Write a Note on The Aptness and Significance of The Play Candida.

 

                

The text of candida as it originally appeared in plays pleasant and unpleasant dated 1895, has the descriptive sub-title, "A mystery", found in the autograph in longhand version that began on the 2nd October 1894, and completed on the seven December of the same year. The play is “A mystery" because many things in it remain a mystery to us. We fail to know their secret even when we use all our mental power at our command. Both the main and sub-titles are apt and suggestive, for they indicates its central theme. 

The play's title named after the central female character of a middle aged housewife. The naming indicates candida's singular importance in the play and since Shaw, in a sense, was a propagandist, it also indicates that Shaw is going to deal with 'the woman question"- a burning issue in the contemporary late Victorian society. The name candida has a special symbolic significance in this respect. In addition to this, as A.C. ward points out, when the play was first written its full title was Candida: A Mystery, and that mystery part also contributes an additional significance to the title. 

 

Candida is not only a faithful wife, she is also the strongest character in the paly, and is guided by common sense, not by emotion or passion, she takes the situation under her own control, brings the dispute of her husband and younger lover to an immediate end, and imposes her own will upon both men. Instead of the little woman reaching up towards the arm of  a strong man, We have the strong woman reaching down to pick up her chill. The patriarchal pattern of the morel household transformed to a matriarchal one due to candida’s latent aggressiveness exercised over the two men of her life. Candida is very similar to Ibsen’s A doll's house in its treatment of an intelligent women ,who wants to be emancipated from the rational bonds of marrig.but  whereas Nora begins her journey by leaving the house ,candida’s journey starts by staying at home. It is the lover who leaves the house with the "secret" in his heart which is supposed to constitute the "mystery" of the sub-title .

 

       The apparently weak and dependent poet is really far stronger in spirit than candida’s physical robust and self-assured husband. Although in the 'Auction scene' the husband offers his strength for candida's defence, she soon points out that his strength is rooted in her, and would be non-existent without womanly care and devotion. The poet on the contrary ,has spent all his life in spiritual loneliness and self-dependence ; and live quite well without the ministration of candida and anyone else .for  a brief time he was emotionally dazed by his glimpse of happiness that candida spends about her and the hope that  a romantic love for a woman could satisfy his deepest need. But candida's long speech at the end of the auction sconce reveals to march banks a life of domestic dependence and contentment which his lonely spirit would find imprisoning and disgusting. A poet / artist life is in his poetry /art - not  in a state of domestic bliss which includes peeling of onions, trimming of lamps tending of children. As an artist he is capable of renouncing personal happiness in the interest of some larger creative purpose.

 
The meaning and the significance of candida

 

The title of the play candida is very apt and appropriate, because it is the name of the central character who is the pivot of the story candida is the most important character. She is the wife of reverend James mayor morel, a clergyman of the Church of England, he is a socialist Christian .he dotes on his wife .this make Proserpine, his secretary remark:

 

                                  

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