Abstract
Psychic economy or material psychology? Several chapters ago, this question was raised, accompanied by reasons for replacing “psychic economy” with another phrase that might more effectively encapsulate defining elements of a Shavian psychology—and a Shavian theory of psychology—exhibited by characters in his novels. Part of the reason for doing so, and prefatory to a reading of Shaw’s fourth novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, is to underscore and amplify the near omnipresence of observable physiological change in the novel and to assess its provenience in such negative affects as shame. The confirmation of shame’s existence through the blush, the stooped shoulder, or the averted gaze, in other words, is as material as the appearances of such explicitly materialist disagreements and anxieties over value, overpayment, and utility in Freud’s dreams and those of his patients. Further, particularly where the prospect of marriage is concerned in Shaw’s novel, the intrusion of social class and money frequently catalyzes blushing and other physiological signs of powerful feelings and deep emotion.
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Notes
- 1.
Kornbluh, 3.
- 2.
Kornbluh, 11.
- 3.
Kornbluh refers to a “naturalization of capitalism” in critical exegeses of Freudian thought that originates, in part, in Strachey’s translation of a term such as “cathexis” as “investment.” “Investment,” she charges, “occludes the diversity of processes at work; characterizing the Freudian subject as an ‘investor’ and thus a typical bourgeois agent of finance dangerously reduces the intricacy of Freud’s ideas.” See Kornbluh, 144–45.
- 4.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, for example, Freud suggests that “one gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure” from such “sources of psychical and intellectual work” as scientific problem-solving or artistic creation. He describes the “capacity of the psychical constitution to adapt its function to the environment and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure”; and he alludes to the diminished pursuit of happiness in a man’s “later years” that may lead him to “find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication” (SE 21: 84).
- 5.
Analogies to economics, both overt and more subtle, abound in Civilization and Its Discontents. Adverting later to the same issue of the diversification of libidinal aims, Freud, like a prudent businessman and “wise men of every age,” advises against making “genital eroticism the central point” of one’s life, even though it might afford “the strongest experiences of satisfaction,” because of the “extreme suffering” that results from rejection or loss of the love-object (SE 21: 101). Besides, man does not have “unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal” (SE 21: 103), scarcity being a feature of both the psychical and ascendant money economies.
- 6.
Kornbluh, 142. The previous quotations from Kornbluh are taken from Realizing Capital, 137–41.
- 7.
Kornbluh, 146.
- 8.
Sedgwick, 98.
- 9.
Darwin, 310, 324.
- 10.
Sedgwick, 98, 104.
- 11.
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 104.
- 12.
Freud was well aware that some feelings are elicited from both external and internal stimuli. Guilt or remorse and some varieties of fear provide examples in the later pages of Civilization and Its Discontents. Describing the relationship between “conscience” and the operations of the super ego, he alludes to “two strata” of guilt—“one coming from fear of the external authority, the other from fear of the internal authority” (SE 21: 137)—and concedes that the existence of a remorse “older” than conscience has “perplexed” him. Here, again, the intangibility of feeling surfaces in the essay as a kind of intellectual “torment,” albeit one not so acute as Freud’s earlier complaint about the problems inherent to assessing feeling more generally.
- 13.
Two examples night be adduced to delineate the range of uses to which Shaw puts paleness in Cashel Byron’s Profession. In an early conversation with Lydia, Cashel becomes self-aware of the inelegance of his language and his reference to himself as a “professional pug.” Shaw’s narrator describes his reaction: “He recollected himself, and turned quite pale” (69). Later in the novel, when Cashel asks her to marry him, Lydia “became very pale,” pointing out to him that although her wealth will allow him to be exceptionally “idle,” she will always be a “busy woman” who is “preoccupied with work” (224). Cashel responds by saying that he would not be idle and, in fact, after their marriage he undertakes a variety of productive activities.
- 14.
Darwin, 312.
- 15.
Darwin, 324.
- 16.
See Paul Ekman, “Cross-Cultural Studies of Facial Expression,” especially 169–86. Here Ekman addresses directly Darwin’s view of the universality of expression, finally agreeing with Sylvan Tomkins that “the number of feelings which have a distinct facial appearance is probably small” (182). Here, Ekman also offers useful observations about both gesture as it pertains to expression and so-called “emblematic expressions” (which are used when one is located physically at a distance from another and attempts to convey a message nonverbally).
- 17.
