tourelles. Finally, Joan appears on horseback to proclaim victory and to be greeted with loud cheers. The devaluation of this tradition in Shaw’s play is marked by the heroine’s responds to Dunois’s invitation in scene V to go out and greet the crowd eager to see her. Joan’s

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tells him she is afraid of crowds, a response that points to Shaw’s subversion of the pictorial convention.

Shaw’s victory scene does not accede to the sensational climactic spot in the genre or to its pictorial convention. After Joan’s rise to influence in scenes II of the Romance, the Victorian audience of military melodrama expects real action on the battle field as she moves towards Orleans. Instead Shaw’s scene III (the battle scene) is an anti-climax in which dialogue or talk substitutes action. In almost all Victorian history plays, the spectacular siege of Orleans was the lengthiest scene. In contrast, Shaw’s Orleans scene is the shortest and consists entirely of dialogue between Dunois, his page and Joan. No heroic English soldier appears fighting valiantly for his country in a show of patriotism. Action is completely kept off stage, and in place of the pictorial realism the scene deserves, it is the cheers of the single Page that end the scene. His lone cheers underscore the absence in St Joan of the “big ending” of Joan histories; an ending marked by flag waving and laud cheering from crowds.

Huizinga’s appreciation of the play’s pictorial quality in scene IV was probably inspired by the fact that an actor was selected to play Warwick whose facial type has “clearly been copied from the gilded bronze likeness on the Earl’s tomb at Warwick” (C.f. Weintraub, 1973:62). It does not matter whether we agree with Huizinga or with Desmond McCarthy (1951:163) who also insists that Warwick is “purely an eighteenth century nobleman”. True, the characters of scene four are well contextextualized by the medieval consumes, but Shaw carefully strips the pictorial trappings of the scene through the anachronistic language of his characters.

The characters do not speak like medieval people. Their language clearly subverts the pictorial in scene IV. In place of the pictorial convention, Shaw substitutes language as a means of historicizing periods or systems. Neither Shaw nor Brecht is concerned with the past as distant and profoundly different from the present, and through Shaw’s use of anachronism in St. Joan, Joan’s personal history takes on the life of Hegel’s World-Historical-individual. The “tent scene” shows Shaw’s imagination reaching out to the past and authenticating it to 20th century audience through the capacity of his characters to imaginatively remember the past in terms of current events. The characters inhabit a milieu that is identifiably not theirs as the principles of “Protestantism” and “Nationalism” were not articulated in any such manner in the 15th century. Shaw’s medieval characters speak with foreknowledge of contemporary political issues despite their costumes. In Shaw’s retrospective memory of this medieval history, these issues symbolize current ideas in Joan’s spirit as he saw them, and his anachronism helps objectify her actual influence on her environment to Shaw’s 20th century audience in whose context these ideas were political realities.

Hence, however old the costumes of scene IV, the consciousness of the wearers remain quite modern. The sense of genuine cultural “otherness” affecting ways of thought and even the constitution of the mind in remote periods is minimized as Cauchon and Warwick talk anachronistically with foreknowledge of contemporary history. Shaw thus attaches famous medieval names and costumes to characters whose

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real essence is the familiar and ordinary. In making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, he anticipates Brecht’s theatre of alienation.

Shaw’s aim as a dramatic historian was in part, the pedagogical one of educating his audience by alienating them: “the whole value of Joan to us is how you can bring her circumstances into contact with our life and our circumstances” (VI: 226-7, 229).The playwright attains this by comparing the medieval system to the 20th century with quite mortifying effects on his audience who hold the Victorian positivist view of their civilization that Shaw’s play debunks. His preface emphasizes that, Joan’s story can only be told properly by someone sympathetic to the Middle Ages and free from the 19th century positivist thinking. Her historian “must understand the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire much more intimately than our Whig historians have ever understood them” (VI: 20, 44). That understanding is expressed through anachronism.

The anachronistically modern tone of the characters levels the medieval period and 20th century and thus, shows Shaw’s resistance to Victorian perception of the natural direction of history as forward and upward. In his preface, Shaw warns his audience,

If you...are in the habit of ridiculing your aunt for wearing ‘medieval clothes’, meaning those in vogue in the eighteen-nineties, and are quite convinced that the world has progressed enormously, both morally and mechanically since Joan’s time, then you will never understand why Joan was burnt, much less feel that you might have voted for burning her yourself if you had been a member of the court that tried her... (VI: 43-44).

Anachronism allows the audience to see that there has been no significant change or improvement in man’s thought since the middle ages. Words like Nationalism, Protestantism and slangs like “France for the French”, “English for the English” purportedly propagated by Joan function to reveal kinship between past (medieval period) and present (20th century) and thus, to give the past a reality for present audiences that is absent in the pictorial form of 19th century historical melodrama.

Shaw’s anachronism points to the truth of Voltaire’s judgment that “man generally speaking was always what he is now”; to Hume’s view that “It is generally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in nations and ages, and that human nature remains the same in its principles and operations,60 and finally, to G.M. Trevelyan (1930:100): “history starts out from the astonishing proposition that there is no difference in degree of reality between past and present”. Through anachronism, Shaw’s history conveys something of the distinctiveness and sameness of historical periods at the same time and his epilogue, discussed below (C. f. V. 4) is pivotal to this alienation strategy. It forces the audience to see that, like Joan’s medieval opponents, they too would have voted for Joan’s execution if they had been part of the medieval age, and would still vote for it if she were to return. The epilogue is in itself an anachronism but before discussing its dramatic and historicist

60 Voltaire, Esai sur les moeurs, quoted in Isaiach Berlin (1976: 197); David Hume, Enquiry

Concerning Human understanding. Quoted by Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument” In: R.H. Canary and H. Kozicki (1979: 138.

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implications for Shaw’s play and audience, it is important to examine two other modern functions of language in St. Joan.

V.3.5. Language as alienation technique

Joan’s most outstanding feature is her loneliness and Shaw establishes her alienation by means of language. Shaw prized the “discussion above all else in drama and as I have shown in his use of anachronism, language functions in Shaw’s history to historicize systems, but language in Shaw’s histories also serves a characterizing function. It is used to delineate his protagonist as subversive. Joan’s language can best be considered within the context of the modern historical hero’s radical discourse in which language functions as an alienation technique to isolate the hero and his radical consciousness from the dominant cultural ideology. In modern historical drama, the hero’s ideas gain acceptance only within his society’s marginal culture, since such figures whether consciously or unconsciously, overtly antagonize the ruling ideology. It is not surprising that in modern history plays, Brecht’s Galileo, Strindberg's Master Olof , Shaw's St. Joan, recantation is offered as alternative to the protagonist’s death.

Strindberg’s hero illuminates Joan’s use of language. Lars Anderson’s exalting address to his students exemplifies the linguistic isolation that characterizes heroes of modern historical drama: “I wasn’t born a fighter; I can only supply you with the weapons. God’s pure words shall be your weapons…Every human being must fight for the freedom of his own spirit” (Strindberg, 1975: 28). Shaw too, emphasizes that imagination is the beginning of creation, but new thought is never easily accepted in our predominantly idealist human society. Hence, the Realist with a radically new thought is often isolated or alienated by his language. Language is thought and fighting for the freedom of the individual spirit and thought as Strindberg’s Lars Anderson’s puts it, characterizes heroic figures in modern historical drama: Shaw’s Joan, Eliot’s Becket and Brecht’s Galileo. In these plays, the hero chooses either to speak his mind and bear the consequences or to withdraw from society and live in a world of self exile like Keegan in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904) who like Joan, convinces everyone each time he speaks that he is mad.

Ideas and their articulation come to the forefront in modern historical drama while action and pictorial spectacle move to the background. The heroes articulate their minds and these articulations lead to alienation for them. Through her lengthy speech in Scene V discussed earlier, Joan registers her own alienation from society. Her statement, —“I have always been alone” ― aligns her with the protagonists of most modern history plays. The culmination of her alienation is the archbishop’s declaration that Joan stands “alone”, “absolutely alone” in trusting in her “headstrong presumption”. Her language is responsible for her problems as Dunois explains. Dunois declares that if Joan “fell into the Loire” he “would jump in full amour to fish her out”; but if she “plays the fool at Compiègne”, that is, if she speaks her mind, he will abandon her “to her doom” (VI: 155). In Sc. V, Dunois regrets: “if only she [Joan]

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would keep quiet, or go home”, but words are her only weapons and she must speak her mind and this leads to her tragedy. The epilogue further punctuates her alienation. After kneeling in praise of her, her opponents are still not willing to accept Joan’s individual spirit and hastily withdraw at the mention of her reincarnation. If Joan's society is not yet ready for World-individuals as Joan’s heart-rending cry at the end of the Epilogue implies, it is because it cannot stand the expression of a free mind against ideals. Unlike his contemporaries, Shaw uses language to alienate his protagonists.

In one sense, Shaw uses language in a way typical of modern drama. Long before Structuralism, Shaw understood and practiced the relativity of language in his dramatic text. As far as the relation of language to meaning is concerned, language in St. Joan is sometimes used as an attack on the values of language itself. In this aspect, St. Joan anticipates the works of post-war or absurdist dramatists like Beckett, Ionesco etc.. In St. Joan we remarkably notice the unreliability of language to convey meaning. Words and concepts become so slippery that communication between the major characters in conflict is almost impossible. Through contradictory use of words like “guilt”, “miracles”, “recantation”, “voices,” “the church”, “heresy”, “Protestantism”, “Nationalism” etc., Shaw shows the problematic involved in language use. These words mean different things to Cauchon, Warwick and the Inquisition on the one hand, and another to Joan on the other hand. The trial scene almost gives us the impression that Joan and her opponents speak in different languages. In fact, the language at times comes close to the in-communicative language of post war drama.

V. 3.6. History on an Open stage: text/ audience relationship

In St. Joan, Shaw redefines the relationship between performed text and its viewers. Crucial to this project is his reassessment of the staging of historical drama in what he once called, the “invincible wall” (Theatres, I: 134). One way of articulating this Shavian reassessment is to refer to what Stanley Cavell (1976: 157) says is the modern dramatist’s denial of the “fourth wall” notion inherent in the proscenium stage:

Practically or conventionally, ‘audience’― for theatre in the period of Shakespeare through, say, the 19th century― means ‘those present whom the actors ignored,’ those beyond the fourth wall. Deny that wall― that is, recognize those in attendance― and the audience vanishes. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that if anything is sensibly to be grasped as “modern theatre”, one of its descriptions would be the various ways in which modern dramatists have denied the wall.

In various ways, Shaw postulated and long practised the denial of “the fourth wall”. He recognized that the proscenium arch functioned in a manner analogous to the frame of a painting in that it enclosed the stage-picture and separated the drama from the audience before it. As early as 1896, Shaw, writing as dramatic critic suggested that,

Any play performed on a platform amidst the audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is presented as a picture framed by the proscenium. Also, that we are less conscious of the artificiality of the stage when a few conventions adroitly handled, are

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substituted for attempts at an impossible scenic verisimilitude. All the old-fashioned tale-of-adventure plays, with their frequent changes of scene, and all the new problem plays, with their intense intimacies, should be done in this way (Our Theatres, 2,184).

The Victorian history play produced on the proscenium stage merely recreated the material reality of past eras through pictorial realism. Such productions reduced the dramatic text to a skeleton for flashy, elaborate spectacle that placed history in a grandiose albeit remote past, making it an object of attention without giving its audience a feeling of participating in history. This denial of an immediate theatrical communion or mutual participation between actors and audience was ultimately re-enforced by the dramatic texts which rejected experimentation in staging as commercial playwrights exploited the popular well-made formula. Inevitably, the viewers of the plays felt removed from the life of the drama as history was imprisoned in the past and therefore cut off from the limelight of their own present realities.

Shaw’s redefinition of the subject or content of drama, his insistence that a realistic play must raise and suggestively discuss “problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience” led inevitably to his conception of a “rhetorical treatment” of subjects (in a discussion as opposed to action). This Shavian convention originates from his awareness of the need for a drama that redefines its audience and transforms the nature of the dramatic experience by abolishing the “fourth wall”. As Georg Lukács (1972:118) asserts, “as soon as the stage’s fourth wall becomes no more than the transparent screen… the spectator of drama is not accidentally present at any accidental private incident….What he is offered must be a public event in terms of innermost content and form”. This recognition of the relation between “public” event and “innermost content and form” obliged Shaw to turn to the open stage in the form of “discussions” and anachronism in history as we see in scene IV and the epilogue of St. Joan. Through these devices, he redefined the nature of the theatrical experience for his audience in a text-audience relation.

Scene IV and the epilogue are alienating portions of Shaw’s play aimed at public education of the audience on the mediocrity of their positivist notion of history. These portions of the play, which are also based on Shaw’s “discussion” mode function to open up medieval history to 20th century audiences in the same way as any play becomes open to the audience when performed on an “open” stage. In The Open Stage (1951), Southern argues that, the open stage removes the aesthetic distance between object and observer in the theatre and symbolizes the modern reaction to, or revolts against the “illusionist pictures” of the proscenium stage because produced on an open stage history heightens the audience consciousness of its own presence and participation in the theatrical event. Shaw’s anachronism is anti-illusionist and functions to create the critical distance that Southern describes.

Shaw’s appropriation of age old devices like prologues and epilogues for what Hermassi (1977:114) says is the need for political education of the audience by the modern dramatist is significant. Hermassi’s call for “political education” coincides with Shaw’s pedagogic use of anachronism in scene IV and in the epilogue. Shaw’s

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epilogue incorporates in a special way the inherent impulse to open up the stage to audience so as to politically educate them. Anachronism not only opens up history to his audience but politically educates them in ways comparable to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Surprisingly, Eliot who strongly criticized the historicity of St. Joan later admitted the indebtedness of Murder in the Cathedral to Shaw’s St. Joan. Eliot cautiously confessed in Poetry and Drama (1951) that in his use of colloquial prose in the speeches of the Knights in Murder in the Cathedral, “I may for ought I know, have been slightly under the influence of Saint Joan”. At close look however, there is more of Shaw’s influence on Eliot’s play than Eliot was willing to admit.

Like the Four Knights’ appeal to the audience at the end of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Shaw’s epilogue obliterates the notion that history is “closed” by the death of the protagonist. Most plays based on Thomas Becket and Joan of Arc ended on the tragic note of the protagonist’s death.61 In both Shaw’s St. Joan and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the playwrights open a conventionally “closed” history by continuing the play after the protagonists’ deaths, thereby foiling the expectations of their respective audience. But more significantly, Shaw and Eliot involve their audience in their histories. Eliot involves his audience in his history more explicitly by demanding that it sits in judgment of Becket’s assassins. After Becket’s murder, the four Knights each articulately appeal to the audience based on their serious, almost admirable motivations for killing Becket. By succumbing to any of these appeals to economic stability or nationalistic zeal, the audience in effect sanction the Knights’ actions and admits to its own susceptibility to these arguments for the elimination of ideas potentially damaging to the status quo. The convincing arguments of Shaw’s characters in the “tent scene” on why Joan must be stopped or destroyed, or their various excuses in the epilogue for why she need not return, serve the same function as the four Knights’ appeal to the audience in Eliot’s play. Thus, in St. Joan the audience function in the same way as the audience of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral are intended to function: as judges of the debate. As Shaw’s characters in the tent scene and the epilogue present their various arguments against the Maid and their reasons for wanting to crush her, or for rejecting her reincarnation, Shaw gives his audience the opportunity to sit in judgment of Joan as well as her murderers.

One of the most defining aspects of a modern historical drama has to do with open perspective structures precisely, with foregrounding endearing ideas in contrast to the perspectival closures of 19th century dramas. Here again, one can compare St. Joan to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. If the modern history play evolves to be dominated by ideas and not action, St. Joan like Murder in the Cathedral meets this criterion. A number of such history plays concerning intellectual heroes, Ibsen’s The Emperor and Galilean and Brecht’s Galileo, all end in thought provoking ideas. Shaw also substitutes the idea for the action. St. Joan culminates, not in the gallows or closure, 61 I say “most of the plays on Joan” because a few end with her rescue or in the appearance

of various supernatural figures, e.g., John Henderson´s and the 1971 Garrick Joan of Arc, but most of them ended in the death of Joan in conformity with the records.

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but in ideas that live longer than the author. Shaw claims that like Victorian drama, Shakespeare’s plays end “...with the moral judgment hurled at the audiences head....” (189). St. Joan ends with Joan’s question on when the world will be ready to receive its saints. The open-ending rejects the note of finality, even in tragedy and such an ending expresses Shaw’s belief that the plot of drama is like history, an unending dialectical process and that audience should not be provided with easy moral judgments, but should be forced to exercise their critical powers of judgment to reach individual moral or historical conclusions. Joan’s question leaves the play to be continued by history and later generations of playwrights who may want to pull the strings and answer the question of when the world shall be ready to receive its geniuses or evolutionists.

V.4.The Tragicomic structure and historicist implications of the Epilogue

The epilogue is indeed, the game-changing element in Shaw’s tragedy. Shaw criticized death and suicides in drama as “stage murders” “vulgar substitutes for tragedy” or “slaughters in the classical or Shakespearean manner” (Prefaces, 200). True to these criticisms, in St. Joan he continues his play after the conventional tragic ending or denouement (the death of the tragic protagonist). Like Shaw’s ambivalent handling of the conflict between protagonist and antagonists as well as the tragic flaw above, the epilogue to St. Joan has attracted dismissive criticism of the tragic status of the play. Critics argued that the epilogue is superfluous and if anything, destroys the tragic implication of the play. To Barnet (1956), epilogues and prologues are added to tragedy only if they contribute to the sense of finality of the tragic picture and Shaw’s epilogue has virtually no relation with the tragedy.

I wish to argue here that, the epilogue constitutes a summary of the tragicomic structure and paradoxical historicist implications of the play, and in this paradoxical historiography, the epilogue becomes quite controversial and yet in form, the most modern aspect of Shaw’s drama. As an evolutionist, Shaw, contrary to Victorian linear and realistic history held that the design of history is ambivalently pessimistic or cyclical and yet optimistic and progressive. The romance of Joan’s rise is not enough for Shaw and he must add “the tragedy of her execution”, but even the tragedy is not enough and Shaw must dramatize “the comedy of the attempts of posterity to make amends for the execution”. From being acclaimed a saviour in the romance, Joan is denounced as a heretic and executed in the tragedy and again canonized in the comic epilogue, but even in the epilogue, she is rejected again. The contradictory movement of the plot reflects the many-sidedness of Shaw’s historical attitudes. In this light, the simultaneous canonization and rejection of the saint in the epilogue constitutes a summary of this historiography. The epilogue thus repeats in little the tragic-comic pattern and historicism of the play as a whole.

While this tragicomic epilogue remains Shaw’s highest expression of his paradoxical vision of the historical design, it is not without serious repercussions on the tragic genre Shaw ascribes to his play. In a sense, Shaw’s epilogue destroys or

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weakens the tragic implication. In its comic mode, the epilogue weakens the tragic impact of the execution by allowing us to escape the pain of tragic death so fundamental to tragedy, into a region of cosy immortality where Shaw’s characters congregate amicably to discuss the significance of the heroine’s death and canonization. It thus becomes anti-climatic when read with the preceding tragedy. Beside, its dream-like expressionistic quality strikes us as incongruous to the realistic form of historical drama. Yet, I also think, if the epilogue were in form and tone equal to the body of the play, it rather would have destroyed the play’s organic unity. The epilogue’s rather differentness sets it apart from the rest of the drama as an epilogue ought to be separated.

In another sense, this epilogue, reminiscent of Shaw’s structural principle of taking the conventional plot beyond its traditional ending (the death of the protagonist), strikes at the very root of tragedy which as Aristotle holds, depicts an action that is complete. Yet the mere addition of an epilogue should not disqualify the play as tragedy. Shaw’s epilogue also strikes us as consistent with classical tragedy. An epilogue can rightly be included in a tragedy if it adds to the sense of tragic finality, and many Greek tragic dramatists did add epilogues to their plays. But the challenge posed by Shaw’s epilogue is that, it simultaneously cancels and affirms, refutes and repeats the tragic implication. In this regard, it illustrates the complexity and many-sidedness of Shaw’s historiography as well as functions as a summary of the tragic-comic pattern of the play as a whole.

Shaw’s epilogue offers a situation wherein, the genius is recognized and adored, but as a living possibility is again rejected by all including the 20th century Gentleman in whose historical epoch the saint was canonized. In repeating the tragic renunciation of the evolutionary genius five hundred years after her execution, Shaw offers a 20th century version of the medieval trial and execution of Joan, with the aim of showing that, if Joan was to return today, she will be killed again, even by the 20th century that makes claims to a superior civilization. In the timeless world of the epilogue, the saint is rejected again. The implication is that nothing has changed in man’s make-up since the medieval times. In spite of its alienating effect, the dramatic action contributes strongly to the sense of tragic finality that Barnet claims the epilogue lacks. It illustrates Shaw's pessimistic view of history as recurrent. Man has not evolved.

Shaw’s epilogue thus, functions as a reminder to the audience, of the tragic implication of the preceding scene. It repeats in very symbolic terms, both the tragicomic pattern of the entire play―the rise and fall of Joan in the romance and tragic plots—, as well as the author’s prefatory argument. Shaw's preface compares Joan to past and contemporary heroic victims of religious and political persecutions, Christ, Socrates and the 20th century feminist activist, Sylvia Pankhurst.62 The 62 Sylvia Pankhurst is the daughter of Mrs. Emeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women´s

Social and Political Union. As leading campaigners for women’s rights in London in 1906, the Pankhursts suffered torture for their beliefs and in 1912, like Joan, they adopted more militant tactics. Under their leadership, the suffragist movement became a political

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comparison with Sylvia Pankhurst for instance, demonstrates that, heroines of women’s rights and freedom in the 20th century still suffer the same chauvinist stereotypes that caused the tragedy of earlier feminists. One must remember that Joan's judges accused her of dressing like a man and frown on her preference for a male profession. The comparison establishes the similarity between the medieval age’s response to Joan’s feminism and the 20th century response to Pankhurst’s. Such a comparison exposes the Victorian notion of historical progress as an illusion. Contrary to the view that the 19th or 20th century are superior to the medieval age, the preface bluntly asserts that they are worse: “Joan got a fairer trial from the [medieval] church and the Inquisition than any prisoner of her type, and in her situation gets nowadays in any official secular court” (VI:62). One of Shaw’s many other assertions along these lines is that Socrates’ accusers, “if born 2300 years later might have been picked out of any first class carriage in a suburban railway during the evening or morning rush from or to the City” or, “ there was not the smallest ground for the self complacent conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant than the fifteenth, or that such an event as the execution of Joan could not possibly occur in what we call our own more enlightened times” (VI: 61).

The preface seems to demonstrate that, the more things appear to change, the more they remain the same or even go worse. This prefatory argument is dramatized in the generic tensions of the plot that culminate in the paradoxical epilogue. The inspiring force of hope that Joan represents in the romance plot was dashed in the tragic plot. Projected on the scale of recurrence, the epilogue repeats the optimistic and pessimistic vision of history in the canonization and rejection of Joan.

The main dramatic action of the epilogue is the question of whether Joan should return “a living woman” and the reaction of the characters to this question affirms or repeats the comic and tragic implications of the plot. Shaw deliberately administers an anti-climax to this solemn final action to express his tragic-comic or paradoxical historicism. After learning that she has been canonized and, just when the characters have all shown their love and admiration, Joan asks them, “And now tell me: shall I rise from the dead, and come back to you a living woman?” “A sudden darkness blots out the walls of the room as they all spring to their feet in consternation”. In fact, no one wants the saint’s return and one by one and in a pattern of denial to controvert the previous paean of praise, the characters signal their refusal as each excuses himself and withdraws. This juxtaposition of farcical reverence and rhapsodic praise on the one hand with a rejection of the agent of evolution on the other, gives the epilogue a paradoxical and fully tragic-comic significance. The medieval characters rejected and executed the saint for fear of her ideas and, although the 20th century canonized and praise her, they too do not want the saint who might still act as a far too early

force for women’s rights. Joan is a martyr of Feminism, nationalism and Protestantism The historical truth of the comparison with the Pankhurst is that society will ever remain resistant to new ideas. As Shaw asserts in the preface to Adrocle and the Lion, “[M]y martyrs are the martyrs of all time, and my persecutors the persecutors of all time”.

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proponent of new ideas. Confronted with her possible return, even the anachronistic 20th century Gentleman who brings the news of her canonization must “return to Rome for fresh instructions.”

The historical implication of the 20th century Gentleman’s action in particular is projected on the audience who are his contemporaries and who nurture the thought of a superior civilization. Like the idealist characters of the medieval age who executed Joan on the basis of the institutional (especially the religious) ideologies they stood for, the 20th century Gentleman (the audience’s contemporary) must consult Rome (the symbol of his religious idealism) in order to answer the question of a possible Joan return. Five hundred years after Joan’s execution, nothing has substantially changed in man’s adherence to idealisms, especially as symbolized by religious institutions.

The epilogue is not just Shaw the joker or comedian taking over from Shaw, the tragic dramatist. It is an attempt to universalize Joan’s history in the author’s proposition that each age brings to the cross those progressive forces who assault its ideals (Christ’s, Socrates’, Joan’s, Pankhurst’s etc.), though such geniuses are indeed struggling to change society for the better. King Charles’s musing in the epilogue that if Joan were to return to the world she would be killed again in six months should have a real alienating effect on the audience. Perhaps Cauchon’s plea to the saint is even more alienating: “mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic, please spare them” your return. “Mortal eyes” make no distinction between Joan’s medieval executioners and the 20th century audience. It is the tragedy of mankind’s eternal rejection of its evolutionary geniuses that isespressed in the heart-rending cry with which Joan closes the epilogue: “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” (164).

The epilogue also repeats the tragic picture in another way. Joan is flattered by her adversaries; there are reports of the defilement of Cauchon’s grave by the population in repudiation of his part in Joan's execution; threr are reports of her canonization and reports of statues erected in Joan's honour. These are no doubt, recorded “facts”, but these apparent evidence of recognition and acceptance do not bear evidence of meaningful change or progress and are indeed, ineffectual in ameliorating the central moral conflict in all epochs between World-individuals and our idealistic societies. These “facts” which Victorian historians would interpret as evidence of the progress of their civilization are dismissed in the epilogue as mere “illusions of progress” or lip-service by the repeated rejection of the saint. The historical truth of Joan's life as the epilogue demonstrates is that in 1456, the world could live as it did in the 1920s and still continues to do today, with Joan’s statues, but as a “living woman” who might once more act as an early (and thus too early) proponent of new ideas for the future, she would have to be burned, crucified, or otherwise disposed of all over again as Christ and Socrates were. In one sense, Shaw’s epilogue implies that the world might never be ready to receive its saints at all because the evolutionary intellect will never be tolerated in any age, since the conflict between idealism (conservatism) and realism (change) or between genius and cultural mediocrity, will never be resolved and will

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continuously lead to the destruction of geniuses in all ages under the pretext of protecting institutional ideals.

