Significance of younger characters – Eric, Sheila and Gerald

The younger characters represent hope for the future and optimism at the start of the play. They have happiness, marriage and business success set before them. Ultimately, Priestley uses them to show that redemption from guilt is by no means inevitable.

Sheila is presented as the stereotypical young woman who lives an idyllic life. Perhaps in that sense her name is an ironic counterpart to Eva. Eva suggests the biblical figure of Eve, representing all women. The ‘She’ of Sheila is supposed to indicate Sheila and Eva are both inextricably linked and bound together – one of the principal lessons of the play. Her diction reflects her initial happiness at the start of the play; she speak in a light, joking voice about “these purple-faced old men” who know all about port, and in “mock aggressiveness” to Gerald as the whether he might “object” to joining her family. Her life is mostly full of laughter and happiness.

Priestley steeps Sheila’s initial words and manner in irony. Her playful “aggressiveness” towards Gerald is replaced by real aggression when she discovers his affair with Eva, Then she speaks “stormily,” suggesting raging and deep emotions. The joking about drunken old men anticipates the sexual assaults of “Alderman Meggarty” on Eva with his “obscene fat carcass.” The repulsion with which he is described reflects the immorality of his actions, and picturing his body as a “carcass” suggests that beneath the social respectability of his title (which Mrs Birling insists should be used) lies, symbolically, moral death. He is a “drunken old sot” and “notorious womaniser.” Sheila’s initial light-hearted remarks anticipate Priestley later revealing them to refer, ironically, to a grotesque and turbulent social reality which she has to come to terms with.

In a sense, Sheila is presented initially