Bernard Shaw: Reimagining Women and Ireland, 1892–1914 [1st ed. 2023] 3031325885, 9783031325885

Table of contents :
Shaw on Punctuation
Acknowledgements
Praise for Bernard Shaw: Reimagining Women and Ireland 1892–1914
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: Women, Nation, Enablement, and the Irish Question
Chapter 2: The Opposing Strata of Feminism: Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession
2.1 The Widower’s Daughter, Her Maid, and The Countess
2.2 Shaw’s Dublin Contemporary: W.B. Yeats
2.3 The Prostitute’s Daughter, Her Mother, and Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts
Chapter 3: The Marriage of Change: Candida and Getting Married
3.1 Candida—The Ménage à Trois Trebled
3.2 Getting Married—The Big Greek Wedding
Chapter 4: John Bull, Nora Reilly and the Garden City: A Match Made in “Heavn”
Chapter 5: The Wild West Meets the West End: The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Pygmalion
5.1 The “Wild West” Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Feemy Evans
5.2 A West End Adaptation of the Myth: Pygmalion
Epilogue: Tying the Knot
References
Index

Citation preview

BERNARD SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Bernard Shaw Reimagining Women and Ireland, 1892–1914 Audrey McNamara

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries Series Editors

Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Massachusetts Maritime Academy Pocasset, MA, USA Peter Gahan Independent Scholar Los Angeles, CA, USA

The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following. Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.

Audrey McNamara

Bernard Shaw Reimagining Women and Ireland, 1892–1914

Audrey McNamara School of English, Drama and Film University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISSN 2634-5811     ISSN 2634-582X (electronic) Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries ISBN 978-3-031-32588-5    ISBN 978-3-031-32589-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover artwork copyright credit to Ian O’Hare, artist This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my wonderful parents, Paddy and Lauri, and my beautiful sister, Denise All sleeping with the angels

Shaw on Punctuation

In an essay entitled “Spelling Reform v Phonetic Reform: A Plea for Speech Nationalisation” published in the Morning Star in 1901, Shaw wrote: The apostrophies [sic] in ain’t, don’t, haven’t, etc., look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan’t should be sha”n’t, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.

Shaw’s views on punctuation will be respected with regard to his own words in this book.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan, the series editors, both of whom have been immensely supportive of me. Their friendship and mentoring, as well as their scholarship sustained me through the writing process of this book. I also wish to thank friends, colleagues, and scholars who have supported and encouraged me through the process of writing this monograph: Susanne Colleary, Colette Yeates, Zeljka Doljanin, Anthony Roche, Declan Kiberd, David Clare, Julie Sparks, Stephen Watt, Gustavo Rodrígues Martín, Brad Kent, Eamonn Jordan, Justine Zapin, Eva Urban-Deveraux, and Kasia Lech. Appreciation must be given to all the wonderful Shaw scholars, past and present whose work has influenced and enriched my thinking. My gratitude also goes to my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Eileen Srebernik, and the project coordinator, Ruby Panigraphi, for their help and guidance as I completed my book submission. I also wish to give heartfelt thanks to the president of Ireland Michael D.  Higgins, whose support for the furthering of Shaw studies was a launching pad for much of the Shaw and Ireland scholarship of the past eleven years when he opened the Shaw 2012 International conference in the National Gallery of Dublin. I know that his support is widely appreciated by the wider community of the International Shaw Society (ISS). The ISS also receives my thanks. Current ISS president, Bob Gaines, former presidents, Richard Dietrich (ISS Founder), Leonard Connoly, and Michael O’Hara are thanked for their support and commitment to furthering Shaw studies internationally. It is also important to thank the two vice-presidents, Ellen Dolgin (former) and Jennifer Buckley (current). ix

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On a more personal note, I give love and thanks to my late parents, Paddy and Lauri, my late sister, Denise and my wonderful brothers, Patrick, Brian, David, Noel and their families. I am blessed to have them in my life. I would like to give special thanks, love, and appreciation to my son, Ian O’Hare, for his wonderful cover art of this book and his unwavering support through all my endeavours.

Praise for Bernard Shaw: Reimagining Women and Ireland 1892–1914 “Bernard Shaw: Reimagining Women and Ireland 1892–1914 advances an ambitious and timely thesis: namely, that Shaw’s advocacy for women’s rights parallels and informs his views of the coterminous Irish nationalist project. Audrey McNamara wisely focuses her attention on plays written between 1892 and 1914, a crucial period for both movements. The results include fine readings of some of Shaw’s most important works: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, John Bull’s Other Island, and Pygmalion.” —Stephen Watt, Provost Professor of English, Indiana University, USA.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Women, Nation, Enablement, and the Irish Question  1 2 The  Opposing Strata of Feminism: Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession 17 3 The Marriage of Change: Candida and Getting Married 59 4 John  Bull, Nora Reilly and the Garden City: A Match Made in “Heavn” 87 5 The  Wild West Meets the West End: The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Pygmalion117 Epilogue: Tying the Knot153 References157 Index165

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About the Author

Audrey McNamara  lectures at University College Dublin, Ireland and is an adjunct lecturer for Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She was guest coeditor for Shaw 36.1: Shaw and Money (2016) and Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (2020). She is also on the Editorial Board of Shaw: The Journal of Shaw Studies.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Women, Nation, Enablement, and the Irish Question

A prolific playwright with an oeuvre of almost sixty plays, Bernard Shaw has, as Nicholas Grene contends, “so long remained the invisible man of Irish theater”.1 There has been a slight shift in that attitude in recent years with four of his plays, which had never previously been staged by the Abbey Theatre, making their National Theatre debut: Pygmalion, 2011, Major Barbara, 2013, Heartbreak House, 2014, and You Never Can Tell, 2015. Since 1989 there have been fifteen professional Shaw productions: three in The Gate Theatre, four in the Abbey Theatre, one in the Peacock Theatre, with the remainder performed in regional theatre spaces around Ireland. Most Shavian drama has been produced in England, the United States, and Canada, where the annual Shaw Festival takes place in Niagara-­ on-­the-Lake. Likewise, much of the academic investigation into and critique of Shaw’s work is also attributed to international scholars. However, there is an emergent interest on the part of Irish scholars in the playwright especially in relation to his Irish heritage, as most recently framed by Peter Gahan’s Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, 2010, David Clare’s Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 2015, and Audrey McNamara and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, 2020.2 The premise of this book is to engage with that scholarly discourse and emphasise Shaw’s centrality to the Irish theatrical tradition where, arguably, he sits uncomfortably at present. In my reading of a representative selection of plays during the period 1892 to 1914, I will seek to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2_1

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connect Shaw’s drama to an era that was a momentous time for both the emergence of female suffrage and Irish national independence, where Shaw reacted to the two movements within his dramatic canon. The years between 1889, when the Woman’s Franchise League was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, and 1914, when World War I began, were the most violent years in the history of women’s suffrage. This was mirrored by the nationalist political tensions building in Ireland from the time of Charles Stewart Parnell’s 1890 fall to the third Home Rule Bill that was passed in 1912, but suspended prior to enactment in August 1914 due to the war. Interestingly, this period was also the time Shaw wrote many of his major plays: Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and, significantly, John Bull’s Other Island. Bearing these developments in mind, I will interrogate how Shaw uses the trope of the feminine to challenge societal and personal mores, and as a representation of nation in relation to the country of his birth. Many critics have discussed Shaw and marriage in relation to Shaw’s own views and his personal life, but the trope of marriage in his work, to date, has been undervalued. There are exceptions of course. Robert Gaines’s Bernard Shaw’s Marriages and Misalliances (Palgrave 2017) begins a discourse on this issue, focusing on the emerging woman question in relation to the marriage conventions of Shaw’s time. Invariably, at some stage in each play Shaw creates a dialogue on marriage, giving it a very important dramaturgical function in the overall theme of his plays. This conversation is continued in other titles in the “Shaw and His Contemporaries” series, particularly in Marriage and Late Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian (2021), which through an analysis of Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and others, examines how theatre became a forum for the discussion of marriage. In foregrounding such notions as ownership and equality within relationships and marriages, Shaw reveals how gender roles within the marriage contract were polarised in the nineteenth century and beyond. Two very different models of individual agency and independence for husbands and wives seemed to operate within marriage, in effect, making a mockery of the institution itself. Shaw believed that the institution needed reform and stated that “there is no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing question of improving its conditions” (CPP IV: 319/20). There was a patriarchal expectation in marriage that subsumed the woman’s identity, where everything she owned became her husband’s property. Even though the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 sought to redress this inequality, suffragette scholar Sally Mitchell

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maintains that “the law could not shield a woman from the emotional and physical pressure exerted by a husband who wanted to get his hands on his wife’s money”.3 However, despite these inequalities marriage was considered one of the most significant achievements in a woman’s life. H.E. Harvey, writing in the 1890s, succinctly explains: The artificial distinction conferred on society on the married woman as compared with the unmarried, combined with the difficulty of qualifying for other professions, is, of course the great inducement to marriage with the majority of women, as very many women do not care for domestic life would greatly prefer independence and liberty. But they marry because society expects it of them, and tempts them with its favours.4

Significantly, I think, in the preface to Getting Married, Shaw construed marriage as related to conceptions of nationhood: “If marriage cannot be made to produce something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else the nation will have to go” (CPP IV: 328). By recognising the common denominator of “marriage”, this book will demonstrate that Shaw, in engaging with the topic of marriage and the social constraints that it placed on women in his plays, was directly probing women’s rights under the constrictive marriage laws. Most importantly, it will establish through the subject of marriage that he was simultaneously probing the effect of the coercive Act of Union (1800) and the subsequent demand for Home Rule and political autonomy for Ireland.5 Given Shaw’s sense of the importance that the marriage question had for the structure of nation, particularly within or under British law, there existed at the time remarkable similarities intertwined in the goals of both the struggle for women’s suffrage, beginning with the Married Woman’s Property Act (1882), and the endeavours for Irish national independence. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford’s analysis of the relationship between marriage and nation determines the connections that serve to view the relationship between the two institutions: In legal terms, marriage transformed husband and wife into one person and that person is the husband: we can therefore see that matrimony was a better (and more damning) analogy for political union than many of its proponents realized. Even those who were not enthusiastic about British rule and sought to ameliorate its harsher effects used the trope with little consciousness of the gender disadvantage to the feminine partner.6

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The rejection in 1867 of John Stuart Mill’s amendment to the Franchise Reform Bill to allow women the vote, on the same property terms as men, laid the foundation for the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Throughout the next few decades, various women’s suffrage movements were created in localised areas, eventually becoming part of an umbrella organisation known as The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1898. The inability to vote meant that Victorian women had very few rights: their disenfranchised status epitomised civil inequality. Campaigners wanted the vote to be granted to women as they felt that without voting rights, women were subordinate to men as defined by law. Organised suffragettes felt that the best way to achieve equal status with men, in society and in the home, was to obtain the right to vote and participate in the parliamentary process. Emmeline Pankhurst, together with her husband Richard Pankhurst, founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 with the aim of securing the vote for women in local elections. These societies led to a rethinking of the inherent role of women in society and when Sarah Grand coined the term “new woman” in 1894 in her article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”,7 it immediately became synonymous with the women’s suffrage movements. The “new woman”, as Carolyn Nelson states, “came to denote the woman who has finally solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-­ the-Woman’s-Sphere and prescribed the remedy”.8 Nelson also maintains that “The marriage question was central to most discussions by and about the New Woman and was an important part of New Woman writing, both fiction and essays”.9 She also emphasised that Mona Caird’s essay “Marriage”, published in 1888, “began an important public debate on issues relating to marriage that continued in the periodicals during the next decade”.10 Caird’s essay examines the woman’s role within marriage as being one of captivity. She traces the institution back to a period she terms as “the matriarchal age” when the woman was the head of the family, with an unquestionable right both to her children and to property which eventually would be “inherited through her—and her alone”.11 Caird blames the era when men became hunter-gatherers for the change in social structure and states that these men “being unable to procure wives in the woods and solitudes, used to make raids upon the settlements and carry off some of the women. This was the origin of the modern idea of possession in marriage. The woman became the property of the man, his own by right of conquest. Now the wife is his by law”.12 The core of Caird’s arguments

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offer a solution to the inequality of the marital state. She proposes a “co-­ educational system” that will result in seeing “the folly of permitting the forces of one sex to pull against and neutralise the workings of the other”.13 This, she concludes, should “gladden and give new life to all humanity”.14 The essay she was to write eleven years later in 1899, “Does Marriage Hinder A Woman’s Self Development?”, creates an example of the male adopting the female role within the family and ends with the question she posed in the title. This drew a reaction from Gertrude Atherton who gave an “either/or” response. Atherton maintained that whatever a woman decided, it should be to either get married and give full attention to her husband or “if she wants to be great she must go the pace alone”.15 In other words, she implied that there was no way of combining both marriage and career for a woman. The limitations in her argument are apparent when she does not apply the same formula to the man. Such was the power of the marriage question in the 1890s that, according to Carolyn Nelson, led to London’s The Telegraph starting a letters column with the title “Is Marriage A Failure?” Within two months they received 27,000 letters.16 Many other articles addressing the marriage question were written in this decade, including: A Young Woman’s Right: Knowledge by Julia M.A. Hawksley, The Voice of Woman by H.E. Harvey, and Plain Words on the Woman Question by Grant Allen. By the time of the 1907 amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act, the women’s suffrage movement was in full swing and this momentum continued into 1914 until the start of World War I, when all suffrage activity ceased on account of the war effort. Emmeline Pankhurst stated in her biography that, “For the present at least our arms are grounded, for directly the threat of foreign war descended on our nation we declared a complete truce from militancy”.17 Mirroring the struggle of the women’s movement in light of the political volatility that marriage meant for women in both England and Ireland was the Irish national struggle for independence in the 1890s. Ireland, in effect, was suffering similar problems of subordination and disenfranchisement that the women’s suffrage movement was rebelling against. The forced, centuries-old colonisation of Ireland left an indelible mark on the psyche of the Irish people and a growing hostility towards what Declan Kiberd describes as the English experimentation of Ireland with “laissez faire economics, oscillations from conciliations to coercion, curfews and martial law”.18 As a nation, Ireland was the subject of a dominant controlling ruler, England. Cullingford argues that “the familiar

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background of the gendered analogy that aligns England with the powerful male, Ireland with the weaker female, and tells of the Union through the metaphor of either rape or of heterosexual marriage”.19 The basis for the conflict in the late nineteenth century had its roots in the British response to the 1798 Irish rebellion, when the 1801 Act of Union was instigated “as a means of consolidating British control over Ireland, a dependent kingdom”.20 It was supported by the Catholic population at first as they thought it would lead to Catholic Emancipation; however, the failure of this to materialise set into motion a chain of events that would culminate in the fight for Home Rule and ultimately national independence. In 1812, Daniel O’Connell took up the gauntlet for the fight for Catholic emancipation and by the 1832 general election, O’Connell had imposed a repeal (of the Act) pledge on “sympathetic parliamentary candidates”.21 O’Connell’s idea of repeal was to restore the kingdom of Ireland without breaking the monarchical connection with Britain. Alvin Jackson states that the “repeal pledge looked forward to Parnell and the Home Rule era”.22 The evolution of a Home Rule Movement represented a long-standing demand for self-government within Ireland. The period of history in the aftermath of O’Connell was a tumultuous time in Irish political, social, and economic life. The onset of the Great Famine in 1847 further heightened political awareness of the social injustices being meted out to the Irish people. Kiberd states that “the balance of the debate was well-registered in the popular peasant […]: God sent the potato-blight but the English caused the famine”.23 This sentiment fed into the nationalist psyche and created civil unrest, causing pockets of uprisings throughout Ireland that were badly organised. Nonetheless, there was still some political impact from these insurgencies. The repercussions from the 1867 rebellion, as Jackson argues, “stimulated a much more intense and sympathetic popular interest than the botched manoeuvres of the rebels”.24 He maintained that “as with the 1916 rising, so in 1867 the execution of Irish rebels created a consensus of support for Fenianism which had hitherto been conspicuously lacking”.25 The politician who took up Daniel O’Connell’s mantle and campaigned vehemently for Home Rule was Isaac Butt. He formed the Home Government Association in 1870 with the intention of “uniting Protestant dissidents with Catholic Liberals in a constitutional initiative which was blessed with the “benevolent neutrality” of an insurrectionist body, the Irish Republican Brotherhood”.26 However, as Jackson argues, Butt’s ideal of Home Rule was imperialistic and “gentrified”.27 This was in

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opposition to the agrarian policies initiated in Daniel O’Connell’s time, and followed through in the tenure of Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell engaged with William Gladstone’s Liberal government during the 1880s in an effort to push through a Home Rule Bill. Stephen Lee argues that “His [Parnell’s] machinations in parliament were frustrating for all the British parties, but were highly successful in increasing the pressure for Home Rule”.28 Parnell’s game of cat and mouse with the Liberal government, in which he voted for the Conservative party in the 1885 election, served to hasten Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule. However, Gladstone failed to engage with Parnell or any other parliamentary leaders on any aspect of the bill and so, four years after the 1882 Married Woman’s Property Act was passed, the first Home Rule Bill was presented to, and defeated in, the House of Commons in 1886.29 The second Home Rule Bill in 1893, three years after Parnell’s fall and two years after his death, was passed in the House of Commons but defeated in the House of Lords. Despite these defeats, it would be, as Stephen Lee argues, “a mistake to see Ireland reverting to a repressed condition”.30 In fact, P.J. Mathews states: With the realisation that little could be achieved at Westminster and a weariness of the divisive squabbling of the politicians, a new generation of Irish intellectuals came up with a strategy of working for a form of de facto home rule despite its unattainability de jure. The plan was to mobilise and apply the latent national intelligence of the country to the practical needs of Ireland, a strategy conveniently encapsulated in the term ‘self-help’. Central to the endeavour was the realisation that the Irish had accepted London as the centre of culture and civilisation for too long and that the time had come for the Irish people to regenerate their own intellectual terms of reference and narratives of cultural meaning.31

This culminated in what is ultimately termed as the Celtic Revival which encompassed a revival in Irish sports, literature, folklore, music, and a renewed interest in revitalising the declining Irish language. This new national narrative crafted was designed to separate Ireland from the culture of England, the Revival was one initiative in a larger movement which was to establish new Irish national self-movements such as the Gaelic Athletic Society (GAA 1884), the Gaelic League (1893), the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS 1894), the Irish Literary Society (ILS 1892), the Irish Literary Theatre (1899), and eventually in 1905, Sinn Féin (a political party that played no real role until after 1916),

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thereby laying the basis for reform of sport, the Irish language, agriculture, and politics, with the common mission of removing any English influences. The establishment in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre by Edward Martyn, W.B Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory is testament to the need to enact a new Irishness.32 P.J. Matthews maintains, “that it represented the first serious attempt by a group of Irish artists to consciously replace English cultural imports with a home-grown alternative”.33 Yeats and Gregory, like other artists, were part of the Ascendency class in Ireland known as the Anglo-Irish, and because of the perceived instability of their identity, they were regarded as neither Irish in Ireland nor English in England. The foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre was to lead to the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902, which opened the Abbey Theatre in 1904 through the sponsorship of Annie Horniman, an English theatre manager and patron. It was to become a cornerstone in the cultural fight for Irish independence. One of the problematic aspects of the Irish National Theatre was the construct of a new Irishness based on either the appropriation of a fantasied Irish past or focused on a reconfigured view of Irish peasantry by an Anglo-Irish contingent that was perceived to marginalise Irish-Ireland through the very forum that sought to liberate it. However, one of the developments of this new theatre movement was the “imagined entity” that was of the gendered subaltern, “woman”, which became “the focus of woman as a supernatural and immortal entity whose power lies in her status as object cause of both national and sexual desire”.34 Paul Murphy quotes Melissa Shira who explains the new attention on woman as connected to an established peasant tradition: “Since the anti-Catholic Penal Codes of the seventeenth century”, Shira explains, “it had been forbidden to directly refer to, or name, Ireland in ballads and poems and so on. Hence the female personification of the nation began, and flourished as an iconographic trope of cultural and political resistance.”35

Cathy Leeney further grounds the notion of “‘Mother Ireland’ as signifying a central point in images of land, of tradition, of occupation and betrayal, and of vulnerability and sacrifice”.36 Yeats and the other progenitors of the new National Theatre adopted this icon and so, the concept of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen and Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan

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came into being as a means of self-identification for the Anglo-Irish class. The latter play connects to the above peasant tradition, generating one of the early Abbey Theatre’s most popular plays.37 The dramatization of the peasant was to give veracity to the tenuous national identity of the Ascendency class, who sometimes felt that they were strangers within their own country. Melissa Fegan’s definition of an “internal stranger”, a subject borne from her examination of the Anglo-Irish writer, is extremely appropriate in its analysis of: Irish writers, preoccupied with their own identity, aware that in their metropolitan English-speaking, English-governed world they are indeed stranger to both the English and the vast majority of the Irish, began to reformulate and renegotiate their identity, reclaiming the figure of the Anglo-Irishman as the internal stranger by bringing him home.38

In defining the Anglo-Irish as the internal stranger, Fegan states that “Englishness becomes […] a polar opposition to Irishness”.39 The role of the internal stranger is a complex one and created by an exploration of the English/Irish divide. Fegan speaks of the “Irish perception of the Englishman as a stranger”.40 Through her explanation, the volatile situation of the Anglo-Irish can go some way to explain the need for writers like Yeats and Lady Gregory to establish a national identity by creating a structured past immersed in a mythological Celtic narrative. But as Fegan argues, “the key problem in post-Union Ireland is not England’s relationship with Ireland but the estrangement of the disparate groups within Ireland”.41 That is problematic as in many writings of the time the indigenous Irish are portrayed as peasants who are “saved” or “led by” by the redemptive benevolence of an upper-class (Anglo-Irish) character. The writer in this case is the internal stranger who does not come to the scene with an outward-looking vision, but rather with a desire to fashion an indisputable space for themselves that places them firmly within a constructed society, one where their value is a superior irreplaceability. Within Shaw’s drama the internal stranger is the character (like Shaw himself) who left the home place many years before and returns to find that nothing has changed in the intervening years. They are, in fact, a barometer of stagnation. Along with the returning internal stranger there arrives the ultimate stranger, the one who will effect change or highlight the need for change within the space being dramatized.

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This leads on to the theme of what Nicholas Grene describes as “the stranger in the house”. Grene traces the invention of the “stranger” to Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1902).42 Grene deliberates on the role of the stranger: A room within a house, a family in the room, stand in for normality, for ordinary, familiar life; into the room enters a stranger, and the incursion of that extrinsic, extraordinary figure alters, potentially transforms the scene. […] The status of the stranger who comes from without may be questionable: does he/she belong to the same ‘real’ world as the ordinary figures within the house or to some other supernatural otherworld? […] In each case the stranger who comes from outside is, in his/her strangeness, the representative of an uncanny other, the umheimlich which contrasts with the home entered. Yet he/she is also an agent testing that ‘home’ finding out its hidden weaknesses or malaise, drawing away one or more of its family members to danger or death outside.43

Shaw, as the returning internal stranger, having lived in London since 1876, takes this trope of the stranger and uses it in a much less fatalistic way by giving, if not life, at least resolution to a conflicted or decaying scene. The stranger is present in most of Shaw’s plays, Mrs George in Getting Married, The Woman in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Eliza in Pygmalion. Lickcheese in Widowers’ Houses, and Marchbanks in Candida. In John Bull’s Other Island the stranger is Tom Broadbent who comes to Rosscullen, representing the coloniser, along with the retuning Larry Doyle (internal stranger), who has not set foot in Ireland for eighteen years. The Celtic Revival thrived and the successes of the individual organisations, which continue to exist in the twenty-first century, are well documented. However, as Lee notes of the Revival, “although these are unquestionably happier times, the Irish Nationalists continue[d] to think in terms of Home Rule”.44 Finally, the third Home Rule Bill was passed in 1912 to be enacted in 1914. However, as with the women’s suffrage movement, World War I ensued and stymied the enactment of the Bill, leaving both Ireland and the women’s movement in states of unsatisfactory limbo. It is in this period of time, the 1880s to 1914—against a backdrop of monumental political, social, and national change—that Bernard Shaw’s social concerns; critical and theoretical writings; and his playwriting skills came into being. His dramatic interpretation of social

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and national events gave him the platform to exercise his interest in human interactions and relationships. In particular, his concentration on male/ female relationships, and especially the marriage question, served to illuminate wider social and national issues such as the Irish/English quandary that was the focal point of Irish and British politics of the time. Shaw being an engaged writer, there can be no doubt about the influence that the social and political realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had on his work, particularly on his dramatic canon of major plays. Chapter 2 explores Shaw’s construction of his female characters through an analysis of two of his first three plays, Widowers’ Houses (1892) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), to establish how he used his emerging craft to critique and advocate against the archaic manner in which women then were mostly portrayed on stage. He was “tired of the brainless-susceptible heroine …who is called sweetly womanly because, having nothing but her sex to insist on, she insists on it constantly”.45 The characters of Blanche Sartorius and her maid in Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren and her daughter, Vivie, in Mrs Warren’s Profession fulfil Shaw’s dramatic promise that women have the “ability and character to make [their] living in other professions”.46 These plays interrogate the opposing strata of feminisms in a patriarchal society, a factor which served to drive forward Shaw’s interest on the effect that contrasting views had on the emerging female independence in society. To highlight his dramatic style, the chapter examines the influence of both William Butler Yeats and Henrik Ibsen, through an analysis of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen (1892) and Ibsen’s Ghosts (1891). The purpose of this investigation is to establish Shaw’s interest in Irish drama by using the Countess Cathleen as a counterpoint to his own writing style, while also reflecting his international view through his admiration for Ibsen’s dramatic work. Within the two plays under discussion, I hope to demonstrate that Shaw used the trope of marriage both to negotiate patriarchal concepts of women’s societal role and the associated ideology of barter and ownership, and to create a platform for the emergence of the “new woman”, as represented by Blanche Sartorius and Vivie Warren. This trope will acquire a more nationalist inflection as Shaw’s craft develops, which the coming chapters demonstrate. Chapter 3 explores Shaw’s Candida (1894) and Getting Married (1908) and I argue that the era between these two plays marks a change in Shaw’s application to his work, which dramatically advances/alters Shaw’s focus. The writing of Candida signifies a crisis in Shaw’s personal life, and the intervening years before writing Getting Married demonstrate his

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movement as a playwright to a greater engagement with the country of his birth. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, an Irish contemporary and admirer of Shaw, maintains that “In the preface On [sic] Marriage, again we are confronted with a specially [sic] Irish question” (154). Shaw had followed the scandal and fate of the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Charles Stewart Parnell, and Katharine O’Shea, which arguably influenced the writing of Getting Married. Shaw had been vocal against the devastating treatment the couple received in the London press and wrote several letters to The Star in November 1890 in support of Parnell and O’Shea. His Star letters disparaged the marriage laws that offered no support for women entrapped within loveless marriages, anticipating his future work on behalf of both women and Ireland given that the scandal threatened and derailed the IPP’s efforts for Irish Home Rule. While Candida appeared to settle a “question” within the poet’s (Shaw) heart at a time when Shaw had to make personal decisions around his writing, Getting Married opens wider debates around the issues of union/disunion, and devolution on a more Irish national level. The shift in Shaw’s focus in the years between the writing of Candida and Getting Married signals Shaw’s maturation as a playwright and his deeper engagement with the land of his birth as the next chapter argues. John Bull’s Other Island (1904) is the focus of the Chap. 4, which examines the play both as Shaw’s response to the rising Irish conflict in the first decade of the twentieth century and as an example of his deep engagement with Ireland politically and socially. He took issue with the reinventing of Ireland, which he believed was part of the neo-Gaelic movement’s plan to disassociate it from anything English. He believed that Ireland needed to have an international outlook in order to survive as a nation, and that the myth of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the centrepiece of Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, was fanciful and unrealistic. Shaw viewed Ireland through the watchful eyes of the character of Nora Reilly, whom he constructed to be the antithesis of the Yeats/Gregory Cathleen character. The Shavian engagement with the colonial aspect of Irish history is ingeniously interrogated by Shaw through a British mindset, that of the Garden City experiment taking place in England in the first decade of the twentieth century. By combining these different tropes, the marriage of Broadbent and Nora, which will signify a marriage between England and Ireland, and the Garden City experiment which speaks to domination by a stronger power, the chapter unearths the play’s intersection between a

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romantic/non-romantic story and its link to twinning the concepts of colonisation and nationalism in an Irish context. Chapter 5 broadens the discussion of union and marriage through readings of The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909) and Pygmalion (1912). It investigates the idea of Shaw’s Irish background emerging more definitively in his work following his major Irish play, John Bull’s Other Island, which was reprinted in 1912  in an inexpensive paper edition to support the then pending third Home Rule Bill.47 Shaw approaches the woman question from a different perspective in both plays. Feemy Evans (The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet) and Eliza Doolittle (Pygmalion) represent both the lower stratum of society and the lower stratum of their gender. The trope of marriage yet again raises the question of equality and ownership, and both characters reject it. The additional important character, the ethereal “Woman” in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet also rejects marriage; she further serves to destabilise the archaic myth of feminine construction. There are distinct and dramatic references in each play to the Irish question, entwined in Shaw’s efforts on behalf of women’s rights over conventional and entrapping (for women) marriages. The chapter argues that Shaw engages with the ancient Irish Óisín myth in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, which in turn points squarely to the Irish question. The use of the tactical device of language and the part it plays in defining identity in Pygmalion reflected not only the ongoing debate within nationalist Ireland on Irish language as a symbol of Irishness, but also the very equation of possessive domination or independent equality. Both, arguably, were inherently and unquestionably crucial to Ireland from 1909 to the 1916 Rising, and beyond. These two plays reflect and reveal much of the then pressing debates on Ireland, which were linked to Shaw’s continued advocacy for women’s rights, at the expense of archaic marriage laws and colonial practices. Before exploring the aforementioned examples from Shaw’s dramatic canon, a word is needed on this book’s methodology. The arguments presented are organised through a text-first approach, allowing for Shaw’s plays, and the issues they engage with, to fully speak. The following discussions and analyses will demonstrate Shaw’s early and complex engagement with the feminine in terms of subjugation, disenfranchisement, defiance, and rebellion in ways that intricately expand beyond the scope of the much debated interpersonal social issues on equality. This analysis will also establish how Shaw’s engagement with national issues in terms of the Irish/British relationship can, at times, parallel the complexities of

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woman-imaging, making the issues of marriage, union, and nation central to Shaw’s dramatic practice. In fact, this study demonstrates that Shaw’s focus on the marriage question became a tool with which he interrogated the Irish question, for both Ireland and Britain.

Notes 1. Nicholas Grene, “Shaw and the Irish Theatre: An Unacknowledged Presence” Shaw and the Last Hundred Years, Vol 14, ed Bernard Dukore (USA: Pennsylvania State University Press 1994) pp 153–165 p. 164. 2. There have been some non-Irish scholars who have recently focused work on Shaw and his working relationship to Ireland. 3. Sally Mitchel, Daily Life in Victorian England (USA: Greenwood Publishing Group 1996) p. 104. 4. H.E. Harvey, “The Voice of Woman” A New Woman Reader ed Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Canada: Broadview Press 2001) pp 207–210 p. 209. 5. The Act of Union 1800 was introduced by William Pitt, the prime minister to abolish the Irish Parliament and create the united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act was instigated in response to the failed rebellion of 1798 which brought the Irish question to the fore; a question that the British Government wanted put paid to forever. 6. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork: Cork University Press 2001) p. 28/29. 7. Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “Introduction” A New Woman Reader p. x. 8. Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “Introduction” In A New Woman Reader. Ed Carolyn Christensen Nelson, (Canada: Broadview Press 2001) p. x. 9. Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “Introduction” A New Woman Reader p. x. 10. Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “Introduction” A New Woman Reader p. x. 11. Mona Caird, “Marriage” In A New Woman Reader. Ed Carolyn Christensen Nelson, (Canada: Broadview Press 2001 A New Woman Reader p. 188. 12. Mona Caird, “Marriage” A New Woman Reader p. 188. 13. Mona Caird, “Marriage” A New Woman Reader p. 199. 14. Mona Caird, “Marriage” A New Woman Reader p. 199. 15. Gertrude Atherton, “Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s Self Development?” In A New Woman Reader. Ed Carolyn Christensen Nelson, (Canada: Broadview Press 2001) p. 202. 16. Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “The Marriage Question” A New Woman Reader p. 184. 17. Emeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914) p. 364.

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18. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (Great Britain: Vintage 1996) p. 24. 19. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture p. 7. 20. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing 2003) p. 24. 21. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 37. 22. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 38. 23. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation p. 21. 24. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 103. 25. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 103. 26. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 110. 27. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 p. 112. 28. Stephen Lee, Aspects of British Political History 1815–1914 (London: Routledge, 2002) p. 300. 29. Alan J. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition: Responsible Government and Modern Ireland (Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1994) p. 64. 30. Stephen Lee, Aspects of British Political History 1815–1914 p. 301. 31. P.J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press 2003) p. 8. 32. In truth, at the time, it was a long way from a national theatre, using mainly English actors and only one weekend of performances in 1899,1900, and 1901. 33. P.J.  Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, The Gaelic League and The Co-operative Movement p. 22. 34. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama 1899–1949 (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008) p. 119 35. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama 1899–1949 p. 118. 36. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence on Stage (New York: Peter Lang 2010) p. 46. 37. Riders to the Sea (1904) by J.M. Synge also portrayed a “Mother Ireland” trope but of course it was not a romanticised version. Rather than calling for her sons to die for her, Synge’s Maurya epitomises the experience of many Irish peasant mothers, whose reality was one of profound loss and suffering. 38. Melissa Fegan, ‘Isn’t it your own country?’ The Stranger in Nineteenth-­ Century Irish Literature in The Yearbook of English Studies Vol 34, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing (2004) pp 31–45 p. 38. 39. Melisa Fegan, ‘Isn’t it your own country?’: The Stranger in Nineteenth-­ Century Irish Literature p. 34.

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40. Melissa Fegan, ‘Isn’t it your own country?’ The Stranger in Nineteenth-­ Century Irish Literature p. 33. 41. Melissa Fegan, ‘Isn’t it your own country?’ The Stranger in NineteenthCentury Irish Literature p. 45. 42. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: From Boucicault to Friel (USA New York: Cambridge University Press 1999) p. 53. 43. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: From Boucicault to Friel p. 52. 44. Stephen Lee, Aspects of British Political History 1815–1914 p. 305. 45. Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties p. 112. 46. Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties p. 113. 47. The play was consciously and purposely reprinted in 1912 to coincide with the Home Rule Act, at Shaw’s request. The edition was an inexpensive paper edition that sold for six pence. Shaw wanted it to reach as many Irish as possible, regardless of class. Shaw also revised the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island following the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. This demonstrates his acute engagement and awareness of Ireland.

CHAPTER 2

The Opposing Strata of Feminism: Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession

Peter Gahan argues that Shaw’s first three plays all raised hitherto unmentionable sexual problems, female sadism in Widowers’ Houses (1892), open sexuality outside marriage in The Philanderer (1894), and incest and prostitution in Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893).1 While this statement is undoubtedly true, there are infinitely more layers in each of these that deal with broader social and economic issues affecting women in particular. Two of the three plays discussed in this chapter, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, deal with notions of female respectability, property, and ownership through the contract of marriage. Blanche Sartorius’s pending marriage to Harry Trench in the former play is tied essentially to money, property, and ownership, though Shaw does give his female character a part in the decision-making for her future. Mrs Warren, in the eponymous play, uses the married title of “Mrs” to lend respectability to her social position even though her choice of business as a brothel owner is less than salubrious. Despite rejecting marriage for herself, she expects her daughter Vivie to follow the conventional marriage route accepted in polite society, again raising notions of property, social standing, and ownership. Shaw’s female characters in these two early plays were reflective of the changing nature of society at the fin de siècle. Shrewd, strong, and articulate for the most part. Blanche Sartorius and Mrs Warren and her daughter Vivie also share a common background of particular significance: they © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2_2

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come from “new money”, not the aristocracy where women were educated to be wives, mothers, and hostesses for their husbands. The notion of “new money” works to demonstrate greater female engagement in the public sphere of the male characters. Blanche Sartorius becomes interested and involved in the business world of her father and, her fiancé, Harry Trench. Mrs Warren is a self-made, wealthy woman who makes her money from prostitution and her daughter, Vivie, takes up a profession that was male dominated. It is apparent that there was a shift away from that patriarchal mindset by Shaw, among others, in keeping with the zeitgeist of the twentieth century. Sally Peters argues that “his [Shaw’s] heroines variously overturn custom, care not a whit for propriety, pretend to be docile and submissive while joyously insisting on their status as fully fledged human beings”.2 Peters’ analysis is especially succinct in the case of Blanche Sartorius. As Shaw’s first female protagonist, Blanche is most likely the darkest of all Shavian women; indeed, as Michael Holroyd recalls, her predatory character and terrifying temper prompted Oscar Wilde to congratulate Shaw on her creation.3 For those very reasons, Blanche Sartorius did nothing for the reputation of women in the late nineteenth century. However, the dominating force of her character and her central position in the play moved the female character centre stage in a more assertive role than had previously been dramatized. Blanche Sartorius challenges the notion of the idealised woman. Mark Fortier maintains that “patriarchal cultural visions often reduce women to stereotypes, virgin, whore, Madonna, [and] bitch”.4 These versions were even further stereotyped by socio-cultural circumstances through the Victorian period as many scholars have illustrated. How a female was portrayed often depended on her social standing: the “whore”, for example, was often associated with a lower socio-economic class, whereas the “virgin/Madonna” character was aligned with higher social classes, especially when it came to literary and dramatic works from the Victorian era. A quote from Manners Makyth Man sums up the role of the “ideal woman” whose “first business is to be happy—a sunbeam in the house, making others happy”.5 This was the superimposed ideal for all women but especially those in the middle and upper classes.6 The expectation of femininity in the lower classes was never really a case for discussion, as is apparent with both the maid in Widowers’ Houses and the unseen female “employees” in Mrs Warren’s Profession. The general consensus was that those in the lower classes were there to serve, and as such did not warrant much consideration. As Fortier argues, “[…] the theory of materialist feminism sees the feminine as constructed

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alongside other forces such as class or race, thereby demonstrating that women do not constitute one homogenous group but are often at odds with each other: poor, black against rich, white”, with variations of this model across cultures, societies, and histories.7 Similarly, Sue-Ellen Case maintains that “[…] the definitive role that class plays in social organisation means there are crucial differences between upper-middle class women and working class women. Not only are not all women not sisters but women in the privileged class actually oppress women in the working class”.8 Shaw’s middle class attitude is very much in line with what Case suggests. He exposes the fallacy of all women being sisters as can be seen in the violent scene between Blanche Sartorius and her maid. Blanche’s brutal treatment of the maid is reflective of the differences that both Fortier and Case discuss. This notion of opposing feminisms is continued when Mrs Warren takes a patriarchal stance on her daughter Vivie’s future.

