"Father Undershaft" and the Kids

In Act I of Major Barbara, Barbara Undershaft's first words to her father are, perhaps prophetically, "Quite right" (111, 85). ¹ In Act II, when her fiancé, Cusins--who in Act III agrees to allow Undershaft to adopt him as his son and to become his heir--first addresses him using a filial term, he says, perhaps equally prophetically, "Father Undershaft: you are mistaken" (III, 116). In the tension between the phrases of these kids--to pluralize the term Charles Lomax uses about Sarah, "a little kid," which Lady Britomart sarcastically dubs an example of "that elegance of diction and refinement of thought that seem never to desert [him]" (III, 82)--lies the relationship between Barbara, Cusins, and her father, and forge the play's dominant themes.

I am a bit perplexed that many critics, readers, directors, and actors have concluded that Undershaft so dazzles his older daughter and the young man who will become his adopted son that they agree with his moral views and consent to carry on in his ways. ² Critics, directors, and readers still reach this conclusion, or conclusions close to it, even in the 1990s. To David Gordon, for example, "The reason the play runs into trouble after two exceptionally brilliant acts (in the view of almost every critic, beginning with Shaw himself) is that it is so fascinated by Undershaft's power that it cannot make enough room for the counterclaim of wisdom." Undershaft's "gospel that poverty is the worst of crimes only really makes sense in so far as we can imagine the kind of Utopian society discovered for us in Perivale St Andrew." Instead of Barbara's and Cusins's vision replacing his or fusing with it, "he continues to dominate" Act III. Her "metaphorical ascent" is unsatisfactory and "[w]e see neither her nor Cusins resisting temptations and overcoming them." ³ John Bertolini sees Barbara as a virtual "orphan" with an "absentee father," questing for "paternal respect and affection," and he finds that the play's major dramatic action "hinges on the question of whether Cusins will accept the job from Undershaft (and in turn whether Barbara will still marry Cusins if he takes the job)." ⁴ Bertolini does not explore new directions that Cusins or Barbara might take afterward. In J. Ellen Gainor's view, Undershaft triumphs over his daughter, whose impending marriage signals "the triumph of the (father]" and who "is reduced from an independent, professional woman to a child crying for her mother to help her select a house for herself and her husband-to-be." Approvingly, Gainor quotes the last paragraph of an article by Thomas Noel: "There is nothing at the conclusion of Major Barbara to indicate that she will take over leadership and much in the play to indicate that she will not. It is hard to see her as the dynamic visionary who will lead the way to a better future." ⁵ According to Tracy Davis, too, Undershaft triumphs; his "solution to poverty, Shaw seems to argue, is a socialist dystopia on a par with the sentimentality fostered by the East End missionaries who trade contrition for soup." ⁶ This deduction implies that Barbara trades one false hope for another, and Davis gives no weight to her and Cusins's hopes that they might improve upon Undershaft's solution.

Undershaft's gospel dominated a symposium that followed a performance of Major Barbara by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in February 1991. One audience member articulately denounced the character's doctrine, which she took to be the author's; to ensure her meaning was clear, she wrote the statement in advance and read it (perhaps she was a Harvard student). What she said was congruent with many views expressed at the symposium. From 16 April to 1 November 1998, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake produced Major Barbara. In March, its director, Helena Kaut-Howson, phoned...