The Shavian Irrational Knots

Robert A. Gaines, ed. Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xxxv + 229 pp. Cloth $99.99 E–Book $79.99. Volume in the Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries Series. Nelson O'Çeallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan, eds.

"I AM NOT one of your Bernard Shaws who consider nothing sacred." Thus speaks Henry Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel inE. M. Forster's Howard's End, published in 1910. By that date, Shaw had become famous—or infamous, depending on the eye of the beholder—as the Mephistophelean mocker of all that was held sacred in the Victorian and Edwardian periods of English society. To some, his iconoclastic views were a breath of fresh air in the stuffy domains of middle-class life and the nuclear family. To others, such as the highly respectable, but as it turns out hypocritical, tycoon Wilcox, and his counterparts in real life, his views were anathema. Shaw's critical and often irreverent scrutiny of the social order of fin-de-siècle England and its moral and philosophical underpinnings and assumptions ranged very widely. The institution of marriage, "The Irrational Knot," as it is dubbed in the title of the second of Shaw's early novels, and the ideals attached to the institution, was a central object of that scrutiny. As is shown in this book, the subject of marriage continued to be an important theme in Shaw's writings throughout his career. Robert Gaines rightly perceived that the absence of a full-scale examination of Shaw's treatment of marriage constituted a significant gap in Shaw studies. Gathering together twelve apostles, in the form of a group of Shavian scholars, he edited the collection of essays under review which is aimed at filling that gap.

An early chapter, "The 'Mystical Union' De-Mystified in Plays Unpleasant," by L. W. Conolly provides a typically well-informed and informative sketch of the laws governing marriage and divorce in England following the passing of the Marriage Act in 1753. Although it was initiated in the so-called Age of Enlightenment, enlightenment was not particularly conspicuous in the legislation relating to marriage, and progress towards reform proceeded at a glacially slow pace. The 1753 legislation decreed that "marriages had to be performed in an Anglican church by an ordained minister of the Church of England." The sanctity of this form of marriage was underlined in the wording of the service which stated that it was an estate "instituted by God … signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church." It was not until 1836 that the legislation was changed to provide for civil marriages in a secular contract, the path chosen by George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw when they married in a registry office in Covent Garden in 1898. A further reform was belatedly introduced in 1882 with the Married Women's Property Act which at last allowed women to retain control of their own property after marriage. This was of some significance in the case of the Shaws since, at least at the time of their marriage, the value of Charlotte's property exceeded that of Shaw's by nearly 100 percent. It was not until 1937 that discrimination against women in the laws of divorce were removed. It was no wonder that marriage and the laws regarding its dissolution in divorce became prominent subjects in Shaw's social criticism. In Plays Unpleasant, Conolly argues, particularly in the portrayal of Blanche Sartorius (in Widowers' Houses) and Vivie Warren (in Mrs Warren's Profession), Shaw raised deeply unsettling questions about the whole institution of marriage. In these plays marriage is seen as "the portal, not to 'a mystical union' as the church would have it, but to an unscrupulous capitalist ethos."

In a thoughtful and observant essay, "The Pragmatic Partnerships of Plays Pleasant," Jennifer Buckley argues that these works also raise "disquieting" questions about marriage. In You Never Can Tell the comedy is certainly overshadowed by bitter reminders of a broken marriage in the older generation; and the institution of marriage itself is seen in a critical light. Buckley recalls that the haughty but attractive Gloria Clandon makes the rather severe statement: "I do not think the conditions of marriage at present are such as any self-respecting woman can accept." She also points out that Gloria's heavy seaside reading matter is John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My only quarrel with Buckley's argument about this play is that she seems to see the "fizzy" farce, as she calls it, as something of a distraction from the critical investigation of marriage. I see the farcical comedy rather as part of a joyous sweeping away of rational argument, just as passion replaces the rationalisation of male-female relations in the Second Act dialogue between Gloria and the young dentist she is destined to marry, Valentine. The closing speech of the play, addressed to the temporarily depressed Valentine by the philosophical Waiter, William, provides an upbeat, though amusingly measured, view of marriage: "Cheer up, sir, cheer up. Every man is frightened of marriage when it comes to the point; but it often turns out very comfortable, very enjoyable and happy indeed, sir—from time to time."

In her contribution to the collection, Rodelle Weintraub turns attention to Shaw's own experiences in the field of male-female relations and his marriage. Shaw once declared himself to be "an incorrigible philanderer" and the character referred to in the title of his early play The Philanderer has clear autobiographical dimensions. Weintraub's essay, "Not Really a Philanderer," challenges this description of Shaw, and rightly points out that Shaw's Leporello list of sexually consummated affairs was comparatively modest. In the course of the essay, Weintraub makes an interesting contribution to this subject with the suggestion, which strikes me as quite possibly true, that Shaw was not only a lover of the actress Janet Achurch but the father of her child Nora, named after the Ibsen character Achurch helped to make famous in England by her playing of the role.

The early years of the twentieth-century were a peak period in the Shavian anatomies of marriage in his plays (including as they do two works with titles that specifically signal the subject, Getting Married and Misalliance). Michel W. Pharand deals skilfully with the theme in three earlier works of this period, Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara. To Jack Tanner in Man and Superman "marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealisations." But despite his voluble fulminations against it, he too is swept into the irrational knot by instinctive forces of nature which dwarf the arguments about the follies and perils of the tender trap. As Jean Reynolds points out in a chapter dealing with some of the later plays, including the delightful Village Wooing, the view of marriage which emerges from the plays is in some ways quite conservative. For all its problems, it is admitted by Shaw to be an indispensable custom. As Reynolds reminds us, one of the headings in Shaw's Preface to Getting Married is: "Marriage Nevertheless Inevitable."

In other essays in this collection Richard Farr Dietrich discusses the beginnings of Shaw's iconoclastic social commentary in his early writings; Lawrence Switzky analyses what he calls "decoy marriages" and social contracts in Three Plays for Puritans; Peter Gahan explores "Marriage and Mating in the Plays of Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker, 1908–1911"; Ellen Ecker Dolgin examines Shaw plays from The Doctor's Dilemma to Pygmalion in relation to developments in the feminist movement and "evolving marital choices"; Audrey McNamara in a chapter entitled "From Ellie to Eve" points to the fracture of "societal and family life" caused by World War I and the consequent adjustments that Shaw perceived necessary in relation to marriage;D. A. Hadfield treats the drama between the two World Wars, with interesting reflections on the work of Marie Stopes in relation to Shaw; and Matthew Yde writes about "Matrimonial Partnerships and Politics in Three Late Plays."

At the risk of sounding like Cato the Elder, with his repeated calls for the destruction of Carthage in the Roman Senate, I have more than once argued, with a great deal of supporting evidence, that the Shaw-inspired accounts of his parents' marriage and their characters found in the work of B. C. Rosset, St. John Ervine, Holroyd and others are quite unreliable. Unfortunately there are several rather prominent deployments of these accounts in this book. In its early years, the marriage of George Carr and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw was clearly not the instant disaster and dreadful mistake that Shaw melodramatically made it out to be.

Reservation about some of the biographical assumptions in the work aside, this collection of essays illuminates the Shavian treatment of marriage from many different angles and across a very wide spectrum of his works. Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances amply justifies Gaines's idea of the need for it and supplies a convincing testimony to the central importance of the marriage theme in Shaw's writings.