Shaw and Woman

70 2 For permission to use and quote from papers in the Arthur Symons Collection, I am indebted to the Princeton University Library. Symons' heirs, Mrs. Nona Hill and Mrs. Hope Rutherford, have also kindly given me permission to quote from these and his other unpublished writings. 3 See "Pages from the Life of Muriel Broadbent" and the two revised stories, "Pages from the Life of Lucy Newcome" (this title is typed on a slip pasted over the printed title, "The Childhood of Lucy Newcome"), on proof sheets for The Savoy, Dec. I896, pp. 51-61, and an unpublished typescript of 26 leaves, numbered 34-59, untitled in this version, in the Princeton Symons Collection; and letters from Symons to John Quinn, e.g. March 6, 1915, in the John Quinn Collection, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, to which I am indebted for permission to cite the correspondence. 4 For permission to use and quote from this material, I am indebted to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Shaw and Woman Rodelle Weintraub (ed). Fabian Feminist: Bernard Shaw and Woman (University Park, Pa. and Lond: Pennsylvania UP, 1977)· $13750. Fabian Feminist is an anthology of more than twenty-five articles arranged into such topics as "Literary and Mythic Influences," "Political and Economic Influences," "Sex Roles or True Vocation?" "Shaw's Liberated Women," "Influence of Shaw's Feminism," and "Shaw on Feminist Issues." The contributors include both Shaw scholars and feminist writers. My immediate reaction to the book was to question whether it is merely riding the wave of topicality. There is nothing wrong, of course, with being topical, but the problem with many movements is that their proponents believe they have discovered something wrong which only they can correct. Axiomatic, too, is the idea that people outside the movement have ignored the problem at hand. Such, I think, is the case of feminism and its role in the academic world. Doubtless many academicians have given somewhat short shrift to the multifaceted role of women in literature, or women as authors. However, some of us have found feminism to be just as important and. central as other topics. I include "as other topics" simply because I believe that one meets a work of literature on its own terms; if a novel is about industrialism, say, then that is its focus and other issues are tangential, though significant. Obviously different readers will argue where the writer's particular emphasis falls, but the frame of reference is clearly limited to the central topic. To argue that the work is about something else is perverse. In short, I'm arguing that none of us should ride our personal hobby-horses to the exclusion of other admissible 71 considerations. It is wrong to approach literature solely with feminist eyes, or Marxist eyes, or whatever is the current fad. Where feminism or Marxism is appropriate, well and good, but only when it is appropriate. My argument may sound naive and simplistic (and clearly I do not have the space to develop it fully); however, I know of one English Department where two courses which could be labelled feminist failed to include any of the dramatic literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To omit Ibsen, Pinero, Shaw, H. A. Jones and many others (in favour of more "topical" writers) seems to me perverse. To write a book on Shavian feminism is not perverse since the role of women is unarguably one of Shaw's central themes, and so in that sense Fabian Feminism is both topical (from the temporal standpoint) and relevant (from the academic standpoint). However, I sense that topicality is more the motivating force behind this anthology than is academic relevance. This, I think, becomes abundantly clear in Germaine Greer's brief article "A Whore in Every Home" in which Greer uses Mrs. Warren's Profession simply as a vehicle for the feminist cause. It also emerges in the way that articles, previously printed elsewhere (and a good number have been so printed), are patched together to give the appearance of being...