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

104 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
for “dramatic effect” that Shaw first described in connection with Ibsen.
Arms and the Man would also seem to provide good examples of this kind
of dramatic sleight of hand. The audience’s judgments of Raina, Sergius,
and Bluntschli are bound to change during the course of the play. There is
a difference, however. Shaw’s insistence that he no longer used the categories
of good and evil “even for dramatic effect” occurred in a letter attacking
Archer’s criticism of Arms and the Man. That Shaw would wish to
abandon such judgments is not surprising because the very essence of
Shaw’s moral position is that all such categories falsify reality and obscure
the truth. This is really the difference between Ibsen and Shaw, at least as
Shaw saw it: Ibsen is always seeking to replace outworn ideals with new
and better ones, while Shaw saw no need for ideals at all. His point in Arms
and the Man is not that Bluntschli is the true hero and Sergius a hollow
sham; it is not a question of showing that those we had admired are contemptible
and those we despised are commendable. It is folly to declare,
like Sergius, that life is a farce because we have discovered it is not a fairy
tale. Reality is more interesting and more worthy of respect than any such
childish fancies.
Shaw’s next play makes this distinction between himself and Ibsen explicit.
Shaw called his play a “counterblast to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, showing
that in the real typical doll’s house it is the man who is the doll”
(“Shaw Reveals Who Was Candida” 603). Morell, he said, “is really nothing
but Helmer getting fair play” (Collected Letters 1:612). The plot of
Candida has little in common with that of A Doll’s House. In that respect,
the play is similar to The Lady from the Sea, but plot was not Shaw’s concern
in contrasting the plays. He was calling attention to differences in the
depiction of character. In no play by Ibsen is the technique of tricking the
spectator into a meanly false judgment used more obviously than in A
Doll’s House. Here Ibsen is clearly using the categories of good and evil to
produce a dramatic effect. Nora, Helmer, and Krogstad are all portrayed in
the beginning of the play in ways calculated to elicit conventional responses,
but by the conclusion the judgments on all three will have been
reversed. The villainous Krogstad becomes a sympathetic victim; the upright
Helmer is transformed into a shallow and selfish tyrant; and Nora,
who seemed so charmingly frivolous, is seen to be resourceful and heroic.
Nora discovers that the ideal on which she had based her life was false, a
mask for a cheap and tawdry reality; she leaves to seek an ideal worth
living for. She still believes in the miracle of a “true” marriage but knows
that she must first seek it elsewhere.