Doing Proper Things for Improper Reasons: Spiritual Ambivalence in Major Barbara

Doing Proper Things For Improper Reasons:

Spiritual Ambivalence In Major Barbara

During the discussion of Undershaft's anonymous contribution of £5,000 to the Salvation Army, Lady Britomart condemns him as follows: "Thats Andrew all over. He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it"; to which Cusins replies, "He convinced me that I have all my life been doing improper things for proper reasons." ¹ In these statements, we have a key to understanding the themes at work in the play: that supposed opposites are often confused and intermingled, and more important to Andrew Undershaft and to our understanding the human condition, any decisions we make regarding what is proper or improper, good or evil, are fraught with doubt and ambivalence. Certainty, whether based on the authority of religion, government, or self, is always already lost. Institutional religions, however, impose a strict and overly simplistic reading of both ends of the certain–uncertain binary, an imposition that Shaw's Major Barbara deconstructs and denounces as either the perspective of a deceitful fool or the luxury of "a rich, strong, and safe life" (460).

Of the many writers who expressed some form of dissatisfaction with the institutions that affected and reflected his time, Shaw is ostensibly vocal, yet profoundly ambivalent. A self-proclaimed atheist, he is harshly critical of religious beliefs in many of his best-known works, yet his own life reveals him to have been deeply fascinated by theology, particularly with the strength of people's religious convictions. In his short story, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, his eponymous title character is both searching for and dismantling religious systems and traditions in her misguided journey—acting literally on a missionary's command to "seek and ye shall find." In Major Barbara, Shaw presents a much more complex grappling with dogmatic religiosity and cultural atheism, underscoring an ideology that seems inherent to all of his major writings: human beings require a purpose, indeed a kind of spiritualism, to be fully human, but that purpose is undermined by an orthodox rigidity that either enforces or rejects the spiritual. In Major Barbara, neither the Salvation Army version of faith that Barbara represents, nor the philosophical intellectualism of Cusins, nor the weak relativism of Lomax, nor the self-serving perspective of Undershaft provides a sufficient means for living fully. Oddly enough it is Undershaft who voices a problematic and vague, spiritual tenet: "There is only one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true morality" (441). Focusing on this paradox, Major Barbara presents us with a new, interdependent, if unholy, trinity: Undershaft/Cusins/Barbara.

None of them alone posits a complete portrait, but taken together their combination is much akin to Shaw's coupling of Jesus and Judas in Passion Play, as discussed in Charles A. Berst's "In the Beginning: The Poetic Genesis of Shaw's God." ² In Major Barbara, however, Undershaft presents a much more complex, albeit ambivalent representation of morality than in the earlier play. Undershaft is not ambivalent or doubtful about the nature of religious beliefs or even about his own values. Instead, Undershaft's representation shows the necessity of living with multiple modes of valuation, some of which may appear exclusive. The value of the spiritual is ambiguously (and self-servingly) stated in Undershaft's thesis that every man has a different yet no less true morality. Much of the play is an indictment against religion at the same time that it shows religion's worth to human beings and society. As such, Major Barbara is a study of religiosity and spirituality, underscoring what Clayton Crockett argues in "Postmodernism and Its Secrets": "The true function of religion serves to support an open and honest endeavor of the intellect in its quest for knowledge and freedom. Secrecy must be opposed in religion, because...