Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Online Free

conventional thinking and automatic assumptions so they would think for themselves, such a state of unease and discomfort suited his purpose perfectly.
    The play’s ending similarly disallows the audience a complacent position. Vivie renews the struggle with her mother until she learns that her mother has not renounced her “profession” and yet pursues the image of respectability. Not being able to stand her mother’s hypocrisy in this regard, which to Vivie signifies a lack of integrity, she breaks with her mother finally and fully in a scene of compelling conflict in which every line between them contains a bullet wrapped in an irony.
    The final phase of their confrontation begins with Mrs. Warren appealing to her daughter on the basis of duty and justice, and as she does so Shaw directs that she fall back into her dialect “recklessly,” as a way of showing the emotional pitch she has reached, in which she is no longer in control of what she says or feels. But she errs when she invokes Vivie’s daughterly duty. Such an appeal, based as it is on convention, will not sway the hardheaded Vivie. Mrs. Warren’s other appeal, “Who is to care for me when I’m old?” makes it seem as if she only supported Vivie so she would have a prop for her old age. But when she adds that she kept herself “lonely” for Vivie by letting go all of the girls who had formed an attachment to her, she hits the audience right in the heart, though she touches Vivie not at all. Quite the opposite: Mrs. Warren’s regression to her native accent (according to Shaw’s stage directions) jars and antagonizes Vivie. Another dramatist might have made Vivie melt a little at her mother’s self-denial, but it is precisely Shaw’s strength and originality that he does not and instead has Vivie firmly repudiate her mother’s assertion of her daughterly duty.
    Mrs. Warren then shifts to a more aggressive tactic. And by her economic vocabulary, Shaw shows how capitalism marks every aspect of human relations: She accuses Vivie of “stealing” an education from her mother, and avers that instead of sending Vivie away to school, she should have brought her up in her own house. As if correcting her mother’s grammar, Vivie says, “[quietly] In one of your own houses,” reminding her with devastating insult that she is a procuress. This is too much for Mrs. Warren, and she begins to separate herself from her daughter by referring to Vivie in the third person: “(screaming). Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her” (p. 102). Here Shaw deliberately invokes King Lear’s curse on his daughter, Goneril, for driving him from her house, in which he likewise refers to his daughter in the third person though she is present: “If she must teem, / Create her child of spleen, that it may live / And be a thwart disnatured torment to her... that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/To have a thankless child” (act 1 , scene 4). Though this allusion is ominous in so far as it predicts Mrs. Warren’s being driven away by her daughter, it also begins to betray the presence of comic and ironic elements. For example, Mrs. Warren invites an invisible audience to “listen” to how Vivie “spits on her mother’s grey hairs”—a mixing of the aural and the visual, not unlike Bottom’s proclamation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that “the ear of man hath not seen... what my dream was” (act 4, scene I). The simultaneity of authentic tragic emotion and the faintly ridiculous is deeply Shavian (even though it derives partly from the Ibsen who wrote The Wild Duck).
    Shaw augments both the tragedy and the comedy in