Shaw's cop-out

If you are looking for witty repartee between male and female characters, Shaw's one act, Overruled, I think wins hands down over Candida.<br><br>Candida chooses her comfortable though boring and befuddled husband over the passionate young poet. In the end she decides to choose the weaker "baby" of the two, meaning her husband, while the youngster poet ends up with a scolding and a cop-out admonition about how the difference in their ages will eventually extinguish any feelings of passion between them.<br><br>After re-reading Candida I can only say to put on its production in this day and age should require an apologetic statement to all the women who have chosen happiness with younger men that suit them. Given that Candida was a "strong woman" play in Shaw's day and age, it is now so culturally outdated as to be unworthy of a staging. If you want the satire and the wit that Shaw could produce with such ease, save your time, and read the one act Overruled. A theatre group in Richmond, Virginia is planning on Candida this Spring.

See later post.

The playwright presents a female fantasizing abandonment of marriage vows -- the possibility of a (second) chance at shaping her future.
The vows were to a representative of the very authority, Anglican or Church of Ireland, central to her current perception of a suffocating existence.
The fantasy takes the form of a tripartite caricature of the playwright himself: the husband who smothers Candida's mind by virtue (!) of his "authoritative" and meddlesome intrusion -- extending into all of surrounding society; a Wilde-like but sexually aggressive youth, lacking insights into the world of female emotion and showing little promise of gaining them; and Candida's father, the boorish commercial man, of John Bull dimensions, one of Shaw's assiduously shunned fears.
These psychological influences over Candida, each derived from Shaw, are now to be reconciled.
Adhering to one of them alone will be no grand triumph of spirit for Candida. But it will frame her future, and is necessary to her healthy functioning.
Shaw projects that Candida's choice is only superficially, though amusingly, a vexed one.
She enters the stage already aware of the inadequacy of her parent as an influence, and resumes her 10-year path (presumably the duration of her marriage) to Oedipal freedom.
The young artist is glaringly inadequate -- as an artist and a man, which he is not yet in any mature sense. In forms both personal and creative, Shaw perhaps recalls and justifies his own rejections at a similar age.
Candida remains with her well-intentioned but less than sensitive husband.
She thus reiterates an earlier choice, made when less mature but instinctively correct.
Shaw's own artistic life path is implicitly reaffirmed.
Loyalty makes Candida a virtuous -- not by any sense perfect -- whole. She has chosen the well intentioned, prolific, side of Shaw's complex self. Shaw no doubt approves, for Candida and for himself.