A Study of Heartbreak House
Heartbreak House is not the best of George Bernard Shaw’s plays. The best is Saint Joan, but Heartbreak House is the best of Shavian drama of ides. It is described by Eric Bentley as “the clock – full of Shavian ideas”. According to Bentley:
Heartbreak House might be called the Nightmare of a Fabian. All Shaw’s themes are in it. You might learn from it his teachings on love, religion, education, and politics. But you are unlikely to do so, not only because the play is not an argument in their favour. It is a demonstration that they are all being disregarded or defeated. It is a picture of failure.
The play is, undoubtedly, a picture of the civilised Europe before the first world war, “muddling through, heedless of the fact that its days are numbered” (Mendelson, p.399). This idea of muddling is underscored very early in the play precisely in Act I where Lady Utterword “sitting down with a flounce on the sofa”, tells Ellie:
I know how you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty – three years, and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servant spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody… and what is worse, the same disorder of ideas, in talk, in feeling (Act I).
The picture painted above is the character of Europe that is spiritually dead. The chaotic state of affairs anticipates social catastrophe. Even though Shaw gives his play a comical spirit, Michael J. Mendelson argues that Shaw:
employed the methods of comedy to state his case. But the result of all his playfulness in this work is not comic at all, is not actually much different from the accumulation of spiritually dead things in “The Wastelands” or the resignation nada in Hemmingway. Heartbreak House almost reeks with decay, pessimism, and futility.
The ending of the play leaves one more disturbing than its beginning. The melancholy strains of Randall’s flute, the explosions in the skies, and the detonated dynamite, all leave us with an impression of “a society withering away”. In fact, the play depicts a picture of a failed world, a world in a state of moral bankruptcy, where everyone is drifting to the point of no return. The text showcases irreconcilable ideas and irresolvable differences.
There is no agreement on what should be the basis of existence. For example, Ellie Dunn wants to marry Boss Maugan in order to be free from the clutches of poverty but Captain sees the idea as mortgaging one’s soul which may give one an opportunity to eat but not to live. So the problem of what to do in a world that lacks standards of existence is very much at issue here. In this regard, Robert W. Corrigan observes that it is in Heartbreak House that Shaw:
first came to grips without equivocation with those questions which had haunted Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov before him. How is one to live in an irrational world? How is one to give meaning to life in a world where one doesn’t know the rules? How are human relationships to be maintained meaningfully when one cannot be sure of his feelings and when one’s feelings can change without one knowing it? How can man live without being destroyed when irreconcilable conflict is the central fact of life?
Harold Clurman explains that in the text, “characters are ideas – conceptions of people, theatrically and comically coloured”. Even though characters represent ideas, they seek escape from their condition. The implication is that no idea satisfactorily explains their existence. Hector Hushabye says that everyone poses. Shaw’s interest is to find or reveal the man under the pose. In respect of the behaviour of characters, Clurman says:
They are all aware that they are living in a looney world, which they are expected to take seriously but cant. As they progress they become aware of the need to act mad in order to approximate reality.
This accounts for sudden entrances and exits and the hectic or rapid movement of the play. Lack of agreement on issues makes everyone to fly off the handle. Each character appears to be shot off from anything apart from his or her thought about things and life generally. In fact, Shotover typifies the tempo of the play “He moves with nervous energy, sudden shifts of pace to absolute quiet or concentrated energy – as when he sits down to work on his drawing board” (Churman, p.410). With respect to the universe of the play and the characters as well, Robert W. Corrigan notes:
The world of the Heartbreak House is one that has permanently misplaced life, vitality, and victory of Major Barbara. The people who whirl before us in this mad “dance of death” rapidly lose whatever veneer of virtue they have had and stand revealed as vain, insipid, blind, and vapid men and women who have made their society into an economic, political, and as far as practical, a moral vacuum.
Though they display dazzling intelligence, wit, and knowledge of the world, the men and women of the play failed to move their society positively forward. Corrigan says that difference between this play and those “written before it is that man not only does not succeed in Heartbreak House, but the possibility of his succeeding is flatly rejected”. Heartbreak House counters Shaw’s optimistic view of life in his previous plays. Shaw had believed in the salvaging power of the life force. He had believed that “salvation was possible if only we are bold of heart and clear in mind”. However, in “Heartbreak House, that hard-won optimism disappears never again to return”… as such hope went up in smoke with the bomb that falls at the final curtain.”
However, it is necessary to state that the neurosis, disillusionment, and decay suggested in the play are not peculiar to Europe alone. The play is essentially a picture of the entire modern world where our chosen values keep everyone gasping. To lend authority to this, Clurman says:
The thought and warning which informs the play stated in a frolic of entertaining word and postures – is wholly appropriate to our day and our theatre. Though the people of Heartbreak House are English, it is not merely a play about a certain class or a certain country. Time has turned it into a play about practically all of us, everywhere.
CONCLUSION
George Bernard Shaw, a Puritan, Fabian, critic, vegetarian, etc, attained a very high altitude in playwriting, leaving behind him over sixty plays with vast subject matter. His drama of ideas such as Heartbreak House examines the confusion inherent in human thought. Here a man that has been very optimistic about life concludes that humanity has lost focus as a result of irreconcilable ideas and is therefore, drifting to the point of utter dissolution. In Heartbreak House considered by Bentley to be the clock – full of Shaw’s ideas, man has no hope of salvation but is at the brink of disaster.
This article examines the personality of George Bernard Shaw and his perception of drama. It precisely examines Shaw’s biography, the Shaw drama, and the factors that shape his dramatic vision as well as attempt to analyse Heartbreak House as a play that contains most of the themes the playwright has been concerned with.
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