Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

94 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
supporters as of his detractors. His opponents were “unconscious pessimists”
who sought refuge in the pleasant lies of the stage because they
could not bear to face reality. His supporters cheered him on, urging him to
“tear the mask of respectability from the smug bourgeois, and show
the liar, the thief, the coward, the libertine beneath.”
Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the conscious
hardy pessimist is more exasperating than the abuse of the unconscious,
fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all. (“Dramatic Realist”
325)
As Shaw saw it, his job “as a realist playwright” was to make people face
the truth and know that they have both the power and the responsibility
to change it if they find it distasteful; it was not to throw stones at the
middle class and urge his public to join in. If we keep this in mind, we see
that the criticism of Widowers’ Houses may have struck deeper than Shaw
was willing to admit. If the public could see nothing but the depiction of
egregious scoundrelism, they missed the essential point. A focal point of
the discussion, both in the attack of the critics and Shaw’s response to
them, was the character of Blanche. Her undisciplined ill temper, Archer
realized, was not the product of ineptitude in an inexperienced dramatist;
Shaw clearly intended to make her what she is. But Archer could see no
reason for it. Why, he asked, “should he have made Blanche a vixen at all?
It is all very well to steer clear of the ordinary sympathetic heroine, but
why rush to the opposite extreme?” (Evans 51). If we ignore the tone of
offended idealism, this is a valid question. Shaw’s rejoinder was simply
that he “confesses to having jilted the ideal lady for a real one” (Shaw’s
emphasis) (Pref. Widowers’ Houses 680). That explanation is insufficient
because it does not say why this particular real lady was chosen to be a
part of this particular dramatic composition. A conventional realist might
reply that he had seen such people in such a setting and chose to depict the
truth as he actually saw it. We get a sense of this when Shaw defends
his portrait of Blanche by saying that we “want a theatre for people . . .
who have some real sense that women are human beings just like men,
only worse brought up, and consequently worse behaved” (681), but Shaw
never uses the standard defense of the traditional realist: that “I paint only
what I see before me, without comment or interpretation.” He always contended
that the dramatist should be an interpreter of life. Shortly before he
had admitted to having “recklessly sacrificed realism to dramatic effect in
the machinery of the play” (679).