Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel

245 Pages·2018·2.06 MB·English

by  Stephen Watt (auth.)

Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries
BERNARD SHAW’S FICTION,
MATERIAL PSYCHOLOGY, & AFFECT
Shaw, Freud, Simmel
Stephen Watt
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Series Editors
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Pocasset, MA, USA
Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse
range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic
understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in
reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a
leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and
American following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle
for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s.
His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, fem-
inist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as
pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contem-
poraries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of
other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it
develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of
the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements cov-
ered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14785
Stephen Watt
Bernard Shaw’s
Fiction, Material
Psychology, and Affect
Shaw, Freud, Simmel
Stephen Watt
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, USA
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
ISBN 978-3-319-71512-4 ISBN 978-3-319-71513-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71513-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932696
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Art, Raleigh Purchased with funds from the North Carolina Museum of Art Docents,
2010.2/1 277
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v
A
cknowledgements
The genealogy of this book, like most with which I am familiar, is para-
doxically straightforward and somewhat gnarled by complexities that
require just a little unraveling. A summary of these latter issues might wait
for another occasion, however, as the straightforward part is simply
described and bears directly on the pages that follow. After agreeing some
time ago to edit a special issue of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw
Studies on the topic of “Shaw and Money,” Nelson Ritschel and Audrey
MacNamara approached me about contributing an article that addressed
this topic through a reading of the five novels that Shaw wrote between
1879 and 1883. I was flattered to have been asked and pleased to comply
with their request, the result appearing in the journal in 2016, and I am
grateful that they afforded me this opportunity. For throughout the pro-
cess of preparing the article—“Unashamed: Value, Affect, and Shaw’s
Psychology of Money,” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 36.1
(2016): 53–72, which forms the basis of Chap. 3 of this book—I began to
suspect that a good deal more might be said about both Shaw’s fiction and
his evolving understanding of such matters as money, the subjective qual-
ity of putatively objective notions such as value, the social performance of
wealth and class, and more. However, while I was sure that these issues
vitally inform, at times even dominate, both Shaw’s writing and his own
interior life—and, for this reason, the pages that follow include not only
sustained readings of his novels, but also discussions of many of his plays,
essays, and letters—I really wasn’t certain that I was capable of a book that
concentrated largely on the five novels he produced as a struggling young
immigrant living in London.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
After the article appeared, Ritschel and Peter Gahan, general editors of
this series of texts on “Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries” and both
excellent scholars in their own right, wondered about much the same
thing and posed a question: Did a book-length project lurk somewhere in
my muddle of thoughts about Shaw’s fiction and the psychical and affec-
tive implications of money, among other material entities, on both him
and his characters? Uncertain of how to respond, I spent the better part of
a year reading and outlining before hazarding a tepid “yes.” Then, of
course, more work and study followed, during which time another more
precise challenge emerged: namely, how might this study contribute to the
larger aims of Nelson and Peter’s series? Given the fact that the pages that
follow combine a morsel of economic theory of Shaw’s era with more
generous portions of both sociological and nascent psychoanalytic thought
at the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century and after, several answers pre-
sented themselves. As the nonagenarian Shaw admitted in his autobio-
graphical volume Sixteen Self Sketches (1949), for example, his understand-
ing of the theories of Karl Marx in the early 1880s was subsequently
revised by his conversations—and published dialogue—with Philip
Wicksteed (1844–1927), who was himself greatly influenced by the mar-
ginal economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), a fact of which Shaw
was very much aware. Both economists appear in the pages that follow,
but not in the leading roles that they might. When discussing affect and
performance, to take another example, prominent actors of the fin de siècle
stage such as the Italian star Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), whose talent
confirmed for Shaw that a “dramatic critic is really the servant of a high
art,” also appear in these pages, although again not necessarily in the spot-
light their distinguished careers and international influence merit. In some
ways, it seems an almost impossible task to discuss so multifoliate an intel-
lectual as Shaw without reference to a host of composers, philosophers,
actors and playwrights, politicians, economists, and more. In other words,
the contemporaries who might have been featured in the limelight of this
