Theme of Love and War
Satire is the "biting exposure of human folly which criticizes human conduct, and aims to correct it" (Di Yanni 839). Moliere was the French master of satiric comedy, and Shaw has been hailed likewise--as the "Irish Moliere." In Arms and the Man, Shaw demonstrates his genius for satire by exposing the incongruities of life and criticizing the contradictions in human character.
Arms and the Man is quite possibly Shaw's most popular play. The success of Arms and the Man has been consistent right from its first production in 1894. The original staging of the play was so well received that Shaw's reputation as one of the greatest wits in the London drama scene was almost instantly established. Shaw himself, present at the opening performance, was actually dissappointed in the response of the audience. It is true that Arms and the Man is a comedy, but it is also about war. The setting of the play is in war-torn Bulgaria, and focusses not only on the romance between the young people of the play, but the atrocities that go on during war times and the ability of people not so very far removed from these atrocities to ignore them completely.
Coming just a few years before the start of the Great War, Shaw's play turned out to be sadly prophetic. When war was declared, young men literally flooded the offices in order to sign up. These men carried with them the same romantic - and wholly innacurate - ideas of the "glories" of war that Raina and her mother Catherine carry with them at the start of the play.
Over the course of the play, Raina loses this romantic ideal in favour of a far more productive and accurate version that allows her to find true love. Sergius, her betrothed at the start of the play, goes through a similar transformation, realising that there must be more to himself than the two dimensional ideal of the soldier that young ladies seem to worship.
Unfortunately, Shaw's message was disregarded, and the Great War carried on exactly as he could have predicted. His nation suffered an immense period of disillusionment, as the true nature of war was shown to them - at their very doorstep.
Although the play is now more than a hundred years old, its themes of love and war are possibly more valid than ever before. Its comedy is still fresh and entertaining and its story of love and romance can appeal to us all. This is why it is still so widely produced.
Shaw has selected two main themes war and love for his play Arms and the Man. Shaw has shown how the romance of war leads to the romance of love. Arms and the Man portrays this having ruthlessly thrown among the idealisms. The material and the background for the war has been provided by the historic war between Bulgaria and Serbia. And the theme for Love has been provided by his own personal life. Shaw's mother married his father against the advice of her friends, and she suffered for her absolute surrender to the romance of love. Her ...
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Shaw has selected two main themes war and love for his play Arms and the Man. Shaw has shown how the romance of war leads to the romance of love. Arms and the Man portrays this having ruthlessly thrown among the idealisms. The material and the background for the war has been provided by the historic war between Bulgaria and Serbia. And the theme for Love has been provided by his own personal life. Shaw's mother married his father against the advice of her friends, and she suffered for her absolute surrender to the romance of love. Her husband was a confirmed drunkard, and the dream of her romance was soon shattered when she discovered during their honeymoon in Liverpool that the wardrobe was full of empty bottles. She was disgusted with her husband and finally left him. Shaw had not forgotten the bitter experience of his boyhood days.
Consequently, in his play Shaw has criticized the romantic notions about both Love and War. A.C. Ward writes in his introduction to Arms and the Man "Behind the humor of the relationship of Raina, Sergius and Bluntschillay the memories of Shaw's own childhood in a home shadowed by the failure of his parents' marriage."
The romantic view of war, which has sought to dispel, is based on the idealistic notion that men fight because they are heroes, and that the running of the greatest risk brings the brightest glory. It is such a bloated notion that Raina Petkoff has about her Sergius. She believes that the world is a happy place where heroes partake in such adventures and their heroines feel the glory. Then suddenly reality breaks in upon her in the form of the weary, dirt stained Swiss soldier. His very appearance and his notions about a soldier's duty alarm her but impress her as nearer and his notions about a soldier's duty alarm but impress her as a nearer truth than her own high flown notions.
Love and war are the main subjects of this play. Shaw addresses each, showing the disparity between how these issues are perceived and what they are in actuality. Love, of course, is often regarded in romantic terms. Raina, of Arms and the Man, is described as a young, beautiful woman who indeed does hold to idealistic notions concerning the emotion of love. To her, "the world really is a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act in its romance!" (Shaw 1294, act 1). She acts as though she can continue to live in her ideal world forever and believes that she has found a true love in Sergius. As a couple, they put on a show for each other to prove their emotions are real. Raina says, in effect, that she is perfect in Sergius' company--"'When I think of you, I feel that I could never do a base deed, or think and ignoble thought'"--and he, in hers--"'You will never disappoint me, Sergius,'" she adds (1311, act 2).
However, by the play's end, Shaw is eager to reveal that all is not as it seems with any of the characters, especially with Raina. The audience knows it, and the characters learn the truth, too. When Sergius discovers the facts about his fiancée, he exclaims, "'You love that man! . . . You allow him to make love to you behind my back, just as you treat me as your affianced husband behind his'" (1329, act 3). Later, he comes to the realization that their "romance is shattered. [And] Life's a farce" (1330, act 3). It almost seems as though the playwright himself is saying this line; he speaks them to the audience as directly as if he were on stage. For Shaw often stocked his plays "full of lines in which the characters explode romantic elusions" (Ervine 269).
