Summary
The scene opens in Alhambra, Spain, in the garden of a grand villa. Shaw describes the grand, intimidating landscape of mountains in the background as well as details in the foreground—namely, books left in the villa garden, rather than sports equipment or newspaper. After a moment, Henry Straker exits the villa’s front door, accompanied by an older man whose formal outfit seems ill-suited to the hot climate. The man has a look of stubborn toughness in spite of his age, and, Shaw notes in the stage directions, a mild Irish accent, softened by years of living abroad in America. His name, we learn, is Hector Malone. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Hector Malone is also the name of the man who got Violet pregnant and secretly married her. This man, as we soon learn, is in fact the father of Violet’s husband.
Malone and Straker begin bickering almost right away. It seems as if Malone has come to England to visit Violet, and Straker, skeptical as ever, is suspicious of his reasons for visiting. Violet’s arrival interrupts the argument, and Mr. Malone requests a private word with her. Once the two are alone and seated in the garden, Malone reads a note that Violet wrote, intended for the younger Hector Malone (to keep things simple, in the rest of the summary we’ll call the father “Mr. Malone” and the son “Hector"). Mr. Malone is distressed by the intimate tone of the mundane note, and Violet admits that, in fact, Hector has asked her to marry him. Malone is not pleased with the prospect of his son marrying Violet, and tells her so. Violet reacts with total composure, as usual, sternly scolding Malone for his rudeness. Malone informs Violet that his feelings aren’t personal—he simply has other plans for his son, namely, marriage to a girl from a family far wealthier and higher-status than Violet’s.
Violet pushes back on Malone, noting that she’s as well-off as Hector and would be a perfectly suitable wife for him. But Malone’s motives are complex. He hints that he possesses great wealth and that he would be willing to effectively compensate a high-born English girl in return for marrying his son. Because Violet, though from a respectable background, is not part of an important family and cannot lay claim to a famous or historic estate, she would offer Hector no improvement in social standing. Violet notes the prejudice in Malone’s worldview, telling her potential father-in-law that his insistence on a titled wife for his son is no better than her family’s own snobbery against commoners.
Malone reveals a highly personal reason for wanting his son to marry into a high-status family with property. He was born, he explains, in Ireland. His own father died during Ireland’s potato famine—which he refuses to call a famine, noting that food was available—but exported, rather than given to starving Irish people. These events prompted Malone and his mother to leave Ireland. Now, Malone would like his son to marry into the very British upper-class that oppressed Ireland during his youth there. The conversation spins out of control, with both Violet and Malone feeling bewildered and confused. At this point, Hector Malone the younger arrives unexpectedly.
Violet does her best to intercept Hector before he can join the conversation, but he pushes past her to voice his anger at his father. After all, he points out, Mr. Malone read his mail and is now trying hard to interfere in his marriage. Hector seems nearly distraught, telling his father that these various misdeeds are in fact anathema to British society and that the two of them have no choice but to return to America. Violet is doing her best to mediate when Tanner, Ramsden, Ann, and Octavius—Violet’s brother—turn up. While Violet tries her best to introduce the older Malone to her friends and family, Hector escalates the conflict with his father, spreading tension to the rest of the group. In the face of this unpleasant situation, Octavius and Ann sneak into the house together.
Meanwhile, the scene between Violet, the two Malones, and her two legal guardians grows increasingly absurd. Ramsden and Tanner scold Hector for trying to marry Violet when she is, in fact, already married—although only Hector knows that she’s in fact married to him. Hector’s father is disgusted at his son and at Violet for acting so flirtatious when she’s supposedly married to another man. Tanner, meanwhile, commends Hector for flouting the rules of monogamy, not realizing that Hector is in fact Violet’s husband. Still, he says with regret, Violet wishes to be monogamous and therefore cannot be with Hector. Losing control, Hector announces the truth to everyone, telling them that he is in fact Violet’s husband.
Everyone feels personally slighted by this deception. Mr. Malone threatens to cut his son off financially, for which Hector is prepared. He announces that he is going to begin a job of his own. He then returns a sum of money that his father previously gave him. Octavius then bolts down from the villa, where he has been watching the whole scene, to shake Hector’s hand. Both Tanner and Octavius offer to lend financial support to Hector, but Hector refuses, telling the others that he wants to make his own living. After everyone else goes inside, Malone and Violet are left together. They agree that Hector’s plan to earn his own living will likely go nowhere, and Malone re-returns his money to Violet. These two characters seem to be each others’ equals.
Analysis
Characters in Man and Superman, in spite of their exaggerated worldviews and manners, often serve as mouthpieces for George Bernard Shaw’s own philosophical and political views. Here, via Mr. Malone, the Irish playwright expresses a righteous fury at the economic oppression of the Irish people. At the same time, he makes fun of American ideals, even while sympathizing with the drive for justice that underlies them.
In order to understand the various political philosophies at hand, it’s necessary to pay attention to the details of Mr. Malone’s background. The man was born to a working-class Irish family. Like many other Irish people in the nineteenth century, his life was changed by the disastrous Great Famine in the 1840s. However, Shaw carefully emphasizes that the potato famine stemmed from preventable political causes rather than unanticipated natural ones. Ireland, long before the famine, suffered economically under English rule, and in fact remained a colony at the time of this play’s writing. Shaw, through the character of Malone, links this long history of colonial oppression to the catastrophic famine.
The way in which Malone creates this link is important as well: he refuses to refer to the horrific events of the 1840s as a “famine,” calling it instead a “starvation” in order both to vividly emphasize its physical effects on the Irish population and to reject the narrative of scarcity that has generally been used to characterize these years. Shaw is deeply concerned with the way in which history is shaped retroactively with words and narratives. In this instance, he insists that naming can be a political act, and that the truth can only be reached with a careful choice of words to describe the past.
In spite of his humble origins, though, Malone has by now achieved what we think of as the American Dream. He’s rich, he’s nearly lost his working-class Irish accent, and he has a plan for passing down his wealth to his children, giving them a better life than he had. It is here that Shaw casts a critical eye on both Malone and the American mindset more broadly. Malone voices derision for his home country, telling Violet that he has no desire to return to Ireland or improve the lot of Irish people. Instead, using the wealth that American capitalism has abundantly granted him, he wants to essentially buy England. He hopes in this way to exact revenge on the colonial power that nearly ruined his life. It’s easy to see why this path could be satisfying, and Shaw makes sure that Malone’s indignation acts as a buffer against judgmental audience members who might otherwise look down on his plan of revenge. At the same time, the plan is clearly hollow and vindictive, and won't help anyone. If Malone forcing his son to marry a titled English heiress in order to nominally join the very class of elites who benefit from Irish oppression seems somewhat hypocritical, that’s because it is. In this way, Shaw steers us back to the viewpoint he’s been hinting at for a while. The current system of British colonialism won’t work, he suggests, but rather than looking to ahistorical American consumerism for an answer (or to the uninformed anarchism of Mendoza’s crew, for that matter) we’ll need a principled, socialist system that lets us rise above our baser instincts and become the best versions of ourselves—the “superman” of the title.
