The Feminist Shaw

Shaw and the Contemporary Literary Theories of Feminism

Nishtha Mishra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000511673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios asiaticoamericanos

This book takes us through the life and works of George Bernard Shaw as a feminist. It critically explores his major plays to showcase how his works discuss ideas, practices, discourses, and ideologies that are considered to be antecedents to the modern feminist movements.

While the involvement of male feminists in feminist movements prior to the twentieth century were sporadic, isolated, and relatively unconnected, Shaw used the dramatic form of realistic theatre to communicate socialist and feminist ideas to his contemporary audience. The volume sheds light on how Shaw in his plays and prefaces exposes the iniquities suffered by women. His women characters do not conform to the Victorian notions of femininity; voice self-awareness, self-evaluation, and realisation of personal worth; and break free from the typical mythical representation in literature, to pave the way for the future generations of female character. Shaw's women break the stereotypes of Victorian society to voice and follow their dreams and desires without the fear of societal sanction. Through selections from texts such as Back to Methuselah, Pygmalion, Candida, Arms and the Man, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Man and Superman, The Black Girl in search of God, and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, this book highlights how Shaw gave the world ideologies that have since been adapted by the second- and third-wave feminists.

Foregrounding Shaw's critical role in strengthening feminist characters in modern literature, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, theatre studies, feminism, freudian studies and gender studies.

Part I History, philosophy, and influence

1 George Bernard Shaw, the forgotten feminist An introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429280443-2

George Bernard Shaw, being the “Fabian feminist” he was, showed what women are; what they should be; and where they stood in the process of evolution. Shaw accords woman the nobler role of the creative energy which, in his view, would eventually lead to the production of a superior race. Through the philosophical treatise of Life Force he tried to establish the intellectual superiority of women who are evolved enough to be a ready source of creative energy and consciousness. His female characters, who broke the stereotype of Victorian society in voicing and following their dreams and desires without the fear of societal sanction, paved the way for the coming generation of women to have the confidence of exploring all the untouched horizons which were up to that point forbidden to them owing to various societal restrictions. The echoes of George Bernard Shaw’s ideas can be seen in the contemporary tenets of feminist movements.

Gareth Griffith, in his book Socialism and Superior brains: the political thought of Bernard Shaw (1993), recognized that the 1890s connected Shaw’s name intimately with propaganda on behalf of the New Woman. He became well known as an arch supporter of women liberalism by then. In his plays and prefaces, he exposes the iniquities suffered by women; his women characters do not conform to the Victorian notions of femininity; and they broke free from their mythical representation in literature on many occasions. The de-romanticized ‘New Woman’ appeared in Shaw’s new-age novels as early as 1880. Marian Lind in The Irrational Knot anticipates Henrik Ibsen’s Nora Helmar by six years. She yearns to be “a wife and not a fragile ornament kept in a glass case.” It is possible that Candida is not inspired by Ibsen’s Doll’s House, but is instead an extension of one of Shaw’s own creations. Not only was he the first to present the “New Woman” on the British stage but also his portrayal of three great historical figures, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Catherine II, shatters their romantic image. Cleopatra masters statecraft; Joan defies the well-entrenched feudal system and the Church; Catherine, who dominated 18th-century Europe, appears human with her frailties.

Shaw floors the so-called progressives with his remarkably ingenious arguments. The older reformer will opine that women should have equal rights with men, but Shaw declares that their rights should be identical with those of men. He considers a woman not as a prophetess or a muse but rather as a comrade. This can be best seen in his play Pygmalion. In this play, Prof. Henry Higgins presents the outlook of Shaw, treating Eliza Doolittle as a comrade, and thus does not show her any extra courtesy. Many feminists argue for the participation of women in physical activities as much as men and suggest that they should become soldiers if necessary. But Shaw states that women have been soldiers, even in the past as in his Saint Joan. He does not plea for the emancipation of one sex at the cost of the other, nor does he want the women to be ill-treated. He has developed this type of equality of the sexes from the very first of his plays. Gladys Crane argues for Shaw, in the collection Fabian Feminist, stating that the principal traits that Shaw coloured his characters with exhibited the metamorphosis in his times and celebrated self-awareness, self-evaluation and the realisation of personal worth.

It wasn’t only in the world of literature that Shaw’s efforts to secure the rights of women were sidelined but also his role in important movements of women liberty were ignored before Michael Holroyd, in his essay ‘GBS: Women and the Body Politics’ (1979), unearthed George Bernard Shaw’s forgotten role in one of the important issues relating to women’s liberty:

… in the course of his duties at Saint Pancras Vestryman, he agitated for free public lavatories for women and went on to produce for The Englishwoman (March 1909) “The Unmentionable Case for Women’s Suffrage.” To some political sensibilities this was grossly unappealing, and the story of this battle does not appear even as a footnote in histories of the women’s movement. Shaw went so far as to arrange for a dummy lavatory to be placed in Camden Town where it was passionately assailed as an obstruction to the traffic, the tradesmen of the district careering into it in such quantities as to make it clear that these were no accidents but the charges of antifeminist cavalry. The battered structure, shudderingly identified in council as “this abomination,” became a monument to victory when the municipal franchise was extended to women. A woman’s free public lavatory was then opened in Leicester Square.

