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Hostages of Heartbreak: The Women of Heartbreak House

Poor Captain Shotover! Emotionally poked and prodded by the demon and vampire women in Shaw's Heartbreak House,1 the old Captain's only remaining solace is his seventh degree of concentration the rum bottle. As the patriarch of his dysfunctional family, Shotover is often considered the darling of this play because of the wonderfully quirky quips that turn him from the fool to the sage by the time the curtain drops. Similarly, Shotover' s curious likeness to Shaw places this character in a privileged position, for we get the feeling that through Shotover, Shaw himself is presiding over the play. While these things may be true, they do not explain Shotover' s hold over all the women in this play. In our need to love Shaw, and by extension Shotover, have we simply neglected to see the more ominous, paternal desolation that lies at the heart of the heartbreak in this play? While critics have contended that Captain Shotover is a wise, rum-soaked, doddering, and harmless old man, hen-pecked by the wiles of the dangerous women in the play, I believe a reevaluation of Shotover is in order. Indeed, if we refrain from the tendency to lionize Shotover and instead scrutinize his actions, we see that he is the most dangerous and destructive force of Heartbreak House, and his manipulative emotional games have kept all the women hostage to his desperate emotional needs. How can this feeble, cantankerous octogenarian be the root of all evil? Surely, it is the women of this play who are evil or so many critics have contended in their analyses of Heartbreak House. A. M. Gibbs, for example, in his book Heartbreak House: Preludes to Apocalypse2 claims that "[t]he main paradigm of female-male relations in Heartbreak House is a pattern of female domination, involving mutual flirtation and sexual negotiation between male and female figures followed by exposure, humiliation and rejection of the male, and his reduction to abject states of frustration and childishness" (33-34). It would seem that the males (including Shotover)