SHAW, CLASS, AND THE MELODRAMAS OF LONDON LIFE
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 32; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.32.1.0059
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Studies
ResumoShaw's first performed play, Widowers' Houses (1892), is marked by a notable absence. Although the plot centers on rack-renting (the charging of extortionate rents) and the shame of the slum landlords, at no point do we see any such slums or any of their tenants. Shaw would in time avail himself of more direct representations of the urban poor in Major Barbara and Pygmalion. However, I would argue that many of Shaw's dramas of London life, whether they put impoverished characters center stage or deflect our interest toward more apparently romantic plots, as in Widowers' Houses and even Candida, show canny awareness of the conventions of urban melodramas.In Widowers' Houses, the lower-class victims—and the world they inhabit—remain off-stage. Instead, we begin the drama in Remagen on the Rhine, where a group of English tourists of slightly varying classes attempts to sort out their proper relationships.1 The play seems, at the start, to be a kind of romantic comedy, focusing on the movement toward marriage of aristocratically connected Harry Trench and moneyed Blanche Sartorius (tellingly described by Shaw as “presentably ladylike”).2 After a dance of status in which the men attempt to read one another's rank and place based on relations (“I have the honor of being known to Lady Roxdale, who is, I believe, a near relation of yours”) and abodes (“I have … a furnished villa at Surbiton for the summer. I live in Bedford Square”), it emerges that Blanche and Harry have already commenced a romance, which quickly becomes an engagement (7, 8). The first act of the play reveals little of its eventual focus on London real estate, as Sartorius is evasive when asked the location of his properties. But the act establishes a certain mode, a network of affiliation, that will prove crucial to a reading of later events in Widowers' Houses—and to Shaw's highly sophisticated treatment of urban poverty in later plays.Trench and Cokane do not know the Sartorius family, or do not seem to. These people eye one another with interest, hostility, or veiled meaning. The bonds are eventually made or revealed; interestingly, this occurs in part by proxy: Lady Roxdale, whom we never see, is a point of connection, a means of making introductions and establishing common ground. In a peculiar turn of events, Sartorius demands that Harry write immediately to his relations—the esteemed Lady Roxdale in particular: “I shall expect you to write to your relatives explaining your intention, and adding what you think proper as to my daughter's fitness for the best society. When you can shew me a few letters from the principal members of your family, congratulating you in a fairly cordial way, I shall be satisfied. Can I say more?” (16). Harry is “much puzzled” by Sartorius's desire for the letters as a “guarantee,” one balancing his own “guarantee” that “there shall be no difficulty about money” (16). Harry promptly settles down to write the letter, which becomes an occasion for an extended bit of business. Harry asks the watchful, ever useful Cokane to draft the letter for him; it is at this point that money becomes more clearly a subject, as Cokane asks, “What is Sartorius?” (18). Harry of course cannot answer and is unsure why he should care how the man has made his money. Once Harry has left his friend to his work, Sartorius himself offers to assist Cokane with his composition (in doing so giving the latter grounds for some suspicion). The scene ends with Cokane presenting the finished work to Sartorius for his perusal, and the happy group heads off to dinner.The first act has thus provided a romance—a possible misalliance—and dangled before the audience a hint of mystery or scandal as to the origin of Sartorius's wealth. But it has, more importantly, established a template for the key problems of the play. One might wonder about the drawn-out business with the letter. Sartorius demands a guarantee from third parties of his daughter's acceptance; Harry demands that Cokane write the letter for him; Cokane accepts assistance from Sartorius in accomplishing his task. The diffuse, indirect nature of the action here, its overly involved quality, points to a question of responsibility, of agency: Precisely who is engaged in an action here, and why? For whom? Then there is the seemingly offhand detail that Cokane writes the letter on the back of a map ripped from a Baedeker. The map turns out to be a most appropriate symbol to toss into a scene marked by mysterious connections and cooperative actions.The inscription of Blanche and Harry's engagement on the back of a map takes on much greater resonance in the second act, at Sartorius's finely furnished villa in Surbiton. It is in this scene that the crisis