Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries

6. Major Barbara: The Salvation Army’s “Garden” and Cusins’s Books

· 74 · 6 Major Barbara The Salvation Army’s “Garden” and Cusins’s Books In his second and third decades of writing, comprising his works from Major Barbara to Back to Methuselah, from around 1906 to about 1922 and covering a little over the first two decades of the twentieth century, Shaw continued to explore new usages of gardens and libraries. The major plays treated by this study out of this period are Major Barbara, Misalliance, Heartbreak House, and Back to Methuselah. Some of the other well-known plays from this period include The Doctor’s Dilemma and Pygmalion, while Saint Joan and Too True to Be Good come a little later, but gardens and libraries are used most prominently in the four plays chosen. What is particularly relevant, and more to the point, is that Shaw, in his middle years and his more mature works, continues to find new ways in which to use gardens and libraries. Major Barbara has always presented audiences and critics with a challenge . As Eric Bentley, the sage of the modern drama, says, “Major Barbara is a play we all stumble over.”1 Alfred Turco adds that “this drama poses enormous critical difficulties,”2 and Robert Jordan calls Undershaft a “strange figure.”3 Critics also disagree over what the play concerns itself with. Some—to cite only a few from among many differing opinions— have said that the play deals with “the problem of maturity,”4 that the play speaks “not so much about money as about power,”5 that it deals with the “corrupting effects of power,”6 or that it presents a study of the “nutritional urge” as represented in Undershaft.7 Shaw, apparently, would be puzzled by these kinds of comments, for he wrote in his preface to the play that Undershaft should not “perplex you in the least,” that he becomes “quite intelligible,” and that what he, Shaw, does in the play is really quite simple.8 • Major Barbara: The Salvation Army’s “Garden” and Cusins’s Books · 75 The difficulty for critics seems to arise from the fact that they do not take Shaw at his word, as typified, for example, by J. L. Wisenthal when he argues that Shaw’s preface is “misleading.”9 Shaw begins his essay with the general statement that security “cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone ’s head.”10 He then adds a more explicit statement, stating that what appears as new “is that article of Undershaft’s religion which recognizes in Money the first need and in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.”11 In the play, Undershaft says that poverty is “the worst of crimes,”12 and Shaw stresses it by noting that the concept forms a tenet of Undershaft’s religion. If we accept that Shaw and Undershaft are not speaking metaphorically and hyperbolically but literally, we can begin to understand Shaw’s positionbetter .Shawelaborateshispointbystatingthatthe“cryingneedofthe nation” is “simply enough money” and the “evil to be attacked is . . . simply poverty.”13 Shaw then points out that once you “fix [your eyes] on this truth just under your nose,” then “Andrew Undershaft’s views will not perplex you in the least.”14 In the play, Shaw merely works out his premise to its logical conclusion : If “poverty is the vilest sin of man,” then it is viler than making weapons ; thus, poverty persists as such an evil condition that building terrible weapons to make money is preferable to being poor. That demonstrates how destructive to human beings and the human spirit poverty is, so says Shaw—and his play. Shaw says it another way in his preface: “Undershaft is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative to poverty of a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him, not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.”15 Shaw further points out that all money “is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty,”16 and manufacturing armaments, implies Shaw, becomes nothing more than another example of money’s sulliedness. Thus, a double bind exists: Poverty is a crime, but all money is tainted; therefore, it really does not matter what course one takes to avoidbeingpoor,aslongoneremainstruthfulaboutwhatone does. Being cautious in interpreting Shaw’s comments is not an unwise habit, for he himself warns that...