|
|
Major Barbara portrays the conflict between the spiritual and worldly power embodied in Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her Machiavellian father, millionaire arms manufacturer, Andrew Undershaft. While visiting her East End shelter for the poor, as part of a bargain struck between them, he reveals that the shelter’s benefactor made his money by distilling whiskey. Barbara suffers a crisis of faith as she glimpses the possibility that all salvation and philanthropy are tainted at the source. The next day, visiting the munitions factory with her mother, Lady Britomart, and her fiancé, classical scholar Adolphus Cusins, Barbara is further shaken to discover that her father is a model employer. Cusins enters the debate, revealing that he is technically a foundling and therefore eligible to inherit the Undershaft empire (as Undershaft’s children are not). When Cusins agrees to enter the business, Barbara recovers her spirit as she embraces this new possibility of hope for the future.
[ Top ] Introductory analysis (1st Paragraph) from: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/theatrearts/archives/MajorBarbara.htmlSynopsis from: http://department.monm.edu/cata/gallery/2223/Major/summary.htm |
There are no easy answers to questions of war and peace,
government and industry, wealth and poverty, or religion and faith in G.
Bernard Shaw’s 1906 comedy, Major Barbara. A life-long socialist
and pacifist, Shaw puts his most provocative remarks into the mouth of
Andrew Undershaft, an unrepentant billionaire capitalist and war
contractor, who tries to entice his aristocratic daughter, a major in the
Salvation Army, and her fiancé, a professor of Greek, to take over the
family business. Shaw’s play is as unsettling at the beginning of the
twenty-first century--in our era of terrorism and preemptive warfare, and
globalization and poverty--as it was when it was first performed at the
dawn of the twentieth century, less than decade before "the war to
end all wars."