emerges, when Harry discovers the truth about his future father-in-law's properties. He learns this, appropriately enough, through the character of Lickcheese, Sartorius's agent: “a shabby, needy man, with dirty face and linen, scrubby beard and whiskers, going bald. A nervous, wiry, pertinacious human terrier, judged by his mouth and eyes, but miserably apprehensive and servile before Sartorius” (25). Lickcheese evokes a long tradition of urban melodrama, and his arrival prompts Sartorius to step into the role of a most traditional kind of villain, one who rages when he discovers that his rent-collector has spent all of one pound four on wood to repair a staircase: “Boards! Firewood, sir, firewood! They will burn every stick of it. You have spent twenty-four shillings of my money on firewood for them” (26). Lickcheese, promptly sacked, turns to Harry for assistance and reveals to him the whole squalid picture of the family business. The crowning horror comes when Harry understands that the man has lost his place not for being too hard on tenants, but too soft. Lickcheese paints a dark picture of his former employer: “Just look how he lives himself, and youll see the good of it to him. He likes a low death-rate and a gravel soil for himself, he does. You come down with me to Robbins's Row; and I'll shew you a soil and a death-rate, I will! And, mind you, it's me that makes it pay him so well. Catch him going down to collect his own rents! Not likely!” (31).Now we come to it. The property over which Sartorius and Lickcheese argue is located in St. Giles, a parish that long stood as a representative slum. In David Jerrold's novel St. Giles and St. James (1851, dramatized at the City of London Theatre in 1853), it was the dark image of outcast London facing its polar opposite, the wealthy St. James's parish in the west. A midcentury ballad provides the image of contrast: In St. James's in calling the morning is spent,In St. Giles's, the landlord calls for his rent,In St. James's the Queen holds a drawing-room gay,In St. Giles's Mr. Smith holds a garret all day.In St. James's the togs are got out very bright,In St. Giles's they're got out every Saturday night,In St. James's they sleep on down pillows and snore,In St. Giles's the same, but it's down on the floor.3 According to Lickcheese, Sartorius owns additional properties in Marylebone and Bethnal Green, also noted in the day for their poverty and “lowness.” The standard representations of St. Giles and its like, on and off the stage, have a long history going back to the many stage adaptations of Pierce Egan's Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis.4 This hugely popular urban extravaganza, serialized in 1820–21 and then published in full, established a pattern for stage scenes of London life, high and low. The original work takes a merry view of low life, as the young swells of the title enjoy themselves in settings rich and poor, carefully juxtaposed (Almack's Assembly Rooms in the West are balanced by “All-Max,” a gin house in the East—“max” being slang for that popular beverage).By the middle of the century, the work of Henry Mayhew, James Greenwood, and other “social explorers” brought a more somber quality to surveys of London life, especially on the stage. Gone were the days of Tom and Jerry, of William Moncrieff's The Scamps of London (Sadler's Wells 1843), and Charles Selby's London by Night (Strand 1844), with their emphasis on jollity and shenanigans. The poor had become a problem, and the view of them became less amused and distant, more serious and apparently empathetic. Just as Egan's writings had very promptly been given theatrical form, so too were those of Mayhew. His great opus, London Labour and the London Poor (initially serialized in the Morning Chronicle before receiving a first collected publication in 1851), clearly inspired such works as J. B. Johnstone's How We Live in the World of London; or, London Labour and the London Poor, a huge hit at the Surrey in 1856, and James Elphinstone's London Labour & London Poor; or, Want and Vice (Pavilion 1854). In the 1850s and 1860s, a vogue for plays dramatizing the relations between London's rich and poor seized the metropolitan theaters, north and south, east and west, from low “saloon” houses to West End redoubts of the “legitimate” drama. Examples include T. G. Blake's Life as it is; or, The Pauper's Crib and the Model Lodging House (Pavilion 1852), George Conquest's Rich in Love but Poor in Pocket (Grecian 1857), J. Towers's Halfpenny Child; or, The Archives of the Poor (Victoria 1857), Mrs. Henry Young's The Beggar's Banquet; or, Beneath the Lamps of London (Effingham 1862), Dion Boucicault's The Streets of London (Princess's 1864), C. H. Hazlewood's The Casual Ward (Marylebone and Sadler's Wells 1866), Andrew Halliday's The Great City (Drury Lane 1867), and Boucicault's After Dark (Princess's 1868). The urban melodrama remained on the boards into Shaw's day in such