book are many, and the majority of them, regrettably, will not be.
However, some other contemporaries of Bernard Shaw will figure
prominently in the pages that follow, ones he hardly knew or, in actuality,
knew relatively little about even if on occasion he might have suggested
otherwise. That is to say, while Shaw and Wicksteed may have skirmished
collegially in the mid-1880s over Marx’s Value Theory—a disagreement
waged, as biographer Michael Holroyd terms it, in the “friendliest spirit”—
they also participated convivially for some years in discussions of e conomics
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S ix
with several friends and acquaintances that Holroyd valorizes as the “clos-
est thing” Shaw got to a university education. Shaw did not cultivate such
a close relationship, however, with two European counterparts, Sigmund
Freud and Georg Simmel, the former of whom Shaw was certainly aware
and about whom he expressed a variety of opinions, many of them queru-
lous or even combative, and the latter of whom Shaw apparently did not
know well, if at all. Yet, these three are, quite literally, contemporaries:
Freud was born less than three months before Shaw in May, 1856; and
Simmel, less than two years later on March 1, 1858. And, as I have indi-
cated, unlike, say, the close relationships Shaw enjoyed with William
Archer, or with Beatrice and Sidney Webb—relationships that directly
influenced his writing and thought—this trio of relative strangers had no
such interactions but nevertheless shared remarkable intellectual affinities.
Here I mean to reference more than Freud’s admiration of Ibsen—in his
“Autobiographical Study,” he revealed his affinity with Dr. Stockmann in
An Enemy of the People and his disdain for the “compact majority” that
opposed him—or his quotation from the Preface of Shaw’s Doctor’s
Dilemma while mourning the death of a beloved grandson in 1923. All
three thinkers, for example, were compelled to engage the science of
Charles Darwin, although Simmel did less of this than Freud or Shaw; all
three puzzled over such issues as value and the relationships between
money, capital, and people; and all three were concerned with life in the
increasingly frenetic modern city and its effect on human sensibilities, as
the following pages will attempt to delineate.
Such a claim may strike some as beyond counterintuitive. After all,
when Shaw was not dismissive of or ambivalent about psychoanalytic
thought, he was accusing Freud of lacking both “delicacy and common-
sense.” For over a half of a century, from the work of Brigid Brophy,
Arthur Nethercot, and Sidney P. Alpert in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars
have debated Shaw’s knowledge of and stance toward the emergent dis-
course of psychoanalysis. For Brophy in Black Ship to Hell (1962), Freud
and Shaw are “the two great mainstays” of twentieth-century thought
who laid foundations for a “twentieth-century morality,” and her Shaw
“rarely contradicts the findings of psycho-analysis, though he is at pains to
ignore them.” For Albert in a seminal essay “Reflections on Shaw and
Psychoanalysis” (1971), while Shaw frequently displays a “measure of
familiarity with Freudian method,” this is typically accompanied by “skep-
ticism toward it.” Somewhat contradictorily, he also asserts that Shaw’s
“approach” to the “new theory” was “decidedly open-minded and
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
judicious.” More recently, as Peter Gahan describes it in Shaw Shadows:
Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (2004), Shaw and Freud were “both
rather cagey about each other’s work and not because they were unac-
quainted with it.” Yet, as I think both Albert and Gahan imply, Shaw’s
views of psychoanalysis were far more complicated than simple censure—
or denial. The case is less complicated with Simmel who, in his magnum
opus The Philosophy of Money (1900), which grew out of lectures he deliv-
ered in Vienna (and elsewhere) in the 1890s, makes no reference to Freud
at all. Freud, however, as his distinguished biographer Peter Gay observes,
certainly knew of Simmel, as Karen Horney invoked his work in criticizing
the male bias inherent to much psychoanalytic thought. But neither Freud
nor Shaw engaged Simmel’s multidisciplinary and influential writing
about money or assessed Simmel’s enormous impact on modern
sociology.
Happily, however, excavating relationships between these intellectual
“mainstays” or “bearded masters,” to borrow Brophy’s terms, is not the
aim of this book. Instead, the prompt to think about a project on Shaw’s
fiction as part of a series entitled “Shaw and His Contemporaries” led me,
for reasons that I hope will become clear, to affinities between these three
distinguished figures who, although working in different fields, nonethe-
less contributed to a discourse concerned with how modern human sub-
jectivity—particularly as manifested in feeling and emotion—was being
shaped by the velocity and increasing financialization of modern life. In
some respects, this book advances an approach similar to that which
Elizabeth S. Goodstein develops in those parts of Georg Simmel and the
Disciplinary Imaginary (2017) that identify parallels between Freudian
psychoanalysis and Simmelian sociology: between foreignness in Simmel’s
“Excurs über den Fremden” (“Excursus on the Stranger,” 1908) and
Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919), for example, or between the nervous
exhaustion of life in the modern metropolis and Freudian assessments of
the ego’s functioning as a defense against the external world. However,
unlike Goodstein’s fine book and the work of these other extraordinary
scholars, my goals here revolve, finally, around Bernard Shaw’s novels and
their representations of a particularly material—and at times materialist—
psychology and its relation to both feeling and emotion. Throughout this
book, then, and particularly in its second chapter, I attempt to delineate
the ways in which Freud’s and Simmel’s theories of such matters as value
and affect might aid in a reading of Shaw’s fiction (and, occasionally, of
Shaw himself).