Getting Married — Reading Notes

The Preface as Provocation

The preface occupies roughly half the text and functions as a dramatic monologue in its own right. Shaw attacks "dangerous nonsense" about marriage, citing George Eliot's illicit union and Nietzsche's quip about married philosophers. He frames marriage as a legal trap that forces "disastrous anarchical action" from those who rebel. Yet he also warns against private reform, insisting on institutional change. This tension—between individual freedom and social necessity—prepares readers for the play's debates, where characters like Lesbia and the General embody the very conflicts Shaw outlines.

Lesbia's Refusal: A Voice of Independence

In the excerpted dialogue, Lesbia Grantham rejects General Boxer's repeated proposals with a frankness that startles him. She calls herself "a regular old maid" who values her own house, books, music, and order above a husband's presence. When the General asks about children, she retorts that she "ought to have children" but refuses to have a man "bothering me to be a wife at the same time." Her language is precise and unapologetic: she cannot stand "a great lout of a man smoking all over my house." Shaw gives her the strongest lines, making her a counterweight to sentimental ideals of marriage.

The General's Sentimental Persistence

General Boxer, by contrast, speaks in the clichés of romantic devotion: "The heart has its preferences," he insists, and one image "gets indelibly" fixed. Lesbia interrupts him, noting his "correct" sentiments are predictable. He is a "sentimental noodle," she says, who does not see women as they are. The General's pipe soothes him; Lesbia finds the smell disgusting. Their exchange reveals a fundamental mismatch: he offers love and marriage; she offers independence and a critique of domestic intrusion. Shaw uses their banter to expose the gap between conventional romance and lived reality.

Structure and Argument in the Excerpts

The excerpts move from abstract preface to concrete dialogue, mirroring Shaw's method of testing ideas through character. The preface states a problem; the play stages it. Lesbia's refusal is not a plot twist but a philosophical position, articulated with the same clarity Shaw uses in his opening polemic. Readers should note how the General's sentimental language contrasts with Lesbia's blunt practicality—a pattern that recurs throughout Shaw's work. The excerpts do not reveal the play's resolution, but they establish its central conflict: between institutional marriage and personal autonomy, between romantic ideals and domestic realities.

Because the excerpts include only the preface and a single scene, readers should approach the full play as an extension of the debate begun here. Shaw does not offer easy answers; instead, he lets characters argue from different premises. Pay attention to how later scenes develop or challenge the positions staked out in these opening pages. The play's title, Getting Married, may be ironic: the excerpts suggest that getting married is precisely what some characters will resist, question, or redefine.

That rainy afternoon, Shaw’s Lesbia kept her independence while the General stormed about, and I found myself thinking of storm-tossed Pericles, who loses everything yet keeps his course. The debate felt like a ship’s hull against weather—argument as navigation. Later, I pulled down Pericles, Prince of Tyre — A Closer Reading, and the rain seemed to match its tide.