productions as Paul Meritt and G. F. Rowe's The New Babylon (Duke's 1879), George R. Sims's The Lights O' London (Princess's 1881), Robert Buchanan and Harriet Jay's Alone in London; or, A Woman Against the World (Olympic 1885), and George R. Sims and Henry Pettit's London Day by Day (Adelphi 1889).5In melodramas that focus on class relations and conflicts, the norm was to see an interlocking series of poor and wealthy settings (specified by neighborhood and even street) and alternating public and private scenes. The public scenes might be squares, transit hubs, courtrooms, parks, or bridges; these were ideal locations for the intermingling of classes. Meritt and Rowe's New Babylon, for example, features scenes in Cremorne Gardens and on the Thames Embankment, as well as “low” scenes in a St. Giles night cellar and at Seven Dials (a notorious slum) and a posh gathering for a sale at Tattersall's (the famed auction house for race horses). These plays relied heavily on London scenery, and on a highly realistic mise en scène, for an aura of authenticity.Widowers' Houses, while it evokes the plots of London melodramas (cross-class romance, the suffering and exploitation of the poor) and their character types (the hard-hearted, wealthy villain and the devious, scruffy lackey), denies its audience the neat sense of balance provided by those earlier plays. While I am not suggesting that Shaw knew all or even many of these works firsthand, he was certainly acquainted with the melodramatic traditions, particularly those that were alive and well in his own days as theatergoer—including his years attending productions at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. Martin Meisel, who has amply demonstrated Shaw's careful attention to and adaptation of inherited models, asserts that “[e]ven if Shaw had been born a cockney full of scorn for provincial theater, he would have been deeply marked as a playgoer and as a playwright by the Permanent Company Playing Repertory” (18).6 Shaw himself cheekily insisted that it was not required for him to attend a production at the Adelphi (a famous purveyor of blood and thunder) to grasp the essentials of its type: “my frequent allusions to Adelphi melodrama were all founded on a knowledge so perfect that there was no need to verify it experimentally; and now that the experiment has been imposed on me in the course of my professional duty, it has confirmed my deductions to the minutest particular.”7 Shaw knew his conventions, and in Widowers' Houses we see an early attempt to thwart them. These plays invariably established and developed a contrast between rich and poor, and then worked furiously to collapse that distinction via a transformation in class status in which the poor and rich become one: a watercress girl turns out to be an heiress (William Travers's The Watercress Girl at the City of London, 1865), the daughter of a wretched ironmonger inherits £100,000 (Edward Towers's Ready and Willing: A Working Man's Story at the Effingham in 1867), a ruined man, falsely accused and imprisoned, becomes a fugitive and a pauper, only to be magically restored (courtesy of a hidden will and an act of conscience) to wealth and status in the final scene (Sims's The Lights O' London). Such contrivances were a staple of tales of the poor, including those in the novels Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, et al.Plays of this sort only appeared to address social problems, and their elaborate scenic effects and re-creations of London locales provided them with a gritty veneer of reality. Act II of Widowers' Houses, in echoing certain aspects of these works, sets up a play that never materializes. In response to some dissatisfied audiences and critics of the 1892 premiere at the Royalty Theatre (staged by the Independent Theatre Society), Shaw indicates that he knew full well the source of their annoyance: [it was] all because my hero did not, when he heard that his income came from slum property, at once relinquish it (i.e. make a present to Sartorius without benefiting the tenants) and go to the goldfields to dig out nuggets with his strong right arm so that he might return to wed his Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the faithful Cokane. (If this is not satisfactory, I can reel off half a dozen alternative “dramatic” plots within ten minutes' thought, and yet I am told I have no dramatic capacity).8 Instead of such remarkably action-packed scenes, we get stasis. Trench, upon discovering Sartorius's distasteful mode of business, determines to refuse his money (but not his daughter). This seems noble enough. But Blanche will have none of it and flies into a rage, thinking that Trench merely desires to jilt her; Sartorius, by contrast, when he realizes the problem, suppresses his anger and suggests that he and Trench have “a little quiet discussion of this sentimental notion of yours” (41). He argues for the rightness, indeed fairness, of the status