Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (3 page)

Shaw augments both the tragedy and the comedy in Mrs. Warren's next speech to her daughter by having her invoke Heaven (the only time in the play she does) to forgive her for only doing good to Vivie. Such irony—her asking Heaven to forgive her for doing good—marks the moment as Shavian: Just when the pathos of the scene reaches tragic proportions, when the mother-daughter bond's being violently severed produces the proper tragic awe, Shaw chooses just this moment to have Mrs. Warren become ridiculous by exhibiting a shocking misapprehension of the circumstances in which Heaven normally forgives people. Shaw compounds the tragicomedy of the intense moment—the climax of the play, really—by having Mrs. Warren invoke Heaven again: “From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I'll do wrong and nothing but wrong” (p. 103). A detached observer might have pointed out to Mrs. Warren that the people Heaven usually helps in their last hour are not those who have done nothing but wrong during the period preceding their last hour.

The closest analogue to such an unsettling mixture of comic and tragic registers, perhaps, would be found in The Merchant
of Venice
when Shylock reacts to his daughter's rejection of him, when she elopes with Lorenzo and steals her father's money (act 2, scene 8). Shylock cannot seem to make up his mind about which is the greater loss (or betrayal), his stolen ducats or his deserting daughter, Jessica: He seems to feel both keenly and to be unaware of the irony of such an economy of emotion. Likewise, Mrs. Warren's sorrow and anger at what she feels is a betrayal by her own daughter seem to stem more from the disappointment of her hopes that Vivie would be the prop of her old age than from the loss of her daughter's affection and companionship, particularly since Mrs. Warren was quite generous in providing materially for Vivie, but quite stingy with maternal care and time. After all, Mrs. Warren had a business to run and so could not be a mother; and now Vivie has her own business to tend, doing actuarial calculations for a woman lawyer, and so cannot be a daughter. Justice has an ironic sense of humor.

Shaw's final stage direction in the scene, Vivie “goes
at
her work with
a
plunge, and soon becomes
absorbed
in
her figures”
(p. 103) maintains the perfect ambiguity with which Shaw presents the reunion and re-separation of mother and daughter. If we find Vivie hard-hearted, like Lear's daughters, and Mrs. Warren a pitiable and cruelly rejected weak figure, we must ignore her mother's lifelong egoism, her regarding her daughter as a financial investment against the loneliness and enfeeblement of old age, and above all, her ridiculously contradictory invocation of Heaven's aid in her vow to do nothing but wrong henceforth. If we find Mrs. Warren a monstrous parody of maternity, and Vivie's self-emancipation a liberation from her mother's oppression, we must ignore how Vivie severs all intimate human connections (her suitor, Frank, and her mother) in favor of turning herself into one of the drowned numbers in her actuarial calculations (“goes
at
her
work
with
a
plunge,
and
soon becomes
absorbed
in her
figures”
). No choice is made easy: The cost is laid out nakedly for each reader to gauge and decide its worth. Vivie does liberate herself, but was it worth the cost? The play began with Vivie alone on stage, lying in a hammock while reading a book and making notes; it ends with Vivie alone, sitting at a desk, having read a final note from the suitor she has rejected, and making notes again. In between, she has reunited and re-separated from her mother. Is she now a grown-up, independent, liberated woman? Assuredly, yes. And yet ...

To its would-be censors, Shaw's play was about prostitution; to Shaw's socialist friends, it was an indictment of the capitalist system; to readers and playgoers of the twenty-first century, it is still a play about costs, but not in the sense of capitalism's profits and losses. Rather, it teaches the lesson that everything, even reputed social progress, comes at a cost, sometimes at the cost of humanity.

