Homo Philanderus as Created and Embodied by Bernard Shaw

Reflecting on that long-postponed but eagerly anticipated moment when Jenny Patterson finally eased him into yielding up his virginity on his twenty-ninth birthday, Shaw told his "sex-obsessed" biographer, Frank Harris, that if he wanted to visualize the episode better he should reread The Philanderer and "cast her for the part of Julia, and me for that of Charteris." He added: "I was, in fact, a born philanderer, a type you don't understand."¹ Given Shaw's tendency to put distinctive slants on ideas that other people might assume they comprehend (as Frank Harris certainly would have), and realizing the rich trove of evidence available in his life and works for a study of philandering as conceived and practiced by a true original, we shall explore in some depth the phenomenon of Bernard Shaw and his offspring Leonard Charteris as varieties of genus homo, species philanderus. As we shall see, they are far from identical twins.

Shaw himself supplied a formal definition of the key term. In 1907, with most (but by no means all) of his philandering career behind him, he answered a query from Hugo Vallentin, who was translating The Philanderer into Swedish: "No language that I know has an equivalent for ‘philanderer.' A philanderer is a man who is strongly attracted by women. He flirts with them, falls half in love with them, makes them fall in love with him, but will not commit himself to any permanent relation with them, and often retreats at the last moment if his suit is successful—loves them but loves himself more—is too cautious, too fastidious, ever to give himself away."² Since Shaw was aiming to help Vallentin translate his play about a philanderer, his definition conveniently applies not only to himself but also to his dramatic creation, Charteris.

In dictionaries that stress usage, such as Merriam Webster's, a philanderer is defined as a man who makes love to a woman—or to many women— without the usual assumption that it might very well lead to marriage. This approximates Shaw's conception, and holds true for his affair with Jenny Patterson (Julia in the play), but it doesn't fit the crucial case before us very well. Charteris's wooing of Grace Tranfield is a literary parallel to Shaw's real-life wooing of Florence Farr, and in both cases the philanderer would almost surely have ended up married if the philanderee had not posed objections as a self-respecting independent woman. An assumption on the part of the male that marriage was out of the question did not exist; the relief that both Shaw and Charteris felt was prompted by the escape, and the justification they accepted, was the lady's "advanced" point of view.

The historically oriented Oxford English Dictionary defines "philander" as "a casual romantic or sexual encounter." Its first exemplary quotation is from—what else—Shaw's Philanderer, when Charteris declares to Grace: "It was nothing but a philander with Julia—nothing else in the world, I assure you."³ Most of you will have detected the inappropriateness of this example, which highlights another difference between a dictionary definition and Shaw's: Charteris is trying to make his affair with Julia sound casual to Grace, but it was certainly far from that, just as Shaw's affair with Jenny Patterson was far from casual. A philanderer, by Shaw's own definition, is "strongly attracted by women." Flirting with them is only a baby step toward falling "half in love with them," or even toward a higher degree of seriousness that merits the unqualified term, "loves them." The latter state often leads to a "suit," or proposal—something that could possibly be "successful" and lead to a "permanent relation."

Shaw's philanderings were sufficient in quantity to verify the epithet "incorrigible philanderer" that he applied to himself.⁴ (Sylvia's teasing words for Charteris are more blunt: "You are an awful devil for philandering" [180]). The letters he wrote in the early twenties to ladies he favored indicate that his apprentice efforts went little beyond...