Theme: modernism in american literature contents: introduction chapter the early twentieth century literature (1901-1939). Modernism

George Bernard Shaw

1856-1950

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a family of a civil servant. He was fifteen when he left school to become an office boy at a firm of land agents in Dublin. Being fond of the theatre he visited it from his earliest years and acquired so profound a knowledge of Shakespeare that he knew many of the plays by heart.
At the age of nineteen Shaw moved to England to spend his remaining 75 years there. In London B. Shaw had no intention of continuing office work and he spent a lot of time educating himself. He used to say: “Though almost penniless I had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture gallery in Trafalgar Square and another at Hampton Court without any servants to look after or rent to pay. I had the brains to use them.”
Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five long novels, such as Immaturity, Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in which he tackled the problems of marriage and showed himself as the fighter for family relations built on spiritual understanding free from social and class prejudices. Other works are An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron’s Profession.
In the early eighties Shaw was deeply impressed by the increasing unemployment in London, being not far from poverty himself. At the British Museum reading room he read Karl Marx in a French version and “From that hour I became a man with some business in the world.” In 1884 B. Shaw joined the Fabian Society which based their activity on believing in slow development of different social reforms instead of revolutionary measures. He became one of the most famous public speakers, who was feared by every opponent for his sharp tongue and clear argument.
About this time Shaw was offered a job in the Pall Mall Gazette and in a short time he became one of the most popular critics of music, art and drama in London. He published several books of criticism on music and theatre, among them London Music, Music in London, Our Theatres in the Nineties. Nevertheless Shaw’s attention was turned to the drama as a means of expressing the ideas crowding his mind. The long list of his plays opens with the cycle of Plays Unpleasant which marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama. This cycle includes Widower’s Houses (1892), Philanderer (1893) and Mrs.Warren’s Profession (1894). He protests against the evils of the society and the low position of a woman. He exposes such seamy sides of bourgeois society as poverty, sexual exploitation, marriage as a business deal, prostitution.
Widower’s Houses. The first performance of B. Shaw’s play Widower’s Houses in 1892 was quite a sensation. Shaw was attacked both by the public and the critics who called him a cynic.
The theme was declared by Shaw to be “middleclass respectability fattening on the poverty of the slums as flies fatten on filth”. The play was a ruthless exposure of the darker sides of English life.
A respectable English gentleman Sartorius has made his fortune by renting tenement houses in the slum area. The houses are in a terrible state, but he refuses to spend any money on repairs. During the rest on the Rein he acquaints his daughter Blanche with a young doctor Harry Trench. They fall in love with each other and decide to marry. They return to England where Harry Trench pays a visit to Mr. Sartorius’ house and is shocked at finding out that Sartorius’s wealth has come from slum property. Trench offers Blanche to live on his income which he believes is derived in an honest way. However, Sartorius proves to Trench that the wealth of the latter comes from the same source, because the slums are located on the land that belongs to Trench and his aunt. The play reveals that the respectability of the rich rests on the money squeezed out of suffering and starving people.
Thus the start was made. He started by criticizing bourgeois morals and corruption. A year later he wrote the Philanderer and a few months later another satire Mrs. Warren’s Profession, all the three being “plays unpleasant”, because he was telling the truth to the bourgeois readers and spectators.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Mrs. Warren is a proprietress of several brothels in Belgium, Vienne, Budapest and she profits greatly from them. She considers her business quite honest and noble. She is able to give her daughter Vivie a decent education at private school and then at the university. Her daughter does not suspect what the source of her mother’s income is. When she becomes aware of this her first impulse was to protest against it. It seemed that Bernard Shaw’s intention was to portray a new character who due to her energy would try to change things in the bourgeois society. But it didn’t happen. Her mother told the story of life of three sisters: one of them, got poisoned by lead at the factory and died, another married a worker and kept the house and three children for 16 shillings a week till her husband deteriorated through heavy drinking. “Was it worthy to keep straight for the sake of it?” she asks her daughter. Then she told her daughter about her work as a scullery maid until she and her sister Lizz opened a brothel. It was a first-rate brothel and the girls were treated miles better than she was treated working as a scullery maid. Little by little her daughter begins to take mother’s side. “You were right if taken from practical point of view”, she said. “And from all others”, was Mrs. Warren’s answer. She said that marriage did not settle the question, so the best way was to chase a bachelor, marry him and live on his money. Prostitution is tackled by Shaw as the social evil and he severely criticizes it. No wonder that the play did not see the stage until 1902.
The first cycle was followed by another one which he called now Plays Pleasant. There appeared Arms and the Man (“The Chocolate Soldier”), The Man of Destiny, and Candida.
The title of the cycle is rather ironical: through the amusing situations and witty scenes with sparkling dialogues B. Shaw continues his criticism of bourgeois morals and ideals. He attacks militarism and war, their senselessness and cruelty, ridicules war and the so-called glories of war (Arms and the Man, 1894). This is a story of a man who gives up military service, the war and the arms entirely for a woman’s society. Edward VII, then a would-be king, Prince of Wales said that the author of the play must be a fool. Shaw dethroned Napoleon in The Man of Destiny. The main attention of the author is paid to the problem of morality. He calls upon the people to unmask, to free themselves from prejudices and illusions. Then followed Candida, the comic play You Never Can Tell, and the equally comic Androcles and the Lion. The third cycle of plays of B. Shaw Three Plays for the Puritans includes: The Devil’s Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899). The title of the third cycle has a double meaning: on the one hand the plays turn against English Puritanism, bigotry and hypocrisy, on the other hand they are directed against the decadent drama. He contrasts his plays for puritans to those where the main themes tackled are love and marriage. Shaw explains that the greatest evil is to replace intellectual life by love intrigues.
