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  • Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia by Matthew Yde
  • Christopher Innes
Matthew Yde. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 227. $80.00 (Hb).

Matthew Yde’s Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia is an extremely knowledgeable and highly provocative analysis of George Bernard Shaw’s political beliefs and social ideals. Yde’s aim, as he outlines it, is to show the extent to which Shaw’s utopian writings resonated with prototypical concepts of totalitarianism – including not just eugenics but also mass exterminations of undesirable elements in a population – decades before totalitarian regimes appeared: “[S]ome of [Shaw’s] earlier works contain,” as Yde puts it, “elements later found in those movements” (7). The book analyses a selection of plays from Man and Superman onwards, through the lens of “Shaw’s vexing relation to totalitarianism and its leaders” (4), and compares his political ideas to the Nazi “Final Solution” in the 1930s. This reading produces some startling results, even though it relies on the unverifiable supposition that Shaw’s support for absolute political order and total control of a population was fuelled by psychological needs derived from his disordered childhood, in Dublin, with a drunken father and a disintegrating family.

Yde rightly points out that Shaw’s utopian ideals and their relationship to eugenics have been largely ignored by other critics and that his political support of dictators has generally been separated from his utopian ideals. He suggests that, from Eric Bentley on, the focus on Shaw as a dramatist has been designed to disguise his political affiliations. Yde’s critique of recent Shaw biographies is correct: not one mentions his repeated calls for extermination. Yde, by contrast, identifies such calls in Shaw’s letters, his prefaces, his play Back to Methuselah, and the symbolic figure of the angel, in the drama The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, and argues that they are the integral accompaniment to Shaw’s utopianism. Yde’s political approach produces ingenious and insightful interpretations of the play John Bull’s Other Island and of the Hell scene from Man and Superman, in which the Devil and Don Juan are presented as a synthesis, representing the ethos of creative destruction. His reading of The Millionairess as a fascist allegory also adds to standard interpretations.

Yde’s analysis of Shaw’s work is broader than one might expect from his political approach. He outlines the concepts that Shaw developed through his essays on Ibsen and Wagner and cites passages from prefaces to various plays. He argues that the “deeply sinister” ideals of Back to Methuselah (130) are also, to a significant degree, promoted in other plays, from Man and Superman and Major Barbara through The Millionairess, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, and his last play, Farfetched Fables, which was [End Page 448] written in 1950. Yde thus demonstrates that Shaw’s endorsement of such ideals not only predated but also continued well after the horrific, murderous, and dystopian effects of the Fascist and Stalinist regimes had been revealed and documented. He acknowledges that Shaw’s abhorrent utopianism might be attributed to the “Zeitgeist” – he cites examples of “utopian” literature from Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote The Coming Race, in 1871, and other contemporaries and traces these tendencies back to Plato’s Republic – yet argues that Shaw was a prime mover of totalitarianism and even influenced Hitler. Indeed, he explicitly compares Shaw’s ideal of eugenic utopianism with German medical killing in the 1930s, analysing the preface and the script of Major Barbara to demonstrate Shaw’s seriousness about the “scientific elimination of those unwilling or unable to raise themselves to utopia’s level” (107).

In his analysis of Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism,” Yde delivers, with striking documentation, the insights that Stockmann, from An Enemy of the People, is a precursor of fascist ideals, that Ibsen himself shared Stockmann’s views, and that Stockmann’s address to the mob was echoed by Hitler, in some of his speeches. He thus demonstrates that other writers of the time, even those less closely associated with totalitarian beliefs than Shaw, were equally involved in these politics. Yde’s attempt to...

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