The Price Of Salvation: Moral Economics In Major Barbara

Abstract

"IN ALL MY PLAYS," Bernard Shaw wrote to Archibald Henderson in 1904, "my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michael Angelo.” But the inclusion of economics in his plays, he always maintained, did not make them mere tracts. "My plays are no more economic treatises than Shakespear's," he declared in his Sixteen Self Sketches. "It is true that neither Widowers' Houses nor Major Barbara could have been written by an economic ignoramus, and that Mrs Warren's Profession is an economic exposure of the White Slave Traffic as well as a melodrama. There is an economic link between Cashel Byron, Sartorius, Mrs Warren, and Undershaft: all of them prospering in questionable activities. But would anyone but a buffleheheaded idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers, infer that all my plays were written as economic essays, and not as plays of life, character, and human destiny like those of Shakespear or Euripides?" Shaw's comments invite inquiry into how economics functions aesthetically in his dramas: how it affects not only thematic content, but characterization and dramatic structure as well. From this standpoint it may be useful to consider the influence economics exerts on "life, character, and human destiny" in one of the plays he mentions, Major Barbara.