Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw (world of reading TXT) đź“•
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Following the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the ward of Jack Tanner and Roebuck Ramsden; Jack is a childhood friend, author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook, and descendant of Don Juan, while Roebuck Ramsden is a respectable friend of her father’s entirely opposed to Jack’s philosophy. Also in mourning are Octavius Robinson, who is openly in love with Ann, and his sister Violet, who is secretly pregnant. So begins a journey that will take them across London, Europe, and to Hell.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Man and Superman between 1901 and 1903. It was first performed in 1905 with the third act excised; a part of that third act, Don Juan in Hell, was performed in 1907. The full play was not performed in its entirety until 1915.
Shaw explains that he wrote Man and Superman after being challenged to write on the theme of Don Juan. Once described as Shaw’s most allusive play, Man and Superman refers to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. It combines Nietzsche’s argument that humanity is evolving towards a “superman” with the philosophy of Don Juan as a way to present his conception of society: namely, that it is women who are the driving force behind natural selection and the propagation of the species. To this end, Shaw includes as an appendix The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion as written by the character Jack Tanner.
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- Author: George Bernard Shaw
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If the really impressive books and other artworks of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women’s pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive artworks. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the “self-sacrifice” (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d’oeuvres.
I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of life and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and all women. Hence it is that the world’s books get written, its pictures painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex. Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art, instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and asceticism, amorism and puritanism are equally unreal in the great philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow’s head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance
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