Bernard Shaw Man and Superman

Man and Anti-Superwoman: The dramatic art of Shaw's "Man and Superman"

Although George Bernard Shaw paints himself as a revolutionary iconoclast in the concluding afterward to his play, "Man and Superman," ultimately his philosophy is anti-feminist. It is reactionary rather than revolutionary in its nature, portraying extraordinary women fulfilling their ultimate philosophical function as the helpers of extraordinary men, rather than achieving astounding mental prowess in their own right.

In Shaw, and his hero Jack Tanner's estimation in "Man and Superman," women are essentially physical creatures. Men are essentially intellectual creatures. Through the mouthpiece of Jack Tanner, Shaw notes, in Chapter 5 of what he titles 'The Revolutionist's Handbook,' "Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our present reliance on promiscuous marriage." Tanner is loud-mouthed and shocking to conventional societal norms in his attitudes, but Shaw always focuses on procreation as the essence of womankind, even while he condemns conventional marriage. Marriage is bad not because it oppresses women, but because women produce, under its current social status, inferior men.

In Shaw's created world, even women agree with this estimation of their sex as the breeders of great men. In Act I, the weak and poetic Octavius observes, "Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man's character incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a big success of some kind." (I.1.20-23) In short, Ann, and rightly so in Shaw's ethical terms, perceives her success to by synonymous with her husband's accomplishments. But this is given a supposedly revolutionary interpretation by Shaw, namely that great women exist to motivate the Superman Tanner to greatness and to produce great children with the Superman. Yet note in this view that women are not great in and of their own merit. In fact, Ann demands the social constraints of guardianship upon her, to bind her more securely to Tanner's fate, to harness her physical essence and life force with masculine creativity.

Women and male greatness are thus posed as complementary, but of decidedly different essences. This renders females as more animal in their natures, rather than intellectual. Perhaps to Shaw's Victorian audiences, weaned on an ideology of female weakness behind the closed doors of the bedroom, the common image of the angel in the home, and women's lack of sexual appetite, this might have seemed revolutionary. Octavius expresses this philosophy in his view of Ann.

However, Shaw's philosophy, rather than being revolutionary really harkens back to medieval notions of women's greater carnality, much as Tanner's revolutionary manifesto echo Plato's view of women as genetic breeding grounds for the best of philosophical men in his "Republic." Before the famous Don Juan in Hell sequence of the play, the Jewish philosopher Mendoza states, "I am well aware that the ordinary man -- even the ordinary brigand, who can scarcely be called an ordinary man [Hear, hear!] -- Is not a philosopher. Common sense is good enough for him; and in our business affairs common sense is good enough for me." (III.24) Philosophers seek more than common sense, but women are of the common, physical world. In other words, women only exist to produce progeny of male greatness and great philosophy of note.