Feminism and Female Stereotypes in Shaw

Author(s): Elsie Adams

Source: The Shaw Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, SHAW AND WOMAN (JANUARY, 1974), pp. 17-22
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40682312
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 Feminism and Female
Stereotypes in Shaw
Elsie Adams1

"I say, Archer, my God, what women!" exclaimed Robert Louis

Stevenson of Cashel Byrons Profession in 1888.2 Since then, it has
become a critical cliché that Bernard Shaw is the creator of start-
lingly original fictional women, an opinion that is echoed in the only
full-length study of Shaw and women, Barbara Bellow Watson's
A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Woman (New York: Norton, 1964).
This book, dealing at length with Shaw's treatment of women in
his political theory and fictional practice, emphasizes Shaw's de-
parture from convention in his creation of domineering, clever, sen-
sible, good-humored, sexually aggressive - in short, "unladylike" -
women.3 Undeniably, Shaw portrays arresting and powerful women.
But in spite of his departure from the nineteenth-century stereotype of
the demure, fragile, "womanly" woman, he more often than not creates
women characters who belong to types familiar in Western literature.
In play after play, he presents us with various combinations of the
traditional figure of temptress, goddess, or mother (usually with a
capital M); and, even when he creates a woman who has broken
out of a traditional "female" role, he tends to draw on another literary
type - the "emancipated" woman.
In sharp contrast with such traditional treatment of women in his
plays, Shaw's political statements about women challenged (and
continue to challenge) tradition. Shaw was an early and vigorous
exponent of female/male equality, insisting "that a woman is really
only a man in petticoats, or, if you like, that a man is a woman without
petticoats."4 His essay on "The Womanly Woman" in The Quintes-
sence of Ibsenism can still stand as a revolutionary feminist docu-
ment, with its analysis of the social conditioning causing women to
sacrifice self for others; its view of a male-ruled society dictating that
women minister to male appetites; its argument that "The domestic
career is no more natural to all women than the military career is
1 Dr. Adams, author of Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes (1971) teaches in the School of Literature,
California State University, San Diego.
2 Letter to William Archer, quoted in its entirety in Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw:
Man of the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), p. 128.
3 Watson, p. 19, et passim. Other studies ot bhaw s women include Joseph Molnars bhaw s
Four Kinds of Women," Theatre Arts, XXXVI (Dec. 1952), 18-21, 92, which proposes the
types of the Womanly Woman, the Shavian Emancipated Woman, the Life Force Woman, the
Shavian New Woman; Toni Block's "Shaw's Women," MD, II (Sept. 1959), 133-38, which
offers real life sources for the female characters; and Betty Bändel, "G.B. S. and the Opposite
Sex," rev. Watson, A Shavian Guide, Shaw R, VIII (May 1965), 77-80. Arthur H. Nethercot,
in "The Female of the Species," Men and Supermen: The Shavian Portrait Gallery (Cam-
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954; New York: Blom, 1966), pp 77-126, lists the Womanly
Woman, the Pursuing Woman, the Mother Woman, the New Woman, the Younger Generation,
and the Manly Woman.
* "Woman - Man in Petticoats," in Platform and Pulpit, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 174.