Shaw's distinctness as a playwright in Mrs. Warren's Profession is not exhausted by either his mixture of comic and tragic tones, or his evenhanded, if not downright ambiguous, presentation of both sides of a given issue; his distinctness is also defined by his bold and unsettling (not vulgar or obscene) treatment of sexuality. There is a momentary yet extraordinary sexual tension in the opening of the second act between Mrs. Warren and her daughter's suitor, Frank, a tension that Shaw presents as arising on the instant and subsiding as quickly and spontaneously as it arose, just as such tensions rise and fall in life, without specific impetus and without furtherance. As Frank helps Mrs. Warren take off her shawl, Shaw's stage directions indicate that he gives “her shoulders the most delicate possible little caress with
hisfingers.”
Mrs. Warren, while continuing her idle conversation with him, glances “back
at him for an
instant from the corner
of
her eye
as she detects
the pressure” (p. 47). Interestingly, when Shaw revised the text for a subsequent publication (and after more experience with staging his plays), he changed the stage direction to an action more readily detected by the audience:
“gallantly
giving her shoulders
a
very perceptible squeeze.” A camera could easily convey the action and its significance in the earlier version, but on stage the new formulation would be more clear to the audience.

As the scene progresses, what began as a silent, subtle exchange of sexual signals between Frank and his girlfriend's mother becomes something more than mere naughtiness. Frank continues to flirt with Mrs. Warren by asking her to take him with her to Vienna, by teasing her with his playacting, and by using his wooing voice on her until finally he makes a cheeky remark that provokes her to pretend “to box his
ears.”
So far the bantering, though odd, seems not too far beyond the playful and harmless. But then Mrs. Warren looks at his
“pretty,
upturned face for
a
moment, tempted. At
last
she kisses him
and
immediately
turns away,
out
of patience with herself”
(p. 48). What motivates her to do this? Sexual competition with her Cambridge-educated daughter? An aging woman's impulsive attempt to assert her continuing sexual attractiveness? A momentary surge of sexual appetite? This moment is genuinely Shavian because of its fidelity to the suddenness of human impulse and the mysteriousness of human motivation.

As rapidly as the impulse arises in Mrs. Warren, it subsides and changes into half-hearted regret: “There! I shouldn't have done that. I am wicked. Never you mind, my dear: it's only a motherly kiss.” (The spaced lettering in “a m” was Shaw's way of telling the actor where the accent should fall in the delivery of the line.) Her self-reproach would be more convincing if she did not quite relish her own misbehavior so much, which relish the emphasis on “am” enacts. But even more Shavian (or ironic) is her use of the word “motherly” here. Her kiss is “motherly” only in the sense that Jocasta's kisses to Oedipus were “motherly.” And her “motherly” kiss utterly undermines any “motherly” claims she makes upon Vivie in the final scene of the play. Shaw's characters are complex and contradictory, and he gives them a moment-to-moment life on stage that is as unpredictable and funny and disturbing as that of anyone you are likely to meet on the planet Earth.

Mrs.
Warren's Profession
would be the last play Shaw would write in Ibsen's mood, meaning a play in which Shaw almost always compresses his humor into irony and allows darker human impulses to dominate the more genial ones. For example, Frank woos Vivie by playing a fantasy-game with her in which the two imagine themselves as the Babes in the Wood covered with leaves. What Shaw would later convert into the ridiculousness of human romantic impulse he here makes ironically sinister: The Babes in the Wood of legend were young brother and sister orphans whose bodies, after the two children were abandoned in the Wood and starved to death, were covered in strawberry leaves by the birds. Frank's invitation to Vivie to get covered with leaves, therefore, suggests that their potential sexual relations would be a perverse death for Vivie. But Shaw simply did not have the gloomy Norwegian's relentless appetite for unrelieved irony and darkness, though he admired the depths of human nature Ibsen's genius allowed him to reach.

After Mrs.
Warren's
Profession, Shaw's next four plays, including Candida (completed in 1894), more truly expressed his individual nature, personality, and idiosyncratic view of life. Shaw would later group Mrs. Warren's
Profession
(written in 1893) with
Widowers' Houses
and The Philanderer as “unpleasant plays.” He grouped Candida with Arms
and
the Man (1894; a satire of war as a force inimical to romance and sexuality), The Man
of
Destiny (1895; a one-act play about Napoleon's involvement in a romantic intrigue), and You Never Can Tell (1896; Shaw's response to Oscar Wilde's The Importance
of Being
Earnest) as “pleasant.” In 1898 he published these works, in two volumes, as Plays Pleasant
and
Unpleasant.

