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

A Playwright’s Progress 95
In calling the first three plays “unpleasant” he was describing his own
feeling about them as much as that of the public, confessing that “the mere
perusal of [them] induces loathing in every person, including myself, in
whom the theatrical instinct flourishes in its integrity” (Drama Observed
2:694). Even in his vigorous defense of Widowers’ Houses he makes this
“reservation”:
It is saturated with the vulgarity of the life it represents: the people
do not speak nobly, live gracefully, or sincerely face their own position:
the author is not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the
underlying beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the
smooth surface of “respectability” a handful of the slime and foulness
of its polluted bed. . . . I offer it as my own criticism of the author
of Widowers’ Houses that the disillusion which makes all great dramatic
poets tragic has here made him only derisive. (670–71)
The key to Shaw’s characterization in his first play lies in the phrase “the
people do not . . . sincerely face their own position.” There is something
intrinsically ugly about seeing people evade responsibility, people engaged
in what we would now call “denial.” The traits that so annoy critics about
the persons of this drama are different ways of evading reality. Blanche’s
sharp temper as well as Trench’s passive resignation are, in some sense,
both symptom and cause of their denial. Blanche, brought up to be a
“lady,” reacts with ladylike revulsion to the filth of poverty and explodes
with anger at any suggestion that it might have anything to do with her.
Trench merely sulks. He is too honest and too conscientious to take refuge
in the facile hypocrisy of his friend Cokane and too unimaginative to see a
way out. Shaw’s point (as valid today as then) is that this is the way perfectly
ordinary people do behave.
Shaw’s difficulty, then, was to reconcile this kind of unflinching realism
with his desire to make his public understand “that my attacks are directed
against themselves, not against my stage figures” (Pref. Unpleasant Plays
1:34). Unfortunately, even the expressions he used here (“handful of the
slime and foulness of its polluted bed”) help confirm the interpretation of
the “hardy pessimists” that Shaw was to find so exasperating later. He did
not want to abuse or assault his audience, for he knew that you do not
make people better by verbal attacks any more than by physical ones; you
make them worse. He wanted to open their eyes and awaken their consciences.
You do that only if you assume that they have consciences to
rouse.