The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays by J.L. Wisenthal

Abstract

127 J.L. Wisenthal, The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw's Middle Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1974). 259. $10.00 Emperor or Galilean, empire of the flesh or of the spirit, stupidity or imagina­ tion, power material or power spiritual - many of the chords resounding throughout Shaw's works and life are struck in this tightly argued, solidly based discussion of some of the major plays. Shaw has always invited contraries of opinion and action, choosing to emphasize the dialectics of debate in his lifelong attempt to persuade the reader to contemplate the range of choices before him, forcing him to select and therefore to think. Wit, rhetoric, sentiment, and impudence are drawn into the barrage of truths and counter-truths which make up Shaw's style; like Wilde, he might easily have pronounced: "Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth." For Shaw's masks were many, and he never rested from his self-appointed role of Happy Hypocrite. The Marriage of Contraries concentrates on nine plays written between 1903 and 1923: Man and Superman, Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Pygmalion, Misalliance, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan. However, Professor Wisenthal marshals an im­ pressive force of examples from a much wider range of novels, essays, letters, reviews, unpublished manuscripts, secondary sources, and many of the other plays. Despite the complexities of his subject, the argument is simple: Shaw, concerned primarily with the division between the empire of the flesh and the empire of the spirit, strives to illustrate through his writings the evolutionary path by which a comprehensive synthesis of opposites may eventually be achieved. Professor Wisenthal sees this pattern explicit in characterization, especially in reversals of the audience's expectations of character, and implicit in form. Not surprisingly, this approach is most effective for such avowed problem plays as Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and - to a lesser extent - Misalliance. The tripartite analysis of Man and Superman as book, comedy, and handbook brilliantly provides rich insight into Shaw's economic philosophy and turns up rewarding parallels with other plays, au­ thors, and nationalities (Shaw once reminded William Archer of "m y extraor­ dinarily happy command of classes & grades of civilization"). Professor Wisenthal 's reading is particularly effective when he draws parallels between characters; indeed he might have extended this further, for example, by de­ veloping the link between Captain Shotover's powerful warning of the drunken captain and Larry Doyle's impassioned denunciation of the dreaming Irishman. Similarly, his comments on the influence of Swift, Blake, Carlyle, Ibsen, and Nietzsche are illuminating; but what of those acknowledged models, Bunyan and Dickens? So too, although several comparisons are drawn between Shaw and Yeats, he overlooks Yeats's own frequent paraphrasing of Blake's "Without contraries there is no progression." 128 Inevitably such an attempt to map Shaw clearly and consistently - to assume that clarity of thought represents simplicity of theory and presentation founders , because subject and manner are so fascinatingly complex. The danger is evident even in Professor Wisenthal's discussion of Man and Superman, when he attributes the force of the Devil's cynicism to pessimism in Shaw himself, and when the too simple equation of Doha Ana with Philistinism not only deflates the resounding ending to the Hell Scene but subtly aligns the power of the Life Force with the wrong camp. Greater hazards, and deeper currents, threaten when hidden motives (which run counter to Shaw's character presentation) are attributed to Undershaft so that the reading of Major Barbara may come out as charted; nor can Saint Joan's great speeches be simply dismissed as “ embarrassingly rhetorical." We must, as Shaw instructed Ellen Terry, learn to read on the lines, rather than between the lines; we must learn to trust the author. Otherwise it is too easy to provide, for example, a simple reading of pessimism for both Joan and Captain Shotover (and thence for Shaw) and choose to ignore the melodramatic, sensational, and comic complexities of Shaw's dramatic form. Wisely, Professor Wisenthal does not examine those plays which do not cleanly follow the dialectical pattern...