GBS & Affect Theory

AS I CONSIDER Watt's astute and ambitious study of Shaw's fiction, I recall watching BBC coverage of the Pope's visit to Dublin. There appeared again and again on the placards of the Irish demonstrators the word "SHAME"—this child abuse scandal by the clerics is currently Ireland's greatest shame. According to Watt, Shaw's sense of Dublin's deepest shame was one that he shared: poverty. Historically, Irish culture is a shame culture; the Celtic Brehon law from ancient times taught that food strikes could be effective because they shamed the oppressor. Sitting and starving at the landlord's door or at the home of the unfair Lord presented the public spectacle that is most abhorred in a shame culture. Centuries of colonial oppression layered that cultural heritage with the imposition of the performance of a colonized subject that formed and deformed so much of Irish life as witnessed by their English rulers and as dramatized in Shaw's anti-colonial comedy, John Bull's Other Island. Poverty is itself a spectacle of hunger, evictions, rags, dirt and homelessness—to name some of the most visible signs which Shaw attacked in such plays as Widowers' Houses, Mrs Warren's Profession, Pygmalion, and Major Barbara. As Shaw's work attests and Watt traces, poverty also leaves deep invisible scars in the psyche and triggers a variety of surprising and oftentimes unpredictable emotions from disgust to contempt to murderous rage and deep depression. All of these emotions are displayed in Shaw's fiction.

Serious consideration of the psychology of Shaw's fictional world and its relationship to the growth of psychology as a science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been long overdue. Watt relies on Freud and Simmel, two psychologists from the early twentieth century, for his study of Shaw's contemporary influences. However, his breakthrough contribution to Shavian scholarship is his recognition and analysis of the centrality of Simmel's discoveries and their resonances in Shaw's plays and novels. Watt takes a risk when he admits that Shaw did not seem to know Simmel well or at all. Shaw's connections to Freud and Simmel were not personal but cultural. He explores how Shaw writes into that conversation about anxiety and shame that those two ground-breaking figures were exploring in their clinical work.

In addition, to locate his own theoretical approach and to confirm the contemporary extension of material psychology, Watt invokes the recent ascension of contemporary Affect Theory, especially the insights of Sarah Ahmed. In a rich, dense and multi-faceted approach, Watt combines these three areas of concern. He reads Shaw's writing, particularly his early novels, in the context of an emergent psychoanalysis at the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century, so-called "marginal" economics, and contemporary affect theory. That multi-layered analysis of shame and anxiety spans over a century of theory and is applied to a series of novels that Shaw wrote before he discovered his genius for play-writing.

Watt does not limit his focus within even those broad parameters. Instead he seeks more evidence of Shaw's peculiar relationship to money and poverty in his plays as well as in his novels. Watt cites with approval Shaw's description of Undershaft who scrawled "UNASHAMED" on his shop wall in Major Barbara, announcing, in effect, that "the acquisition of wealth, even if it fails to bring respectability, can effectively banish the shame of poverty." Although it may banish the conscious shame of poverty, such refusals of shame cannot quite blunt or deny the uncontrollable eruptions of powerful emotions in physical signs like blushing or trembling or fainting: the unwelcome exposure of that remembered lack.

Shaw was an early adapter of the now common celebrity compulsion to control the narrative. He was his own best publicist, creating a three-letter nom...