Page 152 - Gullivers

his readers and audiences to abandon their received opinions, their preconceived ideas of the world and of themselves. He was attracted to anarchism, and like Swist, he recognised how states could exploit, if not enslave, the poor and his writing constitutes a sustained attack on inherited opinions via humour and satire. Shaw’s fundamental belief was one he shared with Swist, that is, that hypocritical moral codes were an impediment to the individual and thus to the economy. He extended his analysis to gender roles and here too tradition and outdated ‘morality’ were pronounced amoral as in Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), Arms and The Man (1894), and many other works are predicated on the Swistian approach of sustained examination of an original maxim or set of so-called moral beliefs.
While Swist shied away from examinations of the individual self, Shaw’s writing uses Swist’s method to alert his audiences to the trends in self-deception that handicap us as individuals. As Declan Kiberd remarks, in what is itself a very Swistian comment: “The Victorians harped so incessantly on notions of gentility as to throw serious doubt on their achievement of it” and Shaw, recognising
this, lampooned his society’s obsessions in many works where he plays off the archaic against the new, the traditional views on respectability and the more modern ideas of equality. He too offers extreme scenarios in his dramas and in his political writing, osten aiming for the operatic and the absurd in an attempt to jolt his audiences and readers into recognition. He deplored much of what had occurred in Ireland and like Swist, he saw history and morality as incontrovertibly linked. As a socialist he railed against the exploitation of the masses and the hypocrisy of the ruling elite. Like Swist, he believed that the human subject
was similar in key respects regardless of whatever culture he or she was raised
in. He employed his predecessor’s literary strategy of using the text to examine
a central maxim. This is at the heart of one of Shaw’s most successful plays,
John Bull’s Other Island (1904) where he challenges ideas of racial identity and racial stereotyping.
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