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Major Barbara: Concurrence of Shaw and Marx; Dialectic of Social Reform and Life Force

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2016, 29(3), pp.65-98
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Eom Tae-yong 1

1가톨릭관동대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Major Barbara: Concurrence of Shaw and Marx; Dialectic of Social Reform and Life Force Abstract Eom,Tae-Yong Major Barbara, one of George Bernard Shaw’s finest dramas, deals with such materials as poverty, social vices, secularization of religion and alienation of human beings, which are thought to be derived from the social structure of capitalism. Although this play has been researched by a variety of viewpoints. it is regrettable that it has not yet been analyzed on the basis of Karl Marx’s ideas at least in the Korean academia. Shaw’s coherent opinion that poverty is the root of all evils is also remarkably represented here as in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Undershaft, a main character, defines poverty as crime and argues that vices of poverty do harm to the whole community including the rich as well as the poor. His claim that a scoundrel could become a gentleman only if he got out of poverty reminds us of Marx’s proposition of “their social being that specifies their consciousness.” Shaw and Marx repudiated the conventional notion that assiduous people grow rich and lazy people fall into poverty. Shaw emphasized through his agent Undershaft that ‘money and gunpowder’ is the indispensable power not only for materialistic salvation but also for spiritual redemption. On the other hand, Barbara would never accept her father Undershaft’s creed of money and gunpower as a devotional apostle who has struggled to save poor people from destitution and sins. Her pure but immature zeal, however, gets to break down due to a ruffian Bill Walker’s ‘Crosstianity’ of vengeance and punishment and the fake contrition of a lumpenproletariat Price, and moreover owing to the event that Mrs Baines, an office superior to Barbara, tries to collect huge donations from a distiller Bodger and the munitions manufacturer Undershaft. Barbara feels severely alienated with realizing that her religiously romantic ideal was an illusory dream not based on actual life. It looks like a mental phenomenon similar to the alienation by fetishism of products or religions observed by Marx. Nonetheless, Barbara manages to free herself from the frustration because she has kept her own orignal inspiration - her own pure moral will or ‘Barbara’s Christianity’ - deep in heart, and finally decides to recognize the power of Undershaft’s money and gunpowder. Cusins, Barbara’s fiance, is given the qualification for Undershaft’s successor thanks to his fanatical enthusiasm and prodigious brain power. Barbara and Cusins strive to appropriate Undershaft’s money and gunpowder by virtue of their Life Force, her intense moral will and his excellent intellectual vitality, together, and thus continue to develop a dialectical synthesis for both materialistic salvation and spiritual redemption. But the authentic dialectical development ought to be the sublime process of the struggle between actualities and ideals deep in internal minds of Barbara and Cusins, especially in Barbara’s intrinsic spirit, rather than to be the external conflicts and combination of contrasting views. This process shall go through the intrinsic reality of human beings and society by ‘alienation and superseding of alienation, or actual objectification by appropriation of objective being’, which Marx organized by embracing the positive aspects of Hegelian dialectic. That is ‘Barbara’s Christianity,’ Life Force and its Creative Evolution, the dialectical development of ideals and actualities, and the authentic realism.

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