Shaw’s comparison of the two star-actresses is, in this respect, not entirely unique. When Duse first appeared in Paris two years later and the pair reprised their performances of Marguerite Gauthier, the “sumptuously gowned” and more demonstrative Bernhardt contrasted sharply with the “more subdued and poignant” Duse. See Duse on Tour: Guido Noccioli’s Diaries, 1906–07, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 30.
- 18.
Simmel, “La Duse” (May 8, 1901), trans. Thomas M. Kemple, in Theory, Culture & Society 29 (7/8) (2012): 277. Simmel wrote considerably more about the theatre than this, including a 1912 essay “The Dramatic Actor and Reality,” trans. K. Peter Etzkorn, in Georg Simmel: The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 91–97. Here, Simmel argues that “the genuine and incomparable dramatic art … lives in the realm between the written play and reality” (95), an assertion that would render irrelevant the search for “real” people on stage. Simmel also completed a book manuscript, believed to be lost, near the time of his death in 1918 on the sociology of the stage actor. For details, see Henry Schermer and David Jary, Form and Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology: A New Interpretation, 54–55.
- 19.
Noccioli, 20.
- 20.
Eva Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 81.
- 21.
Here Shaw’s description echoes Darwin’s dissection of the blush and physical gestures that typically accompany it and shame. “Under a keen sense of shame,” Darwin notes in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “there is a strong desire for concealment. We turn away the whole body, more especially the face, which we endeavour in some manner to hide. An ashamed person can hardly endure to meet the gaze of those present…” (319). In this way, Duse’s blush is emblematic of what is, perhaps, a universal and involuntary reaction.
- 22.
Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 3.
- 23.
It is important to note that laughter is construed by many anthropologists as a facial expression potentially conveying a range of emotions, some of which have little to do with amusement or pleasure. Paul Ekman discusses this phenomenon along with cultural “emblems” in relation to the argument about universal facial expressions in “Cross-Cultural Studies of Facial Expression,” 179–85.
- 24.
Blushes may be transformed into facial signs of more turbulent emotion in the later, failing moments of intimate relationships as well. In Love Among the Artists Adrian Herbert, falling hopelessly in love with the enchanting Polish pianist Aurélie Szczympliça, visits Mary Sutherland to discuss ending their nearly three-year engagement. Mary turns “red” when Herbert implies that she is eager to break off their relationship, and Herbert, “also reddening,” rejoins the insinuation by pleading his innocence in the matter (162–63).
- 25.
Marian Lind’s tendency to blush manifests itself in the early moments of her relationship with Ned Conolly in The Irrational Knot. When she happens across Conolly in his laboratory and interrupts his work, for example, she blushes “vigorously” after discovering who it is (58).
- 26.
In The Irrational Knot, Marmaduke Lind confronts his cousin Marian about sending Conolly to him to discuss his growing disfavor over his relationship with Susanna Conolly and his indifference toward Constance Carbury. Marmaduke notes her strange look and Marian admits that she had “only blushed.” His response: “Blushed! Why don’t you blush red, like other people, and not green!” (Knot, 91).
- 27.
Darwin, 324.
- 28.
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 103.
- 29.
Tomkins, qtd. in Sedgwick, 99. Sedgwick adds yet another dimension to this conversation by suggesting both the “digital” and “analogue” connotations of affects and the affect system. An example of the latter, the affect system encompasses more and “qualitatively different” possibilities than the off/on switching of the sexual or instinctual drive (101).
- 30.
Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels, 131.
- 31.
Darwin, 319.
- 32.
Sedgwick discusses through the metaphoric opposition digital/analog approaches to affect that privilege the on/off effect of stimulus over the analog model of multiple differentiation and gradual reaction (101).
- 33.
See, among many others, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. For a generation or more now, the premise that the dynamics of spectation include a male viewer and a female object of his gaze has animated innumerable scholarly projects.
- 34.
Peter Gahan, Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914, x.
- 35.
Gahan, x. Here Gahan refers to Crick’s article “Shaw as Political Thinker, or the Dogs That Did Not Bark,” SHAW 11: Shaw and Politics, ed. T.F. Evans (University Park: Penn State Press, 1991), 21–36.
- 36.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983; New York: Random House, 2008), 117–18.
- 37.
Rushdie, 124, 126.
- 38.
Rushdie, 125.
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Watt, S. (2018). Cashel Byron’s Blush—And Others. In: Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71513-1_5
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