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

A Playwright’s Progress 99
too “lived one life and believed in another” (1:355). That is the point of the
final scene between Vivie and her mother. In their first confrontation Mrs.
Warren plays the conventional mother, then, under her daughter’s cool
and implacable onslaught, she breaks down to reveal her true self. Of
course, when she attempts to resume her hypocritical pose her daughter
sees through it.
We see Shaw’s progress toward his own form of realism most clearly in
the character of Vivie. She is markedly different, not only from Maupassant’s
Yvette but from Blanche in Widowers’ Houses. Vivie and Blanche
were both raised as “ladies” and protected from the sordid circumstances
that shaped their parents lives, but Vivie has a self-awareness of her advantages
of which Blanche is incapable. She is superior in Shaw’s eyes, both to
Blanche and to her mother, because she condemns her mother only for
living one life and believing in another. Where Blanche repudiates the poverty
from which her father sprang in a fit of ill-tempered denial, Vivie
coolly accepts her mother for what she is, without judgment, and without
becoming sentimentally blinded to the fact that she has indeed been raised
to be too good for her mother’s life.
That the personalities of Shaw’s two young women differ is obvious;
what is significant is that the character of Vivie better serves Shaw’s dramatic
and philosophical purposes than that of Blanche. When Archer
asked: “Why make Blanche a vixen at all?,” Shaw could only reply that he
had supplied a particular real young lady in place of the expected universal
“ideal” one and that Blanche’s temper and attitudes were not uncommon
among women of her circumstances. That might be enough for the conventional
realist, but Shaw was striving, first, to be an interpreter of life,
and second (but most important), to penetrate and if possible eradicate
those artificial categories of good and evil that prevent us from seeing
people as they really are. In Blanche and Trench he showed us two very
ordinary people faced with their own involvement with something abhorrent
to their consciences; lacking the imagination to see a way out, they
react by becoming irritable. Trench retreats into sullenness and cynicism
while Blanche has a blazing fit of temper if anyone is so inconsiderate as to
touch that sore spot in her psyche. Shaw could plausibly argue that this is
a perfectly truthful portrait. It is not, unfortunately, what most of his audience
saw. They perceived an attack on the entire bourgeoisie, a picture of a
class of moral monsters, utterly vicious and corrupt. The Sartoriuses in the
audience, knowing themselves to be kindly but realistically practical humanitarians,
could dismiss Shaw as a vitriolic liar; the enemies of the bour-