Оригинални научни рад 821.111-83.09 Shaw G. B. : 342.7-055.2

Biljana R. Vlašković1 Faculty of Philology and Arts University of Kragujevac

BERNARD SHAW AND THE FEMALE VOICE

This paper deals with the basic aspects of Bernard Shaw’s artistic and socialistic approaches to the feminist causes. Shaw’s views on female self and sexuality have been found controversial by various critics, primarily because they ridicule traditional roles of women as wives and mothers. As such, they have been the source of a fundamental misunderstanding of Shavian art and politics. By providing the suitable context for Shaw’s feminism and by delineating various responses to Henrik Ibsen’s concept of the New Woman, the paper traces Shaw’s gradual transition from his early description of women as confined to the realm of the domestic and sexual to his later championship of female issues, as seen in his ardent support for women’s right to work, get divorce, educate themselves, and become equal to men. Key Words: Bernard Shaw, feminism, prostitution, divorce, New Woman, gender equality

In his book on Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton (1986: 64-65) explains why the Elizabethans used the word nothing to denote the female genitals. He says that from a phallocentric point of view, men find it reassuring that women have nothing between their legs, since this reinforces the male’s power over the female. However, a woman’s nothing can also become a “yawning abyss within which man can lose his virile identity”. In this regard, the sweet nothing becomes a sinister everything, for the essence of the riddle of woman is her “power to incite the tumultuous ‘everything’ of desire in man himself, and so destroy him”. The most famous Elizabethan playwright described this power play between Man and Woman in many of his plays and notably in his sonnets, giving a more tantalizing, hence more ominous, role to what was then considered the weaker sex: All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. (Shakespeare 2002: 731)

Hell in Shakespeare’s vocabulary equals the meaning of nothing. With the image of hell, it does not take a great leap of the imagination to conceive of a sweltering abyss in the middle of which Man can easily find himself engulfed in flames of his own desire. In view of this, it seems appropriate that Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) should set the scene of John Tanner’s capitulation to Ann Whitefield in a dreamlike Hell, for, as Dietrich (1986: 1

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438) notes, “Shaw believes “Hell” to be the proper place for marriages to be made”. Moreover, in Man and Superman, Shaw inverts the conventional romantic conception of the female as the weaker sex by making the woman “the pursuer and contriver” and the man “the pursued and disposed of” (Shaw 1946a: 17), thereby following the Shakespearean law: And when a woman woos, what woman’s son Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed? (Shakespeare 2002: 723)

This paper champions Bernard Shaw as the playwright who changed the very concept of female sexuality and self, both in his plays and prefaces, as well as his philosophical essays. The analysis will trace the developmental path of Shaw’s views on the female self and sexuality, from the anti-feminist influence that Ernest Belfort Bax, an English socialist and philosophical essayist, exerted over Shaw even before he was acquainted with the misogyny of Schopenhauer, to the evident change in Shaw’s later works in which he devotes his artistic sense to defending the rights of women. Contrary to some popular views of Shavian critics, we will argue that in exposing modern women as the sex more active and vibrant than was thought before, Shaw did not put forward his misogynistic views, but rather the opposite: following the Nietzschean tradition, he became the mouthpiece of the reexamination of the stale views on female self and sexuality. When in 1869 John Stuart Mill wrote his famous essay “The Subjection of Women”, the ideal image of Woman as mother and wife had already been anchored in the 19th century society. That a woman should be independent seemed extremely unnatural for patriarchal societies, which regarded the female sex as one that is incapable of taking care of itself. Consequently, the common view was that women should be confined to the safety of their family homes under the watchful eye of their husbands. Opposing this, Mill (1999) wrote: But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.

