This is an extract from my Guide to An Inspector Calls
There is about a 1 in 4 chance of Sheila being the exam question in any one year. More, if you count questions like ‘How does Priestley present the younger generation?’
Sheila in Act One
There are three themes affecting Sheila in the play. Her connection to The Inspector and the supernatural, her role in providing a feminist perspective, and her promotion of The Inspector’s socialist message.
1945 is a very early moment in history for Priestley to be taking a feminist perspective. However, it is women voters who are going to make the difference in electing a Labour government and rejecting the capitalist society they have grown up in. To encourage this, Priestley constructs Sheila so that we can understand why even she, a rich, privileged, upper class woman, would wish to reject the capitalist upbringing she has had.
In terms of the morality play, Sheila’s sin of vanity is no worse than any of the other ‘deadly sins’. However, when looked at through the lens of socialism, Sheila’s sin is probably worse than any of the other characters. This is not the conventional view, which sees Sheila as the least guilty character.
In a socialist society, everyone receives a fair wage for their work. This is most true for Eva when she works at Milwards. Although Birling had her sacked from his factory, her job there would have been noisy, repetitive, difficult and hazardous. In contrast, Milwards is clearly a high class store, with a far better working environment and one which will be far more sociable. Losing this job is far more of a loss than at Birling’s factory – we can guess that there might only be 100 such jobs at Milwards, but there would probably be over 1000 working at each of Birlings and Crofts.
We can confidently say that losing the Milwards job was far worse for Eva than being sacked by Birling. Without this moment, Eva would never have had to consider prostitution.
How does Priestley Make us Sympathetic to Sheila?
The first thing Priestley does with us with Sheila is introduce us to a moment of doubt, and we can see that all is not well in her relationship with Gerald. The stage directions reveal that Sheila is caught in two minds, “half serious, half playful”. She is “serious” because she suspects Gerald has been unfaithful. She is “playful” because she still sees it as her role to put up with this, and act flirtatiously in order to be a good prospect for marriage.
This is the heart of the feminist conflict. In a patriarchal society, Sheila is completely dependent on men. The best life she can create for herself is to marry as well as she can – she needs someone loving, handsome, wealthy and well placed in the social hierarchy. With no way of earning her own income, which of these items on her list is most important, and which is most easy to compromise?
Priestley uses this dilemma to create conflict in Sheila’s mind. At the very moment that Gerald is going to bring out the engagement ring, Sheila brings up the events of “last summer”. Now this is quite a brave thing to do because Gerald might choose to break the engagement off, fearful that his guilty secret will come out. When he talks about being “busy” with “business” she pushes the point: “yes, that’s what you say.” It’s letting him know that she suspects him, but she is not demanding that he tells the truth. Sheila here is her mother’s daughter, speaking in code. She raises this at a family meal, as though to warn Gerald that he can’t afford for his affairs to become public knowledge.
Will Sheila Allow Gerald to Have Affairs?
Her mother has clearly trained her to accept this: “when you’re married you realise that men with important work to do sometimes have to spend nearly all their time and energy on their business.” However, Priestley also escalates the conflict here. If we focus on “married” we can see this as a more dramatic warning from Sybil to her daughter. Once Sheila is “married” to Gerald, his behaviour is likely to be even worse, with more periods away from her. From a feminist perspective, Priestley is showing that Gerald only has a motive to behave well towards Sheila while he is wooing her, as she can always refuse his offer of engagement. Once married, however, she may have too much to lose, and he won’t have to work so hard to ensure her happiness.
You might argue that Mrs Birling is only talking about “business”, not her husband’s affairs. However, the phrase “just as I did” strongly suggests that it is not work that took Birling away, but affairs. If it were work, she would say ‘just as I have’. After all, Birling’s work has only grown more successful, and he would have a greater need to travel now than he did earlier in their marriage. Instead, his absences are far less, because he is older, and much less inclined to have affairs now.
Sheila decides to take the more risky role than her mother, still half flirtatiously, to call Gerald’s bluff: “you be careful.” One way of reading this is as a warning not to take her for granted with further absences once they are married. A more cynical interpretation is that she is only warning him to be discrete, to be “careful” that Sheila does not find out about his affairs.
