Sheila Birling Character

Initially Priestley presents the character Sheila Birling as shallow and naive. He firstly does this through his use of stage directions, which describe her as "a pretty girl in her early twenties, very pleased with life and rather excited." The words “very pleased” imply that she has an easy life and no worries or concerns, which contrasts with the life of Eva Smith, a poor lower class girl. This suggests that Sheila is very naive to the hardships that people of lower classes face in life. In addition, Priestley chooses language which presents Sheila as quite immature - for example she calls her mother “mummy” and uses words such as “squiffy” and “jolly well”. Therefore, at the outset of the play the audience takes a disliking to the character
Firstly, she is the only character to react and care about Eva’s death - she exclaims, “Oh, how horrible! Was it an accident?..What was she like? Quite young?” This shows how at the start of the play she is so far the only character that is capable of change. She also has more empathy for Eva than any other character, recognising her as a person and not just a worker, and expresses horror that women like her are treated so badly in factories like her father’s - “these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people”. Through this criticism of her father we see that she has a sense of social responsibility and compassion and therefore she is very different from her parents. She, alongside Eric, provides the audience with a sense of hope for the future. She shows that the youth can leave behind capitalist views like those of Mr and Mrs Birling and that society can improve if people make changes and take responsibility for their actions and for one another. Being a co-founder of the Socialist Commonwealth Party and writing in 1945, Priestley was keen to capitalise on the momentum being generated by the landslide victory of the Labour Party and the desire for social change at the time. He would aim for an ‘An Inspector Calls’ to promote socialist views in order to change Britain from a strongly capitalised
She shows perception in her attitude towards him, realising that he already knows much of what he is asking them and showing intuition about what his questioning is leading to. She is also very perceptive of Gerald - for example we hear at she has had suspicions about him when she mentions "last summer, when you never came near me” and immediately realises that he knew Daisy Renton from his reaction when the Inspector mentioned her name. Indeed, at the end of the Act One, she seems to be the only character that can pick up on the part Gerald played in Eva Smith’s death. Furthermore, Sheila is intuitive, as she knows Eric drinks a lot. By the end of Act One we see that she is not as shallow and naive as we may have first imagined her to