Major Barbara portrays the conflict between the spiritual and worldly power embodied in Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her Machiavellian father, millionaire arms manufacturer, Andrew Undershaft. While visiting her East End shelter for the poor, as part of a bargain struck between them, he reveals that the shelter’s benefactor made his money by distilling whiskey. Barbara suffers a crisis of faith as she glimpses the possibility that all salvation and philanthropy are tainted at the source. The next day, visiting the munitions factory with her mother, Lady Britomart, and her fiancé, classical scholar Adolphus Cusins, Barbara is further shaken to discover that her father is a model employer. Cusins enters the debate, revealing that he is technically a foundling and therefore eligible to inherit the Undershaft empire (as Undershaft’s children are not). When Cusins agrees to enter the business, Barbara recovers her spirit as she embraces this new possibility of hope for the future.
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| Sybil Thorndike as Barbara and Baliol Holloway as Undershaft in Wyndam's Theatre, 1929. |
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, © Margaret Drabble and Oxford University Press 1995 http://www.xrefer.com/entry/372694