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

A Playwright’s Progress 97
pishly than thoroughly. Yvette then tries but fails to commit suicide, reviving
in the arms of her suitor and begging him to love her. He discreetly
destroys the note she had left explaining that she wished to die rather than
become a courtesan.
The “realism” of the piece is produced by a counterpoint between the
allure of a charged erotic atmosphere and the cynical revelation of its tawdry
nature. Until the pivotal point in the story, the viewpoint is strictly
masculine: the women are described entirely as objects of desire. The
mother is careless and luxurious:
She was one of those women who were created to love and to be
loved. From the lowest of origins, she had risen through love, making
it a profession almost without knowing it; acting on instinct, with an
inborn talent, she accepted money as she did kisses, naturally, indiscriminately,
using her remarkable instinct in a simple and unreasoning
manner as do beasts, made clever by the exigencies of their existence.
(73) 3
There is little here, objectively speaking, that might not be said of Mrs.
Warren, but Shaw tries to show us the woman from her own point of view
whereas Yvette’s mother is seen entirely from without. Shaw’s brothel
keeper is amiable and vulgar: “She may be a good sort; but she’s a bad lot,
a very bad lot,” as Frank so brightly puts it. Yvette’s mother (who goes
under the name of the Marquise Obardi) is demeaned and glamorized at
the same time. She is a sensual animal, soiled but exciting. Yvette, in the
first part of the story is an entrancing enigma, a tantalizing and elusive
prey, brightly, pertly, and suggestively leading her pursuer on. Only when
he emphatically rejects the possibility of marriage between them are we
suddenly made privy to her own thoughts. Subsequently she appears as a
naive child whose mind has been shaped by romantic novels and whose
manners were picked up thoughtlessly from her surroundings. She is a
bewildered, pathetic victim. Her attempted suicide by chloroform draws
her into a confused and desperate dream from which she emerges in a
passive and total acceptance of the life that fate has given her. We know
that her lover, to whom she has now submitted utterly, will leave her just
as he would any whore.
Maupassant’s technique is to offer a sensual and glamorously unrestrained
world which he continuously undercuts by revealing its nasty,
repellent, and cynical side. Shaw avoids either extreme. The world he presents
is distinctly prosaic and ordinary except that a number of the charac-