How Likely is it that Sheila Knows Gerald has had an Affair of Affairs?
Eric’s reaction to Gerald saying “Oh – I will” be careful, is a sudden “guffaw”. Now many readers take this to simply signify that Eric is drunk. He is clearly suggesting that there is very little chance that Gerald is going to be “careful”. This further suggests that Gerald hasn’t just had a single affair. He is maybe well known for it, for Eric to find out about it, and to be so dismissive of the possibility of Gerald being “careful”. This strongly suggests that Sheila also knows he is having affairs, that this is simply a pattern of behaviour he won’t break. We can see her warning then as the need to be discrete, rather than an expectation that he will stop.
So, Sheila is clearly struggling with the morality of the time, this accepted idea that women would simply have to put up with their rich and powerful husbands having affairs when they wanted. The emancipated women of 1945 would see Sheila’s dilemma, and also recognise that they would not have to make the same compromise. However, for upper class women, the problem would in fact be the same. Even more importantly, the pressures after 1918, with nearly one million British men killed, would have meant there was far more pressure on women to accept their husbands having affairs. Put simply, there were far more women than men, and they could dictate more of their own terms. There were over 380,000 military deaths of UK combatants in The Second World War, and women would again feel this conflict between marrying for love, or for economic security.
Priestley dramatizes the conflict further by presenting it in capitalist terms. He makes Birling describe Sheila’s marriage as a business alliance, where “Crofts and Birlings are no longer competing but are working together”. Sybil objects to this in a telling way. She doesn’t tell Birling that he is wrong to view the marriage in capitalist terms. Instead, she advises him, “I don't think you ought to talk business on an occasion like this.” Here she simply means it is too unromantic to mention the truth at their engagement – it should remain unspoken because it is unromantic, not because it is untrue.
Sheila’s reply is unusually incoherent, “All wrong.” This is a sentence without a verb, not a proper sentence. It is as though she can’t find the words to express what is wrong with Birling’s view. This is again because, intellectually, she knows it is true. Her marriage is simply making the best economic match that she can. This only happens because the patriarchal society forces her to make this compromise.
Sheila is her Father’s Property
Both a feminist and socialist perspective will see Sheila as a possession of her father. She could find her own way in life up to a point. She has not been to university, unlike Eric. She will only have been educated in ways which make her attractive to upper class men. She’ll have learned to manage a housekeeper, a cook, a maid or two, but she won’t have been prepared in any way for marrying someone socially inferior, without serving staff. Although she could do it, like so many of the women in her 1945 audience, it is totally outside her experience.
It is even more difficult for her to imagine this other life because of the way Birling treats her. He describes her in front of Gerald, “She'll make you happy” as though that is what she has been brought up to do.
When Birling describes the marriage, he says “Sheila’s a lucky girl – and I think you're a pretty fortunate young man too, Gerald.” He clearly sees Sheila as more lucky than Gerald. She should therefore be more grateful at the marriage than Gerald is. If he were talking about love, then he wouldn’t describe Gerald as being “pretty fortunate”, he would say Gerald was very fortunate, because Sheila has so much love for him. However, he is thinking in purely financial terms, so yes, Sheila is “lucky” because Crofts is bigger than Birling is, but Gerald is also lucky because there is going to be an alliance with a large, though not as large, company. That’s why he is only “pretty fortunate”.
This puts Sheila in a really difficult position. She appears clearly to love Gerald, and she also realises that it is somehow her family duty as a daughter to go along with this match, because it’s such a fortunate one for the fortunes of the family.
However, when she proposes a toast, she decides that actually she should focus just on Gerald. And she wants to emphasise her personal connection and love for him: “I drink to you Gerald.”
The conversation between them next feels slightly ominous. Instead of saying he’s going to make her as happy as she deserves to be, he says “I hope I can make you as happy as you deserve to be,” already introducing doubt, perhaps self-doubt. Perhaps he does not believe he can remain faithful to her.
Again she has to hide her true feelings. One way of reading this is that she sees Gerald’s words as a real mark of love, to make her happy, and that’s why she warns, “I’ll start weeping”. Alternatively, we can see an underlying tension here. Sheila might realise that he knows he can’t be faithful to her, and the “weeping” then becomes an acknowledgement that he is offering a weak kind of love.