By 1900 Shaw had established his reputation as a playwright. He wrote one play after another as well as books of criticism and pamphlets on socialism. B. Shaw’s plays were not merely plays of dramatic action. Their tension was created by the struggle of ideas; they always set out to solve some social, moral or philosophical problems. In his more than fifty plays, in their numerous prefaces, Shaw has treated almost every public and social theme of the century.
Shaw made a revolution in the theatre of his time. Shaw’s plays deal with various problems: politics, science, religion, education and economics. And in solving them he criticizes the vices of capitalist society laying bare its gross injustice and showing its inhumanity.
B. Shaw also revived the practice of including a long preface and sometimes a sequel in the published version, explaining what the play was about and what he actually meant. He gained a reputation as a man of brilliant wit, making frequent and effective use of the paradox, which can be found in dramatic structure, characters and style. Shaw uses them not merely for the sake of witty play of words, but to turn inside out the moral and social truths of the bourgeois world.
During World War I Shaw wrote long and daring articles, protesting against the imperialist governments and their war policy. In his article “Common Sense about the War” he said: “No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather the harvest in the villages and make a revolution in the towns.”
Shaw was greatly interested in Russian culture. He highly appreciated and admired L. Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and also Chekhov and Gorky.
B. Shaw was at was at the peak of his fame (1925) when he received the International Nobel Prize for Literature.
In spite of the fact that he called himself a socialist, Shaw was at times incredibly contemptuous of the working class and thought it incapable of ever playing a significant role in winning socialism. He never fully understood Marxism. Shaw saw and felt the class contradictions of the new imperialist era very sharp and intense and in his analysis of the political and economic basis of imperialism he went much farther than his predecessors, the mid-nineteenth century writers. Shaw's aim was to show real life, not to write plays for entertainment with a “happy end”. He opposed the so called “well-made play trend” – which was very popular among the playwrights of his time.
The list of Shaw’s plays is very vast; to his most popular plays also belong Pygmalion (1912), The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House (1917), Major Barbara, Saint Joan.
Heartbreak House was written during World War I. Shaw himself highly appreciated the play and in the preface to it he disclosed the symbolic meaning of the title. In the subtitle he called the play “fantasia in the Russian manner on the English theme”. The dramatic pattern of the play is Chekhovian; a group of people in a country house, the collision of their conflicting ideas and their impact on each other.
Shaw sympathized with these people for their culture, sincerity, disgust for business, and at the same time accused them of idleness, of hatred for politics, of being helpless wasters of their inheritance. The author indicated the futility of the life of bourgeois intelligentsia.
Pygmalion. The main hero of this play, Professor Henry Higgins, is presented rather ironically, as a kind of modern Pygmalion. (Pygmalion, a celebrated sculptor of mythological antiquity and King of Cyprus, fell in love with a statue of Galatea which he had made of ivory, and at his prayer Aphrodite had given life to it. Pygmalion is often accepted as a symbol of the power to breathe life and soul into inanimate things).
In actual fact the satire implied in the play is directed against Professor Henry Sweet, a well-known English philologist and phonetician. There are touches of Sweet’s character in the play, but Henry Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.
Professor Higgins meets Eliza one stormy night selling flowers to a crowd under the portico of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The professor, struck by her remarkably pure Cockney pronunciation is making notes of her words with a view of studying them at home. A gentleman seems particularly interested in Higgins, and the conversation, which springs up between them reveals that he is Colonel Pickering, a student of Indian dialects. He and Higgins, it appears, have been interested in each other's work for years. Higgins points out that he can perfect the girl's shocking pronunciation which keeps her selling flowers in the street and prevents her from getting a respectable position as a saleslady in a flower shop.
The remark has made a deep impression on Eliza and the very next day she visits the professor to take lessons in pronunciation, at a price she considers fully sufficient of one shilling an hour. Finding Eliza's offer very interesting professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering make a bet, that in six months Higgins will teach Eliza the language of “Shakespeare and Milton” and pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador’s party. If Higgins succeeded Pickering would pay the expenses of the experiment.
Eliza is taken into Higgins’ house where during several months she is being taught to speak correct English. While staying at Higgins’ home Eliza gets accustomed to Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. Higgins is not married and lives alone with his servants and his elderly housekeeper. He often finds Eliza amusing and Eliza, grateful for the education he is giving her, makes herself useful to him wherever she can. In order to prove his experiment Higgins dresses Eliza in beautiful clothes and takes her to the Ambassador’s Garden Party where she meets the “cream” of society. Everybody takes her for a grand lady.
Higgins wins his bet. But he has forgotten that a flower-girl is a human being with mind and heart. He looks upon her only as a thing. He does not care what is to become of her when he has finished his instruction. He says, “When I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter, and then it will be her own business again.” Higgins is not unkind by nature and perhaps he has even grown fond of Eliza without knowing it; but what is an ignorant flower-girl to a gentleman of means and wide education... Eliza teaches him how wrong he is, giving him a lesson of feeling. The lesson costs her some pain because not only has she got accustomed to Higgins, but has also begun to love him.
B. Shaw’s play Pygmalion is a satire on higher society. Here aristocrats are opposed to a simple girl. At the very beginning of this comedy Shaw stresses the difference between the speech of educated people and that of the ignorant people (the Cockney speech).
In his preface to Pygmalion Shaw wrote: “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him. The reformer we need most today is an energetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.”