When Gerald Croft offers his second proposal of the night to Sheila Birling - “Now – How about this ring?”, J. B. Priestley places her at a crossroads to make a big point about patriarchy. It is a daring move, and the question brings with it a hint of triumph. Having conceded much of his power to Sheila when caught cheating, once the family realises the Inspector’s visit might have been a strange trick, Gerald immediately seeks to redress the balance and brazenly asks for Sheila’s reassurance that she is going to behave herself and, in some ways, atone for the embarrassment she has caused him.
But she refuses him and, while a modern audience might feel happy about this, a contemporary 1940s audience might have been slower to rejoice. In marrying Gerald, Sheila would have accepted a life of mistrust and dissatisfaction. However, in breaking the engagement, Sheila also potentially ruins what might have been her last chance to secure any sort of marriage at all. Throughout An Inspector Calls, the audience witnesses how the ‘fat carcass’ of the patriarchy slowly crushes the life out of Eva Smith for asserting her independence, and the sheer folly of trying to do so. Despite their different statuses, Sheila was no different. They were equals as women for what little it was worth. United at the bottom of the heap.
The opening scene and stage directions suggest that Sheila has done well for herself even though her family is not securely upper class. Sheila is a ‘pretty girl in her early twenties, very pleased with life and rather excited.’ The fact that Priestley describes her as a ‘pretty girl’ suggests that he wants us think she is naïve and immature. It might also imply a kind of patronising kindness on Priestley’s part. He an eye for beauty that may well have informed his angelic depiction of Eva, so maybe he wanted to present Sheila in a good light while not making too much of her attractiveness, so that Eva’s beauty remained unrivalled.
Sheila is also presented as the classic society brood mare. Raised on an education that presumably favoured fashion over philosophy, Sheila will have been rigorously tutored in the art of marrying well so that she could make a well-to-do man respectable and provide him with sons. She certainly would not have enjoyed the public-school education Eric had simply because he was male, and Sybil’s upper-class background and Arthur’s money will have meant that Sheila would have been eligible to be ‘out in society’ as a debutante from the age of seventeen.
The debutante ritual flourished from 1780 and then fell out of fashion after the Labour victory in 1945 and was disbanded altogether by HM Queen Elizabeth in 1958. Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, Great Britain became the dominant power in the West, and the debutante culture spread outward from fashionable London to provincial cities in Britain and eventually to the colonies. The teenage daughters of the rich and powerful would be brought ‘out’ and flaunted in front of society’s most marriageable men in a season of extravagant parties, essentially for the purpose of being ‘selected’ as prospective wives. By today’s standards, this seems laughably sexist, but it was viewed as an important rite of passage in its heyday – involving being presented to royalty at Court - and was taken extremely seriously in the upper echelons of English society. Therefore, to only have just become engaged in her early twenties would suggest that there was something about Sheila (or the family) that prevented her from being a first choice. It might be that Sheila’s father’s trading roots were off-putting, or that merely being ‘a pretty girl’ was insufficient pedigree to give her any sort of tangible advantage. It is a possibility that Sheila’s application to become a ‘deb’ was not even approved, which might explain much of Sybil Birling’s overbearing and anxious attitude towards her children as well as making the audience wonder whether there was something wrong with Gerald.
Right from the beginning, Priestley puts the audience on alert that there is something ‘fishy’ about the engagement by hinting that things may not be as rose-tinted as the lighting effects suggest. Overall, the Birlings are seen to be trying too hard with Gerald, which suggests an uncomfortable note of desperation. Mr Birling is too eager to show off his success in front of his future son in law – even indiscreetly mentioning the prospect of a knighthood - and the surly attitude of Eric during Arthur’s speeches about being ‘a hard-headed man of business’ betrays the fact that this kind of overdone self-promotion was entirely typical of his father on social occasions. The entire opening scene is riddled with miscommunication and hints at underlying problems. Sheila is passive aggressive with Gerald about his lack of commitment and Gerald seems confused at the mention of his father’s port supplier which suggests that such matters are not important to him. Sybil does her best to steer her ‘portentous’ husband clear of etiquette blunders with little effect and Eric’s tipsy assertion that Sheila has a ‘rotten temper’ is hastily glazed over. Indeed, Sheila does seem rather vapid and unlikeable initially. Priestley describes her as ‘rather excited’ and the modifier implies a note of criticism – almost as if she is getting her hopes up to quickly and suggesting a lack of control in her personality that some men might find off-putting. So, in actual fact, the engagement is probably not as secure as it first appears, cleverly foreshadowing the arrival of the Inspector just in time to utterly ruin everything.
