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

A Playwright’s Progress 101
woman,” is at least as bad-tempered as Blanche, but Shaw allows us finally
to see that she is a victim as well. Her sister Sylvia, although a relatively
minor character, provides an important counterpoint. Her mannishness is
obviously contrasted to Julia’s undisciplined femininity and links her to
Charteris, for they are both rebels on principle. He is a principled philanderer
and she a principled transvestite. Both are grotesque responses to a
grotesque social code that seeks to force men and women into becoming
“ideal” husbands and wives in “ideal” marriages, yet they are probably the
two most astute and observant characters in the play. Julia and Grace are
also coerced into unhappy choices by the same tyrannical code. While
Grace’s self-possession is highlighted by Julia’s hysteria, they are similar
in that both are forced into self-denying choices by their circumstances.
Both are denied a loving marriage on honorable terms; the difference is
that Julia does not have the strength of mind to abstain from marriage
altogether and Grace does. We cannot admire Julia, but in the end we pity
her, and our admiration for Grace is tempered by distaste for the choice
that is forced on her. In Grace we get a foretaste of Vivie.
Vivie
Vivie, most unlike Blanche, is not ordinary. She may well be, as Shaw
claimed, “a real modern lady of the governing class,” but she is certainly
not an average specimen of middle-class English females (“Method and
Secret” 440). Like Grace, she is unusual because she needs to be, both for
her own salvation and for Shaw’s dramatic conception. An ordinary girl
might well react like Yvette, although Shaw would reject both the attempted
suicide and the conclusion that a girl in her situation was doomed
to either the convent or the brothel. Yvette’s despair was that she wanted
marriage but was destined to become a courtesan; Shaw makes it clear
through Mrs. Warren that the alternative Yvette thought of as a paradise
closed to her was just another form of sexual slavery. “What is any respectable
girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get
the benefit of his money by marrying him?—as if a marriage ceremony
could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing?” (1:313).
Vivie firmly and decisively rejects marriage. In a superficial sense she is a
combination of both Grace and Sylvia. She has Grace’s strength of mind,
but her mannishness seems natural to her, whereas that of Sylvia appears
rather affected, a symptom of fashionable “Ibsenism.” She also, surprisingly,
has something in common with Blanche. They both had parents who
knew at first hand the choices forced on the poor, and both benefited from