(Holroyd 28)

He had earlier identified himself as a suffragist; but later supported his stance there, from the outside. His articles and letters published in The Times and New Statesman were given mention in papers like Suffragate and Votes for Women prior to the World Wars, as well as during and post, the World War years. As for his role in the suffrage, he pointed out cleverly in an interview with Maud Churton Braby in 1906 that

suffrage was nothing to him and that he had no opinion of it since, being a man he’d already got it … Of course, if I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote …Women should have a revolution –they should shoot, kill, maim, destroy –until they are given the vote.

(ibid.)

In the initial chapters of his “neo-Ibsenite philosophy”, Shaw succeeded in performing “a beautifully planned demolition of the nineteenth-century woman-on-a-pedestal” in “The Womanly Woman”.

Now of all the idealist abominations that society make pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that she likes it; and if she ventures to contradict the pretence, declaring her no true woman … The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men … If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else … The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.

(The Quintessence of Ibsenism 43–44)

“One is not born a woman, but made one.” When Simone de Beauvoir pointed this “second sex” position out, this realisation became a war cry for women and has remained so since then. But Holroyd traces this down a letter which Shaw wrote to The Times (which was never acknowledged), where he had recognised the process of this conditioning of women as early as 1913 while describing the “Prime Minister’s rabbit theory” as he cleared his stance on women franchise:

In the debate on the Dickinson Bill Mr. Asquith for the first time opposed the franchise for women explicitly on the ground that woman is not the female of the human species, but a distinct and inferior species, naturally disqualified from voting as a rabbit is disqualified from voting. This is a very common opinion … Many men would vote for anything rather than be suspected of the rabbit theory.

(Holroyd 24)

As a Shavian critic, Holroyd writes about how Shaw recognised the problem of the “otherness” of women in his Intelligent Woman’s Guide: “Shaw ignores the “femaleness” of women, but treats them as the outsiders and have-nots of a male culture, and analyses in a most practical way the limits imposed on them by that culture. He does not propose socialism as a cure-all but attempts to trace specific ‘evils’ to inequality of income” (Holroyd 21).

Shaw was foresighted enough to predict an inherent flaw in the voting system that would be the voting of women for male candidates (proving he can enter the realm of female experience and search the problem from its core despite being a male). As such, even if the voting rights were secured to them they won’t be using it for the effective utilisation of their representation in any democratic parliament. Holroyd continued to elaborate upon Shaw’s political stance with regard to the feminist movement in the Autumn 1979 edition of Critical Inquiry:

Women were the same as men: but different. But of the two, he calculated, women were fractionally less idiotic than men. “The only decent government is government by a body of men and women,” he said in 1906: “but if only one sex must govern, then I should say, let it be women – put the men out! Such an enormous amount of work done is of the nature of national housekeeping, that obviously women should have a hand in it.” … Shaw’s remedy, as he explained to Lady Rhondda, was the Coupled Vote. Since we inhabit a world of men and women in approximately equal numbers, he proposed that the smallest unit of government should not be the individual but a pair. All that was needed was law declaring single votes to be invalid: all valid votes must go to a man-and-woman.

(ibid. 19, 29)

Ironically enough, decades later and despite continually revised agendas of feminism, over the years, the equal representation of women in any parliament has not been achieved nor has Shaw’s suggestion of coupled vote put to test or suggested.

Furthermore, not only did he advocate the idea of “freedom of womb” through his philosophy of Life Force and eugenics but also his stand for the population control and spread of awareness regarding the contraception was way ahead of the inclusion of this topic in the feminist movement. As he transcribes the long quotations from the chapter ‘Socialism and Marriage’ in Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Henry Somerville, in his essay ‘George Bernard Shaw Socialist’ (1928), writes:

He thinks it might be necessary for the State to prescribe the maximum number of children per family. He goes on to say:

Any State limiting the number of children permitted to a family would be compelled not only to tolerate contraception, but to inculcate it and instruct women in its methods. And this would immediately bring it in conflict with the Churches. Whether under such circumstances the State would simply ignore the Churches, or pass a law under which their preachers could be prosecuted for sedition, would depend wholly on the gravity of the emergency, and not on the principles of liberty, toleration, freedom of conscience, and so-forth, which were so stirringly trumpeted in England in the eighteenth century, when the boot was on the other foot.

