Widowers' Houses: A Question of Genre

Widowers' Houses: A Question of Genre BERNARD F. DUKORE • IT IS FAIRLY OBVIOUS that one of Shaw's dramatic strategies consists of thwarting audiences' expectations. "Never mislead an audience, was an old rule," says Shaw in The Quintessence ofIbsenism. "But the new school will trick the spectator into forming a meanly false judgment, and then convict him of it in the next act, often to his grievous mortification."} A member of the new school, Shaw employs such strategies in his treatment of genre. When one considers Widowers' Houses in generic terms, one recognizes at the outset its affinities to three conventional dramatic forms: melodrama, the well-made play, and romantic comedy. But no sooner does one recognize this when one also recognizes how different the play is from all three. Melodrama is the kind of play Shaw explicitly refused to turn Widowers' Houses into. A conflict of unmistakable good with clearcut evil, of hero versus villain? "In such cheap wares," Shaw asserts in his Preface to Plays Pleasant, "I do not deal."2 Sartorius is not a villain, nor Trench a hero. Rousing speeches for a forthcoming battle ofgood against evil remain unmade, and both the Sanitary Inspector and the clergyman, Sartorius's antagonists, remain offstage. Sartorius does not repent and Trench does not become a Socialist - not even a Fabian Socialist. The question of Socialism is raised only to be discarded. "I assume, to begin with, Dr. Trench," says Sartorius, "that you are not a Socialist, or anything of that sort." "Certainly not," declares Trench. "I'm a Conservative.,,3 The ground rules established, Sartorius can persuasively justify himself, and thereby Shaw indicts the audience. In enabling the potential villain of a melodrama to justify himself under the eXisting social framework, and in emphasizing the absence of any solution under it, Shaw is able to blame the framework itself - and us along with it, since by not changing it we acquiesce in its continuation. 27 28 BERNARD F. DUKORE The well-made play is variously employed, parodied, and ignored. A withheld secret is utilized, and so are coincidences, contrivances, a misunderstanding , and other features of that genre. But the happy denouement is mocked even ~s the characters celebrate it, the raisonneur is omitted, the misalliance theme is dropped shortly after it is raised (for, as Martin Meisel points out,4 economically there is no misalliance between the capitalists and the aristocrats), and Shaw's characters - such as the bumbling hero and the aggressive ingenue - are considerably different from their well-made counterparts. Chiefly, the generic basis of Widowers' Houses' structure, and its point of departure, is romantic comedy, in the conventional formula of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl - Acts I, II, and III, respectively. Going beyond romantic comedy, however, Shaw moves the play into the area of tragicomedy. Consider in this respect some of the reviews that greeted this play when it was first produced at the Independent Theatre: "The characters are depicted naturally, and not in the glorified form so common upon the conventional stage"; "Revolting picture of middle-class life"; "characters unsympathetic, sordid, soulless"; "Mr Gilbert possesses an uncanny habit of turning up the seamy side of life's robe; but Mr Shaw's world has not rags enough to cover its nudity. He aims to show with Zolaesque exactitude that middle-class life is foul and leprous."s Are these the notices of a romantic comedy? Not quite. And Shaw's defense of what he calls his "mere topical farce" hardly seems like the pleading of a farceur: "nobody will find it a beautiful or lovable work. It is saturated with the vulgarity of the life it represents...." Instead, the author is "dragging up to the smooth surface of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure against your shudder at its blackness.,,6 The play's hero - so called because he is played by the young, leading man and because he becomes engaged to the play's young lady, a pretty heiress - is not the typical hero of a romantic comedy. Trench is weak willed, a...