Arms and the Man PDF

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Arms and the Man Arms and the Man (1894) is an early comedy by the great Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), and is an excellent example of the techniques used by Shaw to implement social criticism in his drama. In the Victorian era (1839-1901) British drama gradually declined to mere melodrama, where the focus was on superficial personal emotion and passion without much reference to the pressing issues of human existence. Shaw was profoundly influenced by the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), whose influence was felt throughout Europe. a more realistic theatre and held that the theatre had a serious purpose and should address the important social and political issues of the day. Shaw declared that he did not like to people comfortable when they should be uncomfortable and that in his plays, he wanted to confront his audience with their own inadequacies in order to bring them to a ‘sense of sin’. Shaw solved this problem by coating the bitter pill of his serious messages and contentions in sugar the sugar of comedy. He made his audiences laugh and without realizing it they were laughing at themselves, at their own beliefs and prejudices. Shaw sought to reform his audiences by laughter. The issues Shaw criticizes in this play are romantic attitudes to love and war. The play does not attempt any historical verisimilitude, however, and could have been set in any distant, exotic spot. The two characters that most clearly express the attitudes to love and war that Shaw wants to undermine are Raina, a beautiful maiden from a rich and prominent Bulgarian family, and her fiancé, Sergius Saranoff, who is the archetypal romantic hero, handsome, brave and dashing. Shaw makes these characters attractive but eminently foolish. The two approach each other in rapture with exclamations such as ‘My hero! My king!’ and ‘My queen!’, swearing to a ‘higher love’ that they entertain for each other, while, in fact, Raina secretly fancies another man while Sergius flirts outrageously with the maid. In fact, Sergius admits to the maid, Louka, that the ‘higher love’ is a ‘very fatiguing thing to keep up for any length of time’. As far as attitudes to War are concerned, Sergius arrives on the scene as the hero of a bold and dashing cavalry charge at the guns of the enemy (shades of Tennyson’s the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’), fêted by everyone. It is soon revealed to the audience, however, that this charge was an eminently irresponsible act, virtually suicidal, that only succeeded by chance as the enemy had at that moment run out of ammunition. Opposed to these two operatic characters, Shaw poses the professional Swiss soldier, Bluntschli, who acts as a foil and undercuts the overblown performance of the other two with common sense, honesty and true vigour. In addition to these qualities, Shaw endows him with charm and humour and he quickly and amusingly punctures the over-the-top notions of the other two. The audience laughs at this and does not consciously realize that the ideas of love and war espoused by Sergius and Raina and shown up as utterly unrealistic and foolish by Bluntschli, are very much the prevalent notions of their time, probably shared by the greater part of the audience. And so, Shaw slips in the medicine under the sugar, and educates his audience while he entertains them. Shaw, who was a socialist, also takes some sideswipes at the class structure, for example by revealing Nikola, the man servant, to be ‘the

ablest man in Bulgaria’. In the end Shaw further confounds the audience by pointing out that Bluntschli, the realist, is in fact a ‘true romantic’, as opposed to the false, make-believe romance previously espoused by Sergius and Raina. What Shaw manages to achieve is that the argumentation in the play (sometimes referred to as ‘dramatic dialectics’), which is the main focus of his attention, is absorbed entirely into the action, plot and characters of the play. The members of the audience are entertained and become involved in what is happening on stage and never experience that they are being confronted with an unpalatable argument or an unsolicited sermon. TOOL KIT

SOCIAL REFORMS (ETIQUETTE) The play persistently points out that division between the classes as unethical and unjust. The play maintains that in fact there is no inherent difference between a member of the working class and a member of the aristocracy beyond the way they are treated by society. Louka is the most adamant socialist voice in this play. She insists she does not have the “soul of a servant” and refuses to think of herself as subservient simply because she was born into the working class. She falls in love with Sergius and calls Raina by her first name. In doing so she eschews convention and promotes her own equality. Shaw uses this bitter pill to let society know that their ideas of war are skewed but instead of just telling it he coats it in humour. Takes social issue and write it in a certain way that won’t offend or irritate society but actually enjoy the message across naively. Get them thinking ‘ok. Maybe he has a point.’ Shaw also attacks social inequality between servant class and master class. Louka is his mouthpiece of conveying his democratic ideas of the essential equality between one person and another. She is a maid-servant of the Petkoff family but she has not the soul of a servant. She calls Raina by her name and says, “I have a right to call her Raina: she calls me Louka.”

