How Does Priestley Present Gerald In An Inspector Calls

How does Priestley Present Gerald in An Inspector Calls

In his didactic play ‘An Inspector Calls’, Priestley presents Gerald, and the upper class as a whole, to be extremely callous and unwilling to accept the opportunity for redemption. He explores themes and ideologies such as patriarchy in order to excoriate those for living protected in an ‘ivory tower’ of wealth, luxury and, most significantly, denial. The methods used by Priestley to do all of this encourages the audience in a contemporary society to look at themselves with an inverted eye and strive for equality.

In Gerald, an 'easy well-bred young man-about-town', we see a wealthy aristocrat who perpetuates the patriarchal ideology followed by many in 1912, the time in which play was

Here, we can look closely at the connotations of the adjectives 'unpleasant' and 'disturbing' which convey the image of perturbing and unsettling events. By saying that young women should be 'protected' against such things, Gerald is perhaps adopting the common Edwardian view that women are incapable of coping or dealing with them.

The Inspector satirises the hypocrisy in Gerald's argument and points out that Eva Smith wasn't protected against 'unpleasant and disturbing things'. We might get the idea from this that Gerald believes bourgeoisie women should be looked after yet the proletariats should not. Priestley could be encouraging the audience to look at this view from a feminist's perspective which may argue that women are just as capable as men in coping with atrocities.

We also see how Gerald treats women when Sheila asks if the engagement ring he presented her with was the 'one you wanted me to have?'. In this instance, the pronoun 'you' paired with the verb

'wanted' shows us how Sheila cares about and values Gerald's desires. Because of this, one might argue that Sheila is showing herself to be both passive and submissive, allowing Gerald to be

However, this idea is undermined when we reach the end of the play. In fact, Gerald is the first to point out the possibility of the whole evening being a 'hoax'. We get the idea that Gerald strongly believes that what he'd just experienced was just a practical joke. Perhaps Gerald is in denial and doesn't want to face what he has done. By him presenting such a theory with relief, the audience may wonder if

Gerald really did care for Daisy or if he, like questioned beforehand, just used her for his own amusement. This suggestion continues to emerge when Gerald, again, offers Sheila the engagement ring whilst saying 'everything's alright now'.

Here, 'alright' connotes to being normal by thinking that 'everything' is so, we get the idea that Gerald is more concerned about getting caught than accepting responsibility for what he has done. This, of course, is a moral dilemma and leads us to question if everything is 'alright' if nobody realises your mistakes. Priestley obviously thinks not and encourages the audience to disregard this belief too. He could be arguing that anyone with morals would be concerned about what they had done, thus