Twenty-two years after Mill, Bernard Shaw fought for the same cause in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), by averring that “[i]f we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else” (Shaw 1915: 45). But the doors to the house, theretofore imagined as a cage, were boldly opened and slammed by Ibsen’s Nora in 1879, and ten years later in London as well, when the play premiered at the Novelty Theatre. Ibsen, “the hero of the new departure” (Shaw 1946b: 12), steered the theatrical art away from the womanly woman towards the 82

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unwomanly woman, which proved to have exerted a tremendous influence on Shaw, who accepted Ibsen’s philosophy. Yet, not all people were thrilled with the concept of New Woman. Shaw’s fellow socialist, Ernest Belfort Bax, responded to Mill’s essay by writing “The Legal Subjection of Men” in 1908, in which he reproaches the Civil Law for being unjust to men by giving so many privileges to women. He goes to great lengths to ensure that he has included each of the privileges that women have, one of them, and the most interesting, being ‘Impunity to murder husband’, by using, for example, Violence: A wife is still “weak woman” when armed with a poker, a metal pot, a vitriol bottle, a petroleum can, or a revolver. If these lethal substances killed her husband it must have been by accident. In any case he had taken her “for better or worse,” and had to put up with the consequences. Why did he cross her temper? Besides, even if she were ill-tempered, why did he not make a better selection when marrying? (Bax 1908)

According to Bax, there are still many different ways to dispose of a husband – poisoning him, stabbing him, setting him on fire, driving a wagon over him – and he gives an appropriate example of each, stressing that in each of these cases the wife was not, if at all, fairly punished for her crime, simply because she was regarded as the weaker sex (Ibid). Bax’s misogynistic attitudes were so deep that they “would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer himself”, Shaw (1960: 12) admitted in his preface to Major Barbara. Being a personal friend of Shaw’s, Bax acquainted him with the homoist attitude and forced him to “recognize the extent to which public opinion … is corrupted by feminist sentiment” (Ibid). Thus, during the 1890s, as Kerry Powell (1998: 82) notes, Shaw was “in substantial agreement with a long, often unspoken Victorian tradition which deemed the writing of drama to require a cast of mind recognized as masculine”2, which he defines as “Shaw’s confused response to the developing identity of the New Woman in the 1890s” (90): [F]or Shaw, a woman’s strength is misdirected and grotesque unless fundamentally sexual, seeking out and compelling a superior man to mate with her and produce “supermen”. Like many men of the 1890s, therefore, Shaw could be enthusiastic about the New Woman when he could imagine her disruptions being confined to the realm of the domestic and sexual. (78)

Although this is true of the early Shaw, the cogency of Powell’s argument must be disputed with regard to Shavian discourse as a whole. In 2 Powell (1998: 86) further notices that “the New Woman movement as it touched the theatre depended to a large degree on the ability of women to write plays, but repeatedly Shaw discredited the efforts of women as playwrights, [primarily because of] an excessive amount of feeling in those plays … His reactions in the aggregate suggest a skepticism that women could write good drama at all, although he stopped short of the sweeping assertions that Victorian men often made about women’s lack of capacity for playwriting”. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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Quintessence of Ibsenism, to give but one example, Shaw (1915: 44) states that “the domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men”. Yet, even though Shaw’s attitudes towards female sexuality would change considerably in the years to come, he never abandoned his “moderate Fabian political views” which shaped the writings of his plays too rigidly, for which he was severely reprimanded by Emma Goldman in The Social Significance of Modern Drama (see Powell, 1998: 81). The attacks on the female sex came not only from Bax, but from all sides, and were not limited to the island. The most famous non-English misogynist was Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote in his essay “On Women” that [i]t is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. (Schopenhauer 1970: 85)

These condemnations further escalated in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that a man must think of a woman “as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein” (Nietzsche 2006: 166), whereas in Thus Spake Zarathustra his famous advice to all men was to ensure their women were tamed: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!” (Nietzsche 1911: 77). In the midst of this vigorous criticism of women in the works of the two influential German philosophers, and in spite of the ideas which Bernard Shaw shared with the latter, the socialist in him obliged him to speak in behalf of women’s cause and equal rights for both genders. Thus, as early as 1884, Shaw composed a Manifesto for the Fabian society, laying down the equal rights of men and women as one of its main principles. “Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women”, Shaw (1884: 2) wrote, “and … the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights”. In her essay on Bernard Shaw, whom she wittily calls “a feminist in spite of himself”, Sally Peters (1998: 3) draws analogies between Shaw’s relationship with his mother, coupled with his observance of her progressive behavior, and Shaw’s later feminism. She claims that “it was his mother’s assertion of female power and her defiance of assigned female roles concerning sexuality, respectability, and career fulfillment that most affected Shaw” (6). As stated by Peters, Shaw’s novels, which were written prior to his plays, all reveal his early feminist sympathies (9), and concludes that in the writer’s comic universe, “women are more than equal to the ineffectual men around them” (18). Accordingly, Shaw (1961: 174) sardonically describes Woman as really only a man in petticoats, whereas reversely, Man is a woman without petticoats. Therefore, instead of a phallus or a phallic object, petticoats become the signifier of gender. Shaw’s most famous heroine, Saint Joan, reinforces this satirical statement and shocks 84

