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

100 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
geoisie could shift all the blame for the evils depicted on the likes of Sartorius,
Blanche, and Trench, thus allowing themselves to wallow in selfrighteousness.
Both would miss the point. Ordinary characters might do
for the ordinary realist but not for the Shavian realist, simply because
when they were portrayed honestly, without the filtering lenses of conventional
morality, they were not perceived as ordinary. Something more
was needed.
Extraordinary Characters in The Philanderer
We get a taste of that something in The Philanderer. The technique may
have been borrowed in part from Ibsen. When Shaw told Archer that he no
longer used the categories of good and evil even “for dramatic effect” he
probably had in mind a device of the new school of drama he had described
in the Quintessence. Modern writers, he said, “will trick the spectator into
forming a meanly false judgment, and then convict him of it in the next
act, often to his grievous mortification. When you despise something you
ought to take off your hat to, or admire and imitate something you ought
to loathe, you cannot resist the dramatist who knows how to touch these
morbid spots in you and make you see that they are morbid” (219). As
Carpenter shows, this technique is used in the Unpleasant Plays, but it
evolves in a decidedly Shavian fashion. Its use is relatively crude, possibly
even accidental, in Widowers’ Houses. True, we are led to view Sartorius as
a conventionally villainous slumlord (after first hinting that he has a conventionally
disgraceful secret), and then we listen to his thoroughly reasonable
defense of himself. Blanche and Trench are presented as more or
less conventional young lovers but turn out to be something quite different.
But it is hard to say that we are really challenged to question our own
values, particularly our self-righteous tendency to blame others for the ills
of the world. Sartorius’s rationalization, however valid as to the facts, does
not really make him an empathetic character, and the young lovers probably
engage our curiosity (at least that of those of us intrigued by the
vagaries of the human psyche when it is negotiating the stormy waters
of romantic love) more than our sympathy. Widowers’ Houses provided
a superficially conventional romantic comedy with a strong dose of something
sharply acrid and bitter. It is like picking up a chocolate to discover
it tastes of aloes. The conventional marriage in Shaw’s second play is
certainly tinged with bitterness, but it is also complicated with contrasting
qualities. We are not merely to see white as black and black as white.
Our sympathies are confused, not merely inverted. Julia, the “womanly