SATIRE The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. One of Shaw's aims in this play is to debunk the romantic heroics of war; he wanted to present a realistic account of war and to remove all pretensions of nobility from war. It is not, however, an antiwar play; instead, it is a satire on those attitudes which would glorify war. Shaw declared that he did not like to people comfortable when they should be uncomfortable. He shows the fakeness of love and the incorrect notions of war through satire. He made the audience laugh without realising they were laughing at themselves. Shaw satirises conventional romantic notions about war and soldiering through his mouthpiece, Bluntschli. Shaw satirises the supposed heroism.

Shaw satirises the ideals of romantic love in the play through the characters of Raina and Sergius. They are two apostles of ‘higher love’. Raina addresses him as her ‘king’ and he addresses her as his ‘queen’. Shaw also ridicules the romantic attitude and poses of Raina and Sergius. Sergius is not a chivalrous knight. He acts like a fool in leading the cavalry charge against the artillery. He is proud of his victory at the battle of Slivnitza but actually he is a stupid. He strikes poses and so is easily befooled and entrapped into marriage by a mere maid-servant. Raina is also like Sergius. She tells lies and strikes poses. She says that her romantic ideas have been derived from her reading Byron and Pushkin and seeing operas at Bucharest. Bluntschli sees through her and laughs at her poses and lies. The Petkoffs are proud of their library, their staircases, and their electric bell. Thus, in Arms and the Man Shaw satirises romantic conceptions about love and war, marriage, social inequality and snobbery.

ROMANTISED AND REALISTIC VIEWS OF LOVE AND WAR Notions of love and war as well as class are turned upside down and the reader is forced to confront them just as British playgoers There are two simultaneous affairs in the play, Raina and Bluntschli’s, and Sergius and Louka’s. Thus, characters who claim to be noble and pure, and never lie—especially Raina and Sergius—are precisely the characters whose infidelities will advance the plot of the play, and reveal their and others’ hypocrisies of conduct. What becomes clear as the play progresses, however, is that war is simply a job for soldiers, and nothing more. Sergius is not the hero he is initially thought to be. He romanticizes war to such an extent that he leads a foolish charge against the enemy, and only does so in order to climb the ranks for recognition. Bluntschli also destroys Raina’s romantic idea of war and heroism when he proves that the best soldiers are often not identified as such on the outside. Though Catherine and Raina are ostensibly dependent upon the outcome of the war, in dealing with Bluntshli they are also active participants in some of its intrigues. In harbouring an enemy and ultimately marrying him, they add to the argument that war and its divisiveness can be meaningless. Shaw displays an interest in revealing human realities like love and war for what they really are: often ugly, contradictory, and thoroughly complex. He implicitly criticizes romantic art for avoiding these realities, and giving us a sugar-coated version of human life and human history. Conversely, his work puts forth the argument that art should be able to make sense of and account for human experiences. -

WAR

Shaw satirizes the romantic notions about war that glorify a grisly business. If not for the comic dialogue, the audience would more easily recognize that they are being presented with a soldier who has escaped from a horrific battle after three days of being under fire. He is exhausted, starving, and being pursued. Such is the experience of a real soldier. The key elements of the play are really contained in Sergius and Raina, rather than in Bluntschli. Bluntschli really never changes in the course of the play; he is the standard against which the others are measured.

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ROMANCE

Her relationship with Sergius (whom the stage directions call a “Byronic hero” after the Romantic poet Lord Byron) embodies almost all of the romantic ideals: they are both beautiful, refined, and appear to be infatuated with each other. However, this romantic, idealistic vision of love does not stand up when reality sets in. Raina and Sergius’s flawed romanticism also shows through in their conception of war. Raina waxes poetic about how Sergius is an ideal soldier: brave, virile, ruthless but fair. It turns out Sergius’s cavalry charge was ill-advised, and the charge only succeeded because the opposing side didn’t have the correct ammunition. Sergius is not the perfect soldier—he is a farce. And the real soldier, Bluntschli, runs away from battle and carries sweets instead of a gun. He also speaks honestly about the brutality and violence of war—which involves more drunkenness and abuse than it does heroics and gallantry....