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her judges by refusing to dress as becomes her sex, because the very thought of living among soldiers in petticoats is unbearable: I was a soldier living among soldiers. I am a prisoner guarded by soldiers. If I were to dress as a woman they would think of me as a woman; and then what would become of me? If I dress as a soldier they think of me as a soldier, and I can live with them as I do at home with my brothers. That is why St Catherine tells me I must not dress as a woman until she gives me leave. (Shaw 1952: 160)

This is expressed somewhat mockingly in several other plays, in which Shaw depicts his heroines as manly dressed, unusually strong, drinking whiskey and smoking cigars. While some feminists deemed Shaw’s caricature of the New Woman highly inappropriate (see Powell, 1998: 78), we believe that his comedy had a subversive role with the goal of shocking the audience and consequently changing the current state of affairs. Interestingly, it was precisely this image of women smoking cigars that helped promote control of the masses and the change of consumers’ habits during the 1920s in the United States, when Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, used the theories of his uncle to manipulate the crowds3, as Adam Curtis (2002) shows in his documentary The Century of the Self. Advised by certain psychoanalysts, Bernays realized that the only way to boost the selling of cigarettes was to convince women that cigars are their source of masculine power. Having the right shape for a phallic object, cigars came to represent male sexual power, and in the hands of a woman challenged the ‘stronger’ sex, since women now came to have their own ‘penises’ and were not regarded as deficient any longer. Shaw’s early heroine who fits the description of New Woman is Vivie Warren from Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in 1894, performed in 1902), a 22-year-old “attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly educated young middle-class Englishwoman … prompt, strong, confident, self-possessed” (Shaw 1946b: 214), in short, everything that a woman was not supposed to be at the time. But even more important than the challenging description of Vivie is the overall topic of the play – female prostitution – which, as Shaw (181) states, is caused by “underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women”. Shaw deliberately chose to start his dramatic career with Plays Unpleasant, Mrs. Warren’s Profession being one of them. The author himself realized that this move was anything but beneficial for an upstart crow, but he decided to “fight the theatre … with plays” (185). Starting from the belief that poverty is the root of all evil, Shaw claims that women are often forced to turn to prostitution because they lack basic means of survival, and depicts Mrs. Warren, Vivie’s mother, as one such woman, who, because of her indigent youth, had no alternative 3 At the core of Freud’s theories was the following idea: “By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus, docile” (Curtis 2002). Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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but to resort to prostitution and eventually become a brothel owner. The ‘unpleasant’ thing about this play is not so much the mentioning of prostitution as the way Shaw (220) describes Mrs. Warren, as “on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman”, which alone explains why the play had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain for full eight years. Complaints about Mrs. Warren not being wicked enough did not deter Shaw from achieving his aim, which was to throw the guilt of her profession on the British public (201). He managed to show that poverty denied women’s right to choose, since there were no moral alternatives to choose from: “For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality” (202). Vivie’s astonishment at having learned that her education had been paid by the money earned from brothel keeping is soon waved aside by Mrs. Warren’s defence of herself, which, Shaw (201) says, is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly.

