Giving the Devil More Than His Due

Abstract

Major Barbara is of central significance in Shaw’s work. It recapitulates themes and techniques of many of the earlier plays in an imaginative dramatic structure all its own. Like the Unpleasant plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, it is concerned with uncovering the economic facts which lie beneath the social surfaces of capitalism. Barbara, like Harry Trench and Vivie Warren, is given a disillusioning education in the workings of the cash nexus. As in the Plays for Puritans, The Devil’s Disciple and Captain Brassbound, Shaw’s theme is conversion; not only the conversions which Barbara attempts in the Salvation Army shelter, but the conversion of her and Cusins which Undershaft effects in the munitions works at Perivale St Andrews. But Major Barbara has also the wider and deeper ideological concerns of the two major plays which immediately preceded it and to which it is linked, Man and Superman and John Bull’s Other Island. In the conflict between the religion of the Salvation Army and Undershaft’s religion of money and gunpowder Shaw found a new and arresting vehicle for his most fundamental intellectual and spiritual themes. Major Barbara is his fullest attempt to ask and answer the question — what then must we do to be saved?