Summary
After the characters have gone to sleep and the stage is dark, strains of otherworldly music begin to sound. As the music fades in and out, a figure appears in the darkness. He comes into view and is identifiable as Don Juan Tenorio, a Spanish sixteenth-century nobleman—who happens to look quite a bit like Jack Tanner. He is joined by an elderly woman, Dona Ana de Ulloa. She is horrified to discover that she is in hell, protesting that she always went to confession even when she had nothing to confess. Don Juan seems to be an authority on the subject of hell, assuring her in spite of her denials that she belongs there. He explains that he is in hell for murder, but softens this explanation by noting that he killed someone in the context of a duel. Ana de Ulloa is concerned to find herself among murderers, and, still in disbelief, asks her companion how it is possible that she is in hell if she does not feel pain. Don Juan replies that this is precisely how he knows that she belongs in hell—a truly good person would find hell unbearable.
Don Juan then tells the old woman all about the circumstances surrounding the duel in which he killed a man—the man, he says, was the outraged father of a woman he had fallen in love with. Dona Ana de Ulloa claims that her own father was killed under precisely these circumstances. After this, the old woman transforms into a young one, prompted by a discussion in which Don Juan tells her that age is meaningless now that she has died. Once she is young and beautiful, the audience sees that she bears a great resemblance to Ann. Don Juan, meanwhile, is surprised to recognize her and immediately realizes who she is (not having been previously introduced). She is, he explains, the very same woman whom he once loved, and whose father he killed in a duel. Shortly thereafter, the haunting music returns, announcing a new arrival. Don Juan tells Ana that it will be her father, the very one he killed long ago. The person who enters the scene, though, is not quite a man: he is a statue with a striking resemblance to Roebuck Ramsden. The statue of Ana's father is visiting from heaven, because he finds life there unbearably boring. He does not recognize his own daughter at first, and cavalierly tells her that he will no longer treat her as a parent treats a child, but rather as a fellow adult. He then explains that he will be staying in hell, which he finds more comfortable and amusing than heaven. After the statue makes himself at home, the music begins again, bringing with it a new arrival—the Devil himself. In this case, the Devil looks remarkably similar to Mendoza, the brigand who captured Jack Tanner.
The Devil, as the ruler of hell, is thrilled to learn that he has gained a new permanent resident in the form of the statue. The Devil and the statue get along well, and agree enthusiastically that heaven is boring and dreary, while hell is delightful. Don Juan finds all of this insulting and offensive, but the Devil defends himself, arguing that he does not deserve his bad reputation on earth and that he helps people find meaning. Furthermore, he says, hell is simply a better place. In hell, he says, people seek out happiness and pleasure. Heaven is devoted to knowledge-seeking and self-improvement, which is boring and unsatisfying. Don Juan, however, finds this description appealing. He thinks that heaven, with its opportunities for truth-seeking and intellectual growth, is a better place to live out the urges of one's life-force. After all, the life-force, though it cannot be seen, prompts people to learn and become more intellectually sophisticated. Don Juan waxes poetic for a while, moved by the idea of human potential and growth over generations aided by the life-force. The Devil and the statue react skeptically, making clear that they have little patience with those who talk breathlessly about the life-force.
Don Juan, like Tanner, is able to turn any topic of discussion into a poetic and impassioned monologue. This is particularly true when the conversation turns to gender roles, a topic about which Tanner has previously had a great deal to say. Don Juan believes that men and women are both motivated to act in very specific ways by the life-force. Women are driven to give birth to children, thus producing new and successively improved generations. Men, meanwhile, instinctively provide for women and children, but also have leftover energy and brainpower with which to philosophize and grow beyond their animal ways of life, becoming better and more like the ideal superman. The other characters react with a mixture of apathy and outrage, especially when Don Juan claims that marriage, far from being the sacred, honorable institution so beloved by Ana and her ilk, is actually no more than a tool used by the life-force to produce more children. In the end, Don Juan argues, those obsessed with socially-acceptable morality and sentimentality are opposed to the growth inherent in new generations, while followers of the life-force will continue to reproduce in the hopes of bettering the next generation. This, incidentally, is why he finds hell so maddeningly boring—in its sensory satisfaction and sentimental complacency, it provides no opportunity for change, growth, and the search for knowledge. In fact, Don Juan eventually decides that he would like to leave hell and go to heaven. The Devil tells him that this is entirely possible, since the divide between the two is more psychological than geographic. With that, Don Juan departs, leaving the others behind.
