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Aic eva and responsibility

Aic eva and responsibility

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How does Priestley use the character of Eva Smith to

present ideas about responsibility?

Eva Smith’s role in An Inspector Calls is absolutely central, and yet she remains

elusive, as she never appears on stage, but haunts the play from the moment the

Inspector arrives and announces that she committed suicide and died in ‘agony’.

The overall point is about society, and about social responsibility, so Eva Smith must

be generally representative of the poor and oppressed if she is to be Priestley’s tool

for presenting his message that society must be radically changed through the

transfer of power from individuals to the socialist state.

A key aspect of Eva Smith’s role is to provoke empathy. If the Birlings and Gerald,

and the audience, can be made to feel what she feels, to share in her suffering,

then they will be more ready to accept that they are responsible for her, and by

extension, for those like her, who lack power and wealth. If society is “one body”,

then naturally, any part of it that feels pain should make the rest of the body suffer

with it. Thus, Priestley begins the Inspector’s interrogations with an emphasis on the

pain of Eva Smith’s death. The word “agony” is crucial here, emphasising as it does

the intense suffering of her final hours. Priestley returns to this multiple times, with the

Inspector using phrases like “burnt her inside out”, or “she lies with a burnt-out inside

on a slab”. The way that the characters respond to this is an indication of how

prepared they are to accept responsibility. Eric and Sheila are clearly more shocked

right from the moment of hearing the news, with Eric exclaiming “My God”, and

Sheila “how horrible!”; the exclamation emphasising her shock. Birling, however, is

determined to keep cool, telling Eric to “keep quiet” and not to “get excited”. Both

of the elder Birlings repeatedly accuse their children of being “hysterical”, indicating

that they consider their reaction to be over-emotional. But emotion is precisely what

Priestley aims to create, so that the Birlings, Croft, and of course, the audience, can

put themselves in the position of the suffering poor. As the Inspector says, “it would

do us all a bit of good if sometimes we tried to put ourselves in the place of these

young women counting their pennies, in their dingy little back bedrooms”. Sheila,

the most ready to empathise and to accept responsibility, of course agrees.

Having shocked the Birlings, and the audience, with the graphic details of Eva

Smith’s death, Priestley aims to build sympathy for her so that she will be seen entirely

as an innocent victim of other people’s selfish actions. Thus the idea of responsibility

is focused entirely upon those with power and wealth, and focused upon the idea

that they should no longer have this power and wealth, and by implication, it should

be given over to a socialist government that will make wiser use of it. Eva’s role in the

strike is subtly misrepresented by Priestley in order to remove any possibility of blame

being attached to her actions. The Inspector says, for example, that Eva was fired

“for wanting twenty-five shillings a week instead of twenty-two and six”, but of

course, she was not fired for this - she was fired for organising a strike, an industrial

act of war which could have wrecked Mr Birling’s business. But as Priestley wants Eva

to be an innocent victim, and for all of the responsibility to rest with the Birlings and

Croft, he does not wish to dwell upon the idea that a worker might have

responsibilities to their employer.

In the case of Sheila, Priestley creates a situation where responsibility clearly

attaches to the one with wealth and power, and the accusation of the Inspector is

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very pointed. He leaves no doubt in the audience’s mind that Sheila acted entirely

out of selfish spite. She punished Eva just because she was “jealous” of her and

because she was in a “furious temper”. Sheila accepts full responsibility for what she

did, and evidently feels very guilty and determined to act differently. She becomes

the strongest voice amongst the Birlings in favour of the idea that they must change

their lives and adopt a new attitude towards the working classes, and she is furious

with her parents when they revert to complacency in Act Three, following the

discovery that the Inspector was not a police officer: “You began to learn

something. And now you've stopped. You're ready to go on in the same old way”.

Priestley uses Sheila to summarise the accusations of the Inspector, thus presenting

them in a way which attaches equal blame to all of their actions: “Father threw this

girl out because she asked for decent wages. I went and pushed her farther out,

right into the street, just because I was angry and she was pretty.” Once again, this is

a misrepresentation of Birling’s reasons for firing Eva, which presents her as an

innocent victim and Mr Birling as entirely unreasonable. It also places Sheila’s

obviously unjust action exactly on a level with her father’s. In making the defence of

business interests and acts of selfish spite entirely morally equal, Priestley is ensuring

that the audience attaches all responsibility to the Birlings and Croft, and none to

Eva.

Another way in which Priestley removes any responsibility from Eva herself is by

presenting her suicide as something which was done to her, rather than as

something she did herself, as if the Birlings poured the disinfectant down her throat.

The inspector initiates this idea of connections through anadiplosis: By repeating

“what happened to her afterwards” at the end of one clause and the beginning of

the next, the sentence structure itself cleverly emphasises how the content of these

statements is in inextricably connected and leads on from one another. This cleverly

suggests how each member of the Birlings, and Gerald played a part together in the

death of Eva Smith. Next, he memorably summarises this concept with the

metaphorical image of “A chain of events”. The concrete noun “chain” refers to an

object that embodies physical linking. Even more so that that however it connotes

heaviness and imprisonment perhaps in firing at the links between various “events”

involving the Birlings and Eva Smith could be what weighs down the entire family.

Furthermore, the words ‘chain’, ‘determined’ and ‘driven’, all present Eva’s actions

as being caused by external influences, not by her own free will. Priestley clearly

applies Marxist social determinism here, but very selectively. Eva is not to be blamed

for her actions, because they were ‘determined’ by factors outside her control, but

the Birlings are to be blamed, and no one can be blamed unless they have free will..

Priestley wants all of the responsibility to rest upon the Birlings and Croft, so they are

the only ones who are presented as being able to make free moral choices. They

are the ones who murdered Eva Smith’s unborn child. No responsibility whatever is to

be attached to the pregnant Eva who actually drank the disinfectant.

In conclusion, Priestley uses the character of Eva Smith to present responsibility as

something which rests entirely with those who have wealth and power. According to

Priestley, they are to blame for social ills, for the sufferings of the oppressed masses

whom she represents. Unless they accept this responsibility and support social

change, then they will be punished in ‘fire and blood and anguish’ - violent change

like that which had taken place in 1917 in Russia. The play’s first audience in Russia in

1945 would have applauded this message, as would many of those who watched it

for the first time in London in 1946, as the Labour Party introduced socialist reforms,

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How does Priestley use the character of Eva Smith to present ideas about responsibility? Eva Smith’s role in An Inspector Calls is absolutely central, and yet she remains elusive, as she never appears on stage, but haunts the play from the moment the Inspector arrives and announces that she committed suicide and died in ‘agony’. The overall point is about society, and about social responsibility, so Eva Smith must be generally representative of the poor and oppressed if she is to be Priestley’s tool for presenting his message that society must be radically changed through the transfer of power from individuals to the socialist state. A key aspect of Eva Smith’s role is to provoke empathy. If the Birlings and Gerald, and the audience, can be made to feel what she feels, to share in her suffering, then they will be more ready to accept that they are responsible for her, and by ex ...
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