quo, insisting that since the poor “do not know how to live in proper dwellings” and inevitably destroy them, “you cannot help them, no matter how much you may sympathize with them. It does them more harm than good in the long run” (41, 42).Trench is brought up short by this argument, but Sartorius goes further, revealing to Trench that his own £700 a year comes from the rents on Sartorius's slum properties (the esteemed if invisible Lady Roxdale likewise benefits). The purported villain drives his point home: “What Lickcheese did for me, I do for you. He and I are alike intermediaries. You are the principal” (42). With Sartorius's transformation from villain to mere intermediary, Shaw's careful construction of proxy communication and connection in Act I begins to pay off. Sartorius posits a world of intermediaries, helpless to change anything. Far from being morally energized, Trench is deflated and demoralized; there will be no journey to the gold fields for him. He woefully asks, “Do you mean to say that I am just as bad as you are?” To which his would-be relation replies, “If … you mean that you are just as powerless to alter the state of society, then you are unfortunately quite right” (43). Trench, our hero, will do nothing, and the true conflict in the scene emerges when Blanche, feeling insulted, rejects him. Rather than the false connections of melodrama—lost heirs, hidden wills—Shaw lays out an entirely different model of affiliation, one that not only fails to resolve the problems raised by the play, but even goes so far as to suggest that the problems may not be resolved at all.Certainly by 1892 the feel-good plays of urban misery had run their course. Looking back to the myriad midcentury dramas of wealth and poverty, one notes a touchingly earnest quality, an insistence that when people perceive suffering, they will work to end it. In Johnstone's Mayhew knockoff of 1856, How We Live in the World of London; or, London Labour and London Poor, a wealthy gentleman expresses horror at the privations of poor children. A friend assures him that “[t]he press has recently become a powerful advocate for the poor and some of its noblest spirits have laid their hands upon the plough and guided by such hands there's little fear but the harvest will be a bright one.”9 There are even distant echoes in the Trench/Sartorius exchange of a much earlier work on the housing problem: T. G. Blake's Life as it is; or, The Pauper's Crib and the Model Lodging House (Pavilion 1852). Blake's opening presents Mr. Heartall and Deputy Podd (who attended Harrow together) discussing the issue: Podd asks, “Why should we build palaces for the poor?” He is charitable but doesn't want to get his hands dirty, to have actual contact with poverty. His friend Heartall plans to build model lodging houses; Podd's response is “a pig will be a pig.” But by the closing scene Heartall has, unsurprisingly, won the argument, as he addresses the audience: “Let me hope that you will all give your support to the Model Lodging House. Folding doors thrown open and discover the Model Lodging House with two seraphs holding a scroll entitled ‘Sanitary Reform.’ Tableau. Curtain.”10 A series of images published in The Illustrated London News in 1875, under the heading “Dwellings of the London Poor,” seems to avoid casting responsibility on investors such as Sartorius and Trench while dangling before them the possibility of making money through improvement of properties. The author bemoans “the comfortless scenes of London poor-folk life—not altogether the fault of those suffering its misery, nor yet entirely the fault of their landlords,” while promising that reform is likely to pay shareholders just as much as other good investments.11 The depressing lack of progress in solving the housing problem was clear in 1883, when Andrew Mearns wrote “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor” as an anonymous pamphlet. This work was heavily publicized by the crusading journalist W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette, where he complained of a lack of progress and will: Not only have existing slums remained almost untouched by past efforts, but our great cities, especially London, are yearly adding new layers of brick and mortar to their already excessive circumference…. The mere reiteration of the painful facts is not wholly useless. The mass of well-meaning indolent people should be made continually to see—not merely to realize in the abstract, but to have before them as a vivid haunting picture—the misery which goes on disregarded by them at their own back doors…. The man who lives by letting a pestilential dwelling-house is morally on a par with a man who lives by keeping a brothel, and ought to be branded accordingly. But though that necessary if unpleasant business be worth doing, it is, of course, subordinate to the constructive work of finding a solution for this complex difficulty.12 Stead, in his insistence