Marriages and Misalliances

Robert A. Gaines has done well bringing into a book twelve new essays that analyze Shaw's representations of marriage and misalliance in ways that can provide a deeper understanding of virtually everything he wrote. These pieces are almost all by the most seasoned of Shaw scholars. They write with the pleasantly awakened passion of erudite people who have been interrupted doing something else to join a conversation on an urgently durable subject. The collection's compounded thesis is that Shaw's evolving view of his marriage/misalliance antonyms is important to engage because it has a so far persistent relevance and is world-bettering. The book is more interesting because its contributors' select biopsies of Shaw's life form a context for a chronology of its progress in his plays.

Richard Farr Dietrich's "Shaw's Early Writings: A Prologue to the Playwright" is also a prologue to the book. He explains how inevitable the marriage/misalliance topic is and how it is at the center of GBS's five failed early novels. To enable this thesis, Dietrich sends us back to his own "Shaw and the Uncrucifying of Christ," the lead essay in SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 8, in which he repeats Shaw's insistence on possession of a sense of humor as essential to the discourses of would-be "world-betterers." The most famous figure who lacked a sense of humor was Shaw's benighted Jesus as featured in the preface to Androcles. Jesus is delusional. He thinks he is the son of God. Absence of a sense of humor is the trait of people, great and small, who are not grounded by an appetite for life—this life, not life after death–in a future that for Shaw does not yet exist. This is the basis for Shaw's difficult but life-affirming Creative Evolution. Dietrich thus reads the novels' stories with Shaw's own special marriage in mind: The five novels "fictionalize and dramatize this same dialectic, between that longing for a fellowship of hearth and home that marriage ideally brings and his fear that marriage would be followed by a homeless misalliance after the breakup … multiplied many times over by his own adult singularity that led him to fear in marriage the thwarting of his passion for world betterment" (7).

L. W. Conolly's "The 'Mystical Union' De-Mystified: Marriage in 'Plays Unpleasant,'" the second essay in the book, foregrounds a digest of the English marriage/divorce laws from 1753 to 1937 that made the laws for women who married a quicksand. Moreover, these laws are an essential context for every essay in the book. On the matter of marriage and misalliance in the "Plays Unpleasant," he explains, "At the end of Widowers' Houses there is a business and family cohesion around Sartorius that depends on his daughter's marriage to Trench" (31). Mrs. Warren's Profession provides exactly no positive recommendation of "family." Vivie is a simplified example of Shaw's advice. She is a complicit capitalist but does no direct business with slum housing or prostitution. Nor is an affinity for marriage in her narrative. The unpleasant "mystical union" of the Paramore-Julia marriage in Philanderer is also an obvious misalliance. Marriage laws for women would be "de-mystified" when the laws of marriage became secular. Thereafter the influence of "mystical union" religious marriage mythologies would diminish.

Chapter 3 presents Jennifer Buckley's "The Pragmatic Partnerships of Plays Pleasant," which explores Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell. "Not content to remain a propagandizing prophet relegated to the theatrical wilderness, Shaw made his first, partially successful attempts to enact what we might call a Fabian [pragmatic tactic of 'permeation'] strategy, pursued both dramaturgically and institutionally" (41). Thus, the "pragmatic" consisted of including in these plays elements of commercial, popular, and conventionally romantic appeal. Shaw's "Pleasant" plays do not explicitly, in any straightforward way, "critique contemporary marriage and gender codes...