Heartbreak House is a play of family reunion. The reunion, however, is not complete nor does it have the harmonious effect such a gathering should evoke. The family is as dysfunctional at the end of the reunion as it was at the start. The play is also a critique of the English leisured class on the eve of the First World War.
Bernard Shaw uses a ship metaphor and employs nautical diction to depict the vulnerability of England on the verge of an impending war: a nation, neglected by its educated and cultured elite, is heading for disaster just like a foundering ship destined for the rocks. Heartbreak House is a drama of a discordant family which undergoes a heartbreaking experience. Metaphorically, it also portrays the ship of state in disarray and heading for catastrophe.
Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall
In his lengthy introduction, Shaw claims that Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play: It is cultured, leisured Europe before the War. Shaw makes a distinction between what he calls Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. The former is filled with society of high culture which indulges in the pleasures of art music and literature to the neglect of politics and governance.
The latter consists of “exiles from the library, the music room, and the picture gallery.” They prefer to ride on horseback. The heartbreakers, who are the “sole repositories of culture,” fail to provide the moral and intellectual guidance that could save Europe from the horrors of impending war. And their failure paves the way for the “barbarian” horsebreakers to forge an alliance with the vulgar and greedy capitalists to propel themselves to power.
Looking through Shaw’s double prism of Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall, we can identify Hesione, Hector, Shotover, Ellie and Mazzini as heartbreakers and Randall, Ariadne and the absent Hastings as horsebreakers. Ariadne escaped from her father’s Bohemian house by marrying into Horseback Hall and now identifies herself as the mistress of “Government House.” She reasserts her renunciation of Heartbreak House and affirms her place in Horseback Hall when she warns Hector not to think of her as a Bohemian because she is a Shotover: “You may think because I’m a Shotover that I’m a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian. But I’m not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism.”
Who is to Lead
The heartbreakers cannot lead because their disordered lives, filled with dreams, sleep and idle talk are wasted in foolish pursuits. If their conduct makes the family reunion an unpleasant affair, at the allegorical level it makes good governance impossible. Shotover cannot lead because he is too old as well as resigned, and his sporadic display of wisdom is rum induced.
Ellie doesn’t fit the bill because her youth and vitality lack direction. She has shrugged off her foolish romanticism but only to turn to crass materialism. Hesione is a temptress fully occupied with breaking and mending hearts. Hector has been emasculated by Hesione’s demonic charm to become her lap dog. She has used him up and left him nothing but dreams. Mazzini is admirable but ineffective and his naivety makes him exploitable by people like Mangan.
If nobody among the heartbreakers can rise to the task of navigating the ship, is that responsibility to be left to Mangan the capitalist or to Hastings of Horseback Hall? Mangan thinks he is up to the task. Shaw, however, does not deem the heartless and exploitative capitalist fit for that job. That is why he has him blown up at the end of the play along with the burglar, Mangan’s spiritual brother.
Ariadne thinks only her husband can save the nation: “There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease.” Shaw does not find this alternative acceptable, either, and suggests through Shotover that it is better to see the ship go down than to live under dictatorship.
The Fate of England
Heartbreak House is not a drama of hope or triumph either as the staging of a family reunion or as a symbolic depiction of a larger society called England. Neither Ariadne nor her father nor her sister cherishes the reunion. In fact, Ariadne bitterly regrets her return to the house she left twenty-three years ago. The bombing experience has not brought Shotover and his daughters closer, as might be expected of a family facing external danger together. Unlike Chekhov’s play where members of the family try and adjust to the loss of the Cherry Orchard by facing life’s challenges in their separate ways, the heartbreakers converge to wallow in a longing for extinction.
At the allegorical level, the half-drunk erratic skipper and his zombie-like crew let the ship drift into shallow water, symbolizing the indolence of the cultured elite who are letting the nation head for its doom. For the moment, providence has saved the heartbreakers from annihilation. But the danger is not over, and they choose to persist in expressing a death wish rather than learn to navigate. More than their romantic folly and Bohemian apathy, it is this yearning for obliteration which makes Heartbreak House the most pessimistic play by Bernard Shaw, who has had his heart broken by England.
References:
- Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt. Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1964.
- Shaw, Bernard. Heartbreak House. Mineola: Dover Publication, 1996.
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