2 - Arrested Development: Utopian Desires, Designs and Deferrals in Man and Superman and John Bull's Other Island

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In 1912, Shaw prepared a special edition of John Bull's Other Island with a new preface conclusively demonstrating the inevitability of Home Rule in Ireland. A draft preserved in the British Library shows Shaw assuring his readers that everyone in Ireland really wants Home Rule. When he finally acknowledges the existence of militant unionists, Shaw disables sympathy for them by conflating political orientation with sexual orientation:

There are, I know, men and women who are political perverts by nature. The supreme misfortune of being born with one's natural instincts turned against nature by a freak of nature is a phenomenon that occurs politically as well as physiologically. There are Poles who are devoted with all their soul to Russia and the maintenance of Russian rule in Poland … [and] Indians and Egyptians who are ready to sacrifice all they possess for England and English rule. And it is not to be denied that among these are persons of high character and remarkable ability, comparing very favorably with the dregs of the nationalist movements, which, just because they are national and normal, are made up of all sorts … […] Even in more personal relations, natural passion cannot pretend to inspire more intense devotion than perverted passion. But when all is said, the pervert, however magnificently he may conduct his campaign against nature, remains abhorrent. (Shaw, ‘Preface to the Home Rule Edition’, ADD 50615, 21/6)

Superficially this may look like an ordinary instance of Victorian homophobia: Shaw deploys the ‘perversion’ trope to render militant unionism loathsome and wrong. By aligning it with heterosexuality, Shaw seeks to render Home Rule inevitable – as inevitable as what Malthus called ‘passion between the sexes’ and what Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’.

But this analogy also shows how strongly the rhetoric of inversion and perversion generated by the sexual revolution we examined in the previous chapter conditioned Shaw's ambivalence about Ireland's alterity. We perceive in this passage a certain shame about the way the paradox of militant unionism – a physical-force resistance movement whose members assert their loyalty to England by threatening to rebel against it, and their political autonomy by fighting not to be free – queers the campaign for Home Rule, which could otherwise present as ‘national and normal’.