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natural to all men"; and its insistence that female rebellion is the
first step to emancipation.5 With these pro-feminist statements in
mind, we might reasonably expect to find women in Shaw's plays
who are men in petticoats, or who are in rebellion against traditional
definitions and roles. But, as I have said, what we in fact find are
permutations of basic literary types: temptress, mother, goddess.
The temptress in Western tradition is, like Eve, the cause of
man's fall from grace or, like Pandora, responsible for unleashing evil
on the world. She inspires awe and terror, for, though she fascinates,
she is manipulative, destructive, sometimes deadly. She is La Belle
Dame sans Merci, who seduces the knight and then leaves him
wandering, psychically devastated, in a symbolic wasteland. She is the
serpent-lady (the "Dragon Lady" belongs to the type), the femme
fatale, or, in some literature, the castrating bitch. This type appears
throughout Shaw's work, often associated metaphorically with the
"tiger cat" or "viper." We see her in Blanche Sartorius' animal ferocity
in love-making; in Raina Petkoff's attack after discovering Sergius'
flirtation with Louka; in Ann Whitefield's tightening boa-like grip on
Tanner. Shaw's fullest treatment of the femme fatale is Cleopatra,
the kitten turned tiger, who against Caesar's advice stains her hands
with her enemy's blood.
There is a sense in which all of Shaw's strong-willed, dominating
women are variations of this dangerous but attractive type. Cer-
tainly men are no match for these women: "Don't hit us when we're
down," Tanner pleads with Violet after she delivers a tongue-lashing
to everyone for assuming she is a "fallen woman." When Sergius
calls Raina a "Tiger cat!" and Raina objects, Bluntschli explains to her,
"What else can he do, dear lady? He must defend himself somehow."
Even the male-dominated Eliza Doolittle shows her claws and
threatens to scratch when Higgins and Pickering ignore her after her
triumph in Act IV.6
For the most part, however, the women in Shaw's plays do
not threaten men through tigerish displays of temper; more char-
acteristically they dominate through kittenish "feminine wiles" (i.e.,
deceit and cunning). Lady Cicely, for example, controls everyone
around her while ostensibly deferring to male authority and superior
knowledge. She protects and nurses her baby-men - she even mends
their clothes! - all the time arranging their lives and doing as she
likes.
Lady Cicely exemplifies another major type in Shaw's plays:
the mother-woman. This type is, of course, also as old as Eve, the

5 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Major Critical Essays (London: Constable, 1932), pp. 32-41.
6 The three scenes occur, respectively, in Man and Superman, p. 44; Arms and the Man, in
Plays Pleasant, p. 62; and Pygmalion, pp. 266-67. All my references to Shaw's works, unless
otherwise noted, are to the Constable Standard Edition of the Works of Bernard Shaw.

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mother of us all, and appears in mythology in various forms of the
fertile Earth-Mother. Without rehearsing the case for Shaw's "mother-
fixation," we should note that his plays abound with women for whom
maternity is a calling. They are women who instinctively offer ma-
ternal protection and control, as when Raina maternally coaxes
and shakes her "chocolate cream soldier" when he is too tired to stay
awake or when Major Barbara bosses her "dear little Dolly Boy."
Candida is one of the best examples of Shaw's mother- women:
throughout the play she babies and bullies her two "boys," Morell
and Marchbanks, who take turns in the last act sitting in a child's
chair at her feet. Dona Ana (and presumably Ann Whitefield in
Act IV of Man and Superman) becomes another archetypal mother,
as she leaves the dialogue in hell searching for a father for the super-
man (Act III). What these women have in common is an instinct for
mothering, an ability to manage others, and a tendency to brook no
interference with their own plans. In their will to prevail, they
have affinities with Philip Wylie's "mom," except that we condemn
"mom" and are forced to admire - even if grudgingly - the tremen-
dous vitality of Shaw's mothers.7
In his attitude toward women and the Life Force, Shaw -
who in theory advocates sexual equality - makes rigid sex role di-
visions. According to the argument of Man and Superman, it is man's
function (as thinker, philosopher) to create new mind, while woman's
function (as childbearer, mother) is to create new life. Surprisingly,
even in the midst of an attack on marriage as an oppressive insti-
tution (in "The Womanly Woman") Shaw says that motherhood is a
means by which a woman regains the self-respect she loses through
marriage.8 And such reverence for motherhood leads, ironically, to an
idealization of woman: "Sexually, Woman is Nature's contrivance for
perpetuating its highest achievement."9 As not only the creator of
life but also the nourisher and sustainer of it, the Life Force woman
becomes Shaw's version of the Great Mother, traditionally revered
but also feared. In "Symbolic Figures and the Symbolic Technique of
George Bernard Shaw," Margaret Schlauch argues that this Mother-
Goddess is a recurrent symbolic figure in Shaw, and cites as examples
Lady Cicely, Candida, Mrs. George (Getting Married), and Mrs.
Hushabye (Heartbreak House). She further notes that "In their
most elaborated forms . . . Shaw's goddess-figures serve as clear
allegorical vehicles for his theory of the Life Force, as incarnations

7 An informative article on the kinds of mothers in Shaw's plays (based on his categories in
My Dear Dorothea) is Andrina Gilmartin's "Mr. Shaw's Many Mothers," Shaw R, VIII (Sept.
1965), 93-103; Shaw's mothers are divided into three types: the "kind" mother; the bored
one (who can nevertheless do an adequate job of mothering with assistance and guidance), and
the "wicked" one.
* The Quintessence of Ibsentsm, p. 38.
9 Spoken by Don Juan, Man and Superman, p. 107.

