Jean Reynolds – författare

When offstage actions contradict a playwright’s onstage message, literary study gets messy. In his personal relationships, George Bernard Shaw was often ambivalent toward liberated women—surprisingly so, considering his reputation as one of the first champions of women’s rights. His private attitudes sit uncomfortably beside his public philosophies that were so foundational to first-wave feminism.Here, Shaw’s long-recognised influence on feminism is re-examined through the lens of twenty-first-century feminist thought as well as previously unpublished primary sources. New links appear between Shaw’s writings and his gendered notions of physicality, pain, performance, nationalism, authorship, and politics. The book’s archival material includes previously unpublished Shaw correspondence and excerpts from the works of his feminist playwright contemporaries. Shaw and Feminisms explores Shaw’s strong female characters, his real-life involvement with women, and his continuing impact on theatre and politics today.

When offstage actions contradict a playwright’s onstage message, literary study gets messy. In his personal relationships, George Bernard Shaw was often ambivalent toward liberated women—surprisingly so, considering his reputation as one of the first champions of women’s rights. His private attitudes sit uncomfortably beside his public philosophies that were so foundational to first-wave feminism.Here, Shaw’s long-recognized influence on feminism is reexamined through the lens of twenty-first-century feminist thought as well as previously unpublished primary sources. New links appear between Shaw’s writings and his gendered notions of physicality, pain, performance, nationalism, authorship, and politics. The book’s archival material includes previously unpublished Shaw correspondence and excerpts from the works of his feminist playwright contemporaries. Shaw and Feminisms explores Shaw’s strong female characters, his real-life involvement with women, and his continuing impact on theater and politics today.

This book focuses on two important topics in Shaw’s Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two “Shavian sisters”— Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle—are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls “the problem of language.” Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is Eliza’s acting coach and phonetics teacher, as well as the star of an impromptu, open-air phonetics show. The language content in these two plays is just as intriguing. Did Eliza Doolittle have to learn Standard English to become a complete human being? Should we worry about the bad grammar we hear at Barbara Undershaft’s Salvation Army shelter? Is English losing its precision and purity?Meanwhile, in the background, Shaw keeps reminding us that language and theatre are always present in our everyday lives—sometimes serving as stabilizing forces, and sometimes working to undo them.