on the efficacy of a “vivid haunting picture,” reveals a continuing belief that images of poverty will have a galvanizing and transformative effect. The Illustrated London News piece likewise insisted that its pictures of the home life of the poor will “serve the cause of reform.”13 Without arguing that this can never happen, one can understand that Shaw might, by 1892, have his doubts. The London stage had provided a veritable decades-long parade of pictures haunting and vivid. In the last act of Widowers' Houses, he tries a different tack, offering up a different kind of horrifying image, in which resolution of the plot and unity among the characters are achieved by a clear intention to maintain the status quo. Any improvement in the circumstances of the poor is reduced to a tactic by their betters to make more money, via Lickcheese's scheme to modify slum dwellings that are soon to be torn down only to increase their compensation value. Significantly, half of the renovated dwellings would be let to Lickcheese's front business, the unattractively named North Thames Iced Mutton Depot Company. Trench, who as mortgagee on the properties must be brought into the fold, shows his newfound perspicacity by anticipating Lickcheese's plan: “… it appears that the dirtier a place is the more rent you get; and the decenter it is, the more compensation you get. So we're to give up dirt and go in for decency” (59–60). If the poor were absent before, they are doubly erased at the play's conclusion, soon to be banished even from the slums they currently inhabit.Typical melodramatic methods of resolving and containing the social problems put on display in the Victorian theater included especially the use of family restoration, marriage (actual or impending), and the class transformation of a central character. While Shaw replaces the poor in Widowers' Houses with a freighted absence, pointedly depriving audiences of the customary balance and neat divisions of urban melodrama, he is most generous in making use of these other conventions. But the unity achieved in the final act systematically deprives the audience of its usual effect—that is, to resolve, magically if falsely, the “realistic” subject matter of the drama. Any hint of a rift between Blanche and her father upon her discovery of the nature of his business is dropped when she expresses disgust not at him but at his tenants: “I hate the poor. At least, I hate those dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live like pigs” (57). Here Blanche echoes hard-hearted female “heavies” such as the social-climbing Hetty in Sims's The Lights O' London, who flatly asserts “I hate poor people” as she conspires with the play's wealthy villain.14 Blanche and Trench are reconciled, but their bond represents only the strengthening of a particular economic position of privilege. And Shaw goes out of his way to make their mutual attraction in Act III overwhelmingly physical (the description in the text offers what is, basically, a mating dance): the emphasis on material possession is driven home in the contradictory moment when Blanche chastises Trench for mooning over a framed photo of her: “How dare you touch anything belonging to me?” she asks, while she “crushes him in an ecstatic embrace,” neatly transforming a moment of romance into one of ownership (66).Critics loathed Blanche, refusing to see her as an authentic character. William Archer, as reviewer for The World, offered what he considered a more truthful image of her type: “the average Surbiton damsel would have been loud in her sympathies for the denizens of the paternal rookeries, and would probably, by way of atonement, have given three more hours a week to her district-visiting for at least a month to come.”15 But it was Lickcheese who garnered particularly ambivalent attention. His character, a forerunner of Doolittle in Pygmalion, reappears in Act III as a changed man, embodying the ever-popular melodramatic twist whereby the poor are rescued from poverty by becoming wealthy through such mechanisms as hidden identities and wills. Lickcheese, a low figure when we meet him, seems poised to fall even lower when fired by Sartorius. However, his entrance in the final act provides a sensational effect: The change in his appearance is dazzling. He is in evening dress, with an overcoat lined throughout with furs presenting all the hues of the tiger. His shirt is fastened at the breast with a single diamond stud. His silk hat is of the glossiest black; a handsome gold watch-chain hangs like a garland on his filled-out waistcoat; he has shaved his whiskers and grown a mustache, the ends of which are waxed and pointed. As Sartorius stares speechless at him, he stands, smiling, to be admired, intensely enjoying the effect he is producing. (51) There proves to be no magic to the rise of Lickcheese, who has learned only too well how to game the system and who has come to bring Sartorius—and Trench—into his