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

96 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
Shaw made only two more stabs at the kind of realism that is intent on
exposing ugly truths. Perhaps he found the task to have been too much, for
he wanted to show intolerable situations while insisting to the audience
that the characters who do tolerate them are no different from themselves.
He did not want to tint his characters with an artificial stage glamour, nor
did he wish to vilify them. He wanted to show them accepting the unacceptable,
yet he wished members of the public to see themselves on the
stage and identify with these ordinary people: ordinary people acquiescing
in (and thus collaborating with) infamous activity. Above all, he wanted
the public to see that the infamy need not be accepted. This is clearly not a
simple task.
Successfully Unpleasant Realism: Mrs. Warren’s Profession
He came closest to actually achieving this stupendous goal in Mrs.
Warren’s Profession. The last of Shaw’s unpleasantly realistic plays, it best
shows how Shaw differed from the traditional realists when he was working
their vein. The play was inspired in some part by Yvette, a novella by
Maupassant. Whether or not Shaw actually read the book, it provides an
interesting comparison; the similarities are so strong that they make the
contrasts striking. Shaw admitted only that Janet Achurch had told him
the story, which he dismissed as “ultra-romantic,” and that he said he
would “work out the real truth about that mother some day” (“Mr. Shaw’s
Method and Secret” 440). His characterization of the work as “ultra-romantic”
suggests to some that he either did not in fact read it or that he
misunderstood its tone (Bullough 344). In the conventional sense, the
story as Maupassant tells it is realistic, but there are reasons, I believe, to
think that Shaw would see it as highly romantic even if he did read it.
The tone is entirely different from anything Shaw would ever write.
Yvette is a young woman who has been raised in a brothel run by her
mother, yet she has somehow avoided being contaminated with knowledge
either of her mother’s profession or of the nature of the house. She attracts
the attention of a man-about-town who finds her irresistible. He is intrigued
by the way she combines a reckless, brazen manner with what at
times seems extreme innocence or naïveté. He pursues her and she teases
him. Finally, when he believes he is about to make his conquest, it appears
that she expected a proposal of marriage. His amazed reaction is the turning
point that leads her to discover the truth. She then discovers her
mother with a lover and later confronts her with the discovery. The
mother defends herself much as Mrs. Warren does, although more snap-