How and why does Sheila change in An Inspector Calls? Write about: 

• how Sheila responds to her family and to the Inspector
• how Priestley presents Sheila by the ways he writes about her 

On the face of things, at the beginning of the play, Sheila is a conventional middle-class girl, dutifully preparing to marry a man who enhances her and her family’s social position. She is an intelligent young woman who isn’t entirely taken in by Gerald’s explanations of where he was ‘last summer’ when he ‘hardly came near’ her. However, she is not so independent of thought not to be delighted with her ‘beauty’ of an engagement ring which allows her to feel ‘really engaged.’ The family dinner might be celebrating her engagement and therefore in important step towards adulthood for her, but she isn’t so far from childhood that we don’t get a sense of her innocence and naivety. She and her brother Eric briefly squabble and she calls him ‘squiffy’, ‘an ass’ and later on ‘a chump,’ insults that don’t sound very distant from the nursery. Whilst we see her taking an adult step in life, getting engaged, she is still depicted as very young and untainted by the harsh realities of life. In performance, this aspect of her character could well be enhanced by choosing a young-looking actress to play her and highlighting her innocence by choosing clothing that emphasises this.

Initially, Sheila responds with some suspicion to the inspector, picking up on his rather subtle suggestions that the Birling family have some responsibility for Eva Smith’s death. She says to him, ‘what do you mean by saying that? You talk as if we were responsible- ’ foreshadowing the inspector’s later stream of accusations. Priestley is creating an intelligent character who is probably saying what the audience is thinking and, at the same time, getting them on her side as the voice of reason in the Birling family. He further builds sympathy for Sheila when she shows her compassion for Eva and girls like her when she says, ‘these girls aren’t cheap labour – they’re people.’ However, she risks losing the audience’s sympathy when her part in the Eva Smith saga is unveiled, but she is redeemed by her honest, emotional response when challenged with the consequences for Eva of her own actions in the department store. She quickly accepts responsibility when confronted by the Inspector with her ‘jealousy’ of Eva’s prettiness. Sheila is quick to recognise her own fault and to show how she has learned from the episode, a complete opposite of her father’s refusal to take responsibility. Whilst Birling’s social attitudes and self-righteousness have been ingrained in his personality over decades, Sheila is young, uninformed and open to accepting her part in the tragedy.

Sheila continues to show her keen ability to see through and understand people when left alone with Gerald at the end of act one. She can see how ‘guilty’ Gerald looks when Eva’s next alias is mentioned. She sees that ‘Daisy Renton’ has some meaning for him. She may have been an innocent at the beginning of the play, but she is quickly using her native intelligence to get to the truth about her family and fiancé’s dealings with the young woman. Her ‘rather hysterical’ laughter at Gerald’s suggestion that they can keep his relationship with Eva/Daisy from the Inspector is a clear sign that the safe middle-class-world shades are lifting from her eyes. She says, ‘why – you fool – he knows. Of course he knows’ the power balance between them shifts here, he might have been the man choosing her engagement ring a few scenes ago, but now, she is the one with the clarity of insight.

As act two progresses, Sheila gains in confidence and clarity about her moral stance with regard to Eva/Daisy. When she has her long speech about not disliking Gerald as much as she had in the past and respecting him for his honesty, she seems a young woman who is grappling with the realities of life, unpolluted by the twisted moral certainties of her parent’s generation. As she takes on more and more of the inquisitive role of the Inspector, accusing her mother of lying about recognising the girl in the photograph, and summarising the accusations so far, the audience sees her gaining in power and strength. We begin to see what Priestley wants us to see in this play, that the future could be different. Not only could the certainties of the class structure be swept away, but also the inequities of the patriarchy could also be replaced by a world that allows women to see the world as it is, no longer protected from its harsher realities.

When, at the end of the play, the family begin to doubt that the Inspector was who he says he was, Sheila is the one who sees the bigger picture. She doesn’t think it matters whether he really was a policeman, but is more concerned with the real world implications of the family’s actions. She accuses her family of not ‘facing the facts’ of what they all admitted to having done over the course of the evening, but of trying to weasel their way out of taking responsibility. Ultimately only the younger generation, Eric and Sheila take responsibility whereas the others, particularly Mr and Mrs Birling refuse to accept any liability.

In allowing his younger characters, particularly Sheila, to accept responsibility for the ways that the family, in their wealth and privilege have treated Eva/Daisy, Priestley wants his audience to see that change is possible in the hands of the future generation. Putting so much of the moral clarity in the mouth of the daughter of the family also reinforces the role that Priestley sees gender equality as having in the future. Sheila changes from a naïve, ill-informed conformist to a clear-sighted moral arbiter over the course of this play. Given that the time of writing An Inspector Calls is already a few decades on from the time when it was set, pre-first world war, Priestley presumably hopes that some of the social reform he wished to see had already occurred. Sheila’s education is rapid as she learns about life beyond her own class, but that serves to bring the audience with her on her journey.