2.1   The Widower’s Daughter, Her Maid, and The Countess Widowers’ Houses is Shaw’s first play and was staged in 1892, though it had been a work in progress for some nine years previously. Shaw had collaborated with William Archer on Archer’s idea for a plot. When Shaw had used up the plot, originally titled Rhinegold, while writing the first act and being some way into the second, he requested more help from Archer. Archer stated in an article of 14 December 1892 in The World that “[…] he [Shaw] simply gave me an outline in narrative of what he had done; I saw that far from using up my plot, he had not even touched it. There the matter rested for months and years”.9 Shaw states that he only found the play years later when going through some old papers and was “so tickled by it that he had to sit down and finish it at once”.10 Shaw claimed that it was a play that could have only been written by a social economist.11 This somewhat ironic statement has its grounding in Shaw’s first paid employment in Dublin, when he worked as a clerk for Uniacke Townshend’s Land Agency company. A.  M. Gibbs argues that Shaw’s “[…] critical thoughts about private land ownership crystallised after his arrival in London, stimulated by his contact with Marxist and other Socialist thought, such as that of Henry George and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (whose dictum “Property … is theft” is frequently quoted by Shaw)”.12 The ostensible subject of the play is, of course, socio-economic based on

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the owning and renting of properties to impoverished tenants. The dramatic focus of this subject, however, is presented through Blanche Sartorius’s portrayal and the topic of her impending marriage to Harry Trench. When Shaw began writing the play in 1883, the Married Woman’s Property Act (1882) had just come into being. Part of the basis for the Marriage Act is very relevant to the debate of ownership and liability in the play, specifically as the impediment to the marriage of Blanche and Trench is related directly to property ownership. One of the purposes of the Act was to ensure that “Married women [were] to be capable of holding property and of contracting as a feme sole [sic]” (Married Woman’s Property Act 1882 [Ch. 75]). Blanche Sartorius’s financial position is stronger than that of Harry Trench, though that does not guarantee her an equal role in the forthcoming marriage. The basis of most non-working-class marriages in the nineteenth century were for financial gain and social position, though it was always the man who, true to form, remained the dominant partner. Shaw turns that notion on its head. The financial end of the bargain often served to boost flagging estates where the “old inherited money”, prior to the industrial revolution, had been taken for granted without much provision for future investment. This societal trend of a father’s money purchasing an enhanced social position for his daughter through a suitable match, is reflected in the play through Sartorius’s efforts to buy into Trench’s aristocratic lineage to gain respectability for both his daughter and himself. Widowers’ Houses opens with two of the main characters, Dr Harry Trench and William de Burgh Cokane, in “the garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine”.13 (CPP IV: 495) Trench is presented as an impoverished medical student, albeit from a noble background. His aunt, Lady Roxdale, is a liminal figure on whom some of the drama hinges. Cokane is described as much older, “…probably over 40, possibly 50: an ill-­ nourished scanty-haired gentleman with affected manners”. (CPP IV: 495) There is no mention of Cokane’s occupation, thereby generating notions of idleness and entitlement. They are soon joined by Sartorius and his daughter, Blanche. Blanche appears innocuous at first, but Shaw marked her character from her entrance onto the stage with her father in the first act. Shaw describes Sartorius as having “incisive domineering utterance, and imposing style”, being “formidable to servants” and “not easily accessible to anyone” (CPP IV: 497) Shaw states that Blanche is “her father’s daughter”. (CPP IV: 497) In actual fact, as her character develops throughout the play it becomes obvious that she is tougher, and has a more callous

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personality than her father. Shaw confesses in Prefaces that he “jilted the ideal lady for a real one”; that he “did it intentionally; and he will probably do it again and yet again, even at the risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter ideals”.14 Whilst appearing genial in her dialogue when she is first introduced, Blanche’s true nature becomes apparent early on in Act I when her father insists she join the group on a short sightseeing expedition to “the Apollinaris Church”. (CPP IV: 501) At the suggestion Blanche’s demeanour becomes “petulant” and her face assumes a “grimace”. (CPP IV: 501) Until this point the dialogue has been polite, introductory, and, ultimately, misleading. A false sense of security has been created and an audience may be lured into believing that they are experiencing the staging of a typical, moneyed Victorian holiday. In fact, the audience are part of a liminal social space which embraces the conventions of the wealthy Victorians abroad, and demonstrates how their social attitudes in their home parlours travel with them to their holiday destinations. It has the effect of making everything that is not English foreign, even though it is they, the English holidaymakers, who are foreigners. Blanche’s petulance becomes more divisive as her character develops. The unfolding plot reveals that she and Trench have already secretly met on the cruise and each had designs on the other. The revelation of this underhandedness defines the self-centredness of both characters. However, it becomes obvious that Blanche is the more conniving of the two and is used to getting her own way. Her manner towards Trench is quite threatening; she acts “contemptuously, impatiently and with suppressed resentment” (CPP IV: 502/03). She speaks “sharply” and with “false pathos”. She “turns away moodily” (CPP IV: 502). The effect of her behaviour manifests itself in Trench’s reaction to her when she “bristles instantly, overdoes it and frightens him” (CPP IV: 503). Trench becomes “totally unnerved” which “totally deprives him of the power of speech”, and when he manages to speak, he “stammers” (CPP IV: 503). These descriptions do not paint a very romantic picture; what they do convey is the power struggle between Blanche and Trench, with their impending marriage being symbolic of the collusion of the elite in society to maintain the status quo. Trench’s struggle is in trying to regain the control he has conceded to Blanche through fear. Shaw has firmly established Blanche’s persona by the end of Act I.  She is calculating, manipulative, aggressive, and stubborn. She is designed as Shaw’s challenge to the perception of the Victorian woman as being powerless in her societal role. Shaw cleverly illustrates his point in Act III, when the audience is presented with the helplessness felt

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by Sartorius in regard to his daughter’s behaviour. He realises that if he gives in to her demands, he will be powerless. It is obvious, though, that he lacks the will to fight her, and, in fact, seems to be intimidated by her when he states that he cannot help it; he has had his own way all his life and because she is young, he believes that it is her turn now (CPP IV: 542). In fact from Act I, it is obvious that Blanche is beyond her father’s control—a radically new direction for drama in 1892. The shadowy figure of Lady Roxdale comes into play in the latter part of this act when Trench informs Sartorius that he wants to marry Blanche. Sartorius is very agreeable to the arrangement, with the proviso that he needs a guarantee from Trench’s family, meaning of course Lady Roxdale, that Blanche “be received on equal terms” (CPP IV: 508). Although Lady Roxdale is a liminal figure, Shaw, through an artful tactical device, has afforded her great social power. The acceptance of Sartorius and Blanche into upper-class society hinges on Lady Roxdale’s permission, bypassing the customary patriarchal hierarchy and subverting the perceived norm of the time, where marriage hinged on the father’s permission. Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1894) was to take up the paternal function set out by Shaw’s Lady Roxdale, but unlike Shaw’s character, the presence of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell was a physical one. It is quite possible that Wilde developed her character as a homage to the Shavian construct. He thanked Shaw in a letter in May 1893 “very sincerely for Op 2 of the great Celtic school. I have read it twice with keenest interest”.15 He continued that he “admire[d] the horrible flesh and blood of your creatures, and your preface is a masterpiece—a real masterpiece of trenchant writing and caustic wit and dramatic instinct”.16 Terence Brown states that Lady Bracknell being “without any sentimental compunction of any kind lets us see how money is the key to survival in the upper reaches in English society”.17 Shaw in Widowers’ Houses exposes not only the importance of social mobility for the “new money” class, but the importance of that “new money” to the old order, a theme that continued to resonate in Wilde’s 1894 play. Trench’s dependence on his rental income suggests the diminished prosperity of the upper class. Sartorius asks of Trench: “[…] to write to your relatives explaining your intention and adding what you think is proper as to my daughter’s fitness for the best society. When you can shew me a few letters from the principal members of your family, congratulating you in a fairly cordial way, I shall be satisfied. Can I say more?” (CPP IV: 508). Sartorius is determined to be accepted to an established higher

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societal level. Holroyd maintains that “these negotiations reveal a real money–for-social-position bargain.”18 What is really happening, despite the strength of Blanche’s character, is the notion of ownership and barter, as Sartorius tells Trench that “the matter is not settled” (CPP IV: 508) until this part of the deal has been satisfied. Comedy ensues when Trench enlists the help of Cokane to write the letter, confiding in him that “youre the man that will tell me what to say” (CPP IV: 509). Having been challenged with the task, Cokane seeks to find out more about Sartorius and approaches him directly. Sartorius directs him to write that Trench: Made the acquaintance of a young lady, the daughter of—[he hesitates] Cokane: [writing] ‘acquaintance of a young lady, the daughter of’—yes? Sartorius: ‘of’—you had better say a ‘gentleman’ Cokane: [surprised] of course (CPP IV: 513)

The upshot of this exchange is that Sartorius confides in Cokane as to how he has made his money, which is not something that Sartorius has shared with Trench. Cokane also withholds this information from Trench, demonstrating a weakness in Cokane’s character in that he does not act in his friend’s interest as he keeps both this information and Trench’s own part in it from him. It seems that Cokane accepts the issue of Sartorius’s profits as the practical reality of business. Either way, Cokane’s silence with Trench regarding the money denotes a man who will use information to suit his own needs. This theme of deceit manifests once again in both the actions of Cokane and Sartorius. Perhaps for Shaw, Cokane’s silence or deception is consistent with his Irish namesake de Burgh’s historical deception of Ireland, in favour of English and Anglo would-be imperialists. More to the point, Cokane’s exposition leads to the creation of a situation or dilemma in Act II that exposes Trench’s notions as ultimately hypocritical. Act II begins comically with a courting protocol being observed. The letter with which Trench is to arrive is more important to Sartorius than it is to Blanche as romance appears to be overlaid with economics. Acceptance by Trench’s socially elite family is foremost on Sartorius’s mind, and Blanche’s future hinges on a favourable letter. It is obvious that there will be no way that Sartorius will agree to a marriage between Trench and his daughter if she is not accepted into Trench’s family at the highest level. Lickcheese, who is Sartorius’s bagman or rent collector, described in the stage directions as “a wiry, pertinacious human terrier” (CPP IV: 517),

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arrives in the opening scene. His arrival highlights Sartorius’s callous attitude to his own business as he confronts Lickcheese for spending some of the rent money he collected on repairs to the slums. The tone becomes more serious when the adage about money being the root of all evil comes into play. Shaw hits a sour note in response to this statement from Cokane, when Lickcheese replies, “Yes, sir; and we’d all like to have the tree growing in our garden” (CPP IV: 524). This statement leads into a scenario that eventually brings the wedding plans to a halt, despite the favourable letter received from Lady Roxdale, as Trench takes the high moral ground over how Sartorius earns his money: Lickcheese: Tenement houses, let from week to week by the room or half room; aye, or quarter room. It pays when you know how to work it, sir. Nothing like it. It’s been calculated on the cubic foot of the space, sir, that you can get higher rents letting by the room than you can get for a mansion in Park Lane. Trench: I hope Mr. Sartorius hasnt much of that sort of property, however much it may pay. Lickcheese: He has nothing else, sir […] (CPP IV: 523) Trench’s outrage is ironic, as earlier he had chastised Cokane for being “moral” over the writing of the letter for him to his aunt, Lady Roxdale. This serves to expose Trench as an inept character. But more than Trench’s ineptitude is revealed. He has just listened to a tirade from Lickcheese about how Sartorius had made his money and how people had suffered in the accumulation of that wealth. The crisis comes in the play when it is revealed that he, Trench, is the one who has mortgaged the property to Sartorius and was claiming a seven hundred pound income from the interest on the loan as his own income. When he raises the matter with Sartorius, Sartorius states that “when people are poor you cannot help them” (CPP IV: 534). Shaw, with these lines, alludes to aristocratic apathy toward the lower classes in society, one of his many focuses when he joined the Fabian Society in 1884. In the 1893 preface to the play, Shaw states of Sartorius, “[I]t lies in his indifference to defects in our social system which produce a class of person’s so poor that they are driven by constant physical privation to turn everything they can lay hands on into more fuel and more food”.19 Replying to the information that he is the mortgagee of Sartorius’s property, Trench asks “(dazed)”:

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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 quite right. (CPP IV: 535)

There is nothing sentimental in Widowers’ Houses. Shaw, in the preface to Plays Unpleasant, stated, “I have shewn middle class respectability and younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum, as flies fatten on filth” (CPP III: xxvii). His aim was to stir the social conscience of his era and in doing so, highlight the bargaining power of the marital game where money is traded for status and vice versa. Act II utterly exposes Blanche as a petulant, spoilt, vicious young woman who is determined to have her own way. Sally Peters argues that Shaw’s “bitter satire on slum landlordism scandalised the critics and they especially detested its heroine, the darkly melodramatic Blanche Sartorius, who beats her maid”.20 Shaw is radical in his portrayal of Blanche’s character. Although he had stated that he wanted her to be perceived as “a type”, he pushed the boundaries of his representation to the extreme, perhaps to shock his audience or cause controversy. This approach worked. In his preface to the play, Appendix II, he addresses the letters and articles written against Blanche’s character after the play was first performed. Blanche Sartorius’s treatment of the parlour maid is a good example of the feminist class division that Mark Fortier speaks about. Despite the audience not being witness to the first exchange in the play between Blanche and the maid, they are aware that Blanche has been cruel to her. When the maid reappears having acted on instructions from Sartorius to tell Blanche that he wished to see her, “she is on the verge of tears” (CPP IV: 536). The maid is defined by her position in life and does not even warrant a description in the stage directions. Although Shaw gave her the name “Annie” in 1892 when writing the play, he removed that moniker in its rewriting in 1898.21 Her working-class background condemns her to a life of servility and humiliation. Arguably, a variation of the maid figure reappears as the characters of Feemy in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Eliza in Pygmalion, but with very different outcomes. The parlour maid in the play is at the mercy of her employer in a poverty-­ridden social milieu. Her relationship with Blanche is a mixture of confused emotions. The maid is afraid of her, yet she understands her, and even more incredulously, seems to like her. Shaw’s stage directions inform that “the maid looks at her with abject wounded affection and bodily terror”

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(CPP IV: 537). In the violent scene which so scandalised the 1892 audience, she pleads with Blanche to let her go, anticipating the classic rationalization of physical abusers, “you know youll be sorry: you always are” (CPP IV: 538). The parlour maid is both terrorised and servile, but she is also loyal and Blanche is very aware of this. She tells her father, when he chides her over her show of temper, that she never shows her temper to any of the servants “but [only to] that girl”, and remarks that she is the only one who will stay with them (CPP IV: 538/539). Blanche and the maid, it appears, are engaged in their own political and psychological power struggle, between dominant and submissive, with the latter allowing the dynamic to continue due to her economic plight. The maid has the instilled notion of her own worthlessness from Blanche’s abuse and class but despite that, her feelings for Blanche are borne of loyalty. It is a complicated, yet simple, power struggle that promises only one outcome, and it was not going to favour the maid. Blanche’s dominant position within the house is made very clear in the latter part of this second act. Sartorius, “with his habitual peremptoriness” demands of the maid that she fetch Blanche “tell Miss Blanche that I want her”. (CPP IV: 536) He obviously reacts to the parlour maid whose face falls “expressively”. (CPP IV: 536) Having second thoughts, he rephrases the question to the much softer, “My love to Miss Blanche; and I am alone here and would like to see her for a moment if she is not busy”. (CPP IV: 536) Sartorius realises that he cannot make demands on his daughter; the maid’s expression alerts him to the dangerous territory that he was treading, and it would not be just the maid who would suffer his daughter’s ill-temper. Changing his tone caused the maid to look “relieved”. (CPP IV: 536) The absolute power that Blanche holds within the house and, as a result within the play, manifests itself in the verbal exchange between Sartorius and the parlour maid. The tension building within this scene is further exploited on stage. Blanche creates the same fear in the other characters, especially Trench who comments on how angry Blanche can become. Shaw’s description of the reappearance of the parlour maid after relaying Sartorius’s message to Blanche, stating that she is a “snivelling sympathetic creature” heightens the tension. (CPP IV: 536) The maid serves the plot well as her demeanour informs the audience of Blanche’s mood, and also of Blanche’s control of her father and the household. Sartorius fears that the distressed state of the parlour maid will serve to infuriate Blanche even further, and worse, will alert the guests to the fact that Blanche is the root cause of that terror. However, Blanche is not to be controlled and

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Sartorius’s exit is designed to clear his guests from the room before they witness Blanche in an “intense passion”. (CPP IV: 537) The terror is palpable at this stage in the scene which is arguably the most powerful scene in the play. The drama heightens with Blanche’s brutal physical and verbal attack on the parlour maid “seizing her by the throat and hair” and saying, “Stop that noise, I tell you, unless you want me to kill you”. (CPP IV: 538) The sheer brutality of Blanche’s behaviour was certainly not the accepted temperament of a young Victorian lady. Indeed, her challenge to her father on the subject of her marriage to Trench is most likely as shocking to the audience as her physical assault on the parlour maid. In fact, it probably scandalised them more, for disobedience against a father was not something that was countenanced in patriarchal Victorian times. Sartorius realises that if he gives in to her demands, he will be powerless. It is obvious though that he has not the will to fight her, and moreover, he seems to be intimidated by her. It is evident from Act I that Blanche is outside her father’s control—a radical new direction for 1892. In asking, “May I do as I like about this marriage; or must I do as you like?” (CPP IV: 539), Blanche was not making a polite request. It was a demand; as was demonstrated when she insisted that he must answer her. (CPP IV: 539) Nobody controls Blanche; it is apparent she is her own mistress. The third and final act offers neither a plan for dealing with social injustices brought to light in the first two acts nor any indication that the characters have changed their hypocritical mindsets. Instead, in Act III Shaw creates a back story by changing Lickcheese’s circumstances and raising his financial status in society, thereby changing his demeanour in his dealings with others, especially with Sartorius. Lickcheese expects respect now that he is a man of means. It is a parallel story to that of Sartorius whose beginnings were similar to those of Lickcheese. Shaw has married the lower and middle classes of society through money, by demonstrating that in society money holds the power—a recurring theme throughout much of Shaw’s dramatic canon, as seen with the father, Alfred Doolittle, in Pygmalion. Trench is persuaded to go along with a scheme to improve the tenements in order to gain higher compensation from the local council, when the time comes. He has, without a doubt, stepped off his high horse on the social issue and exposes himself to be as disinterested in dealing with social problems as the rest of them. Nicholas Grene maintains that “Trench’s assimilation into corrupt capitalist world is complete”.22 He could judge from a distance but was completely ineffectual when the problem was in his own space. A subversion of morals rears its head when he says, “So

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we’re to give up the dirt and go in for decency”. (CPP IV: 552) The audience is totally aware at this stage that the only reason the dirt is being given up is so that these men can become even richer than they are. It is not a social conscience that is guiding them, it is pure greed.

2.2  Shaw’s Dublin Contemporary: W.B. Yeats Shaw’s contemporary, friend, and somewhat uneasy adversary, W.B. Yeats, wrote his first play, The Countess Cathleen, also in 1892 (first performed in 1899 as the Irish Literary Theatre’s inaugural performance). His female protagonist could not have been more different from Shaw’s character, Blanche. Cathleen’s character is self-sacrificing though self-serving, and the antithesis to Blanche Sartorius. At the same time, Shaw disagreed with the Yeatsian notion of “nationalism against internationalism”23 when it came to the Irish question and felt it is not so much as one against the other, but rather how they can be made to fit. As early as 1888, in an unsigned letter to the Star, Shaw made his views on the governing of Ireland very clear. He stated that “It is time…for the people of Ireland to declare that they accept advice and counsel in their political concerns from no power on earth not the political leaders they themselves have chosen”.24 There is no doubt that Shaw’s views on Ireland evolved and changed, and as time progressed, it becomes clearer that Shaw saw internationalism as the way forward, certainly for Ireland. The establishment in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre by W.B Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Edward Martyn is testament to the need to enact a new Irishness. P.J. Mathews maintains: “[…] that it represented the first serious attempt by a group of Irish artists to consciously replace English cultural imports with a home-grown alternative”.25 W.B.  Yeats and Lady Gregory, as two of these artists, were part of the Ascendency class,26 in Ireland known as the Anglo-Irish. Because of the perceived instability of their identity, they were regarded as neither Irish in Ireland nor English in England. The new national narrative they were to craft was designed to separate them from the culture of England. Mathews maintains that Lady Gregory “believed that Ireland needed to break free of the identity foisted upon it and create itself anew”.27 Mathews asserts of Lady Gregory’s dream for an “authentic Irish spirit” that she “had another Anglo-Irish hero in mind to build on the work of the IAOS and the Gaelic League—the quintessential Sanchez-Quixote, W.  B. Yeats”.28 The

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Yeats-Gregory-Martyn manifesto for the Irish Literary Theatre, reprinted in Gregory’s Our Irish Theatre, stated ambitiously: We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.29

In particular, Yeats harked after an ancient and idealised past through which he wished to construct a new Irish identity. He was constantly reconstructing an ancient ideal through Celtic myths to suit his vision for the future, whereas Shaw took a more pragmatic approach. Shaw believed that within theatre, and with reference to Ibsen, “that all progress involves the destruction of the old order”.30 Yeats, on the other hand, bemoaned the fact that he “did not discover in his youth that his theatre must be an ancient theatre that could be made by unrolling a carpet, or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against the wall”.31 Harold Fromm argues that for Shaw, Ibsen was the literary counterpart of Wagner, rejecting old forms and subjects.32 Shaw believed that progress lay in Ibsen’s anti-idealist approach to drama, though as Joan Templeton argues, “his (Shaw’s) dramaturgy was all his own”.33 Yeats had an unrequited love for nationalist icon, Maud Gonne, who became the central muse for his female characters, especially those of the “Cathleens”. Yeats used these to create his idealised vision of the formation of a new Ireland. Intriguingly, the Cathleen ni Houlihan archetype was employed in numerous popular Irish melodramas of the nineteenth century, taking its form from English romantic melodramas of the same period. Yeats’s sense of forging a new Irish image based on Ireland’s past mythology perhaps owed much to popular English theatre rather than that of an ancient Ireland. Ironically, the real life Maud Gonne was nothing like the Yeatsian idealised version. She was a passionate, nationalist

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revolutionary who had two children outside of marriage34 and who “advocated the use of physical force as a means of achieving national independence”, but never physically fought for Ireland herself.35 Scandalously for the times, she divorced her husband, the nationalist but abusive John MacBride in 1907 through the French courts.36 Despite the abuse, the divorce significantly harmed Gonne’s popularity in Ireland.37 Notwithstanding the reality of her personality, John Harwood maintains that for Yeats, Maud Gonne did not overpower his imagination; his imagination overpowered “Maud Gonne” and he then began, in life, to enter into “the image he had made”.38 By subsuming his image of Gonne in his imagination, Yeats dominated the feminine in order to reaffirm his masculinity; masculinity that was a sign of power, control, and domination, although this domination was restricted to his creative imagination. Yeats’s domination of Gonne in his writing was due to the fact that she never allowed him to do so physically.39 The pedestal that Yeats erected for Gonne was one on which he placed each of his central iconic female characters, such as the title characters in Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, who both came to signify redemption for Irish nationalism. Yeats adapted this icon and so the concept of the Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan came into being as a means of self-identification for those who felt displaced in the quest for a national Irish identity. Shaw, and indeed J.M Synge, countered Yeats’s efforts to romanticise Ireland by constructing their female characters as representations of real women.40 In creating The Countess Cathleen,41 Yeats has deified her character and elevated her as the saviour of the peasants. P. J. Mathews argues that “The peasantry are not the main focus of The Countess Cathleen and serve merely to provide a context for the benevolence of the heroine—the aristocratic Cathleen”.42 Her persona as a benevolent aristocrat therefore serves to embody the Yeatsian ideal of the Irish ascendency as saviours of an emerging independent Ireland. Cathleen’s superior position is confirmed towards the end of the play when she offers her soul to the demons in exchange for the souls of all the peasants: A Peasant. Do not, do not for souls the like of ours are not precious to God as your soul is. O! What would Heaven do without you, lady?43

In analysing the character of Cathleen, it is obvious that Yeats has presented an Irish version of the Victorian model of the ideal female, by portraying her character as subservient to the wishes of others. In this regard,

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Mary Trotter argues that “Irish women’s assumed helplessness put Irish men in a hypermasculine position from feminised colonised to powerful champion”.44 The Countess Cathleen, dedicated to Maud Gonne, is myth-­ based and suited Yeats’s style of dramatic writing. The heroism of the character Cathleen is surreal. She wants to sacrifice herself for others and she is prepared to give her soul to the devil in exchange for the happiness of the peasants. Using the concept of myth, Yeats seems to be aligning himself to this otherworldly character of Cathleen, by creating a space for himself in an Irish society that needs heroic deeds to save it. Shaw’s character, Blanche Sartorius, is a complete contrast to the Countess, and states that she hates “the poor. At least I hate those dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live like pigs” (CPP IV: 549). Shaw exposes Blanche’s prejudices as hypocritical by presenting the other side of the argument when he has Sartorius state that his mother was poor and that “poverty was not her fault” (CPP IV: 549). Yeats, on the other hand, presents “the peasants”, a term derogatory in itself, as ungrateful and resentful in the face of help being offered from a member of the aristocracy. The truth was that it was the so-called peasantry that suffered during the famine at the hands of the wealthy through eviction and starvation.45 Mary: Shemus: Teigue: Shemus:

Mary:

You never thanked her ladyship. Thank her For seven halfpence and a silver bit? But for this empty purse. What’s that for thanks, Or what’s the double of it she promised, With bread and flesh and every sort of food Up to a price no man has ever heard the like of And rising every day? We have all she had; she emptied her purse before our eyes.46

There is no argument with the fact the language of the Yeats’s play is skilfully poetic, however, his treatment of the characters within the play falls far short of the realist drama being practised on the wider European stage. Yeats’s style of drama was designed to separate Ireland from the rest of the world, to internalise a vision, a myth which Yeats perpetrated in order to reaffirm his own identity, though he did want English critical acclaim for his work. He wrote in a letter to Lady Gregory in 1920 that “the book (Autobiographies) was no longer a mere autobiography, but a political and literary testament … intended to give philosophy to the movement … it is nationalism against internationalism, the rooted against the rootless

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people”.47 Shaw’s views differed in that his vision for Ireland was an international one as discussed previously. Yeats “as an internal stranger”48 was creating a space for Irish Protestantism through his dramatic form. His drama, for this reason, depended on segregation from any other culture or trend. Joep Leerssen argues that “Indeed, Yeats’s drama is highly undramatic. A story unfolds and winds its course, often in a fatalistic, preordained way; the characters play their parts in a sequence of events which are unsurprising because they are often mythical, inevitable or fatal”.49 Not only is the character of Cathleen an idealised female model, her behaviour is not typical of how most of the aristocratic classes treated the poor during the famine years.50 Yeats’s play illustrates how singularly distant Cathleen is from those around her. Her dialogue operates almost as a monologue, and her interaction with other characters is minimal. In the opening act, for example, Cathleen’s tone is general as she addresses the company rather than Mary, who attempts to directly engage in conversation: Mary: Then you are the Countess Cathleen? Cathleen: And this woman, Oona, my nurse should have remembered it, for we were happy for a long time here.51 This brief exchange demonstrates the wide gap in social circumstances between Cathleen, Mary and Oona. Cathleen’s tone is superior. She does not acknowledge Mary’s question and in fact, chooses to ignore it. Yeats, in stage directions at the opening of the act, had described Oona as Cathleen’s “foster mother”.52 Cathleen is now referring to her as “my nurse”, thereby relegating her from role of “mother” and withdrawing into what Leerssen described of Yeats, “a haughty class bound elitism”.53 The portrayal of the peasant woman, Mary, is one of complete subservience and she is in awe of Cathleen. She alluded to her forefathers as “my old fathers” but did not use a descriptor when speaking about Cathleen’s “fathers”.54 Cathleen takes no responsibility for the fact that her group are lost and cannot find the way to her childhood home. In stating that Oona should have remembered the way, she places herself in a situation where others are responsible for her well-being. This is paradoxical to the way the play develops where she is the one offering her soul in return for the souls of all the peasants. Yeats is implying that her worth is greater; therefore her sacrifice matches that worth and she should not be worrying about

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mundane matters, such as how to find her way. In short, the gulf between the two classes portrayed is too wide to have effect. For this reason, the play fails to reach a dramatic intensity, lacking any charged emotion that would create a dramatic power to engage the audience emotionally. Grene quotes Shaw as stating that “he [Shaw] created nothing; he invented nothing; he imagined nothing; he simply discovered drama in real life”.55 An audience could relate to the impassioned emotion that Blanche displays, whether they liked her character or not. They would not have met many Countess Cathleens; such otherworldliness is not a factor of human behaviour. Blanche’s ill-treatment of the maid, though not approved of, was also a behavioural trait that many would have been familiar with. Shaw stated that “Some people think that ladies with tempers are never personally violent. I happen to know they are”.56 Although Blanche’s temper tantrum terrified the maid, the discourse conducted was not one sided; the parlour maid attempted to hold her own ground and make Blanche see reason: “you know youll be sorry: you always are. Remember how dreadfully my head was cut the last time” (CCPIV 538). It is natural for one person to defend themselves against another no matter what the other person’s privilege is considered to be. Mary’s complete servility towards the Countess is not a natural state, especially in the face of death. Shaw knew the instinct for survival is the strongest instinct and used it to validate his drama as something that would give the audience something to chew on. As Grene correctly maintains, “What Shaw rightly detected in Ibsen, and was most crucial for him, was a radical belief in artistic truth telling that went far beyond any party political platform”.57 Shaw believed that “Ibsen was the realist who had enabled theatre to escape from the vapid and meaningless ideals that had dominated it for so long”.58 The “vapid ideals” that Shaw sought to negate were those that would not create a difference in an audience, no matter how short lived that difference was to be. It was a model he followed and one that worked extremely well with his subject matter, both ostensible and subliminal. Blanche Sartorius signifies the emergence of the “new woman” and though Shaw has not painted her in a very flattering light, her character is central to the dramatic impetus that moves the female centre stage. Moving her centre stage also demonstrates woman’s role in the perpetration and consolidation of patriarchy. It is not so much about the new woman as rebel dramaturgically, but more how her given class allegiances place her in opposition to her fellow sisters. Her treatment of the parlour maid is indicative of the unequal status of the feminine in society, and it

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centralises one of the core challenges of feminism which demonstrates the imbalance of the feminist approach. That is, through Blanche Shaw pushed the notion of the Ibsenite real woman to another level. The merits of this tactical device could be described as twofold: firstly, whether her character is loved or hated, she will not be forgotten. This serves Shaw’s need to be recognised as a dramatist. Shaw said of the original two nights performances of the play that: The first [performance] provoked a sensational mixture of applause and hooting, which I countered successfully in a speech before the curtain. A unanimously favourable reception of the second was followed by a press discussion of the play that lasted a fortnight. I was denounced as a pamphleteer void of dramatic faculty; but all the stage effects I had planned came off perfectly; and this convinced me that I was a born master of the theatre.59

Shaw through this first play achieved publicity, derisive though it appeared to be, that ensured that his name would be recognised on a theatrical platform. Secondly, for Shavian drama, the extremity of Blanche’s character cracked the idealistic mode of female characters making way for a newer presentment in dramatic thinking and performance. Blanche’s character is daring and crosses the private sphere of the feminine into the public sphere of the male using the age-old barter system of marriage but in this instance, it is through her own manoeuvring that the bargaining begins. Her father’s reaction demonstrates the eagerness of the rising working class to be afforded the opportunity for upward social mobility. This desire for upward social mobility manifests again in the play through the character of Lickcheese whose change in circumstances shadows Sartorius’s earlier undocumented rise through the social ranks. Trench’s affronted morality, in light of the revelations on Sartorius’s business, demonstrates the myopia with which the upper classes view commerce and perhaps goes some way to explaining the decline in the financial fortunes of that class. They want money but they do not wish to be informed of where it comes from; thereby possessing a pretentious and artificial conscience as it were. Perhaps most importantly, Yeats and Shaw construed social class and the possibility of upward mobility very differently. Yeats’ elitist approach constrained his ability to recognise any rise in fortune of the subaltern classes as the result of these classes’ efforts or self-determination; their redemption or success could only originate in the benevolence of the Ascendency. This blinkered view reflected both Yeats’s need for validation

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and that of a displaced Ascendency class. Shaw, on the other hand, as a realist had no compunction in facing up to what he considered the realities of a situation. The difference in thinking between the two playwrights was to prove very influential in the manner that Shaw approached the “Irish question”, and in tracing the small intricacies in his growing body of work it is not difficult to find the undertones of Shaw’s Irish allusions, such as giving Cokane the full moniker of William de Burgh Cokane. Shaw’s first play engaged in a head-on battle with the woman question through the character of Blanche Sartorius, and in using the notion of woman as an economic commodity through marriage, ownership, wealth, and property and also by subverting the previously imposed female silence into the bargain, Shaw opened up a dialogue that becomes a trope throughout his work. Ultimately, in 1892 Shaw presented Blanche as a real person. Ten years later, in Dublin, Yeats presented Cathleen ni Houlihan as anything but a real person; she was a constructed male fantasy—on numerous levels. In examining the presentation of the character of Blanche Sartorius, it is obvious not only how contentious the “woman question” was in the 1890s but how Shaw utilised her character to demonstrate preconceived notions around marriage, property, and ownership. The irony in creating what seemed to be “a happy ending” confirmed the traditional ideas of the marriage union for the middle classes. Even though Trench states, “that he won’t have relations between Miss Sartorius and himself made part of the bargain”, the crux of the matter is that this is exactly what happened (CPP IV: 555). Paradoxically, social standing was purchased with “new money” through marriage to Blanche, who became the complicit trade-­ off between both criteria. These themes present themselves in the second Shaw play to be examined in this chapter, Mrs Warren’s Profession. However, in this play, the wealth, property, and ownership are attributed to the eponymous character Mrs Warren, coupled with the double standards she applies in relation to her daughter, Vivie.

