Shaw’s Attitude to Marriage and Family Life as Revealed in You Never Can Tell

In You Never Can Tell, Shaw displays his positive attitude to marriage, though elsewhere he considers marriage as a ‘mistake’. According to Shaw, marriage and family life should be based on mutual understanding, not on sentiment and emotion.

In You Never Can Tell, we find the conflict between two sorts of family life -one is typified by Mrs. Clandon and the other is typified by Mr. Crampton. When her children insist that they want to know who their father is, Mrs. Clandon tells them about the ideals of family life. She says that there are two sorts of family life one is based on mutual respect and the other is dominated by husbands. Mrs. Clandon stands for the first kind of life which is based on mutual respect. In this kind of life, every member of the family can enjoy his/ her rights to independence and privacy. In the second kind of life, the husband becomes a domestic tyrant who denies his wife and children their rights. He is suspicious of his wife and opens her letters and demands an explanation of every expenditure of her money and time. Being victim of the tyranny of the husband, the wife does the same to her children; she deprives her children of their independence and privacy. Family life should be based on duty, affection, morality and religion. But when a father or mother interferes with his/ her children’s work, life becomes a round of tyranny, jealousy and suspicion on the part of the parents and lying, rebellion and resentment on the part of the children. Mr. Crampton stands for this second kind of life.

Mr. Crampton and his wife were a miserable married couple. Because of the disparity of taste and temperament, she seeks judicial separation. To protect her children from the tyranny of her husband, she left her husband and began to live in Madeira with her three children. She even changes her name from Mrs. Crampton to Mrs. Clandon. She also changes the names of her two daughters Sophronia to Gloria and Dorothea to Dolly, She teaches her children her own ideals. But after a long gap of eighteen years when she meets her husband, her character begins to change. Now she wants feelings from her husband. Mr. Crampton, on the other hand, has passed through a process of moral regeneration after his separation from his wife and children. So, at last they get reconciled. Through their reconciliation, Shaw shows that family life should not be dissolved and it must be based on wisdom and understanding, not emotion.

In You Never Can Tell, the waiter is the mouthpiece of Shaw. He says, “Matrimony requires consideration and judgement, but not emotion.” After Valentine’s engagement to Gloria, he tastes the bitterness of a married man because he has no partner in the dance. The waiter then encourages Valentine not to be depressed and delivers the message of the drama. The message is that young men and women at the point of marrying regard marriage as a source of dread but after all marriages are not so unhappy and uncomfortable as they think. Marriages create a paradise on earth by producing happiness and comfort to both the husband and the wife. It is only in a few cases that marriages prove unhappy. But this does not mean that marriage should be condemned indiscriminately.