Sheila Can’t Escape Capitalism and the Social Hierarchy
Priestley presents Sheila at her most childish when she receives the engagement ring, calling her parents “mummy” and “daddy”. Priestley does this because he makes her most fixated on wealth at this stage: he implies that the love of wealth is a childish desire we should resist as we become adult.
She asks “Is it the one you wanted me to have?” perhaps suggesting that it was expensive – her question is then asking if he could afford it. Her excitement therefore isn’t about being engaged, it’s about receiving this particular, expensive ring. We can also see that she treats it as more important than Gerald, who she kisses “hastily”. We then watch her on stage, putting on the ring “admiringly”, and she expresses more love for it than she has for Gerald: “I'll never let it go out of my sight for an instant.” Indeed, she might be making a point that, while Gerald will no doubt leave her frequently for “business”, the ring can be relied on to be utterly faithful. The ring is also a symbol of her financial security.
Her mother also takes the same view. Gerald himself is not important, it is what the ring symbolises which matters. This is why she immediately tries to take Sheila away, “I think Sheila and I had better go into the drawing room.” In this world, celebrating her new financial security, together as women, is far more important than Sheila showering Gerald with any affection.
It’s also revealing that Sheila calls the ring “a beauty”. Eva’s “Beauty” will be Sheila’s motive for having her sacked. This illustrates, from a feminist perspective, how upper-class women in particular are forced to pay for too much attention to their looks because that is the way they are going to attract a wealthy husband. This patriarchal society equates female beauty with wealth. Priestley takes that to its logical next step, when Eva can only exploit the financial value of her beauty through sex in exchange for financial security, however temporary.
Priestley makes this point more strongly when Sheila first hears of Eva’s death, which is why he makes her ask, was Eva “Pretty?” This is the primary way in which society has taught women to judge each other.
Sheila again picks up on Priestley’s feminist message when she attacks her father’s capitalist reasons for sacking Eva: “But these girls aren't cheap labour – they're people.” She is not simply protesting about capitalism, where people, workers are exploited by the rich, she’s picking on the fact that these women, or “girls”, so less than adults, and are now treated as less than people: “cheap labour”. And she emphasises that neither of these is correct: “They’re people”, not to be diminished as childlike and “girls”, and not to be diminished as a thing, “labour”, something that can be bought and sold.
This is exactly The Inspector’s message which Sheila has already learned: “sometimes if we tried to put ourselves in the place of these young women.” Notice that he picks up on Sheila’s objection to them as “girls” and calls them “women”, because he is carrying Priestley’s feminist message also. We might expect Sheila to simply go along with this.
The Patriarchal Society Corrupts all Women
Next Priestley returns to the feminist perspective, marrying it with the morality play, so we discover Sheila’s vanity. So as soon as Sheila hears that Eva was fired after a customer complaint, she asks “What did this girl look like?” This is a surprise. The incident happened a nearly two years ago, and Eva was only in the post a couple of months. So, Sheila may only have seen her once. The only reason that she has remembered Eva’s looks is because she was so attractive.
Here Priestley is suggesting that this patriarchal society has corrupted women – it makes all women vain, because it is the only way they can maintain their value in a society which places so much worth on appearance. For young, rich women like Sheila, the hierarchy isn’t just about wealth, they must be attractive to maintain that wealth through marriage.
This is why Sheila turns on Eva. Because Eva is more attractive than her. We can also look at this in simple capitalist terms. Eva is an economic threat to Sheila, because she is more attractive than Sheila. Readers might think this is a step too far, but consider this – Eva does replace Sheila in Gerald’s affections, even if only for a few months. She is also able to marry Eric, as he proposes to her. It is her decision not to accept this proposal.
Sheila is the Most Honest Character
Priestley decides to make Sheila unique amongst all the other characters, because she is the only one who attempts to be honest. Her father first claims he can’t remember who Eva Smith was. Her mother will do the same. Gerald denied that he had had an affair with Daisy Renton, then pretended that he had simply wanted to “help” her, rather than taking on his friends lodging for the express purpose of installing a mistress. Mrs Birling likewise denies having done anything wrong and also initially denies having met Eva. Eric appears to be honest, but crucially says he can’t remember what happened that night he forced himself into Eva’s flat, leaving it open for us to assume that he has probably raped her. But this is not something he will admit, even to himself.
