Man and Superman, A Step in Shavian Disillusionment

Abstract

cOCIALISM is of course the underlying subject of all of Shaw's d plays, and since it early proved a very unpopular subject, he abandoned it as an explicit theme after Mrs. Warren's Profession and did not return to it until Man and Superman. But whereas Aidrs. Warren is a savage indictment of capitalism, Man and Superman is a complex satire of socialism itself. Obviously, these two plays mark successive stages in a process of disillusionment. The tides of hope and despair are not easily traced in a thinker so little inclined to consistency or frankness with himself. Shaw seldom admits a disappointment-perhaps not even to himself-without being ready to proclaim a new hope. Consequently, the same drama may contain in a sense both pessimism and optimism, revealing the new faith with the ghost of the old faith in its arms. Or again, Shaw may simply hold an unsatisfactory doctrine in abeyance-and take up a new set of problems. The outward causes of his disillusionment are political events. The inward cause is what might be called his millennial temperament. Like the primitive Christians, he looked for a miraculous deliverance within his own lifetime, and this expectation was greatly intensified by his having come to political manhood in the ardent eighties. But like his Victorian predecessors, Shaw was also a practical reformer, with a keen sense of outward reality. Consequently, he was trapped between his vision and the facts. As he grew older, he hoped more and more desperately for less and less. He invented more and more ingenious reasons for optimism, more and more violent cures for a chronic ailment. The first stage of his disillusionment appears in Mrs. Warren (1894), which is bitter satire followed by a change of subject. The second stage appears in Man and Superman (1903), which-somewhat inconsistently-exposes the futilities of parlor Fabianism, suggests the possibilities of working-