Pre-Oedipal Shaw: "It's Always the Mother"

Pre-Oedipal Shaw:

"It's Always the Mother"

The idea of maternal responsibility for the mishaps of the young haunted Bernard Shaw throughout his long dramatic career. "It's always the mother," John Tanner tells us in Man and Superman. ¹ Shaw loved the company of women, as evidenced by the young females he mentored in the Fabian Summer Schools, the actresses he wooed, his long friendships with Beatrice Webb and Kathleen Scott, and his forty-five-year marriage to Charlotte. Problems began when women morphed into mothers. The epigrammatic Shaw targeted mothers as marks for his stinging wit, as in the following:

• in The Admirable Bashville, when Cashel Byron agrees to go to prison: "I shall feel safe: there are no mothers there" (2:474)
• in the preface to Getting Married: "A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children may be all very well in a book . . . but in actual life, she's a nuisance" (3:469)
• in Mrs Warren's Profession, Mrs. Warren states: "No woman ever had luck with a mother's curse on her" (1:355)

Although Shaw's treatment of the maternal is often humorous, often acerbic, Shaw conducts an investigation throughout his plays of what was for him a serious social issue, the organization of the family and the mother's singular role within it.

As with many other social issues, Shaw employed his dramatic art to examine various mother–child relationships and to study the mother's centrality in creating an individual's identity, even in a patriarchal society. Yet he recognized that sometimes despite the mother's best efforts, her relationships with her children so often prove negative. Many scholars have focused on the maladaptive or even conspicuously absent mothers in Shaw's family dramas. Their assessments of Shaw's love/hate relationship with the mother figure vary from the biographical—Shaw's problems with his own mother are well documented—to the dramatic, in which stereotypical Victorian mothers often serve as convenient foils to the rebellious younger generation. ² This article expands upon those critiques and suggests that Shaw's extensive dramatic investigation of all things maternal, whether the mother is present or absent, strong or weak, prefigures a heretofore underrepresented area of psychoanalytical inquiry into Shaw's work—object relations theory. ³ Developed from Freudian psychology, this theory not only posits an all-important natural, pre-Oedipal bonding between mother and child before the child reaches the Oedipal phase of the Freudian model of human development, but also suggests that because of this powerful early bond, society could "regress" to a matriarchy, thus fueling the patriarchal fear of the overwhelming mother, a fear that fascinates dramatists and psychologists alike. ⁴

Shaw is certainly not the only playwright of his time making monsters out of women in traditional female roles, especially that of the mother. Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, and Somerset Maugham are in on this game, too. Perhaps Wilde provides the most notable paradigm of the outlandish mother in the late Victorian era with the infamous Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. In comparing Lady Bracknell with Shaw's Lady Britomart, Barbara Bellow Watson comments that "the overpowering dowager is a stock figure of comedy" and notes that while Britomart moves and breathes as a fully realized character, Bracknell is a purely comic bully, a caricature, a figure frozen in her entrancing pose. ⁵ Russell Jackson labels Lady Bracknell as Wilde's "funniest embodiment" of the playwright's attempts to "simultaneously engage with and mock the forms and rules of Society." Jackson continues, calling Lady Bracknell "draconian," "mercenary," and above all, comic in the motherly management of her daughter's impending engagement. ⁶ Moreover, even the stock comic character of the domineering mother is not immune to the Victorian era's fascination with the woman with a past. Richard...