In contrast, Sheila admits that she persuaded, or was going to persuade her mother to close their “account” and that she had “been in a bad temper”. She therefore admits she did not have a proper reason for getting Eva sacked. But, as she says, “at least, I’m trying to tell the truth.” This allows us to think, if any character can change, it’s going to be Sheila.
She uses this honesty to ask Gerald to admit to his affairs, “I expect you’ve done things you’re ashamed of too.” Notice the plural. Because he is an upper-class man, Sheila does not imagine a single thing he has done which is shameful. If he has had an affair, she probably thinks this is only one in a pattern of behaviour.
Gerald is incredibly reluctant to reveal his affair in front of Sheila, asking if they can “leave it at that”. However, Sheila’s questioning almost suggests that she will be relieved if he has only had the one affair: “Were you seeing her last spring and summer”? If we emphasise “and” it could show her expectation that he would have had affairs with different women, changing them as often as the seasons. Similarly, if we emphasise “her” we can see her checking that there is only one “girl”.
Priestley Focuses on Eva and Sheila Because he has a Feminist Message
From a feminist perspective, Priestley would be highlighting the awful compromise women have to make in their marriages, in order to achieve financial independence. It’s interesting that, in recalling the incident where she got Eva sacked, Sheila uses the very language that her mother uses several times later in the play: “this girl had been very impertinent”.
Impertinence means rudeness towards people entitled to (or who believe they are entitled to) respect. Sheila clearly felt at this point that she was entitled to respect, as a wealthy woman. However, perhaps what makes her so vindictive, is that she is not wealthy in her own right. Her power is only borrowed from the fact that her mother is a customer, and from the fact that her father is “well known in the town” as an influential man.
If she, Eva, had “been some miserable plain little creature, I don’t suppose I’d have done it.” So, looking at the play as a morality play, we can see that Eva has been treated so poorly because of Sheila’s vanity. However, from a feminist perspective, we see that that vanity is only so important because it’s the only way that Sheila can make herself marketable to attractive, rich men. This is what she means by “looked as if she could take care of herself.”
Priestley emphasises the theme of the morality play when he The Inspector points out that her sin is actually envy: she is “jealous of” Eva’s looks. However, he links the morality play, not to Christianity, but to capitalism and feminism: “so you used the power you had as a daughter of a good customer and also of a man well known in the town, to punish the girl”. This “power” is clearly linked to the financial, capitalist power of her parents here. However, notice how The Inspector places the most important power relationship first, her power only comes “as a daughter”. Priestley is highlighting that society gives her no real power as a woman, she is totally subservient to her parents. So, it is no surprise that Sheila mirrors this relationship, making Eva totally subservient to her.
From the feminist perspective, Priestley is asking us as an audience just how many mistresses Gerald could have before we would review Sheila’s marriage to Gerald as being completely unacceptable.
Gerald simply wants to keep the affair secret from The Inspector. This changes Sheila’s behaviour. She becomes hysterical, which will happen quite a few times in the play. Priestley might do this to show that The Inspector is having such a profound effect on her. But, another way of looking at it is to think that, it first happened here. What seems to have had this profound effect is realising that she has to marry someone who is deeply unfaithful.
The Inspector is Priestley’s Proxy. Sheila is The Inspector’s Proxy.
Priestley ends Act 1 with Sheila having replaced The Inspector, who is off stage. Priestley wants us to see her growing link to The Inspector. She warns Gerald, “We haven't much time”, which The Inspector will repeat later in the play.
She also begins to sense the future more clearly, “And I hate to think how much he knows that we don't know yet. You'll see. You'll see.” This repetition emphasises Priestley’s message, that they must all “see” what they have done, and learn from it. However, even in this act, Priestley suggests that they probably won’t. He undermines her with the stage direction, “laughs rather hysterically”, so that we don’t trust her judgement or, if we do, we don’t trust her ability to be rational once she has learned The Inspector’s lesson.
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