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Social and Religious Aspects 61 SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS Throughout Shaw’s and Anna’s life, they preached and professed socialism. They clamoured for a political freedom, economic and social equality. They were the strong upholders of individual liberty. They were always the pungent and outspoken critics of their age. Their socialism was not dogmatic. They believed that nothing is perfect, but everything is in the process of continuous evolution and change. They, therefore, did not favour a revolution, but a slow and gradual transformation through democratic means. They believed that if the condition of civilised societies was to be improved, it must be done by legislation aiming at equality, minimising the fortunes of the rich in order to help and uplift the poor. Though they continued to preach equality in the rest of their life, as they grew older they trusted less in the power of the acts of Parliament to increase the level of the poor and the needy. Shaw and Anna came round to the opinion that the first thing required in the making of a good society is not so much good laws as good men and women that is, who are righteous in spirit and not merely well intentioned and kind hearted. They bellowed good people would make good laws, but good laws passed by a few need not necessarily make a good society. Despite the fact that he was a democratic socialist, in the 1930s Shaw approved of the dictatorship of Stalin and also made some ambiguous statements that could be interpreted as being pro - Hitler. In 1945, in his preface to his play Geneva Shaw claimed that the majority of the victims of the Nazi extermination camps had in fact died of “overcrowding”. However, 62 he also stated that Hitler had become a “mad messiah” over time. Shaw contrasted this with the situation in the Soviet Union where, according to Shaw, Stalin made good by doing things better. Shaw also made numerous anti-Semitic comments at this time, although to the extent which he was merely being ironic or provocative is unclear. His pro-Stalin bias is undeniable, however, although it is rarely commented on in discussions of his work. Shaw remained in many ways an Edwardian who never fully understood the politics of totalitarian age. Shaw may be a socialist in his treatises, but he realises that neither socialism nor capitalism nor feudalism, nor any other ‘ism’ can be the basis of an art. He thinks that he is a bundle of contradictions. In House , the house appears in the guise of an old fashioned high-pooped ship. It is “an art of society, a ‘soul’s ship’ and a ship of state threatened by the rocks” (Meisel 130). In Houses , the emotional logic of the play proceeds through the demonstration of the integrity of the social fabric in which all are implicated-slum-dwellers, renters, and aristocrats, as well as landlords and rent collectors. But as Martin Meisel says : The end of the play narrows and enforces a “residual impact”. The alternatives offered or implied are in fact not two but three: to acquiesce in the reality of one’s complicity and make the best of it; to flee into private world of feeling and imagination; or to will the overthrow of the whole. The end of the play illustrates the first alternative in all its disagreeableness, and explodes the second alternative as illusory, leaving the third as the unstated terminus of the emotional dialectic. Trench accepts the first alternative: he 63 ‘stands in’ at the end with the others, to make the best of his threatened resources. His action undermines the second alternative, subjective withdrawal and private fulfillment; for the romance of the play. Trench’s alliance with the slumlord’s daughter, is now consummated (whether Trench admits it or not) only as part of the compact between land, capital, and enterprise. The audience is left, then, with the third unstated alternative a revulsion from the whole in which all are so thoroughly implicated that the only release can be in the will to transform the whole. (115) Shaw is a thorough participant in the social life of England without anyone asking for it. He always analyses human motives and causes of action and has to find out whether they are justified or not. He regards current views of economics, religion, sexual relationships, and the like as entirely wrong and so seeks to change them by discussing them and turning them topsy - turvy in his plays. In the course of his long dramatic career, he has expressed himself practically on every subject-religion, politics, morality, marriage and family relations, racial prejudices, poverty and social standards. Of the dramatists handling similar themes in Tamil Nadu, Anna has unique qualities as an artist springing from a common ground. The history of his time contains more sufficient and splendid reasons for the part played by social themes in a drama that is alive to contemporary reality. The common grounds in this context may be certain beliefs, attitudes, human desires, social oppression, economic instabilities, cultural misrepresentation and political dominations as that of Shaw’s. 64 Shaw’s Houses is an experiment in society and politics. According to Shaw the players designed to induce people to vote on the progressive side in a council election in London (WH xix). Martin Meisel in Shaw and Revolution : The Politics of the Plays suggests Although it demonstrates with the logic of a paradigm the complicity of the whole of society in slum landlordism, the play suggests that the country council and the vestries could at least alleviate the worst of the abuses; could provide, in other words, one of those ‘partly installments of betterment’. But this strategy conflicts with others in the play, and is -as Shaw seems to have realized - about as adequate to the scab of the demonstration of universal complicity [....] (114) Houses is prescient, reflective, comic and tragic in turns. It is with a matchmaking people, eccentric relatives, and matched guests bustling around a set that resembles an old fashioned ship. The house itself functions allegorically as a ship of state; like England after a war of the world devoid of its Victorian ideals. Mazzini gives voice to what the most discouraged Fabian. Mazzini: I joined societies and made speeches and wrote pamphlets. That was all I would do but, you know, though the people in the societies thought they knew more than Mangam, most of them would have joined if they had known as much. You see they never had money to handle or any man to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up; it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddlem any 65 longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to nothing ever does happen. It’s amazing how well we get along, all things considered too. (CPPI 592) Horseback Hall in Houses, consists of boorish ignorant philistines and Heart break House of people in whom the pleasures of music, art, literature and the theatre have supplanted hunting, shooting and fishing. Those characters whose spiritual home is Horseback Hall are Mangam, the ultra-conventional and hyper critical Ariadans and her husband Hastings Utterword, a colonial bureaucrat so faceless that he never actually appears in the play but so powerful that he dominates ideal solution to England’s problems would be, according to Ariadane, to get rid of the ridiculous sham democracy. In Houses , the shipping away of fraud, pose and illusion occurs in characters. Shotover is said to have sold his soul to the Devil long ago in Zanzibar; it was just a ruse, a rumour spread by himself to intimidate unruly suitors. Now he strives to attain the seventh degree of concentration which turns out to mean that he is tipping rum in the kitchen. Hector’s vaunted exploits are, of course, false. So is Hesione’s exquisite, admired hair. Even Mangam’s reputation for toughness and wealth is a facade. He never goes near his factories because the workers alarm him and anyway they belong to all sorts of lazy good-for nothing capitalists. And a flirtation with Hesione reduces the great entrepreneur to abide misery, rejected, the bubs helplessly. As Michael Holroyd observes, “Houses is a socialist play without a socialist 66 in it” (BS .I 248). Even the morally indignant Trench is ultimately co-opted into the scramble after greater wealth the slums will be improved but only for street improvements. The mortgager Trench, ground land-lord, in order to exploit a development project seeking to tear the properties down lady Roxdale (Trench’s aunt), mortgage Sartorius, and Sartorius’s former rent collector Lickcheese easily conspire to take the slight risk: Trench: As I understand it, Robbin’s Row is to be pulled down to make way for the new street into the strand, and the straight tip now is to go for compensation [...] well it appears that the dirtier a place is the more rent you get; and the decenter it is, the more compensation you get. So were to give up dirt and go in for decency. (CPP 451-52) The play originally aimed at instructing voters for upcoming municipal election reflecting both the Fabians’ platform and gradualist reform tactics. Barbara Bellow Natoon in A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Women says : Of all Shaw’s plays, Heartbreak House is the one which, in all its artificialities, has the greatest claim to a certain kind of realism. It is realistic in the sense that it treats people according to the immediate social strains behind their behavior, and not according to the eternal principles behind their behavior.
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