Major Barbara and Cloud Nine

George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine both satirize the social norms and values of their respective societies. In Major Barbara, we see that Shaw satirizes attempts at social reform predicated on conventional Christian norms and values such as love, honor, justice, and truth. Munitions tycoon Andrew Undershaft turns these values on their head to the consternation of his daughter Barbara, who compassionately tries to spread these values through her work for the Salvation Army. In Churchill's Cloud Nine, the author satirizes patriarchal values of the Victorian era. White is the dominant racial perspective, masculinity is the dominant gender value, and heterosexuality is the dominant sexual ideology. Churchill shows these values to be superficial and too rigidly defined to represent the reality of relations between individuals. In both plays, conventional values are satirized for being artificially imposed on individuals, arbitrarily created, and ineffective in affording individuals the "good life."

In Major Barbara, Andrew Undershaft is a titan of capitalism, made wealthy by his munitions manufacturing. Undershaft is charming, witty, and bombastic in contrast to his daughter Barbra who preaches humility and submission as the means of salvation. Barbara detests her father's seeming insensitivity to profiting from munitions whose purpose is to destroy others. Undershaft, in contrast, tells Barb

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d pleasure, attending to the desires of their husband and not theirs. Clive's wife is played by a male and the black servant, Joshua, is played by a white man because both wish to be what is favored or considered valued in society, men and whites respectively. Churchill satirizes the patriarchal values of this society, demonstrating that when those who are outside the norms try to comply with them, they often lose their identity, like Betty and Joshua being something else than they are to please the dominant value system. Clive continually attempts to perpetuate and maintain masculine values in the play. We see he instills masculinity and places the bond between men and their control in society as the ultimate understanding of males. As he tells Edward, "You should always respect and love me, Edward, not for myself, I may not deserve it, but as I respected and loved my father, because he was my father. Through our father we love our Queen and our God, Edward. Do you understand? It is something men understand," (Churchill p. 32). Clive tells Edward that he should not have emotions because "A boy has no business having feelings," and that he spends too much time with women whose "effeminacy is contagious," (Churchill p. 19;

Category: Literature - M