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

108 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
physical danger. For Shaw both of these represent healthy manifestations
of the Life Force, so he does not cynically debunk them, but he does challenge
conventional expectations about them. The nature of the challenge
corresponds to the nature of the theme. There is some overlap, but romance
is the nucleus of the “pleasant” and “unpleasant plays” (except
Man of Destiny and possibly Arms and the Man) and heroism is the core
of the Three Plays for Puritans. This is true even of Mrs Warren’s Profession,
although the romance of Vivie and Frank is overwhelmed, in more
than one sense, by the general corruption of the sexual instinct that is the
theme of that play. The most common device in those plays is the overturning
of gender stereotypes. Frank is a quasi-masculine parody of the
stereotypical worthless woman: his ambition is to become a kept man, but
he wants to do it in style. Vivie’s masculinity hardly needs comment, but
in breaking off from her mother and Frank she is cutting herself off from
not one, but two, whores. The Philanderer plays blatantly with gender stereotypes;
Widowers’ Houses pits a violently aggressive female against a
passive, reluctant male; and Valentine in You Never Can Tell flaunts his
effeminate lightness and frivolity and even uses them as weapons against
Gloria’s awesome strength. Morrell and Candida appear at first relatively
conventional, but Marchbanks provides a source of X rays that pierce their
facades. He of course is an explosive compound of almost hysterical cowardly
effeminacy and terrifying strength and determination. We should
not conclude from such character portrayals that Shaw believed that we
are all really androgynous (or that men are really effeminate and women
masculine), for if we look at the plays with a military theme (Man of Destiny
and Arms and the Man together with the Plays for Puritans) we find
that we are firmly back in the land of manly men and womanly women.
Judith Anderson, Cleopatra, and Lady Cicely are as feminine while Richard,
Dick Dudgeon, Caesar, and Captain Brassbound are as masculine as
the most stalwart of traditionalists could want. The plays of sexual negotiation
overturn gender roles, but the plays of military action and physical
danger challenge received notions of valor and courage. Arms and the Man
and Man of Destiny, which deal with both themes, occupy a middle
ground.
The challenge to expectations of the audience corresponds to the challenges
that the characters experience themselves, for all of these early
plays depict journeys of discovery in which characters more or less painfully
learn who they themselves really are, either with respect to society,
to each other, or to their own self-image. The drama emerges from the