Yet, the epilogue is not exclusively pessimistic. While its pessimism echoes the Devil’s historicist vision in the Hell debate of Man and Superman, the epilogue also encodes Don’s optimistic vision of history, so that the entire epilogue becomes quite contradictory in its historical attitudes and thus expressive of Shaw’s overall view of the historical design as pessimistic and progressive, cyclical and progressive.

In essence, the epilogue is intended as a salute to the spirit of Joan as a World-individual in the light of what it has achieved, both for the short term ―the freeing of France and the firm establishment of Charles VI on the throne―, and in the long term― i.e., as a source of inspiration to later generations, the recognition of which is the litany of praise from the assembled foes of the past scenes, who all kneel in thanks to her for showing them their “limitations”. The rehabilitation and canonization of Joan constitute recognition of the change she inspired and thus, indicate that humanity has progressed. Some of the ideas Joan stood for, “Protestantism” and “Nationalism” have flourished. Dunois has employed her tactics to defeat the English, and King Charles now leads his Nation. To this extent, the change Joan inspired is achieved (progress). Yet, by her rejection, Shaw only asserts that, although humanity has progressed to Nationalism and Protestantism in the 20th century, it still has a long way to go before it reaches (as it definitely will) the wisdom of the saints.

As aforementioned, the epilogue functions as a summary of Shaw’s tragicomic historicism and as a reminder to the preceding tragedy. Shaw’s critics may still object to the epilogue with the argument that such a reminder as it offers is superfluous in tragedy. But the epilogue will appear structurally and thematically acceptable in classical tragedy if we think of it functioning in the same way as the chorus in Greek tragedy. Commenting on the modern playwright’s appropriation of old age devices for the political education of his audience, Hermassi (1977:114) asserts,

We know from the origins of the chorus in Greek tragedy that the choral function is developed essentially in relation to the needs of political education, that it draws the dialogue of the play to those elements teaching the community as a whole...

In the chant-like passages of Shaw’s epilogue, we are harked back to the ancient chorus of Greek theatre commenting on, and drawing from the dramatic moments of the play, the universal truth. Like the chorus in Greek drama, the epilogue constitutes a gloss on the main points of the play, on its historical implication, though with serious generic repercussions. The romance of Joan’s rise gives way to the tragedy of her fall and then, proceeds to the triumphant comedy of her canonization, but even this triumphant comedy is qualified as tragic by the renewed rejection of the saint so that, in the end one cannot label the play a romance, a tragedy or a comedy.

Shaw’s history does not take his audience to one direction, but throws them into a tension between opposing but equally valid ways of understanding the historical process. The generic tension in St. Joan gives us a vital and unexpected encounter between antithetical ways of interpreting the historical process. Yet, Shaw’s history is

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not as sociological as many critics think. The play is indeed, a solemn memory erected to the saint. Beneath it surface dramatic structure is a deep poetic structure by which Shaw immortalizes Joan as a metaphor for imagination.

V. 5. The Poetic Structure: Joan as Metaphor for Imagination

It was common knowledge that Shaw was a reformer, not a poet or an artist. A fair sampling of reviews and criticism of St. Joan from 1925 on reveals that a majority of critics either thought of the play as an impudent historical pamphlet masquerading as drama or a flippant treatment of a sacred subject. As cited in my introduction, T.S. Eliot dismissed the play with infamous labels: “the patent ju-ju of the life force”, “a gross superstition”, the “greatest sacrilege” and “one of the most superstitious of effigies which have been erected to that remarkable woman”. Like many other critics, Eliot saw just the sociological interpretation of the saint expressed in the surface structures of St.Joan. Shaw he argued had turned the newly canonized saint into “a great middle-class reformer”. Yeats also claims Shaw was a reformer, not a poet.

In his short “Note” to the first production of St. Joan, Pirandello (1970: 446-451) points out the ambiguity of Shaw’s position: “There is a great poet in Shaw, but this combative Anglo-Irishman is quite willing to forget that he is a poet, so interested is he in being a citizen of the country, or a man of the twentieth century society”. Pirandello further asserts that, St. Joan is “a work of poetry from beginning to end” (450). What Pirandello meant by this encompassing statement is not explained, but it is obvious that he thought of St. Joan as something other than a impudent treatment of a sacred subject as Eliot does. I wish to explore the poetic dimension of St. Joan in its deep structure, which reveals Shaw’s most immanent concerned with his art as a product of the imagination and with his heroine as a metaphor for the artistic imagination.

In St. Joan, Shaw is not concerned with “How it really happened” to Joan, but with “How she should or shall be remembered”. In St. Joan, he provides a retrospective and future memory of Joan as a metaphor of imagination. In so doing, he also gives full illustration of his own theory of artistic creativity as a product of the imagination. For Shaw, “imagination is the beginning of creation” even in history writing: “You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will” (Methuselah, 69-70).However, Shaw distinguished “the realistic imagination” from the “romantic imagination” and, as explained in my introduction and theoretical chapter, these forms of imagination relate to forms of social life, literary writing, reading and interpretation. The romantic imagination is the source of idealistic life/ interpretation/reading/writing. It is “the power to [merely] see things as they are”, the inability to transcend the concrete visible objects to a deeper imaginative level of reality. On the other hand, the “realistic imagination” is a catalyst in “conceiving something better” and “striving to bring it into existence...” (165-66); “a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities yet inexperienced, and of testing the

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feasibility and desirability of serious utopias” (IV: 104-5). Shaw further gives the working of imagination a theatrical context in his metaphor of “the world as stage” (C.f. I.4) in which he asserts that “the great critics are those who penetrate and understand the [stage] illusion”.

As a poetic expression of this metaphor of the working of the imagination, St. Joan provides the clearest evidence of Shaw’s ideas about the imagination in artistic writing, reading and interpretation. In this regard, the poetic nature of the play lies less in Joan’s catholic sainthood, but more in its artistry, in the metaphorical memory of Joan that Shaw ingrains in his play and which I take to be an illustration of the workings of the imagination. To make my point, I shall begin with the Epilogue, which is pivotal to the deep poetic structure and to the metaphorical re-representation of Saint Joan as a symbol of the imagination. The epilogue also contains the clearest evidence of Shaw’s preoccupation with the nature of imagination in his own art. After illustrating Shaw’s theme of the working of the imagination in the Epilogue, I will then return to other scenes in the play to elaborate on the poetic images, metaphors and devices in Shaw’s poetic memory of Joan as a symbol of the imagination.

The epilogue begins with a description of Charles’ reading in bed, or rather, “looking at the pictures in Fouquet’s Boccaccio”. The stage direction is not simply a good-humoured joke at the expense of king Charles portrayed throughout the play as foolish, childishly self-centred and limited in intellectual capacity. It underscores the thematics of reading and appreciating artistic works or life and is thus central to the poetic memory of Joan whom Shaw re-presents as a symbol of imagination itself. The actual joke is that Charles interests himself only in the dirty pictures in the book. Only the dirty pictures hold Charles attention, Fouquet’s colouring or Boccaccio’s prose style does not. Charles’ insensitivity to art here foreshadows his respond to Joan’s final proposal to return to life as well as reminds us of how Charles misunderstood the imaginative Joan while she was alive. Charles insensitivity to art and to Joan amount to the same thing: the lack of imagination.

This opening stage directions of the epilogue by which Shaw insinuates his notions of art is only part of a pattern of symbols and imageries through which Shaw dramatizes his sense of his art. His preoccupation with art emerges more clearly as he goes on in these opening stage directions to direct out attention from Fouquet’s illustrations to a “picture of the Virgin lighted by candles of painted wax,” and further, describes the walls of Charles’ room as “hung from ceiling to floor with painted curtains which stir at times in the draughts”. Lastly, Shaw tells us that Charles’ watchman’s rattle is “handsomely designed and gaily painted”. In short, Shaw wants us to see Charles surrounded by paintings of one kind or another— a painted manuscript, painted candles, painted curtains, and a painted toy—but painting used to satisfy the human need for a decorous living space, adornment to please the eye.

Against this decorative use of art, Shaw sets Joan as symbol and metaphor. Joan enters when “A rush of wind through the doors sets the walls swaying agitatedly. The candles go out. He [Charles] calls in the darkness.” Whatever visual pleasure we took

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in Charles’s colourful surroundings ends as, “A flash of summer lightning shews up the lancet window” and “A figure is seen in silhouette against it.” The movement of light from darkness to a figure seen in silhouette, to Joan dimly seen, culminates in the last moments of the Epilogue when, “the last remaining rays of light gather into a white radiance descending on Joan.” At that moment, Joan stands literally and figuratively illuminated, for Shaw intends the Epilogue to make us see Joan more clearly as a metaphor that has meaning for the world, not merely as a decorative figure in memory and imagination. Hence, he allows Joan herself to articulate this metaphorical significance: “I hope men will be the better for remembering me; and they would not remember me so well if you [Peter Cauchon] had not burned me”.

The rays of white light on Joan symbolize her immortality (one is reminded of the Executioner’s report that “ her heart will not burn”), but it is also a transfiguration of the light from the fire that burned her, a connection that Shaw suggests to us through Cauchon’s description of Joan’s burning— “even as she burned, the flames whitened into the radiance of the Church Triumphant”—, as well as through the description of the curtains in Charles’ bedroom: “At first glance the prevailing yellow and red in these hanging pictures is somewhat flamelike when the folds breathe in the wind.” Since the Epilogue follows shortly after Joan is burned, Shaw cannot fail to remind us of those flames.

It could be said that this final vision of the illuminated and solitary Saint Joan in the epilogue is a conventional tableau that has no more meaning than other such melodramatic stage-lighting effects, that it is visual rhetoric and merely a counterpart to her final rhetorical question: “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” No doubt the emotion of this last moment derives partly from the rhetorical strategy and is genuinely complex and poetic. The final “radiance” fulfils the imagistic movement from darkness to light that the figure of Joan follows before our eyes. But even more poetic is the ritualistic structuring of the immediately preceding episode in the epilogue. With a Deum-like sequence of lauds to Joan, each character in the Epilogue kneels in turn to hymn her praises, only to be asked by Joan if she should then return to earth. With their sadly comic volte-faces, each one rises to reject her proposal and leaves her on stage alone. This ritual-like stage action points to Joan’s isolation as a symbolic figure as well as to her personal isolation. She remains a scapegoat rejected by her comrades and community and therefore a real tragic figure. The kneeling to praise, the rising to reject, and the successive desertions of Joan in the Epilogue re-enact the whole drama as discussed above, which consists of Joan’s rise to influence and power in scenes I to III and her fall in Scenes IV and V.

Joan’s illuminated isolation at the end of the Epilogue is an attempt by Shaw the poet to help us imagined Saint Joan, which means above all, to see her clearly as a metaphor of the imagination itself or an icon in the scripture of Creative evolution. Re-presenting Joan as imagination requires artistic imagination from Shaw the artist, but seeing Joan clearly as metaphor for imagination requires artistic imagination from the

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audience/readers as well. That is essentially why in St. Joan, the basic metaphors for lack of the imagination, whether in understanding Joan when she was alive or in appreciating her metaphorical implication when she returns in the epilogue are images of poor sight and darkness. In the epilogue, these images are chiefly associated with De Stogumber and Charles, and they illustrate their inability to read the symbolic of Joan’s life and death or see her clearly as a metaphor.

When de Stogumber first appears in the epilogue, he fails to see the spirit of Joan and even refuses to accept that her spirit lives on. When he realizes that he may again be in Joan’s presence, he reacts immediately by denying that she is Joan: “My sight is bad; I cannot distinguish your features: but you are not she.” Just before he says this, de Stogumber explains how he was saved: “I had not seen it [cruelty] you know. That is the great thing: you must see it. And then you are redeemed and saved.” Cauchon asks him if the sufferings of Christ were not enough for him, and de Stogumber replies: “I had seen them in pictures and read of them in books, and been greatly moved by them, as I thought. But it was no use: it was not our Lord that redeemed me, but a young woman whom I saw actually burned to death. It was dreadful. But it saved me” (161). Cauchon then asks what the reader should take to be a central question of the play, “Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?” In the play’s terms then, imagination is how the human mind bridges the gap between life and art; between the concrete visible objects and the imaginative reality underneath them, in short, between reality and fantasy. For that gap to be bridged the one must possess Shaw’s “realistic imagination”, which is not so much a question of action in the real world (though this is partly so), but rather of what takes place in the human mind.

Like most critics who see only the sociological perspective of the play, most of the character associated with blindness cannot imaginatively respond to Joan’s life, her voices or her reincarnation. In short, they cannot respond to metaphor. The deep structure of the play represents the thematic of imagination in the patterned metaphors of blindness or darkness and light, with Joan as the central metaphor of light. These contrasting patterns illuminate the poetic structure of the play. The dramatic plot represents Joan as politically daring, but Joan’s daring as Shaw wants his readers to see is mainly imaginative and is imaginatively illustrated in the deep poetic structure. She possesses imaginative power that she conquers not just the English, but “loneliness” and “death. Warned in scene V that she stands alone, Joan responds, “Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone.... my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God....In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die” (154). In Shaw’s theory, God is the Imagination or the life force that propels daring people.

The central drama of St. Joan lies in part, in her imaginative conquest of the fear of death. This is seen in the trial scene when she tears her recantation with a locus of powerful emotion and accepts death while asserting the value of life as nothing but living in imaginative freedom. The reader must not mistake the tragic catastrophe or

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Joan’s preference for death to life imprisonment for one of the stage “suicides” or “murders” that Shaw criticized in Victorian and Shakespearean dramas. Joan’s preference for death is due to the fact that the alternative offered is worse than burning at the stake: “light your fires. Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?” Life for Joan’s is freedom and she can hardly conceive of life in perpetual confinement. That is why, in her preference for death, Joan asserts the value of life; of freedom over life itself.

However, the freedom Joan desires is not simply the freedom of movement (though that too, is important to her), but more significantly, the freedom of the imagination: “if only I could hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these I cannot live” (164). The imaginative freedom Joan asserts here is exclusively aural. For Shaw, Joan’s voices and the bells she hears replicate the creative imagination or “the life force”. Real death for Joan means being cut off from the voice of the imagination. Hence, her dread of the imprisonment of her imagination crushes her fear of fire and of physical death: “light your fires” she cries to her judges, when she learns that she would suffer life imprisonment.

Throughout St. Joan, Shaw re-presents Joan as a metaphor for the imagination. Against her powerful imagination he stresses the blindness and lack of imagination in others. Joan is associated with images of light and nature while her unimaginative opponents are associated with images of poor sight, so that the deep poetic structure revolves around contrastive images and accentuates the imagination as a central theme.

The first contrastive instance of this poetic pattern is humorously brought to the audience through a pair of stage direction. At her first entrance in scene I, Shaw describes Joan as having “eyes very wide apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people.” In contrast, when Shaw introduces the Dauphin in scene II, he stresses his lack of imagination in his “little narrow eyes, near together.” The Dauphin lacks imagination and his later assertion to Joan is intended as a visionary irony: “I have my eyes open”. This irony humorously hints at Charles’ lack of imagination, which is stressed throughout the play and emphatically in his artistic taste in the epilogue. Like many other characters in the play, Charles eyes may be open, but only to see the visible objects of life; what lies in front of him for, throughout the play, he demonstrates that he has no vision for France as Joan has.

Shaw also makes Joan stimulate imagination in others especially in the first movement of the play: “there is something about her” Polly tells Baudricourt (VI: 89). After Baudricourt is finally convinced to send her to the Dauphin, Joan says, “Oh squire! Your head is all circled with light, like a saint’s,” and Baudricourt looks “up for his halo rather apprehensively” (sc. I). Like many characters in the play, he sees only the concrete objects of life, but Joan can make people see more than what is in front of their eyes. In short, Joan enables people to see the metaphoric dimension of reality.

This poetic power in her is brought into high relief through the discussion of

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miracles between the Archbishop and La Tremouille (Sc. II), where the Archbishop explains that the church nourishes people’s “faith with poetry” and “parables” that pass for “miracles”. Shortly after this humorous play on the inspirational force of poetic imagination, Shaw underlines his point through a deft bit of characterization. Here, Shaw has the Archbishop identify Pythagoras as “A sage who held that the earth is round and that it moves round the sun,” at which La Tremouille exclaims; “What an utter fool! Couldnt he use his eyes?” Like Baudricourt, Charles and de Stogumber, La Tremouille has very limited imaginative vision. He cannot see the metaphoric dimension of reality, the poetry in life, its miracles, which can only be apprehended through the “mind’s eyes” and not the physical eye.

More important in the entire poetic structure however, is the representation of Joan as an emblem of imagination itself, especially in its essence of freedom. Nowhere does Shaw better bring out this identification than in the short scene before Orleans between Dunois and his Page. The scene opens with Dunois invoking the West wind in an attempt at a poetic incantation: “Mary in the blue snoop, Kingfisher color: will you grudge me a west wind?” The obvious echo here is Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. As Dunois finishes his prayer-Poem, the Page bounces to his feet: The Page: See! There! There she goes! Dunois: Who? The Maid? The Page: No: the kingfisher. Like blue lightning

Shortly after this, both men again watch another kingfisher fly by the reeds and “they follow the flight till the bird takes cover.” That they are waiting for Joan, and that Dunois thinks the Page means Joan when he first cries out, suffices to enforce our identifying Joan with the kingfisher. As a metaphor for Joan, the bird’s name (“kingfisher”) also takes the reader back to the Dauphin’s court scene (Sc. II), where Joan’s imaginative power or, if you like, spiritual power is put to the test. Here, Shaw literalizes his metaphor of Joan as kingfisher, as Joan searches for the king “along the row of courtiers, and presently makes a dive, and drags out Charles by the arm.” We can see that Shaw’s mind symbolically identifies Joan with the kingfisher bird. (Summer lightning also presages Joan’s appearance in the Epilogue, a reminder of the “blue lightning” to which the Page compares the kingfisher).The identification of Joan as kingfisher however, goes beyond the mere picturesque or even beyond the punning senses in the bird’s name and in Charles’ label, Dauphin (Dolphin) for, in the next exchange between the Page and Dunois, we see the kingfisher image expand into a multivalent metaphor for Joan that reaches the core of the play’s meaning: The page: Arent they lovely? I wish I could catch them. Dunois: Let me catch you trying to trap them, and I will put you in the iron cage for a month

to teach you what a cage feels like.

Dunois’ words proleptically point to the trial scene where Joan’s imprisonment is in question, and where Shaw maintains Joan’s association with nature and with the soaring imagination, more specifically with the image of “flying”.

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Joan: And why must I be chained by the feet to a log of wood? Are you afraid I will fly away? . . .

Courcelles: If you cannot fly like a witch, how is it that you are still alive?”

The instinctive reaction of unimaginative people to the “lovely” things in life or nature; to free things like the kingfisher, is to capture and cage them. So too with Joan who is not only a political freedom fighter, but an icon in Shaw’s scripture of creative evolution and a stimulant to the imagination in others: her lovely, free imagination provokes unimaginative idealists to want to destroy her, or failing that, at least to cage her for life. In their desire to imprison Joan, Shaw shows that they want to deny metaphor or the imagination that Joan embodies: the freedom to soar beyond things, to metaphorize the world and to see more than the visible objects of life.

After Dunois utters a second Prayer-Poem, this time to the kingfisher bird, asking it to send a west wind, Joan immediately enters, and at the end of the scene the west wind comes, as if there were a silent consonance between them. Indeed, there is, for Joan represents nature, the free mind and the wind symbolize the freedom of life.

The presentation of Dunois and his Page as waiting (whether for Joan or the West wind) brings us to the final element in the poetic construct of Joan’s history: the theme of time. The theme is important because of Joan’s final question in the epilogue, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?,” The question is not simply a rhetorical flourish to conclude the play, but a question that underscores a recurrent theme in Shaw’s dramatic works: the need for man to evolve in tandem with the imaginative life force. With this question, the epilogue transports the audience into the world of Beckett’s plays: a universe beyond historicist hopes in which no meaningful change seems possible.

St. Joan is a history play, but also a poetic work about time. Like Beckett in Waiting for Godot, or the dream sequence of Man and Superman where the Devil asserts that life is merely an act of “killing time”, much of what the characters of St. Joan spend time doing is waiting: in scene I, waiting for the hens to lay; in Scene II, the court waits for the Dauphin (“La Tremouille: What the devil does the Dauphin mean by keeping us waiting like this?”); in Scene III, Dunois waits for the west wind and for Joan; in Scene IV, Warwick and de Stogumber wait for Cauchon to arrive; in Scene V, after the coronation, the people wait to see Joan; in Scene VI, the English wait for the outcome of the trial (“Warwick: Is this trial never going to end?”); and in the Epilogue, Joan remains waiting for the earth (mankind) to be ready to receive God’s saints or if you like, Shaw’s evolutionists. The recurring sense of expectancy, of waiting upon time works as a structural force in the play and gives Joan’s last line its peculiar poetic power. We have been waiting all through the play for historical time to unfold and at the end of the play (the epilogue), we wait for imaginative time to unfold; that is, we ask ourselves what our imaginations can create in time.

Like all historical dramas, Shaw places his play within the realistic limits of human time. The setting of every scene is specified with regards to realistic time and dates. Yet, as an elaborate work with memory, Shaw also collapses time in St. Joan. And the

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pivot of this imaginative display in time is the epilogue.63 Shaw places the Epilogue in historical time: “a windy night in June 1456”. But more than that, he tells us the exact beginning, the middle and end of the scene, midnight. He does so through images of time. Before the dialogue begins, he tells us, “A distant clock strikes the half-hour softly,” which we know means 11:30 P.M. Approximately halfway through the scene, just before the Soldier enters, “the clock strikes the third quarter.” In other words, the time Shaw indicates as passing during the action of the Epilogue equals half an hour. Although he locates the action chronologically and represents it as transpiring in real time, yet the action is not realistic for, characters who are dead appear in it (Joan herself, Cauchon and others), as well as characters who are alive but who could not actually be present in Charles’ chamber. Moreover, Shaw creates unrealistic entrances for his characters. For example, Dunois enters “through the tapestry on Joan’s left, the candles relighting themselves at the same moment, and illuminating his armor and surcoat cheerfully”. Shaw thereby metaphorically underlines his sense of the Epilogue as a pure product of art, of the imagination and as evidence of this, Shaw collapses time and space in the Epilogue —a normal procedure for a dramatist who wishes to represent the action of a dream on stage. But the epilogue is not actually a dream.

Upon her astonishing entrance, Joan tells Charles that she is only a dream of his; yet this “psychological” explanation for Shaw’s complete departure from the realistic tradition of historical drama is no doubt offered tongue in cheek. Joan significantly remains on stage after Charles and the other characters have disappeared. It is clear that Shaw does not intend the Epilogue to be merely Charles’ dream, and certainly not his wish fulfilment.64 Indeed, it cannot be the dream of any character on stage, for toward the end of the scene, “a clerical looking Gentleman,” dressed “in the fashion of 1920, suddenly appears.” It can only be Shaw’s imaginative penetration of Joan’s history, projected on the audience and on stage as a fantastical proposition, a “what if Joan were free to talk with her friends and foes after her death and learn of her canonization?” Only as a figment of the playwright’s creative imagination, which he endeavours to share with us, can the medieval Maid re-emerge from his epilogue and

63 In his preface, Shaw hits at his self-conscious treatment of time in the play. “... as it [the

play] is for stage use I have had to condense into three and a half hours a series of events which in their historical happening were spread over four times as many months; for the theatre imposes unities of time and place from which Nature in her boundless wastefulness is free. Therefore, the reader must not suppose that Joan really put Robert de Baudricourt in her pocket in fifteen minutes, nor that her excommunication, recantation, relapse, and death were a matter of half an hour or so”. A long time critic of the theatre, Shaw knew that his audience were aware of necessary condensation as cannon in dramatic writing. His playful patronizing of the audience here is indeed, not as we may expect, an exhortation to willing suspension of disbelief (of which his audience were also obviously familiar), but an attempt to make his readers aware in an indirect way that he was playing with time in the play for a reason other than the usual.

64 In his “Note by the Author” Shaw asserts, “the epilogue is obviously not a representation of an actual scene, or even a recorded dream; but it is none the less historical” (VI: 213).

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from previous literature as a gifted but unwanted harbinger of the time to come, another imaginative genius like Christ or Socrates, cast by the less gifted bulk of idealist humanity in the inglorious thankless role of the crucified Messiah.

Through the epilogue, the most poetic portion of Shaw’s history, the author helps the audience to imagine the historical events of Joan’s life in metaphorical terms and to ask itself when it will be ready to receive God’s saints. And the moment when it contemplates this question is midnight in stage time and in real time (Shaw surely must have planned that the last half-hour of the play from 11:30 pm to midnight would also correspond to the time the audience would be hearing the play in the theatre—assuming an evening performance begins at 8:00pm —, so that imagination and reality or imaginative time and realistic time come together artfully on borderline between the death of the midnight bell’s last chime and the day’s rebirth into the “white radiance” descending on Joan. In the ritualized ending to the play, the pallid green light of the false images and dim sight yields to the visionary white light around the lonely figure of Joan, praying her quietly but urgent evolutionary question, “How long, O Lord, how long?” and just when the bells chime midnight.

Shaw wrote Saint Joan to help us imagine Saint Joan, that is to help us sense what imagination is. In doing so, he appeals to three kinds of imagination in the audience as this last episode shows: the hallucinatory imagination, through the dream setting (one should be reminded here of Shaw’s insistance in his dramatic theory that his art is the product of “sane hallucination” [C.f. ch. II: 3. 2 ]); the auditory, through the chime of the bells and the visual, through the white radiance on Joan. The interrelation of these senses in the poetic construct of St. Joan especially in the epilogue is significant.

The epilogue is a ritualistic rehearsal of the use of the chimes in the play. Speaking to Dunois after Charles’ coronation, Joan tries to explain her sense of imagination resonating within her:

It is in the bells I hear my voices. Not today, when they all rang: that was nothing but jangling. But here in this corner, where the bells come from a distance through the quiet of the country-side, my voices are in them. [The cathedral clock chimes the quarter] Hark! [She becomes rapt] Do you hear? ‘Dear-child-of-God’: just what you said. At the half-hour they will say ‘Be-brave-go-on.’ At the three-quarters they will say ‘I-am-thy-Help.’ But it is at the hour, when the great bell goes after ‘God-will-save-France’: it is then that St. Margaret and St. Catherine and sometimes even the blessed Michael will say things that I cannot tell beforehand. Then, oh then— (VI: 143).

Dunois, one of the blind characters of the play interrupts her at this point, for to him, when Joan talks this way, she seems “a bit cracked,” but surely his interruption is timely. The filling in of that dash that halts her speech is the Epilogue, especially its final moments when we hear those chimes Joan only describes here, and we see the white radiance descending on her head.