Ana de Ulloa, hearing the Devil warn the statue about the dangers of seeking Superman status, asks whether the Superman exists yet, and the others explain that he does not, but may come to be in the future. She announces that she has more work to do, and disappears with the mysterious words, "A father—for the Superman." After she departs, Tanner wakes from his dream, and discovers that Ramsden, Octavius, Ann, Violet, and Hector Malone have come to rescue him. Ann is particularly eager to rush to his aid. He tells his friends not to harm his abductors, identifying them as his escorts.
Analysis
Mundane everyday reality makes up the background for the beginning of this play. The characters are modern Englishmen and tend to be concerned with the non-mysterious issues of politics, money, and reputation. Of course, some of them purport to have grander callings, such as political revolution, but their settings contradict them, insisting on the less exciting reality. Here, though, we enter a dream-world, where the rules are somewhat looser and stranger. The ironic humor present in the rest of the play remains, but Shaw still provokes the audience’s sense of the mysterious, striking an uneasy balance between the ethereal and the silly. On the one hand, for instance, Tanner’s dream makes it clear that he fancies himself a Don Juan, and this deep dive into his fantasies renders him vulnerable and a bit diminished. On the other hand, Tanner truly is something of a Don Juan, given his charisma and intelligence. Furthermore, Shaw’s insistence on musical effects in the transition to the dream-state makes clear that he wants the scene to feel real and somewhat otherworldly to the audience.
While the previous scene largely mocked wealthy young men obsessed with politics, Shaw now turns his razor-sharp wit to the subject of religion. Religion here arrives in the form of an elderly Spanish woman. Much like Mendoza and Tanner, the old woman in this scene—who is called Ana, but is clearly a dream-version of Ann—is so committed to the most dramatic outer trappings of her ideology that she fails to seek any actual moral good. In her case, the ideology is Catholicism, and the outer trapping to which she clings is confession. She tells Tanner/Don Juan that she loves confession so much that she often confesses to that which she has never actually committed, thereby absurdly defeating the actual purpose of the ritual. In this discussion, we also see the typical ideas of heaven and hell overturned. Heaven becomes a realm of discomfort, but it is uncomfortable because it is meaningful, while hell is comfortably bland and meaningless.
This admission of Ana's echoes, for instance, Mendoza’s earlier insistence that he eats only rabbit and prickly pear as a way to live out his socialist politics. In both cases, Shaw pokes fun at those who adopt the aesthetic signals of morality without actual self-criticism or intellectual engagement. A few other heady philosophical ideas get tossed into the mix over the course of Ana and Tanner’s chat, most notably ones about death, grief, and eternity. These complex ideas are generally cloaked in humor. For instance, Tanner points out to Ana that she no longer has any need to wear mourning clothes for her father, since the idea of one dead person grieving another makes no sense.
The conversation wears on while Don Juan/Tanner swaps conversation partners. He chats with Ana’s father, who is also a statue—but who is also, in fact, Roebuck Ramsden. It seems that Tanner thinks of Ramsden as something of a statue: grand, unchanging, and ultimately rather useless. Eventually, they’re all joined by the Devil himself, who seems to be a version of Mendoza. The dream setting allows Shaw to take these liberties, and also to hint at the subconscious associations Tanner holds between certain people and ideas. Though Freud and his theory of the subconscious haven’t been mentioned, his ideas are present throughout the scene. It is only through dreams that the audience can understand Tanner’s feelings, independent of the persona he wishes to project onto the world.
Eventually, the argument between the Devil and Don Juan turns to the topic of eternity. Confessing irritation with the conditions in hell, Don Juan asks to be sent to heaven instead, prompting bad news from his companion. The Devil explains that everyone wearies of heaven just as they weary of hell, and while in life men are satisfied and motivated by social progress, in the afterlife they see the futility of these changes. Don Juan dismisses these objections, invoking the value of the “life-force,” which can be found only in heaven. The Devil is irritated by the new trend of “Life Force worshipers,” for which he blames the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The Devil raises Nietzsche’s concept of an “Übermensch,” or “Superman”—a kind of idealized version of a human, created only with continual generations of self-improvement. This is only possible with great effort and with the help of the life-force. It seems, then, that Shaw is framing Tanner himself as a kind of idealized moral human, slowed down by others who may not have reached his level of integrity.