Love, though, is not the only concept around which romanticism abounds. The other point that Arms and the Man seeks to make is that war, too, has been idealized. The perspective that most of the characters have on war is practically mythology. The first scene depicts Raina and her mother, and their morbid excitement over the latest battle. In fact, Raina's first reaction to the news of the battle is to ask whether there was a victory. Her second is to ask, "'Is father safe?'" as an afterthought (Shaw 1293, act 1). She has no idea what war is really all about. To keep herself safe, all Raina feels she needs to do is "roll [herself] up in bed with [her] ears well covered" (1294, act 1).
Shaw soon presents a more realistic view of warfare by introducing the character of Bluntschli. His name is symbolic in that he truly is "blunt." He declares that "'nine soldiers out of ten are born fools'" (1297, act 1). Raina, obviously, has never thought this. She makes heroes out of generals and majors, and, of course, Sergius. But Bluntschli continues; his conversation with her is nothing short of taunting until she is "outraged in her most cherished ideals of manhood" (1299, act 1). Bluntschli reveals that he carries not cartridges with him but chocolate. He is more concerned with his "want of food and sleep . . . he has found by experience that it is more important to have a few bits of chocolate to eat in the field than cartridges for his revolver" (Ervine 268). Finally, Raina begins to understand the reality of war when Sergius, too, exposes the truth about soldiering, saying: 'I am no longer a soldier. Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.' (Shaw 1309-1310, act 2). With those words, Sergius extracts any thoughts from Raina's mind, and her mother's mind, that the men fighting in battles are all noble, heroic, or honorable. They are simply men, doing a job, and trying, on any terms, to stay alive.
When Shaw has Sergius relay these words, though, he is doing more than just dispelling romantic notions that the characters, and the audience, have about war; he is pointing out the hypocrisy of humans in general. For Sergius had always represented himself as the opposite of what the above-mentioned declaration entails. All of the characters in this play misrepresent themselves in one way or another in fact. Shaw constructs the characters so that there is a "discrepancy between how they think and how they act, between what they say and what they do" (Di Yanni 828). An example of such a contradiction is the topic of the library. Raina boasts about her family's library, "the only one in Bulgaria" (Shaw 1303, act 1). However, the library is found to be lacking. Shaw writes: "It is not much of a library. Its literary equipment consists of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed; and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gifts books on them" (1319, act 3).
Bluntschli, again, is the voice of truth, seeing through this and all of Raina's, and her family's, charades. She pledges devotion to her intended, but is attracted to Bluntschli. She says that the Petkoffs are the "richest and best known in [the] country" of Bulgaria (1302, act 1, emphasis mine), and yet she "is determined to be a Viennese lady" (1293, act 1). Acting one way and being another is second nature to her. Surprisingly though Bluntschli admires her. He says, "'When you strike that noble attitude and speak in that thrilling voice, I admire you; but I find it impossible to believe a single word you say'" (1323, act 3).
Ironically, Shaw himself leads his audience to believe exactly what he has to say. He does indeed expose the folly of hypocrisy, the stupidity of misrepresenting oneself. In addition, he displays the paradox of the misunderstandings that people have about war and love. Each are romanticized and idealized, ignoring the more ugly and brutal sides each has. Shaw brings those other sides to light. For satire is also used as a means to correct that which it exposes and criticizes. Shaw was not satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding glory on robbery, starvation, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, cupidity, and all the other commonplaces of civilization" (qtd. in Ervine 268, emphasis mine), and he does not want the audience of Arms and the Man to be, either.
Shaw has mocked at hero-worshipping and sees nothing Platonic about Love also. He tries to prove that Love too is a mere biological need of us and not a spiritual one. Thus he has tried to present the contrast between Romantic and the Real.
The play has two themes love and war and both are universal. Romantic notions about war need to be cured as much today as much as in 1890's. The suffering caused by the two world wars has convinced all those who can think that war has to be abandoned, if humanity is to survive. As our age is a nuclear age, and the age of missiles hence the message of the play is more significant which has kept and is still keeping the play as alive as it was at the time of its birth.
The second universal theme of love is again significant, just as war blinds the man; love too blinds him and makes him incapable to see the reality. As after effects of war are terrible, similarly after effects of 'idealistic romantic love' are also terrible. Thus the play presents the reality of love and war and makes us feel it.
References:
Ervine, St. John. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends. New York: Morrow, 1956.
Dent, Alan ed. Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence. New York: Knopf, 1952.
Di Yanni, Robert. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Shaw, George Bernard. Arms and the Man. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed.
Robert Di Yanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998.