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

102 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
their parents’ desire to give their children what was denied to themselves.
The result in both cases is an unbridgeable chasm between parent and
child. Both parents have succeeded in raising their children above themselves.
Blanche, however, has become a lady only in the conventional
sense: a useless creature whose claim to superiority is the habit of idle and
pampered living and a strong distaste for vulgar realities. Vivie has taken a
step to becoming a lady in Shaw’s sense: “she who, generously overearnsing
her income, leaves the nation in her debt and the world a better world
than she found it” (Intelligent Woman’s Guide 500). She is genuinely better
than her mother, partly because she is realist enough, first, to appreciate
her parent on her own terms and know that she owes her advantages to
the unpleasant choices her mother made, and second, to know that the
chasm between them is real and permanent, not something that can be
bridged by mere sentimental appreciation. The final scene, in which she
calmly and cheerfully, but emphatically, rejects love, romance, and art, is
the natural result of Vivie’s personality, but it strikes precisely the right
dramatic and philosophical chord. The ending is unpleasant but not without
hope. Her cool masculine manner is an appropriate contrast to a world
in which feminine sexuality and sentiment have been degraded into commodities
in the possession of male slave masters, although it is hardly the
answer for all women. Her economic independence is a token of the solution
necessary if the problem is to be answered for all women, yet it is
achieved here at the cost of social isolation. We can sympathize with her
utter rejection of art and romance when we have seen how thoroughly
corrupt they have become, but most of us feel the loss far more keenly
than does Vivie. There are no heroes; all (with the possible exception of
Crofts) are given sympathetic traits or scenes, but in the end all are indicted
as accessories or principals in prostitution. So are we in the audience.
Vivie’s ambiguous character ends the play: her financial independence represents
the only cure possible, but she, like the others, turns her back on
the disease and firmly shuts the door. In short, although the play ends on a
note of hope, not despair, it never lets us take our eyes away from the
brutal realities that, with our acquiescence, are allowed to continue.
Shaw demonstrated in Mrs Warren’s Profession that he could produce
an effective dramatic picture of unpleasant social realities, presented from
the perspective of his own hopeful realism, but he never repeated the experiment.
Perhaps he simply became convinced that it was pointless to
show the privileged class “repulsive pictures of evils they are powerless to
abolish” (“Realism, Real and Unreal” 111). In any event, he henceforth