The poetry of the play concentrates itself in the theatrical gestures of light, sound, visual images and language coming together to make us feel what we might otherwise be incapable of feeling. Shaw’s use of theatrical metaphor here, like his metaphor of

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“the world as stage” or the “platonic metaphor of the cave”, creates a heightened and therefore new sense of aesthetic and exquisite reality in his audience and in those readers/critics who have imagination themselves. The extensive use of theatrical gestures enables the critical reader/spectator to penetrate the external “facts” of Joan’s life and to perceive a deeper reality behind her death and behind the surface dramatic action in order to see Joan more clearly as a metaphor of the imagination.

The delicacy and feeling with which Shaw accomplishes his meaning elude demonstration somewhat, in part because aural and visual stage rhythm accounts for much of the proper effect. The ritual isolation of Joan proceeds regularly as each character in turn demurs from her proposal to return to life, and then rises and exits. When we reach the last character, the Soldier, Shaw applies great rhythm to his exit speech. The Soldier with an instinctive, if not fully conscious sense of the pain caused by the others’ rejection of Joan, begins to “lecture” her not to pay heed to such lofty personages as kings and archbishops. But before he can even begin his explanation of why she “has as good a right to [her] notions as they have to theirs,” the midnight bells begin to chime and Joan never hears his lecture as he departs with rhythmic pattern: “Excuse me: a pressing appointment—[He goes on tiptoe].” This ritualistic ending combine the visual and acoustic devices as the chimes of the bells merges with the lonely figure of Joan in the white radiance and thus, effectively draw the audience attention to the retrospective memory of Joan that Shaw dramatizes. What Joan hears in the chimes is the poetic imagination or inspiration and in this ritualistic ending, the imaginative reader is inspired to join Joan’s meditation on when humanity shall be able to receive God’s saints.

Shaw makes Joan an embodiment of imagination in character and in symbolic terms, thus helping us to imagine imagination. The play is a real attempt on the playwright’s part to show Joan’s tragedy in the ultimate light of divine comedy and of history; to transcend the past, the present, the verisimilar form of historical drama, the tragic death of the protagonist, and to discern the historical truth of Joan’s execution as well as explore its significance to present and future audience. It is by a complex mode of becoming by dint of being imaginatively recalled in a retrospective consciousness that Joan emerges literally and figuratively at the end of Shaw’s play –– the epilogue ––, as a poetic metaphor or symbol of imagination and thus, as Shaw’s artistic creation. Through his artistry, Shaw allows a purer and more poetic interpretation of the medieval saint’s history to emerge from his play. He acknowledges like precedents that Joan was a saint but with the instinct of an artist, points up to those elements in her that had evolutionary and spiritual implications far beyond the Catholic mould. The effect is that he produces history that is both Shavian and genuinely a play about the historical Joan. This probably is what Pirandello meant when he called the play “a work of poetry from beginning to end”.

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VII. FANNY´S FIRST PLAY (1910): SHAW’S SENSE OF HIS ART IN METATHEATRE

According to Robert Alter (1975: x) “literary realism is a tantalizing contradiction in terms.” While the great tradition of western literature willingly accepts fiction as reality, the “other tradition”, the modern, bases itself on the logical possibility that, since fictions are not real, a work of art only comes close to the truth of reality when it does not pretend to be what it is not, but declares itself for what it is, fiction. The implication is that realism in modern and postmodern works of art is perceived in terms of artistic self-consciousness or self-reflexivity. However, in his study of artistic self-consciousness in the novel, Alter (1975) traces this modernist trend in the novel’s early beginnings and hence, places only the novel in what he describes as a “distinctive generic trend”, that parallels the great realistic tradition and which may be called ‘the other tradition’”. Yet, if tracing artistic self-consciousness from the earliest beginnings of a genre makes the phenomenon “a distinctive trend” in that genre, then artistic self-consciousness might more probably prove to be “a distinctive generic trend in the drama”, which in showing evidence of self-consciousness since its inception, can claim a head-start over the novel of some two thousand years.

If any conscious breaking of the illusion in art can be called “self-consciousness”, the chorus in Greek tragedy would represent the earliest evidence in Western literature of the artist’s awareness of his art as art. In British drama, the phenomena had long been well-established. Medieval drama, not far removed from ritual is non-illusory. Many of the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, prologues, epilogues, asides, direct addresses and “the play-within-a play” are notable examples of self-consciousness and whatever their thematic purpose, exist to formally remind audience that it is watching a play which while pretending to be reality is not.

However, these instances of the disregard for dramatic illusion are only related to the modern phenomenon of self-consciousness in drama. In modern dramatic theory, this self-consciousness is called “metadrama” or, “metatheatre”.65 And if Lionel Abel is correct in Metatheatre (1963) that, a play that is pervasively concerned with itself as drama is characteristic of the genre, then Fanny’s First Play fully belongs to the genre. The phenomena of self-consciousness in which I wish to place Fanny’s first Play in this chapter involves that persistent and pervasive inward turning of the text and its textual strategies which, when pursued to an extreme results in a work becoming supremely aware of itself as artifice and unabashedly self reflective. In short, when fully pursued, self-consciousness results in the form of a work becoming its content. Regardless of genre, Manfred Pfister (1991) calls such a text a “metatext” and uses it to distinguish the modern from the postmodern text.

Answering his title question, “How Modern is Intertextuality?” Pfister (1991)

65 For a survey of self-consciousness in drama from Shakespeare, see Anne. Righter (1967);

James. L. Calderwood 1967, Metadrama and Robert Egan (1975).

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insists that the difference between a modern and postmodern text lies in the quality of the text’s intertextuality. The modern text is the product of intertextuality conceived within the framework of structuralist theories of intertextuality and the postmodern text is a product of “the intertextuality conceived and realized within the framework of poststructuralist theories of intertextuality” (Pfister, 1991: 214). Pfister explains that, self-consciousness in a postmodern text does not simply imply the persistent and recurrent appearance of self-referentiality. The postmodern text is a “metatext”, in which “intertextuality is not only used as a device among others, but foregrounded, thematized and theorized as a central constructional principle”. It is “a text about texts or textuality, an auto-reflective and auto-referential text, which thematizes its own textual status and the devices on which it is based” to the extent that, it loses itself in a “mirror maze” of intertextual and metatextual reflections (Ibid.: 215).

The definition provides a framework for my discussion of Fanny’s First Play as Shaw’s fullest expression of his sense of his art as a form of cultural and aesthetic criticism, but more significantly, as a metadramatic forerunner to the postructuralist critique of the text in general and Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” in particular.

VII. 1. The Theatrical and Historical Context: The aesthetic-ethical theme

Fanny’s first play needs to be examined in a variety of contexts. The first is to embed the play in Shaw’s critical writings on art and to see it as part of his socialist political campaign against the nature and function of art on the English stage. A fundamental dialectics of literature and culture or aesthetic and ethical criticism informs Shaw’s oeuvre. Inasmuch as his works deal with the conflict of Realism and Idealism (whether in writing, reading, criticism or social life), all his plays and genre transformations are deeply embedded in this political theme by which Shaw emphasizes the inextricable relation of aesthetics to ethical transformation. But Fanny’s first Play seems particularly inspired by the need to give dramatic illustration (form or structure) to the dialectics of aesthetics and ethics in Shaw’s critical writing. Though the dialectics of aesthetics and ethics implicitly animate all Shaw’s plays, it is in Fanny’s first play that he most profoundly gives this dialectical theme a dramatic form. To see its centrality in the structure of the play requires a recollection of Shaw’s principles of literary criticism.

To Shaw, art is a vehicle or an instrument for expressing new socio-cultural ideas and that instrument is useless if one has nothing to work upon with it: “new ideas make their technique as water makes its channel; and the technician without ideas is as useless as the canal-constructor without water” (Prefaces, 751). Shaw asserts that “A true original style is never achieved for its own sake. Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style” (Ibid.: 165-6). In other words, a work of art cannot command attention without a certain ethical basis. Ethical concerns in themselves are just as insufficient as technical skills without ethical

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substance. For Shaw, ethics and artistic skills are inseparable. H. C. Duffin, in The Quintessence of Bernard Shaw sums up Shaw’s principle of dramatic writing thus, “Art by itself gives aestheticism, ethics alone Puritanism. Ethics provides the end, the aim, art the inspiration. Ethics by themselves are lifeless, even vicious. Inspiration by itself is aimless, vague, nebulous” (H.C. Duffin, 1939: 178)

Shaw himself most appropriately formulates this aesthetic-ethical dialectics in his metaphor of “the world as stage”, which not only accentuates the dialogue between art and social life in Fanny’s first play, but emphasises that every writer must embed the literary text in culture and the reader must read the cultural text in the literary text as well. As this metaphor makes clear, Shaw’s aesthetic-ethical theme relates to writing, reading and subjectivity as well:

Nothing is more significant than the statement that ‘all the world’s a stage’. The whole world is ruled by theatrical illusion....The great critics are those who penetrate, and understand the illusion: the great men are those who, as dramatists planning the development of nations, or as actors carrying out the drama are behind the scenes of the world....Even the great metaphor is inaccurately expressed; for the world is a playhouse, not merely a stage (Drama 2, 714, emphasis are mine)

This Shavian metaphor is, to say the least, given material form in the aesthetic-ethical theme and dialectical structure of Fanny’s first play. As Shaw’s most explicit exploration of the dynamics of aesthetics to ethics in the form and content of comedy, Fanny’s First play is a lesson on writing and a satire on the kind of closed reading pursued by Victorian critics.

However, while the play gives dramatic form to Shaw’s critical themes, it is also a conscious attempt on the playwright’s part to insert his play in an ongoing Victorian discourse on the relation of art to moral value. Broadly speaking, there were two opposed schools of thought about literature or art in general in the Victorian era: the aesthetes and the moralists. The aesthetes were votaries of “art for art’s sake”. They had no other aim save to burn incense at the altar of art and worship art for its own glory. Love of beauty was their creed, and if in glorifying beauty they were sensuous, they had but scant fear for the charges of the moralists and orthodox puritans. They held that the writer should not try to preach or reform society, but must reveal or illuminate art itself.’ For them, the joy of art is the creation of beauty.

In stark opposition to the prevalent forms of art that were influenced by the l’art pour l’art movement, Shaw maintained that “for Art’s sake alone [he] would not face the toil of writing a single sentence” (Prefaces, 165). Though more emphatic on the moral value of art, Shaw was following in the footsteps of the Victorian critic, John Ruskin who championed the moralist view of art against the aesthetes. Moralists like Ruskin held that the writer should inevitably influence the life and character of the reader. Art, says Tolstoy, is not to be valued merely for its beauty or its aesthetic pleasures. Like food it must be judged by its effect, not on the palate, but on the health.

Shaw highly admired Ruskin’s moral stance on art and his play is in part, a tribute to Ruskin’s aesthetic-ethical stance in this discourse. For Shaw, although Ruskin is

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generally considered a moralist in art, the Victorian critic was the synthesis of the aesthetic-ethical debate. In his critical writings on Ruskin, Shaw deconstructs Ruskin’s aesthetic criticism, showing the critic as controversially an aesthete and a moralist. But Shaw’s contradictory representation of Ruskin as the synthesis of the aesthetic-ethical discourse rather than a partisan reflect more, Shaw’s own stance on the subject. Shaw was an aesthetically minded anti-aesthete, believing in the unity of form and content; of aesthetics to ethics as discussed above. In Fanny’s first Play, he uses Ruskin to illuminate his own position on the debate, just as he fathers his own artistic techniques on Ibsen in The Quintessence.

As part of the centennial discourse on aesthetics and ethics and as an elaboration of his own stance in this debate, Shaw, in Fanny’s First play employs, Ruskin as offstage referential figure for the theme and form of the play. Shaw uses Ruskin’s personal biography and aesthetic-ethical thinking about art to structure his play and to illuminate certain aspects of his onstage characters. Ruskin figures strongly in the ideological structure of Fanny’s first play, and in his poetic use of Ruskin, Shaw inserts the play in the debate on aesthetics and ethics in which Ruskin played a leading role.

But more than any of the above contexts, Shaw’s play was directly inspired by the negative critical reception that he and the participating playwrights in his Court Theatre experiment received from conventional Victorian critics. These hostile critical reviews become a context for reading the play as a satire on Victorian critics and criticism or as a critica lecture on playwriting and reading. In many respects, the play is also a criticism of criticism i.e., as criticism of Victorian critical approaches to literary texts. In response to negative criticism of his own works and of the Court Theatre experiment, Shaw wrote Fanny’s First play as a satirical parody of his critics, but also as a dramatic lesson on how to read or how not to read a play-text.

To understand the play as a satirical retort to Shaw’s Edwardian-Victorian critics, it is important to bear in mind that, although by 1911 when Shaw wrote Fanny’s first Play, he was highly influential in intellectual, political and cultural circles and among young theatregoers, he was not yet a popular playwright. He was no doubt well-known as a dramatist in Britain and Ireland, North America, and Germany. He had made a fortune from his plays, but has not had a fashionable or popular West End success. This only came with Pygmalion in 1914. With the Court Theatre experiment, however, the unjust critical attacks he had suffered since the 1890s assumed full force and were not only directed against Shaw’s drama, but also against all the participating playwrights in the Court theatre experiment, which aimed at showing the feasibility and necessity of a national repertory theatre. Shaw’s experience with Granville Barker in setting up the new Court Theatre simultaneously made Shaw the leading exponent of the New Drama in England in the eyes of a few and the object of fierce criticism from a majority of critics. The newness of the plays made each new production the victim of the same adverse critical attacks that have been directed at Shaw’s drama. While acknowledging the success of the plays in the Court theatre, critics denied the plays the right to be called plays, their characters to be real characters, their authors to

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be real dramatists, or the discussion mode of Shaw’s drama to be called drama at all. Shaw was exasperated by these outrageous or, at least, what he considered

inadequate criticism, but more because they diverted attention from the Court Theatre experiment. In response, he wrote Fanny’s First Play, as a satire and a lesson or how to write and read a play. Fanny’s First Play is drama about drama in much the same way as Man and Superman is a comedy about the philosophy of comedy. But because of its critical frame and context, the play can be read as a mine of information on the ethical content and form the Shaw play-text. A brief summary of the play may put in perspective its metatextual content and form.

VI.2. A brief summary of Fanny’s first play

Fanny’s first play is a comic farce structured in “a play-within-a-play”, consisting of an Induction, the play proper and an Epilogue. Shaw’s play was first performed anonymously and critical reviews were very much focussed on identifying the author. But the play itself is about reading anonymous writing in which respect, Fanny’s first play is a critical work that precedes not just I.R. Richard’s Practical Criticism (1929), but also Barthes’ “The Death of the author” by well over sixty years.

Fanny’s First play is about Fanny’s first play. Unknown to anyone even her father, Fanny, the heroine has written a play and wants to have it performed on her birthday. Conscious that her father’s 18th century aesthetic and cultural taste runs counter the form and realistic content of her play, and yet, eager to know how her play fits in her “arts for art sake” context, Fanny decides to have her play performed anonymously before a group of eminent critics. Counting so much on the refine and sentimental upbringing he has given his daughter, Count O’Dowda erroneously anticipates that the kind of play Fanny will obviously like to have performed on her birthday is a sentimental romantic comedy. O’Dowda recruits Savoyard to manage the performance of his daughter’s birthday play. Savoyard selects the critics in attendance and prepares the performance in the Induction.

Besides it anonymous authorial context, Fanny’s play, (Shaw’s inner play) is untitled. The inner play is about a young girl of Fanny’s age, Margaret Knox who revolts against her family upbringing, i.e., her family religion, parental authority and all the class ideologies that the renowned Knox and Gilbey families represent. Like Fanny in the frame play who shocks her father with the ethical content of her play, Margaret’s ethical revolt shocks her puritan parents and the invited guest of critics. The epilogue registers the critical disapproval of the invited critics to the form and content of “Fanny’s play”. But more significantly; it satirizes the critics’ attempt at identifying the author of the play as a first step to evaluating it.

Fanny’s First play is one of Shaw’s minor comedies and, simple as it may appear, it is also his most modern in being a drama about drama and about dramatic criticism as well as in its self-reflexivity. As drama about drama and dramatic criticism, it engages the postructuralist themes of authorship, writing, reading, language, meaning

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and subjectivity. Shaw subtitles the play, “An Easy play for a Little theatre” and however easy this little work may be, the playwright does not leave artistry behind. One may say with Pfister that it is a “metatext” for, “intertextuality is not only used as a device among others in Fanny’s First play, but is foregrounded, thematized and theorized as a central constructional principle”. The play is thus an expression of Shaw’s postmodern sense of his art.

This chapter contends that Fanny’s first play is in postmodern fashion, unabashedly self-reflective and supremely aware of itself, not just as drama about drama, but also as drama about dramatic criticism. Few playwrights before Shaw have analysed their own themes and techniques of dramatic writing in their fictions as intensely as Shaw does in Fanny's first Play. Initially intended as a satirical critique of Victorian critics and their stereotyped theoretical approaches to his art, Shaw’s Fanny’s first play anticipates the entire French world of intertextualists: Krestiva, Barthes, Derrida, Levi-Strauss and post war philosophers like Recoeur. The play engages the major themes of Poststructuralism― authorship, language, writing, reading, subjectivity, textuality and does so within the form of fiction (drama) in order to demonstrate that the fictional mode might be a better mode for criticism than the analytical mode. Criticism (aesthetic and ethical) become deeply entangled in fiction as the traditional boundary collapses in Shaw's comedy. Through the critical content of his play, Shaw transforms what should otherwise be a Victorian farce or melodrama into a dramatic exercise on how to read and write a play-text.

Also striking is the linguistic structure on which Shaw constructs his play. Everything seems paired, not just to illustrate the dialectical relation of aesthetics to ethics, but to simultaneously show identity and difference. Written in “a Play-within-a play”, the frame is focused on the aesthetic conflict of daughter against father while the inner play is focussed on the ethical conflict of daughter against mother. The outer play is the aesthetic context through which the ethical conflict of the inner play is seen. At the background to the aesthetic-ethical dialectics of frame and inner play is the life and aesthetic-ethical writings of John Ruskin. In fact, in his structure, Shaw is raising the question that has plagued his own arts for so long: whether we should consider art purely as art or as a form of cultural (re) interpretation and, while he does more than raise the question in the aesthetic theme of the frame, the ethical theme of the inner play is meant to be seen as the necessary Derridean “Supplement” to the aesthetic frame. From this dialectics, Shaw builds up intricate binary structures of similarities and contrasts around his main themes so that every aspect of the play; every item in the plot reflects each other as if in a hall of mirrors. In this language-based structure by which everything is systematically paired to simultaneously show identify and difference, Shaw anticipates the linkage between structure and signification that inspired modern theories of intertextuality.

In fact, more than Shaw’s better known plays, Fanny's First Play reveals that Shaw’s was more self-conscious in his art than was ever thought by his critics or revealed by him during his life time. M. Morgan (1972:94) notes “evidence of the

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careful planning that went into Shaw’s apparently careless playwriting” and asserts, “it brings out the fact that he was writing as Shakespeare was supposed to have written, on different levels to suit the taste and capacities of different sections of his audience”. Fanny’s first Play is constructed to operate on several different levels. It therefore seems reasonable that an intertextual approach to the manifold structures of the play must be based on the postructuralist concept of intertextuality postulated by Krestiva, who, drawing from Bakhtin’s dialogism and polysemy defined a text as “constructed as a mosaic of quotations” and, a new structure as generated in the intersection of different structures. As Krestiva asserts,

Bachtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exists but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is the conception of his ‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings; that of the writer, the addressee (or character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context” (Krestiva, 1984: 35-36)

Before a detail analysis of the plot, I want to focuses on the deliberate structural strategies at work that allow Fanny's First play to operate on manifold levels is Shaw’s exploration of his aesthetic-ethical theme.

VI.3. Levels of Structural Dialogue

The subtitle, “An Easy Play for a Little Theatre,” appears ironic because Fanny’s First play is the most daring of Shaw's plays in terms of form and content. It is first and foremost, “a play-within-a-play” where one fits in, and dialogues with the other in demonstrating the inextricable relation of aesthetics to ethics in Shaw’s art. There is an untitled three act comedy with an unknown author framed in an Induction and an epilogue. “The induction” is essentially concerned with preparations for the performance of the untitled anonymous inner play, but it also functions as expository act to introduce the main characters. It is followed by the performance of the “play proper” (Fanny’s play” or the Inner play) and then, by the epilogue, which is entirely concerned with the attempts of invited audience-critics to place “Fanny’s play”. Written in Shaw’s “discussion” mode, the epilogue is also a satire on the specialized critics who insist on being told who the author is, as a first step in providing value judgment. As satire then, the epilogue is a critical decanonization of the 19th century “Art for art sake theory” and a parody of contemporary critics and criticism. The audience-critics of “Fanny’s Play” are burlesque of Shaw’s real critics in the London theatre of the 1890s and, in modelling his critic-characters on his own real critics outside the fictional world of Fanny’s first play, Shaw brings together fiction and reality as the epilogue passes into a a ridiculous review of the disparaging reviews of Shaw’s play in Victorian criticism. Just as Shaw’s portrait of his fictional audience-critics flaunt the borders of fiction and reality in being based on life models, his

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author-character, Fanny as well as her fictional heroine, Margaret are ambiguously modelled on Ruskin and Shaw. Hence, as metatheatre, Fanny’s first play’s main characters are metafictional characters.

But Fanny’s First play is not just “a- play-within-a-play”, but also drama about drama; about the aesthetic-ethical form and content of drama. As “a play within a play” then, the frame also dialogues with the inner play at the thematic level. Both plays are variations of a single theme in Shaw’s drama: the conflict of Realism and Idealism. However, in Fanny’s First play, the theme is modelled on a generational or oedipal conflict. To say the least, both frame and inner plays deal with the oedipal revolts of children against their parents; of the young against the old. Yet, as mentioned, the play is structured to demonstrate the dialectical relation of aesthetics to ethics. Hence, while both frame and framed plays deal with the theme of oedipal revolt, the frame is predominantly concerned with the aesthetic revolt of daughter against father and the inner play, with the ethical revolt of daughter against mother. Yet both conflicts are inseparable as Shaw frames the ethical revolt in the aesthetic revolt.

By writing a socially realistic play that she knows is repulsive both to her father’s aesthetic and cultural taste as well as disregards the aesthetic norms of the time, and by inviting her father and critics of his generation to watch it, Fanny is not only revolting against the aesthetic system and her social class but also against the sentimental upbringing her father has given her. She is in fact identifying herself with her ethically rebellious heroine. Fanny’s play, the inner play is about a young girl of her own age, Margaret who revolts against parental authority, class respectability and religion. The aesthetic revolt of the frame thus dialogues with the ethical revolt of the inner play at structural and thematic levels for, Fanny is identifying herself with her work.

A little above the structure of “the play-within the Play” is the ideological structure, which Shaw builds on the figure of John Ruskin. As background referential character for the structure and themes of the play, Shaw’s play is modelled on Ruskin as the leading figure in the aesthetic-ethical debate of the 19th century. In his critical writings on Ruskin, Shaw presents the Victorian critic contradictorily as an aesthete and a moralist and this contradiction accentuates the thematic focus and conflict in Fanny’s first Play. For Shaw, aestheticism is a form of idealism and while he attributes the idealist aspects of Ruskin’s thought on art to his Idealist characters mainly, the representatives of the old generation (his critic-audience and parents like Count O’Dowda in the frame and the Knoxes and Gilbey parents in the inner play), he uses Ruskin’s ethical revolutionary biography (his personal rebellion against his puritan family religion for instance), and his ethical criticism of art to illuminate aspects of his two heroines’ rebellion. Just to cite an example, like the heroines of Shaw’s frame and inner plays, Ruskin was brought up by idealistic parents. He also revolted against his family religion and ethics after embracing it in his youth. Ruskin’s mother, Margaret Cox was a staunch evangelist like Mrs Knox. Shaw’s frame play splits Ruskin’s mother into two characters, Knox and Margaret, mother and daughter. In other words, it is Ruskin’s ethical rebellion against her mother’s religion that is transposed and re-

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enacted in the ethical conflict of Margaret against her mother’s religion in the inner play. But this conflict is transposed into a daughter-father aesthetic conflict in the frame, so that both conflicts accentuate the central theme of oedipal revolt.

The oedipal conflict between generations (parents and their children) is also a literary conflict in which Shaw inserts himself. Shaw, the author returns to his text, but as in the Barthesan sense of “the author as guest”; that is, through the string of authorial shadows that he creates to deconstruct his own authorial identity. The oedipal conflict in the play is also that between the literary son, Shaw and his literary father, Ruskin. In his contradictory presentation of Ruskin as an aesthete and moralist, and his ambivalent identification of Fanny and Margaret with both Ruskin and himself, Shaw presents himself as the young writer and critic that will replace Ruskin.

As drama about dramatic criticism, the structure of Fanny's First play is even more challenging for Shaw plays beyond the frame66 of his work and extracts humour by withholding both his name as author of Fanny's first play and the name of the fictional author of the inner play from both the real critics who attended the first performance of Fanny’s first Play and from the fictional critics in attendance at “Fanny’s Play” (the inner play), so that, the real problem of identifying the author of Fanny's First play after its first anonymous performance in London in 1911 is replicated in the fictional world of Shaw’s play through the anonymous performance situation of the inner play. In other words, the real problem in critical reviews of the first performance of Fanny's First play becomes the fictional problem with which Shaw confronts the fictional critics of “Fanny's play” (or the inner play). In this way, Shaw makes the fictional critics of the inner play repeat in little the real critics of his drama as they struggle to identify the author of the inner play that they have just watched. The real question of identifying Shaw (as author) in real reviews is identical with the fictional problem of identifying Fanny as author in the fictional inner play.67

As already discussed above, the frame play serves as an aesthetic context in which the aesthetic idealism of the old generation of critics is seen as identical to the ethical idealism of the parents in the inner play. The frame presents the aesthetic idealism of the cultural elite who cannot read the signs of a changing aesthetic taste in Fanny’s play. It is thus through the aesthetic perspective of the frame play that the ethical 66 One notes here Derrida’s similar interest in the “Supplementary logic” of the frame,

parergon (literally, beyond the work”). See, “translator’s Preface” to Of Grammatology, “Parergon, a latecomer among these nicknames, is a frame and a supplementary ‘addition’” (Derrida, Grammatology, Ixxii).

67 The concealment of the authorship was quite deliberate. Audience attending the performance found the author’s name displayed on the paybills as Xxxxxxx Xxxx. When Shaw handed the script to Lillah McCarthy who was to play Margaret, he urged her to “do everything to suggest the play is by Barrie” (C.f. H. Pearson, 1942:256). The title is also quite ambiguous. In using the title, Fanny’s First Play for both the frame and inner plays and leaving the inner play untitled, Shaw creates a titular ambivalence that raises questions of authorship. Fanny’s First play is used in this chapter to stand for the combination of inner and frame plays while “Fanny´s play” refers to the inner play.

