By Victorian standards, his emancipated, self-possessed heroines such as Candida, Saint Joan, Major Barbara and Ann Whitefield were highly unconventional, and in many cases their lofty ideals and willful pride seemed to elevate them above their male counterparts. legal equality of every variety.''Ĭertainly it is easy enough to understand the impulse behind this romanticization of Shaw as a feminist. ''Much of Shaw is not only still fresh,'' writes Rodelle Weintraub in her introduction to a study of Shaw entitled ''Fabian Feminist,'' ''but can be seen in the banners and goals of the contemporary feminist movement: equal opportunity to secure employment and equal pay for equal work contracts for marriage marriage free from degrading economic and possessive-sexual factors. He claimed that he had always ''stood up for the intellectual capacity of women,'' yet assigned the power of fecundity to ''mother woman,'' while reserving creativity for ''artist man.'' And in his own life, he disdained sexuality - he failed to consummate his own marriage - but cherished a high-flown romanticism, carrying on firey romances with some of the leading actresses of the day.ĭespite such ambivalence, Shaw has recently been adopted as a kind of father figure by certain proponents of women's liberation. He was a socialist, for instance, who championed the suffra-gette movement, yet frequently employed the misogynist vocabulary of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his plays, de-scribing woman as a predatory animal intent on imprisoning her male prey. There are now three major Shavian productions on stage in Manhattan -''Misalliance'' is playin g at the Roundabout Theater, and ''My Fair Lad y'' (which was inspired, of course, by ''Pygmalion'') isat the Uris - and the heroines of these plays not only form a composite por trait of what was known in Shaw's day as the New Woman, but they also betray complicated and frequently contradictory views of women refl ected in both Shaw's life and art. ''She means,'' he explains, ''that she belongs to herself.'' Indeed ''Candida,'' which is now previewing a t the Circle in the Square, portrays the female of the species no t as a passively sweet Victorian lady, but as a strong, independent and thoroughly selfassured woman - an ''unwomanly woman,'' w ho belongs to no one butherself. ''I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other.'' Her husband firmly nods, but her you ng lover gets the point.
''Oh! I am to choose, am I?,'' she exclaims. In the penultimate scene of George Bernard Shaw's ''Candida'' the heroine is confronted by the two men who love her, and she recoils from their ultimatum.
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