As moral conventions rapidly evolved with the approach of the twentieth century, Shaw and his contemporaries struggled to come to terms with families no longer defined by strict patriarchal roles. Utilizing different critical methods and focusing on different plays, the panelists all respond to changing notions of family in the Late Victorian era. Whether focused on gender, physiology, or legality, they all analyze the implications of controversial plays by Shaw and his contemporaries. The challenges these plays made to conventional morality were often met with resistance, but even that resistance could prove productive in the struggle to reshape family and society. Ultimately, drama became a crucible in which a new order could be forged.
In “‘People with unimproved minds’: Shavian Fathers and Resistance to the Ideal Paterfamilias,” Dibasi Roy looks at the early comedies of Shaw to examine the construction of Late Victorian fatherhood. Roy traces the unorthodox patterns of fatherhoods that challenge traditional concepts of being a father as represented in Shaw’s plays. When portrayed against the institutions of family, marriage, and religious and sexual normativity, Shaw’s fathers offer unusual aspects in the discussions of Late Victorian fatherhood in their acceptance and rejections of the orthodox roles of masculinities. Shaw accommodated the concepts of absent, tyrannical, authoritative and caring fathers, proposed by John Tosh, within the diminishing ideal of Late Victorian fatherhood. The identities of Shavian fathers and father figures are problematized by the rising socio-political, gender and legal reforms of the era, along with growing religious skepticism, which contributed to dethrone the tyrannical father. From tactless stereotypical orthodoxy to amiable paternal attachment and affection, Shaw’s fathers traverse gender and psychological binaries and represent masculinities in many dimensions.
Alice Clapie turns to resemblances among Shaw’s family of Irish writers in “Eugenic Laughter, Universal Laughter: Shaw’s Physiological Dramaturgy.” In his criticism of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which left not a single reviewer indifferent to the uncontrollable contagious laughter the play produced, Shaw seemed to gesture toward a use of laughter in the name of eugenics. Shaw’s engagement with eugenics goes beyond discourse, attributing a physiological effect to laughter in the theatre. The closing lines of Pygmalion and Man and Superman, along with Shaw’s rehearsal methods and his criticism of farce, reveal physiology as a driving force of Shaw’s dramaturgy. Clapie explores the uncomfortable notion of “eugenic laughter” in Shaw’s physiological dramaturgy, acknowledging the popularity of eugenics for social progress at the turn of the 20th century, and examining the presence, function, and conceptualization of a “eugenic laughter” within Shaw’s work. If eugenics is severely frowned upon today, it was far from unpopular during Shaw’s time, and remained for years an important crux in the discussion of familial issues.
Finally, Dan Stuart analyzes the controversies behind Shaw’s most infamous family drama in “Reconsidering the Unpleasant: Victorian Morality and the Censorship of Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” The play, among Shaw’s most noteworthy works, dealt with the then-controversial subject of prostitution, foregrounding the mitigating factors underlying the trade’s proliferation while exploring conflicting attitudes about gender roles and social mobility in Late Victorian society. Today it is performed routinely as a staple of the playwright’s repertoire, yet the play was initially met with intense opposition. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner, primary censor of dramatic works in Great Britain, refused to license it, strictly prohibiting any type of production. The adversity proved an obstacle to Shaw initially, but it permitted him the opportunity to publish a text version in 1898, accompanied by a lengthy preface laying forth his convictions. At the time, the preface was considered a further hindrance, as Shaw’s indictment of the capitalist system only brought the work under stronger scrutiny. Yet Stuart argues this appeal to rationality proved lucrative in the following decades, as censorship only enhanced the allure of Shaw’s work.