Truncated Love in Candida and Heartbreak House

Shaw's imagination as it is revealed in the plays is intensely and complexly heterosexual. My claim is obviously supported by such works as Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and Misalliance, where the Life Force works remorselessly until it triumphs. But Shaw's heterosexual couples are not confined to those the Life Force has thrown together imperiously, "intending," as it were, to promote its evolutionary mission through them. Among these other couples, some marry (reproduce) only generally prompted by Evolution to do so, like Violet and Malone or the Collinses, the Tarletons, and the Utterwords. Others develop a relationship because they are drawn to each other or because they are brought together by circumstance, only to conclude that it should not lead to marriage, like Vivie and Frank or Lavinia and the Captain or Lesbia and the General.

One may regard these relationships as failures of the Life Force, as in some sense they are. But one may also think of them as experiments whose biological truncation enables Shaw to display in dramatic terms a range of heterosexual configurations. For example, Marchbanks, Higgins, Lavinia, Lina, and Cicely (with help from Brassbound) end a heterosexual relationship or resist allowing it to come to sexual fulfillment for essentially artistic, religious, or intensely held private reasons. Ellie, Vivie, and Lesbia do so too, but for them at least part of the reason is that society has failed to give the Life Force a setting they find acceptable. All these and other Shaw characters share an obvious common ground—they think and feel about a possible sexual partner, even if they do so only negatively, as Vivie does of Crofts.

Shaw's invention is varied enough that the psychosexual dynamic at work between potential partners is individually engaging, inviting separate critical attention. Here I shall confine myself to looking at the heterosexual dynamic of two plays, Candida and Heartbreak House. In both, Shaw proposes couplings that are unlikely to come to happy endings—young Marchbanks and mature and married Candida, young Ellie and mature and married Hector, young Ellie and mature and unattractive Mangan, young Ellie and very old Shotover. The Life Force is sometimes at a disadvantage in the mating game.

Candida is a difficult play because all three principals, especially Candida, seem to invite fixed appraisals, when in fact they are complex characters.¹ The hardest by far to read is Candida, who is not simply an intelligent, liberated, frank, and beautiful maternal comforter (the Virgin Mother); she is also self-indulgent, cruel, narrow in her interests, and less sound in "instinctual intelligence" than she thinks she is. Marchbanks is not only a Shelleyan-sensitive poet who sees into the human heart with unerring accuracy, but he is also sexually immature and so maladroit socially as to be dangerous. Finally we may see Morell as Candida and Marchbanks do—as an overly indulged windbag, utterly dependent on his wife—when in fact he has won the remarkable Candida's love to begin with, and despite his fear of losing her, deliberately leaves her and Marchbanks alone to bring their amatory gymnastics to a head.

It is possible, of course, that Shaw himself was ambivalent about his characters, especially Candida and Marchbanks, giving the title and the first two acts, more or less, to her, and the remainder, especially his mission-heavy departure into the night with an important secret, to him, not having known at first that Marchbanks was to become radically independent of Candida. But I think Shaw had a thorough artistic grasp of their characters from the start, however unconsciously. Candida had to be attractive enough to take possession of Marchbanks's perceptive young mind. And Marchbanks had to be vital and intelligent enough to choose, finally, an independent life; but early on, he had to be immature enough to be engulfed by Candida.

A look at Shaw's stage directions describing Candida on her...