Shaw's Candida

The sociopolitical climate of Shaw's England appears to have offered the playwright the subject of his conflict. In his 1895 essay on the problem play, Shaw states the primacy of social issues in modern drama, expressing himself in dramatic rather than directly sociopolitical terms. One critical point is that a good problem play is good chiefly because of the emotional content of the human condition portrayed in the text.

Social questions are produced by the conflict of human institutions with human feeling. . . . Now the material of the dramatist is always some conflict of human feeling with circumstances; so that, since institutions are circumstances, every social question furnishes material for drama. The institutions assumed that it was natural to a woman to allow her husband to own her property and person, and to represent her in politics as a father represents his infant child. The moment that seemed no longer natural to some women, it became grievously oppressive. Immediately there was a woman Question, which has produced Married Women's Property Acts, Divorce Acts, [and] Woman's Suffrage in local elections (Shaw 444).

. . .
s, Candida is irrevocably of the next socially evolutionary generation. On the whole, Candida loves Burgess for what he is to her rather than blame him for what he is not. The wry attitude with which she treats the uneasy reconciliation between Burgess and husband indicates that she does have knowledge of the heart and of the mind that neither man possesses. Burgess, for his part, complains that Morell turned her against him and insinuates that she is socializing above her station when he jokes that Marchbanks is a nobleman. The joke's on him, of course, and Shaw's comic treatment of a family in transition should not distract from the underlying point that Candida is also, or at any rate has become, a creature of conventional middle class marriage. And not only its creature but also its protector and nurturer: wife, mother, and factotum to a clergyman with a well-publicized social conscience. Candida is caretaker for a way of life that she wishes she could have in substance as well as in form and that her husband, in his fatuous self-absorption, thinks she does have. As Arnott puts it, "Morell loves Candida and idolizes the married state. In the course of the play, however, he is gradually brought to realize that he is a parasite
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2001
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)