Abstract
While An Unsocial Socialist, like several of Shakespeare’s later plays, might be described as a “dark comedy”—that is, its narrative, while admitting a death, concludes with two marriages and is populated by character types conventional to social comedy—it is hardly the case that Sidney Trefusis’s psyche (or that of his first wife, Henrietta) is schematized for comic purposes. This is merely one of the novel’s many paradoxes or antinomies. On the contrary, such characters more closely resemble widely circulated stereotypes of hysterics, female exotics, and the men who abandon them. As in earlier chapters, this reading of what is arguably Shaw’s most important novel employs psychoanalysis (and its history), affect theory, and theories of value in addressing, first, the “unsocial” in An Unsocial Socialist and, second, the “socialist” connotations of Shaw’s title, particularly as these pertain to theories of value and Trefusis’s critique of capitalism. Not surprisingly, these two terms often intersect in this chapter’s delineation of the overdetermined nature of Trefusis’s unsocial “heartlessness” and in the broad dimensions of industrial capitalism’s fracturing of the human subject.
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Notes
- 1.
Stanley Weintraub, “Introduction” to An Unfinished Novel by Bernard Shaw, 12.
- 2.
Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels, 148, 149.
- 3.
Susan Cannon Harris, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions, 20.
- 4.
See Chapter Two of Harris’s Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions, 57–95.
- 5.
Here, I am referring to Declan Kiberd’s chapter “George Bernard Shaw and Arms and the Man” in Irish Classics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 341; and Silver, Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side, 71.
- 6.
It should be added that the remaining fragments of An Unfinished Novel, composed in May and June of 1887 with additions in early 1888, contain some of these elements as well. The flirtatious Mrs. Maddick, for example, blushes several times during her conversations with Dr. Kincaid. In the closing, intimate conversation between the pair, she “reddened, ashamed of herself” (85) and “became very red, but an irrepressible gleam of fun shot through her embarrasment [sic]” (87). To take another example, her husband Dr. Maddick, not unlike several better-known Shavian characters, attempts to perform a role for which he is ill-suited, in this case that of a “young, handsome, and dashing man.” His failure in this role—unlike, say, the more successful social performance of Sholto Douglas’s mother, the wealthy dowager in The Irrational Knot—is largely due to the unfortunate fact that he lacked “money enough to be more than a passable imitation” (52). Perhaps most important, Kincaid, like Trefusis, decries the effects of poverty on workers, particularly health issues originating in exhaustion, malnutrition, and alcoholism (68).
- 7.
Weintraub briefly describes the circumstances of this addition in his “Introduction” to An Unfinished Novel, explaining that Swan Sonnenschein had actually suggested the addition of a preface and Shaw countered with this letter (18–19).
- 8.
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 132.
- 9.
Weintraub, 12.
- 10.
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 347.
- 11.
I specify “slightly more than five weeks” to account for two pieces of mildly conflicting evidence on this point. In his letter to Henrietta, Trefusis notes that for “five weeks” he has “walked and talked and dallied with the loveliest woman in the world” (11), while Henrietta’s mother observes that her daughter has been married for “nearly six weeks” (10).
- 12.
See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 82–89.
- 13.
Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels, 146. As Dietrich observes, earlier characters in Shaw’s novels including Robert Smith, Owen Jack, and Lydia Carew embark upon similar projects.
- 14.
The first quotation in this sentence is from Silver, 71; the second is from Dan H. Laurence, Collected Letters 1874–1897, 62.
- 15.
Silver, 67, 69.
- 16.
See Silver, 66–68.
- 17.
In the early pages of Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Matthew Yde references George Orwell’s remark about a largely overlooked “sadistic element” in Shaw’s work and alludes to a “sadistic streak” in Silver’s readings of Shaw (10). Yde argues for a more complex and multidimensional Shaw than he finds in Silver’s readings.
- 18.
In “Jitta’s Atonement: The Birth of Psychoanalysis and ‘The Fetters of the Feminine Psyche,’” Peter Gahan references this line from Shaw’s On the Principles of Christianity (1916). Gahan also quotes these lines from Shaw relevant to Jansenius’s dilemma: “We must become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost: unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves” (qtd. in Gahan, 157). In such formulations, while not replicating in all its nuances the death-instinct of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920; English translation, 1922) and elsewhere in Freud, Shaw nonetheless approaches theorizations of the opposition of life and death in much post-Freudian thought.
- 19.
Later, while revealing his and Henrietta’s identities to Miss Wilson, Trefusis repeats this formulation of their marriage and intimacy, reproducing the tension between desire and negative affect. He tells Miss Wilson that their marital “bliss” was “perfect,” but that the same elements of their association that “attracted” him “so strongly” at first “repelled him so horribly afterwards.” Consequently, he feels reluctant to resume connubial relations “just yet” (102).
- 20.
Silver emphasizes that Shaw was “especially concerned” over his own “indifference to others,” and it distresses him because “it may have been as responsible as his poverty for the breakdown of the romance with Alice” and her accusation that he was like a machine (72).
- 21.
Silver, 55, 74.
- 22.
For a brief discussion of the Jewess on the nineteenth-century stage, see my “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious, 88–99. Shaw was certainly familiar with Ivanhoe, as both letters and his allusions to Scott in theatre reviews confirm. He also lampooned mercilessly Daly’s various productions of Shakespeare and adaptations of European comedy. Leah, the Forsaken was also an infrequent attraction in Sarah Bernhardt’s repertory as well. It would have been difficult, in other words, for anyone so culturally literate as Shaw to remain ignorant of the figure of the exotic Jewess in nineteenth-century culture.
- 23.
See Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 40).
- 24.
