Irony and dialectic: Shaw's Candida

Eugene Marchbanks is among the youngest of the magnificent oddballs of drama. He is fashioned by Bernard Shaw as an eighteen-year-old quixotic and contradictory spirit, shy by his own description yet consciously and intrusively assertive, poetic in sensibility but of undetermined talents. Marchbanks intrudes into the home of James and Candida Morell and in doing so forms a household triangle that is only quasi-romantic and yet distinctly dialectical in matters of conjugal, sexual, courtly, and familial relations. In essence, Marchbanks is a complicated dialectic unto himself. He is at once acutely perceptive and painfully jejune, an ardent suitor with scant sexuality, outspoken and determined and yet feckless and obfuscating at the same time. As Shaw's agent provocateur, however, he is a superb instigator, neatly able to defy and then erode James Morell's self-satisfaction while convincing himself that he loves and is the best possible match for Morell's wife. The mastering irony for Marchbanks, of course, is that his desire for Candida is so strongly qualified by reticence and that hers for him is so mysterious regarding its motivations and goals. Yet such qualifications, significant as they may be, are mitigated in light of Shaw's broader dialectical program. In truth, and as William Irvine points out, if Shaw had wanted a truly potent sexual threat to enter the Morell household, he could easily have made Marchbanks older, more single-minded, and more robust.