Shaw the Erstwhile Novelist

Shaw the Erstwhile Novelist

In a letter to Daniel Macmillan on 11 September 1943, Bernard Shaw claimed in retrospect that "the novel was not my proper medium. I wrote novels because everybody did so then; and the theatre, my rightful kingdom, was outside literature." ¹ He had written the five novels of his so-called nonage between 1879 and 1883, and "he publicly disparaged and privately cherished" them, as Stanley Weintraub has pointed out. ² Secondary literature on Shaw's novels is scarce, and Shaw's frequent dismissive remarks, which many have uncritically adopted, are at least partly responsible for this neglect. Rosalie Rahal Haddad's book is therefore an important contribution to an underrepresented field of Shavian studies. Haddad aims at "a reevaluation of these important early works in the career of one of the twentieth century's most significant playwrights" (p. 23) by discussing their significance in the context of Victorian society and the dominating literature at the time, as well as by highlighting their importance for Shaw's development as a playwright.

Haddad first briefly introduces each novel by giving a short synopsis. She also gives a selective overview of the literature written on Shaw as a novelist and acknowledges that Weintraub's "Embryo Playwright" article "was very relevant for the development of the present study" (p. 20). In chapter 1, "The Victorian Mentality," Haddad discusses Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Henry James's Daisy Miller, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure in order to provide a background for analyzing Shaw's novels with regard to their challenge to Victorian morality and particularly to the role of women in society. Haddad finds a fundamental difference between the depiction of female figures in Shaw's novels and that in James's and Hardy's: Daisy Miller and Sue Bridehead "are rendered through the filter of male puzzlement, with the result that neither woman is granted a full fictional life of her own," while Shaw's novels present a "much more significant attempt to portray, among other topics, the 'new woman'" (p. 55).

The reason, Haddad claims, that Shaw was able to understand and empathize with women's position in society, "with the enervating difficulties faced by those attempting to swim against the stream" (p. 55), was his own position as an Anglo-Irish outsider in London. In Shaw's novels the female point of view is ever present: "Shaw's writing is unequivocal in freeing women from the chains of society and is free from the ambiguity found in the work of Butler, James and Hardy" (p. 55). Haddad argues that "Shaw's novels certainly cannot compete in plot and style with those of his contemporaries"; the "originality of his writing, however, lies not in his narrative technique but in the concepts he discussed, as early as 1879, and in his observation and criticism of the cultural, political and social scenario of his day" (p. 55). Haddad does not do justice to Butler, James, and Hardy when arriving at this conclusion. She considers only one novel per writer and disregards the works of other authors writing at the time. The claim she makes with respect to the significance of Shaw's novels needs a much broader and more detailed perspective on the work of these and other Victorian novelists. However, it is certainly important to discuss Shaw's novels relative to Victorian fiction in general in order to assess Shaw's achievement as a novelist vis-à-vis his contemporaries.

In chapters 2 and 3, Haddad discusses each of Shaw's novels in their own right, focusing on their significance as cultural and social documents. From her point of view, Shaw's "determination in recording the London of his day as realistically as possible is...