Bernard Shaw wrote his dramas, particularly "Man and Superman," in
             response to the idea that drama should merely entertain or to portray human
             characters as they seem to be in conventional life. "Man and Superman"
             transgresses conventional narrative structures of Victorian drama. It
             details the courtship of John Tanner as a young, angry bachelor and Ann as
             a modern woman who tricks him into becoming her guardian and then her
             husband. This could have been the plot of a comedy, but Shaw reformulates
             it into a philosophical expose. Shaw does this most blatantly in the
             play's dream sequences, when he interpolates an exchange between the two
             actors portraying the romantic protagonists as Don Juan and his consort in
             hell. Don Juan embodies the Superman' for Shaw across history because the
             Don defied conventional social morality. He obeyed the life force or the
             natural instincts present in all human beings for sexual reproduction and
             also excelled in his defiance of social and sexual conventions.
             However, the philosophical connection between Don Juan and Tanner is
             not seamless. Tanner attempts to avoid marriage to sustain his own life
             force. Ann is cleverer. She realizes she cannot simply ignore societal
             dictates. Instead, she uses them to her own advantage, and turns them into
             vehicles of her own desires. She uses Tanner's supposed guardianship of
             her as a way to satisfy her own needs and her own striving to exercise the
             female element of the life force and to claim him as her consort. Although
             Shaw's philosophy rests upon a belief in the difference between the sexes,
             his philosophy is thus not necessarily anti-feminist or at least anti-
             female. Man is portrayed as the intellectual and mental center of the
             world, the creator of theories from the head. However, women are seen as
             the far more powerful and primal source of the animating life force, from
             which all the...