Search Results

By examining Shaw’s use of the garden and the library in Widowers’ Houses in meticulous detail, one gains an appreciation of the complexity, subtlety, and mastery which Shaw therein reveals, as well as an insight into the play’s deeper textual implications. Satorius, whose mother was a poor washerwoman, has pulled himself up from extreme poverty by making a fortune in slum dwellings and presently craves nothing more in the world than for him and his daughter to be accepted by upper class society, a desire which is dramatized by means of the garden and library. Widowers’ Houses also exposes the heartlessness and injustices of British society. It is a remarkable example of Shaw’s dramatic practice of integrating gardens and libraries into the revelation of characters (as well as the implications of their names), the delineation of conflict, the symbolic value of the settings, the establishment of atmosphere, and the development of the theme of pretense and hypocrisy.

Vincent Shing Cheng’s chapter is based on interviews with Chinese former incarcerated drug users, documenting the painful experience of inmates in the laojiao, or ‘reform through education’, detention centres. Instead of ‘rehabilitation’, the detention centre’s brutal treatment seems to echo a general experience of pain and humiliation aimed at socializing and ‘prisonizing’ the new inmates. This combination of informal and formal violence represents a double-edged sword of pain with its own specific rationality in a Chinese philosophy of pain and control. While criminologists suggest that ‘pain’ is counterproductive to offender rehabilitation, the Chinese prison authority has actively used ‘pain to train’ new inmates for the purpose of control. These experiences stand in stark contrast to the official narratives of education. This contradiction has created a system of hypocrisy as counterproductive for the inmates as the ‘pain’ involved in it.

Rousseau is the first writer to signal a radical discontent with the Enlightenment and its creation, the bourgeois. He conveys this critique most powerfully in his denunciation of modernity’s great model of a kind of global civil society described as the “Republic of Letters.” In his First Discourse Rousseau excoriated the Enlightenment for corrupting manners and morals, but in his public Letter to d’Alembert he made clear his case against the Enlightenment’s program for social reform by attacking what he saw as d’Alembert’s reckless proposal for instituting a theater in Geneva. Here he uncovered all the dangers that later writers would call “unintended consequences.” Rousseau’s attack on the Enlightenment’s progressivism was carried out in the name of a new political form that he did much to create: the nation-state. He argued that the national ideal was superior to the universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment.

Shaw is not concerned with the personal issue of prostitution for Kitty Warren but seeks to treat the pervasive presence of hypocrisy in all of society and to expose society’s habit of pretending one thing in order to hide something else; the garden becomes a primary instrument in helping him achieve this purpose. Three of the four acts are located in a garden, or eventually involve the garden, and even the fourth one gives us a reminder of the garden from which Vivi has escaped. The garden functions in the play as a superficially, and ironically, pleasant place, under a cloudless sky, for social intercourse, which really means maintaining a respectable surface on everything, and, even though it is surrounded by an entrapping fence, it allows a view of freedom beyond. Vivie, repulsed by society’s rules, as presented in the gardens, is the only one who can grasp for this freedom and flees from this garden to the city where, she hopes, honesty, hard work, and ability have a better chance to succeed.

While scholars have approached Arms and the Man with a myriad of interpretations, many agree that one of the overarching concerns of the play is the clash between romanticism and realism (“realism” in this chapter is referring primarily to surface verisimilitude rather than the reality of the inner essence of things, the inner “reality” of Plato, Shelley, and Ibsen). This battle of idealism and realism is carried out in the sets as well, specifically with the library and garden. Shaw, aware of the power of the performance value of appropriate settings, draws on the library and garden settings to first present the romantic illusions about these settings and then imbues these same settings with verisimilitude in order to defeat the romantic notions with its opposite. Furthermore, Shaw takes up his position on the side of realism in the physical world by using life-like details and historical accuracy as part of the fabric of the play itself.