The masculine individualist at the center of Heartbreak House

In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon suggests that at the center of the American “frontier myth” is the character of the “rugged” individualist: the cowboy who “embodied [frontier] life;” the “heroically masculine” ‘wild rough-rider of the plains’ (14-15). For Cronon this figure is largely American, but he notes that the image of the frontier nonetheless “had its European antecedents and parallels” (10). Perhaps such a parallel can be found in images of exploration—in the masculine heroes of the “open ocean.” In Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” for example, the ever-receding horizon is the sailor’s open frontier. “All experience” Ulysses declares, “is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move” (sic).

This romanticization of the open frontier also went hand-in-hand, according to Cronon, with a “distaste for modernity.” “Civilization” was what “contaminated its inhabitants and absorbed them into the faceless, collective, contemptible life of the crowd.” And “the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the feminizing tendencies of civilization” (14). We see intimations of this connection in “Ulysses,” too, where civilization is a necessity, but one that simultaneously robs the king of the struggle and the seeking that make him glorious and free. To Telemachus go the “comforts and seductions of civilized life,” as he is fit

            [. . .] by slow prudence to make mild

            A rugged people, and through soft degrees

            Subdue them to the useful and the good.

            Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

            Of common duties, decent not to fail

            In offices of tenderness [. . .]

But for the “heroic” Ulysses, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”

One of the Major characters of Heartbreak House, Captain Shotover, is similarly an explorer and an individualist, poised against the “seductions” of civilization. His house is shaped like the ships he once commanded, but it is populated by women, who are constantly lulling the men of the play to sleep. Ellie stands for the comforts of money and civilization. “Old-fashioned people,” she declares, “think you can have a soul without money,” but she knows better. Her soul “eats,” and eats “[. . .] a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with” (91). And she attempts to lure the Captain from his striving:

ELLIE. [. . .] Dream. I like you to dream. You must never be in the real world when we talk together.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist or too weak. [. . .] I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten. (94)

The Captain’s desires are those of Ulysses, who yearns “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And what the play proposes as a solution to the crisis of modernity is the frontier—the dangers and glories of the open ocean. We see this first in the exchange between Hector and the Captain, in which Hector demands answers:

            HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. [. . .]

HECTOR. Well, I dont mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. [. . .] Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman. [. . .] Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned. (114)

“Tis not too late,” the play seems to be crying with Ulysses, “to seek a newer world.” And this world is one driven by the heroic masculine individualist, who will guide those “that hoard, and sleep, and feed” (Ulysses’ image of his home) to a “glorious” new beginning (Hesione’s word for the partial destruction of their home). As we learn at the end of the play, Ellie, who has flirted throughout with Mangan (the capitalist), and Hector (the dreamer), ultimately decides to marry Captain Shotover. She tells the gathering, “I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father” (108). Thus the play takes up those same images that Cronon describes, and it does so to romanticize a kind of political revolution. Political revolution in Heartbreak House becomes, in other words, something founded upon the myths of exploration, open land, and a masculine individual for whom the world is there for the taking.

[I should mention that Shaw likes to omit things like apostrophes. I didn't put "sic" every time he does this. . .]