The Shavian Concept of Spider-Woman

 

S. C. MATHUR AND AKHILESH KUMAR

 

            Through the eugenistically coloured spectacles of George Bernard Shaw, woman was viewed as a spider who spins her web to ensnare her prey. The Shavian woman, like the spider, creates an atmosphere around herself in which man, especially created by the “inner will of the world” and dainty and delicious to her evolutionary palate, has to do nothing but submit before her advancements. This concept sounds some dire and unhealthy tone. But a Shavian woman is not a treacherous, amorous belle dame sans mercy of the Romantic agony but an independent free-thinker and a holy pilgrim whose “unwomanliness” consists in her active pursuit of a husband. Her “unwomanliness” is admired by Shaw though H. C. Duffin desparagingly called her a spider-female.

 

            The earth left the feet of conventional moralists and status quo defenders when Shaw declared in his epistle dedicating the play Man and Superman to A. B. Walkley that “the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women”.1 It was enough to shatter the sentimental Victorian creed that woman is a repository of delicacy and sex initiative always comes from man. Shaw was frowned at by many for degrading woman – paragon of modesty, and amiable virtues–was termed as woman-hater and women took it as their personal insult when androgynous Shaw crossing the forbidden threshold of their boudoir entered it and unveiled the secret of their age-old device–modesty, centre of all feminine sexual attrac­tions–for which they are desired and with which they hunt their prey. Women’s fury in the air was smelled by Mitchell, Susan L.–“Mr. Bernard Shaw understands women much better than Mr. (George) Moore, but we do not like our Bernard, he sees too much with that chill grey eyes of his. He would be good to us in actual life, clothe us and feed us and give us good wages, but what woman can forgive Man and Superman”?2

 

            Woman assumes modesty and reticence to attract the male she likes. She assumes modesty, coyishness, shyness and suscep­tibility to blush with such a subtle art as to look quite life like and natural and even Nature is jealous how it could be done without her! It may be claimed that it is really natural. But the refutation of the claim lies in the question – Why Nature stops asserting itself when the same coyish virgin begins to talk lust and incest ludicrously, unhestitatingly and unashamedly after being married or sexually experienced? It is because she has done with the device – modesty. She has ensnared her prey. The same change is never noticeable in a man after marriage. Now she is even less modest than her husband and her husband’s remorse is almost Satanic that he could not know about this thunderbolt beforehand.

 

            If we go to the legend of the garden of Eden, it was Eve who first tasted the forbidden fruit and tempted Adam to satisfy her sexual lust and on the contrary Adam was afraid because he was naked. But Shaw was not merely an anthropologist and psychoanalyst, he was primarily a Eugenist. He tries to see “the inner will of the world”–in Creative Evolution, and shattering the Victorian veneer of romance and coquetry, assigned woman the pious role of hunting and capturing the Superman, not due to her lust or sex obsession but to give birth to another Superman ­mentally and physically better as Ann cries out in the III Act of his play Man and Superman: “A father! a father for the Superman!” And Shaw’s mouthpiece John Tanner, truly, though bluntly, said about women that “They tremble when we are in danger, and weep when we die; but the tears are not for us, but for a father wasted, a son’s breeding thrown away.” Thus a woman’s aim being natural, eugenistic and creative is pious and religious. Her instinct, enforced by the Life Force, to attract her male by employing different weapons has been philosophically associated by Shaw with the higher and unselfish purpose. Accord­ing to Shaw all the creative energy of the universe is gathered in a woman to impel her to court her mate and to enforce a man to yield and respond to her biological urges.

 

            For this, women have to be passive and motionless like Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman, who, in the beginning, waits motionlessly and with passivity but when John Tanner tries to extricate himself from her pursuit, she swiftly flings coil after coil about him until he is secured forever! The passivity of Ann Whitefield can be compared with the passivity of a magnet described by Marro in his book La Puberto “the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron towards it” 3 Shaw believed that “Every woman is not Ann, but Ann is every woman, because every woman wants to act like Ann but does not act like her due to the fear of social degradation and assumes the expected modesty to employ it as a weapon to capture the male quarry as Ann does in the beginning because even prostitutes are supposed to wear the cloak of modesty which serves as a bait to attract and please their male clients. And, on the other hand according to Kinsey, a girl who starts to remove her clothing before coitus is “too indecent to have intercourse with”4 Shaw’s theory seems to be approved by Clement of Alexandria who declaimed. “On no account must a woman be permitted to show a man any portion of her body naked, for fear lest both should fall: the one by gazing eagerly, the other by delighting to attract those eager glances”. 5 It reveals that a woman derives pleasure from attracting the eager male glances. But a Shavian woman is curious to attract only the glance of her chosen mate to capture him, because the inner will of the world forces her to do so.