2.3   The Prostitute’s Daughter, Her Mother, and Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts The international influence of the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, appealed to Shavian sensibilities. As Toril Moi points out: “In some ways Ibsen’s cultural and social position is close to that of the great Irish writers emerging towards the end of the nineteenth century. It may be no

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coincidence that George Bernard Shaw […] responded so spontaneously and strongly to Ibsen”.60 In agreement with this, Michael Meyers correctly maintains that Ibsen first broke down social barriers which previously bound theatre; that Ibsen’s second contribution was technical; and that, third, “the depth and subtlety of his understanding of the human character (especially the female character) and, which is rarer, of human relationships” were extraordinary.61 William Archer, in a letter dated 25–28 July (1887), described “Ibsen as essentially a kindred spirit of Shaw—a paradoxist, a sort of Devil’s Advocate who goes around picking holes in every ‘well known fact’”.62 There is little doubt that this is true of Shaw who interrogated what were deemed societal norms, not only through his dramatic writings, but also through the vast bulk of his journalism and correspondence. Ibsen’s concept of the unwomanly woman, and the villain as an idealist, appealed to Shaw’s own perception of society, and it was a trope he adopted in his own dramatic work. Shaw’s book The Quintessence of Ibsenism, first written in 1891 (republished 1913, 1922), delves into the notions of idealism as exposed by Ibsen.63 Meyers, however, sardonically maintains in his biography on Ibsen that it “should have been called The Quintessence of Shavianism”, but does, however, concede that “Shaw’s first book was to perform a great service for Ibsen in drawing attention to his [Ibsen’s] work”.64 It also served to ground Shaw’s dramatic thinking and writing in a tangible form. Shaw’s book on Ibsen engaged with the fundamental social and psychological issues raised in Ibsen’s work, those of mistaken ideals and mistaken perceptions, in particular those ideals and perceptions relating to gender. Joan Templeton, on the 1913 edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, argues that “Shaw was anticipating what cultural historians would later identify as modernism’s essential feature: its thoroughgoing revolt against the prevailing order”.65 Shaw states that “it is not surprising that our society, being directly dominated by men, comes to regard Woman not as an end in herself, like Man, but solely as a means to of ministering to his appetite”.66 He attributes this to man’s search for the ideal, an ideal that will strengthen the patriarchal position. He applauds Ibsen’s technique in bringing everyday human and social problems to the stage and by introducing discussion which Shaw described as “[…] a new technical feature: this addition of a new movement […] to the dramatic form, that A Doll’s House conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art”.67 It was a feature that Shaw invested heavily in his own work, in line with his, earlier discussed, use of the gender tropes employed in

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Ibsen’s work. In the preface to the third edition (1922), Shaw presents a list of societal ideals—Liberal, Feudal, National, Dynastic, Republican, Church, State and Class—as being “[…] all heaped up into a gigantic pile of spiritual high explosive, and then shovelled daily into every house with the morning milk by the newspapers, needed only a bomb thrown at Sarajevo [sic] by a handful of regicide idealists to blow the centre out of Europe”.68 It was Shaw’s contention that had the gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded the twenty million killed in WWI would still have been alive”.69 Shaw viewed himself as a realist and had no time for what he termed as “the masks” worn by those who were afraid to face reality. He stated that: “[…] a realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be free in the world of the living and the free, seeking only to conform to the ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but ‘a good man,’ then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that should by good luck arrive before his bodily death”.70 His assertion was that the only real truth was the one that was faced up to. This train of thought is reflected in his drama as he was extremely willing to let the full force of the Shavian pen be enacted on the stage. Templeton suggests that “For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s ‘new drama’ was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage”.71 Like Ibsen’s plays, Shaw’s dramatic work explores societal incongruities through a gendered lens. The words spoken by Fanny O’Dowda (in possession of an Irish name) in the prologue to Fanny’s First Play (1911), “I had to write or I should have burst. I couldn’t help it” thus belonged not only to her but also to Shaw himself (CPP VI: 89). Gibbs argues that what Ibsen presented to Shaw was the possibility of a type of drama that engaged seriously and imaginatively with moral and philosophical issues in a way that was sharply contrasted by the majority of theatre offerings in the nineteenth century.72 Ibsen wrote Ghosts (1881, staged 1882) in the same year the Married Woman’s Property Act was passed in England and some ten years prior to Shaw’s writing of Mrs Warren’s Profession. This, Shaw’s third play, was completed in November 1894. Shaw stated that it was written “To draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together” (CPP III: 3). It was banned by E. Smyth Piggott, the Lord Chamberlain’s Licenser of Stage Plays and whom Shaw

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referred to as “a walking compendium of vulgar insular prejudice”.73 He maintains that the censor banned it on the grounds that it was “immoral and otherwise improper for the stage”.74 In a letter of May 1897 to his Dublin friend, Matthew Edward McNulty, Shaw spoke about circumventing the censor by staging an impromptu performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession in Dublin, which was outside the censor’s remit, in order to copyright the play.75 It was to be the beginning of a lifelong battle with the censor. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel mused that Shaw, “in Shavian jest may have borrowed the play’s main surname from Sir Charles Warren”.76 Warren was the Chief Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police in 1888 at the time of the notorious Ripper murders in Whitechapel in London and, as history has played out, failed to apprehend the murderer. Two other plays were dealt with in a similar manner. Press Cuttings, written in 1909, was banned on the grounds that it alluded to “personalities expressed or understood”,77 namely those of Arthur Balfour, who had been the Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, and Herbert Asquith, who was the serving Liberal Prime Minister at the time of writing Press Cuttings. The other play to be banned, also in 1909, was The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (discussed in a later chapter) on the grounds that it was blasphemous. Shaw, however, circumvented the censor cleverly on that occasion by offering it to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where the British censor had no jurisdiction. Mrs Warren’s Profession was first published in 1898, though Shaw had to make extensive cuts in order to obtain a licence for the play.78 It was finally staged privately in 1902 by the Stage Society, technically by private performance, at the New Lyric Club which, according to Shaw, “rather courted a pleasantly scandalous reputation” (CPP III: 4). Because it was a private performance, Lord Chamberlain had no influence over its staging. Shaw in his preface to the play amusingly apologised: “To those who went to see a recent performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession expecting to find in it what I have just called an aphrodisiac. That is not my fault: it was the Examiner’s” (CPP III: 17). Shaw also stated in the play’s preface that “no normal woman would be a professional prostitute if she could better herself by being respectable nor marry for money if she could marry for love” (CPP III: 3). While the play’s main subject is prostitution, as with Widowers’ Houses, it is again the subplot which is just as important, if not more so, than the main plot. This subplot manifests itself through the development of the character of Vivie Warren, Kitty Warren’s daughter.79 Through Vivie’s character, Shaw charts the development of an independent-minded woman who appears to make

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many of her own choices, thereby highlighting a way out of the mire that has been created for women in a patriarchal Victorian society. She rejects the life that her mother envisions for her and, in doing so, also rejects marriage as being her only choice. Although Vivie Warren possesses none of the petulance of Blanche Sartorius, she was just as controversial in the early 1890s. Vivie’s relationship with her mother is mainly a distant one and Vivie, in conversation with her mother’s friend Praed, who has come to visit, tells him: […] I hardly know my mother. Since I was a child I have lived in England, at school or college, or with people paid to take charge of me. I have been boarded out all my life. My mother has lived in Brussels or Vienna and never let me go to see her. I only see her when she visits England for a few days. […] don’t imagine I know anything about my mother. I know far less than you do. (CPP III: 39)

Her character is more direct than that of Blanche; her intentions become obvious through dialogue, rather than gesture, and she very quickly makes audiences aware of her mindset. She speaks about the waste of women’s time when it comes to conventional relationships, as she enjoys “a cigar, a little whiskey, and a novel with a good detective story in it” (CPP III: 37). She wants more than anything to earn her own living, “by devilling for Honoria”, a friend of hers who has chambers in Chancery Lane (CPP III: 40). In Vivie, Shaw has created a female with drive and ambition. He said of her that she was “quite an original character”.80 Her handshake is not gentle. Crofts, another friend of Vivie’s mother, notes that “she has a powerful fist” and asks Praed if he had shaken hands with her, to which Praed replies that “yes, it [the pain] will pass off presently” (CPP III: 41). It is clearly not the handshake of a demure Victorian lady, and Shaw is dispelling the myth that firmness and strength are a male prerogative. Kerry Powell states that while Mrs Warren’s Profession “pleased some New Women with its straight forward linkage with prostitution and marriage”, he argues against this, describing Vivie: “as problematic for what was termed as the ‘New Women of the 1890s’ not only because of her manly dress and her predilection for cigars and whiskey but because of her uncritical focus on working and making money in a capitalist and sexist economy”.81 Nonetheless, Shaw’s own view of Vivie was more far-­reaching than the narrower version Powell describes. Shaw claimed that in Vivie, he:

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Put on the stage for the first time […] 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 or babies, making no pretence of caring much about art or romance, respectable through sheer usefulness and strength, and playing the part of the charming woman only as the amusement of her life, not as its serious occupation.82

Shaw’s plan for Vivie, therefore, appears to be one that will add shock value to an already controversial play. What Powell appears to have ignored is that Vivie’s character was very much of her time and in ways, through her, Shaw was paying homage to the New Woman. Kitty Warren, Vivie’s mother, is unconventional: firstly, in her role as mother and secondly, as a mature Victorian female. Gareth Griffith quotes Rebecca West, who wrote in the Freewoman in 1912: “[…] for all Shaw’s audacious discussions, there is not one character in all his eighteen plays who infringes the conventions in practice”.83 Contrasting him with Granville Barker she stated, “Shaw never brought anything so anarchic as an unmarried mother onto his stage”.84 Mrs Warren’s Profession is testament to the whole untruth in that statement. The lifestyle that Shaw assigned to the character of Mrs Warren, whom he describes as “a most deplorable old rip”, demonstrates a completely unconventional lifestyle for a Victorian woman of means.85 As the play progresses, it becomes glaringly obvious that Mrs Warren was never married and that she is a self-­ made woman. She is the unmarried mother that Rebecca West claims never existed in Shaw’s plays. Shaw was also to take up the case of having children without a husband through the character of Lesbia in the 1908 play Getting Married. How Mrs Warren makes her money does not become clear until the second act and even then her “profession” is not described by name. When Vivie questions her about who her father is, Mrs Warren replies that “she can’t tell her” (CPP III: 63). Speaking about Crofts, Vivie asks: How can I feel sure that I have not the contaminated blood of that brutal waster in my veins? Mrs Warren: No no. On my oath it’s not he, nor any of the rest you have ever met. I’m certain of that at least. Vivie’s eyes fasten sternly on her mother as the significance of this flashes on her. (CPP III: 63)

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Grene argues that the gap between Mrs Warren and her daughter is one that Mrs Warren herself has created.86 It is a gap created by the distance, both geographically and emotionally, that Kitty Warren has facilitated. She subverted her role as mother by firstly creating an unconventional (for the time) family unit as a single parent, and secondly, by leaving Vivie to her own devices and never getting familiar with her daughter as someone for whom she should be a responsible parent. The lack of communication between the two women becomes obvious from the first scene, when Praed asks: Has your mother arrived? Vivie: [quickly, evidently sensing aggression] Is she coming? (CPP III: 34)

Kitty Warren has undermined the nurturing matriarchal role by adopting the patriarchal stance of breadwinner and absentee parent. She also harbours an ideal for her daughter, one that she did not entertain for herself; the ideal of wife and mother. When Vivie enquires of her mother if she thinks that they will have much time together, Mrs Warren retorts: [staring at her] Of course; until youre married. (CPP III: 61)

The opposing layers of feminism are at work here, with the diktat of one woman to the other younger one reducing her place in society to the subservient role created by a patriarchal hierarchy. It is clear that Mrs Warren wishes for her daughter the very life she herself strived to avoid. Of course, Mrs Warren avoided marriage when she was Vivie’s age due to the poverty into which she was born. If she managed to escaped the awful factory work, a working class marriage would have condemned her further to a life of drudgery and poverty. She was not prepared to entertain either option. Mrs Warren related to Vivie how she had come to make her choice having watched her younger half-sisters throw away their lives by choosing the so-called respectable route. She asks of Vivie: Well, what did they get for their respectability? I’ll tell you. One of them worked in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a day until she died of lead poisoning. She only expected to get her hands a little paralysed; but she died. The other was always held up to us as a model because she married a government labourer in the Deptford victualing yard, and

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kept his room and the three children on eighteen shillings a week—until he took to the drink. That was worth being respectable for wasnt it. (CPP III: 65/66)

Despite her own unconventional lifestyle, Mrs Warren follows the conventional blinkered thinking of the time. She only recognises two paths for a woman to follow, and both of them involve being subservient to men regardless of class. She denies Vivie the chance for further education, telling her “youre not going back to college again” (CPP III: 61) and stating that: […] the only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man who can afford to be good to her. If she’s in his own station in life, let her make him marry her; but if she’s far beneath him, she cant expect it. (CPP III: 69)

Grene explains, “the working man may have nothing to sell but his labour; the working woman has nothing to sell but herself”.87 Of course, Grene’s explanation is more reasonable than this rather sweeping remark because, in actual fact, the working woman can also sell her labour; it was the difference between men’s and women’s wages that put an unfair pressure on the working woman. To be fair, Grene reasons that what Shaw is in fact doing is “[…] only attacking the level of women’s wages which forces them into prostitution, but he is making the equation between disreputable prostitution and its respectable counterpart in marriage with a similar economic dependence of women on men”.88 In essence, Shaw is creating a dialogue that places women as a medium of economic barter, both within constricts of the law and without. In each case, with both marriage and prostitution, the lack of economic protection for the woman is the same, though the marriage title gives her respectability. Mrs Warren’s mantra for life is created out of the poverty she was born into, and even in creating a wealthy life for herself and Vivie, failed to move on from the age-old standards. The irony of Mrs Warren’s rise in fortune is because of the way she made her money. She has used women whom Ritschel describes as “products of extreme poverty”.89 She is indicative of society’s culpability for the poverty-stricken circumstances of some of its female population. There are striking similarities between Sartorius and Mrs Warren; both have come from poverty-stricken backgrounds raised by their respective mothers. In Sartorius’s case his mother “stood at her washtub thirteen hours a day and thought she was rich when she made

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fifteen shillings a week” (CPP IV: 549). Mrs Warren’s mother “called herself a widow and had a fried-fish shop and kept herself and four daughters out of it” (CPP III: 65). There is also an allusion to Mrs Warren’s mother being unmarried with children, she certainly had children by two different men. Mrs Warren’s decision to follow her elder sister’s trade was prompted by an aversion to experience her mother’s life. Likewise, Sartorius, though it is not clear how he came to finance his property purchases, which hints at a less-than-savoury past, was also determined not to be caught in the poverty trap. The real crux of the driving force for both Mrs Warren and Sartorius is the exploitation of those that are providing their respective incomes, people who are faced with the same desperation that they experienced in their previous lives. However, in describing Mrs Warren’s “profession” as an institution, Shaw maintains that it “is an economic phenomenon, produced by our underpayment and ill-treatment of women who try to earn an honest living” (CPP IV: 377). Sartorius’s capitalist ventures would not be viewed with quite the same immorality as Mrs Warren’s, though the financial motivation is similar. Blanche and Vivie are first generation, or “new money”, and their attitudes reflect it. They both possess confidence and share a blindness to the plight of others. Mrs Warren’s attempt to persuade Vivie to stay with her is suggestive of her approach to persuading women to work in her brothels, a fact that Vivie points out to her when Mrs Warren tries to reason with her: […] and what are you doing here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year. Think it over. Youre shocked, I know. I can enter into your feelings; and I think they do you credit; but trust me, nobody will blame you: you may take my word for that. I know what young girls are; and I know you’ll think better of it when youve turned it over in your mind. Vivie: So that’s how it’s done, is it? You must have said all that to many a woman, mother, to have it so pat. (CPP III: 100)

Vivie has exposed how her mother’s profession is so deeply engrained in her that she cannot differentiate between the language of business and that of her personal life. It is easy to see how a vulnerable young woman, such as the parlour maid in Widowers’ Houses, could be swayed by such a speech if her circumstances were so dire as to drive her to a false utopia. The structure of Mrs Warren’s Profession is similar to that of Widowers’ Houses in that the big recognition scene occurs at the end of Act II and the

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rest of the play shows the characters’ reactions to the new situation.90 Vivie’s frank discussions with her mother about her chosen profession are as revealing of the mother as of the daughter. Vivie’s reaction to her mother’s prostitution was one of practical acceptance. She appreciates what she believes to be her mother’s forthright honesty, and plight to economically survive. Mrs Warren explains her forthrightness: “ask any lady in London society that has daughters; she’ll tell you the same, except I’ll tell you straight and she’ll tell you crooked” (CPP III: 69). Vivie’s respect for her mother increased to the point that she told her, “you’ve completely got the better of me tonight, though I had intended it to be the other way round” (CPP III: 70). Mrs Warren’s too rational acceptance of the situation exacerbates an awareness of the patriarchal economy, where woman is an object to be exchanged. This is ratified by Vivie’s responses to the main revelation. Mrs Warren, on the other hand, has painted a rose-coloured picture of her reasons for choosing the life she did. She had already decreed that Vivie would not return to college, but when backed into a corner having to explain her choices, she twisted the situation to suit her own needs. The penultimate act of the play delivers the crux. Three of the four main male characters are entwined with Mrs Warren and her profession. The fourth male character, Frank the Rector’s son, has romantic inclinations for Vivie which she never seriously considers, telling her mother in Act II that she’ll have to get rid of him, and although she “feels sorry for him he’s not worth it” (CPP III: 61). Croft’s proposal of marriage to Vivie is disturbing when the conversation he had with Praed in Act I is taken into consideration, as to whether he could be Vivie’s father. This signals, obviously, to him having a sexual relationship with Mrs Warren. The outcome of that discussion is suspect and the reasons for disputing his paternity flimsy: Crofts: […] Why for all I know I might be her father Praed: You. Impossible Crofts: [catching him up cunningly] You know for certain that I’m not? Praed: I know nothing about it. I tell you, any more than you. But, really, Crofts—oh no, it’s out of the question. There’s not the least resemblance. Crofts: As to that, there is no resemblance between her and her mother that I can see. […] (CPP III: 43/4)

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What can only be described as a sinister proposal of marriage sets off a dramatic chain of events that will alter the expected course of a happy ending. Angered by her refusal, Crofts reveals that he has been her mother’s business partner all along; what he does not realise is that Vivie is aware of the nature of her mother’s business: Vivie: [rising, almost beside herself] Take care. I know what this business is. Crofts: [starting, with a suppressed oath] Who told you? Vivie: Your partner. My Mother. Crofts: [black with rage] The oldVivie: Just so. (CPP II:I 82/3)

Up to this point Vivie had been willing to accept her mother’s profession, which she thought was in the past. She is incensed with the knowledge that her mother is still actively involved in running brothels throughout Europe. She feels that she has been betrayed as she believed that her mother’s reason for choosing the ignoble profession was because she was destitute. Vivie further argues her case with Crofts, admonishing him for his part in the business: My mother was a very poor woman who had no reasonable choice but to do as she did. You were a rich gentleman; and you did the same for the sake of 35 per cent. You are a pretty common sort of scoundrel, I think. That is my opinion of you. (CPP III: 83)

As the dialogue continues, Vivie begins to come to terms with the fact that her mother is not the victim she had painted herself to be, but is in control of her own life. The problem lies therein with how Mrs Warren perceives Vivie. Her view can be described as patriarchal. She has a vision for Vivie, “an ideal” (CPP III: 39), as Praed terms it, that has nothing to do with what Vivie wants. Vivie has been adamant from the opening of Act I as to the direction she wants to take in her life. Vivie’s dialogue has continually signalled to the fact that she resists the path of marriage. She informed her mother that she would not marry Frank and she resisted her mother’s intentions to marry her off rather than allow her have an education (CPP III: 63). In rejecting marriage, she also rejects her mother’s way of life, thereby opening up the narrow social options afforded to her in polite society. She told Praed:

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I shall set up chambers in the City, and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing. Under cover of that I shall do some law, with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the time. Ive come down here by myself to read law: not for a holiday as my mother imagines. I hate holidays. (CPP III: 37)

The dramatic moment in Act III is further played out when Crofts, incensed at Vivie’s refusal of his marriage proposal, introduces Frank and Vivie to each other as brother and sister. Crofts’ motivation for this revelation is selfish and malicious as he has not had his own way, especially in light of the fact that there is also a doubt as to Vivie’s paternity. This underlying tone of incest creates a new dimension within the play that seems to comment on covert sexual relationships and the pitfalls that surround them. There is also the theme of illegitimacy, and that opens the question of validity of future relationships. Although the obvious target is Mrs Warren for bearing the illegitimate child, the discussion around paternity within the play, firstly between Praed and Crofts in Act I and then between Mrs Warren and Frank’s father, the Rev Samuel Gardner, points to an underbelly of licentious behaviour in what was deemed to be a straitlaced Victorian society. The men, or rather Mrs Warren’s former customers, are as involved in the unsavoury issue of paternity as is Mrs Warren, who does not know who Vivie’s father is. Respectability, for the aristocrat Crofts, and Vicar Garner, is but a sham. However, Crofts’ intimation that Vivie and Frank are half-siblings seems to be just the final push Vivie needed. Marker succinctly states, “[…] when Vivie Warren rushes out of the Rectory garden in disgust, it is not to pursue some ‘tragic’ course of action but rather to get her own life back on track as might be the case in another tradition of writing where it is not the norm for a female to assert herself”.91 In the final act Vivie plays out her dreams, she cuts everyone out of her life who will hold her back, stating that she “does not want a mother and [she] does not want a husband” (CPP III: 103). Vivie, like her mother before her, has rejected the convention of marriage and the ownership it entails. The difference, however, are the choices each woman made. Mrs Warren’s choice came from a drive to break from poverty, Vivie’s from a desire to break free from her mother’s plans for her future and her mother’s brothel-earned money. Shaw dramatizes this evolution in circumstances, and in so doing, gives credence to the fight for female emancipation. Frank realises that Vivie is adamant that there is no future for them and removes himself from the scene, leaving her a note. The next scene with

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her mother is not so pleasant. Vivie admits to being her mother’s daughter when it comes to a work ethic, and making more money than she can spend; but there it ends as she tells her mother: But my work is not your work, and my way is not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: thats all. (CPP III: 102)

Vivie is adamant she will have nothing more to do with her mother. Kitty Warren, with her own version of the truth, has painted herself within this act as a self-serving hypocrite who brings about her own downfall with her daughter by her lies. She becomes, as Gibbs argues, in the final quarrel with her daughter “a wheedling, self-pitying, and emotionally manipulative mother”.92 Faced with Vivie’s resistance to her, Kitty resorts to emotional blackmail, attempting to rouse Vivie’s conscience as a daughter who owes everything to her self-sacrificing mother. Used to getting her own way, Kitty reacts like a spoiled child when Vivie refuses to pander to her tantrums. Vivie has lost all respect for her mother and exposes her hypocrisy, telling Kitty: If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did: but I would not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I’m bidding you goodbye now. I’m right, am I not? (CPP III: 104)

Vivie is distancing herself from the double standards played out by her mother and as the door slams on her mother’s back, Vivie’s expression becomes “one of joyous content” (CPP III: 105). Shaw has freed her from the constraints of a straitlaced Victorian society that sought to create a space for women behind their closed front doors. This space effectively ensured female silence and patriarchal control. The closed door symbolised closing down not only the female mind but also her voice. Nora makes a similar choice in John Bull’s Other Island (under discussion Chap. 4) when she chooses a life with Broadbent rather than continuing to live in Rosscullen thereby also freeing herself from societal constraints. Mark Fortier argues that “feminism works towards the unravelling and overthrowing of patriarchy”.93 While Fortier’s argument holds true, there is a

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deeper issue here. Mrs Warren has internalised the values of patriarchy, and has a false sense of her own freedom as well as a false sense of her own agency. The dialectic is that she has been coerced within a patriarchal order to supply sexual services for men that are delivered by working class women, thereby providing a financially better life for herself and Vivie, not just at the expense of other women but of Vivie as well. In choosing the outside path to the socially acceptable marriage contract, the profession of her character opens up the question of illegitimacy and possible incest. In creating multiple possibilities for the role of Vivie’s father within the play, Shaw has posed the question on the sanctity, or not, of marriage, perhaps reducing it to an economic role in line with the thinking of the time. In some regards, Kitty Warren is the alter ego to Ibsen’s Hélène Alving in Ghosts. Hélène Alving lived society’s ideal of a respectable woman, married to a man considered a pillar of society. However, as with Kitty Warren, it becomes apparent that the ideal does not live up to its name, and by the end of the play, Ibsen has completely subverted this notion. Drawing comparisons with the relationship between the Reverend Samuel Gardner and Mrs Warren, and the relationship between Pastor Manders and Mrs Alving, both sets of characters embody what Shaw described as “the conflict between naturalists and idealists”.94 Both the Reverend Samuel Gardener in Mrs Warren’s Profession and Pastor Manders in Ghosts serve the purpose of lifting the proverbial lid on the status of women across the social classes in the nineteenth century. They both not only exemplify the patriarchal attitude of their era, but also the hypocrisy that manifests itself within that mindset. Kitty Warren summed up the situation of women quite succinctly when she asked: What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and 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. (CPP III: 68)

Grene argues that Shaw equates disreputable prostitution and its respectable counterpart in marriage with a similar economic dependence of women on men.95 It was a theme Shaw had warmed to when he first saw the production of Ghosts in London in 1891.96 After viewing the revived 1897 production in the Strand theatre in London, which happened to coincide with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Shaw made what Meyers termed as an irreverent comparison between Mrs Alving and Queen

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Victoria. Shaw thought it would be very amusing if Victoria could be persuaded to provide a list of the lies that a woman must believe, or pretend to believe, before she could be a young lady in polite society.97 The double standards taking place in that “polite society” are highlighted in Ghosts, which obviously gave Shaw food for thought in the writing of Mrs Warren’s Profession. Pastor Mander’s conversation with Mrs Alving on the reasons for Engstrad’s hasty marriage to Regina, the housemaid’s mother was very telling on the attitudes of the time. Regina’s mother had been taken advantage of by Mrs Alving’s husband, the Chamberlain, and had been given hush money to leave the house in order to avoid embarrassment to the family. Engstrad had married her and claimed the child as his own, leading the Pastor to believe that this was the truth. What shocked the Pastor was not the unplanned pregnancy but the fact that Engstrad had lied about the paternity of the child and that money had changed hands in order to deal with the situation. When Mrs Alving highlighted the fact that she too had married for money, the notion was dismissed by Manders as an altogether different affair. It was expected that a woman would marry, if she could, for money and that marriage would take place at her parents’ behest. Her role then was one of obedience and subservience as Pastor Manders stated, “it was not a wife’s place to judge her husband.”98 Like Mrs Warren’s Profession, Ghosts also “aroused a consternation and hostility beyond anything Ibsen had envisaged.”99 It refers unmistakably, as Meyers notes, to venereal disease, defended free love and suggested that under certain circumstances even incest might be acceptable.100 Mrs Warren’s Profession went one step further than that; it offered brothel management as an escape from a life of drudgery and poverty. If Mrs Warren is the alter ego of Mrs Alving, then Vivie corresponds as Regina’s alter ego. The similarity in the two younger protagonist’s characters, Vivie and Regina, is their determination to live their lives in their own way or at the very least to have some level of agency. They also both have in common the dubious position of illegitimacy. They are both outspoken and forthright in their dealings with others. Vivie, as discussed, is very sure about the path her life is going to take. Regina, like Vivie knows that she has to take control over her own future and she is not afraid of the choices she has to make. It seems hypocritical of Mrs Alving to show concern for Regina’s welfare when a few short minutes earlier she had been willing to permit, even encourage, an incestuous relationship between Oswald, her son, and Regina, her husband’s love child. It comes back to the value of femininity

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and the different values placed on the different social strata by their own sex. It is obvious that Hélène Alving places more value on her son’s patriarchal rights than those of a lowly servant girl. She is willing to sacrifice the girl to her son’s happiness. Regina is, like Vivie Warren and Blanche Sartorius, unashamed to speak her own mind. Although Regina’s choices are not as liberating as Vivie’s appear to be, the crux here is that she feels she has a choice, albeit a limited one. She is also subverting the role of the feminine as nurturing and selfless. She is not willing to sacrifice her life for that of a man. The other shocking element is how far she is willing to go for self-preservation. Similarly, Vivie also finds relief in the shedding of emotional ties; like Regina, it is how she achieves her freedom. In tearing up Frank’s note “without a second thought” (CPP III: 105). Vivie has cut her ties with her past life. Shaw does not leave Vivie with any sense of regret but rather a sense of purpose “as she goes at her work with a plunge and soon becomes absorbed in its figures” (CPP III: 105). However, Regina’s future is not so assured and “Captain Alving’s Refuge” could soon give way to one of Mrs Warren’s brothels. In Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw stated that he has “gone straight at the fact,” as Mrs Warren puts it, “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” (CPP III: 69). Mrs Warren rejected marriage in favour of the other way of life in order to extract herself from the poverty trap she was born into. What is shocking about Mrs Warren’s overall attitude is that in embracing her profession as co-owner and Madam of a series of brothels, she becomes complicit in a patriarchal mindset that perpetrates the continued suppression of women. Through all of these anomalies Shaw has created in Mrs Warren an alternative head of family, thereby rejecting a matriarchal role and its societal implications. Ironically, Kitty Warren wishes to engineer for her daughter the life she rejected for herself, one where further education is denied and marriage features largely in the frame in order to achieve acceptable respectability. Kitty Warren, in taking this stance, plays out the opposing layers of feminism by wishing to place her daughter in a subservient role constructed by a patriarchal society. Furthermore, this form of commodification was one she applied to her own business when young socially deprived women fell prey to her and were drawn into a life of prostitution. The character of Vivie Warren operates very much in opposition to this mentality. Vivie rejects the life her mother has planned for her, though not for the same reasons. While she has the same passion for money that her mother has, telling her that she

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“must make more money than she spends”, her approach to her future is completely different (CPP III: 102). Vivie is Shaw’s “new woman”, one who wishes to control her own destiny which does not involve becoming the property of some man, married or otherwise. Vivie, in rejecting marriage to Frank and not even countenancing marriage to Crofts, is rebuffing the prescribed lifestyle for women in her era. Crofts revelatory inference that Frank and Vivie could be brother and sister gave her the motivation she desired to turn her back on the constraints of a life she had no wish to be part of. In leaving everything behind her, Vivie steers herself away from the realm of the female domestic private and enters the male public sphere of commerce. She has, as her mother did, refused the conventional and all the restraints that entailed for the female. Through this evolution in circumstances between the generations, Shaw has put forward the case for the fight for female emancipation in a society that undervalues the feminine role to the extent that her choices are limited to marriage or the alternative of prostitution in order to gain some measure of financial security. In order to investigate the irrefutable influence of Ibsen’s work on Shaw’s drama, Ghosts has been interrogated as somewhat of a prequel to Mrs Warren’s Profession. There are very striking similarities in the play between the characters and as my analysis demonstrates, Shaw’s treatise on marriage, through the character of Kitty Warren, raises the question of its debateable respectability. Ibsen’s Mrs Alving chose the so-called socially acceptable institution of marriage but her fate could be described as similar to, if not worse than, Kitty Warren’s fate. However, as discussed, the choices for Regina appear more limiting than they do for Vivie Warren. Vivie’s entrance into the world of commerce at least assures her of a greater chance of granting the female a voice away from the closed doors of the domestic space. The relationship between theatrical representation and patriarchy is a complex one that has historic and dramaturgical roots. Case quotes a translation from Aristotle that seems to explain the historically patriarchal mindset: “First and foremost, character should be good … goodness is possible for each class of individuals. For, both a woman and a slave have their particular virtues even though the former of these is inferior to a man, and the latter is completely ignoble”.101 In many respects, Ibsen has endeavoured to free the stage from this stifling mode of thinking.102 Shaw applauded Ibsen’s naturalistic style. Templeton states in relation to Shaw’s review of the 1897 Independent Theatre’s performance of Ghosts that the

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play is “the new theatre of Ibsenism mocking the last hurrah of a vanishing world”.103 Gibbs argues, however, that Shaw did not try to imitate Ibsen.104 Shaw’s style was all his own and his view of how drama should be constructed is very well explained in a letter he wrote to William Archer. The letter was in reply to a dialogue created by Archer titled “the techno-­ Shavian cat”.105 My dear W.A. You haven’t got it yet. The alternatives are not a cat and a jellyfish, but a clockwork cat and a real cat. The clockwork cat is very ingenious and amusing (for five minutes); but the organisation of the live cat beats the construction of the mechanical one all to nothing; and it amuses you not for an age but for all time.106

Shaw’s point is that drama will only survive if it becomes a living, breathing, thinking entity that will impress itself on the psyche of the audience. By introducing two of society’s most basic incongruities as core themes in his plays, slum landlordism in Widowers’ Houses and prostitution in Mrs Warren’s Profession, he, like Ibsen, exposed through a dramatic forum those issues in society that had been previously swept under the carpet. In placing the characters of Blanche Sartorius and Vivie Warren centre stage, he allowed the female voice a platform that had not been widely used for that purpose, and he applied the basis of the marriage question as a benchmark through which choices were made. With Blanche Sartorius’s character there is a sense of experimentation with an attempt to shake up the complacency with which female characters had been previously perceived. Vivie Warren was more indicative of the “new woman” and in handing the power to her character at the end of the play, Shaw established himself as an innovative playwright forging a new mode of dramatic thinking. In adopting this stance in his writing, he was far away from the Yeatsian “ideal”, the sentimental fairy tale that gave rise to The Countess Cathleen as he built on Ibsen’s “real”, the pragmatic Regina in Ghosts. This direction would prove effective in capturing the atmosphere of an evolving political and social landscape, both for Ireland and the role of women, and was to become a key element of his craft.

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Notes 1. Peter Gahan, Shaw Shadows (Florida: University of Florida Press 2004) p. 17. 2. Sally Peters, “A Feminist in Spite of Himself” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw ed Christopher Innes (United Kingdom:. Cambridge University Press 1998) p 17. 3. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love 1 (London: Chatto & Windus 1988) p. 283. 4. Mark Fortier, theory/theatre: an introduction 2nd edition p 114. 5. Rev E. J. Hardy, Manners Maketh Man 1887 (Google Books) pp. 42/43. 6. Mark Fortier, theory/theatre: an introduction 2nd edition p. 114. 7. Mark Fortier, theory/theatre: an introduction 2nd edition p. 114. 8. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre (England: Palgrave Macmillan 2008) p. 83. 9. Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable 1934) p. 668. 10. Bernard Shaw, Prefaces p. 669. 11. C.B.  Purdom, A Guide to the Plays of Bernard Shaw (Great Britain: Methuen 1963) p. 143. 12. A.M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw; A Life (Florida: University of Florida Press 2005) p. 62. 13. The name William de Burgh has its place in early Irish history. De Burgh was part of the entourage that came to Ireland in 1185 with Lord John, King Henry II’s son, who Henry planned to crown King of Ireland. De Burgh, as one of John’s most trusted vassals, was granted a vast estate on the border of Leinster. It is very thought provoking how Shaw links an Anglo-­Irish name from the early conquering English to the slum estates in London. 14. Bernard Shaw, Prefaces p. 680. 15. “Oscar Wilde On Shaw’s Confidence” George Bernard Shaw: The Critical Heritage ed T. F. Evans (New York: Routledge 2013) p. 59. 16. Oscar Wilde, “Oscar Wilde On Shaw’s Confidence” George Bernard Shaw: The Critical Heritage p. 59. 17. Terence Brown, “The Plays” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins 1994) p. 351. 18. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One Definitive Edition (London: Chatto & Windus 1997) p. 160. 19. Bernard Shaw, Prefaces p. 675. 20. Sally Peters, “A Feminist in Spite of Himself” p. 14. 21. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View (Hong Kong: Macmillan Press 1984) p. 17. 22. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 18.

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23. Richard Ellman, The Man and the Masks (London: Macmillan & Co. 1949) p. 242. 24. Bernard Shaw, The Matter with Ireland ed David H.  Greene & Dan H. Laurence (USA: University Press of Florida 2001) p. 24. 25. P.J.  Mathews, The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press 2003) p. 22. 26. Edward Martyn was also a member of the Ascendency class and richer by far but he was Catholic which possibly allowed him easier assimilation into an Irish identity. 27. P.J.  Mathews, The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement p. 12. 28. P.J.  Mathews, The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement p.12. 29. Lady Augusta Persse Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter in Autobiographies (London: G.P. Putnam & Sons 1913) pp. 9/10. 30. Harold Fromm, Bernard Shaw and the Theater in the Nineties (USA: University of Kansas 1967) p. 132. 31. William L Sharp, “ W.B. Yeats: A Poet Not in the Theatre”. The Tulane Drama Review, Vol 4, No 2 (Dec 1959) 67–82 p 67. 32. Harold Fromm, Bernard Shaw and the Theater in the Nineties p 132. 33. Joan Templeton Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) p. 153. 34. Maud Gonne’s first child, a son named George, died before he was a year old. Her second, a daughter named Iseult was born four years later. 35. National Library of Ireland 1916 On-line Exhibition 3.3.2). 36. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and the Socialist Provocation (USA: Florida University Press 2011) p. 52. 37. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and the Socialist Provocation the discussion on Maud Gonne’s public criticism of Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen on its portrayal of an Irish wife walking away from her abusive husband, just as she, Gonne, was planning to do the very same thing. P 52. 38. John Harwood and Deirdre Toomey ed Yeats Annual No 9; Yeats and Women (London: Macmillan Academic Professions 1992) p. 18. 39. When John McBride was executed in 1916, Yeats thought the way was clear for him to marry Gonne. He finally had to accept that was never going to happen. He then turned his attention to Gonne’s daughter, Iseult, and proposed twice to her. She turned him down on both occasions. 40. Synge, for example, though he portrayed Ireland as woman, did so through “real” sexual women which was obviously very different from Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan who states “that while many have loved her,

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she never laid out the bed for any.” Synge disliked Yeats’s romanticised, inhuman women protagonists. A good example of this is the difference between Yeats and Synge’s Deirdres. Interestingly, Yeats got Stella Campbell to perform his Deirdre, whom Synge likened to Mrs Tanqueray, and then he set out to write his own Deirdre play. 41. Richard Ellman in his biography on Yeats that “he had long intended to write a play on the Countess Kathleen O’Shea” (105). Yeats began the play in 1889 and finished and published in 1892 in a volume titled The Countess Kathleen and various Legends. Yeats lived in London at that time and moved in the same literary circles as Shaw. Yeats was friendly with Morris and had supper with Morris most Sunday evenings. In Autobiographies he speaks of meeting Shaw infrequently at these suppers. It would not be beyond the realms of imagination to believe that Shaw was familiar with the work. 42. P.J. Matthews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement p. 52. 43. The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats ed David R. Clarke & Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Palgrave 2001) p. 58. 44. Mary Trotter, Irish National Theaters: Political Performance and the Irish Dramatic Movement (New York: Syracuse University Press 2001) p. 76. 45. See The Ascendancy of the Land Question (Chapter 4) in Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 (UK: Blackwell Publishing 2003). 46. The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats eds David R. Clarke & Rosalind E. Clark pp. 32/33. 47. Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man and the Masks p. 242. 48. See Melissa Fegan’s article “Isn’t it your own country?: The Stranger in Nineteenth Century Irish Literature” Yearbook of English Studies Nineteenth Century Travel Writing Vol 34 (United Kingdom: MHRA, 2004) pp.  31–45 where she examines the homelessness of the AngloIrish writer. 49. Joep Leerssen, The Theatre of William Butler Yeats in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama ed Shaun Richards (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press 2004) p. 58. 50. There were of course exceptions, as some Anglo-Irish landlords treated their tenants well. The family of George Moore, the novelist, who was a first cousin of Edward Martyn were extremely good to their tenants during those hard years. It is known that not one tenant died or was evicted during the famine. 51. The Collected Plays of W.B.  Yeats ed David R.  Clarke & Rosalind E. Clark p. 30. 52. The Collected Plays of W.B.  Yeats ed David R.  Clarke & Rosalind E. Clark p. 27.

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53. Joep Leerssen, The Theatre of William Butler Yeats in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Drama ed Shaun Richards (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press 2004) p. 55. 54. The Collected Plays of W.B.  Yeats ed David R.  Clarke & Rosalind E. Clark p. 31. 55. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 15. 56. Bernard Shaw, Prefaces p. 680. 57. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 7. 58. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 7. 59. Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable 1949) p. 40. 60. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006) p. 65. 61. Michael Meyer, Ibsen Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Company 2004 p. 603/04. 62. Michael Meyer, Ibsen p. 415. 63. See Joan Templeton’s Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) for an exceptional treatise on Shaw and his Quintessence of Ibsenism. 64. Michael Meyer, Ibsen p. 329 & 462. 65. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal p. 292. 66. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Constable 1926) p. 36. 67. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism p. 192. 68. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism p. vii. 69. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism p. vii. 70. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism p. 28. 71. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal p. xii. 72. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 155. 73. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 256. 74. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 181. 75. Bernard Shaw Collected Letters Vol 1: 1874–1897 ed Dan H.  Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt 1965) p. 757. 76. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Shaw, Murder and the Modern Metropolis” ed Desmond Harding Shaw 32: Shaw and the City (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press 2012) p. 113. 77. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 305. 78. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 166. 79. Kitty was also the name disparagingly given by the British press to Katharine O’Shea, Parnell’s long-time partner and eventual wife because of all the scandal around the divorce from her first husband Captain William O’Shea. They had been estranged for many years and Katharine’s lived unmarried with Parnell and had three children with him. They even-

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tually married in 1891 four months before Parnell died. The name Kitty is associated with prostitution which is apt for the theme of the play. 80. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 169. 81. Kerry Powell “New Women, New Plays and Shaw in the 1890s” ed Christopher Innes The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press 1998) p. 78. 82. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 pp 566/67. 83. Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw (London: Routledge 1993) p. 158. 84. Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw p. 158. 85. Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1874–1897 p. 404. 86. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 20. 87. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 2. 88. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 20. 89. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Shaw, Murder and the Modern Metropolis” p. 105. 90. Wiesenthal , J.L. 1983. Having the Last Word: Plot and Counterplot in Bernard Shaw. ELH, Spring, 1983, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 175–196. USA: John Hopkins Press. p. 184. 91. Fredrick J. Marker, “Shaw’s Early Plays” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw ed Christopher Innes (UK: Cambridge University Press 1998) p. 120. 92. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 186. 93. Mark Fortier, theory/theatre: an introduction 2nd edition p. 108. 94. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy p. 91. 95. Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View p. 20. 96. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 p. 289. 97. Michael Meyers, Ibsen p. 552. 98. Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts” The Complete Major Prose Plays Trans & Introduced by Rolf Fjelde (USA: Penguin 1978) p. 226. 99. Michael Meyers, Ibsen p. 348. 100. Michael Meyers, Ibsen p. 350. 101. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. 16. 102. Michael Meyers, Ibsen p. 438. 103. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal p. 248. 104. A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 154. 105. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1911–1925 ed Dan H. Laurence (London: Viking 1985) p. 837. 106. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1911–1925 p. 837.

