Arrested Development: Utopian Desires, Designs and Deferrals in Man and Superman and John Bull’s Other Island

This chapter draws on queer theories of futurity and the history of British socialism to explore Shaw’s radical ambivalence about Irishness and about utopian desire – which were, for him, intimately linked. Shaw’s repudiation of socialist praxis in favor of reproductive futurism in Man and Superman masks his shame about the anti-productivity associated with Irishness. Shaw’s treatment of Ireland and Irishness in Man and Superman, nevertheless, becomes an outlet for his deep discomfort with the developmental logic undergirding both evolutionary theory and capitalism. Shaw recognised the Ireland depicted by the Irish Players during their London visits in 1903 and 1904 as a place outside of developmental logic, in which Shaw might re-present the utopian desires he had rejected after the Avenue Theatre catastrophe. By excavating the role that Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City project once played in John Bull’s construction, this chapter shows how deeply bound up Shaw’s first Irish play was with the socialist dream of land nationalization and with William Morris’s faith in design. Through a reading of Father Keegan, this chapter argues that the play’s failure to develop a coherent plot helps preserve the hope that Ireland might yet become the site of radical change.