In creating the characters of Sheila, Sybil and Eva, J.B. Priestley underlines the magnitude of patriarchal injustice for women from all walks of society – from the lowest to the highest born. Even in an age of massive progress, millennia of inequality meant that women’s rights were still one of the last issues on the agenda for change in 1912 and it suited the men to keep it that way. An assertive woman was a threat and a little bit too much like hard work when there was so much more important stuff to focus on. Not having to worry about interference by females was as good a reason as any not to mess with the system. It simply wasn’t a problem, so why make it one? Priestley was apparently fascinated by circularity and, making the play’s ending mirror the beginning, alludes to his belief that change in society could only be achieved by a force of unprecedented magnitude – like two massive world wars. Looking beyond the final curtain, Priestley makes the point, through Sheila’s dizzyingly swift emancipation, about the futility of early 20th century women trying to make a stand as individuals. Sheila’s rebellion would not change society one iota, Priestley believed, which is possibly why he ensures that her parents’ views dominate the end of the play far more than hers do.
It is therefore entirely possible that Priestley believed Sheila’s final refusal of Gerald was a mistake that she would personally come to regret. Her name is derived from the Latin ‘Cecelia’ which means ‘blind’ which links her character to saintliness and martyrdom. St. Cecelia was martyred for refusing to worship Roman Gods. Instead, she remained true to her Christian faith in a way that parallels Sheila’s rather incredible decision to suddenly reject capitalism despite years of conditioning as a rich, upper middle-class woman. The Inspector’s final speech (that apparently inspires Sheila to break things off with Gerald for good) is an allusion to the actions of a martyr who is too naïve and unprepared to understand the true consequences of her actions and, frustratingly, Priestley ends the play before we can assess whether she actually does have the courage of her convictions. Who is to say, for example, that Sheila wasn’t bullied into changing her mind yet again by her father once the Inspector was gone? Her readiness to rebel and accede to the Inspector’s persuasiveness as a dominant male could be seen as a bit unconvincing in hindsight, particularly when we consider that she could be just as easily exploited by the reverse reasoning of other powerful men in her life who – literally - had a huge amount invested in her doing what they wanted.
So, given her age and status in society, the audience might have considered it utter lunacy on Sheila’s part to be so high-minded in refusing Gerald. Even with the very best reasons to save herself from the disappointment of an unstable marriage, it was neither prudent nor realistic for any woman of the time to allow herself the luxury of waiting for the right ‘fairy prince’ to come along and transport her to a life of mutual bliss and fulfilment. In 1912, emancipation (of a sort), was still six, war-torn years of conflict away, universal suffrage would not become a complete reality until 1928 and in the UK, marriage bars – where a woman would have her employment terminated on marriage – existed in some professional sectors right up until the 1970s. The road to freedom of choice for women like Sheila would long outrun her – even without the indignity of being considered an unmarriageable ‘old maid’ in society by the age of thirty. Turning down a member of the aristocracy, even a thoroughly dishonest and selfish one, probably meant social death for Sheila to be washed down like cold bleach with a life of ‘good deeds’ and enduring the whispered gossip of guests at her parents’ parties.
The wise choice probably would have been to settle for Gerald as the lesser of two unavoidable evils. The decision to refuse him lacked savvy and the first audiences would have felt this keenly. There was more than one potential reason why Sybil Birling was so ready to overlook Gerald’s lack of morality, and it was not necessarily because she didn’t care for her daughter. On the contrary, it was probably because she did.
As previously noted, this was several years before the First World War would decimate a whole generation of men which meant that a whole generation of women were destined never to marry at all. Eric and Gerald, as educated men, would have been among those with the lowest chance of survival in the trenches. As officers, they would have been leading their battalions from the front and were consequently, often among the first to die when the order came to go ‘over the top’. So, even if she had accepted Gerald’s proposal, odds on the war would have left Sheila widowed within a matter of a few years. But at least by then she would have been respectably married – secure financially and socially - and a sensible girl might have done well to consider the ramifications of life in a patriarchy for women who chose to try and live life on their own terms.
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