Sex and Salvation

Sexuality plays a more prominent role in Bernard Shaw's plays than is commonly supposed. In his first play, Widowers' Houses, its importance in the last scene between the main male and female characters is manifest, for Shaw's stage directions explicitly describe animal ferocity, eroticism, and lovemaking. Having a character contrast higher and lower centers (brains and genitals) in a later work, Too True to Be Good, Shaw also has him call a female character the embodiment of the latter and describe her sexual voracity. In addition, Shaw has her proposition a man for explicitly sexual reasons and has him accept her partly for the same reasons. Whereas the sexual scene in the earlier play steams the proceedings, the sexual talk and action of the later work, in which discussion is far more prominent than in the earlier, is comic. Despite the sexual initiative of the latter female character, neither she nor anyone else in this play does anything as physically erotic as the chief female character of Opus One. Partly for this reason, discursiveness and wit usually register more forcefully than sexuality for readers of this play and of most Shavian comedies. Because these readers include actors and directors, their productions demonstrate the same qualities more powerfully than they do sexuality, and audiences find little sexuality in Shavian comedy. If actors and directors take the erotic aspects more fully into account, the results could enrich and vivify their productions, grounding the action and the characters' relationships with each other. Such a notion is not as outlandish as may initially appear, for one of the actor's main jobs is to play the character from that character's viewpoint. In other words, treat the lower centers as well as the higher centers.

For good reasons, Major Barbara is usually considered a discussion play and an exemplary high comedy. In this article, I will examine it from another angle—the importance of sexuality. About a quarter of the way through the second act, Shaw gives a prominent clue to the centrality of sex. When Cusins enters, he and Barbara kiss over the drum he carries, "evidently not for the first time, as people cannot kiss over a big drum without practice. Undershaft coughs."¹ Anyone who has directed this play, or who has played Barbara or Cusins, can testify that Shaw is right: they need practice to kiss over a large drum. Furthermore, their kiss is not a pro forma peck. It is sexual and lasts long enough to embarrass her father, who coughs in order to stop it. Although the actors should not do anything but kiss, that kiss could convey anything to which it may lead. Let us take this sequence as a point of departure for an examination of the play and as a cue for actors and directors.

The play opens with a duologue between Lady Britomart and her son Stephen. The scene soon reveals that he is twenty-four years old, that he was graduated from Harrow and Cambridge, traditional schools for a young man of his class, and that he traveled to India, then a crown colony, and Japan. We also learn that he has two sisters, whose age Shaw does not cite. We may suppose that Barbara is a year or two younger than Stephen, and that Sarah is probably a year or two younger than Barbara.

A healthy, wealthy aristocrat who attended public (or as Americans would say, private) secondary and tertiary schools that are among the best in the world, Stephen then visited two Asian countries, one of which was ruled by his own. Whether he took advantage of sexual opportunities during his travels, the play does not say. Providing a rich subtext, however, it does say that his mother disapproves of "the present fashion of philandering bachelors and late marriages," which suggests that he is, or that his mother thinks he may be, such a bachelor, and that she is trying to arrange a suitable union for him. His assertion that he had rather arrange it for himself prompts her to exclaim, "Nonsense!" but she tries to mollify him by...