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

Major Barbara 127
picture, but Major Barbara is presented frankly as a parable. 2 One expects
a parable to be simple and—at least relatively—uncluttered. Part of the
problem is that Shaw is using “real people I have met and talked to” as a
means of telling his tale (Collected Screenplays 485). That makes the play
much more interesting, but it complicates the task. Even more important is
that the moral of this parable is not simple; Shaw crams a great deal into an
evening’s traffic on the stage. Even the action that emerges when one steps
back far enough from the play is not without its peculiarities. The mutual
attempts at conversion do not even proceed in a direct and straightforward
manner but are indirect and oblique. When Undershaft visits the Salvation
Army shelter, Barbara does not spend any time trying to convert her father;
she gives her entire attention to the conversion of Bill Walker. When
Barbara comes to the munitions factory, her father spends only a few minutes
talking to her; he devotes most of his time to converting Cusins, despite
the remarkable, even obsessive, interest he had shown in Barbara
during the two previous acts.
We have barely touched on the difficult philosophical issues of the play.
It is not surprising that readers are confused by it, but at a good performance
audiences are unaware of these difficulties. The play has a remarkable
coherence in spite of all of these apparent irrelevancies and discontinuities.
All of the complexities are resolved in the throughline of the play,
which is ultimately simple, consistent, and unambiguous. A careful look at
both the overall action and the details shows how they come together in an
almost perfect whole.
An Illusory Conflict
The parable opposes two sets of seemingly irreconcilable principles, polar
opposites that must be eternally at war: spirit against matter, religion
against atheism, altruism versus egoism, heroic idealism opposed to cynical
pragmatism. The triumph of Undershaft—or at least the triumph of
Undershaft and Lazarus, Ltd., over the Salvation Army—can be interpreted
as Chesterton saw it: “Major Barbara . . . contains a strong religious
element; but when all is said, the whole point of the play is that the religious
element is defeated” (190). A more popular view, at least among
Shaw’s fans, is that the play represents a Hegelian dialectic with the succession
of Barbara and Cusins to the Undershaft throne as the final synthesis
of spirit and power, idealism and pragmatism, growth and destruction
(for example, Whitman 223–30). Although some, like Wisenthal, feel
that Shaw successfully presents Cusins as an advance on Undershaft (and