Don Juan (Allegory)
At its core, Man and Superman is an allegorical retelling of the famous "Don Juan" legend. In particular, an allegorical reading can be found in Tanner's extended dream sequence during Act Three. The dream is, on the surface, a reenactment of the original tale, featuring characters such as Don Juan himself and Ana de Ulloa. However, Shaw makes sure using his stage directions that the resemblances between these characters and the play's twentieth-century British characters are immediately visible. Therefore, the Don Juan story becomes a lens through which to view the romance of Jack Tanner and Ann Whitefield. The allegory is primarily useful as a way to point out contrasts between the two stories' settings. Nowadays, Shaw points out, women are far more powerful and willful than in previous generations, and men like Tanner, far from being the impulsive womanizers of the original story, are fiery carriers of the essential life-force.
Statues and portraits (Motif)
Before turning into a statue himself during Act Three, Roebuck Ramsden lives surrounded by the likenesses of famous, mostly dead people. Shaw's stage directions in Act One list a few of the celebrities represented in Ramsden's study: they include the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the politician Richard Cobden, and the novelist George Eliot. These likenesses help set the scene for the audience, signaling that Ramsden is a man of intellect with money to spare on things like paintings and busts. At the same time, a closer look at the images tells in-the-know audience members something important about Ramsden himself. Most of his chosen celebrities were progressive or radical in their own time, but died well before the play takes place. Therefore, Ramsden's chosen decor tells us that he considers himself more open-minded than he actually is.
Boa Constrictor (Symbol)
In Jack Tanner's personal lexicon, boa constrictors symbolize marriage and, more specifically, marriage to Ann. Tanner believes that marriage inhibits freedom and, worse, prevents man from evolving into Superman. For this reason, he not only avoids it himself but urges Octavius to avoid it for the sake of his art and poetry. The boa constrictor draws on the Biblical association of women with snakes, as in the story of the Garden of Eden, where the snake convinces Eve to trick her husband into eating the forbidden fruit. Tanner's habit of comparing Ann to a boa constrictor gives some additional insights into his thoughts about his future wife, beyond the broad observation that she will keep him from doing as he likes: he sees Ann, and women generally, as vindictive actors, enjoying the misery and slow demise of their husbands. And, Tanner believes, women actually benefit from their husbands' misery, and prey on the men around them like predatory boa constrictors.
Wedding Ring (Symbol)
When Violet Robinson arrives at the Ramsden residence with news of her pregnancy, she is able to exert power over the other characters by wearing a wedding ring. In this play, then, the wedding ring is not only a symbol of marriage; it is a symbol of Violet's quiet power over her peers. The ring allows Violet to maintain a sense of moral superiority over others, since she can prove that her pregnancy is legitimate. It also gives her the much more potent tool of information: the others are so eager to know who Violet has married that she's able to manipulate them. The ring, then, serves a complex purpose in this play, since it both symbolizes Violet's power and serves as a reminder of that power to the characters themselves.
The Eye (allegory)
During Tanner's dream, Don Juan uses the human eye as an allegory for what he calls the "mind's eye," a developing tool of insight that allows people to grasp more abstract ideas of morality. This allegory is particularly clever because it hearkens back to Darwinism, a once-radical idea that the play's characters all accept as a given. Just as the human eye took hundreds of generations to develop and eventually gave way to a more fit and hearty generation of people, Don Juan argues, the internal, moral "eye" will form over the course of generations and eventually lead to the more morally and philosophically fit "superman."
Hell and Heaven (Symbol)
Tanner's dream includes a lengthy dialogue between the Devil, the statue, Ana, and Don Juan about the relative merits of heaven and hell. As in so many instances in this play, the line between the earthly and the celestial is blurry, so that their conversation appears to be at least in part about literal possibilities in the afterlife, though it primarily uses heaven and hell as symbols for different social and political orientations. In this case, hell is a place of sensory pleasures and complacent comfort. Heaven is unflatteringly compared to a concert hall in which middle-class Brits pretend to enjoy classical music out of a sense of duty. If anything, these descriptions somewhat overturn the more clichéd symbolic resonances of heaven and hell. Hell, in particular, is generally thought of as a horrible, torturous place; indeed it is a symbol for the worst place imaginable. Here, though, hell is extremely comfortable for people like the Devil (Mendoza) and the statue (Ramsden), who enjoy complacency and comfort. It is only torturous for those who require a more meaningful existence, like Don Juan (Tanner). These afterlives symbolize the choices that these characters have made in the real world. Some are comfortable living out the expectations of a respectable English existence, while others, like Tanner, are only comfortable when pursuing more difficult and uncertain paths.
