Three plays about unpleasant men
Bernard Shaw excels himself once again. Okay, one might ask what is a Christian doing reading Bernard Shaw. Well, ever since I read Pygmalion I have simply loved his work, and in fact he is one of the best modern playwrights to have ever walked this earth. His plays are well structured, characters very realistic, and themes very topical. The theme that seems to run through most of his plays deals with the rights of a woman. To understand this theme one does need to understand the context in which these plays were written.
My Dad had a quick read of one of the prologues to these plays and noticed his comment upon marriage, which immediately confirmed our suspicions that Shaw was not a Christian. However he is not antagonistic towards Christianity, and his Christian characters in the plays are not evil or manipulative. In fact, many of them are very noble characters. However, it is to the theme of marriage which we will look because that is the key to understanding Shaw's attitude towards women.
Simply put, Shaw considers marriage to be little more than white slavery. Once again we need to understand the cultural context. His plays were written around the turn of the 20th Century in England, and if you were a women in that time you had no rights whatsoever. This is the key to the final play in this book 'Mrs Warren's Profession'. The prologue is an explanation as to the play, because the play itself is about prostitution. As he explains, unless a women were to get married she would either live her life as a pauper or a prostitute. If the woman had money she could not hold onto it - she had to get married, and when she did the rights of all her property would instantly transfer to the husband.
It is the male characters in these plays who are unpleasant. The first play, The Widower's House, is about a landlord. Is he dodgy? It is questionable as he defends his actions by saying that if he were to properly maintain his houses then the poor who live in them would not be able to live in them. Therefore he believes that he is providing a community service, albeit a suspicious one. The male in the second play, The Philanderer, is much more unpleasant. The play opens with him sleeping with one woman, and rejecting the advances of a second, and closes with him losing both of them. He only becomes interested in the second woman when she decides she wants to marry another man. At the end of the play we have no sympathy for him - he brought it all upon himself. As he said, he will always be a philanderer (the English definition, not the Greek), and he does not say this with pride, but with regret.
While the theme of two of the Plays Unpleasant are with the treatment of women, the theme of the Widower's House is of the exploitation of the working class. Further, the man who, at the beginning of the play, ends an engagement over dirty money made from a slumlord ends up selling his soul in a business dealing and marrying anyway.
It is also noteworthy that despite Shaw's polemic against the institution of marriage, he did end up having a long and happy marriage. I guess it had to do with his desire not to behave like the society that he spent his life criticising,
