Candida - a problem play

Before the advent of the naturalistic drama in the

middle of the nineteenth century, European theatre
was primarily a form of entertainment and
amusement, as manifested in the plays of Pinero,
Jones and even Oscar Wilde. However, playwrights
like Ibsen, Hauptman, Chekov and Strindberg had
revolutionized European drama by turning their
attention towards the serious socio-economic
problems and issues. In their hands the emergence if
the Prose Play of Ideas accrued in which each play is
centred around some predominant idea dealing with
the social like of man or his relationships. The plays
of George Bernard Shaw have similar sociological
concerns though he prefers to entitle some of them
as 'Pleasant' and others 'Unpleasant'.
Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and Candida
have been designated by Shaw as being Pleasant, but
ironically they are not entirely pleasant plays. Many
problems posed in them are thought-provoking and
even disturbing. Shaw terms them as 'Pleasant' only
in contrast to the 'Unpleasant Plays' such as Mrs.
Warren's Profession and Widowers' Houses, in which
the problems presented are far more grim and
unnerving, such as prostitution and the victimization
of the tenants by landlords, than in 'Pleasant Plays'.
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
theatres are as mischievous as bad schools or bad
churches." He feels that theatre is extremely
important as a 'social organ', and that "dramatic
invention is the first effort of man to become
intellectually conscious." 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 attitudes, disposition and even
moral consciousness. In Candida the central idea is
the traditional love triangle in which the youngster,
Eugene Marchbanks intrudes into a marital
relationship and challenges its assumed bases of
happiness. He is compelled finally to depart from the
wedded 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. As this point a comparison
between Shaw's Candida and Ibsen's Nora becomes
unavoidable. Nora symbolizes a woman's quest for
emancipation to ascertain her individual identity. She
attempts to break free from the shackles of a
conventional marriage in which her husband treats
her with no more importance than a mere doll. For the
sake of her ideal, Nora foregoes the security of a
family and a marital life and even leaves her children
while walking out of Torvald's life.
Candida's choice reflects Shaw's insistence on the
importance of the practical wisdom. Candida, unlike
Nora, is a thoroughly practical minded woman.
Though she is not crude like Burgess, she inherits
some of her father's utilitarian philosophy. Her final
choice of staying with Morell, is not decided by her
love for him but the financial and social security of a
married life that she is afraid of risking. She is
temperamentally different from both Morell and
Marchbanks. Though she is easily approachable, her
thoughts and motives are impenetrable. She is as
unmoved by Morell's genuinely passionate sermons
on social reform as bored by Marchbank's poetry. She
looks after Morell's needs and his households with
perfect efficiency; she equally comes to Marchbank's
rescue, offering 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's ideas about women play with a vital role in
Candida. According to Shaw, a woman is primarily a
manifestation of Life Force whose primary function is
the biological continuity of the race. Consequently
Shaw believes that while choosing a mate, a woman
would select the one who would be the best father fro
her offsprings, eliminating others. Thuds her identity
as a mother is more fundamental than that of a
woman. For this reason Shaw treats Candida as a
mother by mentioning to Ellen Terry that "Candida is
the Virgin Mother, and nobody else as well as alluding
to Titian's painting of the 'Virgin of the Assumptions'.
E. Bentley therefore appropriately comments that
instead of the traditional concept of the little woman
reaching up towards the arm of a strong man, in
Candida we see a strong woman reaching down to
pick up her child. Being a mother, Candida is
committed to neither of the two men.
Shaw deals with the idea of women's emancipation in
Candida from an entirely practical point of view. 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
wielder 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 need her motherly attention. She proves
that Morell is the 'doll' of the house and she is the
real master. In fact she uses Marchbanks to teach
Morell a lesson about his weakness and destroys his
complacency.
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 his
depiction of Marchbanks. Candida realizes that
Marchbansk can never be a proper protector for her

children nor provide her with security as he is

impulsive and passionate. Whereas, as a poet, he has
a sublime and universal artistic function to perform. If
he is confined to the domestic role of a husband, his
aesthetic creativity would be incomplete. It is for this
larger creative purpose that she feels that
Marchbanks would be able to finally renounce his
romantic interest in her. He imparts to him a
hackneyed piece of practical advice to remember
"When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am
sixty, she will be seventy-five", not realizing that such
petty practical concerns do not affect Marchbanks.
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. Morel feels that
marriage to a good woman is a "foretaste of what will
be 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 of lamp 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.