Shaw and the “isms”

Bernard Shaw often proves difficult to pinpoint definitively on any subject, as anyone who has dealt with his socialism, Fabianism, pacifism, and especially feminism has no doubt discovered. The editors and contributors experience this same dilemma in Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off, a much welcomed volume that considers the always-complex Shaw and his favorite topic, women—literal and fictional—from multiple perspectives. The aptly titled work (Feminisms) studies Shaw's various approaches to feminist thinking, playwriting, and personal actions, for good or ill, with the stated goal of collecting “materials covering various aspects of Shaw's work and influence and put[ting] them into dialogue with contemporary feminist thinking.” Shaw's long life and career saw changes and evolutions in his positions, and the book's contributors explore these developments. The editors praise Shaw as the first British playwright to stage serious debates about the “woman question” and as the creator of extraordinary female characters. However, several of his personal relations with women, especially would-be women playwrights, are called into question.Much of the book's considerable strength derives from several chapters that feature au courant literary theory, never-before-published Shaw letters, seldom-discussed Shavian female characters, and Shaw as a multinational figure. For example, in an exemplary essay, Tracy J. R. Collins considers the body as portrayed in drama a major topic in contemporary theory and in the works of Shaw himself. Shaw's athletic women characters use their bodies to advantage in their relations with other characters and generally prove to be women of action in the quest to describe the New Woman that fascinated society during Shaw's early playwriting years.Leonard Conolly presents never-before-published letters from Shaw to the actress Mary Hamilton not only to shed light on Shaw's relationships with women but also to introduce a previously overlooked addition to Shaw's large collection of female friends and acquaintances. Fresh Shaw material is always valuable, and in this essay Conolly uses these letters to aptly demonstrate how Shaw could “speak openly and freely about the Life Force, playwriting, acting, morality, love, marriage, and happiness.”Brad Kent fills a void in Shaw studies by addressing the paucity of commentary devoted to Irish women and focuses on the treatment of female characters in John Bull's Other Island by “situating them in a broad literary history.” Kent posits that Shaw's ambivalence toward women in the play results from his conflicted relationship with his native land, but suggests that Shaw also offers hope for transformation of traditional roles for women into positive agents of progress and change.Kay Li identifies Shaw as a writer of multinational importance and relays the stage history of the first Chinese performances of Mrs Warren's Profession (1920), a talky, immoral play by Chinese standards. Nevertheless, according to Li, the play proved useful to Chinese intellectuals in their “slow march toward equality for women.”In a timely and important interview with D. A. Hadfield, Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, tells of her desire not only to produce stellar productions of Shaw plays featuring his dynamic and energetic women characters, but also to discover and give voice to female playwrights of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Maxwell surmises: “There's no doubt that his [Shaw's] plays are still provocative … because the status quo is so hideously unchanged in so many ways.”The book closes with Michel Pharand's bibliography of writings by and about Shaw concerning love, sex, marriage, women, and related topics, which will be of great value to those wishing to continue and further the study of Shaw and feminisms.However, despite these and other stellar contributions, puzzling aspects of the book emerge. The editors aptly describe the various waves of feminist activism that Shaw lived through and participated in yet never define feminisms or clarify the standard(s) to which Shaw is being held by the various contributors. Instead, the volume focuses on the broader concept of the Woman Question that fueled discussion, often led by Shaw, in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Some definition of or standard for the stated topic would help to unify the work. In the Introduction, the editors suggest that Feminism and Shavian thinking coalesce around three postmodern themes: identity, ambivalence, and incompleteness. Without a clear definition of terms, the volume shares the latter two of these characteristics in examining Shaw's feminism(s).In addition, the collection suffers from an unfortunate lack of balance in representing Shaw's many works. The editors and contributors rely heavily on two plays to construct their arguments, with Mrs Warren's Profession and The Philanderer appearing in five of the book's ten chapters. Brad Kent and John McInerney provide refreshing exceptions with their treatments of John Bull's Other Island and myriad Shaw plays, respectively.The chapter entitled “Shaw and Cruelty” examines the strain of theatrical cruelty that supposedly runs from Henrik Ibsen to Shaw to Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Lawrence Switzky posits that the largely feminist antivivisection movement gave Shaw the language of cruelty with which to inflict pain upon the audience as he created his own dramaturgy. Switzky believes that Shaw learned from Ibsen how to construct the “crucial shift from watching and judging pain to experiencing pain,” using this technique in his Plays Unpleasant “to inflict audience suffering by exposing the complicity of spectators in slum-landlordism, prostitution, and the systematic corruption that licenses these practices.” Shaw's method presumably reveals the tendency toward cruelty in human nature but is “justified by the promise of social benefit.” While Switzky's thesis is intriguing, even tempting, his emphasis on Shaw's use of “cruelty” perhaps exaggerates and overstates (a favorite Shavian tactic) Shaw's stated practice of “sharpshooting at the audience” to help them recognize themselves in the so-called stage “vivisectionists,” such as Sartorius, Crofts, and Charteris, and to make those who did so uncomfortable with their own positions, thereby achieving an effect very different from cruelty. Many critics conclude that in launching his social barbs, Shaw, an avowed meliorist, eschewed “audience vivisection,” even in dealing with unpleasant social practices in great need of reform, in favor of humor.The theme of possible cruelty continues as three contributors employ never-published material to reveal a potential flaw in Shaw's feminism. D. A. Hadfield questions Shaw's efforts to liberate women and avers that his creation of celebrated women characters “may have largely served a desire to constrain and confine them … within the ones he himself defined.” She concludes that Shaw's success as a writer of women was built on his success in keeping them from writing themselves; this theory is based on letters that Shaw exchanged with the celebrated Shavian actress and close friend Janet Achurch, letters in which Shaw discouraged her from continuing to write her unpublished play Mrs. Daintree's Daughter (Hadfield includes excerpts), based on the same de Maupassant play as Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession. While Shaw may have desired to thwart Achurch's playwriting career in order to save her time and energy to star in his own plays, the next two essays feature women would-be playwrights who sought Shaw's endorsement of their work for their own advancement. Margaret Stetz presents unpublished material, including sections of a play by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, wife of Reginald Golding Bright, Shaw's dramatic agent), to supplement her discussion of Shaw's supposed blocking access of Egerton's work to the Court Theatre. In addition, Virginia Costello offers unpublished material from the Emma Goldman archives to reveal Fabian Shaw's refusal to support Goldman's anarchist causes, contending that Shaw only supported women's causes when he had the “upper hand.” Costello further asserts that many of Shaw's female acquaintances felt that in his personal life, Shaw did not live up to the radical philosophy expounded in his plays. One wishes that these charges leveled against Shaw had been set in a stronger context than a few personal letters and reported conversations. Opinions of other contemporaries that these works are worthy of performance and publication would have given more weight to these complaints. Based on the evidence provided in the book, Janet Achurch may have had legitimate grounds for resenting Shaw's refusal to acknowledge her playwriting talents, while Goldman and Egerton may have attempted to use the famous author to promote their own purposes, a ploy that Shaw would no doubt have recognized.Nevertheless, despite these omissions and missteps, Shaw and Feminisms provides valuable material in the quest to place Shaw's multivalent attitudes toward women and gender issues within the debates of his era. The editors and contributors attempt to present various aspects of Shaw, the tireless Fabian fighter for women's rights in his essays and speeches; the would-be world betterer who preached his message of social justice to female audiences and through dazzling New Woman characters; and the inspirer of “actresses and agitators.” The editors quote Lillah McCarthy extensively to underscore this point: “I played Ann Whitefield in ‘Man and Superman.’ She was a ‘new woman’ and she made a new woman of me … she set the world of women free.'” Shaw fought tirelessly for equal rights among the sexes but, according to some, fell short of his own ideals in his personal relationships with women. Yet because the depiction of Shaw as a stalwart feminist is juxtaposed with the implied portrait of a controlling, sometimes cruel, chauvinist (although the term is never used), a clear picture of Shaw and feminism(s) never emerges—and perhaps there isn't one. Undoubtedly, however, this work offers helpful updates and fresh assessments in the continuing study of Shaw and his favorite subject: women. As Rodelle Weintraub states in her foreword, “I learned lots and had to expand my thinking about Shaw,” thus fulfilling one of the main purposes of scholarship: a basis for further study.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.