Thus, prostitution must not be regarded as a willingly chosen vocation, but a kind of slavery no woman would choose had she another way out of poverty. Since the position of women in patriarchal societies had been poor from times immemorial, prostitution was often described as the oldest trade there is, and Shakespeare treated it as such in Measure for Measure, showing also the positive effects of this underworld. His Pompey, the bawd, says that ‘Twas never merry world since, of two usuries, the merriest4 was put down, and the worser5 allowed by order of law a furred gown to keep him warm (Shakespeare 2002: 468),

and adds that unless the officials of Vienna “geld and splay all the youth of the city” (463), prostitution will survive as a lawful trade, because the youth “will to’t then” (Ibid). The problem is that in Shakespeare’s play, apart from Mistress Overdone, the prostitutes are silenced, as Jonathan Dollimore observes: The prostitutes, the most exploited group in the society which the play represents, are absent from it. Virtually everything that happens presupposes them yet they have no voice, no presence. And those who speak for them do so as exploitatively as those who want to eliminate them. (Cited in Friedman 2014) 4 5

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In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Shaw does the opposite and fights against the exploitation of women in the British society by granting them voice. Prostitution, however, is not the only example of economic slavery amongst women. Staying in a bad marriage simply because the wife is not able to provide for herself on her own is another example of such slavery and the issue against which Shaw raises his voice in his play Getting Married, in which he describes divorce as “not the destruction of marriage, but the first condition of its maintenance” (Shaw 1920: 70). At the time when the play was being written (1908), the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act was still in effect. According to this Act, ordinary6 people were allowed to divorce, but the process was too expensive, and what is more, women were obliged to prove not only their husbands’ adultery, but also “additional faults, which included cruelty, rape and incest” (Guardian 2009). In brief, there were more ‘whys’ for the woman to answer than the man, so Shaw (1920: 66) was adamant: “The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for divorce is ‘Why?’”. Unfortunately, having died in 1950, he never got the chance to see his ideas come true as they did, but not until 1969, when the Divorce Reform Act was passed, according to which “a marriage could be ended if it had irretrievably broken down, and neither partner no longer had to prove ‘fault’” (Guardian 2009). Shaw’s ideas can be said to have been too progressive for his time, but many of them eventually found their way to accomplishment. The solution to the economic slavery of women was fairly simple: the Government needed to make “the sexual relations between men and women decent and honorable by making women economically independent of men” (Shaw 1920: 90), which would also solve the problem of unemployment and underpayment of women. Shaw reasoned that in that way women could be allowed to broaden the sphere of their activities and get out of the household in order to achieve economic independence. Thus, divorce would become a natural thing, even a desirable one if the couple was ill-assorted, and by granting its possibility without asking the petitioner why, it was probable that many couples would not even petition for it, since “no room feels like a prison if the door is left open” (70). When in 1912 the report of the British Royal Commission counseled radical changes in the existing laws on divorce, some spoke in favour of these, others disparaged them. Mr. Shaw, speaking for both sides, said: “The moral of both the majority and the minority report is, Don’t get married” (New York Times 1912). That is, don’t get married unless you are granted the possibility to leave the marriage once it has become a locked cage. In his article on divorce, Daniel De Leon (1912) describes these changes as being primarily concerned with 6 My italics. ‘Ordinary’ is presumably an allusion to the famous divorce of not such an ordinary man, King Henry VIII (1491-1547), whose divorce (1533) led to the separation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England the following year. The event is known as ‘The English Reformation’. For more insight on this topic, refer to: Trueman 2006. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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“the placing of husband and wife on an equality of duty in the matter of chastity”. He claims that socialism tore the veil that covered woman’s degradation, and it pointed the finger upon the degradation itself … It pronounced the “flowers” thorns, and it foretold that the “flowers” would wither to make room for the restoration of woman’s freedom; along with that, as a consequence, the purification of man.

Finally, like Shaw, De Leon suggests that divorce is “better for the man, it is better for the woman, it is better for the children, it is better for society that matches that have suffered shipwreck be not perpetuated by shams” (Ibid). Shaw’s socialist ideas and solutions to the female problem got their full expression in his colossal non-fiction work, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1927), which Michael Holroyd (1998: 557) calls “Shaw’s political autobiography … the summary of a lifetime’s thought [and] a work of eloquent insight and fantasy”. Coincidentally, the voting age for women was lowered from thirty to twenty-one just six weeks prior to the publication of the Guide (556), whereas in 1929, “the democratic equality of one adult one vote was finally reached” (Ibid). The circumstances surrounding its publication helped promote Shaw’s Guide and made it one of the most relevant feminist texts produced ever since. The key features of the book are its plain definitions of the subject that is usually considered very hard to grasp. For example, Shaw (2005: xxxvii) defines socialism as “an opinion as to how the income of the country should be distributed”. At the core of socialism lies the conviction that everybody should have an equal share, but in order to come to that final step in political evolution, one must start with the current state of affairs and raise many questions, such as “How much for each? Should each get what she produces? Should each get what she deserves? Should each get what she can grab? How much is enough? What should we buy first?” etc. One of the most important issues in the Guide is the problem of the underpayment of women: Men’s wages are family wages, women’s wages individual wages. The effect is to make the proletarian married woman the slave of a slave, and to establish conventions that the man is the breadwinner; that the woman’s work in the home, being apparently gratuitous, is not work at all; and that women, when they are directly paid for their work, should be paid less than men. (Shaw 2005: lii)