CHAPTER 3

The Marriage of Change: Candida and Getting Married

Candida, written in the latter part of 1894, appears to signal a crisis in both Shaw’s ideals and his personal life. Arguably, Shaw underwent a catharsis in the writing of Candida that directly led to the maturation of his dramatic writing, especially with regard to his portraits of women in the context of women’s rights—as is particularly evident in the 1908 Getting Married. In both of these plays Shaw utilises the “marriage question” to first interrogate the moral dilemma in his own life through Candida, and then to discuss the social dilemma of the “marriage question” posed in Getting Married. In the preface to Getting Married, Shaw describes social orthodoxy “the family and the institution of marriage” (CPP IV: 328) as the cornerstone of civilised life, where he investigated and projected modernising women. In the N.B. to Getting Married, Shaw identifies his rejection of the customary division of dramatic action into acts and scenes, in favour of a return to unity of time and place, as attributed to ancient Greek drama. While Shaw directly refers to the fifth century BC unities of Greek drama, these unities do not just apply to the classical era. Aristotle’s three principles of dramatic form—unity of time, of place, and of action—were adapted during the Renaissance and absorbed into much of the theatre that followed, with the exception being Shakespeare’s drama. Shaw chose to draw attention to the classical period as he uses the three unities to thematically subvert the patriarchal notions and practices of his own time, revealing real women. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2_3

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Nira Yuval-Davis, in discussing Shirley Ortner’s theory that women tend to be identified with nature while men tend to be identified with culture, reasons that “Since human beings everywhere rank their own cultural physical world, as every culture is aimed at controlling and/or transcending nature, women end up with an inferior symbolic position”.1 This inferiority is not always symbolic, as there existed a particular mode of thinking in the Victorian era that had its roots in an ancient classical society rendering the feminine voiceless. Elaine Aston, in her forward to Sue-­ Ellen Case’s book Feminism and Theatre, states, “If feminism begins anywhere it begins with feelings of exclusion: with the growing awareness that women’s social and cultural lives and activities have been overlooked, marginalised and trivialised by male dominated social systems and cultural values”.2 She posits this statement in relation to Case’s work in theatre studies where this exclusion manifests itself most notably. She states that for Case: “To be included rather than excluded made it necessary … to revisit the ‘traditional history’ of the stage, to challenge the patriarchal values of the canonical, the classical order to make a place, ‘a space of our own’”.3 Basically, Case argues that in the representation of women in classical plays it became obvious that gender was at least partially defined by space; public space for men and domestic space for women. In effect, this exclusion constituted the “othering” of woman. The exclusion from the public sphere reduced the feminine to a non-entity, a “she” that must be controlled by the greater and constructed public sphere dominated by a “he”—the male. Through this oppression women can see and hear but cannot speak. Without a voice, change becomes impossible. The resulting stagnation makes the female, broadly speaking, an “internal stranger” within society. Case maintains that “it was this fictional ‘Woman’ who appeared on the stage, in the myths and the plastic arts, representing the patriarchal views attached to the gender while suppressing the experiences, stories, feelings and fantasies of actual women”.4 What was happening, in fact, was that the female voice was silenced and over-ridden in the public, and indeed in the private, sphere by the male one. Even though she is “at home,” she is limited by the projection of a male constructed fantasy of the feminine. This served to disempower the “real” woman by, first, enabling male domination and, second, by reducing the feminine construct to myth. Case points out that “within theatre practice the clearest illustration of this division is in the tradition of the all-male stage”.5 Case’s exploration of theatrical practices through the ages reveals that this practice continued through to Elizabethan times and beyond. She notes that

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“the Athenian composite of politics, myth and culture was assimilated by a growing Christian tradition which revised the classical interpretation of the female and located it within the context of sexuality”.6 As a result, “Women who performed were associated with prostitution,” further compounding the negativism associated with the “public” female figure.7 It is through a lens of opposing views of the feminine that Shaw’s subversions of theatrical form and practice can be seen. He says of the theatre: “… there is one lawful place worse than the gallows and the battlefield, one tolerated pursuit filthier than gluttony and more damnable than wholesome murder. That place is the theatre; that pursuit is playgoing”.8 David Wiles argues that “the theatre of Athens was created for and by men, yet it is generally thought to contain some of the best female roles in the repertory”.9 Shaw’s interest in gender inequality within society propelled him to challenge the perception of the female role on the stage as a signifier for crisis “in how the state imagines and justifies itself”.10 The structure of Greek dramatic form comprises four components. Firstly, the play usually opens with a situation at the point of climax, as is the case in Candida and Getting Married. Secondly, each set of characters is complex with their own set of goals and motives for these goals. Marchbanks, for one, in Candida is testament to that. Thirdly, a “chorus”, used both as a character and commentator on the action, is usually present, Proserpine in Candida and Mr Collins in Getting Married. Finally, there are a series of incidents that give rise to a crisis thereby bringing the protagonists’ actions into focus. Aristotle termed this crisis “peripeteia” or “reversal” in the external situation of the main character[s] and believed that the most skilfully constructed plays featured an act of “recognition” or “anagnorisis”, in which the character responds to change. The other issue, as Case observes, is that “[…] classical plays and theatrical conventions can […] be regarded as allies in the project of suppressing actual women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production”.11 Shaw’s fascination with societal gender inequality propelled him to investigate life from the female viewpoint by examining the patriarchal attitude to women of that time and challenging the thought process that affirmed those attitudes through dramatization. Shaw plays with this perception, empowering the female voice by using the very form that railed against this in the two plays under discussion in this chapter. The importance of this subversion and the power of change he afforded his female characters cannot be underestimated through the use of the classical form of drama, and through all the forms he experimented with.

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Crucially, this deconstruction of the patriarchal subordination of women was to be applied by Shaw to the Irish question, as will be seen in the subsequent chapters. Shaw’s quest, through the writing of Candida, was not merely for someone or something exterior to himself; rather, it was also an interior examination of self and the direction his art was going to take. He associated art with women, admitting in a letter to Jules Magny in December 1890, that “like all lovers of art, I am fond of women”.12 He used this association to appeal to what his audience might understand as the sensibilities in life. Granted, Shaw’s love life was complicated. He stumbled from one relationship to the next, from Jenny Patterson to Florence Farr to Janet Achurch, to name but a few. It appears that the emotional rollercoaster he was on was sapping his creative energy and he needed to make a decision over the direction his life was to take. Through this focus, the chapter will explore how Shaw’s “oedipal crisis” manifests itself through an interaction with the Greek dramatic form and the character of Eugene Marchbanks.13 The resolution of the crisis for the Morells manifests itself as a resolution for the playwright “who knows the secret in the poet’s heart”, a secret which is answered in the later play by Simon Hotchkiss.

3.1   Candida—The Ménage à Trois Trebled While Shaw had many romances, he stayed shy of commitment to any of the recipients of his affections. As A.  M. Gibbs suggests: “Rather than being in pursuit of love—in the romantic sense of complete and reciprocated devotion and commitment to another person—he [Shaw] was trying to escape it”.14 Candida was written in part in response to a desire to change the nature of his relationships with women. The ménage à trois scenario depicted in the play has a basis in Shaw’s own life. In November 1892, Shaw went to stay with the Sparlings with the intention of only staying for a few nights while his house was being decorated. May Sparling had been a confidante and close friend of Shaw’s prior to her marriage to Henry Halliday Sparling; Shaw ended up staying with them until the middle of January of the following year.15 Although all went well at the beginning, the situation soon became complicated. The attraction between May and Shaw seemed to reignite and Shaw stated that he had to “consummate or vanish”.16 He vanished! In some ways Shaw was also replaying the scene from his parents’ marriage before his mother left for England to follow Vandeleur-Lee, who had shared the Shaw marital home from

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approximately 1864. However, Shaw repeatedly felt compelled to claim that the relationship between his mother and Lee was a platonic one: “My mother […] was one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character”.17 He went on to state that she was so sexless it was a wonder to him how she managed to conceive three children. It was, presumably, his theory that his father must have forced himself on her.18 This could be considered very naive of Shaw; nonetheless, he recreated this vestal virgin type persona through the character of Candida and aspired to recreate Janet Achurch through the character, which was based on his notional idea of his mother’s pure moral state. Shaw saw himself as Janet’s saviour from her addiction to alcohol and morphine, and in writing Candida for her, he hoped to show her the error of her ways. He had first seen her in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and was instantly smitten with her, though his mother, who had attended the play with him, commented on Achurch in the play, stating: “That one is a divil”.19 She was the “divil” that Shaw intended to reform. Candida is a three-act play that takes place over one day in the same space, the drawing room, which is also the place where the Reverend James Morell works. In addition to these Aristotelian unities, the play is framed by two acts of identification, namely recognition and acknowledgement, and its action opens at a point of climax which is the return of Candida, Morell’s wife, for a short period to collect some more holiday clothes for the children. Each character within the play is complex, revealing as the plot unfolds their own particular goals and motives. Moreover, as I have suggested, Proserpine Garnett, Morell’s secretary, serves as the chorus; and even though she is not ever present throughout, her character moves the drama along, denotes the time of day, introduces other characters, and keeps the audience informed. It is an interesting choice of name for the secretary and is in keeping with the Greek theme, as she was named after the Greek goddess who was said to be, through her forced marriage to the god of the underworld, responsible for the seasons. The appearance and disappearance of Proserpine, or Prossy as she is called in the play, could be read as a dramatic tool to mark the action of the play. The Shavian character of Proserpine disappears in the third act altogether as the night draws in. Her working day is used to mark time within the play. Equally significant, the mythological Proserpine was also symbolic of the women’s suffrage movement when Shaw wrote the play. Portraying her character as that of a working woman, Proserpine is testament to

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Shaw’s knowledge of and involvement in the growing feminist movement, and it is thought-provoking how he pitches her single status and common sense against male mithering, and Candida’s role of wife and mother. Finally, and possibly the most important element borrowed from the Greek dramatic model, is where a series of incidents give rise to a crisis, bringing the actions of the three main characters into focus. While Holroyd is correct in arguing that it is the most tightly constructed and economical of Shaw’s plays, and its subject matter extremely well-defined, the issues raised within the play are diverse, crossing the realms of religion, politics, and ideological manipulation.20 Shaw’s opinion a decade later on the marriage service as it stood is very clearly outlined in the preface to Getting Married, revealing a more cynical view of marriage than expressed in his 1894 play: “It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in which the[se] obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are in the marriage service. […] the service was really only an attempt to make the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry” (CPP IV: 334/35). It was a view that was not as hardened to such cynicism as when he wrote Candida, which predated the growing militarism among some suffragettes by 1908. Nonetheless, the militarism, including his own for women’s rights, was still fourteen years away, but its ideological seeds were evident in the 1894 Candida. Based on the ménage à trois scenarios discussed in Shaw’s own personal life there are three triangulations within the play that need to be addressed. These triangulations play heavily on the notion of marriage and divorce, property, and ownership. It is quickly revealed that Candida who, according to Gahan, evokes the myth of Demeter (Earth Mother), is returning home the day of the opening scene and Morell is excited.21 He extols the virtues to his curate of being married “to a good woman”, to the Reverend Alexander Mill (Lexy) stating [tenderly]: […] We have no right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Get a wife like my Candida; and youll always be in arrears with your repayments. (CPP III: 204)

Proserpine does not share his enthusiasm, impatiently stating that Oh! A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her. (CPP III: 205)

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Her resentment further manifests itself when she exclaims: Candida here, and Candida there, and Candida everywhere…It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses…to hear a woman raved about in that absurd manner merely because she’s got good hair and a tolerable figure. (CPP III: 205)

Proserpine continues, arguing that she is not jealous of Candida, that she appreciates Candida’s qualities far better than any man, and that it is men that possess amorous delusions when it comes to women (CPP III: 206). There is a notion of untruth in this statement as it becomes obvious throughout the play that Proserpine has feelings for Morell, and it is Candida that raises this with Morell who has appeared oblivious to the fact. In speaking about the secretary to Morell, Candida asks: Why does Prossy condescend to wash up the things, and to peel potatoes and abase herself in all manners of way for six shillings a week less than she used to get in a city office? She’s in love with you, James: that’s the reason. (CPP III: 240)

Morell’s reaction is one of disbelief and the ensuing dialogue on jealousy and love opens the way for the conversation about Eugene Marchbanks. Proserpine’s assertion about Candida’s qualities serve to introduce the type of character the audience are to expect. In addition, through her statement, Proserpine has set up the Shavian argument, that it is the patriarchal mindset that surrounds women that needs adjusting. Holroyd argues that the play is A Doll’s House in reverse.22 It is my contention, however, that there is no reversal of the “doll’s” role within this play. Candida, though the catharsis that Nora Helmer experienced is denied to her, is very much the “doll” as the male characters within the play display the same patriarchal expectations of the role of the feminine. Although Shaw’s creation of Candida’s character is dissimilar to Ibsen’s Nora, the premise for the creation of such a female character is the same. Candida presents a more open character than Nora Helmer and appears, unlike Nora, to be unafraid of her husband’s reaction to her thoughts and ideas. Shaw’s description of Candida is detailed, including: […] she is just like any other pretty woman who is clever enough to make the most of her sexual attractions for trivially selfish ends; but Candida’s serene

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brow, courageous eyes, and well set mouth and chin signify largeness of mind and dignity of character to ennoble her cunning in the affections. A wise hearted observer, looking at her would at once guess that whoever had placed the Virgin of the Assumption on her hearth did so because he fancied some spiritual resemblance between them. (CPP III: 213)

In contrast, Ibsen’s initial character description of Nora is deliberately superficial and serves to set up an impression of a capricious female, though that impression is completely dispelled by the end of the play after Nora’s adjustment. He describes her “street clothes” and her carrying “an armful of packaging”, further enhancing her doll image.23 When Candida returns, she finds her father, Mr Burgess, with Morell in the house. Burgess’s character is portrayed as being “made coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce” (CPP III: 207). Burgess’s dialogue with Morell prior to Candida’s arrival indicates that Burgess is a self-made man “due to commercial prosperity” (CPP III: 207). Burgess’s profession, and his rise through the property strand of economics, echoes Lickcheese’s and indeed Sartorius’s in Widowers’ Houses rise in social mobility and economic fortune. There is also an implication that Morell’s and Candida’s marriage was arranged for social privilege given Burgess’s working class background, echoing Sartorius’s efforts to arrange Blanche’s marriage to Trench—also from Widowers’ Houses. Yet again, Shaw returns to the theme of social mobility for financial gain. He explores social mobility further in John Bull’s Other Island, the topic of the next chapter, when he has Nora Reilly accept the Englishman, Tom Broadbent’s, proposal of marriage creating an Irish/English dichotomy that speaks to Irish Home Rule. On her return, Candida is accompanied by a young man named Eugene Marchbanks, whom she tells her father is “one of James discoveries” (CPP III: 214). Marchbanks is portrayed very much as a Torvald Helmer-like figure, he visualises Candida as Helmer visualises Nora. Helmer places Nora on a pedestal and does not credit her with having her own mind. He refers to her as “squirrel”, “my little lark”, remarks that she is “an odd little one”, and at one point tells her she “not to be a sulky squirrel”.24 His condescension towards her is blatant. Marchbanks talks of the way Candida “inspires love”, also placing her on a pedestal. (CPP III: 221) Both Helmer and Marchbanks are left in no doubt by the end of the plays as to the strength of their respective female protagonists. Marchbanks is a complex character and emerges, in fact, as the “stranger in the house”, fitting

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exactly into the domestic scene as defined by Nicholas Grene in the context of Irish drama. Marchbanks has been taken in by the Morells as a lost soul with nowhere to go. Richard Dietrich describes him as being “rather like a waif or a stray dog”.25 But that is too simplistic a description for the role Marchbanks’ character has been assigned. He is very young and idealistic, and completely smitten with Candida. However, there is an underlying determination in him that causes him to relentlessly pursue his objective, that of taking Candida from Morell. He tells Morell that: Oh, let us put aside all this cant. It horrifies me when I think of the doses of it she has had to endure in all the weary years during which you have selfishly and blindly sacrificed her to minister to your self-sufficiency: you [turning on him] who have not one thought—one sense—in common with her.( CPP III: 221)

Marchbanks romanticises love and in doing so romanticises Candida. He abhors the mundane tasks that are part of day-to-day living and fantasizes that if he had Candida, she would never have to soil her hands again. When Candida speaks about her “own particular pet scrubbing brush” being used for blackleading, Marchbanks emits a “heartbreaking wail”. Candida, concerned for him, enquires: What’s the matter? Are you ill? Eugene He replies with his head bowed in his hands: No: not ill. Only horror! horror! horror! (CPP III: 236)

He matches Helmer’s image of Ibsen’s Nora’s “fair little delicate hands” when he speaks despairingly about Candida’s “beautiful fingers dabbling in paraffin oil”26 (CPP III: 235). When Marchbanks declares his love for Candida to Morell, it is the beginning of a competition for her affections with both men appearing to view her as property. Marchbanks sums it up when he argues with Morell at the end of Act I: […] if you are not ready to lay the truth at her feet as I am—then you will know to the end of your days that she really belongs to me and not to you. […] (CPP III: 225)

Marchbanks views Candida as an object, albeit of love, to be traded. She remains the “doll”, for all intents and purposes, through the construction

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of a patriarchal mindset, rather than the reality of the character created by Shaw. This notion of “woman belonging to” was very much part of the Victorian patriarchal perception of the feminine. Shaw in Candida was exposing the male mindset in opposition to Candida’s pragmatic approach; the male characters appear blind to her independence, leading critics like Michael Holroyd and Peter Gahan to conclude that it is the husband who is the doll. However, the ensuing battle of ownership between Morell and Marchbanks proves exactly the opposite to be true. Shaw plays the notion of ownership to the full. The male protagonists do not even realise that their rationale is askew and that Candida is not a possession, as Shaw makes very clear in the way Candida deals with her situation. In the final act she takes control, and both male protagonists are reduced to nervous and furtive states. When asked to choose between them, Candida enquires: I suppose it is quite settled, I must belong to one or the other? Realisation dawns on Marchbanks and he says anxiously Morell: you dont understand. She means she belongs to herself. (CPP III: 264)

The relationship between Morell and Candida appears reasonably balanced until Marchbanks arrives on the scene with his declaration of love for Candida which is, at first, greeted by Morell with humour and an almost paternal indulgence: Why my dear child, of course you do. Everybody loves her: they cant help it. I like it. But [looking up jocosely at him] I say, Eugene: do you think yours is a case to be talked about? Youre under twenty, she’s over thirty. Doesn’t it look like a case of calf love? (CPP III: 220/21)

Through this exchange Shaw has set up the classical oedipal scenario. Freud states that “the first object of desire, for both male and female children, is the mother, the provider of nourishment, care and of physical needs.”27 This manifests itself, for the boy, in the desire to possess the mother and usurp the father’s position within the family. At this stage in the play, Marchbanks assumes the Freudian role of son and wishes to replace Morell in Candida’s affections. Morell assumes the role of father as he tries to reason with Marchbanks to see that he is being blindly led by his emotions. Marchbanks, however, continues to goad Morell and point

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out the reasons that Candida should come to him. He pushes too far when he states: […] And their wives looked on and saw what fools they were. Oh! It’s an old story: youll find it in the Bible. I imagine King David, in his fits of enthusiasm, was very like you. [Stabbing him with the words] ‘But his wife despised him in her heart’ (CPP III: 223)

Morell now assumes the role of the alpha male and attempts to assert his authority by ordering Marchbanks to “leave my house” (CPP III: 223). Peripeteia comes for Morell at the end of this act through the realisation that his position in Candida’s affections is under threat. The reversal in his own situation comes for Marchbanks when he realises that he has power over Morell with regard to Candida’s affections. Marchbanks declares that he “is the happiest of mortals”. Morell’s reply of “So was I—an hour ago” thus ends Act I in a state of crisis (CPP III: 226). Recognition or anagnorisis for Morell comes in the culmination of Act II when he gets the courage to take the situation in hand. Candida has troubled him when she tells him that “It seems unfair that all the love should go to you and none to him; although he needs it so much more than you do” (CPP III: 241). She is unaware that Marchbanks has declared his love for her to Morell though she is aware of Marchbanks’ feelings for her and appears to treat it with an affectionate tolerance. However, she is also unaware that Morell is feeling very threatened by the way the situation is developing. William Worthen argues that “tragedy in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King lies in the fearsome turn of events caused by Oedipus’s inflexible compulsion to discover the truth.”28 Morell is inviting, if not tragedy, at least despair by forcing resolution of the situation. He engineers a contrivance whereby Candida and Marchbanks are left alone together; he feels it is the only way the problem can be resolved. When Marchbanks realises he is on his own with Candida, he acts in a childish manner becoming “breathless” with excitement (CPP III: 247). Shaw has precipitated the classical Greek crisis, leaving the audience in suspense as to the outcome. Morell’s motivation for this decision is based on his wife’s open discussion with him as she analyses and compares the two men. Morell’s judgement is clouded by Marchbanks’ earlier declaration of love for Candida and he misreads Candida’s concern for Marchbanks which is, in effect, quite maternal. She worries about whom he shall meet and how he shall learn about love. With her practical nature she feels that, as with

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any child, he should be armed with the relevant knowledge before he faces the world. She asks, … will he forgive me for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness, my purity? … (CPP III: 242)

Morell is quite horrified by Candida’s concern for Marchbanks and his myopia stands in the way of his recognition of her affection for Marchbanks. She tells Morell that: He [Marchbanks] is always right. He understands you; he understands me; he understands Prossy; and you my darling, you understand nothing. (CPP III: 243)

Morell’s intolerance of Candida’s empathy towards Marchbanks is indicative of the narrowness of patriarchy’s view of a husband’s ownership of his wife that is about to rear its head in the final discussions. Morell’s expectation fulfils the patriarchal understanding of the marriage contract. However, Shaw drills holes in the notion of marriage being a binding, lifelong commitment. In the preface to the later play Getting Married, he argues that “To impose marriage on two unmarried people who do not desire to marry one another would be admittedly an act of enslavement. But it is no worse than to impose a continuation of marriage on two people who have ceased to desire to be married” (CPP IV: 371). The light-hearted way that Candida approaches the triangle that has been created in her marriage shocks both Morell and her father. Candida is not afraid to speak her mind to the point that her father admonishes her and tells her to: Come: be’ave yourself’, Candy, Whatll Mr Morchbanks think of you? [sic]

Candida replies: This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back for fear of what other people may think of me …. (CPP III: 243)

Sophoclean style, Shaw has Candida present a question, that is really a riddle, towards the end of Act III when she states

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…I am up for auction, it seems. What do you bid, James? (CPP III: 264)

The age-old debate on the ownership of woman rears its head. As the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 had only been in force for twelve years when this play was written, the question that Candida’s character posed was very relevant and this relevance was reinforced when she poses the next as a rhetorical question, “I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other”29 (CPP III: 264). If Candida were to choose to belong to neither, the solution would be the dissolution of a marriage. Although the Married Woman’s Property Act would guarantee Candida her own property, she would lose everything else. If she were to choose Marchbanks, Morell, her husband, could divorce her without her express consent, he would retain ownership of the children and she would lose societal respectability as a divorced woman. It is no wonder her question was ironic when her choice was limited to an either/or situation with no benefit in choosing Marchbanks. Romantic love was not a good economic decision. James Morell offers what he feels a man should offer a woman: his strength, honesty, industry, and his position and authority. Marchbanks offers his weakness, desolation, and his heart’s need (CPP III: 265). Candida replies that she will give herself to the weaker of the two (CPP III: 265). She chooses her husband; firstly, because she realises that he has no idea how dependent he is on her and, secondly, because it would be a damaging decision for her social standing if she were to choose Marchbanks. There is also the issue, although Morell does not realise it, that Marchbanks is a child to Candida. She points this out to Marchbanks through their age difference. Candida is quite aware that she has gained the upper hand in the decision-making, though this has come with the realisation that it would be social suicide to take any other path. Morell is incredulous that Candida has chosen him over the younger man. The patriarchal mindset assumes that woman, wife, and mother are one, and through this, woman’s place has to be justified by looking after man. Although Candida does choose Morell because he needs her, she does so with the knowledge that the other course of action would have ruined her reputation and as such, turns this so-called subservient position into one of strength, one that would not have occurred if she had chosen Marchbanks. Marchbanks has his own catharsis that is shared with neither the couple nor the audience when he leaves stating that he has a bitter secret in his heart. The stage

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directions read that “They [the Morells] embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart” (CPP III: 268). Arguably, it is really Shaw’s own secret that he is speaking about. Writing such a tightly constructed play proved cathartic for the playwright. Holroyd argues that “[Marchbanks] looking upon the suffocating commonplaces of the Morell household concludes that domesticity, security and love are inferior ends compared with the sublime and lonely renunciation of the artist.”30 It is quite possible that Shaw, by the finish of this play, had come to a decision on his own life. As Holroyd states, it is Marchbanks rather than Candida that renounces sex, and it is Shaw’s idealism that transfigures this as “nobler” than happiness.31 In order to be a true artist and writer, Shaw perhaps decided that his approach to his work had to be more single minded, and while romance was still an option, his writing had to take precedence. Shaw’s exploration of marriage, the notion of ownership, divorce, and separation through the relationship triangulations in the play—Morell-Candida-Marchbanks, Morell-Candida-Proserpine, and Morell-Candida-Mr Burgess—continued the debate that was to be an inherent part of Shaw’s work, but most explicitly so in the play he was to write fourteen years later, Getting Married. Shaw engages with this issue overtly in Getting Married, as the following powerful question and answer in the play demonstrate: Leo: Then it’s a mistake to get married. The Bishop: It is, my dear; but its a much bigger mistake not to get married. (CPP IV: 418/19)

Shaw continues the very dramatic debate on separation, divorce, polygamy, polyandry, single parenting, especially single mothers, alluding to lesbianism, and, most importantly, interrogating the law and issues of ownership in relationships that had been raised in Candida—all as he continued to reveal true portraits of women, which, of course, at the time were revolutionary and modernising.

3.2  Getting Married—The Big Greek Wedding Written in 1908, set in spring 1908, and premiered in May of that year. Shaw termed Getting Married a “disquisitory” play concerning what he called “white slavery”, the subject of marriage (CPP IV: 372). The play takes place in real time and Shaw cleverly yet again borrows from the

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Greek dramatic form, using it to enhance his discussion. Unity of time and place was complementary to the nature of the staged discussion, and in a note at the beginning of the play he suggests two curtain falls that will allow this unity to continue, as well as allowing the audience to have their desired intervals. By choosing this dramatic form, Shaw’s subject matter, the issue of marriage, and the ensuing staged discussion, is strengthened as the components that structure the form of Greek drama complement the content of the play. Michael Holroyd, in arguing that Getting Married “confers priority on talking over action and restores potency to the word as the impulse for reform”, misses the point of Shaw’s use of the dramatic form.32 Greek drama, as discussed earlier, had a conflicted and troubled relationship with gender performance and the presence of female parts on stage were performed by male actors. Aristotle says of character that “there are four things to be aimed at…This rule is relative to each class. Even a woman may be good, also a slave: the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.”33 This fact is very significant because Shaw’s subject matter is not being debated in one of his many articles or lectures, but rather is dramatized in a theatrical forum that had been known to be reductive when it came to allowing female voices equal power on the stage. Getting Married opens at the point where a wedding is about to take place, presenting a climax. The bride is the daughter of the Bishop and his wife, Mrs Bridgenorth, and is their sixth and final child to be married. The drama is set around a middle class, religious family, implying complicity between church and state. In his preface to the play, Shaw notes that “… the law regulates their relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but beautiful and holy” (CPP IV: 335). The characters form an ensemble and each has their own distinctive part to play in relation to the subject of marriage. All topics are covered: marriage itself, children, separation, infidelity, polygamy, polyandry, divorce, and the virtues of remaining single. Collins, who is both greengrocer and alderman, moves the dramatic action along by introducing the visiting characters to the house, and marks the scene changes by making announcements. The play moves from one incident to the next, with each of the characters discussing their marital status and, in effect, highlighting the main issues surrounding marriage in 1908, issues which still resonate in many modern societies.

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Shaw opens his drama with a[n] [inferior] woman, which immediately subverts the Aristotelian treatise on the valueless place of woman. Shaw turns this notion on its head by celebrating the potential equality of the sexes and empowering the female voice, using the very form that railed against this. Mrs Bridgenorth is sitting in the kitchen discussing the imminent wedding of the last of her six daughters with Collins. He acts as both commentator and narrator in the play, or rather as a Greek chorus. True to form, he also interacts with each of the characters. In the opening lines he informs the audience of the marriage of the sixth and final daughter of the Bishop and his wife and the fact that he, Collins, has been present at all of the previous ceremonies. Mrs Bridgenorth refers to the fact that nothing could have been organised without him. Mrs Bridgenorth: I have always said you were a wonderful man, Collins. Collins: [almost blushing] Oh, maam! Mrs Bridgenorth: Yes. I could never arrange anything—a wedding or even a dinner-without some hitch or other. Collins: Why should you give yourself the trouble, maam? Send for the greengrocer, maam: thats the secret of easy house-keeping. Bless you, its his business. It pays him and you, let alone the pleasure in a house like this [Mrs Bridgenorth bows in acknowledgement of the compliment]. They joke about the mother-in-law. But they cant get on without both. (CPP IV: 395)

Shaw ensures Collins’s importance in the play by making him trustworthy and invaluable from the opening scene. As the play unfolds, never once are these traits called into question; rather they are reinforced. This is crucial to Collins’s role as commentator from an audience point of view because although Shaw introduces humour to the dialogue, it is obvious that he wishes the subject matter, that of the status of matrimony, to be treated seriously. His seventy-four-page preface to the play is testament to that. Shaw states, “There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action” (CPP IV: 317). Each of the female characters has very strong opinions on her marital status and Shaw uses the stage to give the female an equal voice. It is not his intention to silence the male but rather to demonstrate how the complexities of human relationships belong to both sexes, and how each has an equal right to comment on these difficulties.

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It is essential to look at the various complications as they appear in the play and then demonstrate how they work within the dramatic form. There are many powerful twists revealed throughout, each one designed to deliver a shock factor to the audience. There is Lesbia Grantham, Mrs Bridgenorth’s sister who is constantly refusing the General’s proposal of marriage. The General, or Boxer as he is known, is one of the Bishop’s brothers. The choice of the name Lesbia, perhaps obvious today but clever in 1908, being one letter short of the word lesbian. The word lesbian itself derived its name from an island called Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poet, Sappho. The words lesbian and Sapphic began to appear during the 1890s to describe sexual relations between women as Sappho was well known for her erotic verse, which embraced women as well as men. Lesbia, in the play, is portrayed as a woman who does not like men. She tells the General that she is going to be “an old maid” (266) when he pleads with her for a reason as to why she will not marry him. He argues that “It’s not natural” (CPP IV: 402). The dramatic punch is then delivered when Lesbia retorts: It may not be natural; but it happens all the same. Youll find plenty of women like me, if you care to look for them: women with lots of character and good looks and money and offers, who wont and dont get married. Cant you guess why? (CPP IV: 402)

Shaw keeps the audience reeling when Lesbia continues her argument with Boxer, culminating in her declaration that: I ought to have children. I should be a good mother to children. I believe it would pay the country to pay ME very well to have children. But the country tells me that I cant have a child in my house without having a man in it too; so I tell the country that it will have to do without my children. If I am to be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife at the same time. (CPP IV: 403)

Lesbia showed no compunction in keeping her thoughts, feelings, and emotions to herself. The notion of any woman willing to be an unmarried mother would have been unheard of and unacceptable in the early twentieth century. However, the implications are wider and it appears Shaw is engaging with the subject of single parenting or same-sex parenting, an issue that he had sub-textually dealt with as discussed in Mrs Warren’s

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Profession—specifically when Mrs Warren told her daughter, Vivie, that she had chosen her way of life to avoid the poverty trap that ensnared her younger sisters. Shaw reveals the first dilemma in the play by subverting women’s societal role through the character of Lesbia. Shaw, on discussing this point in the preface to the play, maintains: “That the one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man” (CPP IV: 342). In full swing, Shaw delivers the next dilemma through the introduction once again of a ménage à trois. The Bishop’s other brother, Reginald, arrives for the wedding. His crime is that he has been divorced by his much younger wife for apparently hitting her, and then having an affair with another woman. The situation is more complex than that of course, Shavian style. As the story unfolds it is revealed that his wife had fallen in love with another man, one nearer her own age but because of the intricacies of the law, her reputation would be ruined as she would have been considered a “fallen woman” had she divorced her husband on such grounds. Her husband then staged the hitting incident and pretended to be unfaithful to her in order to protect her reputation. The fact that his reputation does not suffer from this ploy points directly to the inequality of treatment women endured. The dilemma arises before these facts are revealed, when it is learned that his wife, Leo, is coming to the wedding with her new beau Sinjon Hotchkiss. Mrs Bridgenorth wants to refuse him and the General would “cut him dead if he met him in the street” (CPP IV: 407). Lesbia, though more practical than the other two, concurs with them that it might be better if Reginald stays away for the sake of propriety. Leo’s arrival changes this view as it is revealed that Reginald has taken the fall for her dalliance with another man. Leo’s lover’s name is divulged, as is the fact that he is coming to the wedding: Lesbia: May one ask who is the mushroom-faced serpent? Leo: He isnt. Reginald: Sinjon Hotchkiss, of course. Mrs Bridgenorth: Sinjon Hotchkiss, Why, he’s coming to the wedding! (CPP IV: 412)

The “tragedy” of the situation becomes farcical with discussions of “polygamy” and “polyandry” (CPP IV: 416) and whether it is better not to marry at all. The Bishop tells Leo:

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[--] Marry whom you please: at the end of a month he’ll be Reginald all over again. It wasnt worth changing: indeed it wasnt. (CPP IV: 418)

The General asks the Bishop if he believes that respectable people will give up being married, to which the Bishop replies: In England especially, they will. In other countries the introduction of reasonable divorce laws will save the situation; but in England we always let an institution strain itself until it breaks. … (CPP IV: 421)

Shaw has, by this stage, set the tone for further shocks to follow. There is a curtain break before the arrival of Sinjon Hotchkiss. However, prior to this Shaw has created the crisis point in the play. The bride-to-be has locked herself in her room and is reading a pamphlet about marriage titled Do you know what you are going to do? By a Woman who has done it. (CPP IV: 434). She refuses to come out of her room and tells Collins that she will not decide if she is going to marry or not until after she has read the pamphlet. It transpires after the curtain break that the bridegroom, Cecil Sykes, has received a similar pamphlet and arrives at the house irate. The crisis has been established. The issues raised in the pamphlet were socially and legally prevalent at the time. The woman’s rights to freedom were subsumed by her husband; she became his property under law. Edith’s pamphlet informed her of a woman whose husband committed murder and was spared the death penalty: [---] for the sake, they said, of his wife and infant children. And she could not get a divorce from that horrible murderer. They would not even keep him imprisoned for life. For twenty years she had to live singly, bringing up her children by her own work, and knowing that just when they were grown up and beginning life, this dreadful creature would be let out to disgrace them all, and prevent the two girls from getting decently married, and drive the son out of the country perhaps. Is that really the law? Am I to understand that if Cecil commits a murder, or forges, or steals, or becomes an atheist, I cant get divorced from him? (CPP IV: 434)

Cecil had his own grievance. Because marriage to Edith would give him ownership of her, he “should be legally responsible if she libelled anybody, though all her property is protected against me as if I were the lowest thief and cadger” (CPP IV: 427). Cecil had been sent “Belfort Bax’s essays on

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Men’s Wrongs” (CPP IV: 428). E. Belfort Bax was an ardent anti-feminist and Cecil’s information more than likely came from the essay titled The Monstrous Regiment of Womanhood published in 1907  in which Belfort Bax wrote: … he is liable, however, for his wife’s postnuptial torts, so that she has only to slander or libel some person without his knowledge or consent, and whilst she comes off scot free, even though possessed of property, the husband can be cast in damages. Trespass to land, trespass to goods, injuries done through negligence, all these actions coming under the legal definition of “torts,” render the husband liable, no matter what private wealth the wife may possess.34

Belfort Bax was no doubt railing against the 1907 amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which had come into force specifying that any settlement by a husband of his wife’s property is not valid unless executed by her if she is of full age, or confirmed by her after she attains full age.35 Shaw says of marriage that it “remained practically inevitable; and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to make it decent and reasonable” (CPP IV: 318). His feelings on the unfairness perpetrated in the institution of marriage were bound up in a patriarchal mentality, and as Case argues, “where woman became a medium of exchange and marriage became an institution of ownership”.36 Shaw attributes these notions of ownership to the morality of the tenth commandment; Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife which “Englishwomen would one day succeed in obliterating from the walls of […] churches by refusing to enter any building that are publicly classed with a man’s house, his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels” (CPP IV: 321). The situation becomes deadlocked around the topic on the economics of marital rights. No resolution can be found. Shaw cleverly uses this opportunity within the form to subvert the notion of the voiceless female by creating the character of Mrs George. David Wiles argues, in speaking about patriarchy in Athenian society, which was comparable with societal notions in Shaw’s era, that “under democracy women became legal and political non-entities”.37 In discussing Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, he quotes Eteocles as stating “the woman’s place is indoors [….] and she should express no opinions of the outdoor world of men”.38 Mrs George is the epitome of everything rejected as acceptable in patriarchal society. Although there have been

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many strangers arriving at the Bridgenorth residence, some family and some not, Mrs George, arriving as another “stranger in the house”, prompts a catharsis in the play that the other guests do not, as they are part of the impasse of the situation. Playing again against the notion of “the stranger in the house” signifying sacrifice, Mrs George is the antithesis to this notion. She creates a feeling of control in that she brings logic and order to each dilemma. Through this logical approach she generates feelings of relief and resolution to both the characters and the audience. Until this point it appeared there was no resolution. She has been called in on the advice of Collins, his trustworthiness well established, who states: […] that there is a certain lady that I always consult on delicate points like this. She has very exceptional experience, and a wonderful temperament and instinct in affairs of the heart. (CPP IV: 442/43)

This point of view was certainly not the case with many of the female characters in Greek drama: Euripides’ Medea, Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, and Sophocles’ Antigone were all symbolic of irresolvable tragedy. Their decision to seek vengeance or do what they believed to be the right thing culminated in disaster and death, and in each case a household is destroyed. Medea, eponymous antagonist of the Euripides play, murders her own children and her husband Jason’s newly acquired bride and the bride’s father, Creon, because Jason left her for the woman. Jason’s closing speech echoes the perception of the female in the patriarchal mindset of the period: O God, do you hear it, this persecution, These my sufferings from this hateful Woman, this monster, this murderess of children39

David Wiles states that “twenty years before the Euripides play, Athenian law was changed to render the children of non-Athenian citizens illegitimate and that many women would have been in the same predicament as Medea”.40 This information gives new insight and perhaps some understanding into Medea’s actions, but the injustice perpetrated on her and her children was not something acknowledged either within the drama of Euripides or by society itself at the time. The debate on the rights of women and children was still a vital issue in the twentieth century as Shaw’s play attests to. In the case of divorce or separation, the mother surrendered custody of

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the children to the father. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Clytemnestra murdered her husband. Clytemnestra’s revenge was for her daughter, Iphigenia, who was murdered by her own father and Clytemnestra’s husband, to be a sacrifice to secure favourable winds for sailing against Troy. The tragedy continues when Clytemnestra is, in turn, murdered by their son, Orestes, as punishment for that revenge. Orestes’s actions are then vindicated by a decree from the goddess Athena. This vindication is a testament of the value of the female in society where the life of the male is deemed to be more important. The reason for their absence is obvious; they are non-entities in the eyes of a patriarchal society. In Sophocles’ Theban Plays, Antigone is trying to restore her family’s honour by creating equal respect in death for her two brothers who murdered each other. One was considered a hero in the eyes of Creon, the King, and was given a noble funeral; the other, considered the enemy, was left to rot and be eaten by scavengers. Antigone’s attempt to bury his body to give him the same respect as her other brother infuriates Creon and leads to a chain of events that ends with her death and, ultimately, the death of Creon, his wife and his son. Creon, in banishing Antigone to her death, states, “Go then, and share your love among the dead. We’ll have no women’s law here, while I live”.41 Each and every play from the period reinforced the notion that destruction would prevail were women to have any place in what was considered a strong and logical society. As Wiles argues “… tragedy is concerned with how human beings perform their gender. In tragedy men are shown surrendering, for better or for worse, to female emotion and female behaviour”.42 The real tragedy was, in fact, that the female did not even get the chance to perform her own gender. Although these analogies seem far removed from the character of Mrs George, in writing within some of the parameters of Greek form, Shaw destabilises the revengeful female protagonist notion through the creation of Mrs George. Mrs George’s arrival on stage is followed by the second curtain fall, creating a dramatic tension. Continuing on this when the curtain rises, she asks to speak to the ladies first, creating an air of mystery as the audience are not privy to what is said. She then openly challenges Hotchkiss’s affections for Leo asking him if he really thinks he is better suited to “that young saucebox than her husband” (CPP IV: 462). She exposes his fickleness by making him fall in love with her (Mrs George) and orders that he tell Leo that the habit of falling for other men’s wives is growing on him and that she, Mrs George, is his latest (CPP IV: 465). Her interaction with