Like most socialists, Shaw had difficulty recognizing or acknowledging evil in this world—beyond the capitalist system, that is—and the world he creates in his “pleasant plays” is largely devoid of evil and tragedy, though not of sorrow or seriousness. Shaw's turning away from a preoccupation with evil and death (because neither can be helped) meant turning toward the comic spirit that insists the most important thing about human beings is not that we die, but that men and women are sexually attracted to one another, get married, and produce children—a process Shaw found a boundlessly fecund source of humor.

However, in the author of Candida one may find still the author of Mrs.
Warren's
Profession, but as if after a conversion. Where Mrs.
Warren's Profession
presents George Crofts as a palpably repulsive “capitalist bully,” Candida portrays Candida's prosperous father as a genial if scoundrelly businessman. The former acts the villain; the latter plays the comedy figure. With that shift, the banishment of outright evil, the play's weather system becomes Shavian rather than Ibsenesque. Where Mrs. Warren's “motherly” kiss of Frank provoked wonder and revulsion, Candida's embodiment of young motherhood is her sexual attractiveness. And that change makes all the difference in the play's atmosphere, which is not unpleasant but pleasant. Shaw has not abandoned seriousness, but he has become more his true self, expressing his serious ideas through the genre that suited his personality and temperament, comedy, just as Molière had before him.

Candida is the wife of a Christian socialist parson, the Reverend James Morell (pronounced “moral”), the mother of three children, and the object of amorous worship by high-strung eighteen-year-old poet Eugene Marchbanks, who enters the Morell household as an invader, unconsciously intent on winning Candida's affection away from her husband. Eugene's contesting of Morell's right to his wife tests the apparent happiness of the marriage, for the reverend finds himself wilting when the young poet imputes smug dullness to him and implies that his wife sees what a fool he is and despises him for it. And he becomes genuinely perturbed when she says something that seems to confirm Eugene's implication. The final scene in the play, in which Candida solicits bids for her care from her two wooers, is one of the most suspenseful in dramatic literature, for Shaw has cunningly made us care equally for each of the three actors in the contest so that we do not see how to choose. How Shaw resolves the impasse, the paradox according to which Candida makes her choice, I will leave the reader to delight in discovering.

I suggested earlier that in moving from Mrs. Warren's Profession to Candida, Shaw had moved into a different weather system, from a frosty-ironic Ibsenesque climate to a more balmy and clement Shavian one. Nevertheless, Shaw did not discard the Ibsen influence altogether, for in many ways Candida responds to Ibsen's pre-feminist
play A Doll's
House. When at the end of Ibsen's epoch-making play, his heroine, Nora, walks out of her home and leaves behind her husband and children—in order to fulfill her duty to herself as an individual, to get experience, and to decide for herself what she thinks about life, religion, and morality—she slams shut the door of her house of illusions, her doll's house, her unreal life. Shaw was so impressed by Ibsen's courage in making his dramas out of his characters' struggles with the major social and moral issues of his time that he wrote the first sustained critical examination of Ibsen's plays both as works of art and as social criticism, The
Quintessence of Ibsenism
(1891).

A
Doll's
House particularly made its mark on Shaw not only for its bold critique of the restricted roles of women inside the typical respectable middle-class marriage but also because of what Shaw noted as its technical innovation in the art of play-making. For Ibsen, having set up an elaborate situation involving financial fraud and blackmail, does not resolve the crisis in the usual manner, with suicide, but with a discussion between the husband and the wife. Shaw knew that he wanted to do his own version of Ibsen's critique of modern marriage, and Candida was it. But in Shaw's version the modern husband suffers as much as the wife from unreality in a marriage based on illusions. Candida reveals that her husband's public success as a forward-thinking socialist preacher has come at a cost to the women in his family—his mother, his sisters, and his wife—all of whom have guarded him from the quotidian bothers, worries, and responsibilities of life, so that he may win glory and be worshiped in the public arena, a truth the young poet had intuited. Shaw suggests that Morell is as much of a doll living in a doll's house as any wife. But the revelation does not lead to his exiting the house. Instead the young poet slams the door on domestic solace in favor of pursuing the adventure of his life into the unknown region of poetic ambition. And there Shaw leaves the play poised between the two values of domestic love and a poet's destiny. The play celebrates but separates the two realms. And they will not be brought back together until several years later in
Man and Superman.