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idealism of the inner play is reflected. The frame raises direct questions about playwriting, reading authorship, meaning, generic traditions and the nature of criticism. The idealistic response of the critics is shown as identical to the idealistic reaction of the parents of the inner play towards their children. In withholding the identities of the authors of both frame and inner play, and in attributing a single title to both (Fanny’s First Play), Shaw puts a question mark on authorship and on the unitary concept of the text. Hence, the frame raises and discusses questions of authorship, reading, writing, language, meaning and subjectivity in the light of Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”. In brief, it illustrates the complexities of a proper critical response to a text and the need to free criticism from dogmatic theories or ideals.

The Inner play on the other hand, focuses a critical lens on the idealism of the old generation in the socio-cultural sphere. It deals with what Shaw calls “problems of conduct” and its social philosophy can rightly be said to be the philosophy of Creative Evolution, though the philosophy emerges in this play as if in anticipation of the works of post-war writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who have always been fascinated with man’s propensity for crime. The preface asserts crime as a vital first step towards moral freedom: “I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle-class people are all as dead as mutton”. Hence, “the author is driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that would get you into trouble” (IV: 345). This injunction to commit a crime is a on the narrative level, what the frame and inner plays are all about.

Shaw called his play “an easy play for a little theatre”. From this appellation, we can see how the structure functions at another purely formal level. On the purely formal level, Shaw’s structure is characterized by a systematically pairing of items, characters and text to show identity and difference. Because it is “an easy play”, Shaw reduces key elements to conceptual pairs― of either similarities and/or contrasts. But from this simple structure of pairing things, Shaw builds up complex structures of meaning in which his larger thematic concern with an Oedipal struggle at the aesthetic and ethical levels, (of frame and inner play respectively), and between children and their parents is paralleled by the aesthetic and ethical concerns of John Ruskin's art. All this is presented self-reflexively in the context of different theatrical traditions, so that the similarities and binary oppositions on which the play is structured not only make for a “mirror maze” of self-reflexivity, but also occasions a complete fluidity of meaning, requiring of the reader a critical and creative response. Besides this language-based structure of similarities and binary opposition, language functions to define the discourse classes of Shaw’s characters in Fanny’s first play.

VI.3.1. Language and discourse structures

Language assumes new functions in Fanny’s First Play. Besides the binary structure by which Shaw creates the self reflexive structure of his play, language underscores the political theme and defines characters in discourse classes, especially

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in the inner play, which deals with class ideology and prejudices. The inner play is concerned with the ethical conflict between classes as deep socially determined dialects are engaged at the political level of class ideologies. This dialogism is expressed by the characters at the level of the dramatic action ― that is, their language goes beyond the personalities of the individual characters who speak in the lines.

The subject, the very plot of the inner play lends itself to Bakhtinian construct, for the young author, Fanny is propounding a political problem between parents and their children and classes, with a bluntly socialist Fabian resolution (a synthesis). Consequently, in Fanny O’Dowda’s play, the revolutionary discourse of each person outside the cultural centre threatens the position and ideals of the entrenched inside group. Central to this dialectics of inside/outside is the structure of frame and inner plays and the generational conflict between the young and the old, children and parents and artists and precedents, all of which complement the larger theme of Oedipal revolt.

Bakhtin uses the term, “dialogic” to express the ideological warfare that exist between culturally opposed modes of language as well as the effect wrought upon one by the other, or others. Glossing over the term dialogism, Holquist’s note to Bakhtin (1981:426) define dialogism as a “characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia.” Everything means, or is understood as part of a greater whole ― there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others”. Shaw displays a fine knowledge of this notion of language use. Fanny’s First play provides a brilliant example of Bakhtinian polyglossia in the use of multiple socially determined dialects, what Bakhtin calls the “Word” within a given culture. Language is consciously structured to reflect class conflict, that is, distinctions of origin, whether of class, caste or place in society.

Pygmalion (1914), which is also constructed on class dialogue is indeed an improvement on the class-based discourses of Fanny’s First Play and can be used to illustrate the dialect classes of Fanny’s fist play. In Pygmalion, Shaw actually casts language itself in the star role. The real conflict in the play can rightly be said to be a linguistic one for, it is not Higgins and Eliza who are in conflict with each other, but mainly their social classes. This class conflict is clearly manifest in their language. Both individuals are not really in conflict, after all, they both want the flower girl to “talk like a lady”. But conflict in Pygmalion assumes a social dimension as the classes of Higgins and Eliza are shown to be in conflict. Language actually assumes the function of hero and heroine or protagonist and antagonist and the social conflict is mapped out in the quite distinct economic and social worlds of the main characters. This linguistic distinction is carried over to their distinctive attitudes, experiences, abilities, training, perceptions and expectations as Shaw shows the social worlds of Higgins and Eliza engaged in a violent power struggle. The preface to Pygmalion states the dialogic structure in quite Bakhtinian terms. Pointing to the linguistically stratified society dominated by heteroglossia and to the innate hostility of each class ― sprung “Word” towards the other, the preface asserts that, “It was impossible for an English man to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise

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him.” (IV: 317). The same is true of “Fanny's play” (the inner play”) where the two distinguished households, the Gilbeys and Knoxes are marked by their language, class respectability, religious prejudices and morals, which are handed down to succeeding generations of children as family tradition.

However, the class “word” in “Fanny’s play” is only at times expressed in language and more significantly in the dramatic action, that is, in the attitudes of some characters towards those who do not belong to the cultural centre. Clearly, it was in Fanny’s First Play that Shaw first brought the subject of language to bear on his drama. The discourse structures of the characters in the inner play function as protagonist and antagonist, especially at the point of climactic confrontation between daughter (Margaret) and mother, (Mrs. Knox). The climactic conflict is mapped out in Margaret’s language of revolt against hermother’s class ideology. Besides this climactic confrontation, language is a mark of the characters’ quite distinct economic and social worlds, so that, Margaret’s devaluation of the language of her class when she confronts her mother becomes the peak of the generational conflict as well as the height of her attack on the social and class idealisms. The dialogic texture of Shaw’s play is complex. It is sometimes polemic, sometime outspoken as the discourse of each outside group/ person threatens the position of an insider. In the frame too, the critics of “Fanny’s play” belong to different discourse classes with regards to aesthetic criticism. Each represents a particular critical voice on art (a “Word”).

VI.3.2.The dialogic genres

Shaw’s frame and inner plays are structured to dialogue with each other at various levels. The Inner play dealing with an ethical conflict is complemented by the aesthetic conflict of the frame. Margaret's ethical revolt against parental authority, her fight with the police, her attempt to resist arrest, her very subversive language when she confronts her mother and her final rejection of her marital engagement amount to a carnivalesque subversion of social idealism, and is complemented by Fanny's equally carnivalesques subversion of idealistic aesthetic or dogmatic theories in the frame. But the unethical subversion of ideals in the inner play is complemented in both frame and inner plays by a carnivalesque display of generic modes through allusions.

When we turn from the mode of language, (social dialects) to the language of modes (the various genres), it becomes evident that various dramatic genres in themselves set up a dialogic interplay on the narrative level of Shaw's play. Shaw draws on a variety of generic modes, and it is worth noting that as far as the rage of dramatic genres in the play is concerned, we are dealing with a carnival of forms, seldom brought together in a single continuous action in the plot. The induction is a 19th century “Drawing room comedy”, the “play-within-a play” consists of a mixture of farce and melodrama with a romantic resolution, and the epilogue is a Shavian “discussion play”. But throughout his play, Shaw resorts to an extensive allusion to other texts, critical works and literary traditions. There are among others, elements of

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the morality play, comedy of manners, Ibsenian realism against illusions, the fantastic harlequinade plotting, the Commedia dell’arte, an element of socialist allegory, Greek tragedy etc. In fact, at the narrative levels of frame and inner plays, Fanny’s First play displays a carnival of generic modes that can only be likened to the tradition of the court masque, especially as confirmed by the occasion of the performance.

The occasion of “Fanny’s play” brings to mind the old aristocratic Court Masque tradition. The play is performed as part of a private annual ceremony in the noble house of Count O’Dowda. It is a stage performance commemorating the annual birthday of the noble man’s daughter. Like a carnivalesque event too, “Fanny’s play” embodies an aesthetic and ethical revolt. Significantly, there is the easy passage of characters from one role to another which also calls to mind the tradition of the court masque. In the 1916 production of the play, Shaw wrote a verse prologue to substitute the original framing section of the play if the inner play were to be performed independently. This verse prologue was to be delivered by the actress who was to play both Margaret, the heroine of the inner play and Fanny, the author-heroine of the frame play. She was to appear before the curtains dressed as Fanny O’Dowda, and confess her authorship of the play: “It’s really Fanny’s Play; and I am Fanny /I wrote the play. It was my first/ I had to write it or I should have burst:/I couldn’t help it” (IV: 347). The identification of Fanny, the author-heroine of the frame with Margaret, the heroine of the inner play is reflective of the easy crossing of boundary between creator, performer and audience, which marks the masque form.

The structure of the play reveals another dialogic relation on the narrative plane. Precisely because Shaw’s play is written in the form of “a Play within a play”, there arises a complex series of perspectives from which different spectators watch the performance. The frame and inner plays are watched by the actual author (Shaw) with real audience and critics in an actual theatre. The characters who perform the action of the inner play represent the “inside perspective”. The inner action is observed by the four professional critics of the induction and the epilogue as well as by Fanny (the fictional author herself) and by Fanny’s father, Count O’Dowda whose parental vision the inner play makes its target. Count O’Dowda represents the parental point of view in the frame play, but he is replaced in this perspective by the Gilbeys and Knoxes of the inner play who take over the parental perspective. As a whole, Fanny, the fictional author of the piece, notes the effect of the play on her audience as she sits watching on stage in the fictional world of Shaw's play. The fictional critics of her play do the same. But Shaw the real author of Fanny’s First Play and the real critics of his play do the same offstage. The proliferation of perspectives or viewpoints springs directly from the dialogic nature of the play. To quote Bakhtin once more, Fanny’s First Play can be read as a densely interwoven “dialogic” enterprise,68 at the level of language, characterization, textual content, generic modes and performance. 68 C.f. The Dialogic Imagination. See especially page 24, on “Epic and Novel”, which

explores the genres of the (Platonic) dialogue: “Characteristic, even canonic, for the genre is the spoken dialogue framed by a dialogized story” (25).

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It suffices to schematize the complex structural strategies of Fanny’s First Play into three main structural levels ― the narrative structures (frame and inner plays), the self-reflexive level and the formal linguistic structure ― as they function to express the aesthetic ethical theme in Shaw’s play.

The central theme of the play is a generational revolt (aesthetic and ethical) of the young against the old. Perceptibly, this happens on the narrative levels of both frame and inner plays. The oedipal struggle between daughter and father, which takes the form of an aesthetic conflict in the frame is supplemented by a double ethical revolt in the inner play between the Knoxes ― Margaret Cox and her puritanical mother ―, and a separate conflict between the Gilbeys ― Bobby against his own petit bourgeois parents. The aesthetic and ethical conflicts are complimentary and provide the context for Shaw’s use of the offstage figure of John Ruskin to thematically structure contextualize the play in an ongoing aesthetic-ethical discourse on arts. Ruskin's life immensely influences the narrative and thematic structure as well as Sahw’s characterization of his on-stage figures. Ruskin's personal history and aesthetic-ethical conscience provide the conceptual background for the binary structure of the play.

On a purely formal level, Shaw delineates his characters into discourse classes, but beyond this, he uses simply signifying pairs of either similarities or contrasts, anticipating the linkage between structure and signification. For instance, there are two similar revolts by two daughters against two sets of parents in both frame and inner plays. Yet Fanny’s aesthetic revolt in the frame also contrasts Margaret’s ethical revolt in the inner play. This practice of pairing elements (whether of names, relations, texts or whatever) is used to build up complex structures of meaning to simultaneously show identity and difference on the narrative level of the play.

At the self-reflexive level of the structure, Fanny’s First Play is concerned with itself as drama about drama and about dramatic criticism. As drama about drama, not only does a playwright herself figure as one of the major characters of the play, but her own fictional play figures as part of the larger play. In leaving the inner play untitled and the author unnamed, Shaw draws on the life of another offstage figure, Fanny Burney to dcontextualize his play and to allow it to read simply as “text” in the Barthesan sense. The circumstances of Fanny Burney’s anonymous publication of her first novel, Evelina provide Shaw with a deliberate strategy for decontextualizing a text in line with Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and to confront his fictional critics with questions of authorship, reading, writing, subjectivity and meaning.

VI.3.3. The Narrative Structure (Plot): a play-within-a-play

Fanny’s First play comprises two plays where one fits inside (as a part of) another. The play proper, “Fanny’s play” is girdled on both ends by the induction and epilogue, so that it actually begins in the middle, after the induction. In this structure of “a-play –within-a-play”, Shaw gives material form to his structural principle of beginning his

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play in the middle and inserting a discussion where an ordinary play should end. Here Shaw’s implicit theory of beginning a play in the middle is facilitated by the “play-within-a-play structure. After the curtains fall on “Fanny’s play” (the play proper), the rest of the play (the epilogue) is a critical appraisal of the performance by a number of leading drama critics. The epilogue is thus cast in the Shavian “discussion”.

VI.3.3.1. The Induction

The Induction introduces the metafictional characters. It opens with a footman, admitting Savoyard into the country house of Count O’Dowda, a wealthy papal Knight of Irish descent, resident in Venice. Fanny, his cherished daughter is a Cambridge student, a Fabian socialist, suffragette and author of the inner play, at this stage still unknown as author, even to her father and stage manager. All we know at this point is that she wants an untitled play with an unnamed author performed on the occasion of her birthday and Savoyard has been engaged to supply the actors and some professional critics to watch and comment on the event. He has persuaded four well-known London dramatic critics to attend and these learned men are expected for dinner shortly before the performance begins.

We are immediately made aware of the Count’s aestheticism and ethical refinement.69 The Count lives in a Venetian Palazzo and listens preferably to Italian music, Pegolessi. His classic taste corresponds with his attire. We are told that he is a “handsome man of fifty, dressed with studied elegance a hundred years out of date”. Fanny intends to surprise her father with her play, but O’Dowda, counting so much on the sentimental and romantic upbringing he has given his daughter, quite confidently and yet, erroneously predicts the kind of play his daughter would like to have performed on her birthday. He envisages a conjunction of nineteenth century Christmas Pantomime and melodrama with its traditional features of Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon and Punchinello (IV: 356).70 Fanny’s play O’Dowda goes on, 69 The source of O’Dowda’s name, his connection to Venice and his aestheticism may be

inferred from a fact noted in Weintraub (1982:57) that, in 1886, Shaw as art critic reviewed “the Dowdeswell of Venice etchings” and was disappointed in the piece by Whistler. Whistler was the personification of the aestheticism of the “Art for Art sake” theory and the most vigorous opponent of Ruskin’s moral conscience in art. The controversy between Ruskin and Whitsler over artistic content provides a larger structural framework for reading Shaw’s play as part of this discourse.

70 English Christmas Pantomime was an annual entertainment which for a time occupied the nation’s theatres from “Boxing Day (26th of December) to the end of March. Ostensibly an occasion for children, it was above all, a spectacle. Its main features, spectacle, the Pantomime story, the Pantomime animal and the Harlequinade conclusion provided a common ground between Pantomime and Christian Melodrama. The genre had a long history and its tradition had quite decayed by the time Shaw first watched “New Grand Christian Comic Pantomime...Harlequin Puss in Boots” in 1863-64 in Dublin. For a discussion of these minor genres and their influence on Shaw’s drama, see, Meisel

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would resemble a “Louis Quatorze ballet painted by Watteau”. His aesthetic taste being firmly rooted in the eighteenth century world of beautiful arts as we are told, the Count enlarges on his sense of delicatesse:

The heroine would be an exquisite Columbian, her lover, a dainty Harlequinade, her father, a picturesque Pantaloon, and the Valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness of the lovers, a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello or Marscarille or Signarelle (IV: 356).

The Count’s aesthetic taste is further expressed in his rejection of the more evolved 19th century form of this age old genre in preference for its 18th century tradition:

You dont suppose I mean that vulgar, ugly, silly, senseless, malicious and destructive thing, the harlequinade of a nineteenth Century English Christmas pantomime! What was it after all but a stupid attempt to imitate the success made by the genius of Grimaldi a hundred years ago? (IV: 356).

Watteau is of course the Painter of the Italian Comedia Dell’arte and Shaw’s allusive association of the Italian art with the French well-made comedies here is not fortuitous. He is adding the critical subtext that will become part of the subject of his epilogue and thus preparing the audience for his parody of the nineteenth century mechanically plotted drama and its critics in the epilogue. The Count’s association of the Italian and well-made comedies to Fanny’s play is also intended to foreshadow the contrast between these forms and the socially inspired realistic drama that his daughter has written and to prepare the reader for the father’s tragic disenchantment at the end of the performance of Fanny’s play. Cambridge has opened his daughter’s eyes. She is now a suffragette and a Fabian socialist with no intention of presenting any such ideal enhancing play as the Louis Quatorze series of tableau that her father describes or the French romantic well-made comedies of the 19th century. Contrary to these forms, Fanny plans to stage an up-to-date three act play with scandalously modern views, a Fabian resolution and a stern criticism of parental authority and of those existing aesthetic theories that her father and her generation of critics hold in high esteem.

The critics of Fanny’s play, the blutt of Shaw’s satire arrive and are introduced one after the other by Savoyard. They are all modelled on Shaw’s real London critics and in their portraits Shaw begins to flaunt the border between fiction and reality and to implicate the thematic of criticism in his play. To better understand Shaw's portrayal of the critics, it is important to bear in mind that as a dramatist, Shaw was always against plot. He shocked his contemporaries with the assertions that “plot has always been the curse of serious drama, and indeed of serious literature of any kind.” (IV: 784). In various ways he ridiculed the well-made structure which was the standard of dramatic writing at the time. The result was that his contemporaries critics, friends and foes, who believed that drama consisted of the construction of plot never admitted that Shaw was a dramatist. Even friendly critics, Archer and A. B. Walkley who happily conceded that Shaw’s “nonplays” were greatly entertaining in their idiosyncratic way, criticized

(1963: Chapter 13): “Christian Melodrama and Christmas Pantomime”.

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the deficiency of the plays with regards to the rules of plot construction. To the late 19th century critics, plot as derived from Aristotle’s poetics and perfected in mid-19th century well-made plays and novels had to be unitary to produce a coherent narrative as well as express a logical pattern of thought. It is on such contemporary exponents of fixed theory that Shaw models the critic-characters of “Fanny’s play”. They are, Mr. Trotter, Mr. Vaughan, Mr. Gunn and Flawner Bannal.

Like the main characters of the inner play, each critic represents an age group and a separate “voice” or “word” in dramatic criticism. Trotter is the Count’s contemporary, conservative, gentlemanly, and as Savoyard informs us, Trotter is “touchy” on Aristotelian Poetics; a play that departs in the least from the “Stagarite’s” Poetics is for him simply “not a play”. He represents the classical “word” in criticism and his classic thought on literature is marked by his academic robe. Trotter is a member of the academic committee and is dressed in uniform, much like that of the “French academy” (IV: 361). Vaughan is forty and honest in his criticism, but “has no sense of humour... its not that he doesnt see a joke” Savoyard tells us, “he does; and it hurts him”. Gunn is thirty, a cynical young intellectual for whom the most recent experiments in theatre are boring passé or mere repetitions of the traditions. He “pitches on the old intellectuals” for, he entirely lacks respect for any old literary tradition. At the rear is Flawner Bannal, representing the populace or the audience. He is twenty and has no taste. But as Savoyard informs the audience, “Flawner Bannal’s your man. Bannal really represents the British playgoer”.

There is a certain splitting and merging of characters in Shaw’s portrayal of the critics. Trotter is modelled after A. B. Walkley of The Times to whom Shaw dedicated the “Epistle Dedicatory” of Man and superman and whom he associated with the strict Aristotelian notion of plot construction, so antithetical to his own dramaturgy. Trotter is the most articulate of Shaw’s critics in the fictional world of the play where the critics ridiculously discuss Shaw’s “discussion play”. Like Trotter, Walkley was an active critic of Shaw’s drama in the real world of theatrical criticism. As one of the reigning doctrinaire Aristotelian critics of the 19th century, Walkley maintained that Aristotle’s definition of a play was “absolutely valid for all drama in all time”, and that Shaw, in ignoring it, “cheerfully let the quintessential drama go hang”.71 This classical view becomes the overriding principle in Trotter’s criticism of “Fanny’s play” and the object of Shaw’s satire for, Trotter repeats Walkley’s criticism of Shaw in the epilogue.

There is a particular irony which further renders fluid the border between fiction and reality in Trotter’s portrayal. Walkley participates both fictionally and in reality in Fanny’s First play. He actually helped in the make-up of the actor who played his character role (Trotter) in the first performance of the play. After helping in the performance of his own model, Walkley also reviewed the play, but consciously or unconsciously failed to recognize himself in his model. As he asserts in his review,

71 C.f. A .B. Walkley, 1903, 1907, Dramatic Criticism: Three Lectures, 98-99; Drama and

Life, 224-5.

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“We rather like Mr. Trotter, probably for the sole reason that we are all apt to admire our opposite. He is a genuine invention of Mr. X.... a whole figment of the imagination, wholly unlike any real person”.72 Claud King, the actor who played Trotter in the first performance of Shaw’s play had picked up the elder critic’s appearance, manner, and style of speech― his peculiar decorum―all with Walkley’s good-humoured help. But Walkley’s review asserted that “Claude King ...had evidently modelled his diction and demeanour upon Mr. Bernard Shaw”.

As a split character, Trotter is an amalgam of Walkley and Max Beerbohm whose review of Man and Superman ―“not a play” ―, became a stock in trade in Victorian critical reviews of Shaw’s drama. Beerbohm’s dismissals of Shaw's extended dialogues in real reviews are repeated by the fictional critic, Trotter, in the epilogue. Shaw however, cited Walkley and Clement Scott of the Daily News as models for Trotter. Scott was the critic most scandalized by the production of Ibsen’s Ghost (and eventually by Shaw's Widowers Houses) in the 1890s. The Quintessence was the outgrowth of Scott’s hysterical review of Ibsen.73 As discussed in my theoretical chapter, Shaw in part modelled his “Idealists” character catergory in The Quintessence on Clement Scott. As for his dramatic representations of Scott, Shaw has early lampooned the critic in The Philanderer (1893) and Trotter is a continuation of this early dramatic satire.

Like, Scott, Trotter, is scandalized by “Fanny’s play”. Shaw argues in The Quintessence that Ibsen is a Realist author who deconstructed the theatre of romance to which Victorian critics and audience of Scott's frame of mind were accustomed. “Fanny’s Play” follows this Ibsen/Shavian realism and thus shocks the Idealist critic Trotter/Scott as much as the Idealist father, O’Dowda. In their revolt against aesthetic and cultural norms, Fanny and Margaret are typical of Shaw’s masculine women and their actions continue to illuminate Shaw’s deconstruction of gender differences in Victorian culture. In having an educated Cambridge woman (Fanny) write a social realistic play in which her heroine, Margaret overturns the ethical norms of society, Shaw continues his attack on female stereotypes and his strategy of shocking idealist audience and critics by assaulting their cultural conceptions of normality. Trotter is shocked by Fanny’s play.

While Trotter is modelled on Scott and Walkley, Trotter’s aestheticism parallels the aestheticism of Count O’Dowda in the frame play and the social idealism of the parents of the inner play, and this parallel underscores the generational conflict at all levels of the plot. Both Trotter and Count O’Dowda belong to the same generation and both express shock at the feminist “text” of “Fanny’s play”. Trotter is shocked by the “manly woman” or “unwomanly women” in Margaret, the heroine of the inner play, 72 A. B. Walkley, “At the little Theatre”, In: The Times, 20 April 1911, 8. Mr. X... is Shaw. 73 Shaw asserts that, “Scott...went stark raving mad, and produced not only a column of

criticism but a leading article...in which he compared an Ibsen play to “a dirty act done publicly”, “an open drain”, and so on, demanding that the Independent Theatre should be prosecuted, suppressed, fined and deuce knows what” (Letters, I: 289).

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while the Count is rather shocked by the ethical content of his daughter's play. Following from Shaw’s systematic pairing of characters to show identity and difference, Trotter who is modelled after Scott and Walkley is also identified with the Count in his aestheticism. Trotter is a strict adherent of the Aristotelian formula of plot construction, insisting in the epilogue that Aristotle laid down the unchanging rules of drama for all times. Like him, the Count’s aesthetic taste veers towards the moral content of Italian and French well-made comedies. Trotter/Scott/Walkley and the Count are conspicuously dressed in old fashion cloths to signify their generation.

Trotter is a split character of Walkley and Clement Scott. Both critics shared strong Aristotelian views about drama, championed the well-made play, and translated French plays for the London stage. Their disparaging criticisms of Shaw in the 1890s provide the germ for the satirical epilogue where Trotter repeats some of the critical reviews of Shaw’s drama outside the fictional world of the play.

Flawner Bannal may also have been modelled on Clement Scott while Vaughan is modelled on E.A Baughan (1865-1938), a well-known music and drama critic of The Daily News in the 1890s. E.J. West (1958:56) draws a parallel between Clement Scott and Bannal when he asserts that in 1894, when Arms and The Man was first produced, “Clement Scott...prided himself as a dramatic critic in being the vox populi; he had a tremendous photographic memory and could describe accurately what he saw and heard in performance, but he had absolutely no philosophic principles” with regards to dramatic construction. He was, West adds, a “resolute enemy of anything new...he opposed all those things for which Archer of The World, Walkley of The Times, and finally Shaw, of The Saturday Review fought most staunchly.” Introducing Bannal, Savoyard tells us that he “represents the British playgoer”, the vox populi”. Finally, Gunn is modelled on Gilbert Cannan (1884-1955) who was working with The Star around the same period as Shaw.

An invitation is extended to the critics to become part of the dramatic action in the epilogue as they share in the fun of guessing the author, genre and meaning of “Fanny’s play”. In this epilogue, fiction, reality and criticism extend into a critical review as past criticisms of Shaw’s drama are repeated in the critical epilogue.

VI.3.3.2. The Play Proper, the Inner play or “Fanny’s play”

“Fanny's play” begins in the middle of Shaw’s play. It is about two respectable middle-class families living in the suburb of Denmark Hills, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes. These two families are partners in a shop-keeping business of underwear sale and are distinctly marked by their class prejudices. If the frame play satirizes the existing aesthetic thought, the inner play targets the social and ethical system, as the Gilbeys and Knoxes parents take over from the idealist critics and parent (Count O’Dowda) of the frame as bulwarks of an idealist system. Like the idealist-critics of the frame, the Gilbeys and Knoxes represent the Idealism of the social and ethical

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system (mainly class ideology), which Fanny’s play makes the object of its attack. Other characters include a cockney prostitute, Darling Dora, a French sailor, Duvallet, and a footman, Juggins who turns out to be the brother of a duke.

