PAPER IX:

DRAMA III: VICTORIAN TO PRESENT

ENG/M/511010

NAME- KITTU SARKAR

SEMESTER- THIRD

ROLL NUMBER- 19120402008

TOPIC- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S “CANDIDA” AS A PROBLEM PLAY

A ‘Pleasant Play’ in Shaw’s definition can never be merely an entertaining play. According to
him, a merely entertaining presentation is ‘bad’ and “Bad theaters are as mischievous as bad
schools or bad churches”. Thus, even in his ‘Pleasant Play’ Candida he stimulates the audience
intellectually to ponder upon different possibilities in human relationships.

The ideas in Shaw’s plays usually revolve around relationships between men and women,
husbands and wives, parents and children. Many of them focus on problems related to attributes,
disposition and even moral consciousness. In Candida, the central idea is the love triangle in
which the youngster, Eugene Marchbanks intrudes into a martial relationship and challenges it’s
assumed bases of happiness. He is compelled finally to depart from the married life of Rev.
James Morell and Candida, allowing the husband and wife to revive their relationship on new
premises of understanding.

The entire play is targeted towards the moment of Candida’s final choice. Her choice reflects
Shaw’s insistence on the importance of practical wisdom, her final choice of staying with Morell
is not decided byher love for him but the financial and social security of a married life that she is
afraid of risking. She is temperamentally different from Morell and Marchbanks, though she is
easily approachable, her thoughts and motives are impenetrable. She is as unmoved by Morell’s
genuinely passionate serons on social reform. She looks after Morell’s needs and his household
with perfect efficiency, she equally comes to Marchbank’s rescue and offers him ‘her shawl, her
wings, the wrath of stars in her head, the lilies in her hand”, yet she is totally remote from both of
the men.

Shaw deals with the idea of women’s emancipation in Candida, by asserting her will on the two
men, Candida converts the patriarchal pattern of the Victorian household setup into a matriarchal
one. With her monumental influence on Morell and Marchbanks, she becomes the weilder of
power instead of the men. Through her final choice, she exposes Morell’s weakness and proves
that he is no more than a helpless baby who constantly needs her motherly attention , she proves
that Morell is the ‘doll’ of the house and she is the real master. The play also expresses Shaw’s
idea of man as the spiritual creator in contrast to the women who is the biological creator, this is
particularly evident in the case of Marchbanks, and Candida realizes Marchbanks can never be a
protector for her children nor provide her with security as he is impulsive and passionate.

The ideas about marriage that Morell advocates or the ideas about love that Marchbanks
possesses are dismissed as being utterly childish in contrast to Candida’s hardcore practicality.
Morell feels that marriage to a good woman is a “ foretaste of what will be the best in the
Kingdom of Heaven” and Marchbanks idealizes Candida as a “ great soul, craving for reality,
truth, freedom” who should not be confined to trimming or peeling of onions, yet ironically
neither is able to conjecture her real motive. As a Play of Ideas, Candida is not a pleasant one,
the cruel rejection of Marchbanks and the heavy burden of ‘mystery’ in his soul with which he
departs, leaves a sense of bitterness in the minds of the audience. However, the play has a
conventional sense of pleasantness in not allowing the institution of marriage to be seriously
challenged by love.