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of consciously creative evolution."10 Thus we are presented with the
paradox of a man who can argue against the romantic idealization of
woman, but who nevertheless personally worships the mother-goddess
figure he artistically creates.
As agents of the Life Force, such women as Candida, Lady Cicely,
Barbara Undershaft, or Saint Joan are as self-sacrificing as the most
fanatic Victorian martyr-woman. Even as these women avoid the
stereotype of the "womanly woman" and are aggressive, often ma-
nipulative, no-nonsense women, they finally are not self-serving; they
are instead always working for some "higher purpose." Candida, for
example, sees herself as the supporter of male achievement and gives
herself to the man who needs her most. So too Lady Cicely's secret
of command is to lose the one "little bit of self" left in her; she is seen
as totally selfless in her motives, and is called a "saint" by Marzo
(Captain Brassbounds Conversion, in Three Plays for Puritans, pp. 277,
285). Major Barbara is likewise a savior of others, as is Saint Joan.
As Watson notes, "the quality to be extracted from all Shaw's will-
ful women and from some of the men, is saintliness."11 Curiously,
Shaw attacked the women-are-angels morality, but himself liked to
portray women as saints.
Shaw's greatest portraits of women are complex and do not
belong to a single type. Candida, for example, is portrayed as
a seductress, planning to initiate Marchbanks into a knowledge of
"what love really is" (Plays Pleasant, p. 116); at the same time, her
primary instinct is for mothering; the phrases "silly boy" or "my boy"
punctuate her speech to both Morell and Marchbanks. And in the
comparison of Candida to "the Virgin of the Assumption over her
hearth" (p. 89) and the reverence both men have for her (March-
banks kneels for her blessing before he exits at the end of the play),
she can be seen as a Shaw Madonna, in a play which he called "THE
Mother play."12 The interfacing of types in such a complex portrayal
adds depth and texture to Candida and to the play.
So too Ann Whitefield is a combination of literary types. When
we view her through Tanner's eyes we see the dangerous huntress, the
femme fatale: "a cat" (Man and Superman, p. 10), "a boa constrictor"
(p. 11), "the lioness" (p. 22), "a Bengal tiger" (p. 24), "Lady Mephis-
topheles" (p. 31). At the end of Act II Tanner flees from her in terror,
realizing that he is "the marked down victim, the destined prey" (p.
67). And by the end of the play he feels trapped, caught. In con-

10 Science & Society, XXI (Summer 1957), 210-21. Schlauch's examples of the Life Force goddess-
figures: Dona Ana, Prola (The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles), Eve and Lilith (Back to
Methuselah).
» Watson, p. 77. . _ . _. . .. . _ _______ . _ .. _
u Letter to Ellen Terry, in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters iff7f-iffyy, eü. Juan ti. Laurence
(London: Max Reinhardt, 1965), p. 641.

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trast, Ann is seen by Ramsden as the epitome of female propriety and
innocence: "a wonderfully dutiful girl" (p. 6), "only a woman, a
young and inexperienced woman at that" (p. 13). Octavius shares this
mistaken view of her, and also worships her as archetypal goddess; she
reminds him, a stage direction tells us, of "the whole life of the race to
its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it
fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the inner good sense of
nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the aboli-
tion of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood
into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of
all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas" (p. 16).
Here she is linked with Eve and the very source of life ( Shaw himself
seems caught up in this description of her), and thus comes to
embody some of the mother- woman's characteristics. Like Candida,
she babies men: she tells Tanner that he is "a perfect baby in the
things I do understand" (p. 39) and she calls "Ricky-Ticky-Tavvy" "a
nice creature - a good boy" (p. 151). By the end of the play she is
identified, through Dona Ana's dialogue in hell, with the creative
maternal impulse of the Life Force. Shaw describes Ann as "one
of the vital geniuses" who inspires "confidence . . . also some fear" (p.
16). He regards Ann as "Every woman" (Epistle Dedicatory, p.
xxviii); and, significantly, Every woman is a composite of traditional
types.