schemes. Rather than embodying a resolution to class conflict through unlikely transcendence of class, Lickcheese, depressingly, signals only a deeper entrenchment of predatory behavior. He is all the more effective for being, as critics (and Shaw himself) noted, very much a comic figure in the third act; Shaw admitted that “my play was rescued from the fury of an outraged public by Mr. James Welch's creation of Lickcheese.”16Significantly, Lickcheese is the one who brings the couple together; indeed, throughout the scene he seems to be itching to reunite Blanche and Trench. In his role as fixer, he recalls earlier lower-class figures from urban melodrama, the street-smart man or boy who helps to bring about a happy ending and is often in the service of troubled upper-class characters (see Joe Bunt in How We Live in the World of London or Tom Chickweed in Alone in London). Some kind of family restoration (husband and wife, parent and child) proves obligatory in the ending of domestic melodrama generally and is given a particular class twist in urban melodramas, where a character's redemption comes after wandering through London's streets, slums, and workhouses (a central figure in these plays must actually have been poor for the ending to achieve its proper effect). Kristen Leaver has usefully analyzed the anti-Poor Law tendencies in Victorian melodramatic discourse, which opposed the view, embedded in the law that created the workhouse system, of the poor as a single, undifferentiated entity. She sees melodrama as offering only a weak alternative to this perspective, one based on narratives of domestic rescue: “While one group depersonalized the poor by defining them as a mass in exclusively public terms … the other marginalized the poor in private terms by defining them as dependent members of a family unit.”17The once-shabby Lickcheese is not only a mouthpiece for the linking of money and marriage—“Why not have a bit of romance in business when it costs nothing? We all have our feelins: we aint mere calculatin machines” (63)—he is arguably the victorious figure in the end, almost a member of the family himself. Having moved from the margins to the center, he walks arm-in-arm with Sartorius and Trench, the ultimate intermediary (66). In his rise from poverty, he even mirrors Sartorius, the son of a slaving laundress. Via this manipulation of Lickcheese as type, Shaw has turned the usual concluding scene of domestic order into a travesty; he follows the letter of melodramatic law, but, in a kind of theatrical surgery, excises its spirit. Shaw's many evocations of the earlier London dramas of class difference, combined with his steadfast refusal to use them in the traditional fashion—to indicate that the problems raised in the play have actually been solved—provide one explanation for the view of some critics that Shaw was simply inept or cruel. An anonymous reviewer in the Daily Telegraph huffed that the dramatist had failed to produce “a symmetrical play of ambitious and elevating tendencies…. Mr Shaw's system of play-building is indeed as faulty as the construction of the tenements under the system condemned by him.” (This reviewer considered Lickcheese to be Shaw's final insult: “The dramatist is implacable,” he moaned.)18The Athenaeum damned the play as “perverse,” while A. B. Walkley in The Speaker dismissed it as “a singularly bad piece of work.”19 Positive reviews, however, tended to note Shaw's realism, as did Henry William Massingham: “The English stage can be none the worse for a sincere attempt to exhibit life as the dramatist really believes it is being lived in London to-day.”20While Widowers' Houses is notable for incorporating poverty into plot and theme while refusing to put the poor themselves on display, by the 1890s the wholesale exclusion of London's poor became the new theatrical norm (a trend already apparent in the 1870s). While the use of mixed settings would continue, in plays such as Henry Arthur Jones's The Middleman (Shaftsbury 1889), George Moore's The Strike at Arlingford (Independent Theatre Society at the Opera Comique 1893), Sydney Grundy's The New Woman (Comedy 1894), and Arthur Wing Pinero's The Gay Lord Quex (Globe 1899), the trend in West End theaters was toward a unified social scene, often representing the homes and haunts of the upper-middle class and the aristocracy. The emphasis on the realistic mise en scène continued, as did the use of stock characters, revelation scenes, hidden family ties, and plotlines focusing obsessively on a character's proper place in the world. The “world” on stage, however, had shrunk: in the social comedies of Oscar Wilde, and in many of the plays of Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, Sidney Grundy, R. C. Carton, and C. Haddon Chambers, the settings are all of a piece: opulent, wealthy, and determinedly tasteful. Even revivals of earlier melodramas, such as Tom Taylor's 1858 warhorse Still Waters Run
Referência(s)