The play is a conjunction of farce and melodrama though in content one of Shaw’s most social realistic plays. “Fanny’s play” down-rightly condemns parental narrowness and class prejudice in the old generation. It unfolds in three acts scored by a range of social dialects in which the carnival atmosphere is expressed in the tone of the heroine at the climactic confrontation with her parents. Shaw implicitly draws on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but unlike the Montagues and Capulets, the respectable Gilbeys (Act I) and the God-fearing Knoxes (Act II) wish to cement their family ties and business relationship with the marriage of their children, Bobby and Margaret Knox. However, Bobby is smitten with Dora, a street walking prostitute with an indelicate cockney speech, while Bobby’s intended partner; Margaret Knox finds Bobby less stimulating than Duvallet (a walkabout Frenchman on holidays), and far less attractive than Juggins (the footman of the Gilbeys). At the end, Margaret and Bobby break their engagement, and while Bobby engages Dora at the end of the play, Margaret is engaged to the footman. Thus, it is the cultural outsiders in Fanny's play, Darling Dora and the footman who carry the day, pulling the insiders out of the cultural centre. The footman, we are told, serves the middle-class family (the Gilbeys) with tact and finesse and the gracious condescension of a duke. He turns out to be the brother of a Duke. We are also told that he entered domestic service for the melodramatic reason of atoning for a sin of unkindness. Juggins, Duvallet and Darling Dora are stock characters in farce and melodrama.

The main action of the plot turns around remarkable coincidences as in melodrama and farce. Unknown to both respectable families, their children, Bobby and Margaret have run afoul of the law and spent some days in jail. Bobby was merely a drunken accessory to the despicable Darling Dora’s impertinence to have a “copper”, but Margaret on her part consciously strayed from the Salvationist prayer meeting ground into a dancehall where she not only resists police arrest, but assaults the arresting police officer when she found herself part of a crowd being forcefully ejected from the dancehall. This episode transforms Margaret from the docile child of her respectable class and puritan upbringing, a girl who has been awarded the good conduct prize for three years running to the emancipated young woman who is Fanny’s heroine.

Margaret’s bold description of the episode to her mother in act II constitutes the climax of the play, as it powerfully conveys her sense of the encounter as a rite of passage to another life. She tells her shocked puritan mother how she visited a dancehall with Duvallet whom she only just met and how tipsy students from the Cambridge/Oxford Canoe race invaded the place and smashed things until the police arrived:

The students fought with the police; and the police got quite brutal and began to throw everybody downstairs....Two more attacked me and gave me a shove to the door. That quite maddened me. I just got in one good bang on the mouth of one of them....I was

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rushed through the streets to the police station. They kicked me with their knees; they twisted my arms; they taunted and insulted me; they called me vile names....Next morning....the police were quite jolly; and everybody said it was a bit of English fun (IV:393).

The two respectable families, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes want to keep the news of their children’s disgrace secret and to conceal the shame, both from each other and from the public, each family, not knowing that the other is involved in the same dishonour and fearing that the other family will want to break up the engagement if the despicable conduct of their son or daughter is made public, struggles to keep the disgrace to themselves. The two incidents involving Bobby and Margaret occur separately and each family seems unaware that the other is also involved in a mess. While Bobby remains sullen and ready to keep the secret and maintain his class respectability, Margaret publicly celebrate her deliverance from conventional morality. Margaret’s vision of her criminal act as an act of self liberation is the crux of the ethical revolt and needs to be seen against the background of the respectability, decorum and propriety that the Knoxes and Gilbeys have lived by and inculcated in their children.

The two families are the voices of the moribund social traditions that Fanny’s play seeks to sweep aside through Margaret’s rebellion. Committed to amassing wealth and maintaining a reputation in the face of what “people will think”, the two families have always observed propriety and the demands of culture. Tradition and orthodoxy is most important for them, they have no sincere religion worthy of the name and act purely on habit and tradition. They go to church out of habit, but lack a viable religion in the line of Shaw’s “life force” that Margaret epitomizes after her transformation.

Mr. Knox’s great fear after Margaret’s scrape is that it will become known: “Theres only one thing I care about in the world: to Keep this dark” (IV: 397), he pleads with Margaret, and when she will not, he envisages ruination in business and the destruction of his reputation. He clearly believes that whatever has happened to Margaret shouldn’t have happened because respectable girls just do not take up with strangers, get tipsy, brawl or go to jail. And if by a freak of misfortune some such unpleasantness should occur, the code demands that the departure from propriety be ignored, denied, obliterated or swept under the rug. The code of conduct for his class is that one must hide the truth at all cost and keep up a good front before his associates. The Gilbeys implicitly agree with the Knoxes on this philosophy of life and together they join forces as bulwarks of propriety to obscure reality by a welter of forms, custom or Ideals. But the oppressive world of respectability, decorum and propriety must come to terms with reality in Shaw's drama, and Margaret is the evolutionary agent of this reality. Her ethical revolt collapses the barrier and exposes the system that sustains her class. Margaret is the clear-sighted realist in the ethical sphere, calling everything to reckon with the facts and forcing the facts of everyday life through the veneer that polite society assumes.

Instead of accepting the role of the prim and proper “womanly woman” eager to

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settle down to the security and routine of a sheltered domestic life as her family expects and in accordance with her upbringing, Margaret, like Ibsen’s Nora, chooses to live in a real world where there are problems of poverty, sanitation, work-laws, and disease to grapple with. Her mother, a pious puritan Christian has always told her that truth and prayers shall set one free. Margaret has accepted her mother’s religious dogmas at face value and been “set free” indeed by crime, and her mother has got more than she bargained for. The key word which illuminates Margaret after her deliverance or transformation is “reality”. Respectability, propriety, religion and tradition are for her, as for Shaw the enemy. She has been brought up like Fanny in the outer play to regard socio-cultural and religious abstractions as the reality of life and to live by them and while Cambridge has transformed Fanny, a night in Holloway Jail has changed Margaret's vision of life and now, after testing the validity of one ideal after the other, she has been forced to reject each as no longer meaningful and to seek new guidelines for her life in rebellion. Not surprisingly, she now looks to that “instinctive” force, which Shaw believes lead vital people unerringly to right paths rather than to socio-cultural ideals for guidelines.

Margaret has descended into the hell of Holloway Jail where the police brutally man-handles men as if they were animals. She has heard the tales of “Number 407” (the completely dehumanizing label that officialdom uses for her fellow inmate, Dora Delany) and learned for herself firsthand what life means to the lower classes. While in jail, she has learnt and used profane language that she never knew. She has seen suffragettes and hardened criminals and herself rubbed shoulders with a society completely new to her. Now, fully aware that such a world exists, she knows that her new-found independent vision impels her to do what she can to improve it. Duvallet speaks of her in vivid terms as a Shavian realist: she has “the power of seeing things as they really are”, has “calm judgment”, and a “philosophic grasp”, “foresight and true courage” (IV: 429). Margaret is the Shavian genius and agent of the vitalist life force. She has strayed from the apparently “safe” prayer-meeting and hymn-singing gathering which she has often attended as a matter of family culture, into the dancehall from whence she is whisked to jail and from where she has found her right path.

Having undergone a transformation in jail, the comfortable illusions that have ruled Margaret’s life, respectability, propriety and class prejudices are all gone and she can only express her desire for “more music―more happiness―more life”, in short, for a robust life (IV:392). As she tells her mother, she has been good in the eyes of her parents but never free to be herself. “Pretence” is the word which describes her past for her now: “Thats all our respectability is: pretending, pretending, pretending”, she tells her mother. “I shall never be the same again. I shall never speak in the old way again. I’ve been set free from this little hole of a house and its entire pretence...for good or for evil I have been set free; and none of the things that use to hold me can hold me now” (IV: 395-6). She vows to tear down the artificial barriers which divide her class from others in society.

In creating Margaret, Fanny/Shaw is commenting sardonically on the social and

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aesthetic convention of Victorian literature, the view Shaw had earlier countered in Mrs Warren's Profession that young women of spirit are “ruined” by social indiscretions for, contrary to this idealistic notion, Margaret is set free by an act of indiscretion and finds a regenerative faith in the Life force. Her break from ethical conventions and her enthusiastic acceptance of freedom to do evil as well as good ― always the result of genuine freedom in Shavian drama ― contrasts sharply with her family’s religious understanding of freedom and with the aesthetic ideals of Victorian melodrama. Margaret has set out to give meaning to her otherwise meaningless existence by committing a crime and her discussion with her puritan mother in act II, after her release from prison represents the climax of the ethical revolt. Particularly relevant is the indecorum with which Margaret deconstructs the dichotomy of good and evil in relation to freedom: Mrs Knox: I know that prayers can set us free; though you could never understand me when I

told you so; but it sets us free for good, not for evil. Margaret: Then what I did was not evil; or else I was set free for evil as well as good. When I

was at home, and at school I was what you call good; but I wasn’t free. And when I got free I was what most people will call not good (IV: 394).

In sharp contrast to any conventional heroine of her time, Margaret is saved through the loss of her reputation. She looks forward to a future untrammelled by “mere morality”, respectability and custom. Her immersion in an alien world of criminals, streetwalkers and suffragettes has opened her eyes to whole new dimensions of human life and responsibility. Margaret has come to learn Shaw’s dictum in The Quintessence that “conduct must justify itself by its effect on life and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal” (125). Following from her transformation, Margaret is determine to act or behave spontaneously rather than blindly follow conventions and by Shaw’s standards, she becomes the only religious person in the play, that is, in the context of Fanny/Shaw’s conviction of what it is to live by faith. Having shared the treatment of the unprotected deviants of society, her essential gift is to recognize a sense of common humanity with her jail mates and resist the status quo. And she does: “I’ve been shoved and bullied”, she tells her mother. “I’ve been flung into a filthy cell with a lot of other poor wretches....and the only difference between me and the others was that I hit back” (VI: 396). The culmination of her revolt in Act II is that, she flings back the challenge to her upbringing, to the conventional “Word” of her class: “I wasn’t ladylike: I cursed, I called names”. By the end of act II, Margaret is a solid candidate for the bad conduct award. Her pious mother is unable to pray; Mr. Knox has switched from ordering his daughter out of the house to begging her― on his knees― “not to let it out”. But Margaret, liberated from conventional respectability brings down the curtains of act II threatening to destroy her father’s respectability. She will not be quiet about her crime; she will shout it to the top of her voice. In order words, Margaret will publish the revolutionary “Word”: “I’ll tell everybody”. The gap between generations has been shown as resulting from the lack of openness between children and their parents and the suppression of children’s spontaneity by convention,

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which itself cannot stand the taste of time.

Act III resolves the generation conflict with the footman (Juggins) presiding over this resolution and bridging the gap between generations (children and parents). Fanny’s play takes a turn towards a comedy of manners in act III, focusing on the contrast between Bobby’s conventional hypocrisy and the candid nature of gentlemanly courtesy that Juggins represents. The generational conflict has been based on the problem of finding viable morals for parents and children to act on. In act III, Booby seeks advice from Juggins. He wants to break his engagement with Margaret, but as he tells the footman, he would like to “give it a gentlemanly turn”. Taking this a little further Bobby explains, “You know, in my class you have to wrap up things a little bit” (IV: 401). But this class hypocrisy is essentially what the sincere Juggins cannot accept as a code of conduct. Juggins immediately rules out Bobby's approach: “If you wish to spare her feelings, sir, you can marry her. If you hurt her feelings by refusing, you had better not try to get credit for considerateness at the same time.” Bobby persists in seeking a way to squirm out of his engagement with his ego intact and is informed with certitude, “I assure you sir, there’s no correct way of jilting. It’s not correct in itself” (IV: 400).

Juggins, a nobleman who has humbled himself to serve others sets the tone and establishes the true standard of moral behaviour: sincerity and openness as an efficient code for living with other people rather than merely a recipe for “goodness” or respectability. This ideal code of conduct is what Gilbeys and Knoxes parents and their class lacks. Juggins stresses simple honesty and an intelligent consideration for others as the gentlemanly code of behaviour. Opposed to the murky respectability observed and prized by the Gilbeys and the Knoxes of Denmark Hill, the footman’s notion of granting choices for others and assuming responsibility for one’s self dissolves the class barrier. His advice to Bobby is actually a homily on manners:

I have noticed, sir that Denmark Hill thinks the higher you go in the social scale, the less sincerity is allowed, and that only tramps and riff-raff are quite sincere. That’s a mistake. Tramps are often shameless; but theyre never sincere. Swells ― if I may use that convenient name for the upper classes―play much more with their cards on the table (IV: 401).

In this third act, the wrong couples are separated and the right couple brought together in a general levelling that befits a comedy and the ethical theme of the play. Bobby and Margaret tell each other they have been in jail. The conventional Bobby is irritated to hear his wife-to-be has been involved in a shameful act and is even proud of it. Margaret is also contemptuous of Bobby’s hypocrisy. The dissolution of their engagement is precipitated by the arrival of the unrefined Dora Darling. Recognizing Margaret as her jail mate, Dora Darling expresses her delight in her cockney dialect: “Why, it’s never No. 406!” The two are extremely delighted, but Bobby is discomfited by the equality relationship that obtains between the conventionally “good” girl (Margaret) and the “bad” girl (Dora). But Margaret infuriates him even further by speaking to Dora in Dora’s dialect. Her ability to communicate in Dora’s class dialect

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not only marks her devaluation of her own class respectability, but is also the height of the dissolution of class divisions in the play. Bobby and Margaret quarrel over her condescension to Dora until Juggins ushers in Duvallet.

While the above conversation is going on, Juggins spots the young Gilbeys children returning home and sneaks the lot of them into the kitchen. There, he serves them tea and they giggle, sing, joke, but remain cut off from their parents upstairs. While the children are merry-making down stairs, the Gilbeys parents are entertaining the Knoxes parents in fashion and Juggin is also serving the parents an afternoon tea upstairs. The children downstairs are not aware of the presence of their parents upstairs, just as the parents are unaware of their children’s presence. Only Juggins who serves both groups knows of their presence in the house.

History is always an inextricable part of Shaw's drama and Shaw’s dramatic plot is most often used to reflect the movement of history. The conversation of the Gilbeys and the Knoxes parents upstairs veers towards contemporary historical events, earthquakes in San Francisco, Jamaica, Martinique, Messina, and a plague in China, floods in France, and then suddenly they draw an analogy between these contemporary happenings and the events of the dramatic plot : Gilbey: My Bobby in Wormwood Scubs Knox: My Margaret in Holloway! Gilbey: And now, my footman tells me his brother is a duke! Knox: No Mrs. Knox: Whats that? Gilbey: Just before he let you in. A duke! Here has everything been respectable from the

beginning of the world, as you may say, to the present day; and all of a sudden everything is turned upside down.

Mrs. Knox: It’s like in the book of Revelation (IV: 414-15).

Shaw’s drama seeks to destroy its audience concept of normality, alter their present perspective and force them to see themselves from the outside, deprived of their conventional assumptions. “Fanny’s play” seeks to destroy the parents’ notion of their central, natural place in the lives of their children. The allusion to contemporary historical events in the parents’ conversation is meant to illuminate the events of the plot or the dramatic action in which the children seem to invert everything in the ethical sphere: class ideology, respectability, religion etc. “What I want to know is, whats to be the end of this?, says Mr. Knox (IV:,426). Knox is speaking as much about the entanglements of history or the contemporary historical events mentioned above, as about the reversals in the actions of the dramatic plot. Knox’s question applies to the whole society of which he is a part. The “end of this”, Fanny’s play seems to imply, will be the disintegration of the present society which they, the parents (the old generation) regard as a “fact” of nature and the emergence of a new society based on tolerance. Gilbey’s vision of everything “turned upside down” as if in the book of Revelation symbolizes the revolutionary theme of “Fanny’s play” where everything seems to be reversed. Just before the Knoxes parents arrive, Juggins has revealed his

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identity to his Gilbey employers. The Gilbeys are understandably shocked to learn that they have been served and observed by a duke’s brother. This unexpected fairy tale transformation of the footman to a duke is just one in a series of unnatural events recounted by the parents above. The historical events alluded to are the symbolic of the changing culture. It shows the way Fanny O’Dowda, herself a sign of the times (a member of the Cambridge University Fabian Society), and Margaret, her “unwomanly” heroine see their contemporary world. It also shows the way the dramatist (Shaw) who created them writes plays with an eye on the historical process.

“Fanny’s play” seeks “the golden mean” as the ethical principle for parents and children. Such a synthesis is provided by the footman. Juggins, a duke turned footman personifies the abstract moral code needed to establish a socially consistent code of conduct and, it is not coincidental that Shaw chooses him to level the generational conflict. He provides the Fabian resolution to the conflict by bringing together both generations (children and parents). In the kitchen party down stairs where Juggins has brought together the younger generation, there is a symbolic unification of class, gender and nationality among the children which corresponds to the unusual openness among the older folks on the floor above, but both generations remain separate from each other though served by a single person, Juggins.

In the open atmosphere of the upper floor, Mrs. Knox takes the opportunity to deliver her views on family life and morality and one realizes that Margaret’s revolt has completely altered her vision of parent-child relation. She now seems to see the relation of parents to children as founded on tolerance. Mrs. Knox’s poetic speech to the parents also echoes the vision of morality that Juggins epitomize in his little homily to Bobby:

We [Parents] dont really know whats right and whats wrong....We bring our children up just as we were brought up; and we go to chapel just as our parents did; and we say what everybody says; and it goes on all right until something out of the way happens: there is a family quarrel, or one of the children goes wrong, or a father takes to drinking, or an aunt goes mad, or one of us finds ourselves doing something we never thought we’d want to do....with all our respectability and piety, we’ve no real religion and no way of telling right from wrong. We’ve nothing but our habits; and when theyre upset, where are we? ... like Peter in the storm trying to walk on the water and finding he couldn’t (IV:420-21)

Hard on this very poignant moment in the inner play, the children’s party that Juggins has organized below is discovered and brought together with the parent group. With the mingling of generations, the gap is closed, the social unification is complete, every mountain and hill in the social structure is levelled as it becomes evident that the children of these respectable families would choose mates of their free choices and it appears their parents would accept them. Having accomplished the impossible, Juggins Rudolph now declares his feeling for Margaret who has separated from Bobby. He presents his suit, not as a nobleman, but as a sober, honest and industrious servant, “...a man with a character”. Bobby also engages Dora. Thus, the knottiest social difficulty between generations and class are resolved in the time-honoured fashion of comedy,

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but the romantic conventions of envisioned marriages is intended as a social commentary on the dissolution of classes and the bridging of the generational gap. Shaw gives the last word to the French man who compares the play of the new writer to the tradition of well-made comedies. Duvallet asserts that in France, a marital resolution like the one that ends the plot would be impossible. “But here―ah! labelle Angleterre!” And with this, we are dropped again into the frame, the epilogue and into the Shavian “discussion” mode, which is in essence, a critique of the Well-made play.

VI.3.3.3. The epilogue: Satire on Edwardian critics and criticism

The epilogue is not simply a leap into the discussion mode of Shaw’s drama, but also a leap from fiction to criticism, as criticism and reviews become entangled in the fictional epilogue. Reviewing the performance of Fanny’s play, the fictional critics repeat the actual satirical reviews of Shaw’s drama. Count O’Dowda’s expression of the horror of an affronted parent opens the critical discussion: “The Play implies obscure, unjust, unkind reproaches and menaces to all of us who are parents” he moans (IV: 433). Bewildered and horrified, he appeals to the learned critics, “the choice and spirit of this age”, to “render an opinion” on the play. Bannal and Gunn immediately call to question the play’s genre. They find it impossible to render an opinion as demanded. Effectively, Bannal cannot tell if he has watched a farce, melodrama, tragedy, comedy or repository theatre (IV: 435). Gunn declares it, a “rotten old-fashioned domestic melodrama” and elaborates further:

Well, who do you think? Here you have a rotten old-fashioned domestic melodrama acted by the usual stage puppets. The hero’s a naval lieutenant. All melodramatic heroes are naval lieutenants. The heroine gets into trouble by defying the law (if she didnt get into trouble, there’d be no drama) and plays for sympathy all the time as hard as she can. Her good old pious mother turns on her cruel father when he’s going to put her out of the house, and says she’ll go too. Then theres the comic relief: the comic shopkeeper, the comic shopkeeper´s wife, the comic footman who turns out to be a duke in disguise, and the young scapegoat who gives the author his excuse for dragging in a fast young woman. All as old and stale as a fried fish shop on a winter morning (IV: 436).

But Gunn is quick to recognize that there have been certain changes in spite of the stock material of melodrama and farce that the play employs. The Lieutenant is a Frenchman who praises the English and disparages the French: “the hackneyed old Shaw touch”. The characters are not elegant, but second rate middle-class. There is no plot, but instead a “feeble air of intellectual pretentiousness” designed to excuse the badness of the play. “All the old conventions and puppets”, is what it comes down to, “without the old ingenuity and the old enjoyment” (IV: 436).

But the Count presses for judgment: “But is it a good play, Mr. Bannal? (IV: 435) With this question, the audience is thrown into an aesthetic critique as questions of authorship, reading meaning and subjectivity become the subject of the epilogue. To the Count’s question, “But is it a good play Mr. Bannal?” Bannal responds, “thats a

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simple question, simple enough when you know. If its by a good author, it’s a good play, naturally. That stands to reason. Who is the author?” (IV: 435-6). In fact, the epilogue tackles questions of whether or not, understanding a text requires knowledge of its author or his reputation. The quartet of critics who struggle to interpret the play and to identify its genre base the interpretation on the author’s identity. Is it Barrie, Pinero, Granville Barker? Vaughan insists that the content of the play is so “intensely disagreeable” that it could not have been written by Barrie.

In suggesting these authors, the critics try to classify Fanny’s play under the turn of century New Drama and Problem plays. Bannal brilliantly suggests Shaw, but Vaughan also holds on two counts that the play could not have been written by Shaw and in saying so repeats most of the stock criticism of Shaw's drama. The play has “a note of passion”, and Vaughan claims to have “repeatedly proved that Shaw is physiologically incapable of the note of passion” (IV: 438); the characters in the play are distinct from one another, while “Shaw’s characters are himself, merely puppets stuck up to sprout Shaw”. In suggesting Pinero, Barrie and Granville Barker as authors, and in rejecting Shaw, the critics run through all the stock reviews of Shaw in real reviews: intellect without emotions; characters as puppets, indistinguishable mouthpieces for the author; no plot; “a down-market preference of second-rate middle-class” instead of high society; “unpleasantness” instead of entertainment, “not a play”, etc. Trotter articulations are paradigmatic: Trotter [emphatically]: I think I know the sort of entertainments you mean. But please, do not

beg a vital question by calling them plays...these productions, whatever else they may be, are certainly not plays.

Fanny: The authors dont say they are. Trotter[warmly]: I am aware that one author, who is, I blush to say, a personal friend of mine,

resorts freely to the dastardly subterfuge of calling them conversations, discussions and so forth, with the express object of evading criticism. But I’m not to be disarmed by such tricks. I say they are not plays. Dialogues, if you will. Exhibition of character, perhaps: especially the character of the author. Fiction, possibly....But plays, no. I say No. Not plays (IV: 365-66).74

In running through the stock criticism of his own drama in this portion of his play, Shaw thematizes his own techniques of dramatic writing (the discussion element),

74 Trotter’s dismissive “not a play” recalls many other Victorian critics of Shaw in real

reviews, Max Beerbohm’s for instance, cited in chapter IV or, Arnold Bennett’s similar dismissal of the dialogue form and emotional content of Shaw’s plays. Asserting the absence of the “slightest trace of emotion” in Shaw’s plays, Bennett holds, “His dialogue is a continual feast….But to cut it up into lengths and call it a play is simply effrontery. The dialogue is the mere exterior of a play, the part one does last, when the hard creative work is accomplished. Mr. Shaw’s stage-pieces may be genius; careful critics have said so; but they are decidedly not drama. They might more correctly be called the Joseph’s coat of non-existent Joseph; fine raiment resembling a man until you poke it where the ribs ought to be. (Arnold Bennett, “Academy”, February 1901, reprinted in T.F. Evans (1976:92) These criticism become an added text or even a pretext to Fanny´s First Play.

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contrasting it with the more conventional techniques of well-made plotting and giving an outside perspective of them through the views of his more conventional critics who seem imprisoned in stock formulas from the ancients. Trotter stresses against Shaw’s “discussions” that Aristotle laid down the rules of the drama for all times.

In framing “Fanny’s play” in the real critical reception of his own drama, Shaw sets Fanny’s First Play in the critical context of a satire on Edwardian critics and criticism. As a recapitulation of the main grievances of Victorian critics against his plays, Shaw exposes to ridicule the disillusionment and frustration of critics at his own violation of the generic traditions. In refusing to name the authors of the inner and outer plays, Shaw’s treats the audience to rare author-baiting and to an equally rare critic-baiting in the epilogue. With the epilogue, the audience have arrived the point where Shaw was leading them, the point of overlap between inner and frame plays; between criticism, fiction and reality as well as between writing and reading.

The epilogue is the point of overlap between the inner and frame plays and between the aesthetic and ethical themes. It is a meeting ground for the themes of the two plays. The two overlapping issues are the morality of life question that the inner play poses and the morality of art or the question of criticism that the frame play poses. The overlap is contained in Bannal’s view that a reputable author would produce a good play and a disreputable author, a bad play. Just as the Gilbeys and the Knoxes act on questionable ethical assumptions or think in rigid terms, so too do the satirized critics proceed on the questionable aesthetic grounds of identifying the author of a text as a first step in evaluating it. If the inner play parodies parental authority and guidance, the frame parodies such conventional approaches or guidelines to literature. The epilogue puts both plays in perspective: is it right to decide whether a play has merit by finding out who the author is? And is such complacency not analogous to the general tendency of accepting a dubious moral or ethical stance simply because it is performed by people assumed to be “good”, respectable or, because they are sanctioned by social ideals? In the mild tone of the satire, Shaw seeks to argue that most of the disparaging criticisms of his plays were the results of his critics’ dogmatic approaches and preconceive ideas about him as an author.

The epilogue brings the question of critical discourse itself to the centre stage and the squabble between the critics to name the author indicates in boldface that their paths is the wrong way with criticism, just as the way of the parents in the inner play is shown as the wrong way with human behaviour. The struggle of critical discourse to elucidate and condition the art it criticizes has been reduced to an illustration in the critique of fiction within fiction. Both frame and inner plays illustrate two distinct but interrelated forms of idealism, a central theme in all Shaw’s drama. But the parody’s deeper significance lies in Shaw’s advocacy for a new theatre with new dramatic modes, the type of discussion drama that he was trying to naturalize on the English stage. In the critics’ rejection of the discussion drama, the epilogue further exposes their resistance to anything new in the aesthetic sphere, just as the parents of the inner play are shock by any form of behaviour that is not habitual.

