Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Online Free Page A

Mrs. Warren’s next speech to her daughter by having her invoke Heaven (the only time in the play she does) to forgive her for only doing good to Vivie. Such irony—her asking Heaven to forgive her for doing good—marks the moment as Shavian: Just when the pathos of the scene reaches tragic proportions, when the mother-daughter bond’s being violently severed produces the proper tragic awe, Shaw chooses just this moment to have Mrs. Warren become ridiculous by exhibiting a shocking misapprehension of the circumstances in which Heaven normally forgives people. Shaw compounds the tragicomedy of the intense moment—the climax of the play, really—by having Mrs. Warren invoke Heaven again: “From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong” (p. 103). A detached observer might have pointed out to Mrs. Warren that the people Heaven usually helps in their last hour are not those who have done nothing but wrong during the period preceding their last hour.
    The closest analogue to such an unsettling mixture of comic and tragic registers, perhaps, would be found in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock reacts to his daughter’s rejection of him, when she elopes with Lorenzo and steals her father’s money (act 2, scene 8). Shylock cannot seem to make up his mind about which is the greater loss (or betrayal), his stolen ducats or his deserting daughter, Jessica: He seems to feel both keenly and to be unaware of the irony of such an economy of emotion. Likewise, Mrs. Warren’s sorrow and anger at what she feels is a betrayal by her own daughter seem to stem more from the disappointment of her hopes that Vivie would be the prop of her old age than from the loss of her daughter’s affection and companionship, particularly since Mrs. Warren was quite generous in providing materially for Vivie, but quite stingy with maternal care and time. After all, Mrs. Warren had a business to run and so could not be a mother; and now Vivie has her own business to tend, doing actuarial calculations for a woman lawyer, and so cannot be a daughter. Justice has an ironic sense of humor.
    Shaw’s final stage direction in the scene, Vivie “goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures” (p. 103) maintains the perfect ambiguity with which Shaw presents the reunion and re-separation of mother and daughter. If we find Vivie hard-hearted, like Lear’s daughters, and Mrs. Warren a pitiable and cruelly rejected weak figure, we must ignore her mother’s lifelong egoism, her regarding her daughter as a financial investment against the loneliness and enfeeblement of old age, and above all, her ridiculously contradictory invocation of Heaven’s aid in her vow to do nothing but wrong henceforth. If we find Mrs. Warren a monstrous parody of maternity, and Vivie’s self-emancipation a liberation from her mother’s oppression, we must ignore how Vivie severs all intimate human connections (her suitor, Frank, and her mother) in favor of turning herself into one of the drowned numbers in her actuarial calculations (“goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures” ). No choice is made easy: The cost is laid out nakedly for each reader to gauge and decide its worth. Vivie does liberate herself, but was it worth the cost? The play began with Vivie alone on stage, lying in a hammock while reading a book and making notes; it ends with Vivie alone, sitting at a desk, having read a final note from the suitor she has rejected, and making notes again. In between, she has reunited and re-separated from her mother. Is she now a grown-up, independent, liberated woman? Assuredly, yes. And yet ...
    To its would-be censors, Shaw’s play was about prostitution; to Shaw’s socialist friends, it was an indictment of the capitalist system; to readers and playgoers of the twenty-first century, it is