Without delving too deeply into Shaw’s politics, we will merely point to the already conspicuous use of the pronoun she in the above-quoted questions. The fact is, and sixty-five years after Shaw, Drucilla Cornell (1992) stressed it again, that in patriarchal cultures what is human is too often labeled masculine, giving the impression that the feminine part of 88

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humanity is invisible. When Cornell speaks of equivalent rights, she deems it essential that one becomes aware of the marked difference between the masculine and feminine gender/sex. Only together can they make the whole of what we call human. It seems quite remarkable that a cause which Shaw championed was still being fought for during the last decade of the 20th century. Nevertheless, women have one important advantage over men, that of being able to bear children. And this is where Shaw’s political, philosophical, and artistic ideas come together, most notably in Man and Superman. When the question of giving birth to a Superman is raised7, the female gender inevitably dominates over the masculine. Similarly to Shakespeare’s bold heroines, Shaw’s female characters do not wait passively for their man to make the first step, but take initiative instead. Therefore, Ann Whitefield’s cry across the fantastic hellish universe for the Superman’s father (Shaw 1946a: 173) is consistent with Nietzsche’s (1911: 75) description of women in Zarathustra: “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution – it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman, a means: the purpose is always the child”. But far from confining women to the realm of the sexual, as Kerry Powell (1998: 78) suggested, let alone the domestic, Shaw (1946a: 19) criticizes men and their habit of belittling the act of creation, the “terrible moment of birth … its supreme importance and its superhuman effort and peril” soon after the danger is over. What takes place after the birth is that the father “takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and speaking of Woman’s ‘sphere’ with condescension … as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city” (Ibid). And while Nietzsche would not even allow a woman to enter the kitchen8, Shaw expresses his philogynous attitude that because of Woman’s natural position in the matter of giving birth, Man is “no longer victor in the duel of sex” (14). To sum up, throughout his long career Bernard Shaw had been a vigorous defender of equal rights for both genders and an ardent supporter of women’s liberation from their traditional roles as wives and mothers. The myriad female characters from his plays, from Vivie Warren and Eliza Doolittle to Ann Whitefield and Saint Joan, exhibit an atypical pattern of behavior, usually reserved for men. This should not be regarded as a caricature The very need for the Superman is, in its essence, political (Shaw 1946a: 226). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (2006: 163-164) writes: “Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art! Through bad female cooks – through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen – the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with: even to-day matters are very little better.” 7 8

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of the New Woman, but rather as Shaw’s attempt to make people see things from a different angle, that is, the opposite angle. It can be argued, however, that Shavian feminism represents only the propagation of his socialist ideas, but even this view cannot dispute the fact that “much of Shaw is not only still fresh but can be seen in the banners and goals of contemporary feminist movement”, as Rodelle Weintraub (cited in Banerjee 2006: 45) claims in her exhaustive account of Shaw’s feminism, Fabian Feminist: Shaw and Woman. The one conclusion that is beyond doubt is that Shaw’s ideas were far ahead of his time, and that in the literature of the second half of the 20th century one can find these ideas developed and the same problems criticized, mainly through satire of the contemporary treatment of women and their way of life, imposed on them by patriarchal societies.

