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The Devil and Major Barbara
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
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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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968
References
1 Richard M. Ohmann, Shaw: The Style and the Man (Middletown, Conn., 1962), pp. 99–100.
2 Shaw (London, 1925), p. 131.
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6 British Museum, MS. 50661, foil. 81–82. Quoted in Louis Crompton, “Shaw's Challenge to Liberalism,” Prairie Schooner, xxxvii (Summer 1963), 242.
7 Shaw's Plays in Review (New York, 1951), pp. 49–50.
8 The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (New York, 1928), pp. 268–276. Referred to by Julian B. Kaye, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition (Norman, Okla., 1958), pp. 146–147.
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10 4 July 1905. Quoted in Meisel, p. 296.
11 Report of a conversation, in Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works (Cincinnati, 1911), p. 381.
12 George Bernard Shaw (New York, 1956), p. 147.
13 Bernard Shaw (New York, 1957), p. 167.
14 See Stanley Weintraub, “ ‘Shaw's Divine Comedy’: Addendum,” ShawB, ii(May 1958), 22.
15 See Henderson, p. 383; Patrick Braybrooke, The Genius of Bernard Shaw (Philadelphia, 1925), p. 110; and Mac-Carthy, p. 47.
16 Quoted in Henderson, p. 386.
17 Frankel, p. 18.
181 hope that to some extent this clarifies the seeming contradiction in Undershaft noted by Ozy, “The Dramatist's Dilemma: An Interpretation of Major Barbara,” ShawB, ii (Jan. 1958), 24.
19 A point made by William Irvine, The Universe of G. B. S. (New York, 1949), p. 261.
20 Complete Plays, iii, 619.
21 The weakness of Cusins' responses to Undershaft is noted by Chesterton, pp. 130–131.
22 The Idea of a Theater (New York, 1953), pp. 193–194.
23 George Bernard Shaw: A Good Man Fallen Among Fabians (New York, 1950), pp. 129–130.
24 Paradise Lost 1.254–255.
25 “CUSINS. My guardian angel! … I adored what was divine in her … ” (pp. 420, 427).
26 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” A Collection of English Poems, 1660–1800, ed. Ronald S. Crane (New York, 1932), p. 1030.