Eastern Paradox in Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara

Bernard Shaw was not merely a high priest of paradox in his intellectual comedy. At a deep level, his plays feature complex patterns of interpenetrating oppositions that define and wrestle against each other in a manner characteristic of Taoist philosophy. Major Barbara, like Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan, enacts multilayered binaries of male and female, war and peace, profit and generosity, religion and secularism. Shaw incorporated Chinese elements into his plays, and his works in turn have achieved special status and attention in China for their dialectic explorations.