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the General and Lesbia once again puts the subject of marriage on the table, but Lesbia is resolute telling him that she does not want him “enough to make the very unreasonable sacrifices required by marriage” (CPP IV: 468). Mrs George reveals her identity as the secret love-letter writer to the Bishop who is shocked by the revelation. It becomes obvious that her intentions towards him are pure and that she has been inspired by his spirituality. She speaks of the time “When you spoke to my soul all those years ago from your pulpit, you opened the doors of my salvation to me, and now they stand open forever” (CPP IV: 478). She has become a catalyst for the members of the household, the point from which they can all move on. Edith and Cecil marry, having resolved their financial arrangements through an insurance company; Reginald and Leo renege on their divorce and remain married; and Lesbia remains happy in her single state through her continued refusal of the General’s marriage proposal. The General’s acceptance and continued persistence suggest that he does not actually want an acceptance of his offer. Hotchkiss retains his position as the third in a relationship, but this time it is with Mrs George. As the Bishop remarked, “all the problems seem to be resolving themselves” (CPP IV: 483). Aristotle aligned the playwright with the poet and argues that “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen,—what is possible according to the rules of probability or necessity”.43 It is quite clear that Shaw assumes the role of poet within this play. He has presented a series of problems that are quite true to life but he has changed the voice that deals with them. He presents an alternative voice for dealing with real issues raised through the dramatic forum. Mrs George’s character would have been one which signalled crisis in early Greek drama, but in Shaw’s play she provides resolution. In essence through her character, Shaw becomes, as Mrs George so succinctly states, “myself. I’ve not been afraid of myself. And at last I’ve escaped from myself, and am become a voice for them that are afraid to speak, and a cry for the hearts that break in silence” (CPP IV: 477). Filtering through the work of Candida is the personal turmoil that the playwright was dealing with. The original title of the play was Candida a Mystery and the ending attests to that. The mystery was the secret in the “poet’s heart” (CPP III: 268), which is not shared with the audience. There is a marked difference in tone in the two plays. Getting Married, written fourteen years later, goes some way to reveal that “secret”. Hotchkiss declares that:

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Neither shall I be able to steal George’s wife. I have stretched my hand out for that forbidden fruit before; and I know that my hand will always come back empty. To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible … (CPP IV: 491)

This statement of Hotchkiss’s could be the mature voice of Marchbanks who had come to this realisation when Candida chose her husband over him. Marchbanks also experienced a revelation when Candida refused to be a possession and this revelation inspired him to “Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient” (CPP III: 268). The analogy goes much deeper than the ménage à trois relationships depicted in both plays. In Candida the complicated threesomes consisted of Morell, Candida, and Marchbanks, and Morell, Candida and Proserpine with the couple of Morell and Candida being the constants; in Getting Married it was Reginald, Leo, and Hotchkiss, and then George, Mrs George, and Hotchkiss, with Hotchkiss the common denominator in both ménage à trois. Both Marchbanks and Hotchkiss could be representative of the playwright. Marchbanks as a younger, confused Shaw, and Hotchkiss as the mature, confident Shaw, though Joan Templeton argues that such “autobiographical foolishness” irritated Shaw.44 Nonetheless, writers and playwrights do not write from a void. The young Shaw as Marchbanks had to remove himself from the situation in which he found himself in order to establish himself as a writer first and foremost. Hotchkiss is presented as the mature Shaw who is confident in his abilities and can now trust himself in a situation similar to Marchbanks’, to not have all or nothing. In naming Hotchkiss Sonny, “my pet name in the bosom of my own family is Sonny” (CPP IV: 486), Shaw signals an ambiguous self-referentiality which is both playful and revealing. He had been known as Sonny by his family in his youth. The ensuing conversation, after Hotchkiss’s declaration of his pet name reveals that the “poet” is very aware of the journey he has travelled to this point. Hotchkiss speaks of class distinction: If I were your husband’s superior here I should be his superior in heaven or hell: equality lies deeper than that. The coal merchant and I are in love with the same woman. That settles the question for me forever. (CPP IV: 488)

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But what Hotchkiss is really doing is revealing the secret that was in the poet’s heart fourteen years earlier. He echoes Candida’s sentiment when he tells Soames, “I dont believe in anything but my own will and my own pride and honour” (CPP IV: 488). The playwright had come of age. Shaw, in a letter to Charles Charrington a few months after completing Candida, stated, “I have not often formulated the lessons of my apprenticeship as a writer: but I once did write down in a notebook something like this: You cannot be an artist until you have contracted yourself within the limits of your art”.45 In the cathartic writing of Candida, Shaw established a potential shift in patriarchal control, giving a more balancing power to the feminine, opening, perhaps in his own mind, to a greater plane of thought, reaching beyond the bounds of the human union of marriage to engage on a more overt and deeper level with the notion of national union. Shaw demonstrates this engagement in national, indeed in Irish national, political, and social issues in letters written from 1886, when he wrote to The Pall Mall Gazette, a review titled “The Making of an Irish Nation”. Before he had even written his first play, he had engaged with the Irish Question, Home Rule, and, through his letters on the Parnell and Katherine O’Shea scandal, the hypocrisy surrounding the marriage question. He stated in the letter Shall Parnell Go? that “the whole mischief of the matter lay in the law that tied the husband and the wife together…instead of enabling them to dissolve the marriage by mutual consent, without disgrace to either party”.46 In denouncing the law as immoral, he felt it would be better “if the conscience of the nation were to be aroused” underpinning the idea of marriage as the foundation of a nation.47 He expressly states this in the Preface to Getting Married as discussed in chapter one. In writing the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island, the year prior to the writing of Getting Married, he directly addresses the Home Rule question, stating “…the final reason Ireland must have Home Rule is that she has a natural right to it”.48 There is no doubt that his thinking on both topics was well formed, and by that rationale it informed his writing. Shaw’s engagement with Ireland became more pronounced in the intervening years as the political situation in Ireland continued to simmer. While Candida appeared to settle the “question” within the poet’s heart, Getting Married opened wider debates around the issues of union, disunion, and devolution on a more Irish national level which is evidenced somewhat in Getting Married through the Irish-named greengrocer, Collins. In choosing to use an Irish surname it seems that the Irish Shaw is never far away. Frank Sheehy-Skeffington argued in his review of the

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publication of Getting Married and its preface, “This treatise on marriage may serve as a touchstone for Irish virtue, a probe for Irish hypocrisy”.49 Some of Shaw’s Dublin contemporaries were resurrecting the ancient Irish order of portraying Ireland as a woman in order to find or modernise a new Ireland—including J. M. Synge who did so by portraying a woman breaking her marriage tie to an abusive husband. Shaw’s efforts in Candida and Getting Married present the indictment of the existing patriarchal order with regard to women—who are portrayed by Shaw in these plays as already being real, and therefore modernised women ready to emerge once patriarchal laws (such as marriage laws) and attitudes are thoroughly checked. The Shavian “real women” work particularly well in relation to Yeats’s fantasy women characters, who tied Ireland to a mythical past rather than an emerging, modern nation. The questions Shaw debated in the four years prior to Getting Married with John Bull’s Other Island and beyond with The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, which premiered in Dublin in 1909, creates a discourse on language, and identity, which was a very prominent topic within the growing Irish cultural movement, especially within the Gaelic League, and demonstrates Shaw’s commitment to the continued debate on the Irish question.

Notes 1. Nira Yural, Davis Gender and Nation (London. Sage 2004) p. 6. 2. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre (England. Palgrave Macmillan 2008) p. xi. 3. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. xi. 4. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. 7. 5. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. 7. 6. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. 20 7. Sue-Ellen Case, feminism and theatre p. 20. 8. Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties Vol II (London: Constable & Company 1932 revised 1948) p. 22. 9. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (U.K.: Cambridge University Press 2001) p. 66. 10. Women in Athenian Theatre in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama Fourth Edition ed. W.B.  Worthen (California: Wadsworth Cenage Learning 2004) p. 16. 11. Sue-Ellen Case, “Classic Drag: The Creation of Female Parts” in Theatre Journal. Vol 37 no 3 Staging Gender (Oct. 1985) (pp. 317–327) p. 318.

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12. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 ed. Dan H. Laurence (London. Max Reinhardt 1965) p. 279. 13. Some scholars have argued that Marchbanks’ character is based (at least in part) on W.B. Yeats; however, this chapter argues that Shaw uses Marchbanks as a means with which to interrogate his own art and life choices. Shaw could be describing his own youthful self, the shy, nervous young man who arrived in London in 1876 at twenty years of age. 14. A.M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 187. 15. A.M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 126/27. 16. A.M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life p. 127. 17. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love (London: Chatto & Windus.1988) p. 26. 18. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love p. 26. 19. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 p. 216. 20. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love p. 315/16. 21. Bernard Shaw, Candida Introduction by Peter Gahan Ed Dan H. Laurence (USA: Penguin) p. x. 22. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love p. 315. 23. Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House” The Complete Major Prose Plays Trans and Introduced by Rolf Fjelde, (USA: Penguin 1978) p. 125. 24. Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House” The Complete Major Prose Plays p. 126/27/28. 25. Richard Dietrich, British Drama 1890–1950: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne Publishers 1989) @ http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/britishdrama accessed 10th August 2020. 26. Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House” The Complete Major Prose Plays p.129. 27. Ruth Robbins, Literary Feminisms (Hampshire & New  York: Palgrave 2000) p. 108/09. 28. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama Fourth Edition p. 44. 29. Coincidently (or not) 1882 was also the year that saw the foundation of the Irish Parliamentary Party which evolved from The Home Rule League and was led by Charles Stewart Parnell. This party was instrumental in the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1886,and even though it was defeated, it paved the way for further iterations of it as noted in Chapter One. 30. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love p. 316. 31. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love p. 318. 32. Michael Holroyd,Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power (London: Chatto & Windus 1989) p. 198/99. 33. Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle Trans S.H. Butcher (Project Gutenberg eBook 2008) www.gutenburg.org p. 16/17.

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34. Belfort Bax, E Essays on Socialism: The ‘Monstrous Regiment’ Of Woman from Essays on Socialism New & Old (1907) p 109–119 www.marxist.org/ archive/bax/1907/essays/22-­monstrous.htm. 35. In 1906, the year the Married Woman’s Property Act was amended, Shaw wrote the preface to John Bull’s Other Island which dealt in-depth with the Irish Question and England’s treatment of Ireland, marking it a strong possibility that the two issues were aligned in his thinking. 36. Sue-Ellen Case, Classic Drag: The Creation of Female Parts p. 319. 37. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction p. 75. 38. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction p. 77. 39. Euripides, Medea in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama: Fourth Edition ed. W. B. Worthen (California: Wadsworth Cenage Learning 2004) p. 84. 40. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction p. 84. 41. Sophocles. Antigone An English Version by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Available at https://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ antigone_2.pdf accessed 7th July 2020. 42. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction p. 80. 43. Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle Trans S.H. Butcher (Project Gutenberg eBook 2008) www.gutenburg.org p. 11. 44. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal (USA: Palgrave and Macmillan 2018) p. 172. 45. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 p. 490. 46. Bernard Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go?” The Matter with Ireland eds Dan H.  Lawrence & David H.  Greene (Florida: University of Florida Press 2001) p. 30. 47. Bernard Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go?” The Matter with Ireland p. 30. 48. Bernard Shaw, “Preface for Politicians- Extracts” The Matter with Ireland p. 62. 49. Francis Sheehy Skeffington The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet by Bernard Shaw in The Irish Review (Dublin), Vol. 1, No. 3 (May, 1911), pp.  152–155 Published by: Irish Review (Dublin) p.150.

CHAPTER 4

John Bull, Nora Reilly and the Garden City: A Match Made in “Heavn”

There can be no doubt that Irish historical factors at the turn of the twentieth century influenced the writing of Shaw’s 1904 play, John Bull’s Other Island. The Wyndham Land Act 1903, the fifth such act since 1870, enabled Irish tenant farmers to purchase land from English landlords with financial help in the form of loans from the English government or elsewhere, a fact unheard of prior to this time. Following the Wyndham Act of 1904, further division of landed estates in Ireland commenced. In addition, the Home Rule movement which was the subject on an ongoing debate since the 1870s, was continuing to feed tensions in Ireland and England. However, while these contentious issues of the Irish political scene no doubt inspired Shaw to address such matters in dramatic form, it was what Holroyd terms as the “renaissance in Irish theatre” that prompted Shaw to write his definitive Irish play.1 He was impressed by the productions of the early Irish dramatic movement and was determined to contribute one of his plays to their burgeoning repertory. In watching Irish plays at the Royalty Theatre off Shaftsbury Avenue in London on 24 March 1904—a one day run of matinee and evening performances—Shaw identified a niche in the Irish repertoire that he felt compelled to fill.2 The

Not a spelling error. It’s part of the dialogue between Tim Haffigan and Tom Broadbent in relation to the Garden City discussion. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2_4

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matinee ran “A bill of fare that included Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea”.3 Bearing in mind Shaw’s fascination with Women’s suffrage and the marriage question “it can be no coincidence”, as Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel argues, “that Shaw named his main Irish woman character Nora after seeing J.M. Synge’s Nora in London, as both Noras leave with intruding strangers”.4 However, O’Ceallaigh Ritschel argues that though she is important to the play, “she is not the central character”,5 a fact that will be disputed in this chapter. On the opposite end of the scale Fredrick McDowell asserts “She is the Cathleen ni Houlihan figure whom Shaw views sardonically: she lacks the spiritual force associated with such a female symbol of Ireland by the authors of the Celtic Revival and is, instead, a parasitic and ineffectual lady”.6 While McDowell is quite right that Shaw held a sardonic view of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the mythic spirit of Ireland and the title character in W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play, McDowell has missed the point of Shaw’s Nora Reilly. Cathleen ni Houlihan exhibits themes as a nationalist metaphor to the glory of fighting for Irish independence; she represents the notion of nation as an ethereal feminine entity needing the flesh and blood of her menfolk to free her from a patriarchal coloniser. Yeats said of his idea for the play that he “had a very vivid dream one night and I made Cathleen ni Houlihan out of this dream”.7 In Autobiographies Yeats grudgingly states that it was written with Lady Gregory’s help but continues to refer to it as his play.8 There is a school of thought that argues that while Yeats may have had the idea for the play and wrote the verse dialogue, the structure and the dialect belong to Lady Gregory. Set in Killala on the west coast of Ireland in 1798, the site of a famous Irish rebellion when French soldiers arrived to support an Irish rebellion against British control, the play opens in a peasant cottage on the day before the eldest son, Michael Gillane, is to be married. His father, Peter, and his younger brother Patrick, are sitting at each side of a fire while the mother, Bridget, stands at the kitchen table “undoing a parcel” (Yeats 3). The opening dialogue instantly speaks to the outside world, a world where something unknown is being celebrated. However, within the internal space of the cottage, the family is getting ready to celebrate the wedding. The marriage debate resonates, even in what could be described as a political play, with the talk of the “fortune” (Yeats 4) as Brigid describes it, the dowry of one hundred pounds9 that Delia Cahel is bringing to the house through her marriage to Michael. Themes of ownership and barter loom large as Peter enthuses about the money that has come their way

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[..] money is good […] I never thought to see so much money within my four walls. We can do great things now we have it. We can take the ten acres of land we have the chance of since Jamsie Dempsey died, and stock it. We will go to the fair at Ballina to buy the stock. Did Delia ask for any of the money for her own use, Michael? (Yeats 5)

Michael’s answer in the negative speaks to the thinking of a time when a woman’s property became her husband’s. Though the Marriage Act 1882 was valid for Ireland as well as England, when the play was actually written, the same mentality of ownership persisted and women remained subservient to their husbands. The play takes a dramatic shift when the internal and external worlds collide with the arrival of the Old Woman. C.J.  Watson argues that “Sustained by hopes of getting her ‘four beautiful green fields back’ and ‘putting the strangers out of [her] house, she contemptuously rejects the peasants offer of money—‘if anyone would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all’” (Yeats 8). This is a call to arms; the fields the Old Woman is referring to are the four provinces of Ireland and the “strangers in the house” are the English. Michael McAteer maintains that there is an alternative “stranger in the house”, that being Yeats’s theatrical response to historical process.10 He argues that in The Land of Heart’s Desire and Cathleen ni Houlihan, the fairy child and Cathleen respectively are: “[…] embodiments of the ‘Stranger in the House’ […] and there is a credible basis for regarding them as symbolic manifestations of a fundamental material change in relations between characters”.11,12 Following McAteer’s line of thinking, Yeats appeared to be fashioning, for himself and the Ascendency class, a space that was separate from both that of the peasant and the other “stranger in the house”, colonizing England. His Cathleen portraits are a throw-back to a mythical past that shrouds, even disguises, the Ascendancy class as an ally or benefactor of the peasantry, and the poor. By nature the ruse is socially conservative, which catered to the conservative values of a Dublin audience that enjoyed Cathleen ni Houlihan but objected to Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen.13 Yeats is not only looking backwards politically, but also socially in relation to the emergence of the “new woman”. The character of Cathleen ni Houlihan figured as a counterpoint for Shaw’s female characters in his future plays, and more specifically to his views on a romanticised Irish nationalism which Shaw felt, by 1903, was being perpetrated by the progenitors of the Dublin theatre initiative. It

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was an initiative that strove towards an Irish national theatre. Shaw and Yeats were writing, particularly their plays, from the polar opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to their dramatic thought processes. The realist, or practicable approach Shaw took to his work demanded that he debunk the mythical concept he felt was a staple trope of Irish drama. In his essay on “How to Settle the Irish Question” (1917) he discusses Ireland’s desire for autonomy in the context of the Quebec and Sydney Conventions which led to The British North American Act (1867) and the Australian Commonwealth (1901), respectively, and asserts that “It’s no use pretending that what is good for England, for Scotland, for Quebec, for Ontario, for New South Wales is not good enough for Ireland. Ireland sulking in a corner by herself is nothing; Ireland with her finger in every pie will gather more than her share of the plums”.14 Shaw’s thinking behind this statement points towards his international preference for the future of Ireland. He felt that maintaining an insular approach to national identity would not benefit the country; rather, if Ireland were to look outwards rather than inwards, the political gain would be more beneficial. Shaw created Nora to be a more pragmatic character than Synge’s Nora, who although obtaining a degree of autonomy, leaves for a life of poverty. In setting her against the spiritual ideal of freedom at any price, or for no price in the case of Nora Burke, it is quite possible that Shaw now saw the opportunity through his Nora character to openly challenge the notional ideal of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the nationalist symbol of the Irish National Theatre Society, thereby making her central to the plot. In essence, Shaw “fashioned the play to prove a point: the unifying vision of a dreamy, romantic Ireland was invented by the Celtic Renaissance” and as such bore no resemblance to reality.15 After all, Shaw’s Larry Doyle in Act I rejects Cathleen ni Houlihan and the illusion she represents. Declan Kiberd argues that the architects of the neo-Gaelic movement were not the only ones with a hand in the construction of a fantasy for “if Ireland never existed, the English would have invented it”.16 While this may have been so, Ireland did exist, and what was actually happening within the neo-Gaelic movement was a re-invention of Ireland to counteract the perceived homelessness of the Ascendancy class. This narrative of an imagined Ireland was born out of a class awareness of being “English to the Irish” and “Irish to the English”. Shaw set about exposing the reality that Ireland as an imagined space would never survive and needed to see beyond her own borders and seek a more international perspective, as he himself had achieved. Otherwise the fate of the play’s western village of Rosscullen,

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held back by the small and stunted minds of its inhabitants, might become a reality for Ireland as a nation. Shaw’s Nora subverts and exposes the Yeatsian/Gregory Cathleen as a so-called femme fatale that creates a stagnant quagmire with little hope of a resolution. In Act I of John Bull’s Other Island, Tom Broadbent, the soon-to-be realized conquering Englishman, challenges Larry Doyle, the self-exiled Irishman, wondering if she [Nora] is the “reason for your reluctance to come to Ireland with me” (CPP II: 522). There is a shared history between Nora and Doyle that he (Doyle) appears loath to revisit. The implication is that what Doyle (and Shaw) is resisting is the mythical call to the young men of Ireland for the so-called greater sacrifice to the Shan Van Vocht, the Cathleen Ni Houlihan figure, to restore her “four green fields” in order to achieve independence for Ireland. Shaw’s view is that it is not “the old” that is needed for restoration but “the new” and “the young”, a subject he deals with in his later 1916 (though not performed until 1920) play, Heartbreak House through the character of Ellie Dunn.17 He reveals a pattern of stagnation in John Bull’s Other Island through Doyle’s return to Rosscullen and how the mythical symbolism of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Sean Van Vocht, perpetrates that inertia. Through the union of Tom Broadbent and Nora Reilly and her rejection by Larry Doyle, Shaw explores the Irish political situation of the first decade of the twentieth century. The idea of a failed love story and seemingly successful future marriage transects notions of colonization and nationalism. There are patterns of exchange evident in this play that are reminiscent of Widower’s Houses where marriage, property, and social position become the primary reason for marriage. However, Nora, like Blanche, has some control over her own agency and appears to make a calculated decision to marry Broadbent in order to change her status when she is rejected by Doyle through his inability to effectively interact with her. One fact that emerges is that Nora wants to be married; her acceptance of Broadbent’s proposal, when she will wait no further for Doyle, demonstrates that there is always more than one choice. Bearing this in mind, the question posed by Doyle’s romantic ineptness towards her takes on a more nationalistic nuance when considering the implication that a marriage between the two could have signified a “united” Irish marriage. Doyle’s failure, however, to express his love for her through the previous eighteen years and in their first scene together in Act III, forces an English and Irish union, echoing the Home Rule versus Independence for Ireland debate. Nora’s character though faced with a similar dilemma to Blanche

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Sartorius’s character in relation to class and property, moves one step further to represent woman as nation. She would marry a future Liberal MP—the Pro-Home Rule English Party since 1886 that was on the political threshold to return to power in late 1905, which Shaw and many others most likely anticipated, after the long years of Conservative Governments.18 Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Irish-American actress Ada Rehan, said of the composition of John Bull’s Other Island, that “This is the first time I have tried my hand on Ireland: and, of course, being an Irishman, I get a quality into the play that is quite unlike anything in any other plays. It is not particularly complimentary to either the English or the Irish; but it is fascinating”.19 Written under the working title Rule Britannia, John Bull’s Other Island is Shaw’s only full-length play to be set largely in Ireland. The debate on whether Yeats invited Shaw to write a play at this particular time is widely documented. Michael Holroyd, for example, in his biography of Shaw, states that in 1904 Yeats asked Shaw to write his next play as “a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre”.20,21 M.J. Sidnell contends that Yeats did invite Shaw to write a play, but that was in 1901 and Yeats’s intention was that Shaw would “stir things up still further” at a time when the Irish revival was growing.22 The final word has to go to Shaw himself who stated in “Preface for Politicians”, that he “wrote the play at the request of Mr. William Butler Yeats” (CPP II: 443). Clearly there was an understanding that included Shaw, as he would not have been a silent bystander in the process. In a letter to his translator Siegfried Trebitsch in October 1903, he mentioned that his “next play is to be an Irish one”.23 He began writing John Bull’s Other Island in June 1904.24 John Bull’s Other Island betrays, to devastating effect, the twilight reveries of the Celtic Revival by exposing the brutal realities of Irish rural poverty and exploitation. Shaw claims that, Yeats, like anyone else who asked him to write a play, got more than he bargained for (CPP II: 443). The play is incredibly long, some thirty-two thousand words. In taking the opportunity to dramatically interrogate the state of the relationship between Ireland and England in 1904, Shaw demonstrated how little sympathy he had for the romantic Ireland of Yeats, and felt that Yeats’s use of the Irish myth of Cathleen Ní Houlihan was outdated and unrealistic. It is in Act I that Larry Doyle dismisses the reliance on the Cathleen myth: “An Irishman […] dreams of what the Sean Van Vocht said in ninety-­ eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland youve got to call the

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unfortunate island [K]athleen ni Hollihan [sic] and pretend she’s a little old woman” (CPP II: 517). Shaw, in correspondence with J.L. Shine, who played Doyle in the 1904 Royal Court production, stated, of this particular speech, that the audience “will perhaps laugh at Yeats’s expense when you mention [K]athleen ni Hoolihan”[sic].25 Yeats rejected the play, despite realizing the potential of staging a work by such an internationally renowned playwright. In a letter to Lady Gregory, Yeats stated of the play that he “really didn’t like it. It is fundamentally shapeless and ugly”.26 However, he was not quite so blunt with Shaw, citing as his reason for passing on the play the impracticality of staging such a momentous drama in the soon-to-open Abbey Theatre with its excessively small stage. Shaw, in turn, felt the real reason was “it was uncongenial to the spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which was bent on creating a New Ireland after its own ideal”, and that it was in essence “very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland” (CPP II: 443). For his part, Shaw felt that the distance created by his living in England endowed him with a clarity of vision unavailable to those he had left behind.27 Shaw’s critical assessment, of course, happens through the dramatic action and dialogue, and hinges on the trope of marriage to illuminate his perception of the Irish question. The character of Nora Reilly is pivotal to the central themes of the play, from which concepts of ownership evolve, specifically pertaining to land, women, and nation. Before analysing the text of the play, it is important to look at the stage directions that had reportedly caused the Irish Theatre considerable problems. There is no doubt that Shaw’s stage directions and scenery appear complicated. Lewis Casson, in conversation with Basil Langton, maintained that Shaw was not “really interested in the scenery” but solely in the interpretation of the words of the play and “didn’t care about the appearance at all”.28 Jan MacDonald argues against this, stating that Shaw’s rehearsal notebooks prove the opposite is the case.29 Indeed, in a letter to Yeats while writing his play, Shaw inquired as to what he could “depend on in the way of modern appliances, if any” in the Abbey Theatre, months away from its opening. Continuing in his letter, he suggested that since Yeats’s work “dealt in fairy plays” Yeats may have “indulged [..]in hydraulic bridges”.30 Shaw’s attitude towards Yeats’s dramatic focus with Cathleen was, from all angles for the realist Shaw, a procession of fantasy and nothing more.31 Shaw’s instructions in his rehearsal notebook on staging John Bull’s Other Island demonstrate, contrary to Casson’s statement, that he was very interested in the entire production: “The same

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mountain scene will do for the three scenes in Act II but in the second scene, the stone must be removed, the round tower pushed as a wing and the scene disguised by the change of lighting. Sc. I Act IV must be shallow as the hill must be ready set behind it: for the change must not occupy more than one minute at the very outside”.32 In using the excuse of staging difficulties with Shaw’s momentous Irish play, Yeats and the members of the Irish National Theatre Society were acting with a somewhat untruthful diplomacy. They were aware of Shaw’s growing international reputation and needed to maintain an open door for future productions. Both William Fay and Yeats have been quoted voicing their dislike of the play after seeing it staged in the Court Theatre, which paradoxically also had a small stage, in November 1904.33 There is no doubt that there were difficulties to be dealt with in the staging of the play, but an imaginative director could have overcome these especially in light of innovative staging that was being introduced by Gordon Craig as a “revolt against the elaborate productions of Irving and Beerbohm Tree”— and of which Yeats was well-versed in 1904.34 St John Ervine states that Yeats “had borrowed some foolish notions from Mr. Gordon Craig about lighting and scenery […]. He [Yeats] had a model of the Abbey Theatre in his rooms and was fond of experimenting with it”.35 Noting Yeats’s familiarity with Craig and his work, it gives lie to reasoning behind the rejection. In addition, having seen the Royal Theatre performances of the Irish troupe, Shaw was also au-fait with Craig’s new approach to staging and Yeats’s knowledge of it, though Shaw would not have agreed with what St John Ervine termed as “the de-humanisation of the actors” that was part of this new school of design. Shaw’s notes determine that he had intended painted backdrops to be used, which considerably reduced the number of three-dimensional props needed.36 The most intricate part of staging was the change between the first and second acts but this was not an insurmountable problem. Yeats could have consulted Craig for scenic ideas and alternative ways to handle Shaw’s settings. However, as St John Ervine maintains, “Yeats was antipathetic to Shaw, despite his reluctant admiration for some of his work; and he was exceedingly obtuse and stupid about qualities which he himself did not possess”.37 O’Ceallaigh Ritschel argues that the main reason for rejecting Shaw’s play was because Yeats was not going to open the Abbey Theatre in December 1904 “with any play other than his On Baile’s Strand”.38 For the same reason, Yeats delayed Synge’s three act The Well of Saints that was ready and in early rehearsals during the 1904 summer. It did not premier

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until February 1905, well after the Abbey’s opening weeks.39 Ironically, as Anthony Roche argues, all three plays are similar “in structure and concern and appear strongly motivated by the desire to address the historical moment in which an Irish theatre was coming into being”.40 It is valid to reason that Yeats’s ego was not going to let the Abbey be opened with Shaw’s play or Synge’s play, or any play other than his new play. Shaw knew of Yeats’s ego, as did Synge. Irvine argues that “Shaw’s energy seemed vulgar to Yeats, who confused languor and inertia with aristocratic calm and poise”.41 Nonetheless, the decision not to stage the play was a political one. John Bull’s Other Island can be described as epic. The subject of the play, that of the accumulation of land for a syndicate and which could be read on the larger scale of empire (a trope which is to come up again in Heartbreak House in 1916), is presented through its four main characters, Tom Broadbent, Larry Doyle, Peter Keegan, and Nora Reilly. By positioning Nora’s character as being central to the plot, even when not on stage, Shaw essentially positions the question of marriage in relation to change, ownership, and nation to revolve around her through the dialogue of the other three. Broadbent and Doyle are partners in a company Doyle and Broadbent Civil Engineers in Westminster, London. It is Broadbent’s intention to go to Rosscullen, Doyle’s childhood home, to foreclose on a mortgage. Doyle is distraught by this, guided by a romantic childhood memory, rather than any real affection for the person who is to be evicted. Doyle’s pragmatic personality is revealed when he speaks about Rosscullen: “Rosscullen! oh, good Lord, Rosscullen! The dullness! the hopelessness! the ignorance! the bigotry!” (CPP II: 516) The arrival of Broadbent and Doyle to Rosscullen signifies change. While Broadbent, the Englishman, is definitely the “stranger in the house”, equally Doyle, the Irishman, is the “internal stranger” who finds on his arrival that very little, if anything, has changed in his eighteen-year absence. Even more so, his estrangement with Rosscullen is mirrored through Broadbent’s vision for the area. What Broadbent sees as opportunity, Doyle sees as a “changing of the guard” as it were, where no advantageous progress will be made for the inhabitants of Rosscullen—rather, it will be quite the opposite as Doyle well understands. They will merely be swapping one master for another. Doyle’s decision to return to Ireland is one that is made reluctantly and the reason for that reluctance becomes clear when he mentions Nora Reilly, while discussing the trip with Broadbent in Act I. Although Nora does not appear physically until Act II, she features very prominently at

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the end of the previous act through the dialogue between Doyle and Broadbent. It is the first time that Doyle has mentioned Nora to his long-­ time business partner and friend Broadbent, who later in the conversation declares he “caught a name that is new to me: a Miss Nora Reilly” (CPP II: 522). The reason for Doyle’s omission becomes obvious as Nora seems to symbolize the stagnation that Doyle associates with his birth place, and his inability to resolve his feelings for her, and for Ireland. The trichotomy of Nora, Doyle, and Broadbent represents, thematically, the state of affairs between Ireland and England, with Nora embodying a subversion—or a realistic version—of the Shan Van Vocht. Doyle embodies, in turn, the self-exiled Irishman, and Broadbent, the modern and efficient conquering Englishman. The equation reflects for Shaw the Ireland of 1904 accented by the previous eighteen years that Doyle had lived in England, having left the year the first Home Rule Bill went before the British Parliament. Doyle’s memory of Nora over those years reflects the unresolvable process toward Home Rule that was marred by its 1886 defeat and the attempts in the intervening years up to 1904 to recover the prospects of the bill. In addition, there was the ruin of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s leader and chief advocate for Home Rule, Charles Stewart Parnell, through the moralistic 1890–1891 scandal over what Shaw considered was an archaic marriage law (addressed directly in Getting Married). The Ireland that Doyle returns to, within the context of the recent Land Acts, is ripe for modern capitalization, to be delivered by Broadbent, the syndicate he represents, and his partner, the returning Doyle. Broadbent’s idea of conquering Ireland, or at least Rosscullen, is self-serving. Although he states that he supports Home Rule, he is solely in Ireland for his own profit, and not England’s, and he represents the new colonizer that Shaw depicts who is more dangerous than the old colonizers. Rather than creating a global image for the betterment of the country, Shaw has set up a scenario that demonstrates the insularity of capitalism. To interpret the capitalist onslaught, Peter Keegan, a defrocked priest who embraces the socialistic nature of the New Testament, becomes the voice that exposes the shambolic nature of the future plans for the development of Rosscullen. Shaw said of Keegan’s character that he was “a part apart”. Keegan is also, according to Shaw, instilled with “patriotic emotion […] with his island of the saints”.42 The character of Peter Keegan is set up contrary to the character of Broadbent and, though he has what Shaw described as “patriotic emotion”, in actual fact he represents the internationality that Shaw envisioned for Ireland.43 Similar to what the

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Tramp in Synge’s The Shadow envisions, Keegan has seen “wonders I had never seen in Ireland”, and returned to Ireland with an outlook that transcends the insularity of a nation struggling for a national and independent identity (CPP II: 533). In raising the question about the difference between Ireland and England, Shaw muses, “How can I sketch the broad lines of the contrast as they strike me” (CPP II: 448). It was a rhetorical question for the answer was already well formed in his mind: “the Englishman is wholly at the mercy of his imagination, having no sense of reality to check it. The Irishman, with far subtler and more fastidious imagination has one eye always on things as they are” (CPP II: 448). Ignorance of the Irish/ English situation manifests itself from the opening of Act I when Tom Broadbent asks his valet Hodson to repack the luggage he had just returned with from another trip, and to include his revolver, which Doyle has been using as a paperweight (CPP II: 504). Hodson enquires, “Is it a dangerous part you’re going to, sir?” (CPP II: 504). Broadbent replies that he is going to Ireland, and the ensuing conversation between the two men sets the scene for the duplicity that is to follow with the introduction of Tim Haffigan, whom Shaw constructed as a “stage Irishman”, a notion which will be blown apart when the sardonic Larry Doyle appears on stage. The conversation between Broadbent and Haffigan demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge about Ireland or anything Irish. It was foreign territory even though it was a part of the “great” British Empire. Tim Haffigan’s dialogue with Broadbent contained all the expected phrases that are a measure of the Irishman’s authenticity in the eyes of the Englishman, Broadbent. With the entrance of Larry Doyle, Haffigan knows his ruse is soon to be exposed. Broadbent introduces Doyle as a fellow countryman of his. Haffigan’s “brogue” changes its tone, although Broadbent remains oblivious to the change. The sharpness of the dialogue as Doyle picks apart Haffigan’s claims that he is of Irish nationality demonstrates the stereotypical image with which the Irish are presented to the English and also exposes the gullibility of the English Broadbent in believing the farce. Accent is very much played with by Shaw as a barometer of identity, as will be discussed in the next chapter with Pygmalion, for even though the play’s Eliza is tutored to have a “genteel accent” fooling all at the ambassador’s ball, her working class roots are still deeply entrenched in her psyche. Arguably, the Scottish Haffigan plays with the Irish accent to suit his own ends with Broadbent, as Eliza uses her newly acquired accent to benefit her situation in life. Broadbent’s contempt for Haffigan,

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“he’s only an Irishman”, soon turns to amazement when Doyle informs him that he was not an Irishman at all (CPP II: 513). The ignorance of the Englishman comes into play once again when he says, “But he spoke-he behaved just like an Irishman” (CPP II: 513). Doyle reiterates how easily an image can be copied and acted upon when there are “romantic duffers” to believe them. Shaw, in destroying the notion of the stage Irishman also destroys the romantic view with which images of Ireland are held by the non-Irish, especially by those who envision domination over their romantically perceived inferiors. The second scene in Act I conceals Broadbent and Doyle’s motives for making an Irish trip. In addition, the problematic topic introduced in this Act is the question of land, and Home Rule, as revealed in the discussion on the commodification of Rosscullen by the Land Development Syndicate that Broadbent, and Doyle, are part of. Declan Kiberd argues that “Shaw was another Irishman who used England as a laboratory in which he could redefine what it meant to be Irish”.44 This holds true for the experimentation that takes place within John Bull’s Other Island when Shaw introduces Ebenezer Howard’s utopian vision of the Garden City concept. The brainchild of Howard, whom Shaw had befriended in 1879 at a Zetetical Society debate, the Garden City concept was first introduced in a short book entitled To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) later republished under its better-known title, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).45 As Elizabeth Outka explains: Howard’s compact book introduced the modern idea of a planned development, a community designed specifically to correct the haphazard and destructive expansion of urban industrial centers. Garden Cities provided a blueprint for limiting growth and for concentrating housing; more important, it envisioned an unexpected but tantalizing combination of a deliberately constructed “authentic” English country life with a vibrant industrial city.46

Howard’s innovative urban model, the roots of which can be traced to the earlier planned factory towns of Bourneville and Port Sunlight, established a utopian vision of community premised on synthesis: “Town and city must be married and out of that joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation”.47 The first Garden City was built in 1903 at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, close by where, as Sidney P.  Albert states, Shaw was then living at The Old House (Harmer Green, Welwyn) prior to

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establishing his final residence at Ayot St. Lawrence.48 As Albert notes, “Shaw has been depicted as both an early supporter and as an early critic of the Garden City movement. Paradoxically both interpretations appear to be true”.49 In addition to John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw’s sceptical attitude toward Howard’s Garden City, particularly the susceptibility of the concept to mercenary capitalist motives, also appears in Major Barbara (1905), where Perivale St. Andrews is unmasked as a factory town built on the manufacture of armaments. For Outka, these two very different plays present an insightful guide to the critical role that the commodified authentic may play in constructing entire communities, exposing both its rapacious underside, and its surprising power.50 In exposing the proposed commodification of Rosscullen, Shaw in essence, maps a very realistic future of what life could be like for Ireland under the rule of England if she does not embrace a more international and efficient vision. Shaw’s portrayal of Nora Reilly acts as the link between fantasy and reality. Nora may seem to be insulated from any exterior influences as she has never left Rosscullen; however, she is not blinded to an exterior opportunity when it is presented to her in the form of Broadbent. The Shavian message is that insular blindness, which has been adopted by nationalist idealists, needs to extend its reach into a more international forum for true independence to be achieved. Shaw’s attack on the Garden City concept begins with Tom Broadbent’s self-serving investment plans for a new community in Ireland. The analogy for the Garden City concept is to highlight the bigger problem of the commodification of Ireland. Broadbent outlines the Rosscullen project with Tim Haffigan in Act I, who Broadbent hopes will help him win over the local population. Broadbent. Have you ever heard of Garden City? Tim [doubtfully]. D’ye mane Heavn? Broadbent. Heaven! No: it’s near Hitchin. If you can spare half an hour I’ll go into it with you. Tim. I tell you hwat. Gimme a prospectus. Lemmy take it home and reflect on it. Broadbent. Youre quite right: I will. [He gives him a copy of Ebenezer Howard’s book, and several pamphlets.] You understand that the map of the city—the circular construction—is only a suggestion. Tim. I’ll make a careful note o that [looking dazedly at the map]. Broadbent. What I say is, why not start a Garden City in Ireland? (CPP II: 508)

