Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Major Barbara, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Anarchy, and Freedom
Critique of Capitalism
Moralism and Hypocrisy
Good vs. Evil
Punishment and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, doesn’t count on the ability of British theater critics to properly appreciate his work and its context. Thus, he writes an extended preface to explain the more salient points of Major Barbara’s social criticism. The first of these is that poverty is the greatest sin and evil in society. This can be seen in the way poverty breeds disease, urban blight, and crime. A character in the play named Andrew Undershaft worships wealth, and he is, for this reason, framed as the play’s hero. Having recognized an important truth, he acts accordingly and shows how society could improve itself by following his example. If audiences are distressed that society rewards people like Undershaft for such choices, then they should work to reorganize society so that resources are more equitably shared.
Because he seeks to educate his early critics (and, by extension future readers), Shaw’s preface outlines the major themes and concerns of Major Barbara. Shaw is being deliberately provocative when he names poverty as the greatest sin and evil in a society. Most readers could probably point to something they consider worse, but the idea fits in with the play’s critiques of capitalism and the moralism of turn-of-the century British society. Pointing out that poverty creates safe havens for disease and criminality to thrive, Shaw further suggests that inequality harms the wealthy as well as the poor, even if the effects are indirect. Everyone benefits from a more equitable distribution of resources.
Themes
Shaw also suggests that society’s tendency to pretend poverty is somehow honorable only keeps the poor oppressed while endangering everyone’s health and safety. This mindset also leads to a misplaced emphasis on individuals rather than on the common good. When it comes to helping people, Shaw believes it’s important to focus on the health and salvation of the community as a whole—and, more importantly, that action is more valuable than talk.
Shaw points out the way that those with wealth and power weaponize conventional morality to oppress others. It’s hypocritical for the wealthy to claim that poverty is good for the souls of people other than themselves. And yet again, the issue of morality allows Shaw to suggest a communal focus for reforms. Since people share their society, everyone can benefit from social progress like lifting people from poverty. And if that’s the case, then the common good should matter more to reformers than their individual consciences.
Themes
Shaw takes aim at what he sees as the central mistake of both mainstream Christianity and society: an emphasis vengeance masquerading as just punishment. He contrasts this idea of just punishment with the radical forgiveness put forth in the Bible. Forgiveness free of any threat of punishment forces sinner and criminals to either make themselves into better people or to prove themselves irredeemable. Normal forms of punishment exact revenge but fail to reform character.
Despite his evident distrust of conventional morality and mainstream religion, Shaw embraces one of the central tenets of Christianity here, namely the belief that Jesus Christ allowed himself to be crucified to pay the price for every human sin once and for all. This radical form of mercy and forgiveness impresses Shaw, who claims here that almost all punishments paradoxically prevent true reform because they allow people to clear their consciences without changing their ways. Denied this easy absolution, Shaw contends, only the most hardened criminals would persist; the rest would be forced by their guilty consciences to become better people.
Themes
Shaw insists that people who abhor vengeance and celebrate equality are seen as dangerous because they imperil the status quo. Shaw asks those who find his conclusions distasteful to examine their own beliefs. A society’s laws should apply to everybody; unjust laws should be changed rather than ignored. People naturally become anarchists, he argues, when the legal, social, and moral institutions of a nation become divorced from social progress. Anarchism is sometimes a necessary corrective agent, but it’s not a good ongoing situation, and when it becomes popular, this suggests that a society needs to figure out how to encourage the kind of moral responsibility that makes people into good citizens. But until most people can see the state of the world as clearly as so-called cynics like Shaw, society will not arrive at that point.
Shaw defines anarchists as those who can—and do—seize power from oppressors in response to their recognition of inequality or injustice. He celebrates them for their willingness to use any means necessary to achieve social change and for their attacks on what Shaw sees as the hypocritical morality that protects the powerful at the expense of the disenfranchised. One of the ways this played out most visibly in Shaw’s lifetime was in the association of anarchists with socialist movements in Russia and Europe. Still, despite celebrating the use of force, Shaw admits that anarchy isn’t a good state for society to remain in, and to that end, he hopes that people will listen to him and take notes on how they can better organize their societies.
Themes
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