Misalliance: Sex, Socialism and the Collectivist Poet

Misalliance: Sex, Socialism and the Collectivist Poet MICHAEL J. SIDNELL •• IN DRAMATIC COMEDY WE OFTEN HEAR the voices of the playwright and his character simultaneously and distinctly.1 In the most obvious cases the title itself is uttered in character and as the playwright's final aesthetic flourish, a kind of verbal curtain: "I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest." At the end of The Elder Statesman, Eliot slips us a very broad theological wink with Angela's "Now take me to my father." In The Tempest, Miranda's sweetly hopeful note has its own contribution to make to the general reconciliation, but the ironical voice of the playwright has been brought to attention so sharply that it is difficult to register the character's own tones. In the case of Shaw's mannered comedy a veritable principle of construction is to bring character and action onto such terms with the authorial debate that the audience's attention is throughout teasingly balanced between dramatis personae and playwright. All the lines tend to carry the two voices. In Misalliance one such line and one that overtops all the others by its climactic placing and its succinctness is Hypatia's "Papa: buy the brute for me" (IV, 194).2 The line is in character for Hypatia, the climax of the plot and a superb epitome of present things, as presented in the play. In it, romance and materialism are coupled together. The word "Papa" asseverates the bond of nature about which we have been hearing so much, while the appeal that follows is the exaggerated summary of the potential and the limitations of parenthood: uniquely, parenthood makes possible the continuation of the race while the utmost the parent does for the child is to endow it with the potential of parenthood. As in all those "begats" in Genesis, this is what parents and children have in common: links added to links in the coils of generation. What parents claim in addition, m,akes the substance of the choric lament by Summerhayes and Tarleton in the play and 125 126 MICHAEL J. SIDNELL also of Shaw's prefatory disquisition. In asking her father to "buy" Perceval for her, Hypatia puts contemporary sexuality in its proper place, alongside capitalism as a compatible mode of free enterprise... or rather, since that is outside Hypatia's conceptual framework, Shaw puts sex in its place. Unlike Hypatia, and also unlike most of his fellow idealogues, Shaw had the wit (and the upbringing) to recognize in sexuality, as presently expressed, the major counterforce of liberal individualism against social collectivisation. In his own life, the dialectic of sex and socialism was very active; in the case of May Morris with particular clarity: she had singled Shaw out, but said he, "to engage her in any way - to go to Morris and announce that I was taking advantage of the access granted to me as comrade-Communist to commit his beautiful daughter to a desperately insolvent marriage, did not occur to me as a socially possible proceeding." When another comrade in worse circumstances but with a conscience not so nice, or a socialism more inclusive, married May Morris, Shaw went to live with this couple en menage and once again had to choose between what he called "the Bohemian Anarchism that is very common in socialist and literary circles" on the one hand, and on the other, the preservation of private reputations, the course of honour, and the reputation of The Cause.3 The opposition of sex and socialism being a mainspring of Shaw's comedy, I shall return to it, but for the moment pass on to the word "brute" in Hypatia's short speech. In the symmetry of her sentence, "Papa" and "me" are temporal sequence, history as it were, while the alliterative pair "buy" and "brute," intersect time's progress with the here and now of social amplitUde. "Buy" points in the direction of capitalism and Tarleton's business success, "brute" to the value content of this ill-conceived economic superstructure, and to Percival. The word is not entirely definitive of the man, since Percival has many...