(Somerville 464)

There were many women in Shaw’s life whose ultra-modern ideas and actions had an influence on his campaign of feminism. These included, in particular, his mother, Lucinda, who left her young son and her husband, George Carr Shaw, once she realized that he was alcoholic and incapable of supporting the family. She moved to London with Shaw’s sister and George Lee, a “Professor of Music”, where they lived on income from her job as a singing teacher. Lucinda became Shaw’s ideal of an independent feminist woman who did not conform to conventional women’s role as a mother and a wife; Shaw remarked of his mother that “she was simply not a wife or mother at all”. Her “liberated sexuality, self-efficiency and career fulfilment” agreed with the feminist hypothesis of the “New Woman”, a figure of the modern woman who refused to submit to the Victorian ideals of ‘womanliness’.

His own marriage with Charlotte Payne Townsend was no less of avant-garde in nature. It is widely believed to be a contractual one where his wife had expressed the desire to let their marriage remain unconsummated (as Shaw has often suggested). As such, the author who had been the ardent supporter of the manifestation of Life Force produced no children. However, this doesn’t mean that his marriage wasn’t a success. He was a man who practiced what he preached, especially with regard to the equality of the sexes. He advocated the financial independence of women with or without marriage through the example of his own marriage.

Michael Holroyd and Rodelle Weintraub have each mentioned, in their respective essays, how George Bernard Shaw had entered a pre-marital agreement notifying their individual incomes. Post-marriage he refused to file a joint income tax statement because he considered it degrading for wives who had held their own independent properties and incomes prior to their marriages. In a letter that he wrote to the clerk to the Special Commissioners of Income Tax in 1910, he specified: “Her property is a separate property. She keeps a separate bank account at a separate bank. Her solicitor is not my solicitor” (Holroyd 31).

However, on being asked about the neglected role of George Bernard Shaw in the history of feminism, Germaine Greer had once responded in The Guardian (2011): “Feminists have had about as much time for Shaw as he had for them, which strikes me as fair enough … From where I sit, GBS seems less irreverent than irrelevant.” Before Greer too, Shaw’s dethronement as an exponent of feminist cause was beginning to happen. Barbara Bellow Watson’s Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Women categorises Shaw’s depiction of maternal feminine roles and intellectual masculine roles. Another prominent Shavian scholar Elsie Adams, while talking about Shaw’s characterisation of Ann Whitefield, sums up in the Fabian Feminist: “Thus, we are presented with the paradox of a man who can argue against the romantic idealization of women, but who nevertheless personally worships the mother-goddess figure he artistically creates.”

In the character of Ann Whitefield, one can identify the archetypal mother who is controlling and compulsive and yet who surrenders to her matriarchy. However, this position is maintained if we assume that Tanner is the protagonist. As discussed later in this book, once the tables are turned to focus on Ann as the protagonist, her multifaceted personality is revealed. Even then, if one agrees to the contention that Shaw has limited the role of his “New Women” to motherhood, what is then to be said about his characters like Joan, Vivie and Candida, who acted as the mentors to the men in their intellectual pursuit?

Ironically enough, the title of Watson’s work points out that the Shavian world is full of intelligent and intellectually evolved women who were then tasked with becoming the mentors to the men who crave for guidance before sojourning on the path of discovery. Even his second leads, such as Louka in Arms and the Man, served as a mentor to Sergius making him realise the hollowness of his romantic and idealistic claims, and makes it clear that she has no assumptions about the reality. One of the minor characters, Proserpine, in Candida, chides Lexy for his pretences and impersonation of Morell; and Eliza, who is considered inferior to her teacher, checks Prof. Higgins’ behaviour constantly, pointing out that with the gentlemanly attitude lacking in his manners he could not claim rights over her aristocratic skills. These mentors were also entrusted with the responsibility of creative evolution of the future generations through their own creative energy.

However, Shaw’s efforts were forgotten, just like those of many other men who raised their voice for women as feeling individuals and not merely a “shadow”; whose works gave the women characters an outstanding place in the minds of the readers; which may be considered forerunners of the women who were coloured in human colours, with intellectual capacity, and whose purpose in the texts were not limited to being the love interests of the hero. In the history of English literary movements, there might have been a Shavian wave of feminism that seems to have washed away. George Bernard Shaw seem to be a victim of gender discrimination in terms of the banishment of his contribution to feminism as a movement owing to the bias that “only a woman can be the guardian of women interests”, even when the echoes of his ideas can be seen in the contemporary tenets of feminist movements. His expulsion from the feminist league might have been deliberate owing to the desire of second-wave feminists to obtain monopoly over the “literature of their own”. In this concern with gynocriticism and establishing women as independent of men in the literary history, Shaw remained ignored or banished:

George Bernard Shaw has been neglected, even sometimes actively rejected by post 1970s feminist and gender historians writing about the women’s emancipation movement in late Victorian and Edwardian England. This neglect is documented and contrasted with the views of feminists prior to the Second World War and with those of Shaw scholars. The very significant role Shaw played in the campaigns to combat patriarchy, redefine gender roles, change the marriage laws and achieve female suffrage during this period is then described. It is shown that the arguments he ...