Personal and Political Marriages (Bernard Shaw: Reimagining Women and Ireland, 1892–1914)

Making women central to an analysis of Shaw's plays is scarcely something new. The playwright himself drew attention to the radical nature of his practice from the 1890s on. What is less usual is Audrey McNamara embedding the discussion of women's role in Shaw's plays within the context of marriage. Some of the plays are romantic comedies culminating in the marriage of the leads, such as Man and Superman (1902), while others are cantered on married couples. One of the most notable is Candida (1897), where the title character has been married for many years to the Reverend James Mavor Morell (they have several children). There is a fine discussion of Candida in chapter 3 of McNamara's book. But both kinds of plays generally featured a discussion of marriage and what it involved for the woman in terms of legally becoming the property of the husband. McNamara believes that "the trope of marriage in Shaw's work, to date, has been undervalued" and wishes to add to the discussion of the topic inaugurated by Robert Gaines in Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances (Palgrave, 2017). But there is a second dimension to McNamara's analysis, and that is her metaphorical linking of the marriage question to relations between Ireland and England during this same period, 1893–1914: "his concentration on male/female relationships, and especially the marriage question, served to illuminate wider social and national issues such as the Irish/English quandary." Both were hot topics until 1914 when the advent of World War 1 "stymied the enactment of the third Home Rule Bill passed in 1912, leaving both Ireland and the women's movement in states of unsatisfactory limbo."The marriage question leads us straight into the dramatic heart of these plays. The Ireland/England quandary is only central to one of the plays written during this period, John Bull's Other Island (1904), subject of chapter 4. McNamara makes the subject work by broadening the focus to include Shaw's other writing of the period, his journalism, letters, and articles that make frequent reference to Ireland. A good example of this is cited in the introduction: the affair between Charles Stewart Parnell, head of the Irish Parliament Party, and the unhappily married Mrs. Katherine O'Shea. As McNamara writes: "Shaw had been vocal against the devastating treatment the couple received in the London press and wrote several letters to The Star in November 1890 in support of Parnell and O'Shea. His Star letters disparaged the marriage laws that offered no support for women entrapped within loveless marriages, anticipating his future work on behalf of both women and Ireland, given that the scandal threatened and derailed the IPP's efforts for Irish Home Rule."Two of the first three plays written by Shaw are considered in chapter 2. They both move women to the dramatic leads, with Blanche Sartorius in Widowers' Houses and the eponymous character in Mrs. Warren's Profession. Both enjoy a considerable degree of economic freedom. But the two women are very different from each other and from the ideal of the "New Woman." As McNamara puts it, Blanche is "calculating, manipulative, aggressive and stubborn." That she is going to marry Harry Trench by play's end is less a romantic than an economic proposition. The most interesting area of the play are the ways in which Blanche and her maid interact. Far from being bound together as women in a patriarchal society, they play out instead what McNamara, drawing on Mark Fortier's work, describes as "feminist class division." The parlour maid "is at the mercy of her employer in a poverty-ridden social milieu." The sadomasochistic nature of the relationship is brought out in the complex mix of terror and affection with which the maid regards her employer, and the frequent fits of violence it provokes. When the cast protested against the most extreme example of this behavior, both playwright and leading actress (Florence Farr) were adamant in not changing a line or altering any of the script.There is no Mr. Warren in the case. The "Mrs. Warren" moniker has been adopted as a mask of social respectability to cover her profession as a brothel owner. What the play's action does is to separate the having of a child by a woman from any notion of a husband, one of Shaw's chief aims in his writing about marriage. Mrs. Warren and her daughter Vivie make a formidable independent unit. But looked at close up the relationship between mother and daughter throws up complications and contradictions. As McNamara puts it, Mrs. Warren "harbours an ideal for her daughter, one that she did not entertain for herself: the ideal of wife and mother." But Vivie is having none of it. She wants no mother in her life and no husband either. As she says to Mrs. Warren in the final act: "If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did: but I would not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart."The Irish dimension is brought into the argument by McNamara using W. B. Yeats as a foil for Shaw. She contrasts the leading character in The Countess Cathleen (1899) with Blanche Sartorius. Where the Countess harks back "to an ancient and idealised past through which Yeats wished to construct a new Irish identity," Shaw follows the Ibsen line: "all progress involves the destruction of the old order." McNamara deftly uses the