 

            If we see women around us they delight in showing off their feminine forms, wear pointed bras to expose even their covered feminity, use artificial means to emphasize their buttocks, wear small skirts and short blouses displaying partial part of their breasts and use various types of cosmetics. Why all this? To increase their social status? To show their wealth? Foolish! Only to attract their males – a virgin, to prey upon a man to be her husband and a married woman to retain her husband’s interest in her or to be an object of jealousy among her husband’s friends but after all to attract a male glance.

 

            Shaw depicts remarkable examples of this anti-victorian love-­chase as revealed by Julia Craven in The Philanderer. Hypatia Tereleton in Misalliance, Bladche Sartorius in Widowers’ Houses, Gloria Clandon in You Never Can Tell and Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman. In Man and Superman natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action Through the portrayal of its heroine, Ann Whitefield, Shaw has shown us that the Life Force works through women to create a better race and to carry life to its higher levels of consciousness. And in their pursuit they are pious and unselfish though Winsten remarked that Shaw’s cunning and attractive, women disguise their strength as “womanly defencelessness” and simple men are “duped” by them. But this remark is totally unrelated to the soul of Shavian theory The play gives us Shaw’s anthro­pological myth that woman is the prime mover in the evolutionary process.

 

            In Man and Superman, Don Juan is not “a vagabond libertine” as portrayed by Byron but an agent of revolutionary Shavianism and a harbinger of godlike Superman. Shaw changed the Don Juan legend in which Don Juan has always been represented as a pleasure-seeking libertine and seducer who had run away from his women after possessing them and who is finally punished by supernatural powers for his various sexual crimes. On the other hand in Shaw’s play we have philosophical implications of the Don Juan story. The Shavian Don Juan runs away to prevent women from possessing him. In Shaw’s play, amorousness of Don Juan has been transferred to “Dona Juana” the husband-­hunting female. Thus Shaw converted the Don Juan legend of rape and seduction into the legend of courtship and marriage observing the tragic-comic love-chase of the man by the woman in which his Superman hopelessly struggles against the tyranny of the Life Force of sex.

 

            Ann Whitefield, a husband-huntress, does not begin or end with Shaw, she is universal–it is that every woman has the instinct of courting her mate. The idea of spider-woman was first formulated in the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and dramatized in the works of Strindberg but not as we find in the works of Shaw While Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Strindberg gave treacherous image to this pursuit of woman, Shaw endowed it with a holy purpose. And Ann was created not by an anti-feminist but by an arch-feminist with potential adoration for women. Charles Darwin also has given some glimpses of the curious courtship customs of the spider in his esteemed work Descent of Man, whose slogan of “Natural Selection” has been hotly condemned by Shaw because according to Samuel Butler it “banished mind from the universe” and Shaw proposed creative evolution by positive will. Even in Shakespeare’s plays women, termed by Bernard Shaw as “mighty huntresses,” always take the initiative and Rosalind is the burning example. But the difference between Ann and Rosalind is considerable. While Ann responds to the call of Nature with the alacrity of a soldier, Rosalind shows warmth of spontaneity and charms her hero. Thus we see that the ordinary woman’s business is to get married as soon as possible.

 

            To eliminate the Yahoo – t primitive man, the Life Force impels a woman to chase her chosen male relentlessly. As mother­hood is the biological need of a woman, Nature has invented man as a tool to fulfil woman’s purpose. But for man, the rearing of children is as essential a responsibility as breeding them, otherwise he will be treated as the drone, who is killed by the bee just after mating. Tanner says: “If women could do without our work, and we ate their childrens bread instead of making it, they would kill us as the spider kills her mate or as the bee kills the drone. And they would be right if we were good for nothing but love”. 6

 

            Shaw was right in assuming the concept of spider-woman because he himself was relentlessly and cruelly hunted by various glamorous women of his times like Jenny Patterson, Florence Farr, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Miss Erica Cotterill, Ellen Terry and others. He himself has boastingly declared it: “As soon as 1 could afford to dress presentably 1 became accustomed to women falling in love with me. I did not pursue women. I was pursued by them”.7 And in his opinion “Men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women’s business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man”.8 Thus we can confidently assert that woman instinctively hunts the male as motherhood is her primary and biological necessity.

 

Notes

 

1 Shaw, George Bernard, Man and Superman, ed. A. C. Ward (Bombay: Orient Longmans Ltd. 1954.) P. XV.

2 Mitchell, Susan L., George Noore (Dublin: Maunsell, 1916). P. 7.

3 Tr. By Ellis, Havelock in The Psychology of Sex; Vol. III. “The Sexual Impulse in Women.” P.: 181.

4 Quoted in The Difference Between A Man and A Woman: By Theo Lang. (London: Michael Joseph, 1971) P. 348.

5 Ibid. P. 332.

6 Shaw, George Bernard; Man and Superman, ed. A. C. Ward (Bombay: Orient Longmans Ltd., 1954) Pp. 61-62.

7 Quoted in Shaw “The Chucker-out”: By Allan Chappelow (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1909) P.  79.

Shaw, George Bernard, Man and Superman, ed. A. C. Ward. (Bombay : Orient Longmans Ltd., 1954) P. XIII.

 

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