What Runs (In) the Family: Iterated Retelling, Gender, and Genre In You Never Can Tell and Major Barbara

What Runs (In) the Family:

Iterated Retelling, Gender, and Genre in You Never Can Tell and Major Barbara

When I was a graduate student learning how to mark student papers, I was told to be on the lookout for plot summary that tries to masquerade as analysis. So, when I find such passages, I still feel compelled to reinforce this distinction: "Don't tell me the plot, analyze it." But I confess that I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud doing this, because I have also learned from the critical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin that any plot summary is itself a type of analytical act. For Bakhtin, the "retelling in one's own words" is not something that should be dismissed as mere plot summary or paraphrase. ¹ Rather, Bakhtin argues that this "retelling" is "of decisive significance in the evolution of an individual consciousness" because it marks the moment "[w]hen thought begins to work in an independent, experimenting, and discriminating way." ² Before being able to retell, the individual will have only had the ability to recite, to transmit unquestioningly and unproblematically a prior "authoritative discourse." The act of paraphrasing requires the reteller to enter into a dialogic relationship between the "authoritative discourse" and her or his "internally persuasive discourse"—the assimilated knowledge by which one orders, interprets, understands, and re-creates the text. The resultant paraphrase is the product of this dialogic negotiation, which will in turn become part of the writer's "internally persuasive discourse" and will influence any subsequent dialogic negotiations. Plot summary, paraphrase, revoicing, "retelling in one's own words"—no matter what I call it, I have to acknowledge that a careful reader can tell a great deal about what a writer understands to be important by what her or his plot summary includes or omits.

So, for starters, here is what my plot summary includes: A husband and wife separate on the grounds of moral incompatibility. The mother, of course, retains custody of the children, a son and two daughters, raising them entirely as she sees fit without any intervention from the absent father. The family is reunited eighteen years later, just as the eldest daughter is on the verge of marrying. The suitor is the mate ordained for her by the Life Force, but he is her social and financial inferior. There is talk of convention, morality, philosophy, and armaments, and the daughter realizes, to her surprise, that she has much more in common with her long-absent father than she could ever have supposed. Affirming this connection, rich papa willingly provides the money that will allow the couple to marry and fulfill their destiny.

Now, consider: Is this a plot summary of Major Barbara or You Never Can Tell? The answer, of course, is both. In paraphrasing the plays, I deliberately highlighted the elements that both works have in common in order to emphasize the point that although Major Barbara is considered one of Shaw's major philosophical masterpieces and You Never Can Tell tends to be treated as a delightful frolic at the seaside, they both have at their core a remarkably similar cast and plot. Highlighting (paraphrasing, retelling, revoicing) what Major Barbara and You Never Can Tell reiterate helps to separate these "texts" from the contexts within which the meaning of each iteration is read. In this interplay of text and context it is possible to see clearly how each alters or reinterprets the other, a relationship that Bakhtin compares to "a chemical union" where "the degree of dialogized influence, one on the other, can be enormous." ³

According to Kerry Powell, a significant portion of the family reunion plot I have paraphrased is itself a reiteration of a now-forgotten 1896 play by Irish playwright Clotilde Graves, A Mother of Three. ⁴ In this play, the husband, Professor Murgatroyd, abandons...