Introduction: Reading and Rereading Shaw Post-150 Years
Rent from DeepDyveIn the postmodern sense of providing multiple iterations, the articles in this volume display Shaw's relevance to modern readers and audiences. The reason is partly to be found in the plays and their ideas and partly in the history of Shaw production, which brings us to an interesting divergence. On the subject of the plays, these authors find Shaw "prescient"; his ideas, "resonant." Shaw's fascination with technology, globalism, evolution, capitalism, stereotypes, commodities, and national identity makes for an easy fit with very contemporary concerns and critical methodologies. Connections and echoes emerge between Shavian theory and the ideas of such cultural critics as Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Mikhail Bakhtin, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Albert Memmi, and Steven Vogel, among others. Such intertextuality invites us to read Shaw yet again and to do so with an ever-wider critical lens.
On the other hand, the stage history of Shaw productions presents a somewhat different picture. Here, authors such as Lisa Wilde and Nicholas Williams see opportunities lost and call for the need to reread Shaw for dramatic production. There must be, they argue, a greater engagement between Shaw's plays and twentieth- and twenty-first-century social, cultural, and political issues. Both authors deal with the problem of "periodization," of Shaw's enduring association with the stage realism of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Shaw production all too rarely ventures beyond the world of the Victorians and into our own, where, these authors argue, he continues to speak to audiences.
The plays clearly attract critics drawn to issues in contemporary psychology, religion, theater, politics, and culture. The volume begins with a three-piece [End Page 1] group of new "psychological" approaches—noteworthy since Shaw is at times thought quite "unpsychological." Harding, Reynolds, and Lenker reveal that psychological understanding is at the heart of the human condition and at the heart of Shaw's plays, irrespective of how socially conscious Shaw himself might have been. Understanding is neither singular nor essentialist, and the articles present three current but disparate developments in psychological as well as literary theory. Harding brings trauma theory and its concomitant posttraumatic stress disorder to reading Heartbreak House, one of Shaw's more bleak and troublesome plays, and finds it a fundamentally psychosocial study on the effects of World War I. In his reading, the play is a reenactment of the traumatic devastation felt by the British, both as individuals and as a culture. Reynolds revisits her excellent work (and book) on Pygmalion. This time, she looks at the role of language, specifically "talking," in curing psychological disorders or, at least in this case, in remedying the lack of realistic self-awareness evident in both Eliza and Higgins.
Lagretta Lenker takes a somewhat opposing tack. Instead of therapy, she focuses on how psychological states are acquired: Is it "always the mother"? To find the answer in Shaw, she rereads the mother figure across plays, building on and reading against the considerable body of work on mothers and daughters. She argues that "Shaw's extensive dramatic investigation of all things maternal . . . prefigures a heretofore underrepresented area of psychoanalytical inquiry into Shaw's work—object relations theory." Guided by the theories of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, Lenker moves through a reading of many of Shaw's darker images of motherhood, ending by seeing Shaw's Lilith as a hopeful "pre-Oedipal" figure—a high point in Shaw's reassessment of gender roles. The piece is intriguing because given Lenker's very believable argument one cannot help but think about other plays, including those in which mothers are absent. Does Joan evidence any relationship with a mother?
Dorothy Hadfield brings our attention to intertextuality, specifically to issues of retelling. She examines Shaw's rereading of his own plays, seeing in Major Barbara a re-envisioning of You Never Can Tell. Hadfield...
