Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Major Barbara 125
fundamental conflict remains clear and consistent. Despite the intense
philosophical concerns of both Man and Superman and John Bull’s Other
Island, Shaw lets the unfolding of the story take precedence over any attempt
to contrive the morality of the piece. The result is a pair of organic if
unconventional works that are more successful as art than as complete
statements of Shaw’s beliefs. Major Barbara is a different case.
An overview of the play’s action will make its oddness clear. The first
scene ends with a reversal that sets the tone for numerous shifts the action
will take as the play progresses. We are led to believe that Lady Britomart
is (apparently for the first time) asking her eldest child to make an important
decision regarding the family finances, then we suddenly learn that
the decision has been made and that Stephen was being asked only to take
responsibility for it. This might be just an amusing way to provide exposition,
but it is characteristic of the entire play, which is a mosaic of altered
and overturned expectations. Indeed, the scene between Lady Britomart
and Stephen introduces an action that is dropped toward the end of the
first act, ignored entirely in the second, and picked up again in the third
only to be resolved in a casual anticlimax. The problem presented by the
first act, like that of Widowers’ Houses, is the need for money and the
moral difficulty of obtaining it from a “tainted” source—in this case the
profits from the death and destruction factory of Stephen’s father, Andrew
Undershaft. We are made to suspect that Stephen’s sister Barbara, a recent
convert to the Salvation Army, will have moral objections to both the
money and her father’s character. As soon as the father makes his entrance,
this expected conflict melts away and is forgotten. The money is not mentioned,
the daughter shows herself to be surprisingly free of moralizing
priggishness, and the father becomes unaccountably fascinated with both
the daughter he has just met and her religion of poverty. A new question
arises from the meeting of father and daughter. It is a kind of battle of
missionaries; each will try to convert the other and both agree to submit to
the attempt. Undershaft will visit the Salvation Army shelter, and Barbara
will come to the munitions works. This action, which involves two distinct
steps, is also interrupted by the resumption of the question raised in the
first act. The question of obtaining additional income for the two sisters,
which is treated with awkwardly indelicate delicacy in the first act, is
settled with casual abruptness in the first scene of the third act. When
Andrew, obviously ignorant of the purpose of his invitation, asks after his
first entrance, “What can I do for you all?,” Lady Brit tells him that he need
not do anything but sit and enjoy himself, a remark that puts everyone out