The Natural History of Major Barbara

The Natural History ofMajor Barbara KURT TETZELI v. ROSADOR • WHEN IN 1949 FRANCIS FERGUSSON DESCRmED the content of Shavian drama as "unresolved paradox,"! using Major Barbara and Heartbreak House as an illustration, he not only echoed countless early critics,2 but also furthered the label-sticking method of interpretation which has vitiated so much of Shaw criticism. "The play," says Fergusson, "is a parlor-game based upon the freedom of the mind to name and then to rationalize anything, without ever deviating from the concept to the thing." It is, therefore, not grounded in reality, but merely "a string of jokes which touch nothing.,,3 This thesis certainly does run counter to Shaw's professed dramatic aims, and its influence seems due both to Fergusson's persuasive style and to concepts of realism which shortcircuit the subtle relation of the dramatic signs with their extradramatic referents. This difficulty in relating the play's ideas to some consistent Weltanschauung, some formative reality, has apparently led a recent study, in spite of criticizing Fergusson and brilliantly enlarging our understanding of Major Barbara by describing the play's mythical pattern and analogies, to conclude that "as a total structure of ideas the play remains a paradox in which antitheses retain their full value and cannot be resolved away.,,4 In opposition to these views, I shall argue in the following that the play is a portrayal of Shaw's theory of history, and that it derives its, admittedly problematical and highly precarious, consistency from it; that Shaw's view of history as natural history leads to an analysis of the nature of man and society in socio-economic and metabiological or religious terms; that, while the socio-economic dimension of man and society is fully drawn and discussed, the metabiological side is, owing to its future perspective, treated less extensively, thus connecting social actuality and possible biological 141 142 KURT TETZELI v. ROSADOR advance, present diagnosis and future hope only briefly and rather implicitly. Still, the spectator - to whom all Shavian drama, as has frequently been pointed out, is addresseds - is enabled to grasp intuitively a future solution to the tragic waste of the present and its paradoxical social state and to draw hope from this possibility. It is the whole dramatic pattern, not single, seemingly choric utterances of any of his dramatic figures, which Shaw employs to instil this hope. Much criticism has been blinded to this fact by the sheer verbal profusion and eloquence of Shaw's plays. One of the more important elements in this dramatic pattern is the heartbreak, the disillusion and final conversion of Barbara Undershaft, demonstrating the potential for improvement, or even ultimate perfection, of mankind. Heartbreak and conversion, therefore, are not merely individual and spiritual experiences, but tokens of a different existence, the existence of the superman. But if the nexus between the play and reality (history and religion), between the present and the future is severed, Major Barbara is necessarily reduced to a brilliantly clever jeu d'esprit, and mimesis shrinks into unresolved paradox. In a sense all Shavian drama is historical. In an interview on Widowers' Houses, published in The Star (29 November 1892) and drafted by himself, Shaw answers his own question about the number of acts: "Seventeen. 'Widowers' Houses' is a mere episode in a historic drama." (Here Mr. Shaw held me spellbound for nearly an hour with a brilliant • aper~u of the social and industrial development of England from the Reformation up to the twenty-second century of which he has the clearest prevision.)6 Shaw makes a similar point about Arms and the Man.7 Although couched in facetious terms, both remarks throw light on the relation of Shaw's plays to reality. They illustrate his socialist view, that the present is merely an episode in the time-continuum of history, which is shaped by socio-economic conditions. It may be accidental, yet Shaw still commences his historical lecture with the beginnings of capitalism (the Reformation), of which the present is still part and parcel, thus explaining its immediate causes. But the extension of his explanation into the future is probably the most Significant element in Shaw's theory...