There is a last type which Shaw presents which is neither

traditional nor composite; this is the contemporary figure of the
emancipated woman who has rejected typical "female" roles. The
literary treatment of this type has been a portrait of a woman who is
unmarried, plain, and "masculine" in dress and manner. (We know
her in the twentieth century as the stereotyped "career girl" and,
very recently, as the "women's lib freak.") There is a Punch cartoon
of 1880 which graphically depicts the late nineteenth-century version
of this woman: she wears a white shirt and tie and a simply cut suit
(resembling a man's), and wears her hair short, or severely pulled
back. The title "Man or Woman? - A Toss Up" makes the editorial
comment. When Shaw created Vivie Warren, he created a similar
type. Admittedly, Vivie has all the characteristics of a character -
male or female - representing Shaw's values: like Shaw, she has no use
for the beauty-worshippers or the idealizers of love; she believes
in free choice and turns her back on the capitalist exploitation rep-
resented by Mrs. Warren and Crofts; and in one sense she can be said
to fulfill Shaw's explanation that "the secret of the extraordinary knowl-
edge of women which I shew in my plays" is that "I have always as-
sumed that a woman is a person exactly like myself, and that is how

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the trick is done."13 But for those of us who find it refreshing to read
about a literary heroine who is "permanently single . . . and perm-
anently unromantic" (Mrs. Warrens Profession, Plays Unpleasant, p.
235), it is a disappointment to see her resembling a Punch cartoon, her
"masculine" qualities emphasized as she smokes her cigars, carries
her fountain pen and paper knife on a chain, and cripples hands with
her handshake.
In saying that Vivie Warren - or Ann Whitefield, or Candida,
or any of the other of Shaw's magnificant portraits of strong women -
belong to literary types or are composites of them, I am not denigrating
the art of the plays. We take for granted that good - and great - art
can be produced by artists who utilize character types rather than
"real life" models; and we know that typing belongs especially to the
comic mode. Furthermore, we do not expect characters to embody
the complexity of real people; art by its very nature simplifies.
And in defense of Shaw's realism, we can point out that even
stereotypes have some basis in reality. Shaw knew real women - e.g.,
his mother, his sister Lucy, Jenny Patterson, Ellen Terry, Mrs.
Patrick Campbell - who served as partial models for some of his
characters and who apparently in their real lives embodied aspects
of the tiger cat, the mother- woman, or the self-sacrificing saint (as
we no doubt have known women who share some of Candida's mother-
ing, or Ann's man-chasing, or Lady Cicely's manipulative expertise, or
Vivie's independence). But the artistic defense is, finally, the only
defense of Shaw's characters: there is no question that the plays
are interesting and theatrically, structurally, and stylistically effective.
As literary critics we admire Shaw's art.
Otherwise, we have to deplore his failure to create female char-
acters who reflect his expressed opinion that women must be regarded
as equal to men and must seek personal identity - an identity separate
from traditional roles. An examination of the portraits of women in
literature reveals, almost without exception, rigid role definition: as
the Enemy (destroyer, temptress), as the Goddess (purity, sanctity,
selflessness personified), as the Mother, and - recently - as the
"Working Girl." Had Shaw not written so eloquently against stereotyp-
ing women, we would hardly be surprised to find these types in his
work since they are prevalent throughout Western literature. That
the types do appear, however, suggests the need to re-examine all
Shaw's female characters. And as a beginning point, we should stop
exclaiming about their originality and make a clear distinction be-
tween Shaw's traditional treatment of women in the plays and his
feminist politics.

«"Woman - Man in Petticoats," p. 174.

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