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Shaw has exposed Broadbent, as David Clare argues, to be hypocritical, racist, tactless, and full of a ruthless and heartless money-making instinct that regularly offends Irish sensibilities.51 In creating the scenario of a mortgage foreclosure as a reason for Broadbent’s trip to Ireland, Shaw has set up the capitalist element of colonization by introducing the commodification of Rosscullen. In reality, Rosscullen can be seen to represent Ireland as a whole, and in the Shavian ideal, exposes the scenario when insular vision and the greed of capitalism stifle rather than support the growth of an independent nationalist state. Act II opens with a man who is later identified as Keegan, the defrocked priest, talking to a grasshopper. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel states this scene “directly mocks [J.M.] Synge’s nationalized use of Irish cultural traditions of embracing nature”.52 In setting Peter Keegan up as a modern-day Mosses, the antithesis to Broadbent, Shaw is creating another dimension to the unfolding plot. Broadbent is a rogue, albeit one who uses his charm to achieve his own goals. Although he appears on the surface to anticipate the idealistic English Lieutenant Yolland in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), nothing could be further from the truth. Yolland, unlike Broadbent, is a romantic who commits himself to the language and culture of Ireland. R.K.R. Thornton argues convincingly that despite Friel’s documented dislike of Shaw, he was heavily influenced by John Bull’s Other Island in the writing of Translations.53,54 Thornton compares the two plays and maintains that Shaw’s drama “moves … from a consciousness of the self-satisfied smugness of the English and their zeal to ‘improve’ the country while having a culpable blindness and ignorance about its nature, to an exploration of the self-destructiveness of the Irish people’s dream of themselves”.55 In Broadbent, it seems that Shaw creates a “stage Englishman” who, up until this point, appears little more than a blithering idiot who demonstrates smugness.56 True to Shavian form, however, this notion is corrected in Act IV.  Shaw’s dialectical mode of thinking and writing typically examines key issues without engineering resolutions and John Bull’s Other Island is no exception. Broadbent may well be ignorant as to the culture and ways of the Irish people, but he is assured when it comes to his own powers of persuasion. He has a definite purpose for his journey to Ireland and it is quite mercenary. His scheme to transform Rosscullen into a Garden City, comprising of a sweeping vision that is not

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born from any romantic propensity. This “sweeping vision” for the landscape is commercial and smacks of colonization, as in the end Nora the local heiress, becomes part of the acquirement of the local landscape. Broadbent [sincerely moved, shaking his hand warmly]. You shall never regret it, Mr. Keegan; I give you my word for that. I shall bring money here: I shall raise wages: I shall found public institutions: a library, a Polytechnic [undenominational, of course], a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a Garden City of Rosscullen: the round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored. (CPP II: 606)

Keegan, for his part as the rational Irishman, though viewed as mad, acknowledges Broadbent as the “conquering Englishman”, stating that: Within twenty-four hours of your arrival, you have carried off our only heiress, and practically secured the parliamentary seat. And you have promised me that when I come here in the evenings to meditate on my madness; to watch the shadow of the Round Tower lengthening in the sunset; to break my heart uselessly in the curtained gloaming over the dead heart and blinded soul of the island of the saints, you will comfort me with the bustle of a great hotel and the sight of the little children carrying the golf clubs of your tourists as a preparation for the life to come. (CPP II: 602)

There is a note of irony when Keegan describes Nora as our only heiress. Ben Levitas argues that “Shaw’s revelation of Nora Reilly’s income casts light on the relative poverty of Ireland while ironically acknowledging the difference in wealth between his wife and the Rosscullen heiress”.57 It also casts light on the capitalist nature of English colonization; when reading woman as nation, Nora represents the wealth of Ireland, small though it may be, and this wealth is something that will be subsumed by the efficient English conqueror as represented by Broadbent. In conversation with Keegan, Broadbent showers both the Irish and Ireland with platitudes, but Shaw is intent on exposing the latter’s motives as mercenary: “this place may have an industrial future, or it may have a residential future: I cant tell yet; but it’s not going to be a future in the hands of your Dorans or Haffigans, poor devils!” (CPP II: 603/04). Of course, the future of Nora Reilly will also be under Broadbent’s control, or at least seemingly so for Broadbent. For Elizabeth Outka, Broadbent has “no intention of pursuing the Garden City ideal; rather, Broadbent’s plan for Rosscullen

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represents a corruption of Howard’s concept, using the ideal as a cover for the exploitation of Rosscullen”.58 As she explains, the term: does not imply a search for authenticity per se but rather a sustained contradiction that might allow consumers at once connected to a range of values roughly aligned with authenticity and yet also be fully modern […] The urge to construct, but, reproduce, package and sell a range of images and ideas clustered around authenticity and the new literary works that recognized, critiqued, and exploited the phenomenon for innovative literary ends.59

At the heart of Outka’s analysis lies the paradoxical concept of the “commodified authentic”, a complex phenomenon with multiple strategic applications that emerged in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century Britain that impacted commercial and literary culture in diverse ways. Broadbent’s inner vision for Rosscullen involves a distortion of the “authentic” concept that Howard envisioned; it was to go one step further by attempting to commodify Nora. By the end of the play, while Broadbent thinks he is the one who has gained, Nora has made sure that she will not be left behind again. Nora Reilly makes her appearance in the second scene of Act II when she locates Keegan. Nora is a woman in waiting; she has never left Rosscullen and is apprehensive about meeting Larry Doyle with whom she possibly had an understanding with—before he settled in London. Shaw designed Nora to be the antithesis to Yeats’s and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Yeatsian use of the cycle Cathleen myth presents the old hag who bewitches young men to fight for Irish independence, which romantically transforms her into a beautiful young woman. Shaw, in response, turns the Yeats’s image on its head by the presentation of a woman approaching middle-age whose actions are self-serving and practical, suggesting a much different Ireland with different needs in 1904 than the Ireland presented in the 1902 Cathleen ni Houlihan. One construct presents a practical and realist approach to Ireland on the threshold of modernization; the other recalls a mythic fantasy within the litany of Irish political disasters. The dialogue between Nora and Keegan is for Nora to ascertain what to expect when Larry Doyle returns to Rosscullen. When she plucks the heather in the middle of their conversation, Keegan chastises her saying, “Dear Miss Nora: dont pluck the little flower. If it was a pretty baby you wouldnt want to pull its head off and stick it in a vawse o

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water to look at” (CPP II: 532). This comment metaphorically reflects their conversation, the implication being that things taken forcefully from their natural habitat begin to die the minute they are uprooted. Larry Doyle, of course, later disagrees with this sentiment when he tells Nora in Act IV that “one does stick frightfully in the same place, unless some external force comes and routs one out” (CPP II: 588). Keegan essentially agrees with the need to broaden one’s horizons as he tells Nora about his travels and the wonders he had seen: “When I went to those great cities I saw wonders I had never seen in Ireland. But when I came back to Ireland I found all those wonders there waiting for me. You see they had been there all the time; but my eyes had never been opened to them. I did not know what my own house was like, because I had never been outside it” (CPP II: 533). However, it is doubtful that he would agree with Doyle’s belief that force should play a part in opening the mind to new directions. What is at issue, is the need for a new direction for Nora and, by transference, Ireland. Nora had sparked Broadbent’s interest in Act I when Doyle had mentioned her in passing. The capitalizing Broadbent questioned Doyle about her then, and Doyle informed him that he had once been romantic about her, just as he was romantic about Byron’s heroines, but added that she counted no more than they did. Through the conversation, Broadbent himself developed romantic notions, or at least an interest for Nora, telling Doyle “There is something very touching about the history of this beautiful girl”. Doyle’s reply “Beau-! Oho! Heres a chance for Nora and for me!” (CPP II: 526). It was then that Doyle consented to go to Ireland with Broadbent. The Act II meeting between Nora and Broadbent introduces a semblance of a love theme to the proceedings, but this is reduced to a farce by Broadbent’s nonsensical proposal to a woman he had only just met. The pragmatic Irish nature presents itself once more when Nora tells Broadbent “Oh, get along with you, Mr. Broadbent! Youre breaking your heart about me already, I daresay, after seeing me in the dark for two minutes” (CPP II: 543). Excusing him for being drunk, she tells him that he “will be able to judge better in the morning” (CPP II: 546). Shaw’s stage directions at this point amount to a running commentary on the difference between an Englishman and an Irishman: “And he has no suspicion of the fact or of her ignorance of it, that when an Englishman is sentimental he behaves very much as an Irishman does when he is drunk” (CPP II: 546). The proposal is very much a commentary on the colonization of Ireland. Shaw spins a new take on colonization as Nora does not swoon at

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Broadbent’s feet with his marriage proposal, which the English colonizer in him expects and as Clare maintains “Broadbent seems completely unaware of how foolish he appears to the Irish”.60 In fact, she dismisses him and then undermines his self-perceived superiority by deflecting him and his proposal to own her by informing him that he is drunk—which, in turn, transforms the old English colonizing stereotype of the Irish as being drunk. Not only has Nora become the benchmark of control and power, she takes on the role of colonizer over Broadbent—just as Shaw came to see himself in London as colonizing the English. Chesterton maintains that “Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an Irishman”.61 In a previous analysis of Shaw’s Nora, Gareth Griffith maintains that: His [Shaw] portrayal of Irish womanhood, Nora from John Bull’s […] in particular, w[as] in part deliberate Shavian commentar[y] on the nationalist habit of presenting the romantic spirit of Ireland in a female form. More especially, his ignorant Nora […] w[as] his own commentar[y] on Yeat’s [sic] mythology of Cathleen Ni Hoolihan [sic] who calls the young men of Ireland to battle. Shaw’s portraits of Irish womanhood were, by way of contrast, savagely critical. In a backward land the women were the most backward of all, symbolizing not romantic hope, but the waste that belongs to the bitter heart.62

This analysis of Nora is rather damning and is an inaccurate depiction of her character. It may have made sense, perhaps, to Shaw’s contemporary, the socialist James Connolly. In his 1915 The Re-Conquest of Ireland, Connolly lamented that economically working-class Irish women were the “slaves of the slaves”.63 Although Nora is not working class but the daughter of a landlord, the analogy of women, in general, as slaves within a marriage holds firm as discussed in the previous chapter. Shaw had used the word “slave” in the Preface to Getting Married some seven years before Connolly penned it. Both Shaw and Connolly would have acquired the notion of women as slaves from Marx as they both began with his ideas politically. By late 1915, Connolly was re-thinking the potential of all Irish women as he increased his preparations for April 1916 Dublin revolution. Connolly at that time was entrusting more and more of his rebellion plans in his socialistic Irish Citizen Army to his women comrades, such as officers Helena Moloney, Kathleen Lynn, Constance Markievicz, and Winifred Carney to name but a few of his lieutenants. The former two were among

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the rebel garrison during the Easter Rising that fired on Dublin Castle, the seat of British colonial power in Ireland. Markievicz was second-in-­ command of the rebel garrison in St. Stephen’s Green, and Carney wrote the dispatches with Connolly from the rebel headquarters in the General Post Office garrison. Shaw knew in 1904, as Connolly later knew, the nation-­building potential of Irish women. This nation building was to be carried further after 1916 by the likes of Anna Haslam, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, and, of course, Lady Augusta Gregory, who represented many Irish women during Ireland’s bid for independence. It must be remembered that patriarchal dominance after the War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Civil War (1922–1923) ensured that women, and their role in the fight for Irish independence were, if not written out of history, certainly silenced in it. The penultimate Act of the play is particularly significant because it is here that Larry Doyle takes centre-stage, even as a shadowy figure. Frederick P. W. McDowell describes Doyle as operating midway between Broadbent and Keegan in the “dialectical pattern” of the play; or, to put it another way, Doyle is an idealist, but he is also aware of the necessity of maintaining the life he has built for himself.64 Like Hugh in the much later Translations, Doyle is aware that there is no point in hiding behind dreams and theories. As Hugh remarks, “It can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a contour which no longer matches a landscape of … fact”.65 Doyle’s vision for Ireland is an internationalist one in that he wants Ireland’s future with: “the brains and the imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe Island” (CPP II: 521). At this point in the play, Shaw focuses the land question around two very powerful forces: the Catholic Church, with its moral hold on the life of the nation, and the colonizing presence of Britain, whose stranglehold on the Irish political scene discounts all possibilities for Home Rule. As Shaw contends in the play’s preface, “the British government and the Vatican may differ vehemently as to whose subject the Irishman is to be: but they are quite agreed as to the propriety of his being a subject” (CPP II: 457). Shaw examines the consequences of this perpetually subjugating situation through the voice of Doyle when a meeting convenes to offer Larry a seat in Parliament in Act III. In what is quite possibly the most dramatic dialogue in the play, Shaw, through Doyle, critiques the economic and political realities underpinning the transference of land from the landlord system to those that work the land. When it comes to land ownership, the same rules apply: there is always a tiered system regardless of whether or not the

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owner is English or Irish. Doyle castigates the group: “But I tell you plump and plain, Matt, that if anybody thinks things will be better now that the land is handed over to little men like you, without calling you to account either, theyre mistaken” (CPP II: 560). The central power figure in this scene is the priest, Father Dempsey. With mock humility, he leaves it up to Cornelius Doyle to broach the subject of the election with his son, stating: “No, no: go on, you: the Church has no politics” (CPP II: 556). But there is a political aspect to Dempsey’s reasoning as he is focused on making money for the church. He supports Doyle as MP because he already lives in England, has his own income from his civil engineering business, therefore the constituency would not have to fund his living expenses. This would enhance the Church’s coffers. This is probably why he is so outraged when Doyle suggests that they pay labourers like Patsy Farrell £1 a week (CPP II: 561). This would ultimately reduce income to the Church. Nonetheless, Father Dempsey actively participates in the meeting, directing the pace and setting the tone of the meeting while the others bow to his superior position. There is empathy between Doyle and Father Dempsey: they both understand the realities of Irish life—land is religion to the Irishman. Moreover, they are both educated men who are secure in terms of their respective position and know what is needed to copper-fasten the safety valve of the community in order to restrict outside interference to a minimum. Doyle, lacking commitment, does not wish to place himself in a position of power for Ireland. As a returning internal stranger, he feels that the changes he would make would be unwelcome as they would echo Broadbent’s plans for the community, thus depriving Rosscullen of any future autonomy and independence—with rural Rosscullen representing Ireland. Doyle, by sitting on the fence, proves to be as mercenary as Broadbent. His brand of internationality is hollow despite his earlier protestations that he wishes Ireland to be “the brains and imagination of the commonwealth” (CPP II: 521). His actions in supporting Broadbent and the Syndicate’s plan demonstrate that his vested interest is in keeping Rosscullen and, in effect Ireland, insular and its native population subjugated. This is in line with the earlier diagnosis he gave to Matt Haffigan in relation to land ownership. As a consequence, he bows out of the race, leaving the group to discuss a less unorthodox successor. Doyle is pressed as to his reasoning for refusing to become the parliamentary candidate. At first, he merely tells Father Dempsey that he has opinions that would not suit him, the priest. However, as Doyle is

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pressured, the other characters become suspicious and ask the priest to question Doyle as to his intentions regarding the land. Doyle’s rapier-like replies cause consternation to everyone except Father Dempsey. Through this exchange, Shaw demonstrates that those already in positions of power have little to fear, whereas those whose power is newly acquired are in a far more tenuous position and as such feel much less secure. It also returns to the earlier point of political complacency. The climax comes when Doyle suggests that the Catholic Church be disestablished, with stage directions indicating that this is a moment of Sensation (CPP II: 562). Doyle’s speech, as Shaw intends, is designed to cause maximum shock. In the end, it is only the priest who wants Doyle to take the seat, stating that “dheres more in your head than the comb will take out” (CPP II: 564). Moreover, Shaw himself applauds Doyle when he has Broadbent congratulate him (Doyle) on his “really brilliant eloquence” (CPP II: 563). Despite this eloquence, Doyle is ultimately yet again side stepping any public commitment to Ireland and is just as complicit in political and social complacency as Haffigan, Doran, and the others. It is at this point that Broadbent puts himself forward as the new candidate, a fact that also suits Father Dempsey for the same financial reasons that he supported Doyle. Broadbent operates in a roundabout, but relentlessly capitalistic fashion, planting the idea in the minds of his companions, a tactic designed to make them think they have come up with it themselves. He, from all angles, capitalizes on the opportunity that presents itself once Doyle has removed himself from consideration as the candidate. The characters present recognize his sudden effort to grab the candidacy, but are without the knowledge that he is working to take their lands. However, Broadbent is living up to Doyle’s earlier analogy of Broadbent’s English character as akin to that of a caterpillar. Doyle maintained that “A caterpillar when it gets into a tree, instinctively makes itself look like a leaf; so that both its enemies and its prey may mistake it for one and think it not worth bothering about” (CPP II: 522). This description fits very well with what is happening onstage. The group agrees with Doran, although he does not have much sense, when he states, “Divil a mather if he has plenty o money. He’ll do for us right enough” (CPP II: 567). Having his own wealth makes Broadbent attractive in that the Rosscullen folks do not have to support their MP in London, as often was the case. Broadbent describes the manner in which he addresses the group as “straight talk” (CPP II: 568). He appears completely immersed in his own self-image and under the impression that those he is dealing with are

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fools which, of course, they are. They conspire to hold on to the illusion that their autonomy with their small land holdings makes them superior to their poorer neighbours—such as the character Patsy Farrell—which exposes their greed. Broadbent’s actions appear quite unconscious—which is what makes him so dangerous. He even gives the impression that as a political candidate, his complacent Liberal party beliefs will serve the needs of the people. More menacingly, his single-minded determination will not allow anyone to get in his way, an attitude that becomes abundantly clear in the final act—where it becomes evident that if Ireland is to have a hope, it will lie with the Irish person who will be in London and close to Parliamentary power, Nora Reilly. However, McDowell describes Broadbent as the fool who rushes in where angels feared to tread; he is “both the conquering hero and a monstrous caricature of such a hero”.66 On the contrary, Broadbent’s actions have always been more calculating as plays out in the final act. In addition, the absence of Nora’s voice, or that of any woman character’s involvement in the Act III discussion, in which the Rosscullen men consider a new Parliamentary candidate, speaks volumes to the lack of women’s rights in 1904. The final act of the play opens with raucous laughter at the expense of Broadbent, with Shaw counteracting the beginning of Act I in the presentment of a hilarious “stage Englishman”. This, however, is a tactical dramatic device on Shaw’s part because, by the final act, Broadbent, by a manipulative stroke of genius, ingratiates himself into the life of Rosscullen, setting up both a marriage and a business—along with the Rosscullen candidacy for Parliament—and thus secures his place in the community. His marriage to Nora assures him of acceptance into the community, and his willingness to fund the inhabitants on mortgages on their own lands, that harks back to Wyndham Acts of 1903 and 1904, which raises the new danger of small landowners and their debt in mortgages in terms they do not understand.67 The greed of the Rosscullen inhabitants clouds their judgement when they realize that Broadbent will provide them with financial assistance to improve their holdings. They cannot fathom that rather than becoming independent, they are tying themselves even further into the syndicate or in essence, the empire, which will be capitalist to the very core. They are merely swapping one master for another. This new master of efficient capitalism, despite his seemingly foolish and amicable personae, will effectively devour all of them and their land. Larry Doyle, in fact, tells his father that Broadbent will loan him more than the land is worth and that he should be prudent in his borrowing, though Doyle will not stop

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his father borrowing nor will Doyle stop Broadbent when it comes about that he will foreclose on the senior Doyle’s land (CPP II: 587). There is no doubt that this advice will be ignored and, moreover, that the new landowners will inevitably lose all the ground they have gained in their steps toward autonomy. By borrowing more on their land than it is worth to their labour of the land, but less than the land’s actual value to Broadbent’s developmental scheme for the properties, the Rosscullen borrowers will lose everything and be returned to the level of Patsy Farrell, which they had conspired to avoid. The final scene, from which Nora is missing, is given over to the three main male characters, who in turn present their own arguments and points of view, ironically matching Keegan’s “three in one and one in three” speech68(CPP II: 611). Keegan uses the analogy of the Trinity to portray his Utopian view for Ireland’s future, where there is equality and fairness between church, state, and the social order. He accepts, however, that this is “the dream of a madman” (CPP II: 611), having listened to Broadbent’s strategic plan to create an efficient, financially lucrative development on Rosscullen that will weed out the “inefficient[s]” as Broadbent refers to the locals. Keegan paints a picture of Broadbent’s and Doyle’s so-called efficiency by exposing them for the mercenaries that they are, maintaining that they will bleed Rosscullen dry in order to “profit very efficiently” (CPP II: 608). Doyle abhors Keegan’s sentimentality about Ireland, declaring that “it is neither good sense nor good manners and will not stop the syndicate or young Ireland’s interest in Broadbent’s gospel of efficiency”69 (CPP II: 607). Broadbent agrees, stating that “the world belongs to the efficient” (CPP II: 607). Keegan’s later rejoinder, which oscillates between irony and rebuke, demonstrates that resolution is impossible: “Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and this Irishman so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which one of you is the more deeply dammed” (CPP II: 610). Keegan is the true socialist in the mix, though he will not be listened to by anyone in Rosscullen as they consider him quite mad. He shares Doyle’s experience of the wider world, however unlike Doyle, Keegan wishes for a fairer system for the Rosscullen residents. He does attempt to put forward the point that the plan may very well fail, inquiring what will happen to the Haffigans if it does fail. Doyle’s capitalist entrenchment as Broadbent’s lieutenant is fully revealed when he replies that “our syndicate has no conscience: it has no regard for your Haffigans and Doolans and Dorans than it has for a gang of Chinese coolies” (CPP II: 605). Broadbent makes it quite clear despite seemingly

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admiring his industriousness in Act III, it will be the workhouse or America for Haffigan and the others. Keegan appears as the voice of reason, nonetheless, he too steps back, rendering himself powerless against the might of the colonizer as he is a socialist idealist amid a ruthlessly capitalist world where profit, not Keegan’s values, is worshipped. Nora’s absences from the stage when there are significant discussions taking place is strategic on Shaw’s part and speaks to the existence of a very patriarchal society where women had no control or say in either political or social matters. Shaw stated that Nora has “perhaps the best exit in the play” and criticized Granville Barker in his production of the play for having Nora fade “ineffectively, from the stage with a little gasp like the last flicker of a burnt-out candle”.70 It is quite obvious from Shaw’s comments that he wished her absence to speak volumes. It does and has done throughout the play. Nora, though not present in the first act, is misleadingly romanticized through the dialogue between Doyle and Broadbent, in the way that Cathleen ni Houlihan is romanticized at the end of the Yeats/Gregory play. Cathleen, as a young girl, is not seen by the audience. They have witnessed an old woman on stage and only have Patrick’s word that she became “a young girl and … had the walk of a queen”.71 However, while Cathleen has morphed into an ethereal figure by the end of the play, Shaw’s Nora Reilly is humanized by the second act. The stage directions describe her as “a slight weak woman” which belies the strength of her character as the play unfolds. Shaw’s Nora, in the structure of John Bull’s Other Island, has turned the Cathleen myth on its head. Nora’s glaringly obvious absence in the final scene opens up another area of debate in relation to her role as Mrs Tom Broadbent and what that union symbolizes for Ireland. Nora is seemingly a self-serving figure in accepting a union with Broadbent when she perceives Doyle’s romantic inabilities as amounting to rejecting her. Nonetheless, she has shown herself to be a stronger character than Doyle. Nora is wholly aware of her limited options as a woman in a small patriarchal community, even with her “fortune”. However, she is strategic and makes her own decisions, even if the direction is not what she had originally envisioned. Unlike Synge’s Nora who left with a tramp, Nora Reilly leaves with a land developer who will likely be elected to parliament. She has demonstrated to be just as intelligent as Broadbent, because as his wife, she will have position, and she will have power. She will have ability to influence change. Given that in 1904 women still did not have voting rights, she will be as close as a woman could have then been to Parliamentary power, especially as she

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has demonstrated the ability to force Broadbent to succumb to her despite having dismissed his actions as drunkenness in Act II. Broadbent’s prospects, should he get elected would be enhanced if he was elected as a Liberal Party MP from an Irish constituency that formally had an Irish Parliamentary Party MP. He would be celebrated and be quickly elevated to cabinet which in turn, would place him in line to run for Prime Minister. Her influence on Broadbent MP can potentially be significant—far more powerful than had she married Larry Doyle, who cast off the Parliamentary candidacy when it was offered to him. Through the character of Nora Reilly, Shaw set the bar for the marriage debate which was to happen in his 1908 play Getting Married and arguably the character of Mrs George evolved from the seeds of Nora Reilly’s role as Mrs Tom Broadbent, MP. Shaw’s Nora demonstrates that she is no fantasy Cathleen ni Houlihan, but rather a realist character of flesh and bones. Instead of seeking men to die for her independence, Nora ultimately grabs her opportunities—quite efficiently—to secure as much political autonomy as a woman could secure in 1904. Again, she is both a realist image representing Ireland, and an example of a woman transforming herself into the New Woman, as much as Blanche Sartorius had in Widowers’ Houses. Nora is a powerful embodiment of Ireland and for modernizing women, ready to transform the Irish, and the English, in 1904. G. K. Chesterton said of the English that “they will speak to Ireland, they will speak for Ireland, but they will not hear Ireland speak”.72 This statement could also be applied to the progenitors of the Irish Theatre movement as a possible reason for choosing not to open the debate that Shaw’s play would have no doubt created. It was staged in the Court Theatre in London in 1904 with an Irish actress, Ellen O’Malley, playing Nora in a production Shaw planned simultaneously with the planned opening in the Abbey Theatre in December 1904. In correspondence with Ada Rehan, Shaw stated of O’Malley that “it is quite delightful to hear her say, when a huge Englishman hugs her, ‘Ah, don’t do that; I don’t like it.’ with true Irish maiden peevishness”.73 In letters to O’Malley herself, Shaw praised her, saying that he “was so delighted with your Nora” and that she (O’Malley) was “certainly a jewel”.74 The dramatic delivery of the play had ensured its success in England; it was performed one hundred and twenty-one times during the Vedrenne-Barker management of the Court theatre.75 Though the Court players took it on tour to Ireland in 1907, it was not until April 1917, however, one year after the Easter Rising, that it was staged by the Abbey Theatre. By that time,

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according to Shaw, the directors of the Abbey had become pioneers of a new and more truthful kind of Irish drama.76 The political events of 1916 had conspired to create this reality. McDowell argues that as a work of great breadth and authority, John Bull’s Other Island represents one of the pinnacles of Shaw’s dramaturgy.77 No doubt, most of the credit should go to the creation of the character of Nora Reilly who, for her time, was resourceful and decisive, exposed the fallibility of patriarchal thinking, and posed an alternative question on the direction of Irish independence. The 1916 Easter Rising had revealed that Irish women were willing to resourcefully and decisively engage politically. Therefore, with this direction in mind, Shaw’s major Irish play was more than or equally as relevant as Yeats’s fantasy Cathleen ni Houlihan for the events that led to 1916. But as Nora Reilly embraced efficiency for herself, for women, and for Ireland in 1904, Shaw would eventually see that the effects of colonialism went deeper than the modern differences between the inefficient Irish and the efficient English where the Irish needed to embrace Nora’s grasp of efficiency. The depravity of British colonialism for the colonized was darker than Shaw had encountered in 1904. He would turn his attention to the core of colonialism and its many shades—first in his The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet for the Abbey Theatre, and then in his most popular play, which dually questioned subjugation and colonialism on its most personal level, through the real New Woman, Eliza Doolittle, in Pygmalion.

Notes 1. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power 2 (London: Chatto & Windus 1989) p. 82. 2. While the newly formed Irish National Theatre Society performed in London in 1903 and 1904, Shaw only saw performances in 1904. 3. Ben Levitas, “These Islands’ Others: John Bull, The Abbey and the Royal Court” in Irish Theatre in England ed. Richard Cave and Ben Levitas (Ireland: Carysfort Press 2007) p. 19. 4. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge Connolly and the Socialist Provocation (Florida: Florida University Press 2011) p. 38 5. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge Connolly and the Socialist Provocation p. 41. 6. Fredrick P.  W. McDowell, “The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island” in Modern Critical Views: George Bernard Shaw ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers 1987) p. 66.

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7. W.B.  Yeats, “An Irish National Theatre” Modern Irish Drama ed. John P. Harrington (New York: Norton & Co. 1991) p. 390. 8. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan & Co. 1955) p. 451. 9. A hundred pounds in the play’s 1798 setting would have represented a large fortune, and it would still have been a significant amount when the play premiered in 1902. This large amount spoke to Yeats and Gregory’s Ascendancy background rather than that of the characters in the play. The amount of £100 would most definitely have elevated the Gillanes beyond peasantry status. 10. Michael McAteer, “Stranger in the House, Alienation and History in the Land of Heart’s Desire and Cathleen ni Houlihan” Irish Theatre in England ed. Richard Cave and Ben Levitas (Dublin: Carysfort Press 2007) p. 35. 11. Michael McAteer, “Stranger in the House, Alienation and History in the Land of Heart’s Desire and ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan” p. 36. 12. The Land of Heart’s Desire performed in the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894.It did not receive good critical acclaim. In fact Michael McAteer states that it was a disaster. He does concede that this was to do with the play Comedy of Sighs that was also on the bill. Comedy of Sighs was subsequently withdrawn, though Yeats play continued its run this time with Shaw’s Arms and the Man which McAteer informs was “an instant popular success with London Audiences”. See Michael McAteer “Stranger in the House, Alienation and History in the Land of Heart’s Desire and ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan” p. 44 where he also quotes Yeats as saying that “His little play goes on again with Shaw …” Partnering with Shaw’s play changed the reception of Yeats play. 13. Maurya in J.M Synge’s Rider to the Sea also challenges the Yeats/Gregory Cathleen ni Houlihan figure as she is more real. Maurya’s character portrayed a mother Ireland figure whose experience is one of loss—which would have been the experience of most peasant mothers in 1904 whose children would have emigrated or had to take on dangerous work in order to survive. 14. Bernard Shaw, “How to Settle the Irish Question” The Matter with Ireland eds Dan H.  Laurence & David H.  Greene (Florida. Florida University Press 2001) p. 169. 15. Audrey McNamara, “Taking the Bull to Ireland” in Shaw 32: Shaw and the City ed. Desmond Harding (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press 2012) p. 135. 16. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: A Literature of a Modern Nation (Great Britain: Vintage 1996) p. 9. 17. See Audrey McNamara’s “Shaw, Women, and the Dramatizing of Modern Ireland” in Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2020) pp. 161–180.

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18. The date of 1886 is very telling historically and dramatically because as well as being the date the Pro-Home Rule English Party formed, it was also the date that the second Home Rule Bill was rejected by the British Parliament. As the play is set in 1904 and Larry Doyle has been gone for 18 years, it is the year he left for England and makes a very pointed statement on Shaw’s part. It is also ironic that Shaw chose that Tom Broadbent be a member of the Liberal party, a party that he personally loathed as they repeatedly failed to pursue radical social and political agendas and they were also the party that forced Parnell’s ruin. 19. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910  Vol. 2 ed. Dan H.  Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt 1972) p. 458. 20. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power 2 p. 283. 21. In fact Holroyd is mistaken in naming the Irish Literary Society as it ended in 1901. It was the Irish Theatre Society that Shaw had in mind for the play. The society changed its name to the National Theatre Society in 1905, a year after opening the Abbey Theatre. 22. M.J. Sidnell, “Hic and Ille: Shaw and Yeats” in Modern Irish Drama ed. John P. Harrington (USA: W.W Norton & Company 1991) p. 479. 23. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 p. 386. 24. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power 2 p. 83. 25. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 p. 460. 26. The Letters of W.B.  Yeats ed. Alan Wade (London: Rupert Harte-Davis 1954) p. 442. 27. Norma Jencks, “The Rejection of Shaw’s Irish Play: John Bull’s Other Island” in Modern Irish Drama ed. John P.  Harrington (USA: W.W Norton & Company 1991) p. 485. 28. Basil Langton, “Shaw’s Stagecraft” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies Vol. 21 ed. Gale K.  Larson (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 2001) p. 23. 29. Jan McDonald, “Shaw and the Court Theatre” in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw ed. Christopher Innes (UK: Cambridge University Press 1998) p. 277. 30. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 p. 452. 31. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s discussion in Shaw, Synge, Connolly and the Socialist Revolution, around James Connolly’s and Padraic Pearse’s reaction to Cathleen ni Houlihan which they viewed as a fantasy play, O’Ceallaigh Ritschel argues that “…the adult Pearse did not believe in fantasies and neither did Connolly.” p. 201. 32. Jan McDonald, “Shaw and the Court Theatre” p. 277. 33. William Fay later acted in John Bull’s Island. 34. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power 2 p. 82.

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35. St John Ervine, “Some Impressions of My Elders: W.B. Yeats” W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections Vol 1 ed. E.H.  Mikhal (London. Macmillan Press 1977) p. 106. 36. St John Ervine, “Some Impressions of My Elders: W.B. Yeats” p. 106. 37. St John Ervine, Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends (London: Constable 1956) p. 372. 38. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation (USA. Florida Press 2011) p. 28. 39. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation p. 227 n19. 40. Anthony Roche, The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 (London: Bloomsbury 2015) p. 85. 41. St John Ervine, Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends (London. Constable 1956) p. 372. 42. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 pp. 446 & 447. 43. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 p. 447. 44. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: A Literature of a Modern Nation p. 51. 45. Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1988) pp. 13–14. 46. Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009) p. 5. 47. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (United Kingdom. Routledge 2007) p. 48. 48. Sidney P Albert. “Evangelising the Garden City?” in Shaw: The Annual of Shaw Studies 19 (USA: Pennsylvania State University Press 1999) p. 41 49. Sidney P Albert. “Evangelising the Garden City?” p. 6. 50. Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic p. 57. 51. David Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook eds Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel & Peter Gahan (England: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) p. 78. 52. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Shaw and the Syngean Provocation” in Shaw 30: Shaw and the Literary Tradition ed. Peter Gahan (USA: Pennsylvania University Press 2010) p. 82. 53. Brian Friel, “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” in Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries and Interviews ed. Christopher Murray (London and New York: Faber and Faber 1992) p. 51. 54. R.K.R. Thornton, “Friel and Shaw: Dreams and Responsibilities” in Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion. ed. Paul Hylan and Neil Sammells (UK: Springer 1991) pp. 224–233. 55. R.K.R. Thornton, “Friel and Shaw: Dreams and Responsibilities” p. 225.

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56. See David Clare’s chapter “Shaw and the Stage Englishman in Irish Literature” in his excellent book Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (UK & USA: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) pp. 67–122. 57. Ben Levitas, “These Islands’ Others: John Bull, The Abbey and the Royal Court” p. 25. 58. Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic p. 25. 59. Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic p. 5. 60. David Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook p. 87. 61. G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (U.K: House of Stratus 2001) p. 7. 62. Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw (London: Routledge 1993) p. 212. 63. Qtd in Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation p. 177. 64. Fredrick P.  W. McDowell, “The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island” p. 545. 65. Brian Friel, “Translations” in Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber 1984) p. 417. 66. Fredrick P.  W. McDowell, “The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island” p. 551. 67. Synge also noted this danger in his 1905 Congested Districts articles for the Manchester Guardian. 68. Ironically, Three in One and One in Three is also the name of a hymn written by Gilbert Rorison, a Scottish Episcopal minister in 1849 and set to music composed in 1847 by Friedrich Filitz titled Capetown. When Keegan’s prayer-like speech is read aloud, the musicality of the rhythm is evident. https://hymnary.org/text/three_in_one_and_one_in_three. 69. Shaw could be suggesting here that the “young Ireland” Doyle is speaking about is nothing like the Young Ireland of the 1840s nationalist movement. Rather it is a young Ireland that wants modernisation. 70. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 pp. 469 & 470. 71. W.B.  Yeats, “Cathleen ni Houlihan” in Modern Irish Drama ed. John P. Harrington (USA: W.W Norton & Company 1991) p. 11. 72. G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw p. 1. 73. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 p. 458. 74. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910 Vol. 2 pp. 459 & 465. 75. Hesketh Pearson Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (London: Collins, 1945) p. 238. 76. Fredrick P.  W. McDowell, “The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island” p. 542. 77. Fredrick P.  W. McDowell, “The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island” p. 543.

CHAPTER 5

The Wild West Meets the West End: The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Pygmalion

Following the Abbey Theatre’s rejection of John Bull’s Other Island in 1904, it was to be another five years before Shaw’s plays were performed on the Abbey stage, though they did appear on other Irish stages during the interim. In 1907 and 1908, six of his plays, including a performance of John Bull’s Other Island, appeared in the Gaiety Theatre, the Theatre Royal, and the Cork Opera House. In a letter to Lady Gregory in August 1909, Shaw noted that “of the fifteen countries outside Britain in which my plays are performed, my own is by no means the least lucrative …”.1 In June1909, following the refusal of a licence for his latest play The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, Shaw turned his focus once more to the Abbey stage. Anthony Roche argues, “there is evidence in the play itself that Blanco Posnet was all along intended for the Abbey stage”.2 While the two plays discussed in this chapter might seem an unlikely coupling—The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909) a one-act melodrama and Pygmalion (1912) a five-act [anti-]romantic comedy—several very strong themes link them together. The female protagonists in the two plays, for example, Feemy Evans in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion share numerous similarities. While many of Shaw’s heroines are “middle class”, these two are definitely working class. Such was unusual for a Shaw play, that while Shaw was committed to eradicating poverty, he rarely portrayed female protagonists from the labouring classes, though he did give voice © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2_5

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to male working class characters, such as Lickcheese in Widowers’ Houses and Patsy Farrell in John Bull’s Other Island, to name but two. Granted, the “voice” given to Feemy’s character is not necessarily flattering to women, and could fall under the category of the “scum-woman” to which Sarah Grand alludes in her essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”.3 There is evidence that Eliza Doolittle, or the idea of her, was born during the writing of The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. Addressing the censor on morality issues in a section of his preface to Blanco Posnet, titled Eliza and her Bath, Shaw introduces an instance whereby “Eliza stripped off her dressing gown and stepped into her bath” (CPP V: 227). It is no accident, therefore, that this scene appears in the later play (though not until a revised and republished edition in c.1941).4 Eliza’s character could be attributed to a further development of Feemy Evans’s character. The topic of marriage again makes its appearance in these plays. However, it is not mentioned in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet until the end of the play where the small debate, which ensues between Feemy, “the Woman”, and Blanco on the marriage question, is a very pointed sub-textual reference to the Irish question of Home Rule. Eliza in Pygmalion, of course, rejects the notion of marriage or any union with Henry Higgins. The respective rejections of marriage by the two female protagonists strongly suggest that the decision to marry, or not, is a decidedly female choice. Another parallel between these two plays is that they are both based around myth. Of course, as an Irishman, Shaw was doubtless very familiar with Irish Mythology. In addition, he made no secret of the fact that he borrowed from the work of others, like many before him, including Shakespeare. Shakespeare borrowed the plot for Romeo and Juliet from the English poet, Arthur Brooke, who in turn had borrowed it from the French author, Matteo Bandello. Shaw himself stated that “If I find in a book anything I can make use of, I take it gratefully. My plays are full of pillage of this kind … In short, my literary morals are those of Molière and Handel”.5 There is a strong argument to be made that Blanco Posnet and Pygmalion are prime examples of such pillaging. In the former, Shaw, it seems, takes the theme of Tír na nÓg from the Irish myth of Óisín, and plays with the notion of “otherworldliness” present in the Óisin myth. Shaw’s play certainly contains all the ingredients of the myth; the woman, the man, the horse, and the dilemma: After one hundred years he [Óisín] finds a spear washed upon the shore and suddenly longs to return to his warrior comrades and the life of mortal men. Yielding to Óisín’s sorrow, Niamh bridles her horse and conveys her lover

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across the sea to the “Isle of Many Fears”. There Óisín finds a lady chained in the vast hall of the sea-god Manannan. He frees her and confronts her captor, a shape-changing and ever-renewing demon.6

The story continues over a period of another two hundred years when Niamh, finally, gives Óisín a horse to return to his native land, warning him that if ever his foot touches the ground he would be lost forever. Likewise, the Shavian concept of Pygmalion is enmeshed in an existing model which encompasses the history of the myth of Pygmalion. It is to Shaw’s credit that he continued this trend and adapted these myths to shape them to his own dramatic form. This chapter will investigate how the linking of these themes demonstrates Shaw’s continued use of his female characters for debating social issues, and how, since his 1904 John Bull’s Other Island, he uses the feminine trope as a continuing reference to the Irish question.

