Shaw's Devil's Disciple: The Subversion of Melodrama/The Melodrama of Subversion

Shaw's Devil's Disciple: The Subversion of Melodrama/The Melodrama of Subversion MARK H. ST ERNER George Bernard Shaw is arguably the last great rhetorical playwright of the English-speaking stage. Giving theatrical night to the weightiest of notions, Shaw prompted his dramatic characters to consider, analyze, and debate the prolific body of ideas produced by the latter half of the nineteenth century. He managed to avoid tendentiousness by painstakingly voicing both sides of an issue - his habitual mode of expression is in fact the paradox. An alarming number of pundits have concluded that paradox provided not only the major theme of Shaw's work but, in the manner of a contemporary soft drink commercial , its apparent objective as weIL l But Shavian paradox is more than intellectual grandstanding. It is a verbal expression of the fundamental dialectic that informs drama as ,well as the life it imitates: the underlying tension between form and matter, objective and realization, convention and imagination . The Devil's Disciple is an illustration of this tension in its purest. most melodramatic form, a conflict of polar opposites in which the conventions of society are exploded by a rhetorical strategy geared to subversion. Shaw attempts to subvert the very conception of reality commonly held by members of his genteel Victorian audience. Although his broadside attacks on Victorian morality were predicated upon Ibsen's inversions of plot and character, Shaw exceeded his mentor in terms of dramatic language. According to Richard F. Dietrich, Shaw practiced an early form of deconstruction by "dismantl[ing] the familiar linguistic structures people professed as creeds, revealing the contradictions within and between creeds, and between creed and actual behavior.'" This process of defamiliarization underscored the contradictions in the ideational structure of society. For a utopian socialist such as Shaw, this rhetorical technique was crucial to the accomplishment of his primary goal in the theatre, which was to prompt audience members to reconsider the philosophical underpinning of their received ideas. With typically Shavian audacity, The Devi!,s Disciple Modem Drama, 42 (Fall 1999) 338 The Melodrama of Subversion in The Devil's Desciple 339 attempts to subjugate the very form of drama most freighted with both stage conventions and conventional values. Stage melodrama presents a simplified ponrait of good versus evil, replete with stunning dangers and miraculous escapes - the stuff of pure escapism, from The Bells to Lethal Weapon XVI. The aesthetic appeal of this form is not complex. It relies primarily on a strong arousal of the audience's "sense of imminence," a feeling that results from a high expectation ofdominance by the forces of destruction over the forces of good.' The satisfaction thus derived from melodrama appears to hinge upon its completion in a happy ending; the dramatic action is patterned so that a world benighted by crime and violence is restored to moral order. Good characters are increasingly besieged by the bad to the point of terror, at which juncture a providential act of "poetic" justice restores harmony to the vinual world of the stage presentation. The audience of the melodrama is required primarily to feel rather than to think, both because moral distinctions between characters are magnified to an absurd degree and because the stereotyped protagonists are assured by convention of a last-possible-moment dispensation from disaster. Robert W. Corrigan views the black-and-white outlook of melodrama as "the dominant modality of all nineteenth-century British life and though!.'" Quoting Wylie Sypher, he notes that the scientific "fatalism" produced by the theories of Charles Darwin and Auguste Comte generated "a view of the world ... [which] encourage[d] ... melodramatic" thinking. in the ethical sphere. Such reductionist thought tended to include the "oversimplifi[cation]" of ethical premises, a somewhat detached and "fatalis[ticj" outlook, a helpless "displacemeni of [individual] moral responses into the universe," and the resulting intellectual "stasis beyond which" it was not safe to venture.~ Since the Manichean ordering of this melodramatic world into concrete, distinctive bits of good and evil was anathema to Shayian philosophy, The Devil's Disciple must have been contrived either as a crassly com mer~ial project for the theatre or as a peculiar son of challenge for the playwright. It...