The Ungendered Will and the Shavian Superman
Rent from DeepDyveOne of the noted aspects of Bernard Shaw's dramaturgy is his consistent portrayal of the "New Woman," a small but growing class of females in his era, recognized both on- and off-stage, who were economically independent and sexually liberated. Vivie Warren, Barbara Undershaft, and Anne Whitefield, to name a few, earned themselves the moniker of "willful women" and help raise the question of whether Shaw can be considered a feminist. Some argue that the portrayal of these independent women demonstrates that Shaw believed in equality, while others maintain that the women's dispositions mock the developing class and that the very title of "willful" carries with it pejorative connotations, from immaturity and capriciousness to downright abrasiveness, additionally implying that there must be some women who lack a will altogether. Perhaps because of the controversial nature of these women at the time of their creation, followed by the intense development of feminist criticism in the twentieth century, the tension between "Shaw as feminist" and "Shaw as New Woman satirist" has been explored within critical confines that exclude fully half of the figures in the Shavian cannon: the men. Many of Shaw's male protagonists are not dissimilarly willful, also defying convention and causing controversy, either within the context of the plays or in relation to their audiences. In light of this, we shall argue that the portrayal of willfulness in Shaw's plays is not the result of a feminist agenda but, rather, part of the way in which his belief in the Life Force and the advent of a Superman manifests itself. If the willfulness traditionally ascribed to women can be read in male characters as well, it would seem that much feminist criticism against Shaw fails and that the activity of the will is not limited by gender: a new ungendered archetype, focusing on the portrayal of the will, must be created for the Shavian Superman. [End Page 79]
The Superman and the Human Will
The theory of Creative Evolution to which Shaw subscribed is predicated, at least in part, on the idea of a universal will, responsible for both creation and progress thereafter. It entails neither the idea of predestination nor a total lack of direction; Shaw writes in the preface to Back to Methuselah that he would not choose the extreme polarities represented by "Evolution and Genesis." 1 Shaw instead held that Man was capable of becoming more than he currently was and by certain slow steps could ascend to a higher state of being without the assistance, or indeed existence, of God. Yet such a capability goes further than what Shaw refers to as "Circumstantial Selection," that is, Darwinian evolution, whose "hideous fatalism . . . reduce[s] beauty and intelligence . . . strength and purpose . . . honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure" (xlii). Rather, what Shaw calls the Life Force "has got into the minds of men as what they call their will," and through their will, humanity bears the onus for evolution: "[T]he power that produced Man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself" (xvii). 2
Similar notions of the unknowable goal of evolution and Man's role in it persist among critics who deal with what may loosely be called the philosophy of Darwin. In "On the Problem of Direction and Goal in Biological Evolution," Dieter Wanderschneider has argued that the development of consciousness has allowed Man to step outside natural constrictions, to effectively say no to instincts and more survivalist dispositions. The primitive survival imperative being unhinged, "an analogous principle is operating on the cultural level," the...
