From Ellie to Eve: The Quintessence of Marriage in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, and Back to Methuselah

Abstract

Audrey McNamara tackles the interwar years, when women were forced to return to household duties in order to free up the labour market for the men returning from the war, thereby negating the economic freedom these women had come to experience. While analysing Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, McNamara posits that after World War I, Shaw realized the impossibility of returning to a pre-war society. He knew that marriage without society had no way of healing itself from the scars of war, but marriage in its pre-war form was equally intolerable. Shaw thus used his twin concepts of the Life Force and Creative Evolution to help people see beyond the present and to fashion a change that would make marriage—and the nation—stronger, and more independent.