Public versus Private Theme Analysis

The Inspector, and the play at large, challenges the “privacy” of the private sphere, by revealing that actions that the family may have conceived of as private and personal really have an effect beyond themselves and their family. For example, Sheila’s revelation that Eric drinks more than his parents had thought—“he’s been steadily drinking too much for the last two years”— seems like private information but turns out to have a greater effect, insofar as it helps to identify (in the Inspector’s alleged story) Eric as the father of the girl’s child.

In addition, what begins as an inspection of truths that had real consequence on someone outside of the immediate Birling family, ends up also uncovering truths and drama that pertain more privately to the family. For example, the Inspector’s discovery of Gerald’s relationship with Daisy Renton results in the severing of his engagement to Sheila. The inspector has to remind the family to keep their private drama out of his investigation: “There’ll be plenty of time, when I’ve gone, for you all to adjust your family relationships.”

This blurring of the line between the public and the private reflects the play’s interest in class politics, in the conflict between those who want to maintain the privatization of wealth and production, and those who desire the communalization of the same. The Socialist perspective—as represented by the Inspector (and by J.B. Priestley)—challenges and seeks to erase the line between public and private, by de-privatizing the economy, but also by making those who are privileged to see that what they consider "private", by nature of their privilege, has an outside influence on the world from which they are insulated. In other words, the Inspector argues not just for a de-privatized economy but a de-privatized sensibility, a recognition that what seems private to the privileged are in fact strands of a public web of relationships and the moral obligations such relationships create.