Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel by Stephen Watt (review)

As anyone who has read through Shaw’s correspondence or examined his punctilious contracts knows, he felt a lot—adamantly, furiously, deliberately, volubly—about money. As readers and audiences of Shaw’s plays know, he believed that the deepest thoughts and spiritual apprehensions cannot be decoupled from the resources needed to sustain them. In Heartbreak House, Ellie Dunn proposes that her soul, inseparable from her body and its upkeep, “eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with,” all of which are “impossible without lots of money.”

Taken piecemeal, Shaw’s pronouncements on commodified, rational, urbanized modernity sometimes seem merely provocative or perverse. Now Stephen Watt, a widely published scholar of Irish drama and literature, has arrived to make the ingenious argument that Shaw’s inquiry into the relationship between money, embodiment, emotion, and desire is a full-fledged philosophical project, one that positions him as part of a dispersed but coherent fin de siècle investigation into “material psychology”—that is, an “extant discourse on the affective dimensions of capitalism and exchange” (2). Shaw scholars have long tried to correlate the work of Shaw and Sigmund Freud, tantalized by their shared birth year, 1856, but stymied by Shaw’s rejection of psychoanalysis and its proposals that repression and sexual experience are formative experiences. In Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel, Watt untangles that persistent mystery by revealing that Shaw, like Freud and other members of this international vanguard, was fascinated by how the hard facts of money can leave lasting psychic wounds or insinuate themselves into dreams and fantasies. By fusing biographical research, close textual analysis, and various theoretical models, Watt details how Shaw and his characters feel intensely, sometimes too intensely, about poverty, profiting from art, and the ambivalent elation of earning a living. In Watt’s hands, the allegedly unemotional Shaw (W. B. Yeats once dreamed of him as a desensitized sewing machine that “smiled, smiled perpetually”) becomes a native informant about the inner life of the late Victorian cash nexus.¹

We ought to reckon Watt’s study as a great gift to Shaw studies. For one thing, Watt presents the most thoughtful discussion of Shaw’s fiction since Richard Dietrich’s Bernard Shaw’s Novels: Portraits of the Artist as Man and Superman. (Dietrich’s scholarship is threaded through nearly every chapter. Watt frequently invokes Dietrich’s 1984 essay, “Shavian Psychology,” as a foundation and springboard.) The rawness of the early writing, Watt demonstrates, provides a portal into “the relationship between feeling and money, and between earning money and establishing a person’s worth” (101) throughout Shaw’s career. This book ought to reignite interest in the vitality, the hard-won wisdom, of the younger Shaw.

Watt also triangulates Shaw through an assortment of companionable intellects who echo and challenge Shavian conceptions: Georg Simmel, a founding figure in the modern field of sociology; the later Charles Darwin; as well as more recent luminaries like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sarah Ahmed, and Charles Altieri. Many studies of Shaw are primarily archival, collating and contextualizing Shaw’s roving intellect and voracious curiosity. Watt’s book takes a largely theoretical view, considering how Shaw’s writing overlaps with early psychoanalysis, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, as well as the descendant fields of performance studies and affect theory. Watt’s study is an erudite nudge to imagine Shavian affinities beyond his usual intimates and influences. Here he becomes an artist to play with and think alongside.

Divided, puckishly, into five full chapters, an “Entr’acte,” and a postscript, Watt’s book delights in surprising the reader. His introductory chapter, for instance, makes a persuasive case for Shaw’s neglected short story from 1905, “The Theatre of the Future,” as what French philosopher Alain Badiou calls a “testamentary text,” a summary of Shaw’s views of modern subjectivity in which money...