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The satire of the epilogue evokes larger questions about criticism that link the frame to the inner play: questions of order and freedom in art or, the problem of permissible deviance from given socio-cultural and literary institutions. As the inner play seems to make clear, the lack of communication between parents and their children is the main source of conflict between generations. The parents have built their relations with their children on moral prescriptions and this distorting relation has collapsed, just as critical attempts to prescribe the forms of art (drama) turns to hamper the genuine relation that should exist between writers and critics or fiction and criticism. The question of communication between parents and children is treated in the inner play as one that requires a middle ground. Prerequisite for such a meeting ground is tolerance, which corresponds to granting a degree of permissible deviance in the aesthetic field, especially with regards to the concept of genre. In fact, in a variety of ways the ethical subject of the inner play is linked to the aesthetic discourse of the frame and in the epilogue, Shaw brings the thematics of both plays together. Shaw was as protective of artistic freedom as he was vexed by social hypocrisy or idealism. In response to Golding Bright, who once wrote to him abusing Oscar Wilde, Shaw asserted that “the critic’s first duty is to admit, with absolute respect, the right of every man to his own style” (West, 1955:9). He was indeed handing down to Bright the first precept of Alexander Pope’s famous essay on criticism: “A perfect judge will read each work with the same spirit that its author writes”. Shaw’s satire shows his critics’ resistance to reading Fanny's first play in this spirit. In Fanny’s first play too, Shaw seems to imply that criticism should give every work its own style, its own “word”.

VI.4. Form and Dramatic Techniques

VI. 4.1. The offstage figure of Ruskin and the Aesthetic-ethical dialectics

As earlier mentioned, nineteenth century artists belonged to two schools of thought: the aesthetes and moralist.The moralists were led by Ruskins. An 1878 debate between Ruskin and Whistler, which focused on this aesthetic-ethical controversy, caught the attention of Victorian critics (C.f. E. Adams, 1971:54). Ruskin however, lost the debate and his influence on Victorian cultural life as well as his reputation as modern critic of the art was over. Shaw was to pick up the threads of the controversy thirty years later in Fanny’s First Play, which is clearly a resurrection in dramatic form of the Ruskin-whistler debate. Shaw constructs his play on the relation of aesthetics to ethics and in so doing; he uses Ruskin to illuminating his own stance on this discourse.75 Ruskin remains background referential figure for the twin themes, characters and structure of Fanny’s First Play. However, as is typical of Shaw’s

75 Elsie Adams’ Shaw And The Aesthetes (1971) is an insightful study of Shaw’s position

among 19th century aesthetes. Surprisingly, Adams does not include Fanny’s First Play among Shaw’s plays that illustrate his stance on the aesthetic-ethical discourse of his time.

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writings, he polemically occupies both sides of his subject. His representation of Ruskin’s art is quite contradictory for he presents the Victorian critic, both as an aesthete and a moralist and these dialectics manifested in the structure of Fanny’s First Play best illustrate Shaw’s own stance on the relation of aesthetics to ethics. Although Ruskin remains offstage, his thinking about art and even his personal history illuminates aspects of Shaw’s onstage characters and even the structure of his play. This influence is less perceivable in Fanny’s first Play itself than in the playwright’s critical writings on the Victorian critic.

In his critical writings on Ruskin’s thought about art, Shaw presents the great Victorian critic as an aesthete and a moralist and thus as the synthesis of the aesthetic- ethical debate. The character who mediates the conflict in “Fanny’s play” and brings about a resolution to the generational conflict is called Juggins Rudolph. In a Newspaper controversy with the art critic, Roger Fry, Shaw wrote a letter to the Nation in which he referred to John Ruskin as “a quite abysmal Juggins” (C.f. Weintraub, 1989:425). Juggins who acts as synthesizer in the inner play serves the Gilbeys with style and finesse and yet, in terms of ethics, he is the most down-to-earth character in his play. As Shaw presents him, Juggins is an aesthete and a moralist.

Like Juggins, Shaw presents Ruskin in his critical writing as an aesthete and moralist and thus, as the synthesis of the aesthetic-ethical discourse on art. But this deconstruction of Ruskin’s art, like Shaw’s reading of Ibsen in The Quintessence is mainly intended to illuminate Shaw’s own position on the relation of art to ethics. Shaw himself was an aesthetically minded anti-aesthete. He admired beauty and style in art only when it blends with the expression of new socio-cultural Ideas: “‘for Art’s sake’ alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence” (Prefaces, 165). Characteristically, Shaw perceived art in the social and textual nexus of aesthetic, politics and economics. He postulates that, “It is impossible for any fictionist, dramatic or other, to make a true pictures of modern society without some knowledge of the economic anatomy of it” (Prefaces, 708). It is with this view that he begins his appreciation of Ruskin’s art.

For Shaw, the importance of Ruskin as an exemplary artist and critic lie in Ruskin’s role as prophet of economics. In a lecture on Ruskin, Shaw describes the critic’s famous The Stones of Venice as “about art, but very largely about the happiness of the workingmen who made the art... for the beauty of Venice is a reflection of the happiness of the men who made Venice” (C.f. Dan. H. Laurence, 1962:138-9). The moral and economic implications of Ruskin’s art, his aesthetic-ethical approach to art appealed to Shaw both in his own role as attacker of mere aestheticism among his contemporaries and because of his own obsession with aesthetics going beyond art itself to practical ethics.

In spite of his assertion of the moral-economic implications of Ruskin’s Stone of Venice, Shaw was also quick to point out its sensual appeal, especially in a way that humorously denotes Count O’Dowda’s susceptibility to the world of beauty in Fanny’s First Play. Shaw asserts that Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice is also a work that may

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inspire aesthetes to take a journey to Venice: the Britisher reads his “Stones of Venice” until he trembles and thrills with enthusiasm for Carpaccio and Tintoretto, counting himself not happy until the day when he books with Cook or Gaze to Venice, where he hastens, suffocating with emotions, to San Giorgio, Schiavone, only to stand chapfallen in a dirty little church, seeing nothing that he likes to have so well as the Chromo-lithograph he bought with the last Christmas number of the Illustrated London News (B. Tyson, 1996:168-9).

The implication is that Ruskin’s work inspires aestheticism in aesthetes like Count O’Dowda, who perceives art only with the physical senses. Yet, when Shaw sent a letter to Golding Bright with a list of exemplary critics for aspiring critics to read, Ruskin’s name was the first (C.f. Letters,I:464-67).

In Fanny’s First play, the sensual aspects of Ruskin’s thought about art are used to characterize the old generation, Count O’Dowda for instance, who is an aesthete (or an idealist) in the frame play. At the same time, Ruskin’s ethical thought on art is used to reflect aspects of Shaw’s main characters notably, Fanny’s in the frame play and Margaret in the inner play. Ruskin’s aesthetic-ethical conscience about art is thus used to underscore the dual themes and structures by creating contrastive and analogous relations between the two plays. In writing an ethically realistic play that stands against her father’s aestheticism for instance, Fanny’s ethical practicality contrast with her father’s aestheticism, but her aesthetic revolt correspond to Margaret’s ethical revolt in the inner play while their parallel constrast the attitude of the parents and thus, underscore the generational or oedipal struggle between parents and children in both plays.

Venice served as a long time residence for John Ruskin. He lived in Venice and wrote enthusiastically about the city in his Stones of Venice (1851-1853). Venice is also the London suburb where Count O’Dowda and his daughter live. However, Shaw clearly camouflaged the significance of Ruskin in the poetic structure of his Fanny’s first Play. Ruskin is mentioned just once, and as the last name in a list of writers known to have lived in Venice. Accounting for why he left post-industrial England for Venice, Count O´Dowda asserts that he wanted to get out of the

soot and fog and mud and east wind; out of vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and stupidity. Out of all this and [live in Venice] in the sunshine, in the enchanted region of which great artist alone have had the secret, in the sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelly, of the Brownings, of Turner and Ruskin (IV: 354).

In his review of Ruskin’s music Shaw repeatedly uses “Denmark Hill”, the Venice suburb where Ruskin resided as a metaphor for Ruskin. “Denmark Hill” reappears as the setting of Fanny’s First Play. However, in setting his play in Denmark Hill, Shaw was also implicitly alluding to Madras House, a play written just two years before Fanny’s first play by Granville Barker with whom Shaw had a long relation and cooperation on setting up the Repository theatre. In act I of Madras House, one of the characters actually points to Ruskin’s house. Thematically too, Madras House is a play about the rag trade of underwear sales. The two middle class families of “Fanny’s

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play”, the Gilbeys and Knoxes are business partners in the sale of underwear. Underwear assumes a symbolic social, ethical and psychological significance in Shaw’s play. Apart from comfort, adornment and warmth, a major significance and function of clothes is to hide the naked body. Underwear however happens to assume a peculiar semiotic status for Shaw, as a type of clothing which itself requires to be hidden, since it is linked to the genital areas. In Fanny's First Play, underwear functions as cultural signifiers for those realities of life that have been hidden from the children by their parents, primarily for social reasons. They symbolize the social Idealisms by which the old generation of society (represented by the parents) reproduces itself ideologically but smoothly enough, so that the operation is hidden from the younger generation (children) like Fanny and Margaret. Underwear symbolizes the illusionist way the Gilbeys and the Knoxes, representatives of society want their children to read or see their society.

Further biographical clues point to Shaw’s use of Ruskin’s personal history and revolutionary personality in the poetic structure of Fanny’s First play. Ruskin’s personal life provides a background reference for Fanny’s aesthetic revolt against her father in the frame and Margaret’s ethical revolt against her mother in the inner play. Expressing shock and horror at the immorality of his daughter’s play at the end of the performance, Count O’Dowda recounts bringing up his daughter in a very rarefied atmosphere in Venice and thus cannot understand where Fanny picked up her idea of a play. As he insists, Fanny “has never seen an ugly sight or heard an ugly sound that I could spare her; and she has certainly never worn an ugly dress or tasted coarse food or bad wine in her life. She has lived in a palace and her perambulator was a gondola” (IV: 354). Margaret, the heroine of Fanny’s play too, has been brought up in similar circumstances and she ends up like Fanny horrifying her puritan parents by her revolt. The relation with Ruskin’s biography is clear. Ruskin was brought up in a a rarefied atmosphere like Fanny and Margaret, and by idealistic parents who allowed him no contact with the real world and exposed him only to what they thought right and good for him. Like Fanny who revolts against her father’s aesthetic taste, or Margaret who revolts against her family religion, Ruskin revolted against his own family religion. His mother, Margaret Cox, was a strong evangelical Protestant like Mrs. Knox in Shaw’s inner play. The strong-willed heroine of the inner play is called, Margaret and her puritanical mother is called Mrs Knox. Margaret Cox, Ruskin’s mother is thus split into two characters in the inner play, Margaret and Knox. To take the structure of Fanny’s First play as a whole, it is the ethical revolt of John Ruskin that is re-enacted in both the frame and inner plays. The conflict between the son (Ruskin) and his mother (Margaret Cox) is transposed to a Father-daughter aesthetic conflict in the frame and a daughter-mother ethical conflict in the inner play.

Shaw also perceived a strong aesthetic-ethical controversy in Ruskin’s thought about art and further used it to illuminate aspects of his two heroines. On May 2, 1894, Shaw reviewed a collection of Ruskin’s essays On Music, focussing on the aesthetic-ethical contradictions in Ruskin’s utterances about music that expose him at times as

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an aesthete and sometimes as a moralist. Shaw posits that Ruskin’s views on music are “infinitely suggestive and provocative” but adds, “It is at once the strength and weakness of Mr. Ruskin in dealing with music that he is in love with it....and so am I; but I am married to her, so to speak, as a professional critic, whereas he is still a wooer and has the illusions of imperfect knowledge as well as the illuminations of perfect love.” (Music, 3:193-200). Shaw proceeds in his very polemic criticism of Ruskin's art to deconstruct Ruskin’s views on music. To Ruskin’s contention that “true music is the natural expression of a lofty passion for a right cause,” Shaw retorts, “I entirely agree with Mr. Ruskin in this; but it will not hold water for all that. Music will express any emotion, base or lofty. She is absolutely unmoral”. Using Ruskin's example of Mozart’s music to contradict Ruskin's assertion that “music is the expression of emotion for a lofty cause”, Shaw asserts that, he (Ruskin) refers to Mozart “who used the greatest power.... to follow and fit in perfect sound the words of Zaubeflöte and of Don Giovanni― foolishiest and most monstrous of conceivable human words and subjects of thought” (Music, 3, 197). This, Shaw claims, is prove that “music will express any emotion, base or lofty, or that “music is absolutely unmoral”. When Margaret confronts her mother in act II of the inner play, she deconstructs the dichotomy of good/evil; morality and immorality in relation to freedom in the same way as Shaw polemically does Ruskin’s music: Mrs Knox: I know that prayers can set us free; though you could never understand me when I

told you so; but it sets us free for good, not for evil. Margaret: Then what I did was not evil; or else I was set free for evil as well as good. When I

was at home, and at school, I was what you call good; but I wasn’t free. And when I got free I was what most people will call not good (IV: 394).

Another aesthetic-ethical contradiction in Ruskin's thought that Shaw effectively puts to use in his play has to do with codes of conduct for women. In one of Shaw’s comments on Ruskin’s aestheticism or idealism in music, the playwright cites two contradictory advices that Ruskin offers young women in his music criticism. “From the beginning” Ruskin instructs, “consider all your accomplishments [in music] as a means of assistance to others”. To this advice, Shaw exclaims, “This is Denmark Hill with a vengeance”, and as a riposte to Ruskin, Shaw advises “the young ladies of England ...to cultivate music solely for the love and need of it” (Music 3, 197). But then, after citing Ruskin’s idealist advice to women, Shaw also cites an example of what he considers Ruskin’s ethical realism in art; another advice to women, which contradicts his idealist advice. In Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) Ruskin asserts, “Let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s...Turn her loose into the old library ...and let her alone. She will find what is good for her; you cannot”.76 Shaw draws from this second advice for the entire philosophy of his play as seen in the characters and actions of his heroines.

76 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864; 1. Of

Kings Treasuries, 2, Of queens´ Gardens (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865).

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In writing the frame play in the persona of a Fanny, a young female socialist and a suffragette from Cambridge, Shaw allows his play to functions as a riposte to Ruskin’s first advice to women while illustrating Ruskin's second advice which, in all respects conforms to Shaw’s own advice to young females in his two essays, My Dear Dorothea (1878) and The Quintessence where he instructs them that their “Individuality”—the manifestation of their unique will and the ability to think for themselves regardless of codes of conducts—is their most valuable possession.

Like Margaret who turns loose on the ethical front, Fanny has turned herself loose in the libraries of Cambridge University and despite the idealistic upbringing her father has given her, she has independently come up with a socially realistic play. The frame play consists of an aesthetic revolt in which a young girl consciously writes a play that she knows is unpleasant to the aesthetic taste of both her father and leading critics of her time. In doing so, Fanny is aesthetically and ethically revolting against the idealistic upbringing her father has given her. But Fanny’s play (the inner play), is also about a young girl of the author’s age who revolts against the idealistic upbringing her puritanical parents have given her. In endorsing Ruskin’s second advice to young women and rejecting the first, Shaw is implicitly illustrating his own feminist critique of female codes of conduct in The Quintessence: “The sum of the matter is... unless a woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself (148).

From his use of Ruskin's figure too, Shaw constructs his play on the interrelated themes of aesthetics to ethics and these twin themes provide for his play the basis for a systematic pairing of everything into conceptual pairs of similarities and contrast to show identity and difference. Even Shaw’s choice of “a play-within-a-play” seems to have been inspired by the need to dramatize this dialectics of ethics to aesthetics. Beyond this, in his contradictory analysis of Ruskin’s thought, Shaw inserts himself in quite a modern way in the oedipal conflict of his play. The conflict between parents and children is also one between Shaw, the literary son and his literary fathers (Ruskin and Shakespeare) in which the younger Shaw’s searches for his own authorial identity among powerful literary predecessors. Shaw is identifying himself with Ruskin and at the same time distancing himself from his literary father.

VI. 4.2.The author as guest: authorial identity and differance

Fictional artists strongly figure in Shaw’s writings. For Shaw as for Barthes, the so-called author of a text is an identity comprising of many shadows. One might say that the largest shadow cast by Shaw on Fanny’s First play is that of himself as author. Besides the overt discussion of authorship in the epilogue, the different “Shaws” in this dramatic text make questions of authorship, reading, writing and subjectivity the subjects of the drama. One modern aspect of the play is the construction of authorial identities. Shaw created several authorial identities for himself in autobiographical writings, none of which he intends to seen as real. His 1908 declaration about his

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authorial self is clearly realized in Fanny’s First Play: “The celebrated G.B.S. is about as real as a pantomime ostrich...I have never pretended that G.B.S. was real: I have over and over again taken him to pieces before the audience to shew the trick of him”.77 The authorial strategy of Fanny’s first Play reveals how Shaw’s self-reflexive concerns about authorship, texts, and writing are manifest in the textual design or structure of his play.

Authorial identity is a fluctuating subject in postructuralist criticism and so it is in Fanny’s First Play. As Barthes (1977:161) puts it in his essay, “From Work to Text”: It is not that the author may not ‘come back’ in his text, but he then does so as a guest...He becomes as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of the fiction but a fiction contributing to his work”. Shaw was conscious that unlike the narrative writer, the playwright cannot use the self-referential first-person singular pronoun and that authorial identity is an unenunciated subjectivity, Barthes’s “Paper-I”. In Fanny’s First Play, Shaw fills the authorial vacuum in his dramatic texts with a bewildering array of authorial supplementary personae. Hence the author, “Shaw” is consciously cast as a paper-author-a fictional shadow of the author himself. In this cast of fabricated fictional authorial selves, he raises the complicated problem of authorial identity which as Barthes insists, is not unitary. By employing various authorial shadows, the author, Shaw becomes a site of playful linguistic and fictional dramatic discourse by way of Derrida’s or Barthes’s deconstruction of the authorial subject. Juggins, Fanny and Margaret are also shadow reflections of the author, Shaw.

Shaw called himself a “Realist” in art and in writing a rather straight forward social drama in the persona of Fanny whom, as a young lady Ruskin advices ambivalent, Shaw, not only treats his Oedipal theme of revolt as a conflict between his characters (children and their parents) but also as a literary conflict in which he inserts himself in advocacy of, and opposition to Ruskin. Fanny, the author-persona’s conflict with her father reflects the oedipal conflict Shaw, the author-critic was having with Ruskin his predecessor. The conflict between daughter and father in the frame play culminates in the Count’s tragic realization of the horrors of his daughter’s play. In his tragic horror, the Count makes reference to the collapse of the Venetian Tower in 1902. In referring to the collapse of the Venetian tower, he announces that the oedipal drama is over in distinctly phallic terms: “She [Fanny] will never return to Venice. I feel now as I felt when the Campanile fell” (IV: 441). In the collapse of Campanile is also implied the collapse of Ruskin’s aesthetics of Stones of Venice. The stones need to be rebuilt by each new generation of artists, and in writing Fanny’s First Play in the persona of the younger artist, Fanny, Shaw presents himself as the young generation of art-critic that has replaced or will replace Ruskin. The fall of Campanile then, is not just the climactic moment of Fanny’s aesthetic revolt and Margaret's ethical revolt, but also of Shaw’s. It is the culminating climax of the oedipal struggle between children and parents and artists and predecessor, a tragic climax for the parents as expressed in

77 Bernard Shaw, “The Chesterbelloc” (1908) repr. in Pen Portrait and Reviews, 128.

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the Count’s horror and the climax of the oedipal struggle that Shaw, the literary son was having with Ruskin, his literary father figure. Shaw identifies his major characters with Ruskin, but also with himself. Fanny, Margaret and Juggins are identified with Ruskin, but they are also authorial shadows of Shaw.

Fanny is a mirror reflection of Shaw the realist author, but in her ethical revolt, Margaret is also a shadow of Fanny and thus of Shaw. The authorial relation of Fanny to Margaret is marked in performance by the easy crossing of boundary between creator (author) and performer mentioned earlier. Margaret’s ethical revolt against her mother is a variation of Fanny’s aesthetic revolt. She is thus also a mirror reflection of Shaw. But so too is Juggins, the footman who presides over the events of the inner play, bringing about the dissolution of uncomfortable partners (Bobby and Margaret) and engaging himself to Margaret at the end of the play. Juggins virtually bridges the gap between classes, generations and figuratively, between the aesthetic-ethical theme. It follows logically from the dialectical quest for middle ground between children and their parents that none of the parents who act as a God to his children can possibly function as a synthesis in the generational conflict; neither can any of the children who act entirely on their own instincts without regards to their parents feelings. Duvallet for instance, a parent (father of two) who acts with the irresponsibility of a child cannot provide the synthesis for Shaw’s play. It takes a man like Juggin who is a nobleman and a commoner, a brother to a duke who has brought himself down to the level of servant, to bridge the class gap and effect the reconciliation of the young and old.

Juggins who mediates the generational conflict is a surrogate for Ruskin whom Shaw perceives as the synthesis of the aesthetic-ethical debate, but Juggins is also an author-surrogate for Shaw who emphasized the unity of art and ethics throughout his career. Juggins acts as master of ceremony, presiding over the events of the inner play that lead to the final resolution in marriage, a theatrical rite benefiting of comedy. It is Juggin who brings the youths and their parents together and simultaneously serves them an afternoon tea, a situation that leads to the dissolution of the generational and class gaps. The afternoon tea that Juggin serves in this theatre is in itself analogous to the theatrical rite of marriage. The resolution also occurs when Juggins who serves the Gilbeys with style and finesse and Margaret the ethical rebel decide to marry. In their marriage, Shaw is actually marrying the two aspects of his artistic thought identified in Ruskin. Theirs is the union of aesthetics and ethics.

But Juggin’s afternoon tea goes beyond a mere identification of Shaw with Ruskin. Juggin’s action is an implicit textual allusion to another play by Shaw, You Never can Tell. Juggin’s afternoon tea service is analogous to the meal at the end of You Never can Tell, presided over in the same way by a waiter like Juggins named, William ― after William Shakespeare (Morgan, 1972:94-5). If so, then following from this string of identification, Shaw is not only identifying himself with Ruskin but also with his dramatic predecessor, Shakespeare. These strategies of differing the authorial self is closely related to the process of perpetual “différance”, a key term in Derrida’s deconstruction. Like Barthes, Derrida’s deconstruction investigates texts as a matrix of

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non-unified meanings, strategies and discourses in which signification or meaning does not reside in a homogenizing power of a single author, but created by the reader in a network of constant differences where there can never be one graspable meaning. The comic satire of Shaw’s epilogue revolves around the efforts of the critics of “Fanny’s play” to fix meaning in a unitary author or by indentifying the author. Their critical power is however challenged by the series of authorial identifications that Shaw employs to deconstruct his authorship. That Fanny, Margaret and Juggins are authorial shadows of Shaw is evident at the end of the epilogue.

At the height of the argument on authorial identity in the epilogue, two of the critics simultaneously shout “Shaw”, identifying him as the author at the very time that Fanny appears between the curtains to be presented as author. This is an emphatic climactic moment in the oedipal struggle and in the theme of authorial identity that the play takes for subject, but it is also a climactic moment in the interplay of fiction and reality in Shaw’s metatheatre. Here, Shaw employs two different senses; sight and sound to express authorial identity. The identification of Shaw as author coincides with Fanny emerging to be presented as author in the midst of shouts and handclap from the audience. This is however, not just a case of simple identity, but one of identity in difference. But it is also the climactic moment of convergence between fiction and reality in the play. If we recognize that Shaw wrote the inner play in the character of Fanny, it becomes clear that he makes the play both a fiction and real production with a thin and slippery border between the fictional play and the reality of his own first performance of it in which his authorial identity was concealed. The simultaneous identification of Shaw and Fanny as authors is the culminating moment in this interplay of fiction and reality.

The splitting of characters into conceptual pairs of similarities and differences, as seen in Shaw’s presentation of his audience-critics in the Induction and in his authorial strategies create a the fluidity of meaning in Fanny’s first play. Everything from the narrative structure of “the play-within-the play” to the stage characters is structured on the dual aesthetic-ethical theme, but even Shaw’s theme is based on his contradictory reading of Ruskin as aesthete and moralist. This systematic pairing of things in the structure provides for a dazzling self-reflexivity in which everything (characters, text, subject matter etc.) reflects each other as in a hall of mirrors. Meaning in the play becomes traceable only in terms of identity and differences; meaning is located between paired oppositions or contrasts and similarities to show identity and differences. This language-based structure ― about which more will be said below― emanates from Shaw’s foreknowledge of the modern linguistic theory that stemmed from Saussure to inspire structuralist and poststructuralist criticism of intertextuality.78

However, Shaw’s self-reflexive structure is not only the product of his foreknowledge of modern structuralism, but more significantly the effect of his far too

78 Levi-Strauss (1966: 214, 217) for instance insists, “All classification proceeds by pairs of

contrast: classification only ceases when it is no longer possible to establish oppositions”.

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early understanding of the decontextualized situation of the text. The decontextualized situation in which Shaw casts the performances of his two plays allows for a reading of the plays as “text” in the strict sense of a Barthes's “the Death of the Author”. We may want to speculate on where Shaw got his knowledge of the decontextualized text, considering that his play precedes the writings of the poststructuralist critics of the 60s and 70s by almost half a century. Such an investigation leads us to a second off-stage figure in the structure of Fanny’s First Play.

VI. 4.3. Decontextualizing drama/Performance: Fanny’s First Play as

a Pre-Barthesan critique of the “text”

As earlier discussed, it was the negative critical reaction to Shaw’s Court theatre experiment that inspired the writing of Fanny’s First play. The critics’ author-baiting discussion in Shaw’s epilogue clearly suggests that, he consciously conceived his play, not just as a satire on his Victorian-Edwardian critics, but even more, as a lesson on how to read and how not to read a play-text. The Epilogue suggests that writing and criticism are more complicated than simple questions of “closed reading” and authorial identity pursued by Shaw’s contemporary critics. Shaw’s main aim then, was to deliver a critical lecture to his age on reading, writing, textuality and meaning. The remarkable consciousness with which he conceived the decontextualized situation of the frame and inner play attests to his prior knowledge of poststructuralism and suggests that his play can be appreciated in the wider context of Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”.

The concealment of authorship is quite conscious in that, it is doubled. Shaw’s Fanny’s First play was first performed anonymously and, not only is the author of “Fanny’s play” (the inner play) also unknown to the audience who watch it performed in Shaw’s play, but Shaw used the title, Fanny’s First Play to further conceal authorship. The title describes the combination of outer play (supposedly Shaw’s) and the inner play (supposedly Fanny’s), so that such a title becomes as ambiguous as does the authors of both plays. Supposedly written by two different authors, Shaw lumps the inner piece with the frame drama under the same title and thus hits the postructuralist themes of his play ― questions of authorship, reading, writing, subjectivity and meaning. In the dual decontextualized situations of the plays, Shaw clearly accentuates his goals: he wants to teach his critics that a play must be read as a “text” in its own right, but also as one comprising of, and generated by other texts.