5.1   The “Wild West” Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Feemy Evans “He’s a sly one” (CPP V: 254), said Blanco Posnet to Elder Daniels of God. Through the drama that unfolded prior to the play’s premier, this line is better applied to Shaw himself. Shaw had written this play thanks to a suggestion put to him by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who wanted him to write a modern stage version of Don Quixote.7 The excessively long novel would have been an extremely long play had Shaw followed the suggestion. Instead, he used the main protagonist, Don Quixote, and his horse, Rocinante, as his template, weaving in the Irish myth of Óisín and arguably reworking J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (while Synge was dying in hospital)8 to create his own story. Set in the American Wild West, the play mirrors the wild west setting in Playboy. He wrote the play in a little under three weeks, but far from being delighted with it, Shaw stated that Tree “was shocked by it, absolutely horrified”.9 Tree was worried by Shaw’s references to God as “the sly one” and the mention of prostitution. Shaw refused Tree’s recommended changes, telling him instead to submit it to the censor of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, whereby it was promptly refused on the grounds of blasphemy.10 Holroyd argues that there is no doubt that the play was less intended for Tree and His Majesty than it was for Redford and the Lord Chamberlain’s office.11,12

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Having had The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet banned from the English stage by the British censor, which arguably he had to have anticipated, even welcomed, Shaw turned his sights to Ireland’s National Theatre, the Abbey Theatre. He engineered the staging of his play, in collaboration with Lady Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats, in defiance of the English censor, whose censorship did not extend to Ireland. In the summer of 1909, during a visit to Shaw’s home in Ayot St Lawrence, Lady Gregory recalls in her memoir that Shaw presented her with a little book titled The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet as she was leaving. She went on to note that the censor had rejected it.13 On meeting Yeats at St. Pancreas, she showed him the book and told Yeats that she felt the censor’s office were hypocrites.14 Shaw’s play, like J.M.  Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) some two years previously, which faced its own censorship issues in Dublin and London, set the Abbey directors in an almighty battle with Dublin Castle and the Lord Lieutenant by the time Blanco Posnet premiered in August 1909.15 In the preface to the play, Shaw gives his version of the chain of events that led to the eventual writing of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, stating that the truth was rather more amusing than the official version (CPP V: 174). He argued five points under the heading The Story of the Joint Select Committee outlining the agenda of the censor and concluding that all the committee really served to do was to “create hostile bodies by the operation of mere impulse to contradict, an impulse that was always strong in English human nature” (CPP V: 175). Whatever about being strong in an Englishman’s nature, the impulse to contradict was certainly strong in Shaw, the Irishman. The censor was no stranger to Shaw’s work, earlier having refused to license Mrs Warren’s Profession in 1902 and Press Cuttings in June 1909.16 In the letter of refusal for permission to perform the play on the Abbey stage, Dublin Castle (which had no real censorship powers) informed Lady Gregory that: This play was written for production in a London theatre, and its performance was disallowed by the Authority which in England is charged with the Censorship of stage plays. The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey Theatre, which was founded for the express purpose of encouraging dramatic art in Ireland, and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.17

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The official, of course, was very much mistaken that the play had nothing to do with Ireland; it was very much about Ireland and “the Irish question”, and using the Dublin stage as a platform to outwit the British censor would be a coup d’état for Shaw—and Gregory and Yeats. As Christopher Morash observes, “[…] both Dublin Castle and the Abbey were holding strong cards when they settled into a game of bluff and brinkmanship”, which made victory for Ireland’s National theatre all the more satisfying.18 Gregory and Yeats used the play to re-establish their independence as a National Theatre and undermine the censorship power Dublin Castle envisioned it possessed, yet the Castle was without a legal position beyond theatre patent. The Castle threatened to rescind the theatre’s patent but Gregory and Yeats held firm. The Castle stated that all Shaw wanted to do was to use the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland as a whip with which to beat the English censor. Yeats replied that Shaw would use him in that way no matter what happened.19 There were many exchanges between the Lord Lieutenant, his officials, and the progenitors of the Abbey Theatre, with the officials alternately begging, cajoling and threatening Gregory and Yeats. They held their ground, however, and with much trepidation staged the play on 25 August 1909. Lady Gregory states that there were no protests made on any side and when a stranger asked what was going on inside the theatre, as the applause was so tremendous, he was told “They are defying the Lord Lieutenant”.20 The victory was twofold, for the new Irish theatre and for Shaw himself. Although Blanco Posnet was written with the censor in mind, Shaw had to design its form in such a way that when it was presented on stage, it would be irresistible to Yeats. Shaw was aware of Yeats’s interest in mysticism and the occult and knew he had to appeal to that in order to have the play accepted by the Abbey directors. In introducing the seemingly ethereal woman, he mirrored the Yeatsian notion of a Cathleen ni Houlihan type character. George Watson argues of Cathleen ni Houlihan that “Yeats has embodied and unleashed, in an extraordinary way, the definitive myths of the republican nationalist movement”.21 The Yeatsian female persona was she that demanded sacrifice and used her charm to persuade men to do her bidding. In creating an ethereal character in the woman who remained nameless, Shaw played with the Yeatsian notion of mystique. However, Shaw went further than the Yeatsian theme, harkening back to Irish mythical history and playing on the story of the Fianna warrior Óisín. The myth tells how Óisín and his companions “[…] saw a small cloud of

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mist come out of the valley and waft up the hill towards where they sat. When it drew near it broke in two and out from it stepped a milk white steed and a rider clad in scarlet and gold”.22 Blanco introduces a variation of this scene when he asks Strapper to tell the Sheriff how he found him. Strapper. You were looking at a rainbow like a damned silly fool instead of keeping your wits about you; and we stole up on you and had you tight before you could draw a bead on us. (CPP V: 265)

Blanco’s dreamlike trance as he stared at the rainbow echoes Óisín’s reverie as he came to be bewitched by Niamh: “[…] with her beauty and her sweet-sounding voice […]. Gently like one in a dream, Óisín moved towards her and mounting the fairy steed he sat beside Niamh of the Golden Hair”.23 Blanco tells the Sheriff that he was looking at the rainbow because there was something written on it and furthermore it was written in “green on the red streak of the rainbow” (CPP V: 265). This is the only time in the play that a colour of any description is mentioned. Shaw, in a letter to Lady Gregory in August 1909 discussing the dispute with Dublin Castle around the play, stated that “if the colour we must wear be England’s cruel red, then we perish gloriously”.24 The deliberate allusion to the colour green, the national colour of Ireland, and the colour red aligned with the red cross of St George on the English flag subtly conveys the play’s sub-text on the Irish/English situation. Shaw, it appears, put his own spin on the Óisín myth while using elements of the imagery in the tale. Like Óisín, Blanco needed a horse to escape and needed to stay on the horse in order to get as far away from town as possible. Like Óisín, whose journey was thwarted when he stopped to help “a band of churls on the hillside toiling and sweating in the efforts to lift a slab of granite out of a quarry”,25 Blanco’s journey comes to a halt when he comes across a woman with a sick child and surrenders the horse to help her. Once his feet touch the ground, like Óisin, he is doomed to his fate. Shaw may have used the Irish concept of the Spéir Bhean26 in creating the nameless woman, whom Blanco refers to as “the rainbow woman”27 (CPP V: 267). The ambiguity of existence shadows Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan, where there is confusion over the identity of the “old woman”. Ultimately though, Shaw again twists the tale by removing the ethereal and introducing the corporeal, when the woman is produced to be a witness against Blanco, who states:

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Sheriff: that woman aint real. You take care. That woman will make you do what you never intended. Thats the rainbow woman. Thats the woman who brought me to this. (CPP V: 267)

However, in line with his own take on the myth of the Shan Van Vocht, Shaw demonstrates that there is no illusion, only paradoxically, the perception of an illusion. Shaw stated that “of all the tricks which the Irish nation has played on the slow-witted Saxon, the most outrageous is the palming off on him of the imaginary Irishman of romance”.28 In the Yeats/Gregory play, the characters had different perceptions of the female form that they had seen, which created an enigmatic air. In making the woman real, Shaw is dispelling the romantic notion of a female form that can lure men to do her bidding. Displayed in this nameless American Wild West town is a complete sense of lawlessness and lack of justice. Shaw suggested, in a letter to Lady Gregory, the accent the actors should adopt for the play be “in broad Irish, especially as that language will lend itself very congenially to the blasphemies with which the dialogue bristles”.29 From the opening scene the talk is of hanging, shooting and killing. Like Synge’s Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, Shaw’s Blanco is part of a disintegrating society where anarchy amounts to heroism. The characters in The Playboy applaud Christy’s actions when he tells them that he has killed his father and elevate his status in the community. Pegeen. [with blank amazement]. Is it killed your father? Christy. [subsiding]. With the help of God I did surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul. Philly. [retreating with Jimmy]. There’s a daring fellow Jimmy. Oh, glory be to God Michael [with great respect] That was a hanging crime, mister honey. You should have had good reason for doing the like of that.30

They only turn against him when it is revealed that he has not, in fact, killed his father, disappointed that Christy is just like them. His crime is that he has not brought about the sensational change he said he had, and Christy, therefore became their anti-hero: Pegeen. [half laughing through her tears] That’s it, now the world will see him pandied, and he an ugly liar was playing off the hero and the fright of men.31

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In contrast, Blanco did commit the crime he was accused of and conversely his capture served to allow the community’s lawlessness to surface. His only real crime in his own mind was that he did a good deed despite himself and in doing so, shattered his own perception of life. Blanco maintained in relation to God that: […] I had no use for Him—because I lived my life my own way, and would have no truck with His “Dont do this” and “You musnt do that” and “Youll go to hell if you do the other”. I gave Him the go-bye and did without Him all these years. But He caught me out at last. (CPP V: 254)

He is tormented by the reality that he has to face the fact that there he is beholden to something greater than himself. The sense of communal disappointment in his acquittal manifested itself in the removal of the pleasure of the hanging; “disappointed of their natural sport” as the Sherriff names it, the foreman of the jury tells Blanco on his way out, “A man like you makes me sick. Just sick” (CPP V: 272). This retort reveals the malaise of the societal mindset and acts as a marker against the “good deed” that Blanco has performed, albeit against his will. Like Blanco, Feemy, too, acts against her natural instincts in reneging on her testimony against Blanco again highlighting the “rottenness” of the rest of the inhabitants of the town. Feemy rejects her community and moves outside its scope. Pegeen Mike, on the other hand, sides with the community and, in rejecting Christy, remains within its stagnant folds. Declan Kiberd argues that “The Playboy starts and ends with Pegeen’s plight as a trapped rural woman in a landscape virtually bereft of men […]”.32 While this is undoubtedly true, Pegeen, for a time, tries to establish her independence by refusing to marry Shawn, instead choosing Christy, who has arrived as a stranger to the County Mayo community. However, in line with Kiberd’s analysis, in rejecting Christy Mahon the stranger, Pegeen, in effect, is rejecting the wider world and thus seals herself back into a way of life that will offer little hope. Shaw, in a reworking of Pegeen Mike’s character through the character of Feemy Evans, moves some way to remove her from a stagnant situation. In contrast to Pegeen Mike’s final words “Oh my grief, …, I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World”,33 though she was the one who sent him away, Feemy Evans achieves a note of equality when:

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Blanco. [to Feemy, offering his hand] Shake, Feemy Feemy. Get along, you blackguard Blanco. It’s come over me again, same as when the kid touched me, same as when you swore a lie to save my neck Feemy. Oh well, here [They shake hands] (CPP V: 276)

Other analogies exist between Blanco Posnet and Synge’s Playboy. The Ibsenite device of the villain who is an idealist defines the character of Elder Daniels, whom Shaw sardonically described in his essay The Irish Players as “the Lord Chamberlain”.34 Elder Daniels’ counterpart in The Playboy of the Western World is Father Reilly. Though he never appears on stage, Father Reilly, as Anthony Roche observes, is “repeatedly evoked verbally […] But his looming offstage presence is felt throughout […]”.35 Elder Daniels is presented at the beginning telling the women that he needs them to move out of the courthouse because he has a prisoner who has a soul that needs to be saved and that he is bound to put some religion into him before he goes to his Maker’s presence after the trial. The prisoner’s fate is a foregone conclusion making the trial a farce. Blanco, in retort to Strapper, the Sheriff’s younger brother and the man who had arrested him, tells him, “Any fool can hang the wisest man in the country. Nothing he likes better. But you cant hang me” (CPP V: 250). Blanco is hinting at an inner secret which is revealed when Strapper leaves the stage. It emerges that Elder Daniels is really Blanco’s brother. However, the real crux of this scene is when Daniels’ true nature is exposed. Blanco shows him for the hypocrite that he is when he berates him: All you ever did when I owned you was to borrow money from me to get drunk with. Now you lend money and sell drink to other people. I was ashamed of you before; and I’m worse ashamed of you now. (CPP V: 251)

These remarks are only the beginning of Blanco’s assassination of Elder Daniels’ character. Blanco, having stolen a horse from his brother without realising that it belonged to somebody else, justified his actions by telling Elder Daniels that he was taking it in place of his mother’s necklace. Elder Daniels’ reply demonstrates a lack of comprehension of the situation: “Why didnt you take the necklace if you must steal something?” (CPP V: 252) There is a deeper sub-textual implication here, about the notion of regaining something that has been taken without consent. This concept could be applied to recovering the loss of national identity, a repossession by a colonised nation from its oppressor. This notion of reclaiming also

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plays into the myth of Óisín where Óisín’s overwhelming desire to return to his homeland to recall his old way of life led him to risk, fatally, the life he had with Niamh. These literary signals lead to the connection around the state of the affairs between England and Ireland. Elder Daniels is displaying an indignant self-righteousness that is both misplaced and misguided. Blanco has no illusions about his morality or lack of it, however, Elder Daniels is full of such illusions. He has reinvented himself from town drunk to pastor. He gives the impression that he is in a state of grace when, in fact, he is a callous and disingenuous character, just like Broadbent in John Bull’s Other Island. Blanco is quite happy in his irreligious state and is very aware of his agnosticism and the life he lives as a result. Elder Daniels’ attitude, on the other hand, is completely myopic. He firmly believes that he can and could never do any wrong, that “when he was drunk he was in a state of innocence” (CPP V: 253). Shaw ascribes a similar myopathy to the censor. He argues in the preface to the play that “The Achilles heel of the censorship is therefore not the fine plays it has suppressed, but the abominable plays it has licensed” (CPP V: 181). Elder Daniels’ narrow-mindedness continues when he tells Blanco “what keeps America to-day the purest of the nations is that when she’s not working, she’s too drunk to hear the voice of the tempter” (CPP V: 253). Within this dialogue there is an acknowledgement of the Irish association with alcohol which is well documented, and an association that Shaw had first-hand experience of in his childhood through his father of whom he said “he did not shake off his miserable and disgraceful tippling […] until it was too late […]”.36 Keeping in mind the link with The Playboy of the Western World and Pegeen Mike’s livelihood, working in her Father’s pub, Elder Daniels is justifying the way he makes his living but Blanco quickly retorts that Daniels sells: […] You sell drink because you make a bigger profit out of it than selling tea. And you gave up the drink yourself because when you got that fit at Edwardstown the doctor told you youd die the next time; and frightened you off it. (CPP V: 253/54)

Shaw was nullifying, through Blanco’s rhetoric, any high moral reason for irrational judgments, which was of course another swipe at the censor. Everything that Elder Daniels did was for personal gain and not for the greater good as he would have everyone believe.

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From the opening scene of the play, Shaw negates the perceived patriarchal notion of women as domestic angels by having five women (arguably symbolic of the five points of the Joint Select Committee) discuss the merits of hanging. They inform the audience of the mayhem of the society they live in. Jessie speaks of the men in her town: They shoot for the love of it. Look at them at a lynching. Theyre not content to hang the man; but directly the poor creature is swung up they all shoot him full of holes, wasting their cartridges that cost solid money, and pretending they do it in horror of his wickedness, though half of them would have a rope around their own necks if all they did was known. Let alone the mess it makes. (CPP V: 245)

Shaw acerbically describes the women as “pioneers of civilisation” (CPP V: 245). In fairness, their discussion is an exposition of the anarchy within their society and is indicative of the dominant societal mindset. The majority of the women want change, with the exception of Babsy and sometimes Emma who, according to Shaw is a “sneak who sides with Babsy or Jessie, according to the fortunes of war” (CPP V: 246). This pair of women is representative of the mob mentality that exists in their town. Their treatment of Blanco when he arrives in town with Babsy “spitting at him” calling him a “horse thief” and telling him she would “smack his dirty face” and Emma telling him that “there wont be any angels where youre going to” (CPP V: 248/249) contrasts with some of the other women who remove themselves from the violent scene that ensues. From the onset, it is obvious that the majority of the women are innovative in their thinking; the problem lies in the fact that this uncivilised society is powered by men which was made very clear by the Sherriff’s statement “[…] if the women forget their sex they can go out or be put out”. (CPP V: 264) A hierarchy in this culture has been established with men, of course, at the top of this structure, however there are other varying layers occupied by the females. Taking Case’s argument of opposing feminisms, the character of Feemy Evans is very much dictated by the other women’s (and men’s) opinion of her. Feemy is the “fallen woman in homespun” that Lady Gregory argued the censor was hypocritical to ban when he allowed the “fallen woman in satin” to grace the stage.37 Shaw used Feemy’s character to further explode the myth of the stereotypical patriarchal construct of woman as angel, and in doing so, succeeds in exposing patriarchal hypocrisy. Feemy’s character is similar to that of the

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Widow Quin in Synge’s Playboy, who also uses and manipulates situations and people in order to get her own way, and who only does harm in the process. Feemy is painted as a woman of low moral character, echoing the persona of Widow Quin whom Pegeen accuses of prostitution in Act I when she remarks on Quin shaving the “foxy skipper from France for a 3 penny bit and a sop of grass tobacco”, which Quin does not deny or counter.38 The Widow Quin attempted to cajole Christy Mahon away from Pegeen Mike in order to come to live with her. She tells Christy that “you heard me saying at the fall of the night the two of us should be great company”.39 Her character had been set up from the start when Michael tells Christy that “every living Christian is a bona fide, saving one widow alone”.40 This holds true as the widow’s character is developed through the play as a woman for whom the community has little respect. Feemy in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet is similarly exposed as every man’s “secret” from his wife. Like the Widow Quin, she had no compunction about using whatever it takes to attain her own way. Blanco’s first words to Feemy, calling her a slut and telling her to go home and wash herself, informs the audience as to her profession (CPP V: 257). He also accuses her of being a drunk, painting her face and being a “worse danger to the town than ten horse-thieves” (CPP V: 258). This is a damning accusation and serves to destroy Feemy’s credibility as a witness in Blanco’s “excuse” for a trial. In answer to her affirmation of seeing him on the stolen horse, Blanco accuses her of “immoral relations” with every man in town, including the Sheriff (CPP V: 263). Shaw’s trick here was not the denigration of the woman, but rather the denigration of the men. If Feemy, as with Mrs Warren and the Widow Quin, is guilty of immoral relations, then so are the men in the town who engage with her services. Undoubtedly, Feemy’s character does come to symbolise all that is rotten in the society she is part of, together with the myopia that exists within it, and serves to allow the townspeople to focus all the blame on Feemy without acknowledging the greater problem that exists. However, because of the balance of societal power, the other women do not challenge their menfolk; instead they turn on Feemy and castigate her. The dialogue between the women and Feemy is verbally abusive on both sides, along with bourgeois morality and class lines. Emma. How could the like of her tell the truth? Babsy. It would be an insult to every respectable woman here to believe her.

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Feemy. It’s easy to be respectable when nobody ever offers you the chance to be anything else. The women (all clamouring together). Shut up, you hussy. Youre a disgrace. How dare you open your lips to answer your betters? Hold your tongue and learn your place, miss. You painted slut! Whip her out of town! (CPP V: 264)

The hostility between the women is deeply engrained in a patriarchally constructed mindset and serves to play out the deep gender divide. These women as a group, led by the duo Emma and Babsy, are the manifestation of that thought process and through this revelation the marginalised position of women like Feemy Evans is exposed. Feemy is standing in the centre with all sides against her and, though on this particular occasion she is telling the truth, no one believes her. They debate whether she is fit to touch the bible, as the Sheriff addresses Blanco, “[…] I ask the prisoner not to drive us to give Miss Evans the oath”, but in the end she is allowed only because the foreman and “the boys” want to “have a verdict” in order to “have a bit of fun” (CPP V: 264/65/66). The Sheriff states: “Swear Feemy Evans, Elder. She dont need to touch the Book. Let her say the words” (CPP V: 266). Feemy Evans fits the stereotypical patriarchal vision of “whore” and “bitch” as defined by Fortier or Case’s descriptions of “the bitch” and “the vamp”.41 Although the men show no respect for her, they use her to satisfy their own ends. Feemy is an unpleasant character and the varying strata of female social positions comes back into play with the introduction of the nameless woman who is pitched against Feemy as the genteel meets the vulgar. The woman’s position and status are clarified by the Sheriff who states: If Blanco was the man, the lady cant, as a white woman, give him away. She oughtnt be put in that position either to give him away or commit perjury. On the other hand we dont want a horse thief to get off through a lady’s delicacy. (CPP V: 269)

In a twist of fate Feemy is revealed to be a liar, as the woman Blanco did give the horse to denies it was him. In the penultimate scene, Shaw delivers the dramatic twist by giving a heart and a conscience to Feemy. She had been determined to see Blanco hanged but, at the last minute, she relented:

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[bursting into floods of tears and scolding at the other woman] It’s you with your sniveling face that put me off it. [Desperately] No: it wasnt him. I only said it out of spite because he insulted me. May I be struck dead if I ever saw him with the horse. (CPP V: 271)

She, like Blanco, was impelled by something over which she had no control. In giving redemption to Feemy in the same manner as Blanco and through the same medium, Shaw suggests an equality of entitlement to both sexes. Blanco confirms this by “[whispering at her] Softy! Cry-baby! Landed, just like me! Doing what you never intended!” (CPP V: 271). Although the nameless woman has been presented as a powerful, somewhat ethereal presence who appears to have the capacity to bring about change, the dénouement of the play negates that notion. The woman is real and the reason for Blanco’s good deed, to help the sick child, turned out to be in vain, as the child died. Shaw sidestepped the conventional happy ending, in line with the ending of the Óisín in the Land of Forever Young, when Óisín died performing a good deed, thereby questioning the notion of sacrifice; the idea of giving up something for a greater good as a worthwhile exercise. Perhaps as it was first performed on an Irish stage, that of the Abbey Theatre, there was a sub-textual comment on the concept of sacrifice for nationalistic gain. This theme is reinforced in the very last part of the final scene in the play when it turns to the question of marriage. Blanco asks the group “which of you will marry Feemy Evans?” (CPP V: 275). Feemy, in rejecting the offer, demonstrates a single-minded independence that was unexpected because of the so-called respectability that marriage would give her. She told Blanco “[…] when I marry, I’ll marry a man who can do a decent action without surprising himself out of his senses” (CPP V: 275). The implication here is the union would not be to her benefit and she would be on an unequal footing. This reflects the status of union between Ireland and England at the time, and the allusion is further suggested when “the woman” character also rejects marriage, stating: “I dont think any woman wants to be a good wife twice in her life. I want someone to be a good husband to me now” (CPP V: 275). In assuming the feminisation of Ireland as long proven, the woman in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet is making an argument for self-determination and independence, not as a party to be exchanged. The rejection of a marriage union both by Feemy Evans and “the woman” is all the more pointed when it is

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considered that it is heard for the first time on the stage of Ireland’s National Theatre. The Shavian use of myth as a vehicle for dramatic form is found once again in Pygmalion. The play on language use and dialect, combined with the theme of marriage within the drama, serves to interrogate class, gender, and ownership, and the larger question of national identity. It may be no coincidence that Shaw wrote the play in the year that the Home Rule (Ireland) Bill was finally passed, though it was not to be enacted until 1914. What is coincidental but ironic is that the play premiered in London on 11 April 1914 in His Majesty’s Theatre exactly two years to the day after the Home Rule Bill was passed and five months before it was due to be enacted, which as is now known, was never enacted. In addition between completing the play and its premier, there was a brutal economic class war, the Dublin Lockout (1913), which Shaw not only knew about but actively advocated against in Dublin.42 Shaw’s Pygmalion, as with everything he wrote, is informed by the social and political milieu that surrounded him.

5.2  A West End Adaptation of the Myth: Pygmalion “Thank you for thinking I could be your pretty slut”, Mrs Patrick Campbell wrote to Shaw in June 1912 after he had read his new play Pygmalion to her the previous evening.43 She was referring to the character of Eliza Doolittle which, in true Shavian fashion, had been written with her in mind. It was a well-known fact that Shaw was passionately in love with Stella Campbell and their correspondence over many years is well documented. Of course, however, his rationale for writing the play is much deeper than that. In true Shavian fashion, he has taken the myth of Pygmalion and deconstructed it. Leonard Conolly argues, “Shaw had worked particularly hard during rehearsals on impressing both Tree and Mrs Campbell that the ending of his version of the Pygmalion myth did not correspond with the version from classical mythology, at the end of which Pygmalion marries Galatea”.44 It is very comedic and the ostensible subject of the plot appears very simple and obvious, that of the importance of phonetics and “correct” use of language. However, Shaw was much cleverer than that. Through a play on language he exposed how the feminine is constructed by a patriarchal society and through this playfulness,

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proceeds to deconstruct what amounts to another mythical construct of the feminine by exposing the hypocrisies endemic in society of the time. Shaw did not necessarily accept that socialism endeavoured to subvert feminism and suffrage, and the marriage question from the woman’s position. Through his dramatic writing, Shaw establishes that it is not only a gender issue but a class issue within gender that is an underlying concern in society. The play also raises the question of identity, both for woman, and for nation, given the Irish political situation and the granting of the Home Rule Bill in 1912. The primary theme of Pygmalion deals with language as a social discourse in order to assimilate and shape Eliza Doolittle’s character into polite society. However, the sub-textual debate opens up another possibility of a national reading of the play. Awam Amkpa maintains, “[…] that a colonising dominant culture firstly imposes an ideological strain on language where it renders it not simply as a frontier of making meaning but a process of socialising people into a dominant discourse”.45 This was certainly true in the minds of the Gaelic Leaguers who, since 1893, were a driving force for the preservation of the Irish language and Irish culture, in order to create a uniquely Irish identity to separate Ireland from her dominant neighbour. In line with these complex connections and through a textual analysis of class and gender, this chapter will explore the idea that themes in Pygmalion could suggest a nationalist discourse or commentary on subjugation and dominance in the English/Irish political question. In creating the character of Eliza, Shaw’s stage directions emphasize the issue of class differences: […] not at all an attractive person.. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy colour can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be: but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist. (CPP I: 198)

This portrayal of Eliza conjures up a picture of abject poverty. Notable also is the position in which Shaw situates her; she is sitting on the ground sorting out the flowers that have been knocked out of her hand by Freddy Eynsford-Hill in his rush to get a cab for his mother and sister. This is

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indicative of where she is placed, not only on the social ladder, but within gender and class distinctions of the time. It is also the place that Ireland holds within the British Empire in 1912. The Eynsford-Hill ladies in evening dress paint a stark contrast to Eliza’s dishevelled and poor-quality clothing. Her speech and dialect contrast sharply with their more cultured, genteel accents. This gentility, however, does prove to be illusory and is another indicator of the fading wealth of the aristocracy that appears to be inherent in many of Shaw’s plays. These conflicting representations of class, both through appearance and speech, capture the essence of social differences within this devised dramatic forum. Jean Reynolds maintains that “Shaw […] repeatedly struggled with the linguistic issues that preoccupy him in Pygmalion. In his twenties he made the decision to reinvent himself—a shy Irishman with little money and formal education—as a brilliant and entertaining critic and reformer”.46 Shaw had to assimilate into a new and different culture when he moved to London in 1876 and his shyness as a young man is well documented. Though he lived in England for 76 years, he never lost his Irish accent and this is very telling in his approach to Eliza’s character, whereby she changes her pronunciation but not her syntax. This first act introduces a note of chaos; it is quite Grecian in style, seemingly starting at a point of crisis. The opening stage directions create a doomsday-like atmosphere: Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter […] All were peering out gloomily at the rain […] (9)

The tone is set for the sense of crisis and anxiety that Shaw creates in this opening scene. Mrs Eynsford-Hill’s fear is palpable when she feels that Eliza, a lowly flower girl, might be intimate enough with her son to address him by his first name. The Mother. How do you know my son’s name is Freddy, pray? (CPP I: 199) When Eliza informs her that she did not know him and that she “[…] called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you were talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant” (CPP I: 199). Mrs Eynsford-­ Hill immediately loses interest in Eliza, and her daughter, Clara, admonishes her mother stating that “you might have spared Freddy that” (CPP I: 199). This dismissive treatment of Eliza, when it is realised she is

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no threat, is characteristic of the attitude to the female, the lower classes, and the colonised. The scene that ensues introduces paranoia with the chaos as the bystanders are made aware that there is somebody standing nearby taking notes of all that Eliza is saying. The note taker, Professor Henry Higgins, Eliza’s soon-to-be mentor is introduced amid a hail of suspicion and distrust. He is thought to be “a copper’s nark […] a sort of informer”, a notion that Higgins dismisses in an arrogant fashion. He reveals himself to be interested in “… phonetics. The science of speech” to a gentleman who is presented as Colonel Pickering, “author of Spoken Sanskrit” (CPP I: 201, 205, 206). Eliza’s verbal interchange with Higgins has led to him making the claim that he could pass her off as a duchess (CPP I: 206). However, it is Eliza who initiates the change by appearing at Higgins’s home the next day and demanding that he teach her to “talk more genteel” in order that she can rise above the station in life in which she currently resides (CPP I: 212). The Shavian construction of the feminine begins when Higgins rises to Eliza’s challenge. This construction is illusory and designed to take the audience to a familiar and comfortable place before Shaw exposes what the nub of his play is about. It is, in fact, the deconstruction of the feminine. Quite differently to Galatea in the Greek myth, who is presented as a blank canvas, grateful for the life breathed into her by the wishes of a man, Eliza wishes to reject patriarchal governance and plans, and with her newfound knowledge and education, to take a degree of control of her own life and future. Eliza’s arrival in Wimpole Street heralds the unceremonious introduction of Mrs Pearce. Shaw does not mention her as an occupant of the house in the opening stage directions, which state “Mrs Pearce looks in: she is Higgins’s housekeeper” (CPP I: 210). Her interaction with Eliza compounds Eliza’s position at the bottom of the social ladder. She describes Eliza to Higgins “as quite a common girl. Very common indeed” (CPP I: 210). Mrs Pearce, nonetheless, shares an empathy with Eliza, as she is from the same social stratum, though her position as housekeeper gives her a degree of authority over Eliza. Mrs Pearce remains for the exchange between Higgins and Eliza. She attempts to control the situation by reminding the characters to behave with social decorum, and appears at first to treat Eliza with disdain. It becomes clear, however, when Higgins tells her to take Eliza away, stating “if she gives you any trouble, wallop her” (CPP I: 216), that he has crossed a line with Mrs Pearce. This is further exacerbated when he replies to her question of where to put Eliza,

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“Put her in the dustbin” (CPP I: 216). Mrs Pearce tells him “… that you cant walk over everybody like this” (CPP I: 216). Higgins’s dismissive and brutal attitude is a patriarchal assertion of dominance and power. His tone also highlights the limitations of the female within that patriarchal structure. These limitations become further marked when Alfred Doolittle arrives at Higgins’s home, demanding the return of his daughter. However, what actually happens in this scene is the commodification of Eliza. Between Higgins and Doolittle, she becomes an object of barter with Doolittle more interested in selling than Higgins is in buying. Women were seen as part of what Outka termed as “the commodity culture” discussed in the previous chapter. Their exchange value was determined by their social status and property. Although Eliza was a working-class woman she still, as Doolittle tells Higgins, “belongs to me” (CPP I: 226). Higgins replies that he can “take her away” (CPP I: 226). However, in the subsequent debate and verbal fencing, Higgins agrees to Doolittle’s request for five pounds for Eliza, and even increases his offer to ten pounds, which Doolittle refuses: “No, Governor. […] I shouldnt neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less” (CPP I: 231). The deal is sealed. When Eliza encounters her father before he goes, she shows no surprise at the financial exchange and, in fact, does not even question it only to remark that “all he (her father) come here for was to touch you for some money to get drunk on” (CPP I: 233). In every way this act of barter dehumanises Eliza specifically, and women generally. There is no question that money for the female changed hands. The socially acceptable way was the dowry a woman brought to a marriage, which was usually negotiated by the men in the families. The other way was payment for sexual services. In this transaction Eliza is just sold. Doolittle does not question Higgins’s motives, and it is Higgins who is paying for Eliza. This implication falls into the realms of an implied sexual contract, which Alfred Higgins likely assumes. What becomes interesting as the play progresses is how Eliza rises above this portrayal of herself as a commodity. Higgins’s decision to showcase Eliza’s progress at his mother’s “at-­ home” marks the start of Eliza’s emergence from the chrysalis that Higgins had wrapped her in while he worked on his bet to Pickering to “pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party” (CPP I: 206). Higgins’s vision for Eliza is quite myopic. He limits the topics of conversation she can address to “the weather” and “everybody’s health” (CPP I:

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238) Mrs Higgins’s “at-home” sets the scene for Eliza’s presentation into society, to mark her introduction as a lady and act as the first test of Higgins’s experiment as it were. It is also the first time that Shaw informs in his stage directions of the “straitened means” of the Eynsford-Hills. (CPP I: 239) Through the female presence on stage Shaw has engineered a presentation of the different societal strata. There is Mrs Higgins, a well-­ to-­do upper class woman; the Eynsford-Hill ladies who, though originally from an upper class background, are now in “genteel poverty” (CPP I: 239); there is Eliza who hails from a working class background; and finally there is the nameless parlour maid, another symbol of the labouring, in-­ service class. This scene is one of the most comedic in the play, Doolittle’s interaction with Higgins in Act V being the other. The banter that ensues demonstrates that these gatherings are all about appearances. Even though Eliza has been given a limited scope of conversation by Higgins, she still manages to be the central controller of conversation. It is a prime example of how Shaw inverts the Pygmalion myth: when Eliza enters the room, she is “guided by Higgins’s signals” and is very much the graceful mannequin for the first few minutes of the visit (CPP I: 242). Mrs Higgins leads the conversation about the weather and the first cracks in Eliza’s veneer appear when Freddy Eynsford-Hill laughs at her answer. She asks, “what is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right” (CPP I: 243). Her demeanour changes, and she is described as “darkly” in the stage directions as she replies to the next comment on health by Mrs Higgins. Eliza’s social class is revealed, as even though her diction is perfect, her syntax and topic expose her true station in life. However, this exposure of her social class continues to be masked by her beautiful clothes and perfect accent. Eliza has gained control of the situation from Higgins even though she does not yet realise it. She has managed to retain her own sense of self despite Higgins’s attempts to erase her humble beginnings. Higgins does give her the cue when it is time to leave but even then, Eliza retains control of herself and the room. In answering Freddy’s enquiry as to whether she will be “walking across the park” (CPP I: 245) with the now famous line “Not bloody likely”, Eliza has demonstrated an ability to be independent, though, yet again, it is an unconscious action. Mrs Higgins is presented in the stage directions as a product of a highly cultural era, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Elizabeth Cvitan argues that “the intimate association of Morris, Burne-Jones and Rossetti initiated the second generation of Pre-Raphaelitism which aimed to express spiritual truths through aesthetic beauty”.47 Shaw designed Mrs. Higgins

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as a complex character and has, through the stage directions, painted the picture of a shrewd, insightful and spirited character. In not referencing the late (one assumes, though she could be another Shavian single mother like Mrs Warren) Mr Higgins senior, Shaw has also given Mrs Higgins a very independent role. Her independence and Eliza’s, although two very different commodities, share a common ground; both are earned despite their class. Mrs Higgins has a moneyed background but it is the absence of a husband that allows her a freedom that may be otherwise stifled by a dominant male presence. Eliza’s independence will be earned through education. Here the similarities end. Although Mrs Higgins appears concerned about Eliza’s situation in the house in Wimpole Street, she is more concerned about the problem that Eliza will become. She enquires whether either man realised that “when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her?” (CPP I: 250). Neither man has a clue what she means and when she states “A problem”, both men question as to whether Eliza can be made into a lady or not is the problem (CPP I: 250). Higgins feels he has “half solved it already” (CPP I: 250). Mrs Higgins attempts to make her meaning abundantly clear “No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the problem is what is to be done with her afterwards” (CPP I: 250). Higgins argues that “she [Eliza] can go her own way, with all the advantages” he has given her (CPP I: 250). Mrs Higgins tries to make him see sense that “the advantages of that poor woman who was here just now! The manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living without giving her a fine lady’s income” will not work for Eliza when those two men have completed their experiment (CPP I: 250). Although she tries to reason with both Higgins and Pickering, her protestations fall on deaf ears and she is rendered speechless. This speechlessness emphasises the relative powerlessness of the female voice. Mrs Higgins’s frustration manifests itself in her angry exclamations when the two men have left, “Oh men! men!! men!!!” (CPP I: 250). It is quite obvious from this interchange that despite having financial independence, Mrs Higgins is only marginally better off in the larger scheme of things than Eliza, whose voice has been commandeered by Higgins and Pickering. However, rather than portraying Mrs Higgins’s character as weak, Shaw highlights how the men’s illogical behaviour makes them appear narrow-minded and obtuse. More importantly, through Mrs Higgins, he shows that the feminine ideal is a male construct, and demonstrates how her awareness of that construct marks the emergence of change for Eliza. Act III ends with the culmination of Higgins’s