See, for example, “MR DALY FOSSILIZES,” a review of his 1895 adaptation The Railroad of Love, in Our Theatres in the Nineties 1: 163–68, which asks the unflattering questions, “What is to be done with Mr Daly? How shall we open his mind to the fact that he stands on the brink of the twentieth century…” (163)? Here, Shaw alleges that Daly perpetrates not merely “old-fashionedness,” but the “most dangerous sort of old-fashionedness” (165). His review of Daly’s adaptation The Countess Gucki in July, 1896, is similarly dismissive (OT 2: 188–94).
- 25.
Leah, the Forsaken was produced at New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse on February 10, 2017, and ran until March 12, its first revival in New York since 1966.
- 26.
Augustin Daly, Leah, the Forsaken (London/New York: Samuel French/Samuel French & Son, 1863), 21. All further quotations from this play will be followed by page number in the text.
- 27.
I discuss this speech and response to it in “Something Dreadful and Grand,” 93–96. When, for example, Sarah Bernhardt featured Leah in her repertory for her appearance in Chicago in 1892, the Chicago Daily Tribune on March 1 hailed her delivery of the “famous curse” as not only having “moved” but “fairly lifted the audience to its feet.” In this register, as the Tribune’s reviewer phrased it, Leah embodies with “dignity” a “much-wronged, deeply-loving woman.”
- 28.
Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,” eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 143.
- 29.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1985), 129.
- 30.
Showalter also describes the ways in which women in Charcot’s photography at times mimicked the gestural repertory of the stage and thus “performed” hysteria, confirming again the link between cultural and scientific discourses (145–64).
- 31.
Like An Unsocial Socialist, this later play also alludes specifically to hysteria. In an awkward cross-examination by her lover’s widow, Jitta laughs “hysterically” and moments later warns her interlocutor, “Dont make me laugh any more: I am afraid I shall go into hysterics” (CPP 6: 441). For a discussion of Shaw’s knowledge/criticism of Freud and Freudian elements in the play, including hysterical symptoms, see Gahan’s “Jitta’s Atonement,” 138–47, and Shaw Shadows, 102–11.
- 32.
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 341, 359, 344.
- 33.
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 351.
- 34.
Sally Peters, Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 39. Peters’ discussion of the dates of Hetty’s birth and death features other factors as well, such as leap year, the “pagan significance of the winter solstice” in December, and an article in the London Times on the longest day of the year. See Peters, 38–40.
- 35.
Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels, 158, 155.
- 36.
Silver, 71.
- 37.
Silver, 68.
- 38.
My thanks to Richard Dietrich for pointing out to me Stevenson’s reading of Shaw’s novels in serial form. For a widespread discussion of doubling in drama, fiction, and film, see Katherine H. Burkman, The Drama of the Double: Permeable Boundaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 39.
The narrator’s specific allusion to Jansenius’s “love” of money might be regarded, much like the description of his daughter’s exotic beauty, as the product of Shaw’s accession to negative stereotyping of Jews in late-Victorian culture. Also, as Shavians are well aware, this issue arose again with Shaw’s 1938 play Geneva.
- 40.
Georg Simmel, “Authority and Prestige,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 183.
- 41.
Simmel, 184.
- 42.
Peters, 12.
- 43.
Discussing Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Patrick R. Mullen observes that both Wilde and Marx recognize the “social mode of equivalence” in the concept of value. This is as much to say that value’s relationship to labor is only one means of understanding it. See The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22–27.
- 44.
See the first paragraph of the expanded 1889 version of The Portrait of Mr W.H. in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, which includes the sentiment, “all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting” (33). Here Wilde’s narrator is referring to the artist, not the subject or medium of the art, as an actor who attempts to “realize” his or her “own personality on some imaginative plane” outside the “tramelling accidents and limitations of real life” (33). But throughout particularly the latter half of An Unsocial Socialist, portraits, headstones, photograph albums—even country estates and funeral processions—act as substitutes for the feelings, memories, or hypotheses of their subjects or owners.
- 45.
See Antonio Negri, “Value and Affect,” boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 77–88. Negri’s opening sentence argues that for two centuries political economists have failed to decouple “value from labor. Even the marginalist currents and neoclassical schools, whose vocation is dedicated to this decoupling, are forced to take this relationship into account…” (77).
- 46.
Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2, 26.2 (1999): 91. Hardt’s essay is in many ways a response to Negri’s “Value and Affect,” which he translated.
- 47.
The fact that the portrait of Trefusis’s father depicts him wearing his “masonic insignia” may also be significant, as Trefusis immediately isolates it as the nexus of an objection he lodged against him. In this way, much like the punctum Roland Barthes theorizes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), this insignia, this “sting,” “cut,” or detail in the photographic image both “bruises” him and effects a rupture in the dispassionate survey or studium of the picture (26–27).
- 48.
Ruth Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde, and the Political Aesthetics of Labor,” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 606.
- 49.
Roach, Cities of the Dead, 36, 33.
- 50.
Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, 37.
- 51.
This sentence greatly simplifies Wicksteed’s discussion of a consumer’s satisfaction as it relates to the supply of “total” goods, including those complementary or alternative to the commodity in question. In a later chapter, “On the Nature of Curves of Total Satisfaction,” he speculates on the “purely abstract” notion of subjective value attached to each increment of a commodity (474). He concludes that “the importance to us of increased supplies of any one commodity depends not only on the degree to which we are supplied with that commodity, but also on the degree to which we are supplied with all other alternatives or complementary commodities” (482).
- 52.
Wicksteed, 45.
- 53.
Smith, qtd. in Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 85–86.
- 54.
Jevons, 86–87.
- 55.
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 63.
- 56.
Baudrillard, 80, 84.
- 57.
Baudrillard, 70.
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Watt, S. (2018). The Antinomies of An Unsocial Socialist . 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_6
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