Tony Jason Stafford. Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries
2015; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoTony Jason Stafford. Shaw's Settings: and Libraries. Forward by R. F. Dietrich. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xiv + 171 pp. The success of Tony Stafford's Shaw's Settings on gardens and libraries motifs in nine representative plays by Bernard written between 1892 and 1921 is in clarity of its formalism. The plays are among Shaw's most durable works. That gardens and libraries have not been focus of some general studies of is surprising. This is impression left with us in our appreciation of enticing fruits of Stafford's quarrying of evidence of them in these plays. Also, about gardens and libraries, there are unanswered but engaging questions for Shaw's larger canon, and archeological, intertextual, and anthropological/mythological contexts, that Stafford does not intend to answer in this volume. Nevertheless, Stafford's three pages on of Gardens and the Semiotics of Libraries are useful in explaining polarized meanings each motif actually supports: are urban humanity's compromise with retreat from moral nourishment of nature that civilization has imposed. Thus cultivated garden is (1) attempt to stay in touch with nature, (2) expression of expanded consciousness, and (3) a sign of one's ability and means to afford and create such a sanctuary (4) The clear goodness of (1) and (2), above, are erased in impiety of (3). As for libraries, they are as antique as gardens. They aid memories of humans as an accumulated record,... located in one place and available for consultation and access to all.... A repository of accumulated knowledge of a culture (5). Moreover, the possession of a personal library as a symbol of achievement, enlightenment, and wealth became well established (6). Such symbolisms could easily be appropriated by hypocrites. The summary of Stafford's readings, which follows, cannot do justice to them, but it may suggest progress of his method. Stafford begins with Widowers' Houses (1884/92), which exposes heartlessness and injustices of British society [and] underlying and pretense that is really at heart of problem, and this is communicated by Shaw's use of [both] gardens and libraries ... [aiding] delineation of conflict, symbolic value of settings, establishment of atmosphere (22). and her father seek respectability in ownership of a garden. Shaw takes pains to present a surface, in a lovely garden, with delightful weather, pleasant, tranquil, and, almost, 'idyllic' world (Cokane's description), which ironically belies ugliness underneath, foulness composed of greed, pretense, falsity, hypocrisy, and selfishness.... The powerful unwritten laws of upper-class British society are at work, here and in any number of gardens later on.... (11) As for library motif, Blanche is not interested in beautiful tooled classics on library shelves ... [which are displayed] to give impression of'education and breeding'; ... library is present for same reason garden is ... revelation ... [by of unsympathetic] attitudes in British society ... that spawn appearance, pretense, and hypocrisy (19). The visual irony of Blanche's inhumane behavior being played out in front of 'her' library would be evident to (20). Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893): Stafford notes that no library is present in play. Three of play's four sets involve a garden. Act 2 ends with audience looking at garden, enclosed in a fence, with the open land of freedom beyond fence (25). The weather is ironically clear. While open to weather, garden with its palings and gate is a site where all purveyors of various prostitutions and dark capitalistic moralities that are attacked in play come to conspire. Only Vivie escapes capture by decadence fenced in by this green. …
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