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Major plays
Through Shaw’s drama
production, Ibsen exerted a leading effect. According to
Ibsen, surface can
be used to show deeps. So picturing society is suggested to show the
underlying soul or psyche. Shaw understood Ibsen and his psychological
realism in implying that the quintessence of morality was that there was no
quintessence, and since there are no easy or final solutions to the problems
life poses, drama should expose an irreconcilable conflict between the
individual will and the conditions that seek to govern it. In his opinion,
drama should display the conflict between men’s will and their
environment---that is, problem. Shaw thought the dramatist should deal with
social issues, like universal conflict between private will and
circumstance, showing the individual struggle to realize an identity and a
purpose in a mysterious universe. Thus problem drama and discussion drama
are mainly topics Shaw exposed.
Widower’s houses is Shaw’s first comedy. Harry
Trench, a decent and gentle young Englishman, falls in love with Blanche
Sartorius. When he realized the reality that her father is a slum landlord
and they live on it, he refuses to continue their love and receive the money
he needs. The young man with an ideal cannot accept the tainted money as
well as the stained world he is going to confront. The dramatic turning is
impressive and satiric. He finds that he is the very person who mortgaged
the land to Blanche’s father. Later the young man and the girl’s father
rebuild their amity. It is obvious that there is always a great gap between
one’s ideal and reality. When conflicts occur, after a severe struggle one
is accustomed to concede. It is the society and reality that grind one’s
flange and protrusion and make one adapt to them.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession is that of Vivie Warren’s
gradual realization of the source of her mother’s income and thus of her
support through her many years of higher education. It seems her mother, to
escape a life of extreme poverty and hardship, took to prostitution as a
young girl, becoming through perseverance, thrift, and the exercise of
managerial skills the owner and operator of a successful and humanely run
chain of European brothels, heavily invested in by respectable types, and
she feels that she has no apologies to make and that there is no need to
retire as a businesswoman, prostitution being the universal condition in a
capitalist system. Vivie goes through a bitter disillusionment at the
discovery of universal complicity in “tainted” money. Without condemning her
mother, she nevertheless chooses to live a separate, self-supporting life.
From the following selected reading, we can sense the fierce conflict
between the mother and the daughter.
“MRS WARREN
Oh, it's all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air
of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the
trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have
work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there
for me to do? The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not for anything else.
If I didn't do it somebody else would; so I don't do any real harm by it.
And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No: it's of no use: I
can't give it up--not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I'll
never mention it. I'll keep Crofts away. I'll not trouble you much: you see
I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. You'll be
quit of me altogether when I die.
VIVIE
No: I am my mother's daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must
make more money than I spend. 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.”
Apparently, Mrs. Warren’s Profession attacks several
different kinds of social idealism—marital, parental, religious, aesthetic,
romantic, and so on—but the attack on them is not really the sole heart of
the play. The other principal action of this, as well as many other Shaw
plays to come, is essentially psychological: one character, usually a
younger person, is taught a lesson by another character, usually an older
person, who may or may not be aware of what is being taught; and the result
is, first, disillusionment, second, enlightenment, and, third, a growth in
spirit that allows the evolving character to better realize his or her
authentic self. She seems curiously uncommitted, as cutting off parent and
suitor only leaves her in a vacuum. Leaving Vivie with nothing very
worthwhile to do with her new soul may, however, express the problematic
nature.
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