nationalism/internationalism debate to locate Yeats on one side of the argument (championing the national) against Shaw on the other, where it becomes clearer with time that he "saw internationalism as the way forward, certainly for Ireland."Which brings us, after the Candida/Getting Married chapter, to Shaw's Irish play. McNamara concentrates on the frequently overlooked character of Nora, the woman Larry Doyle left behind when he left Roscullen eighteen years before. When Larry returns with his English friend Tom Broadbent, and makes it clear he no longer loves her, she readily accepts Broadbent's proposal of marriage, a real woman exercising her power of choice rather than an idealized figure of Ireland. As McNamara puts it, "By positioning Nora's character as being central to the plot, even when not on stage, Shaw essentially positions the question of marriage in relation to change, ownership and nation to revolve around her." The contrast between Nora and a Cathleen ni Houlihan figure is backed up by Shaw's remarks in the preface: "my new play was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland."Yeats is more specifically targeted in the following lines in the opening act from Larry Doyle, which address Yeats and Gregory's 1902 play, Cathleen ni Houlihan: "The Irishman cant be intelligently political . . .. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend shes a little old woman." McNamara cites a letter Shaw wrote to J. L. Shine who played Larry Doyle in the 1904 Royal Court production, which stated of this particular speech that the audience "will perhaps laugh at Yeats's expense when you mention Kathleen ni Hoolihan." McNamara's argument makes it less surprising that Yeats should have rejected John Bull's Other Island for the Abbey Theatre in the same year.It was to be another five years before a Shaw play was finally staged at the Abbey. In the meantime, as the book points out, a number of other Shaw plays were staged in Dublin, including John Bull's Other Island, which did not go on at the Abbey until (appropriately enough) 1917. But in 1909 Yeats and Gregory elected to put on a one-act play by Shaw, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. It's a minor play in the Shaw canon and, while McNamara has lots of interesting things to say about it, will never be a major work. What recommends it in the Irish context is that Shaw offered it to the Abbey after it had been rejected by the Lord Chamberlain's reader because it was "blasphemous." Since the Lord Chamberlain's writ did not run in Ireland, and there was never theater censorship there, Yeats and Gregory were free to stage it. But in this instance Dublin Castle acted as unofficial censor and brought the Abbey under considerable pressure not to have it staged. Although there was some wobbling along the way, Yeats and Gregory held their ground and Blanco Posnet opened there on 25 August 1909. There were no riots or incidents; the play was a roaring success and was part of the repertoire of the Abbey for decades. McNamara sees the play as intended to run afoul of the British censor all along. I would agree and would see it, further, as always intended for the Abbey stage. It has clear links with the recently staged The Playboy of the Western World; McNamara builds on Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel's analysis of affinities between the two plays, especially on the presentation of the lawlessness of an allegedly law-abiding community in the Wild West/Connemara. She revealingly cites a letter to Lady Gregory from Shaw in which he suggests that "the accent the actors should adopt for the play be 'in broad Irish, especially as that language will lend itself very congenially to the blasphemies with which the dialogue bristles.'" Those "blasphemies," as Shaw is well aware, would be anathema to the Lord Chamberlain's office and more than enough to have the play forbidden in Britain.The final play discussed in the book is Pygmalion. Although not staged until 1914, the play was written in 1912, the Home Rule Bill was granted in the same year and a cheap popular edition of John Bull also appeared, which was purchased and avidly read by the impoverished Sean O'Casey. The Ireland/England relationship is examined through the double lens of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. The book demonstrates that, throughout his long writing career, Shaw consistently referred to Ireland as a feminine construct. Blanco Posnet and Pygmalion are drawn together into a persuasive parallel. Both have women at the center (the prostitute Feemy Evans and Eliza Doolittle), and working-class women at that. Both women are the objects of commodification, a process against which they protest. As McNamara puts it: "In answer to Higgins's suggestion that marriage might be the answer to her current difficulties, she told him, "'I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now youve made a lady of me, Im not fit to sell anything else.'"This is an engrossing read, well written and carefully argued. McNamara says at one stage that her approach is that of close reading, and there is a rich return in the detailed analysis of the individual plays. But there is also a loose argument that I outlined at the start of my review conjoining Shaw's advocacy for women's rights with "the coterminous nationalist project" (Stephen Watt, cited in the book's opening); and this gives shape and point to the book as a whole.