The Tragi-comic Vision of Heartbreak House

Abstract

Despite the oscillations of its critical fortunes in the past, Heartbreak House has come to be regarded by many critics as Shaw’s greatest play. In the second half of the twentieth century there has been a steadily emerging recognition of its outstanding quality, in relation both to Shaw’s other work and to twentieth-century English drama in general. It is a play of great imaginative power and intellectual range, and its portrait of ‘cultured, leisured Europe before the war’1 includes some of Shaw’s most astringent and uncompromising social criticism. The methods of the play are frequently comic, even farcical, in character, but the comedy and farce form an integral part of Shaw’s searching analysis of the predicament of contemporary society. Of all his plays, Heartbreak House shows least evidence of such salving balms of the Shavian universe as Creative Evolution, or Fabian Socialism or feminine wisdom and vitality. The play confronts darkness and violence and the shattering of illusions in an unflinching, exhilarated mood. Although some positive affirmations are discernible in its overall vision, they appear in a context of fiercely negative and destructive feeling. The play is unquestionably one of the most complex of all Shaw’s works, and existing critical discussion is often disappointing in its failure to do justice to the complexity, and to come to grips with the meaning of the play’s central metaphors.