Sheila is a very spoilt, rude, jealous & unkind woman at the start of the play and it obviously having problems with Gerald. The audience know this because she is talking about all last summer when Gerald never came near her; she jokes about an affair, but never brings it any further.
The audience at this point will think she is either a bit too protected by her parents to know what the signs of a cheating man are, or she is pretending she doesn’t know so she can get the ring.
Sheila then finds out from the inspector that Eva killed herself and she is shocked, stage direction-(rather distressed).
When Sheila hears what her father did to Eva, she is shocked and surprised this makes the audience feel differently towards her, because she has more depth. Sheila got Eva sacked from milwards because she was ‘in a furious temper’.
She feels upset and a bit guilty about what she did and the audience now think that she is much deeper in thought.
Sheila is desperate to find out what happened to Eva. She finds out that- Sheila’s father sacked her, Sheila got her sacked from job no 2, she had an affair with Sheila’s fiancé, she fell pregnant with Sheila’s brother’s baby and was turned down by Sheila’s mother when she asked for help. Sheila begins to understand what Goole was trying to tell the Birlings, that ‘you shouldn’t treat people differently due to class’.
Sheila shows the audience that she has learnt a lesson by saying ‘you are forgetting one thing I still can’t forget. Everything we said really happened’ and she later goes on to say ‘I remember what he said, what he did and how he made me feel’. The audience now think that she is a changed woman and has truly learnt the inspector’s message. The audience know she has changed because every time Mr Birling says that everything is alright she contradicts him.
Sheila has learnt that she should be good to everyone; we know this because she says ‘between us we drove that girl to suicide’. Mr and Mrs Birling don’t really learn anything, they start to learn but then stop when they find out the inspector wasn’t real. We know this because Sheila says ‘you began to learn something and now you have stopped’.
