Immaturity : The Naissance of Shavian Drama and Young Shaw’s Exploration of Reality

George Bernard Shaw, a pioneer in modern British drama, began his long literary journey not with plays but with novels. Long regarded merely as apprentice works, Shaw’s five novels have been reevaluated since his death through the studies of Stanley Weintraub and Richard Dietrich, which demonstrate that the novels not only contain the origins of Shavian drama but also possess intrinsic literary merit. This study introduces the basic plot of Immaturity, Shaw’s first novel, which has yet to be discussed in Korean scholarship; traces the early sources of recurrent subject matters and motifs omnipresent in Shavian drama; and highlights young Shaw’s critical view of contemporary British society. The novel depicts the occupations, relationships, religion, courtship, and marriage of eighteen-year-old Robert Smith and the people surrounding him in late-nineteenth-century London. Its anti-sentimental attitudes, anti-romantic views of love and marriage, anti-religious rationalism, the presence of the autonomous New Woman Harriet Russel, and its anti-Victorian critique can all be seen as prototypes of themes that recur throughout Shaw’s plays. According to Georg Lukács, who regarded Shaw as a critical realist, literature must reveal the dialectical totality of its age through ‘typology’, a universal slice of life; the imaginatively weaving reorganization of this totality constitutes literary reality. In Immaturity, Shaw succeeds—albeit modestly yet impressively—in reconstructing the social totality of late Victorian England by representing the characters’ struggles with love and marriage gloomily.