Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries

4. Candida: A Wall of Bookshelves and the Best View of the Garden

4 Candida A Wall of Bookshelves and the Best View of the Garden Of all of Shaw’s earlier plays, it is perhaps with Candida that gardens and libraries contribute the most to understanding some of the deeper nuances and implications of Shaw’s intentions in certain aspects of the play. Much of thescholarship ontheplayshowsthatCandidaisachallenging play with widely divergent and contradictory opinions about it. As Arthur Ganz writes, Candida is “one of the richest, most attractive, and most elusive of Shaw’s earlier plays,”1 even though James Woodfield says that Morell and Marchbanks are “relatively transparent and easily understood” and “contain little mystery.”2 Walter King concludes that there “remains a considerable puzzle, even to critics sympathetic to Shavian ideology and esthetic.”3 Arthur Nethercot sums it up, observing, “for years critic after critic, reader after reader, spectator after spectator have interpreted Candida , Morell, and Marchbanks according to their own temperaments and predilections” and that the work “still remains a mystery.”4 While a study of the functioning of gardens and libraries in Candida may not solve all the puzzles of the play, they do at least cast a somewhat clearer light on one character, and that is Morell. A few examples will illustrate the challenges and diversity of opinions about the play. Charles Berst says that the central element of the play is the “love relationship to Candida”5 by Morell and Marchbanks and the object of the play is to “explore and open up three diverse views of reality ”6 while the “real action of the play derives from the major characters asserting different attitudes toward life . . . rising out of their most basic psychological promptings and estimates of reality”;7 Woodfield contends that Shaw’s “immediate target is marriage” and “the roles of the partners •· 44 · Candida: A Wall of Bookshelves and the Best View of the Garden · 45 and the nature of women”8 while also stressing the “religious context” of the play;9 Walter Lazenby argues that the changes in the characters “exemplify the twin Shavian themes that getting rid of illusions is healthy and that the individual must resist system to be vital”;10 Jacob Adler says that the “motivating force of the play” is Marchbanks’s desire for “truth,” which is “no help to the marriage”;11 William Doan contends that Candida is a play “founded on the power of the eye”;12 and, while speculating that the possibility that “somewhere there exists a key for [Candida’s] interpretation ,” King asserts that “if there be one, it lies within the rhetoric of the play.”13 While differences of opinion about the main concerns of Candida are numerous, an even greater divergence of opinion exists about the characters themselves, and while much of the discussion revolves around the characters of Candida and Marchbanks, a virtual morass of opposing views exists for Morell. Additionally, any study of the setting of Candida forces the attentiononMorell,becauseitishisworldtheplayinhabits,and it warrants a closer examination. On the one hand, staunch supporters of Morell, such as Charles Berst, defendtheminister,eveninthefaceofhisapparentweaknesses,suchashis pomposity. Berst warns that “the actor who plays up Morell’s pomposity and thick-headedness will be missing the full reverberations and strength of his character”14 and defends his preachiness by pointing out that Morell is a “man in whom rhetoric and feeling coalesce.”15 Berst goes on to add that Morell’s praise of Marchbanks “captures the inherent kindliness of Morell”16 and blames Candida for not appreciating “the strengths of [Morell’s] character.”17 Elsie Adams argues that Morell’s being the weaker of the two and in greater need of Candida’s love “does not imply that Shaw meant him to be contemptible” and goes so far as to suggest that Morell is “the sort of man Shaw liked and, in many ways, the sort of man Shaw was.”18 On the other hand, Morell has his detractors. Charles Carpenter asserts that Morell’s delusion that his “practiced rhetoric is capable of meeting any challenge, evokes derisive and at times contemptuous laughter,”19 and Harold Pagliaro believes that if one accepts what Candida says about Morell’s lifelong dependency on women, then he “is reduced to a nullity, except as the sire of her children.”20 John Lucas theorizes that Morell had “been heading for a fall, and we enjoy his discomfiture, the deflating of his male ego,”21 while Patrick White points out that his father-in-law, Burgess, [18.118.12.101] Project...