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prediction for Eliza with his ambition to pass her off as a “duchess at an ambassador’s garden party” becoming a reality (CPP I: 206). Higgins and Pickering render Eliza invisible through their self-­ congratulatory conversation about their success in Eliza’s achievement at the beginning of Act IV.  Shaw describes Eliza’s expression as “almost tragic” (CPP I: 252). This act marks Eliza’s anagnorisis; she becomes fully aware of the futility of her position now that she has fulfilled her usefulness to Higgins. As she listens silently to their conversation, her mood darkens and her “beauty becomes murderous” (CPP I: 254). Once again, Shaw uses anger to demonstrate how frustration at the helplessness of her situation manifests in his characterisation of Eliza. When Higgins walks back in to the room to get his slippers he is totally unprepared and, in fact, quite blind to the gauntlet of emotions that Eliza is experiencing. In his blindness he cannot see Eliza’s point of view, and is most condescending and dismissive towards her. As Sarah Grand argues on patriarchal behaviour: “We have allowed him [man] to arrange the whole societal system and manage or mismanage it all these ages without ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering whether his abilities and his motives are sufficiently good to qualify him for the task”.48 Higgins certainly fits that profile. In temper, after she has thrown his slippers at him, Eliza challenges him, “Ive won your bet for you, havnt I? Thats enough for you. I dont matter, I suppose” (CPP I: 255). Higgins’s response encapsulates the narrow thinking of the man: “You won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! I won it. What did you throw those slippers at me for?” (CPP I: 255). He is so myopic and sequestered within his own world that he cannot see what he has done to Eliza. He has placed her in an impossible situation. She is in a no-[wo]man’s land, straddling the different layers in society but having a place in none of them. In despair, and in answer to his suggestion that marriage might be the answer to her current difficulties, she told him, “I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now youve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish youd left me where you found me” (CPP I: 257). This statement is monumental and divulges vast insights into the state of societal gender inequalities at that particular juncture. In these pre-war years, the battle for equality and suffrage was in a state of flux and in reality, the “woman question” was selective in that it did not offer equality in reality to women, though some may have benefited from more freedom through societal advantages. Eliza takes the decision to leave and in telling Higgins that “[…] I’m only a common ignorant girl; and in my

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station I have to be careful. There cant be any feelings between the like of you and the like of me. […] “she gains the upper hand (CPP I: 258). It is now Higgins who is “sulky” and “furious” (CPP I: 258, 259). This juxtaposition of emotions has thus far been attributed as a feminine trait and in awarding it to Higgins, Shaw has destroyed the popular myth attributing emotional volatility solely to the female. In total opposition to the pandemonium of the opening scene in Act I, Act V opens in the serene calm of Mrs Higgins in her drawing room. Chaos arrives in the door with the appearance of Higgins and Pickering as they come to report Eliza’s disappearance to Mrs Higgins. Yet again, Shaw subverts the notion of the female representing crisis. However, through this subversion, what he does achieve in demonstrating is that the notions of crisis and chaos are human conditions, not gendered ones. The stage directions state that “Higgins bursts in, He is, as the Parlor-maid has said, in a state” (CPP I: 260). It is quite clear that he is at a loss as to understand what has happened to Eliza. He is most perplexed when his mother states that he (Higgins) must have frightened her (CPP I: 260). His myopia is very much intact through his response. His worry is not really for Eliza; it is for himself and how he is going to manage without her. The scene takes on a very patriarchal tone when Doolittle is introduced to the scene and, yet again, Eliza’s financial and emotional dependence on the male is discussed in a disparaging fashion. Doolittle has come into an inheritance, that he allegedly does not welcome, thanks to Higgins, and has arrived to rail against the fact to Higgins and, it must be said, to anyone who cared to listen to him. The kernel of the conversation, of course, reverts to the disappearance of Eliza and who, in fact, owns her. Mrs Higgins, in what one must imagine to be a sardonic tone, states “[…] this solves the problem of Eliza’s future. You can provide for her now” (CPP I: 265). The ensuing dialogue between Doolittle and Higgins is very telling and despite the comedy with which it is delivered, is very dark indeed: Doolittle [with melancholy resignation] Yes, maam: I’m expected to provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a year. Higgins [jumping up] Nonsense! He cant provide for her, He cant provide for her. She doesnt belong to him. I paid him five pounds for her. Doolittle: either youre an honest man or a rogue. Doolittle [tolerantly]

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A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us: a little of both Higgins Well, you took that money for the girl; and you have no right to take her as well. (CPP I: 265)

This patriarchal dialogue was still an acceptable form of debate at the fin de siècle and into the earlier part of the twentieth century, and is a recurring theme in Shaw’s plays, a theme he uses to highlight inequality. Treated as a commodity by both Higgins and her father and even though Mrs Higgins has taken a protective interest in her, Eliza does not raise an argument against this discussion except to tell Higgins not to “be absurd” (CPP I: 265). When Eliza, who has been staying in Mrs Higgins’s house, joins them, it becomes obvious quite quickly that she intends to stand her ground against all the adversity she is still encountering, and does so in a very quiet and dignified manner. It is Higgins who maintains the petulant stance and in doing so gives Eliza the upper hand, which she exploits by drawing a distinction between Higgins’s treatment of her and Pickering’s. She tells Pickering: […] the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will: but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady and always will. (CPP I: 270)

Eliza creates an opposing dichotomy of power when she tells Pickering that he can address her as Eliza but that Higgins has to call her Miss Doolittle (CPP I: 271). It would appear that Eliza has matured. However, in typical Shavian style, her character is humanised when her own prejudices are brought to light at the news that her father is to marry. Eliza gets very angry and states, “Youre going to let yourself down and marry that low common woman!” (CPP I: 272). It is very obvious from this exchange that the gendered class divide is alive and well. Solidarity among the sisterhood was a very contentious issue and Shaw, through Eliza’s statement, is reminding his audience of that fact. Shaw, in breathing life into the character of Eliza, challenges the notion of the feminine construct. Eliza originally appears as a product of Higgins’s conception but ultimately it is the construction of her own power of reasoning that fashions the way her character develops. Unlike Galatea, who

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lived to obey Pygmalion, Eliza, with her new-found confidence and education, removes herself from Higgins, who does not believe that she will go. As she leaves, he issues her with instructions to order a ham and stilton cheese, and to buy him gloves (CPP I: 281). The stage directions state that “she sweeps out”, no slamming of the door for Eliza, rather a determined and forward movement as she gains control of her own life (CPP I: 281). The first performances of the play were in Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in April 1914, directed by actor/manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, also in the role of Henry Higgins, and starring Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza. Such was Beerbohm Tree’s differing interpretation of the play from Shaw’s original idea, that Stella Campbell urged Shaw in a letter to “come soon—or you will not recognise your play”.49 For Shaw, his Pygmalion was not a fairy tale and he certainly did not believe in fairy tale endings, though Beerbohm Tree did everything he could to thwart Shaw’s wishes. Gibbs argues that “Shaw made numerous attempts to reinforce his idea that the play ultimately shows Eliza’s emancipation from Higgins”.50 Beerbohm Tree, however, like a large portion of society, was not yet ready for female emancipation. This chapter has so far looked at Eliza from Shaw’s societal feminist perspective; however, Eliza’s femininity is also symbolic of nation. Amkpa has suggested: Eliza’s home and neighbours are juxtaposed with Higgins’s home, her father with Higgins’s mother, her comportment and linguistic difference from the middle class, etc. This binary is instructive when looked at broadly as Shaw’s attempt to map out the crises of European modernity, its colonising dominant culture and its captive hold on the psyche of the subordinated social classes.51

This statement unlocks the key to a debate which suggests that Shaw constructs the character of Eliza to act as a metaphor for a colonised Ireland, an Ireland that is dominated by her richer and more powerful neighbour. Through his depiction of Eliza, Shaw again denounces the idealistic picture of Ireland as portrayed by W.B. Yeats in the form of his Cathleen ni Houlihan character discussed earlier in the chapter and in the previous chapter. Eliza is by no means, however, a blank canvas or a weak character. Her representation is subtler than that; through her interaction with Higgins, whose name of course is Irish in origin as discussed in detail by

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David Clare,52 she will come to represent how, through language, a nation can reclaim its identity from a conquering empire. Shaw knew the importance of language to a colonised country. During an interview for an Irish newspaper in 1946, Shaw replied to the reporter’s question on how much being Irish had coloured his mental makeup by stating that it made him a foreigner in every other country, but went on to say that “the position of a foreigner with complete command of the same language has great advantages”.53 On the notion of colonialism, there is one overriding and vital question posed on three occasions in Pygmalion, once by Mrs Pearce, secondly by Mrs Higgins, and thirdly by Eliza herself, as to what her future will hold after Higgins is finished with her, that resonates with Britain’s exasperation with Ireland. As Mrs Pearce succinctly asks Higgins: … And what is to become of her when youve finished your teaching? You must look ahead a little. (CPP I: 218)

Later, Mrs Higgins referred to “the problem of what is to be done with her afterwards” as already discussed (CPP I: 250). There is no doubt that the question of Eliza’s future is a huge one and alludes to the bigger question that was a political hotbed at that time between the England and the Ireland especially in light of the 1912 Home Rule Bill. Shaw, though he had left Ireland at twenty years of age, had always maintained his sense of Irishness, stating that he was Irish, typically Irish.54 It stands to reason that this sense of Irishness manifests itself in his writings and subtly underscores the obvious with a layered undercurrent. Eliza represents that ever-­ changing aspect of “the Irish question”. The only way that Higgins could respond to the question posed to him by Mrs Pearce was in a flippant manner, telling her that: Well, when Ive done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so thats all right. (CPP I: 218)

Through this callous reply which implies superiority, Shaw was highlighting British indecisiveness and indifference on how to handle its Irish colony and the Irish question. Later, in 1913, Shaw was to write an essay entitled Why Devolution will not do. In it he states that “It is our [the Irish] business to demand a National Parliament and a Federal Parliament; but we want the National Parliament first”.55 He was aware of the English ineptitude when dealing with Irish affairs and was quite categorically

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stating his allegiance to his Irish roots. In giving Higgins a “laboratory” rather than a study, he directs the theme of the play towards experimentation rather than education. These ideas of imperialism and colonisation are inherent throughout the play and are highlighted from the very first stage directions. The play, as discussed earlier, opens in Covent Garden, which at the time was not the upmarket place it is now, with pedestrians running for shelter from the torrential rain “into the porticos of St Paul’s Church” (CPP I: 197). The notion of Irishness, and the dilemma that presents, is present through the questions of identity that Higgins poses and his concentration on language and dialect as a means of identity. Eliza, in dismissing her birthplace, highlights a signal for change. She displays a clever awareness of the need to improve her circumstances in order to free herself from her social paralysis. She knows that change has to come through language; inequality, repression, and dispossession are structured through language. Eliza realises that in order to succeed in her goals to be accepted and taken seriously in another life, she must learn to “talk more genteel” (CPP I: 212). Even though it was Higgins who introduces the subject of language in Act I: You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as a lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. (CPP I: 206)

It is Eliza who initiates their contact in order to learn the language of commerce. Shaw has played very cleverly with the character of Eliza, in a way that presents her needs as language driven. In a letter to The Freeman’s Journal in October 1910, he wrote quite succinctly about his opinion on the many perceptions of Irish language, and it was his opinion that the Gaelic League was manufacturing a brand of Irish that was not in sync with how Irish was really spoken. He stated that “[…] some of our Gaelic League enthusiasts are trying hard, by setting native Irish speakers to work on their literary exercises, to produce a sort of Gaelic Esperanto which can be imposed on us as our native language”.56 Shaw’s argument is that if another form of language is to be introduced, it may as well be something that will be beneficial to the nation and allow Ireland to take her proper place on the world stage. Bohman-Kalaja argues that “Eliza …

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complicates and reworks the Saxon-Celt divide”.57 She also maintains that “images of the Irish as a race of savages with incomprehensible speech abound in the popular Victorian Press” and she quotes from Punch Magazine “… It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of the Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind, it talks a sort of gibberish”58 Just as Higgins recognises the fact that Eliza has “had to learn a complete new language” (CPP I: 238) in order to fit in with society’s perception of what is acceptable, likewise, the Irish had to adopt the language of the coloniser in order to take control of their own future. Brian Friel deals with this subject succinctly in his play Translations (1980). As Hugh, the schoolmaster in the play states that a few of them did speak English “Outside the parish of course—and then usually for the purposes of commerce”.59 Similarly, the concentration of Maire in Translations underscores the need to learn English to progress as she argues that Daniel O’Connell said, “the old language is a barrier to modern progress”.60 She goes on to state that “he is right” and that she “‘wants English”.61 Maire, like Eliza, displays a drive for her own agency and independence. As Eliza asked of Higgins: “Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up?” (CPP I: 277). Shaw here is posing a bigger question than what was to be done with Eliza when Higgins was finished with her; it is a question of what Eliza is to do with herself. This mirrors Ireland’s political struggle at that particular juncture with the passing of the Home Rule bill in 1912 finally, after decades of negotiations and rejections. Shaw answers the question by empowering Eliza with the knowledge that she has been educated and that no matter what, this cannot be taken back or taken away from her. It is her moment of anagnorisis: Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You cant take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! Thats done you Henry Higgins, it has. Now I dont care (snapping her fingers) for your bullying and big talk. (CPP I: 280)

What becomes obvious from this speech of Eliza’s is that although Higgins has taught her to pronounce correctly, he has not succeeded in changing her dialectical nuances, a fact he references in conversation with his mother just before her “at-home” in Act III when he tells his mother:

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You see, Ive got her pronunciation all right: but you have to consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she pronounces; […] (CPP I: 238/239)

Shaw is cognisant of the fact that, although Irish people learned to speak English, they applied their own dialectical translation to the new language. Kiberd argues of the Irish nation’s approach to English “that once Anglicisation is achieved the Irish and the English, instead of speaking a truly identical tongue, will be divided most treacherously by a common language”.62 Shaw plays beautifully with these dialectical differences through Eliza’s dialogue and the “at-home,” in Act III, is probably the best example of this. Her conversation about how her Aunt died is full of anomalies. Sentences like “‘them as pinched it done her in” are passed off by Higgins as the new small talk; he is able to do so because her diction is perfect, though her syntax leaves a lot to be desired (CPP I: 243). In fact, what is happening is that Shaw is very aware of the dramatic writings of Lady Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge and how they utilise the patterns of native Irish speakers, demonstrating how the English language had been not only adopted, but adapted, to suit the Irish speaker. In other words, the Irish had taken the English language and made it their own. It became known as Hiberno-English and Shaw employs it pointedly in his 1916 play Heartbreak House through the character of Nurse Guinness. Shaw goes one step further in exposing how, when something is created in a laboratory, it may not necessarily survive outside it. Eliza’s education in Higgins’s laboratory bears testament to the fact that, when she tries to survive in the “real” world, she has not necessarily been equipped with the proper tools. Shaw is highlighting what is needed for Ireland if it, as a nation, is to succeed as an independent entity. Through Eliza, he demonstrates how “project Ireland” does not possess the necessary tools to govern itself. He argues in his essay How to Settle the Irish Question that: Surely, of all sorts of dependence, the most abjectly wretched is that in which a minor State is helplessly dependent on a powerful neighbour, who accepts no responsibility for her and shares nothing with her, but makes her soil the no-man’s-land between two frontiers when war breaks out.63

Eliza’s situation represents that of Ireland. She is once again in “no[wo]man’s-land”, possessing a skill acquired that is not fit for purpose, as she was not given the necessary tools to utilise this new-found skill.

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However, Eliza has realised that what she has been given cannot be taken back from her, though without the necessary support and training to enhance this skill, she knows there will be no progress. As with The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, the question of marriage rears its head in the final scene of the final act. Higgins renounces the idea of marrying Eliza telling her, “I’ll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?” (CPP I: 277). Eliza completely rejects the notion telling Higgins “I wouldn’t marry you if you asked me; and youre nearer my age than what he is” (CPP I: 277). What Eliza is rejecting here is the subservience expected of her if she were to marry either of the older men. She knows that in order to progress she has to be on an equal footing with her partner. Her parting retort to Higgins was that she was going to “marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he’s able to support me” (CPP I: 279). This speaks to the English and Irish situation, and the Home Rule Bill (1912) that, at the time of writing of the play, had been passed. This bill was to give equal voice, if not footing, to Ireland in her relationship to England. The Irish voice was to be heard for the first time since the Act of Union 1800. Through the use of myth in both these plays, Shaw raises questions on the validity of the myth of the feminine within a patriarchal society. In constructing the characters of Feemy Evans, the woman, and Eliza Doolittle, Shaw presents the anomalies that exist within the female gender. Both Feemy Evans and Eliza Doolittle are representative of the lower stratum in society and also the lower stratum of their gender. The “Woman” is not so well-defined but it is obvious that there is a higher regard for her within the play than there is for Feemy. The trope of marriage yet again raises questions of equality, and ownership, and in the case of all three characters it was rejected. Whilst Eliza’s rejection was conditional, the point was the same—it was going to be on her terms when she did accept it. There are direct references in each play to the Irish question: the reworking of The Playboy of the Western World through an engagement with the Óisín myth in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet roots the play in an Irish reading of the work, beyond its Irish premier. The tactical device of language utilised in Pygmalion, and the part it plays in defining identity, reflects the ongoing debate by nationalist Ireland on language as an important symbol of Irish identity. In the same way that Eliza retains her sense of self at Mrs Higgins’ “at home”, Ireland is gaining ground in her cultural revolution, although the political battle is yet to be fought and won, which as history plays out brought its own crisis. John Bull’s focused on

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Ireland/England, England/Ireland, where in Pygmalion Shaw targeted the theoretical ideas of subjugation, and domination, both on a national/ cultural level and on the female/male level and the devious manoeuvres the would-be dominants will do in thinking themselves beneficial to the subjugated. Higgins and Broadbent share a good deal; both convince themselves that they are helping Eliza and Ireland, respectively. Higgins wants Eliza to fetch his slippers like a domestically trained dog, and Broadbent thinks he is bringing modernization to Ireland while he confiscates everything, even utilizing Peter Keegan as a curiosity for tourists. Higgins cannot see what he has done, and Broadbent cannot see that his efficiency practices will destroy the Irish such as Matt Haffigan, who, in Broadbent’s thinking, will have to go to America or the workhouse. The difference is that Haffigan will not be able to secure a different reality for himself, whereas Eliza can. There is no doubt as Shaw’s work moved into the second decade of the twentieth century that his engagement with Ireland, its politics, both socially and economically, was increasingly reflected in his work, and inherently tied, hand in hand, to his long work towards women’s rights.

Notes 1. Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1898–1910 (London: Max Reinhardt 1972) p. 864. 2. Anthony Roche The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) p. 90. 3. Grand proposes that the scum-woman is she who provides sexual services for men. See “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” in A New Woman Reader ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Canada: Broadview Press, 2001) pp 141–146. 4. See Leonard Conolly’s note in New Mermaid 2008 annotated edition of Pygmalion. 5. Michael Holroyd Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power (London: Chatto & Windus 1998) p. 334. 6. David Ross, A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (USA: Infobase Publishing 2009) p. 28. 7. Michael Holroyd Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power p. 227. 8. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and the Socialist Provocation where he convincingly argues the links between Synge’s Playboy and Shaw’s Blanco pp. 78–85. 9. Michael Holroyd Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power p. 227.

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10. Michael Holroyd Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power p. 227. 11. Michael Holroyd Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power p. 227. 12. A month after Edward Smyth Pigott, the censor, died in 1895, Shaw wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette that the person who succeeded him should be “a Nobody”. It is safe to assume when George Redford assumed the office, Shaw did not gain a friend! See Bernard F.  Dukore’s excellent book Bernard Shaw and the Censor: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen, eds Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel & Peter Gahan (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2020) for a detailed evaluation of the Censor’s Office and Shaw’s relationship with it. 13. Lady Augusta Persse Gregory, Our Irish Theatre; A Chapter in Autobiographies (New York &London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1913) p. 140. 14. Gregory, Lady Augusta Persse Our Irish Theatre; A Chapter in Autobiographies (New York &London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1913) p. 140. 15. The disruptions in Dublin were an attempt at censorship, and certain lines were removed for its London premier in June 1907. 16. Shortly after the banning of The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, Shaw flagrantly flouted the censor with Press Cuttings (1909). He created two characters whose satirical names were instantly recognisable, thereby brazenly violating the code, which prohibited any offensive representations of living people of stage. Shaw argued that Mitchener was not the late Lord Kitchener and that the character of Prime Minister Balsquith (who first appeared cross-­dressed on the stage) was neither Lord Alfred Balfour nor the Liberal politician Herbert Henry Asquith. (Sally Peters Shaw’s life: A Feminist in spite of himself) Although this play was explicitly about female suffrage, it was not included for analysis in the book because its form, as a farce, did not compliment the trajectory of the book’s argument. 17. Lady Augusta Persse Gregory Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter in Autobiographies p. 143. 18. Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1602–2000 (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press 2002) p. 144. 19. Lady Augusta Persse Gregory, Our Irish Theatre; A Chapter in Autobiographies p. 151. 20. Lady Augusta Persse Gregory, Our Irish Theatre; A Chapter in Autobiographies p. 168. 21. G. J. Watson, [Cathleen Ní Houlihan] in Modern Irish Drama ed. John P. Harrington (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company 1991) 41. 22. Eileen O’Faolain, Irish Sagas & Folk Tales (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 1986), p. 164. 23. Eileen O’Faolain, Irish Sagas & Folk Tales p. 165. 24. Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1898–1910 p. 859. 25. Eileen O’Faolain, Irish Sagas & Folk p. 174.

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26. Spéir Bhean is Gaelic and translates as Sky Woman. A late version (sixteenth–eighteenth century) version of the goddess of sovereignty through whose right a king could rule in Ireland, the spéir bhean was depicted by the bards of the time as a beautiful young woman possibly from the otherworld who wandered the roads searching for the land’s true leader. Her name was sometimes given as Cathleen ni Houlihan, sometimes as Rosin Dubh or Dark Rosaleen. Sometimes she appeared as the Shan Van Vocht (Sean Bhean Bhocht) the “poor old woman” who recalls the hag who turned young again when she was kissed by the rightful ruler. 27. This serves to reinforce the Irish link as the rainbow described by Blanco had “green writing on a streak of red”, as discussed earlier in the chapter aligning the “rainbow woman” with an Irish connection. 28. Bernard Shaw _Our Theatre in the Nineties Vol II (London: Constable & Company 1932 revised 1948) p 29. 29. Bernard Shaw Letter to Lady Gregory August 7 August 1909 Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey ed. Dan H. Laurence & Nicholas Grene (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993) p 11. 30. J.M. Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” in The Complete Plays Introduction and Notes T.R. Henn (London: Methuen Drama1963) p. 183. 31. J.M.  Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” in The Complete Plays p. 224. 32. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: A Literature of a Modern Nation (Great Britain: Vintage 1996) p. 179. 33. J.M.  Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” in The Complete Plays p. 229. 34. Bernard Shaw “Our Irish Players” The Matter with Ireland ed. Dan H.  Laurence & David H.  Greene (USA: University Press Florida, 2001) p 77. 35. Anthony Roche, Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama (Ireland: Carysfort Press 2013) p. 21. 36. Bernard Shaw. Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable & Company Ltd. 1949) p. 14. 37. Lady Gregory’s argument against part of the censor’s objection was that it was “hypocrisy to object to a fallen woman in homespun on the stage, when a fallen woman in satin has been the theme of a great number of plays that have been passed” found in her Our Irish Theatre; A Chapter in Autobiographies p. 146. 38. J.M. Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” p. 191. 39. J.M. Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” p. 204. 40. J.M. Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World” p. 181. 41. Sue-Ellen Case. feminism and the theatre p. 6.

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42. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel. “SHAW, CONNOLLY, AND THE IRISH CITIZEN ARMY.” Shaw 27 (USA: Penn State Press,2007): 118–34. 43. Alan Dent. Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence (London: Victor Gollamcz 1952) p. 19. 44. Bernard Shaw Pygmalion ed. L.W.  Conolly (London: Methuen Drama 2008) p. xxv. 45. Awan Amkpa, Drama and the Languages of Postcolonial Desire: Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” Irish University Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Autumn— Winter, 1999), p. 294. 46. Jean Reynolds Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw p. 2. 47. Elizabeth Cvitan, Art in Evolution: The Association of Burne-Jones, Morris and Rossetti in the second generation of Raphaelitism in Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetics and Decadents Rhode Island: Brown University 2006) available at http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/cvitan.html accessed January 13th 2021. 48. Sarah Grand’s The New Aspect of the Woman Question in The North American Review p. 271. 49. Alan Dent, Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence (London; Victor Gollancz 1952) P. 162. 50. GM Gibbs Bernard Shaw a Life p. 332. 51. Awan Amkpa, Drama and the Languages of Postcolonial Desire: Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” Irish University Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Autumn— Winter, 1999), pp. 294–304 p. 2. 52. David Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (England: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) See chapter 2 “Shaw and the Irish Diaspora” for an excellent Irish reading of Higgin’s character. 53. Bernard Shaw, “Introduction” The Matter with Ireland eds Dan H.  Laurence and David H.  Greene (Florida: University Press Florida, 2001) p. xv. 54. Fredrick P. W. McDowell, The Shavian World of John Bull’s Other Island in Modern Critical Views: George Bernard Shaw ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers 1987) p. 65. 55. Bernard Shaw, The Matter with Ireland p. 204. 56. Bernard Shaw, The Matter with Ireland p. 60. 57. Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, Undoing Identities in Two Irish Shaw Plays: John Bull’s Other Island and Pygmalion In Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition. Ed Peter Gahan. (USA: Penn State Press 2010) p. 120. 58. Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, Undoing Identities in Two Irish Shaw Plays: John Bull’s Other Island and Pygmalion) p. 117. 59. Brian Friel, “Translations” Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber 1984) p. 399.

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60. Brian Friel, “Translations” Plays 1 p. 400. 61. Brian Friel, Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber 1984) p. 400. 62. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: A Literature of a Modern Nation (Great Britain: Vintage 1996) p. 622. 63. Bernard Shaw, The Matter with Ireland p. 159.

Epilogue: Tying the Knot

Bernard Shaw frequently feminised Ireland in his critical, theoretical, and personal writing, which this study has argued. When discussing the subject of Ireland, Shaw mainly used the personal pronoun she/her. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886, where he comments on J.A. Partridge’s The Making of an Irish Nation, Shaw maintains that Partridge claims, “for Ireland absolute political independence of England, while admitting and advocating her subjection to Empire of Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and the colonies”.1 Fast forward to 1918, when in an open letter to Colonel Lynch, he talks of “The appeal to Ireland to ally herself with the French Republic”.2 He continues this trend when writing letters to Forward (Glasgow between 1940–1945), where he again refers to Ireland in the feminine, “Catholic Eire, to say nothing of her Protestants,…” when writing of “Eamonn De Valera and the Second World War”.3 Of course, these examples also serve to demonstrate the breadth of time that Shaw wrote and thought about Ireland. As such, he referred to himself always as an Irishman and engaged himself in her affairs. In the 1906 Preface for Politicians written to accompany John Bull’s Other Island’s 1907 publication, Shaw stated that he was “hampered as an Irishman, by my implacable hostility to English domination” (CPP II: 494). This was a stance he argued more vehemently in the preface to the Home Rule Edition of the play in 1912. In the 1929 postscript to the play’s preface, Shaw encouraged Irish Protestants “to take their chance, trust their grit, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2

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and play their part in a single parliament ruling an undivided Ireland” (CPP II: 501). While there are many Irish tropes in his early plays, as discussed in the first two chapters of this monograph, his interest and involvement with women’s suffrage is also very evident through the characters he created in these plays. In this regard, Shaw pursued two campaigns through many of his plays prior to the Great War; Home Rule and Suffrage, which collided with equal ferocity in the 1904 John Bull’s Other Island. Shaw’s emergence as a playwright in an 1892 environment politically charged by both female suffrage and Irish national independence, in the shadow of Charles Stewart Parnell’s downfall due to divorce laws that victimized married women, also marked the rise of an Irish international drama through the Shavian pen. Shaw used the trope of the feminine to consider personal and societal mores, but also engaged with a very different idea of woman as nation, which was decidedly not the idealist notion of woman and myth that W.B. Yeats conjured. The difference in thinking between Shaw and Yeats was very influential in the manner in which Shaw approached the “Irish question”. In tracing the small intricacies in his growing body of work, it is not difficult to find the undertones of Shaw’s engagement with the Irish question. By exploring the social constraints the marriage question placed on women, especially women of socio-economic disadvantage, Shaw sub-textually, and symbolically probed the coercive effect of the Act of Union 1800 and the subsequent demand for Home Rule for Ireland. As the book argues, Shaw’s preoccupation with marriage and the marriagequestion became a tool with which he interrogated the Irish question. The topic of marriage and the marriage contract, through all the plays discussed in this study, points to Shaw’s continued awareness of the social and political climate of his Irish identity. It is also clear that the consistency of the treatments in his plays of marriage and union forms a basis for the formulation of Shaw’s presentment on matters that capture his imagination, and the ideas of nationalism, and national identity are included with his overt interrogation of personal, gender, and social mores. The divorce laws that prohibited Katharine O’Shea from divorcing Parnell may well have propelled Shaw into tying and intertwining his arguments for women with his arguments for Ireland, at least subconsciously if Shaw ever worked subconsciously. That particular situation has all the ingredients that tie the woman question and the Irish question together; the divorce/marriage law brought down Parnell and everything he did and represented for Home Rule and the Land Question, all because Katharine O’Shea had no rights. In 1892, Shaw as

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much as said this in his letter to The Star in November 1890 when he stated “All the suffering that is now being inflicted on Mr Parnell and his ‘accomplice’ (as Dr Clifford would call her) and all the disastrous consequences threatened to the Irish Nationalist party would have happened equally had Mr Parnell forced Captain O’Shea to take proceedings years ago by openly defying the law”.4 Although Shaw’s dramatic writing has been widely critiqued from many perspectives, his engagement with marriage and union as a personal contract with nationhood has never before been considered as a methodology with which to view his work. This study demonstrates that Shaw was deeply engaged with and committed to the Irish question, and the future of Ireland as an independent nation, in tandem with his fervent commitment to equality in social and gender issues. Yeats may have been interested in the idea of an altered state for Ireland from a mythical perspective, but Shaw’s idea of an altered state was grounded in a material reality that examined the traditions, habits, and patterns of society and, in doing so, explored the wider premise of national identity and independence for Ireland through the tropes of marriage and union. This, in turn, contributes to the reinterpretation of Shaw as an Irish playwright dedicated and committed to his art; an art that incorporated full engagement with Ireland and which to date has been underexplored. This study serves to argue Shaw’s rightful position as an acknowledged and visible man of Irish theatre, indeed as a giant of Irish drama.

Notes 1. Bernard Shaw, “The Making of an Irish Nation” The Matter with Ireland 2ndEdition ed Dan H. Laurence & David H. Greene, (USA: University of Florida Press: 2001) p 15. 2. Bernard Shaw, “War Issues for Irishmen” The Matter with Ireland 2ndEdition p 187. 3. Bernard Shaw, “Eamonn DeValera and the Second World War” The Matter with Ireland 2ndEdition p 323. 4. Bernard Shaw, “Should Parnell Go?” The Matter with Ireland p. 33.

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Index1

A Abbey Theatre, 1, 8, 9, 38, 93, 94, 111, 114n21, 117, 120, 121, 130 Achurch, Janet, 62, 63 Act of Union 1800, 14n5, 146, 154 Albert, Sidney P., 98, 99 Amkpa, Awan, 132, 141 Anglo-Irish, 8, 9, 28, 53n13, 55n50 Archer, William, 19, 36, 52 Aristotle, 51, 59, 61, 73, 81 Ascendency class, 8, 9, 28, 35, 54n26, 89 Aston, Elaine, 60 Atherton, Gertrude, 5 B Barker, Granville, 40, 110 Barker–Vedrenne Company, 111 Belfort, Bax, 77, 78 Bohman-Kalaja, Kimberly, 143

Britain, 6, 14, 102, 105, 117, 142, 153 Brown, Terence, 22 Butt, Isaac, 6 C Caird, Mona, 4 Campbell, Beatrice Stella (“Mrs. Pat”), 55n40, 131, 141 Case, Sue-Ellen, 19, 51, 60, 61, 78, 127, 129 Casson, Lewis, 93 Catholic Church, 105, 107 Celtic Revival, 7, 10, 88, 92 Censor, 38, 118–121, 126, 127, 148n12, 148n16, 149n37 Chesterton, G.K., 104, 111 Clare, David, 1, 100, 104, 142 Colonialism, 112, 142 Connolly, James, 104, 105, 114n31

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. McNamara, Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32589-2

165

166 

INDEX

Court Theatre, 94, 111 Craig, Gordon, 94 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 3, 5 D Dent, Alan, 150n43, 150n49 Dublin Castle, 105, 120–122 E Easter Rising, 16n47, 105, 111, 112 Ellman, Richard, 55n41 Ervine, St. John, 94 Euripides, 79 F Fay, William, 94 Fegan, Melissa, 9 Fortier, Mark, 18, 19, 25, 47, 129 Friel, Brian, 100, 144 play; Translations, 144 G Gaelic League, 7, 28, 84, 132, 143 Gahan, Peter, 1, 17, 64, 68 Gibbs, A.M., 19, 37, 47, 52, 62, 141 Gladstone, William, 7 Gonne, Maud, 29–31, 54n34, 54n37, 54n39 Grand, Sarah, 4, 118, 138, 147n3 Greek drama, 59, 73, 79, 81 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 8, 9, 12, 28, 29, 31, 88, 93, 102, 105, 110, 113n9, 117, 120–123, 127, 145 plays; Cathleen Ni Houlihan (see co-author William Butler Yeats) Grene, Nicholas, 1, 10, 27, 33, 41, 42, 48, 67 Griffith, Gareth, 40, 104

H Hiberno-English, 145 Holroyd, Michael, 18, 23, 64, 65, 68, 72, 73, 87, 92, 119 Home Government Association, 6 Home Rule Bill 1912 Home Rule Acts, 16n47 Pro-Home Rule Party (see Irish Parliamentary Party) Howard, Ebenezer, 98, 99, 102 book; Garden Cities of To-morrow, 98 I Ibsen, Henrik, 11, 29, 33, 35–52, 63, 65–67 play; A Doll’s House, 63; Ghosts, 11, 35–52 Innes, Christopher, 53n2, 57n81, 57n91, 114n29 Irish Civil War, 105 Irish Literary Theatre, 7, 8, 28, 29, 92 Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), 12, 85n29, 96, 111 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 6 Irish War of Independence, 105 J Jackson, Alvin, 6 K Kiberd, Declan, 5, 6, 90, 98, 124, 145 L Langton, Basil, 93 Lee, Stephen, 7, 10, 63 Leeney, Cathy, 8 Leerssen, Joep, 32

 INDEX 

Levitas, Ben, 101 M MacDonald, Jan, 93 Markievicz, Constance, 104, 105 Marriage the marriage question, 3–5, 11, 14, 52, 59, 83, 88, 118, 132, 154 Married Woman’s Property Act 1882, 2, 3, 7, 20, 37, 71 Martyn, Edward, 8, 28, 29, 54n26, 55n50 Marx, Eleanor, 104 Matthews, P.J., 8 McAteer, Michael, 89, 113n12 McDowell, Fredrick P.W., 88, 105, 108, 112 McNulty, Edward, 38 Meyers, Michael, 36, 48, 49 Mill, John Stuart, 4 Mitchell, Sally, 2 Moi, Toril, 35 Moloney, Helena, 104 Morash, Christopher, 121 Murphy, Paul, 8 N Nelson, Carolyn Christian, 4, 5 The New Woman Reader, 147n3 O O’Connell, Daniel, 6, 7, 144 O’Faolain, Eileen, 148n22, 148n23, 148n25 O’Malley, Ellen, 111 O’Shea, Katherine (Kitty), 12, 56n79, 83, 154 Outka, Elizabeth, 98, 99, 101, 102, 135

167

P Pankhurst, Emmeline, 2, 4, 5 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 2, 6, 7, 12, 56–57n79, 83, 85n29, 96, 114n18, 154, 155 Pearson, Hesketh, 116n75 Peters, Sally, 18, 25, 148n16 Powell, Kerry, 39, 40 Purdom, C.B., 53n11 R Rehan, Ada, 92, 111 Reynolds, Jean, 133 Ritschel, Nelson O’Ceallaigh, 1, 38, 42, 54n37, 88, 94, 100, 114n31 Roche, Anthony, 95, 117, 125 Royalty Theatre, London, 87 S Sean Van Vocht, 91, 92 Shakespeare, William, 59, 118 Shaw, Bernard, 1, 17, 59, 87, 117, 153 on the Abbey Theatre, 1, 38, 93, 94, 111, 112, 114n21, 117, 120, 121 books; The Matter with Ireland, 54n24, 86n46, 86n47, 86n48, 113n14, 149n34, 150n53, 150n55, 150n56, 151n63, 155n1, 155n2, 155n3, 155n4; The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 36; Sixteen Self Sketches, 56n59, 149n36 on Catholic Church, 105, 107 on colonialism, 112, 142 on devolution, 12, 83 discussion play, 11, 61, 76, 97, 117, 143, 154 his parents and upbringing, 62

168 

INDEX

Shaw, Bernard  (cont.) on Ibsen, 11, 29, 33, 36, 37, 51, 52, 65 on Ireland, 1, 12–14, 14n2, 16n47, 23, 28, 30, 32, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90–92, 96, 99–104, 112, 120, 121, 131, 141–145, 147, 153, 155 on language, 13, 84, 100, 123, 131, 132, 142, 143, 145, 146 on marriage, 2, 3, 11–14, 17, 35, 42, 48, 51, 62, 64, 70, 72, 73, 78, 95, 96, 104, 108, 111, 154, 155 plays; Candida, 10–12, 59–84; Fanny’s First Play, 37; Getting Married, 3, 10–12, 40, 59–84, 96, 104, 111; John Bull’s Other Island, 2, 10, 12, 13, 16n47, 47, 66, 83, 84, 86n35, 87, 91–93, 95, 99, 100, 110, 112, 117–119, 126, 153, 154; Major Barbara, 1, 2, 99; Mrs Warren’s Profession, 11, 17–52, 75–76, 120; Press Cuttings, 38, 120, 148n16; Pygmalion, 1, 10, 13, 25, 27, 97, 112, 117–147; The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, 10, 13, 25, 38, 84, 112, 117–147; Widower’s Houses, 10, 11, 17–52, 66, 91, 111, 118 on politics, 64, 147 on prostitution, 17, 37, 42, 48, 51, 52, 119, 128 stage directions, 23, 25, 93, 103, 107, 110, 132–134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143 Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 12 Shine, J.L., 93 Sophocles, 69, 79, 80 Suffrage movement, 4, 5, 10, 63

Synge, John Millington, 10, 30, 55n40, 84, 88, 90, 94, 95, 97, 100, 110, 113n13, 125, 128, 145 plays; In the Shadow of the Glen, 54n37, 88, 89; Playboy of the Western World, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 146; Riders to the Sea, 15n37, 88 T Templeton, Joan, 29, 36, 37, 51, 82 Trotter, Mary, 31 V Vatican, 105 Vedrenne-Barker, 111 W Warren, Sir Charles, 38 Wiesenthal, J.L., 57n90 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 18, 22 Wiles, David, 61, 78–80 Woman question, the, 2, 13, 35, 138, 154 Women’s Franchise League, 2, 4 Wyndham Land Acts, 87, 108 Y Yeats, William Butler, 8–12, 28–35, 54n39, 54–55n40, 55n41, 84, 85n13, 88–90, 92–95, 102, 110, 112, 113n9, 113n12, 113n13, 120–123, 141, 154, 155 plays; Cathleen Ni Houlihan (see co-author Lady Augusta Gregory); Countess Kathleen, 55n41 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 60