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2 The Drama of Resistance Major Barbara is a play of midwinter. This is entirely in keeping with the ancient belief that Dionysos was on earth for the three months of winter, a period held sacred to the god.1 One prominent feature of Dionysian worship was the trieteris (Bacchae 133), a midwinter rite celebrated in alternate years. Unlike spring wine festivals, this biennial orgiastic ritual was marked by libations of milk, honey, and water, as well as by the ecstatic oreibasia, or mountain dancing. It probably had as its object some form of revivification of life or crops. The bleak wintry aspect of Shaw’s play is most marked in the Salvation Army setting of Act II. Here, and again in the last scene of the play, Shaw takes religion out of doors, as in Dionysian practice.2 At the very beginning of the act we encounter two hapless characters, Snobby Price and Rummy Mitchens, drawn by circumstances beyond their control into the Salvation Army milieu. On this “grindingly cold raw January day,” they are “not depressed by the cold: rather are they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given an almost jolly turn” (95–96). But the vivacity is neither Bacchic nor Salvationist, for these miserable creatures are not true believers; they are dissembling as converts. Their bacchant qualities are enervate, when they are not simply spurious. Accordingly the occasional stepdance Snobby breaks into as he moves about the shelter issues from no ecstatic joy, nor does the dancing take place on a mountain. Ecstasy and ascent to higher ground are reserved for others, and for later. In the Bacchae, liquefactive miracles yield a “land flowing with milk and wine and honey” (Bacchae 142–43, trans. Conacher), nourishing the god’s followers (Bacchae 704–11).3 In the Salvation shelter Snobby and Rummy, soon joined by secularist Peter Shirley, are fed diluted milk and The Drama of Resistance · 83 bread “with margarine and golden syrup” (95). It is understandable that an attenuated brand of Dionysian religion, dependent upon appeals to charity rather than on miracles for the sustenance it provides to impoverished hangers-on, would have to settle for diluted milk and ersatz honey. According to Teiresias bread is the divine gift of Demeter, or Earth, the provider of dry foods (Bacchae 274–85). The old seer allies her with Dionysos, the giver of liquid nourishment, represented by wine.4 Bread and drink, and meeting basic nutritional needs, become the subject of serious religious concern and discussion in Major Barbara too, as the nutrition passage would lead us to expect. Snobby, Rummy, and Peter face the necessity of adapting their behavior to unfamiliar cult conditions that, at the moment, are their sole source of food and drink. Snobby offers sophistical socialist reasons for his lot and is ready to play to the hilt the ritual game of confession. Rummy complains because confessions of invented misdeeds by women have to be made in private, and do not receive the same kind of favorable attention as those made in public by men. But since the confessions help the Army raise the funds that keep her from starving, she acquiesces in the ceremonial rite. When the starving Peter Shirley is reluctant to take food offered him, Jenny Hill the Salvation lass bids him, “Come, come! the Lord sends it to you: he wasnt above taking bread from his friends; and why should you be?” (99–100). By mentioning a meal shared with the gods, the Bacchae chorus invest a human repast with religious significance (383);5 Jenny is doing much the same, which only adds to the moral burden it imposes on Peter. His reconciliation to the situation is characteristically secular: he accepts the meal as a debt to be repaid. This opening scene of the second act, in which these newcomers make their uncomfortable adjustments to the Salvation Army shelter, corresponds functionally with the serio-comic episode in the Bacchae in which Teiresias and Cadmus give their reasons for converting to the new Dionysian religion. But the process of Dionysian accommodation in Major Barbara is a more gradual and progressive one, developing throughout the play. It begins in the first act, when Stephen discovers his and his family’s inescapable dependence on an income provided by his father, “a profiteer in mutilation and murder” (89). Lady Britomart, like Cadmus, gives priority to family considerations. She is concerned that the family should acquire full benefit from its...

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