“It is expedient that one woman die for the people”: Shaw’s Saint Joan and O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman as Irish Female Martyrdom Plays
Published in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 2026.
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Abstract
This article compares the two 1923 plays through the plot of martyrdom as a discourse of contestation. The audience is faced with a female character undergoing a process of martyrdom—Joan of Arc and Minnie Powell—while the playwrights use them and the backgrounds and themes of the plays to discuss armed nationalism, class issues, and the active nature of women’s utopian beliefs. There are, however, marked differences between the two plays as femininity defines the character of Minnie while the lack of it defines that of Joan, and as The Shadow of a Gunmanis definitely rooted in an Irish context while Saint Joandistances itself from it to the point where it is rarely defined as an Irish play. Because, in part, of the similarities between O’Casey and Shaw as much as because of their “Irishness,” their staging of the plot of martyrdom as a spectacle is a way to subvert the hegemonic discourse of the nation-in-creation as regards to the place of women in it. Joan and Minnie come to represent the subalterns of their society and try, unsuccessfully, to make themselves heard by the ones who could change the established order—the audience.