The whole raison d’être of the title, Fanny’s First Play and of the decontextualized situations of both the frame and inner plays is to ask two questions: who is the author of Fanny’s First Play and who is the author of the inner play? The de-authorized contexts of the plays were consciously meant to make these questions the primordial issues in the play. Shaw significantly left the inner play untitled and instructed the first producers of Fanny’s First Play not to disclose his name as author. The paybills carried Mr. Xxxxxx Xxxx as author’s name. In casting his plays in anonymous author-situation and having his characters discuss question of authorship, Shaw renders his

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play self-referential. That the decontextualized situation of the play was intended to introduce a new kind of reading is further emphasized by Shaw’s preface which insists that, the suppression of authorship is a conscious attempt to deconstruct the authorial myth in reading: “The concealment of the authorship, if a secret de polichinelle can be said to involve concealment, was a necessary part of the play” (IV: 346). He remonstrated with his German translator when he learnt that his identity as author was revealed before the first production of the play in Germany:

It was announced as a play by me. Why did you let them do such a silly thing? The whole Prologue and Epilogue become absurd if the authorship is announced. Also, the announcement make people expect a big and serious play instead of a trifle― ‘a little play for a little theatre’ (Letters III: 158).

How then did Shaw acquire his knowledge of the decontextualized situation of the text? Working without our modern linguistic theories, Shaw drew his insights into the de-authorized context of a text from a real life model. The name, gender and personality of the eponymous author-character, Fanny, as well as the anonymity of authorship and performance context suggest that Shaw drew on the life of Fanny Burney (1752-1840). When Fanny Burney successfully published her first novel, Evelina (1778), its authorship was unknown even to her own father, Charlie Burney. At its publication, Evelina was such a sensation that the big question or challenge to its critics and readers was who the author might possibly be. The general assumption that the author must be a man and not a woman came naturally from the fact that female authors were still not very common in English society of 18th century. Shaw linguistically plays on the question of male/female authorship by titling his play, Fanny's First Play and having the paybills bear “Mr. Xxxxxx Xxxx”. When Fanny Burney’s sister finally told her father that his daughter, Fanny was the author of the sensational novel, Charlie Burney was just as surprised as Count O’Dowda. However, when subsequently, Fanny Burney wrote a play, The Whitlings for production in Sheridan’s Theatre, her father’s opposition to it on grounds that it contained a satire on some recognized portraits of society that were his patrons forced Fanny to withdraw the play.79 Shaw draws from the censored situation of this second work to satirize well recognized critics of the London theatre. His heroine goes further than Fanny Burney to insist on having an anonymous satirical play performed on her birthday when she knows how repulsive the performance will affect both the prudish critics of her father’s generation as well as her father’s aesthetic taste: “The truth is, this play is going to give my father a dreadful shock…I don’t mind this play shocking my father…it’s good for him to be shocked morally. It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date” (IV: 363).

For the name and personality of his heroine and for the decontextualized situation of his play, Shaw draws on the publication circumstances of Fanny Burney’s novel,

79 For a brief discussion of Fanny Burney’s life and works, see, Jeremy Berstein's article,

“The Life and Times of Fanny Burney” In: New Criterion (November), 1999.

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and for his satirical content, he draws from the circumstances of Fanny Burney’s play, The Whitlings. The whole raison d’être of the anonymous frame and inner plays is to deconstruct the text and to raise and discuss text-author/reader/audience related questions. In framing his plays in questions of authorial identity, Shaw not only presents his play as an “open text”, but as one that precedes and satisfies Barthes’s “The Death of the author”.

Barthes dismisses the myth of an author, both as subjective and a as a distraction from the text. A text he insists, should be read in a self reflexive context as part of its own textual history rather than as a product of the author’s unique mind. In suppressing authorial identities, Shaw asks his readers to focus on his play as “text” and not on the author. As Barthes (1968[1977]:145) puts it in “The Death of the Author”,

The author when believed in is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line, divided into a before and an after. The author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to the work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate.

In their speculations on the identity of the author of “Fanny’s play”, in their desire to know and name its author as prerequisite to understanding the text’s meaning and genre, the critics-audience of the fictional play, like the real critics of Shaw’s first anonymous production of Fanny’s First Play give voice to their individual prejudices and to the prejudices of traditional criticism that Shaw’s play is intended to help erase. Like Barthes, Shaw strongly emphasized the elimination of the author from the text as discussed in my introduction. Like Barthes’s essay too, Shaw’s play notably emphasises the text or the relation of reader to text and plays down the authority of the author. As Barthes asserts,

To give a text an author is to impose a limit in the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the author beneath the work: when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’― victory to the critic (Barthes, Ibid.:147).

A paradigmatic illustration of Shaw’s dismissal of the myth of the author is Bannel’s response to the Count’s pressure for judgment: “But is it a good play, Mr. Bannel? Bannel: Thats a simple question, ‘simple enough when you know. If its by a good author, its a

good play, naturally. That stands to reason. Who is the author? Tell me that; and I’ll place the play for you to a hair’s breadth.

In casting his play in an anonymous author situation, in making authorial identity his subject, and in deconstructing his own authorial identity, Shaw, precludes subjectivity. His rejection of subjectivity is further emphasized by the systematic pairing of items, which not only hint on his foreknowledge of intertextuality, but also on the Saussurean linguistic theory that inspired structuralism and postructuralism.

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This systematic pairing, as already stated results in a spectacular self-reflexivity in which, as drama about drama, Fanny’s First Play revels in, and celebrates its own textual tradition.

VI. 4.4. Structure as Signification: self- reflexivity

Shaw’s play is based on a formal linguistic scheme in which everything is paired to show identity and difference in accordance with Saussure’s linguistic theory. In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure asserts,

each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all other terms...The linguistic mechanism is geared to difference and identities, the former being only the counterpoint of the latter...In language, there are only differences....The entire mechanism of language is based on oppositions and on the phonic and conceptual differences (88, 108,120,121).

Shaw enunciated this language-based structure in almost Saussurean terms, when in 1933 he declared that the ability “to distinguish similars and disimilars is the most elementary test of intelligence” (Prefaces, 651). In employing this linguistic scheme as early as 1910 to structure Fanny’s First play, Shaw precedes Saussure in conceiving language as the basis for any semiological system.80

Shaw’s instinctive knowledge of the slippery relation between words and their referents obviously provided the basis of a systematic pairing that, despite the simplicity of the method results in a dazzling self-reflexivity for Fanny’s First Play. The result is that, as drama about drama, the play tends to celebrate its own textual tradition. Everything is made to reflect each other as if in a textual “hall of mirrors” as each item; name, character or text appears only as a shadowy reflection of another; as a signifier with no final signified or with each signified becoming yet another signifier. Savoyard and Count O’Dowda for instance, claim to have been inspired by Byron. The induction makes mention of two Byrons: an early 19th century poet and incidentally a dramatist who like Ruskin also lived for sometime in Venice, and H. Byron, a mid-nineteenth-century dramatist and author of the popular Our Boys. Shaw extracts humour and irony from this identity in difference as both the Count and Savoyard misunderstand each other at the mention of Byron. Both Byrons are dramatists, but from different theatrical traditions. Shaw uses their similarity and differences to underscore the similarity and difference between his two characters on stage: Count O’Dowda, said to be “ennobled” by Byron and Savoyard, said to have played a role in the performance of Byron’s Our Boys. The irony is that the ethically rigid aesthete, Count O’Dowda who strongly objects to his daughter’s revolutionary play claims to have been inspired by such a radically immoral writer like Lord Byron.

There is also the paired opposition of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Shaw

80 Saussure’s work was a reconstruction by his students based primarily on lectures he gave

between 1910-11 (the exact period Shaw wrote Fanny’s First Play) and was only published posthumously in 1915, four years after Fanny´s First Play.

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employs the Cambridge/Oxford pair twice: in the frame and inner plays respectively to evoke the history of English criticism and to illuminate his aesthetic-ethical theme. In the frame play, the Count associates Cambridge with eighteenth-century values, but his author-daughter, a student in Cambridge considers the school the most up-to-date institution for its stance on socialism and women’s rights in the early twentieth-century. On the other hand, Trotter associates Oxford with “the Stagarite”, Aristotle, who laid down the rules of drama. Like all other paired aspects of the play, the Cambridge/Oxford pair is meant to stress identity in difference. Fanny, from Cambridge clashes with her father and Trotter in the academic spheres that is, on aesthetic and political views. They differ in their opinions of what Cambridge signifies and on what a good play is. Such a clash befits an encounter between academic institutions. This academic clash in the frame is contrasted with the non-academic behaviour of the Cambridge/Oxford students in the inner play where it is their annual boat race that leads to their riotous behaviour and to Margaret’s detention. The Cambridge/Oxford pair illuminates the contrast between the ethical revolt of the inner play and the aesthetic revolt of the frame. Both conflicts are identical in being youthful revolts against a system yet, they differ in that, one is aesthetic and the other ethical.

Shaw’s play is fiction and criticism as well. In this dramatic criticism of criticism, the Cambridge/ oxford pair is also used to highlight the history of criticism. In fact, a year after Fanny’s First Play was written (1911), Cambridge broke with tradition in English criticism by setting up its first course in English literature, sometime after a more language-based course in oxford. Cambridge however, became dominant in English literary studies in the English speaking world of the 20th century. Although F. R. Leavis was better known later in the century, I.R. Richard’s Practical Criticism (1929) initiated the new trend in criticism. As Barry (1995: 30) holds,

I.A.Richards...is the pioneer of the decontextextualised approach to literature which became the norm in British literature from the 1930s to the 1970s as ‘practical criticism’ and in America during roughly the same period as ‘New Criticism’. Richard’s experiment in the 1920s of presenting students and tutors with unannotated, anonymous poems for commentary and analysis gave rise to the ideal of removing the props of received opinion and knowledge and fostering a “true judgment” based on first hand opinion.81

It is in this approach to criticism that Shaw casr his play: Is it possible to judge a work without knowing its author? The decontextualized approach to text entails the removal of all props of received opinion and the fostering of “true judgment based on first hand opinion. The failure of Victorian critics to read the play in this light is what playwright satirizes in the fictional critics of his play and the real critics of his drama. By presenting his frame and inner plays in decontextualized situations, Shaw invites his 81 In Practical Criticism, I. A. Richard presents his readers with thirteen unsigned poems to

criticize before opening the accompanying author identifications. Shaw's two plays are presented in exactly this context. The critics criticize the play before the author is revealed. Besides, Shaw never formally acknowledged authorship of the play until its publication in 1914. See Mander and Mitchenson (1955:143).

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critic-spectators to read a play without prejudices about authors. It is in the decontextualized situation of Shaw’s play and in his systematic pairing

of items that the play becomes entirely self-reflexive of its textual tradition. One of the characters is a Frenchman, Duvallet, suggestive of two (deux in French) and has two daughters. He provides a clue to the systematic pairing in the structure. There are two plays (Shaw’s and Fanny’s); two structures (frame and inner play); two authors (Shaw and Fanny); two heroines (Fanny and Margaret); two themes (aesthetic and ethics); two stages (for Shaw’s play and Fanny’s); two audiences (for Shaw’s play and Fanny’s); two sets of critics ( the real critics of Shaw’s play in a real theatre and the fictional critics of Fanny’s in the inner play), two Byrons ( Lord Byron and H. Byron), two Footmen (one in the Induction and Juggins in “Fanny’s Play”), two noblemen (O'Dowda and Juggins), two middle class families and two country houses (The Knoxes/ Gilbeys), Two criminal incidence (Fanny’s/ Margaret’s); two cultural outsiders (Duvallet and Darling Dora), two generations (old/ young); two conflicts (aesthetic and ethical); two shop-keeping families (The Knoxes and Gilbeys), two languages (French and English).

The systematic pairings involve several binary oppositions: frame and inner plays, male and female authors, aesthetics and ethics conflicts, fiction and reality, upper and middle class settings, actors and audience, offstage and on-stage characters, industrialism and culture, social respectability and individual freedom, habitual and practical behaviours, parents and children, husbands and wives, Cambridge and Oxford, English and French names, authors and critics, play and audience, prologue (induction) and epilogue.

Each pair emphasises similarities and differences and the ramification of each set of signifiers is traceable to different meanings through frame and inner plays as in the Byron pairs or the Oxford/Cambridge set above. Meaning is traceable only in signifying differences and requires a critical or creative response from readers.

VI. 4.5. Textual models/generic traditions and Self-reflexivity

For modern theorists, meaning in a text is only possible within the textual history or tradition of which the text is a part. Fanny’s first play celebrates its own textual history and tradition. For Barthes (1977:146), “a text is not a line of words revealing a single ´theological´ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multiple-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original blends and clash”. As Richard Kearney holds, even post-1945 philosophers like Ricoeur who do not deny subjectivity in its entirety are opposed to the traditional notion of a coherent text or meaning. Kearney (1984:32) asserts that, although Ricoeur talks of an “opaque subjectivity”, the philosopher seeks to understand a text only as part of its history:

To dispense with the classical notion of subject as a transparent cogito does not mean...to dispense with all forms of subjectivity. My hermeneutical philosophy has attempted to

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demonstrate the existence of an opaque subjectivity which expresses itself through the detour of countless meditations―signs, symbols, texts and human praxis itself.

As Kearney (1984:138) adds, Ricoeur views subjectivity within a tradition Recoeur point[s] out that human consciousness never knows itself in terms of intuitive immediacy, as Descartes or the early Husserl believed: consciousness must undergo a hermeneutic detour in which it comes to know itself through the mediations of signs, symbols and texts. In other words, consciousness cannot intuit (an schauen) its meaning in and from itself, but must interpret (bermenenein) itself by entering into dialogue with texts of a historical community or common tradition to which it belongs (zuhören).

As drama about drama, Fanny’s First Play is constructed in the full knowledge of the dramatic tradition of which it is a part. The text is inspired by the entire textual history of Western drama. Fanny’s first play evokes classical drama in the allusion to the “Stagarite” or Aristotle, the first theoretician of Greek drama who laid down the generic rules of drama. References are also made to the source of drama in religious ritual for mention is made of “The Salvation Festival” that Margaret attends before her transformation. This Religious meeting evokes the historical origins of Greek and Medieval drama in rituals. The Bible (the book of Revelation) is also alluded to in the Knox/Gilbey family discussion of act III.

The allusion to Aristotle points to the entire western dramatic tradition of which Shaw’s play is a part. The allusion to the early beginnings (the history) of drama draws attention to questions of how the new plays, Fanny’s First Play and “Fanny’s play” fit in the dramatic tradition. This question is carried over to the epilogue: Can the critics of Fanny’s and Shaw’s play read in this play which they claim is “not a play”, the generic text of drama; the history of the forms of drama that the play provides? Though a comedy, the play actually ends in a tragedy for the Count who is struck with horror at the immorality of his daughter’s play. There are references to Harlequin and Columbine, the Comedia dell’arte, to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the two prominent households of Shaw’s play (the Knoxes and the Gilbeys). Implicit references are made to Barker’s The Madras House. Allusions to Pinero, Bessie and Grenville Barker evoke the New Drama and Problem plays of Shaw’s contemporaries. The Count alludes to Nineteenth-century English Pantomime in his prediction of the kind of play Fanny will want to have performed. Fanny’s play itself is structured in three acts and three genres: act I is a 19th century drawing room comedy, act II is a melodrama and farce while act three is a 19th century romantic comedy. The epilogue belongs to satire or parody and itself alludes to various genres of drama. Here, Fanny advocates a “Repository theatre”. The epilogue also evokes and discusses Shaw’s own “discussion plays”. Fanny’s play in itself evokes Shaw’s socialist “drama of ideas” for, it is a political play with a clear attack on ideals of parental authority with a Fabian resolution. It also takes on such vital contemporary political questions of the author’s own time like the suffragist movement, feminism and socialism, police brutality etc. Music is evoked in the Count’s aesthetic taste (Pergolesi and Cimerosa).

While Shaw’s play is virtually a carnival of generic forms, the dramatic action

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parodies some of the texts it evokes. The Gilbeys and Knoxes are fashioned after the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet, but Shaw’s notable households are not engaged in a feud, but in a tradition of friendship and business partnership. Unlike Shakespeare’s rebellious couple who revolt against their families by loving each other, the engaged young couple of “Fanny’s Play” revolt against their families by breaking their engagements and choosing partners other than those their families have chosen for them. Notice the rhyme in names: Romeo and Juliet, Robert and Margaret.

Fanny’s First Play evokes other plays within Shaw’s dramatic corpus. Pygmalion can be read as a Sequel to Fanny’s First Play. Language plays a vital role in both plays. Eliza in Pygmalion goes out to learn how to speak as a lady. At the end of “Fanny’s play”, “Darling Dora”, a cockney prostitute is going to learn language and manners in order to integrate into respectable middle-class society. This play, which ends with a cockney prostitute going to learn language, was written just two years before Pygmalion in which an innocent cockney flower girl does exactly that.

As “criticism of criticism” the satirical content of the play also has textual models or precedents. As a play that focuses a critical lens on theatrical coverage and lampoons critics, Shaw’s play was probably inspired by Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671) and Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) as it was by Ruskin’s criticism. To Fisher (1987:187), Shaw’s play is modelled after a critical piece in the Middle Ages by an Islamic philosopher, Algazali entitled, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, which refuted various facets of Aristotle’s doctrines. In response, Averroroes, in a treatise which restated the case for Aristotle rebutted Algazali’s points against Aristotle in “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”. In much the same spirit, though on a plane less exalting of Aristotle, Shaw’s play contrives a detail “criticism of criticism”.

Fanny’s First play is written as the author’s apologia for his profession as art, culture, music, drama critic and dramatist. The reader is expected to read these strands of writings in the play. If the raison d’être of the play is to raise and discuss the issues of textuality, the relation of author/reader/audience to text, then Shaw’s ending also gives material form to his subject. The curtains fall on the union of author, actors, producer, critics and audience, symbolic of the play’s attempt to bridge the opposition of writer/critic/audience: “The curtains are drawn, revealing the last scene of the play and the actors on the stage, The Count, Savoyard, the critics, and Fanny join them, shaking hands and congratulating”.

Fanny’s First Play shows the connection between Shaw’s thought and late 20th century theories. Had Shaw lived into the 60s and 70s he would not have had much to learn from our modern critics and, contrary to the view that Shaw was not an artist, “a trifle” or “an easy play for a little theatre” as Shaw calls Fanny’s first play places the playwright at the “cutting edge” of aesthetic thought.

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VII. CONCLUSION

This study set out to examine Shaw’s transformations of dramatic genres as force-fields in his socio-cultural and new aesthetic criticism. I formulated my hypothesis on the view that Shaw represents the transition from the Victorian to the modern era. In all my analytical chapters, I have focussed on the intense correspondence between cultural and aesthetic criticism as well as on Shaw’s techniques of dramatic writing to demonstrate that, while to most modern critics Shaw may appear dated, much that has been associated with the most advanced theatre in our generation can be found in his plays or in his writings about the drama. As I argued in my introduction and in all the chapters of this study, Shaw’s first major contribution to drama, one from which all his genre transformations stem and which has remained a current trend in English drama is the political focus he gave English drama by his definition of realism.

Although Shaw’s forms have been superseded by more sophisticated forms, the political focus he initiated in drama when he wrote The Quintessence remains the standard focus of realism in British drama. Perhaps because Shaw was often ahead of his time, he regularly probed for universals to underline the particulars of his plays and the Shavian Canon has remained remarkably alive—even advanced—while theatre fashions come and go.

As early as The Quintessence (1890), parts of which were written before he had even completed this first full-length realistic play, Shaw had written about the future of the theatre in a way that made clear that he wanted to see realistic subjects presented in a way which involved the audience both intellectually and emotionally, but not empathically. Spectators were not to identify themselves with roles in the drama, but were instead to be made “guilty creatures sitting at a play.” On the subject of modern drama Shaw wrote:

An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed. . . . the drama arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals rather than through vulgar attachments, rapacities, generosities, ambitions, misunderstandings, oddities and so forth as to which no moral question is raised. The conflict is not between clear right and wrong. . .

The modern play he insists, would make ideas themselves dramatic and increase the importance of “discussion”. The current impact of these postulation on the content and form of modern drama can be gauged from the postulation of a far later critic, James H. Clancy who, writing about the “new” drama of Camus and Brecht in Essays in Modern Drama (1964) concludes that the major features of the new drama are,

an engagement of the audience as well as the actor and the playwright. The removed observation of the naturalist’s theatre is completely abandoned. ... The play is a dialogue

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in which the audience must participate. . . . To Brecht, the audience must not be a group of ‘people to whom something is being done’. The audience must change, so that the world may be changed (170)

Since the 1890s this had been Shaw’s principle and practice. The alienation techniques, the text-audience relationship, the realistic subject matter and the dialogue form of an audience-engaging theatre described by Clancy here as the techniques of the new drama are techniques that Shaw formulated for discussing social problems on stage. The generic effect on the popular forms of 19th century romantic comedy and melodrama, as demonstrated in chapter one were socially realistic anti-genre types.

The rhetorical convention Shaw formulated as “the discussion” and all the audience- alienating techniques associated with the device remain a blueprint for the mainly dialogue form of modern drama. The social and thematic implication for melodrama lie in the functional definition Shaw gave this rhetorical convention: “a forensic technique of recrimination disillusion and penetration through [false] ideals to the truth, with a free use on the part of the playwright of all the rhetorical and lyrical arts of the orator, the preacher, the pleader, and the rhapsodist”. One major purpose of the “discussion” in Shaw’s drama is to alienate audience and shock them out of their current culture. Like most writers of contemporary theatre—Astaud or Genet, for example—Shaw looked to the theatre as a force to remedy the ills of civilization and as a replacement for the waning influence of the church, from whence theatre first sprang. Like most advanced twentieth-century dramatists, Shaw believed that indifference to the social and political problems in audience or playwrights was a major sin, and that the playwright’s clear duty was to shock audiences out of that state whenever necessary—and in fact, more than necessary. The means—and specific aims—of a Genet or an Astaud might have repelled Shaw, but not the general concept, for, when Shaw was setting the theoretical foundations of modern drama in The Quintessence, he wrote of the necessity’ of the playwright’s devoting himself to showing that “the spirit or will of Man is constantly overgrowing the ideals and that thoughtless conformity to ideals is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow thoughtless violation of them.” Thus it was crucial for the playwright “to keep before the public the importance of being always prepared to act immorally.” This for Shaw meant theatrical shock treatment of recognized generic subjects: “The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.” (145).

As illustrated in all the chapters of this study, in each play, Shaw at least turned the cultural ideal that was the “given” of the dramatic plot on its head, not merely by a crude inversion, but by recruiting eloquent characters holding opposing views of the cultural ideal to analyse, dissect and indeed deconstruct it in a “discussion”. Capitalists are not devils and socialists are not angels Widowers’ Houses seems to assert; the prostitute may even be a victim of society rather than an offender and might even be more virtuous that the supposedly virtuous married woman Mrs Warren’s profession

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adds. And the deliberate explicitness with which these subjects are treated met the Victorian prudish spirit and the conventions of melodrama head-long and evoked outcries of immorality. Yet these realistic trends in Shaw’s early plays flushed out melodrama and have influenced British drama throughout the 20th century. Although the formal frontiers of British drama have been widely extended beyond the Shavian realistic forms, the political and formal focus of British drama remains what Shaw thought the drama should look like when he defined realism and its stylistic terms.

The social and political realism of Shaw’s first plays, though most obvious in the naturalistic theatre of Harley Granville-Barker and John Galsworthy that dominated the English stage in the first decades of the 20th century, can be traced throughout the 20th century. Shaw’s “drama of Ideas” still serves as reference point for John Osborne and indirectly conditions the wave of new drama that broke on the English stage in 1956 after Shaw’s death. Leading British dramatists, Robert Bolt and Edward Bond for instance, who close the 20th century still lay specific emphasis on social themes. Bond is definitely following in Shaw’s footsteps when he lays stress on “Rational Theatre” as well as in his practice of accompanying plays with extended analytical prefaces, while Tom Stoppard’s brand of highly philosophical comedy combined with stylistic experiments is very much a contemporary equivalent of Shaw’s Man and Superman.

The above is not to imply that those who came after Shaw are in any sense subordinate to him. Their work stands on its own merits and extends the forms of English drama far beyond the 19th century forms that Shaw evolved. Yet, there is no doubt that they maintain the realistic trend and political focus of Shaw’s drama with regards to themes and techniques. Shaw’s political influence on the drama will be recognized when one remembers that when Shaw turned from the novel to the drama, the English stage was conspicuously free of any reputable novelists. The real significance of Shaw’s influence is in the way reputable novelists like Galsworthy, D.H. Lawrence, Summerset Maugham or later, J.B. Priestley turned to the stage in the new century in order to address topical issues directly. Shaw had been instrumental in fighting censorship, in sweeping aside the trivial forms of 19th century drama which made novels the main vehicle for social comment, and in setting the stylistic terms for the political focus of English dramatic realism and now, reputable novelists could turn to the drama to address political issues. Almost all British dramatists today are faced with the choice of reforming society by depicting its evils, whether they do so through the more naturalistic forms of Barker, Galsworthy and D.H. Lawrence who write even more photographically than Shaw ever wrote in the Unpleasant plays or, by adopting Brecht’s epic style like Robert Bolt (1924-95) and Edward Bond, they all write with the same realistic emphasis that Shaw began when he defined realism as an attack on prevalent cultural standards (idealisms).

Shaw’s attack on the type of drama that underpins conventional morality by judging outcasts from the standard social perspective, instead of undermining clichés by representing society from the outcast’s point of view has carried all before it. It has led in modern drama to the rejection of the well-made melodramas and sentimental

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comedies that affirmed conventional morality on the English stage and to the common equation today of plays that do not overtly challenge the status quo with conventional /outdated drama. This Shavian attitude toward ideals conditioned the rejection of Rattigan from the English stage in the 1950s.

Nigel (1968:8) asserts that, Shaw “is responsible for bringing back to the stage a seriousness and sense of purpose that it had scarcely enjoyed....” This “seriousness and sense of purpose” lie in the political focus he gave the drama in his definition of realism and which has inspired the political forms of British drama throughout the 20th century. Galsworthy (1909:11, 12) reiterates Shaw’s realism when he defines drama as “a religion in its moral force” and its main function as being “its potential for changing material conditions”. In realistic dramas Barker seems to imply, the aims of the playwrights and his hero appear identical. Trebell, the hero of his Waste (1907) asserts that the aim of the drama is to “preach revolution”.82 This religious sense of mission and reliance on verbal persuasion incorporated in the concept of preaching social change bridges the apparent gap between Shaw and later hard-left writers of the late 20th century as seen in Edward Bond’s call for “a rational theatre”, which also stems from Shaw. Shaw’s influence on British drama runs from the naturalistic drama of Barker and Galsworthy in the opening decades of the 20th century to the rational drama of Bond who closes the century.

Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance (1905) for instance, is a naturalistic rewrite of Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903). Like Shaw’s Ann Whitefield, his heroine takes the lead in proposing marriage while his hero, Edward Voysey is like Shaw’s Don Juan an anti-type of hero. Barker’s depiction of an apparently respectable solicitor who defrauds his clients and whose family wealth comes from his (and his father’s) speculations with the trust they administer is a variation of Widowers’ Houses (1892) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), with theft replacing prostitution and “slum landlordism” as the essence of capitalism. Barker also more profoundly develops the “discussion” trend by which Shaw substitute mere “talk” for action in the drama. But unlike Shaw who presents sex as a positive force for life (the life force), Barker’s naturalism leads him to present the drive for sexual reproduction as the tragic equivalence of fate, especially in works like Waste. Here, although the urge for reproduction is like in Shaw’s Man and Superman completely divorced of personal emotions, the treatment of sex is quite explicit. Like Shaw’s, Barker’s women are motivated by an unexpressed sexual attraction for the men they admire. Yet, in a sense, Barker’s works are critical ripostes to Shaw’s. Although Barker’s women in Waste for instance, are like Shaw’s sexual aggressors, their vulnerability is presented as a “physical curse” while the male for whom intellectual creativity replaces children, as in Man and Superman, is metaphorically sterile.83 Galsworthy’s Justice (1910) and Loyalties (1922) are like Barker’s plays, comparable to Shaw’s in focus, despite their 82 For a discussion of these issues and Barker’s leading role, see George Rowell and

Anthony Jackson (1984). See particularly, pp. 22-34.Also see D. Kennedy (1985). 83 C.f. The Collected Plays of Granville Barker, Vol. I, 168.

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more naturalistic forms. Like Shaw’s, the naturalistic theatre of the early 20th century rejects melodrama and sentimental comedies and concretely presents life on stage.

D.H Lawrence (1961:132) declares, “We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority”. Lawrence claims to offer a different perspective of drama from the rationalism of Shaw, Barker and Galsworthy, but at close look, although Lawrence does not explicitly recreate actuality on stage, he falls in the same naturalistic trend as Barker and Galsworthy, which was directly inspired by Shaw’s early plays. As in Galsworthy’s Strife, a strike occurs in Lawrence’s The Daughter-In-Law (1912) and Touch and Go (1920). However, it is kept off stage to avoid any explicit political dimension in the plays as Lawrence vowed to do, but still, his drama is full of harsh political undertones. Lawrence (1962:122) claims to deliberately present “single human individual” in opposition to “all these social beings of Galsworthy’s” and although he concentrates on the personal relationships and passion of the lower classes, he maintains the political focus of Shaw and the naturalistic dramatists. His intense depiction of the passionate relations of low class individuals is a variation of Shaw’s socialist realism. The rationale is exemplified in Edward Bond’s contention that the only viable culture comes from the uneducated working class.84

For Lawrence, coalminers and peasants in plays like The Daughter-in-Law and Touch and Go are vital figures, being close to nature, while sophistication is suspect and intellectual logic a symptom of decadence. Such an ideology acquires proletarian sanctification. Cultural or social conditioning is assumed to dehumanize an individual: education that emphasized mind over body; behaviour that deadens the mind and facilitates exploitation of one’s fellow beings and a religion shown to enslave the psychic with guilt, all appear a subtle restatement of Shaw’s “war of Ideals.” Although he rejects explicit political propaganda, Lawrence’s form of naturalistic realism, his documentation of the wretchedness of working-class existence and suffering and the evils of bourgeois values is politically close to Shaw’s.

Agitprop and “The Workers’ Theatre Movement” (1926-35) carry the realistic themes of the working population to its extreme. Edward Bond (1934―) who is still a force in British drama has clearly returned to the rational and realistic themes of Shaw with the widest perspective of working class misery in British drama. Although he claims to follow Brecht’s epic style especially in staging, Shaw had conditioned the British stage for Brechtian theatre. Besides, Bond’s drama is openly didactic in its definition of “rational drama”. Bond carries the Shavian ethos in a Brechtian epic form. In Canadian theatre Review (1979) Bond differentiates himself from Brecht in

84 For Edward Bond (1978: xiii), what defines art is “rational objectivity” the expression of

the need for interpretation, meaning, order ― that is: for justice that isn’t fulfilled in the existing social order”. Laid in syllogism, Bond says, art is objective/attacks on social injustice. All art is objective/all attacks are art (And conversely, no work that accepts the existing social order can qualify as art. In other words, objectivity is not impartiality. It comes from a particular political bias. While “rational” theatre is a theatre of political persuasion, as Shaw conceived it, Bond takes the Shavian ethos to its extreme.

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Shavian terms: “In contrast to Brecht, I think it’s necessary to disturb an audience emotionally, to involve them emotionally in my plays, so I’ve had to find ways...to surprise them...(112,113). Bond sees outraging the audience emotionally as a sort of shock therapy designed to galvanize their consciences and provoke them into viewing society “objectively” and “rationally” (that is, from his perspective). His “rational drama” is the closest in recent times to the techniques of the Unpleasant Plays and the quintessential theory of a “Drama of Ideas” emphasized in The Quintessence as consisting of “a terrible art of sharpshooting at the audience, trapping them, fencing with them, aiming always at the sorest spot in their conscience”. If Rattigen almost failed in the English stage in the mid 20th century, it is because he refused to recognize Shaw’s prescribed alienation of audience as the norm in English dramatic realism.

Rattigan (1911-77) was almost forced off the stage when he attempted to up-date the well-made play. Rattigan’s works have however gained a renewed significance because of his change of focus which has made him a forerunner of “Gay drama”. His plays, which turn on a plea for the sexually outlawed, or disabled of all genders supply a modern equivalent of Shaw’s plays, they not only turn around relevant moral issues and themes, but are subversive. But before Rattigan’s change of focus, he avoided overt confrontation with the values of the average spectator and emphasized the entertainment qualities of drama. His public rejection of the “Theatre of Ideas” in 1950 began a debate that drew attacks from the whole spectrum of dramatists at the time, from Christopher Fry to Sean O’Casey, and of course Shaw. Because Rattigan’s drama almost became identified with the conventional view of life, his plays suddenly appeared dated when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger appeared on stage in 1956. As Rattigan confessed in an interview in The Times on 9 May, 1977, “there I was in 1956, a reasonably successful playwright with Separate Tables just opened and suddenly, the whole Royal court thing [referring to George Devine’s ‘New Writers’ Season that first produced John Osborne] exploded, and Coward and Priestley and I were all dismissed, sacked by the critics”.

Osborne won the stage and overtook Rattigan because he presents his protagonists as victims of society. The title of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger defines the underlying theme of all his plays. Each hero is motivated by outrage at the discovery that the idealized Britain, for which so many have sacrificed themselves during the war years, is inauthentic. In one way or another each hero expresses his conviction that the national cults of royalty, Our Finest Hour, Westminster as the Mother of parliamentary democracy etc., are all fraudulent betrayals. The impulse to pull down sham façades, to explode the psychologically crippling Establishment myths is what marks Look Back in Anger. In his drama’s endeavour to destroy idealism, Osborne once more points to Shaw as prototype. Osborne’s disillusionment with the British establishment reflects the Shavian sense of disappointment that the traditional values are not true. It is in part this desire for lost certainties that lead Osborne to the nostalgic portrayal of Edwardian figures like Alison’s father in Look Back in Anger. Ironically for a play, hailed on May 8, 1956 as one that came with the revolution in British drama, Look Back in Anger is

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remarkably derivative or retrospective in thematic and stylistic terms as well. In addition to the setting: “a fairly large attic room of a large Victorian house”, echoes of Ibsen’s Wild Duck which also deal with the destructive effects of idealism litter the play. One needs to remember that Shaw’s redefinition of realism in British drama stems from a re-reading of the “text” of Ibsen’s drama as an attack on Idealism.

Osborne’s Look back in Anger alludes to Shaw: “Proper little Marchbank, you are!”(18) may be ironic, yet Osborne was consciously using the Shavian approach of a “discussion” in describing the rhetorical eloquence of his protagonist as “arias”. In Epitaph for George Dillion (1958), Osborne’s postscript written by his title-figure is clearly modelled on the “Revolutionist Handbook” by the hero of Man and Superman, although Osborne makes a parody of Shaw: “Dialogues not bad, but these great long speeches―that’s a mistake. People want action, excitement. I know you think you’re Bernard Shaw. But where’s he today? Eh? People won’t listen to him.” (75) The parallel with Shaw is not coincidental. Osborne is consciously part of mainstream English theatrical tradition. Shaw had taken Ibsen as his starting point in the 1890s. Yet, the comparison with Shaw defines Osborne’s essential differences and development. The theatrical context of his plays cut through the restrictions of the naturalism. Although his contact is also immediate and direct, he entirely cuts across the naturalistic forms that Shaw, Barker and Galsworthy had propagated, just as Shaw had borrowed from the nineteen-century genres to challenge their premises.

Samuel Beckett’s Existentialist theatre may be the only mark of pioneering into new literary territory. His existentialism renders his plays highly intellectual and although Beckett cannot in any conceivable sense be considered a mainstream British playwright, his influence on British drama is evident in the philosophical comedies of Stoppard, which evolve around philosophers, and it is hardly coincidental that it is in the final lines of Jumpers, perhaps his most philosophical work that Stoppard pays tribute to Beckett. Archie’s final speech― “At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner: ‘Wham bam, thank you Sam’” (78) ― is indeed a coded tribute to Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s work is far more abstract in its philosophical nature than his followers, but the roots of his theatre can still be traced in the Hell dream of Man and Superman which, as a philosophical discourse represents the earliest form of Beckett’s and Stoppard’s theatre. Shaw called his dream “a pit of philosophers” and his Devil’s absurdist vision is of Beckett’s existentialist theatre.

While the social realistic ethos of Shaw’s drama has continued to inspire the thematic thrust of British drama, his “discussion” has inspired the anti-illusionist and fantastic forms of modern drama. But strangely enough, this dialogue form of Shaw’s drama that has become the norm in modern drama consists of his adapting to the stage or of bringing back to life, theatrical conventions which had been discarded when naturalism and realism took hold of the theatre. Though the dialogue form of Shaw’s drama is one mark of his avant-gardism, it is not new in dramatic theory. It can be traced back to Plato’s dialogues as discussed in chapter III and even in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. As a modern anti-illusory device, Shaw’s discussion has far-reaching

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implications on modern dramatic characterization and not only runs counter to the stereotype characters and tightly constructed plots of 19th century melodramas and sentimental comedies. It leads inevitably to the use of fantastic forms and open perspective structures even in modern historical drama.

Gassner (1970: 296) puts Shaw’s dramatic practice in perspective when he declares that, whether in melodrama, comedy or history, Shaw was often

Prepared to violate realistic structure and verisimilitude, to turn somersaults of the most farcical or fantastic kind, and to be arbitrary with his plot or to discard plot altogether. He was ever ready to stop the overt action for a good discussion or good lecture, or even step out of the proscenium frame to harangue the audience on behalf of a relevant philosophy or sociology which is beyond, if not indeed antithetical to, the illusion achieved by plodding realists and the designers who provided scenic realism.

As far back as 1896 for example, Shaw, commenting as a working drama critic rather than playwright, suggested that

any play performed on a platform amidst the audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is presented as a picture framed by a proscenium. Also, that we are less conscious of the artificiality of the stage when a few well-understood conventions, adroitly handled, are substituted for attempts at an impossible scenic verisimilitude. All the old-fashioned tale-of-adventure plays, with their frequent changes of scene, and all the new problem plays, with their intense intimacies, should be done in this way (Theatres, 184).

This anti-illusionist technique which runs counter the naturalistic conventions of drama was practice by Shaw more than a century ago and remains the norm in the modern theatres of Beckett, Stoppard and many others. Today we might consider Shaw’s remarks above as an avant-garde anticipation of the dissolution of “fourth wall”. In fact, what Shaw thought the playhouse should look like then is still largely a modern ideal. At the time, Shaw’s discussion was greeted with hostility. As one critic of wrote of his extensive dialogue in Outlook (1930):

Here is the final exaggeration of all of Shaw’s tendencies as a dramatist. Action has totally disappeared and all the characters sit in chairs, hour in and hour out. And in the place of human emotion is the brain of Shaw, bulging larger and larger, filling the stage, hard and brilliant, glittering like a jewel (429)

Although highly criticized at the time, the dialogue form of Shaw’s Hell scene and the epilogue of St. Joan have become the blueprint for modern drama. Through it, Shaw redefined the nature and function of the dramatic text in a text/audience relationship.

As far as dramatic characterization is concerned, the generic effects of Shaw’s rhetorical convention remain enormous. Shavian characterization permitted non-realistic eloquence. This was not only justifiable on the grounds of psychological validity but was also consistent with the actor’s self-consciousness of his/her role, which Shaw stressed in his dramatic theory. As a dramatist, Shaw recognized that the whole range of human experience cannot be expressed in the normal or ordinary language of probable conversation. To overcome this limitation Shaw employed the player whose speech had vitality beyond what would be normal for his role. This

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intensified rhetoric (possibly poetic prose, or even verse) in Shaw’s drama is not an escape from realism. The technique is psychologically valid for, in times of crisis or peaks of emotion we all reach for another and more metaphorical levels of language. Scenes and speeches such as we find in the “Don Juan in Hell scene” are not an escape from a commitment to reality—they provide for Shaw and later dramatists who use the device, opportunities for creating a reality of ideas and emotions which go beyond the commitment to external details. The effect of the Shavian discussion for the realistic form of historical drama has been fully illustrated in St. Joan.

In order to make ideas dramatic for example, Shaw wanted his characters to be able to step out of their roles now and then and to become bigger than life. Thus he made use of the pre-naturalistic stage convention that characters may have written into their roles an artificial amount of self-consciousness. The device not only permitted the use of certain kinds of ironic wit Shaw loved, but permitted clarity of expression in dialogue unavailable to a doctrinaire realist. Transported into historical drama, Shaw’s discussion mode explodes the realistic theatre of Victorian historical melodrama in which history was entirely set in the past and realized on stage through elaborate costumes, stage design and spectacle. Contrary to the realistic historiography of Victorian historical melodrama Shaw, in the preface to St. Joan postulates “the sacrifice of verisimilitude” (facts and action) and his preference for self-conscious characterization in historical drama:

It is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can they be made intelligible to the audience. All I claim is that by this inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude, the things I represent these three exponents of drama [in Joan]as saying are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing (51).

Shaw insists in the same preface that he was not, “a representation [al]ist or [naturalistic] realist.” Rather, he said, he

. .. was always in the classic tradition, recognizing that stage characters must be endowed by the author with a conscious self-knowledge and power of expression, and . . . a freedom of inhibition, which in real life would make them monsters. . . It is the power to do this that differentiates me (or Shakespeare) from a gramophone and a camera. The representational part of the business is mere costume and Scenery; and I would not give tuppence for any play that could not be acted in curtains and togas as effectively as in elaborately built stage drawing rooms and first-rate modern tailoring (West, 1958:185).

The use of self-conscious characters or actors who are aware of the presence of the audience before them, is a Shavian anti-illusionary device used as early as the turn of century, yet still considered by current playwrights as one of the most modern theatrical aspects. In other refinements these are the techniques of Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s The Chairs, Genet’s The Balcony, and the techniques of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of alienation.

What is most striking about the Shavian discussion as I have illustrated throughout this study, is its ability to alienate audience, a function which counters the 19th century

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perception of drama as a means of pleasing or entertaining audience. This alienation technique as Martin Esslin holds is one of the most modern qualities of 20th century drama. In Brecht (1961) for instance, Esslin sees Brecht’s “Innovations in a theatre which rejects illusion—like the earlier Shaw, from whom Brecht learned—and abandons the pretence that the audience is eavesdropping on actual events”. Brecht’s theatre openly admits “that the theatre is a theatre and not the world itself,” and “approximates the lecture hall, to which audiences come in the expectation that they will be informed, and also the circus arena, where an audience, without identification or illusion, watches performers exhibit their special skills.” (126). By destroying stage illusion and by inhibiting the possibilities of empathic identification between audience and characters, the playwright theoretically at least, creates a distance which forces the spectator to look at the action onstage in a detached and critical Spirit. This indeed is the function of the discussion mode of Shaw’s dreams in Man and Superman and the epilogue of St. Joan. The generic implications of these discussion dreams on the realistic forms of 19th century comedy and histories have been fully explored in chapters IV and V of this study. These dreams in which Shaw’s characters seem to explicitly address the audience function to break the dramatic illusion. Even the epilogue to Fanny’s first Play where the critic-audience discuss Fanny’s play before the audience has a similar anti-illusory function.

Startling though, is the fact that these cerebral dramatic debates that Shaw called “discussions” could come to life in a variety of symbolic settings and forms like dreams and myths. Shaw could combine a dream and myth with his own discussion mode of drama. To these forms is to be added the device of anachronism, which is central to Shaw’s historiography in historical drama. In St. Joan for instance, myth, dream and “discussion” come together in the epilogue. Yet, the play is firmly set in history and follows the usual Shavian formula of testing and discarding illusions. The fantastic dream included in this Shavian history puts it entirely out of tune with the realistic form of Victorian historical drama.

As a recent critic asserts, “At odds with the tenets of naturalism—for which he professed to stand, —Shaw is never in doubt that drama is a matter of illusion and that, far from mirroring nature, reality and life were outside the theatre, with the audience and not on the stage.” He is credited with introducing fantastic forms in English drama and this innovation stems inevitably from his familiarity with the utopian novelistic tradition of his time and his own socialist zeal for change. Already in 1879 Shaw’s “The St. James Mystery” featured an apparition of Mozart. In another story, “The Miraculous Revenge,” written in 1885, a graveyard moves from one side of a river to the other, and two years later, in “Don Giovanni Explains;’ Shaw introduced the ghost of Don Juan to which the dream scene of Man and Superman is an expansion. Shaw’s perculiar use of time by setting his scenarios into the future and past, or by his use of dream states in Man and Superman, St. Joan or Back to Methuselah is typical. His use of the past as setting can be observed as early as l889 in the story “A.D. 3000: The True Report of a County Council Candidate’s Dream” (reprinted in SHAW 6, pp.

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158—64), ‘which portrays the cultural shock (“future shock”) of a late nineteenth-Century political abecedarian transported to a futuristic utopian London. “Aerial Footfall” (1905) evolves around the reception of a charwoman and a bishop into the next world. Other uses ‘of the fantastic include a talking plaster bust of Shakespeare in “A Dressing Room Secret” (1910) and, a disembodied child conversing with Kaiser Wilhelm II during a military engagement in “The Emperor and the Little Girl” (1916). In The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, visits with such luminaries as the God of Noah, the God of Job, Ecclesiastes, Micah, Jesus, Mohammed, Voltaire, and that latter-day prophet, G.B.S. These fantastic forms all point to the experimental nature of Shaw’s drama. The introduction of such forms in small scales genres of the 19th century like comedies and especially histories, transformed the dramatic experience for the Victorian audience.

The anti-illusionist “discussion”, dreams and anachronism in historical drama have not only inspired numerous modern history plays spawned out the Shavian technique, but his view of history as a distant retrospective interpretation of the past has become the norm in modern historical drama. Shaw’s approach to history has inspired the theatre of Giraudoux, Brecht and Anouilh. Anouilh’s The Lark not only takes on Joan’s life as subject, but keeps to the fantastic and anachronistic form of Shaw’s Epilogue to St. Joan throughout. Shaw’s twentieth-century approach to historical drama was established against the background of nineteenth century historiography. He stressed the view that, the theory had to be discredited that,

the only way to write a play which shall convey to the general public an impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak blank verse and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, and any of the material conditions of their existence.

For Shaw, what the purposeful use of anachronism in history shows is that, the period of time covered by history is far too short to allow any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such progress since Caesar’s time (twenty centuries) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have record as existing in the past, exists at the present moment.

Anachronism as I have demonstrated in St. Joan gives us a better perspective of understanding the relativity of time in Shaw’s history, but it also functions to debunk Victorian linear or positivist historiography.

Shaw combines elements of myth, anachronism and dream forms, even in the most realistic dramatic genre (historical drama). These forms in Shaw’s drama are not an escape from realism. Rather, such stage forms in Shaw’s drama, as in the works of most socialist realists are alternative modes of portraying society realistically in terms of politics. Thus, in Saint Joan like in Man and Superman, Shaw uses figures about which an entire mythos has grown up, but fractures the realistic plots of his presentation with the introduction of fantastic dreams. He presents St. Joan for instance, as a realistic chronicle and ends the play in a dream-fantasy. Yet Shaw was

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equally good at breaking the illusion, even of his dreams. An alert audience, watching the epilogue would realize that the appearance of the clerical gentleman in 1920 costume breaks the illusion of the dream. Just as the dream interlude of Man and Superman ends up dispelling the illusion of a dream in this transitional scene: Mendoza: Did you dream? Tanner: Damnably. Did you? Mendoza: Yes. I forget what. You were in it. Tanner: So were you. Amazing.

Shattering illusions, even the illusion of the dream is central to Shaw’s drama. Shaw is credited for extending the thematic and formal scopes of British drama. As

I have demonstrated in almost all the chapters of this study, Shaw’s diverse background knowledge played a vital role in his thematic transformations of dramatic genres. From his economic knowledge, Shaw could transform a farce, melodrama or romantic comedy in Widowers Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession into anti-genre types. A showman of ideas, he introduced new topics into the drama. Deeply involved in the political, religious and even scientific discourses of his time, Shaw quite easily made a religious comedy of the scientific discourses of evolution. Man and Superman as seen in chapter IV, is a Utopian and religious comedy that forays into the new genre of science fiction. The automobile on stage, characters like Henry Straker who masters the new mechanics, the imaginative contrivance of an epic dream in act III, all belong to the genre of science fiction. While Man and Superman is in no way comparable to major works in the SF genre, it at least represents a milestone in that direction. It sowed the seeds for Shaw’s quintessential SF play, Back to Methuselah. Indeed, Shaw’s influence on fantastic and futuristic forms of literature, especially SF has been significantly documented.85 Shaw’s critique of history writing discussed in my theoretical chapter has become the standard approach to historical subjects in drama and his imaginative re-presentation of Joan’s history measures up to some of the best history plays of our times. His aesthetic critique in Fanny’s First Play is a topical invention in comedy and the quality of this critique can only be appreciated in the wider context of the intertextual theories of Krestiva, Barthes and Derrida.

Philosophically too, Shaw’s plays have lost little of their relevance, and may have actually gained some. One critic sees the “most distilled expression” of the Zeitgeist “in the theatre of Beckett, Genet, Shaw and Brecht, where heroic forms for the individual in the democratic and industrialized society are explored.” Another sees

85 C. f. Elizabeth Anne Hull’s, “On His Shoulders: Shaw’s Influence on Clarke’s Childhood’s

End”( Shaw Review, 1997; 17: 97-105); George Slusser’s “Last Men and First Women: The Dynamics of Life Extension in Shaw and Heinlein” (Ibid.: 133-53); Heinlein, for example, unhesitatingly borrowed from Shaw for his 1941 book, Methuselah’s Children; Milton T Wolf (ed. and Foreward), “Shaw and Science Fiction” (Ibid.: 1-238); John Barnes, “Tropics of a Desirable Oxymoron: The Radical Superman in Back to Methuselah (Ibid.: 155-64).

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Shaw as precursor of the “existentialist drama represented by Sartre’s No Exit and The Flies.’’ Still another, writing of Shaw’s existentialism includes Shaw under that much term because such plays as the Don Juan in Hell scene of Man and Superman “contain all the germs of the twentieth—and the twenty-first—century, just as Goethe’s Faust contains all the germs of the nineteenth.” In particular, the Critic (Cohn Wilson) citing Heartbreak House as well, sees Shaw as recognizing the modern world as a “maelstrom of neurosis and futility” in need of “direction and purpose.” Although Shaw employs existentialist settings and expressionist forms like dreams, the vision of life that emerged from these forms was always the Shavian optimistic or positivist vision. Shaw’s Don Juan for instance asks: “Does this colossal mechanism have no purpose?”And his respons remains that whether or not the mechanism has purpose, man must go beyond disillusion to at least act out his life as if purpose existed. This optimism and urge to strive for something better is central to Shaw’s evolutionary vision of life. As Shaw, a generation before Sartre proclaimed in “The Religion of the Future,”: “we must drive into the heads of men the full consciousness of moral responsibility that comes with the knowledge that there will never be a God unless we make him.” From the religious standpoint, Shaw’s plays have retained more currency. As W. Smith (1963: xxiii) says od Shaw’s unorthodox religious philosophy,

A selection from almost any of his religious speeches could be placed in a sermon in almost any church without violating the sermon’s context; yet there is no doubt that his utterances are truly heretical. They were when he made them, and they still are.

Shaw’s heresy especially in his religious plays still has parallels in the theological avant-garde. As Daniel Leary (1966: 15) holds of Shaw’s philosophy, its

...abiding significance— both as an explanation of the present and as a vision of the future—is understood by its striking parallels to the writings of the scientist-priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, [and] the emotional experiences of Shaw’s dramas are essentially’ the expression in character and structure of this philosophy.

This Shavian philosophy as I have shown throughout this study lead inevitably to an objective treatment of generic subjects and a questioning of revered cultural institutions through an impartial presentation of characters (hero and villain) and through the open perspective structures of Shaw’s drama.

That Shaw will remain in tune with the avant-garde in theatrical theory and practice is clearly impossible. Although dramatists will continue to debate man’s role in the universe as Shaw does, their ideas and practices will continue to undergo change. Yesterday’s avant-garde at its most advanced demonstrates its validity as today’s orthodoxy and tomorrow’s discards. That many of Shaw’s ideas have held on so long is remarkable and, although the ironic blend of the comic and the serious labelled “dark comedy” today owes much to Shaw, he would have been himself the first to claim that his ideas would not last too long, for Shaw saw no value in the fixity of ideas. Shaw never intended to found a school of thought on playwriting, although he did intend to influence the thought and drama which came after him. He wrote plays

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because, as he said in the preface to Back to Methuselah, the worst attitude concerning the theatre current at the time he began his writing career was

that intellectual seriousness is out of place on the stage; that the theatre is a place of shallow amusement; that people go there to be soothed after the enormous intellectual strain of a day in the city;’ in short, that a playwright is a person whose business it is to make unwholesome confectionery out of cheap emotions. My answer to this was to put all my intellectual goods in the shop window under the sign of Man and Superman. That part of my design succeeded. By good luck and [good] acting, the comedy triumphed on the stage; and the book was a good deal discussed. Since then the sweet-shop view of the theatre has been out of countenance. . . . And the younger playwrights are not only taking their art seriously, but being taken seriously themselves (Ixxxv).

This was all that Shaw wanted to give the theatre. The important thing for him was not for future dramatists to imitate him but to surpass him. His hope was that future generations of artists and critics shall turn the “petty tentative” he introduced in the drama into masterpieces”. This hope has been realized in modern historiography by critics like Hayden White; in intertextuality by critics like Krestiva, Barthes, Derrida etc. and, in modern dramatic theory by playwrights like Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett etc.

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