Shaw’s Own Problem Play: Major Barbara

Abstract

S H A W ' S O W N P R O B L E M P L A Y : M A J O R B A R B A R A J. PERCY SMITH University of Guelph Major Barbara is to Bernard Shaw as Measure for Measure is to Shake­ speare. Each has for its centra] figure a young and beautiful woman of the purest religious faith and aspiration, who is presented with a moral problem that shakes her to the heart. Each contains an accompanying set of characters who range, as do the incidents of the play, from high comedy to farce to brutality. Each presents a solution to the problem that is of questionable validity in terms of the play itself, and enigmatic as to the author's deeper intention and as to the play's moral and philosophical implications. Each has evoked a notable quantity of critical comment expressing widely varying views, mainly satisfactory to their authors. With few exceptions, the critics who saw the first performance of Major Barbara in 1905 found it too long and ultimately puzzling. Some found it offensive because of Barbara's utterance, in Act 11, of the agonized words of Jesus on the cross, and because of the brutality displayed when in the same Act the ruffian Bill Walker flings down the Salvation Army lass Jenny Hill and punches her in the face. The notion of blasphemy having become as quaint to modern audiences as Shakespearian references to chastity, and the presence of brutality virtually a sine qua non, recent writers have rightly ignored those early objections and turned to the larger issues, not without a wary eye on the Preface. The growing body of critical discussion attests to the troublesome, even ambiguous, quality of the final effect of the play. Not all the critics are troubled. J.L. Wisenthal sees Major Barbara as an assertion of "the necessity of accepting and combining good and evil, heaven and hell."1 His proposition that such a "marriage of contraries" is the theme of the play is held by some others: for example, Robert R. Speckhard, who gives the marriage a Jungian blessing by envisaging Andrew Undershaft as the Doctor/Cook, a magic demon whose "magic is modern magic; the inherent power for good of modern technology: its ability to transform our cities into places fresh and clean and beautiful."2Some see the play in terms of conversion rather than marriage: the conversion of Barbara from Christianity to some­ thing else - a conversion which, says Maurice Valency, is "like Captain Brassbound's, a matter of turning from illusion to reality."3 For Charles Frankel the play presents a "remarkably straightforward espousal of the moralEn g lish S tudies in Ca n ad a, rv, 4, W inter 1978 451 ity of Power" based on the classic "reasons of Machiavelli and Hobbes and Marx and Nietzsche/' followed by an appeal for a "relativistic and provisional view of human ideals."4 Fred Mayne likewise sees it as "an attempt to reconcile the saint and the realist," but he goes on to say that "it is a spurious reconciliation as Shaw seems to realize when he makes Cusins ... the chief object of the campaign for conversion."5 I propose to examine the reasons underlying the critical difficulties that Major Barbara presents, considering first the principal sources of the play and then the ambivalence in Shaw's attitude to the central moral question that it raises. Shaw himself gave at least two different accounts of the origins of Major Barbara. He told his biographer Henderson before 19 11 that he had long "had the idea of the religious play in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and religious views of life"6. He went on to say that the particular circumstance that caused the play to take form was his acquaintance with a young playwright named Charles McEvoy: At the closeof the war between the States in America [Shaw told Henderson], Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy, and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the manufacture of torpedoes and...