G. Thompson
Notes about Major Barbara from a director:
Last time we largely deferred authorial voices from the discussion, along with an account of the factory, and we should start there.
Utopianism of the factory in act 3--describe this utopia. How do the various characters respond to it? Characters' comments and perspectives reflect who they are. Lady Britomart sees nice houses and china and asserts them as the woman's prerogative.
Transition to the factory, 128 ff--description. Stephen is impressed (131). But because the workmen have it so good, it's going to "weaken their sense of responsibility." Here's another authorial voice--are trouble and anxiety good things?
Cholly has lit up a cigarette in the explosives shed (132).
See Meisel notes below.
Cf. an observation cited by W. H. Auden once. "A book is a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out."
The Armorer's Faith--sell to anyone who has the money (139). Discuss. Undershaft on obsolete ideas: do with them what you do with a gun that doesn't work--scrap it. The world won't scrap its obsolete beliefs. "If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow" (141).
Morgan, "Skeptical Faith"--
Relevance of Blake--"Without contraries is no progression . . . From these contraries spring what the religions call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active springing from energy." In calling Good "heaven" and Evil "hell," Blake is not praising or condemning either one--his hell is not a place of fire and punishment, but energy and opposition to the constraints of reason. Being Satan, for Blake, isn't a bad thing; and being Undershaft isn't a bad thing for Shaw, as one of the contraries which brings social progress.
The Salvation Army in the play is not at all the comfortable conventional religion held, without much force, by Stephen and perhaps Lady Britomart. It's "the Church Militant of a universal religion: organized humanity, active, purposeful and joyous in its onslaughts against misery and darkness." (51)
Barbara goes into the background in act 3, then comes to the fore again. "As the representative of spirituality, she returns to inform and bless the compact between reason and energy and the paradox of good in evil, heaven in hell." (52)
Act 1 is a comedy of manners; act 2 brings in "Dickensian realism verging on melodrama"; and act 3 "presents a Utopia designed by contemporary paternalism . . . a front for the Satanic mills that produce the wealth of Wilton Crescent" or that could blow it up. (53)
Dionysus is there because of Nietzsche and the Birth of Tragedy--Nietzsche's opposites line up with Blake's, only labeled as Apollonian (reason and control) and Dionysian (uncontrollable impulses, energy). These are reconciled through artistic jubilee, and this reconciliation is configured by Shaw through Cusins' intent to "make war on war" and Barbara's agreement about the nature of the factory. (56)
We see Orthodox Christianity in Jenny Hill (63)--the response to the bullying male is "too facile," "too sentimental." She has "genuine courage and cheerfulness and industry," but I think turning the other cheek only sustains brutality.
"The whole play is flagrantly concerned with money." (64)
Discuss--Barbara is converted to the acceptance of wealth.
Problem in the resolution (it is a "marriage play")--"There is no wicked side: life is all one." Is that a true resolution, or is it being seduced into acceptance by an older generation? Like Brecht, Shaw turns things back to the audience: "The true resolution of socialist drama belongs not in the work of art but outside it in society." (72)
Watson, "Sainthood for Millionaires"
Play's central feature is irony, set out by the conflict between Undershaft's ideas and those of the rest of his family (14). "Undershaft converts to his own view the representatives of Christian spirituality, of academic classicism, of the old aristocracy, and even the limp indifference of the idle rich. All are forced to recognize the unity of body and soul, the fusion of money with morality. In the model town that so persuades them, the aristocrat sees power and order, the professor of Greek sees lucidity, and the Salvation Army lass sees liberation of the spirit." (14)
Shaw's didacticism--"the message is not mouthed by the actors or moralized by artificial rewards and punishments, but embodied in the living movement of the drama."
"Shell"--"the necessity of realism"
ironic core--"the idea that capitalism as a system is so pervasive and so corrupting that it makes even charity into an evil force." (15)
The Salvation Army feeds the body "in return for dishonesty of the spirit, a rotten bargain" (16)
"only the greatest munitions maker in England can, by a calm insistence on the Undershaft motto, 'Unashamed,' convey the same that attaches to every one of us for our complicity in the crimes of capitalism." (17)
Discuss crimes of capitalism:
Need I go on? We don't even have to mention Donald Trump here--he's a visible figure, a pinata to hit, so that once we chase him out of office we can return in good conscience to the ordinary-level predations.
These are different in detail from what Shaw is talking about, but in some respects they are worse. We know what we are doing to the conditions for life on earth.
"Shaw reminds us again and again that any man or woman who sees how capitalism works, must either replace it or use it for his own survival." (19)
Cf. Cusins near the end on having sold his soul (149).
Family drama as well as a public one--see 20--good ΒΆ that I don't want to type out.
Distinction between "natural bosses" (Undershaft) and "vital geniuses" (Barbara)--they may overlap, but the one has "managing ability," the other "natural vitality." (26)
The play has three religions: Christianity (vanquished in the Salvation Army; the conventional C of E doesn't even merit a mention); millionaire-ism (Bolger, Lazarus); and socialism, embodied in Undershaft's factory and promised through the union of Cusins and Barbara. "It seems possible to infer that the world must be saved by worldy means, that innocence cannot carry us through, but intellect and will power may." (30)
Meisel
The plays are "designed to culminate in a state of feeling, often including uneasiness and unresolved stress, that will effect a permanent change in consciousness bearing on social change." (99)
Shaw is a Fabian, meaning "evolution as opposed to revolution; gradualism as opposed to catastrophism; the achievement of socialism through constitutional and parliamentary means" (100)
This is merged with feminism.
Early "Unpleasant Plays" were an assault on the comfortable assumptions of the audience.
"Pleasant plays" and "plays for puritans"--"Their focus is the private imagination of the audience, truth and illusion, the interplay between private and public ideals. All in the end present a radical criticism of the theoretical value structure, the sustaining ideals, of contemporary--that is, bourgeois--society." (109)
"The rhetoric of the apocalypse" (111) is where we are with Major Barbara--see succession of mottos. Demonstration of complicity (where Stephen gets his money, where the Salvation Army can get theirs).
Undershaft as "Industrial Capitalism" has created a "a private model of state capitalism, organized and welfarized and prosperous enough to be nearly revolution proof" (112-13). But Cusins is tempted by "catastrophist propositions": as "audience surrogate, poet, classical scholar, and lover, delicate of health and archetypal man of peace," he has to assent to raw power as his tool for changing society. See Barbara's last words in the play.
Undershaft, "who makes power for the world to use as it will or must"; Cusins, "the man of intellect and imagination who can envisage alternative realities and channel the energy accordingly;" and Barbara, "the woman of spirit and redemptive purpose, who can rescue both energy and intellect from pointlessness." (113-14)