The short stories can be comprehended as the modern-day written version of tales rendering the folktales that are mostly written with many moral insights and cultural values. Allan H. Pasco, a distinguished professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, defines a short story as short, literary prose fiction, open to any topic or material, but the deciding factor is usually not the presence or absence of a saint or supernatural events, but rather the artistry in the creation of a reality whose existence depends primarily upon the text in question, which thrived from the late nineteenth-century onwards. Short stories like fables and parables are often allegorical in nature, which is an extended metaphor implying something beyond literal. ; The Black Girl in Search of God; is such kind of a well-known allegorical short story by the eminent writer George Bernard Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, was famous for his wits and sly humor and delighted in shaking up the social conservatism of early twentieth-century Britain. He produced several works of vigorous prose, which were literary, classical, and had biblical allusions. His works are a commentary on moral, social, and artistic issues. Bernard Shaw generally wrote about socialism based on equality and justice and played a major role in revolutionizing comedic drama. Pygmalion was certainly his comedic masterpiece performed in 1913. Nonetheless, he decided to write a story deviating from his ordinary course of writing a play, as a playwright, as he has mentioned in his Preface to 'The Black Girl in Search of God'. He believes that 'all truths are divinely inspired' and in fact, he was inspired to write the story. He wrote the story within the setting of African colonization in 1932 as he was one of the Europeans who had a firsthand experience of the brutalities that the natives had to go through.
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The question of whether there exists a God or not was dealt with from the time humans started to evolve and is still a relevant topic to date. Most of the quests that are undertaken in the search for God, however, are concerned with the perspective of the Christian ideology and its relation to the Bible. The reason was mainly because of the superior status that the Europeans had established all over the world with their ability to conquer the world and exert their power primarily based on religion as well racial ideology. In the name of achieving much more freedom, peace and equality they preached their version of God everywhere in the world, converting millions of indigenous peoples into their religious spectrum with the effort of the missionaries, an indirect type of rule to control and colonize the countries. The Europeans through this process of Christianization had got both spiritual as well as secular benefits, thus using Christianity as a potent weapon for European imperialism. The missionaries had created many great impacts on the indigenous people of colonial Africa who were subjected to cultural, political, and religious change. It has been assumed that Christianity played a key role in colonial efforts, allowing Christian missionaries to 'colonize the conscience and consciousness' of Africans, instilling the belief that any non-Christian spiritual ideas are inferior to Christianity, echoing the colonial hierarchical view of culture.
The short story ‘The Black Girl in Search of God’ is a side-splitting comical allegory of a ‘black girl’ which is on the surface a religious fable. It was written by Shaw when he was in a remote coastal village called Knysna, South Africa. The book The Black Girl in Search of God And Some Lesser Tales was published in 1932 and included the short story of the black girl along with the collection of some ‘other lesser tales’. An essential message that Shaw believes and puts forward through the story is that - 'all are equal in the sight of God.' Being an active feminist in his life, Shaw chose a 'black girl' as his protagonist maybe because the most disrespected and neglected is the black woman and he gave a voice to her. He was an immense supporter of women's rights and in 1891 wrote; 'Unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. It is false to say that woman is now directly the slave of man: she is the immediate slave of duty; and as man`s path to freedom is strewn with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on, so much hers be.
Set against the background of colonialism in Africa in the early twentieth century, the black girl is converted to Christianity by Christian missionaries. As the black girl questioned about ‘the God’, the missionary, who converted her, said that 'He has said 'Seek and ye shall find me'. She takes those lines literally and then embarks upon a spiritual journey of the soul in search of God. Along the way through her adventures in a forest, she meets several representations of God and secular authorities, like ‘The Caravan of the Curious’ who are a group of white colonial party, the god of Moses, the God of Job, Micah, Ecclesiastes, Saint Peter, a scientific behaviorist named Pavlov, Mohammed and Jesus Christ too that she meets twice. Most of these versions disgust and appall her with their hopelessly outdated embodiments of deity. The black girl finally meets an old man in his amateurish garden and asks the girl to cultivate the land along with him to His glory and he says that the best place to seek God is in a garden. In the end, an Irishman comes into the garden who claims to be a socialist. The old man asks the girl to marry him and she bears his children making her forget about her thirst for knowledge. In his work ‘The Black Girl’ and some lesser quests: 1932-1934 Leon Hugo comments about ‘The Black Girl’ that this short story is a sport in Shaw`s work; there is nothing else like it, no religious or another fable, no parable, no black or other girl setting out on any picaresque adventure, anywhere.
The old man that the girl finally meets is Voltaire and Shaw expresses Voltaire's philosophical concept of Deism. Deism was a mode of religious thought that dominated during the Europe-wide intellectual movement named the Enlightenment which had gained great currency in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was practically based on the supremacy of human reason. The deists are frequently represented as the champions of freedom that had led to the modern world, existing in opposition to the conservative establishment. Voltaire's thoughts on deism can be seen in his works such as Traite sur la Tolerance, the Dictionary Philosophique, and Letters Philosophiques. He believed that if God did not exist, God must be invented. He criticized the Catholic Church's doctrines for including superstitions and attacking the faith in a Christian God. For him, Man could perceive God through the use of his human reason. This cultivation of one's religion with one's own 'reason' is evident in his book Candide.
The other concept that Shaw puts forward through the story is that of the ‘Creative evolution’. He calls it the ‘The Religion of the Future’ in his play Back to Methuselah. Going against the theory of natural selection by Darwin, Shaw was influenced by Lamarck, a French naturalist, and his answer to the question of what caused biological variations. The answer was that it was caused by the effects of the environment. Lamarck found three truths within the zoological philosophy: the species vary under changing external influences; there is a fundamental unity in the animal world; and there is a progressive and perpetual development. Thus for Shaw, in the struggle for existence, the fittest survive not because of their reason luck or chance but survive by reason of their success which they achieve by undergoing the external pressure of the environment. For him, the moral standards and the religious standards that existed during his time were too narrow and binding, and he received a lot of criticism from the outside. The black girl in the short story refused to just survive under the rules and doctrines spit out by minority white settlers. Under the external pressures of human beings, animals, and nature, the black girl emerges as a champion of Shavian thoughts.
Another focal point that Shaw has put forward in the story is the concern for the colonial 'subject' as well as the concern for the female 'subjects' both through the aspect of colonialism and feminism. Thus the 'subaltern' subjects are at the center of this quest for God. The European imperialists had succeeded in upbringing a connection between religion, the 'other', and female sexuality. Therefore the short story can be said to be having three layers. The various astounding illustrations of the black girl by John Farleigh also have created a great impact on creating this subaltern subject.
This dissertation attempts to analyze the short story 'The Black Girl in Search of God' as a sardonic allegory and how the concepts of feminism and colonialism can be traced throughout the short story and also concerns Bernard Shaw's exposure to colonialism while he was in South Africa. The first chapter titled 'Sardonic Allegory and intertextualities' tries to determine how the story is sardonic in nature, brings to light the intertextualities of the short story with a few classics, and finally compares and contrasts the fable to that of Voltaire`s satirical book Candide. The second chapter, chapter would mainly focus on the subaltern elements in the story concerning colonialism and feminism which remains a double-layered vision in the story. And finally concludes how the black girl is a Shavian champion of religious freedom and feminist rights.
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