Major Barbara Study Guide

George Bernard Shaw was born in Ireland. His parents had a troubled relationship thanks in part to his father’s alcoholism and the family’s subsequent poverty, despite their upper-class roots. He disliked school and dropped out at the age of 15. When his mother’s closest friend left Dublin for London, she and Shaw’s two older sisters followed him, leaving Shaw in Ireland with his father. Shaw left, too, a few years later, to attend the funeral of one of his sisters; he didn’t return to Ireland for nearly three decades. In London, Shaw worked odd jobs and began to write novels and plays, the earliest of which were never published. Eventually, he found financial stability as a music and theater critic. In his late 20s, Shaw became interested in socialism, and he eventually joined the Fabian Society, a British organization that promotes shifting toward democratic socialism through gradual efforts of legal reform rather than through direct revolution. In 1894, Shaw’s play The Arms and the Man was enough of a commercial success to allow him to stop working as a critic and focus on developing his career as a dramatist. He wrote and published 54 plays during his lifetime. Shaw often questioned commonly held beliefs, and he used his plays to highlight what he saw as the hypocrisies and failures of modern society. His views were often rather controversial. He was an atheist and a socialist; he declared both sides were equally blameworthy for World War I; he supported eugenics (although he also decried racism); he questioned the efficacy and utility of vaccines; and he wrote admiringly of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini. Although Shaw married in middle age, he and his wife had no children. He died in 1950, at the age of 94.

Barbara Undershaft is a member of the Salvation Army, a Protestant Christian organization founded in 1865 by a man named William Booth. From its earliest days, the Salvation Army saw—and organized—itself as God’s army, and it dedicated itself to carrying out the divine plan on earth by converting people to Christianity and providing charity for the poor and the outcast members of society. George Bernard Shaw uses Major Barbara as a vehicle to express his socialist views and his approval of anarchist political movements. Socialism is a political philosophy that emphasizes communal (rather than private) ownership and management of the means of production. Although socialist ideas have existed since antiquity, socialist movements and organizations began to coalesce in the 19th century, especially with the works of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, and the foundation of organizations like the Fabian Society in England. The late 19th century also saw the rise of anarchist movements and violent social revolutions as students, workers, and oppressed people agitated for social and political change. One example is the Morrel affair, which Shaw references in the play’s preface. On May 31, 1906, a Basque anarchist named Mateu Morrel tried to assassinate King Alfonso XIII of Spain on his wedding day by throwing a bomb hidden in a bouquet of flowers at the king’s procession. The king and his new wife survived, but Morrel killed 24 bystanders in the crowd and injured dozens more. He fled the scene but was subsequently discovered by the Spanish militia. Morrel took his own life rather than face justice at the hands of the state.

  In his preface to Major Barbara, Shaw describes the rich tradition of literature that spotlights and criticizes social attitudes. He sees Major Barbara as belonging to this tradition. He lavishes praise on A Long Day’s Ride, a serialized novel published by Charles James Lever in 1860-1861. This story features a bumbling, pretentious protagonist who wants to imagine his life as a great adventure and himself as a proper romantic hero. It draws on Cervantes’s much earlier novel Don Quixote (published 1605-1615), which follows a member of the lowest rank of the nobility who tries to live out the fantasy of being a great and glorious knight. Both works feature their protagonists’ failure to break free of their assigned social roles and their shallow personal aspirations. Shaw appreciates this and aspires to take his social criticism a step further, highlighting the failures of society as a whole rather than of individuals. Major Barbara also bears similarities to other works of literary realism published around the turn of the 20th century. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a 1905 American novel that depicts the horrific conditions suffered by the working poor in industrial Chicago and the corruption and hypocrisy of the powerful ranks of society, is one of these works. Another is Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play, The Hairy Ape, which depicts the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and the stark social, racial, and economic divisions within capitalist societies.