The usual interpretations of Major Barbara, which focus on Barbara and align Undershaft's views with those of Shaw, lead to a distorted estimate of the play. Shaw is concerned less with Barbara's religious experience than with the character of Undershaft and the social implications of a philosophy of money and gunpowder. He admires Undershaft's vital genius, but maintains esthetic distance by revealing the arms maker as psychologically conditioned by the experience of his rise to power, his idealism being debilitated by cynicism. In clarifying the social, political, and economic fact of society's dependence on money and gunpowder, Undershaft provides dramatically viable social criticism and suggests a basis for reform. But he is too ensnared in his profession to effect reform himself. Poetically, dramaturgically, and dialectically he plays a devil's role, part social and part Blakean, imposing his diabolism on the well-meaning but misdirected angelicalness of Barbara. Barbara's more sympathetic role offers the audience a spiritual bridge between the simplicity of Stephen and the complexity of Undershaft. As she comes to understand the devil's realities, she provides for the future a hope which Undershaft, with his entanglements, cannot fulfil.
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Mar 1, 1979
S Herbert Frankel + 3
