Getting Married

Mrs. Bridgenorth

As hostess and mother of the bride, Mrs. Bridgenorth moves through the wedding-day bustle with the ease of a woman who has done this many times before, trading dry pleasantries with Collins while the General bolts from the cake. Marriage, she insists, came natural to her — a claim that quietly sets her apart from her unmarried sister Lesbia and from Collins's own reluctant account of being broken into it. Her composure anchors the play's opening world and makes her a steady counterweight to the guests who want to argue marriage into a theory.

Reginald Hotchkiss

Hotchkiss arrives at the wedding armed with statistics and mischief, insisting that the respectable Englishman who defends marriage cannot even say which marriage he means — civil, sacramental, polygamous, or South Dakotan. His gift for unanswerable quibbling exposes the muddle beneath everyone's pieties, and his refusal to let a comfortable phrase stand unchallenged makes him the play's sharpest irritant. He matters because he turns the breakfast table into a debating chamber where the real subject — what marriage is for — cannot be avoided.

Lesbia

Lesbia stands slightly apart from the wedding festivities, the sister whom Collins still hopes to marry off and whom Mrs. Bridgenorth has already written off as a permanent old maid. Her resistance is not coyness but principle: she weighs the economic and emotional costs of marriage and finds the bargain poor, a position Shaw treats with real sympathy rather than as a joke. Her presence forces the play to ask whether a woman can decline marriage without being diminished, and her exchanges sharpen the case against compulsory coupling.

Leo

Leo is the young man who wants the wedding to mean what weddings are supposed to mean — love, permanence, a future — and who cannot understand why Lesbia keeps examining the contract instead of signing it. His emotional weather swings between pleading and indignation, and his sincerity is both his charm and his vulnerability in a household where everyone else has an argument ready. His pursuit of Lesbia gives the play its central romantic pressure and tests whether feeling can survive being cross-examined.

Collins

Collins has superintended so many wedding breakfasts that he can joke about the General's flight from the cake while quietly revealing his own long accommodation to a marriage that never quite came natural to him. His affectionate, rueful account of a wife who locked the doors and made the engine driver promise to be careful — and of children who ran away from home — gives the play its warmest and most ambivalent testimony. He matters because his genial fatalism shows what the marriage debate looks like from inside a real one.

The General

General Bridgenorth is a man of duty and habit who has done his paternal office at wedding after wedding and now finds the ritual unbearable in a way he cannot articulate. His abrupt exit from the cake — noted by Collins with affectionate amusement — hints at a private cost beneath the military bearing, and his traditionalism makes him a natural foil to the play's arguing guests. He matters as the silent, slightly wounded representative of the older generation whose marriages the younger characters are busy renegotiating.