Postmodern Elements in Shaw's Misalliance

Some critics have long understood that Shaw, by the time of the composition of Misalliance, was in fact exploring, for him, new theatrical territory and leaving his dramatic past behind. Stanley Kauffmann in particular eloquently defends the play as an example of Shaw involved in a new experimentation, pointing out that Misalliance "relies on an absurdity of circumstance that underscores the seriousness of what it's about" and is "the first major occurrence in Shaw of a subtext that runs to the end of his career—the idea of absurdity."¹ Kauffmann argues that until roughly 1900, Shaw "took forms and modes that had prevailed in the English-speaking theater for a century," but that from 1900 on he was "much more interested in devising new dramatic shapes," the implication being that Misalliance, written ten years later, represents an accrual of Shaw's experimentation. Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd seems to validate Kauffmann's opinion when he states that Shaw "attempted to do something new" in Misalliance and quotes Shaw as saying that he made a conscious effort to attempt "a specially developed example of high comedy," asserting that "the tone of the play changes from realism into magic realism,"² which, while being anachronistic terminology, does capture something of the nonrealistic nature of the play. And Rodelle Weintraub notes that the play has "fantastic incidents," that it has "a pervasive air of unreality, even of fantasy, hovering about it," and compares it to a "dream" in which "the subtext illuminates that story."³

Instead of trying to understand what Shaw was doing, other critics, especially his contemporary theater reviewers, condemned the play in terms, unintentionally, that partake of the very properties of postmodernism. While one critic called it a "hodge-podge," Shaw's contemporary theater reviewers reviled it as being "absolutely his worst play," as "arrant nonsense,"⁴ as an "uninspired farce" and "a tolerably dull entertainment based on an aimless narrative [emphasis added],"⁵ while Holroyd was not being critical when he talked about Shaw's "formless technique."⁶ Coincidentally and unbeknown to these early critics, they were actually describing properties of postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a vast and complex subject, and much has been written about it, but a brief summary might be useful. Exactly when postmodernism begins remains arguable, but it certainly grows out of, shares some features with, and is a reaction to modernism, the "high" period of which dates from around 1910 to 1930. Postmodernism certainly comes after World War II and may begin to emerge by the 1960s. Fredric Jameson delineates three periods that accompany particular stages of capitalism and the accompanying artistic style: market capitalism (realism), monopoly capitalism (modernism), and multinational or consumer capitalism, which coincides with postmodernism.⁷ Madan Sarup's An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism contains a useful summary. Among the central features of postmodernism in the arts are "the deletion of the boundary between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between elite and popular culture; a stylistic eclecticism and the mixing of codes." Sarup goes on to identify such qualities as parody, pastiche, irony, and playfulness and observes that many writers espouse a "model which emphasizes not depth but surface," as well as rejecting anything that goes beyond the manifest to the latent. Simultaneously, the originality and genius of the artist is replaced by the assumption that "art can only be repetitious." Among other attributes in postmodernism is "a shift of emphasis from content to form or style; a transformation of reality into images; the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents." Sarup also includes such qualities as eclecticism, reflexivity, self-referentiality, quotation, artifice, randomness, anarchy, fragmentation, pastiche, and allegory.⁸ Much more could be said about postmodernism, but this provides a useful starting point.

While Shaw's Misalliance does not contain all the attributes of postmodernism, a close examination reveals that it does contain such elements as randomness, discontinuity, anarchy, and incongruity (qualities unintentionally identified by his contemporary reviewers), as well as self-referentiality, reflexivity, and self-consciousness; parody and self-parody; quotation, appropriation, and pastiche; a debased...