REFERENCES Banerjee 2006: S. K. Banerjee, Shaw: The New Woman as Vital Genius,Feminism in Modern English Drama 1892-1914, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 41-84. Bax 1908: Bax, Ernest Belfort. The Legal Subjection of Men. Wikisource. . 05. 05. 2014. Cornell 1992: D. Cornell, Gender, Sex, and Equivalent Rights, in: Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (Eds.), New York: Routledge, 280-95. Curtis 2002: Curtis, Adam. The Century of the Self. You Tube. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/. 28. 4. 2014. De Leon 1912: De Leon, Daniel. Divorce. The Daily People (Dec. 3, 1912). . 25. 4. 2014. Dietrich 1986: R. Dietrich, Deconstruction as Devil’s Advocacy: A Shavian Alternative, Modern Drama (Vol. 29), Toronto: University of Toronto, 431–451. Eagleton 1986: T. Eagleton, William Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Friedman 2014: Friedman, Michael. Prostitution and the Feminist Appropriation of Measure For Measure on the Stage. Interactive Shakespeare Project. . 3. 5. 2014. Holroyd 1998: M. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, London: Vintage. Mill 1999: Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Constitution Society. . 28. 4. 2014. Nietzsche 1911: F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (2nd Ed.), Edinburgh: The Darien Press. Nietzsche 2006: F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, New York: The Modern Library. Peters 1998: S. Peters, Shaw’s life: a feminist in spite of himself, in: The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Innes (Ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 3-24. Powell 1998: K. Powell, New Women, new plays, and Shaw in the 1890s, in: The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Innes (Ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 76-100. Schopenhauer 1970: A. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, London: Penguin Books. Shakespeare 2002: W. Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, New Lanark: Geddes & Grosset. Shaw 1884: G. B. Shaw, The Fabian Society, Fabian Tracts No. 2, A Manifesto, London: Geo. Standring, 8&9, Finsbury Street, E.G.

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Shaw 1915: G. B. Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, New York: Brentano’s. Shaw 1920: G. B. Shaw, Getting Married, New York: Brentano’s. Shaw 1946a: G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Shaw 1946b: G. B. Shaw, Plays Unpleasant: Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Shaw 1952: G. B. Shaw, Saint Joan, A Chronicle play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Shaw 1960: G. B. Shaw, Major Barbara, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Shaw 1961: G. B. Shaw, Platform and Pulpit (Vol. I), New York: Hill and Wang. Shaw 2005: G. B. Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (2nd Ed.), New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Guardian 2009: A brief history of divorce, From Henry VIII to White v White. The Guardian. . 29. 4. 2014. New York Times 1912: Divorce Plan Shocks Bishop; But Bernard Shaw Draws Moral from British Reports – ‘Don’t Marry’. The New York Times. 29. 4. 2014. Trueman 2006: Trueman, Chris. The Reformation. History Learning Site. 3. 5. 2014. Биљана Влашковић / БЕРНАРД ШО И ЖЕНСКИ ГЛАС Резиме / Рад проучава основне аспекте уметничког и социјалистичког приступа Џорџа Бернарда Шоа теми феминизма. Шоове ставове у вези са женском сексуалношћу и сопством многи критичари сматрају контроверзним, будући да исмевају традиционалне улоге жене као супруге, мајке и домаћице. Као такви, они представљају извор суштинског неразумевања Шоове уметности и политике. У раду је Шоов феминизам најпре постављен у одговарајући историјски контекст, затим су описане различите реакције, укључујући и Шоову, на Ибзенов концепт „Нове жене“, а потом је на примеру Шоових драмских комада, политичких и филозофских списа приказано на који начин су се уметникови ставови о женама мењали, почев од раних дела, као што је драма Занат госпође Ворн (1894), све до Шоовог Водича кроз социјализам и капитализам за интелигентну жену (1927). Обухватајући како историјски контекст, тако и шоовски текст и метатекст, анализа Шоовог феминизма показује да се писац изборио са великим мизогинистичким утицајем свог пријатеља социјалисте, Ернеста Белфорта Бакса, те да се у својим фиктивним и нефиктивним делима борио за једнакост полова и женска права, као што су право на образовање, развод, гласачко право, и тиме постао један од првих модерних писаца који је женама, макар у драми, подарио глас. Кључне речи: Бернард Шо, феминизам, проституција, развод, Нова Жена, једнакост полова Примљен: 4. јуна 2014. Прихваћен за штампу јула 2014.

Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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