Shaws Women

SHAW'S WOMEN WE HAVE ALL HEARD THE OLD COMPLAINT that Shaw could not create a woman in any of his plays without making that woman a female Bernard Shaw. This is, to a certain extent true. In almost every other case, writers choose women characters from two basic sources: the women they would like to meet or the women they have met and on whom they wish to revenge themselves (Strindberg was an extreme case here; Shakespeare did it on more than one occasion). Women writers, of course, do the same with their male characters but mostly in the former category. In the latter case, they do not so much try to get their own back as to use the man in question as a basis for their character-and then remodel him in the way they think he ought to have behaved. Shaw comes somewhere between these extremes; i.e., the male writer and the female. He chooses the women he knows and puts the words he thinks they ought to have said (that is, what he would have said had he been that particular character) into their mouths. But who were the women he knew? I once met an illustrator of children's stories who drew the most enchanting children. They all had dark, shiny hair and large, melting eyes. Later, I met her own small son and tiny daughter and lo! there were her fantasy children in the flesh. So I asked he_r: did she draw children the way she did because of her own two or were her children a physical transmutation of her brain products? She pondered this for a moment and then said: 'As I was drawing children long before I became a mother, I can't have been copying my own. I suppose I must have automatically copied the other children of the family. Now that I think about it, they all look rather like that.' And in the same way, the women in Shaw's family were 'rather like that: They were much stronge~ than the men. They weren't necessarily nicer, but stronger they certainly were. Like his male forbears, Shaw was attracted to strong women. Jenny Patterson, May Morris, Ellen Terry, Stella Campbell and Charlotte Payne-Townshend are the ones we know about. Jenny Patterson was the first (apart from an unimportant episode with a young nurse named Alice Lockett) and her method of securing the twenty-nine year old dreamer of beautiful, cultured and unattainable (because they were unreal) women, was primitive, to say the least. She more or less hauled him into her· bed (or rather his, as she was visiting at his mother's house as a pupil). He seems to have appreciated the experience but tired of the passionate 133 134 MODERN DRAMA September and jealous woman fairly quickly. We can dismiss her as one of the strongminded but stupid ones. She served her purpose; the purpose of rescuing Shaw from his dream women and setting his receptive eye on the physical species. May Morris was next (although here and now we must realise that this was by no means an exhaustive study; merely a glossing over of the principal characters). William Morris's daughter, from her photographs , appears to be the least feminine looking of the women in his life. The face is strong but that of a dreamer. The still shy young man 'married her in heaven' but neglected to tell his spiritual bride of the event. It appears that he was waiting for the time when he could show her that he had more than a toe on the ladder of achievement, but May Morris grew tired of waiting for the declaration and married a man with even less prospects than himself, and Shaw's pride was mortally wounded. If his heart was broken, he never displayed the pieces for public inspection. And then there was the adorable Ellen Terry. As Shaw says, 'it was all on paper: But whereas she did not meet him for many years while tL~eir correspondence flourished, he sat in the stalls and watched-and adored her-from a distance, with the footlights lending their own...