Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Plight of the Weak Throughout David Copperfield, the powerful abuse the weak and helpless. Dickens focuses on orphans, women, and the mentally disabled to show that exploitation—not pity or compassion—is the rule in an industrial society. Dickens draws on his own experience as a child to describe the inhumanity of child labor and debtors’ prison. His characters suffer punishment at the hands of forces larger than themselves, even though they are morally good people.
The arbitrary suffering of innocents makes for the most vividly affecting scenes of the novel. David starves and suffers in a wine-bottling factory as a child. As his guardian, Mr. Murdstone can exploit David as factory labor because the boy is too small and dependent on him to disobey. Likewise, the boys at Salem House have no recourse against the cruel Mr. Creakle. In both situations, children deprived of the care of their natural parents suffer at the hands of their own supposed protectors. The weak in David Copperfield never escape the domination of the powerful by challenging the powerful directly.
Instead, the weak must ally themselves with equally powerful characters. David, for example, doesn’t stand up to Mr. Murdstone and challenge his authority. Instead, he flees to the wealthy Miss Betsey, whose financial stability affords her the power to shelter David from Mr. Murdstone. David’s escape proves neither self-reliance nor his own inner virtue, but rather the significance of family ties and family money in human relationships. Equality in Marriage In the world of the novel, marriages succeed to the extent that husband and wife attain equality in their relationship.
Dickens holds up the Strongs’ marriage as an example to show that marriages can only be happy if neither spouse is subjugated to the other. Indeed, neither of the Strongs views the other as inferior. Conversely, Dickens criticizes characters who attempt to invoke a sense of superiority over their spouses. Mr. Murdstone’s attempts to improve David’s mother’s character, for example, only crush her spirit. Mr. Murdstone forces Clara into submission in the name of improving her, which leaves her meek and voiceless.
In contrast, although Doctor Strong does attempt to improve Annie’s character, he does so not out of a desire to show his moral superiority but rather out of love and respect for Annie. Doctor Strong is gentle and soothing with his wife, rather than abrasive and imperious like Mr. Murdstone. Though Doctor Strong’s marriage is based at least partially on an ideal of equality, he still assumes that his wife, as a woman, depends upon him and needs him for moral guidance. Dickens, we see, does not challenge his society’s constrictive views about the roles of women.
However, by depicting a marriage in which a man and wife share some balance of power, Dickens does point toward an age of empowered women. Wealth and Class Throughout the novel, Dickens criticizes his society’s view of wealth and class as measures of a person’s value. Dickens uses Steerforth, who is wealthy, powerful, and noble, to show that these traits are more likely to corrupt than improve a person’s character. Steerforth is treacherous and self-absorbed. On the other hand, Mr. Peggotty and Ham, both poor, are generous, sympathetic characters.
Many people in Dickens’s time believed that poverty was a symptom of moral degeneracy and that people who were poor deserved to suffer because of inherent deficiencies. Dickens, on the other hand, sympathizes with the poor and implies that their woes result from society’s unfairness, not their own failings. Dickens does not go so far as to suggest that all poor people are absolutely noble and that all rich people are utterly evil. Poor people frequently swindle David when he is young, even though he too is poor and helpless.
Doctor Strong and Agnes, both wealthy, middle-class citizens, nonetheless are morally upstanding. Dickens does not paint a black-and-white moral picture but shows that wealth and class are are unreliable indicators of character and morality. Dickens invites us to judge his characters based on their individual deeds and qualities, not on the hand that the cruel world deals them.
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Mothers and Mother Figures Mothers and mother figures have an essential influence on the identity of the characters in David Copperfield. Almost invariably, good mother figures produce good children while bad mothers yield sinister offspring. This moral connection between mothers and children indicates Dickens’s belief that mothers have an all-important role in shaping their children’s characters and destinies. The success of mother figures in the novel hinges on their ability to care for their children without coddling them.
Miss Betsey, the aunt who raises David, clearly adores him but does not dote on him. She encourages him to be strong in everything he does and to be fair at all times. She corrects him when she thinks he is making a mistake, as with his marriage to Dora, and her ability to see faults in him helps him to mature into a balanced adult. Although Miss Betsey raises David to deal with the difficulties of the world, she does not block those hardships. Instead, she forces David to confront them himself. In contrast, Uriah’s mother, Mrs.
Heep, dotes on her son and allows him to dominate her. As a result, Uriah develops a vain, inflated self-regard that breeds cruel behavior. On the whole, Dickens’s treatment of mother-child relationships in the novel is intended to teach a lesson. He warns mothers to love their children only in moderation and to correct their faults while they can still be fixed. Accented Speech Dickens gives his characters different accents to indicate their social class. Uriah Heep and Mr. Peggotty are two notable examples of such characters whose speech indicates their social standing.
Uriah, in an attempt to appear poor and of good character, consistently drops the “h” in “humble” every time a group of Mr. Wickfield’s friends confront him. Uriah drops this accent as soon as his fraud is revealed: he is not the urchin-child he portrays himself to be, who grew up hard and fell into his current character because of the cruelty of the world. Rather, Uriah is a conniving, double-crossing social climber who views himself as superior to the wealthy and who exploits everyone he can. Mr. Peggotty’s lower-class accent, on the other hand, indicates genuine humility and poverty.
Dickens uses accent in both cases to advance his assertion that class and personal integrity are unrelated and that it is misleading to make any connection between the two. Physical Beauty In David Copperfield, physical beauty corresponds to moral good. Those who are physically beautiful, like David’s mother, are good and noble, while those who are ugly, like Uriah Heep, Mr. Creakle, and Mr. Murdstone, are evil, violent, and ill-tempered. Dickens suggests that internal characteristics, much like physical appearance, cannot be disguised permanently.
Rather, circumstances will eventually reveal the moral value of characters whose good goes unrecognized or whose evil goes unpunished. In David Copperfield, even the most carefully buried characteristics eventually come to light and expose elusive individuals for what they really are. Although Steerforth, for example, initially appears harmless but annoying, he cannot hide his true treachery for years. In this manner, for almost all the characters in the novel, physical beauty corresponds to personal worth.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Sea The sea represents an unknown and powerful force in the lives of the characters in David Copperfield, and it is almost always connected with death. The sea took Little Em’ly’s father in an unfortunate accident over which she had no control. Likewise, the sea takes both Ham and Steerforth. The sea washes Steerforth up on the shore—a moment that symbolizes Steerforth’s moral emptiness, as the sea treats him like flotsam and jetsam.
The storm in the concluding chapters of the novel alerts us to the danger of ignoring the sea’s power and indicates that the novel’s conflicts have reached an uncontrollable level. Like death, the force of the sea is beyond human control. Humans must try to live in harmony with the sea’s mystical power and take precautions to avoid untimely death. Flowers Flowers represent simplicity and innocence in David Copperfield. For example, Steerforth nicknames David “Daisy” because David is naive. David brings Dora flowers on her birthday.
Dora forever paints flowers on her little canvas. When David returns to the Wickfields’ house and the Heeps leave, he discovers that the old flowers are in the room, which indicates that the room has been returned to its previous state of simplicity and innocence. In each of these cases, flowers stand as images of rebirth and health—a significance that points to a springlike quality in characters associated with their blossoms.
Flowers indicate fresh perspective and thought and often recall moments of frivolity and release. Mr. Dick’s Kite Mr. Dick’s enormous kite represents his separation from society. Just as the kite soars above the other characters, Mr. Dick, whom the characters believe to be insane, stands apart from the rest of society. Because Mr. Dick is not a part of the social hierarchies that bind the rest of the characters, he is able to mend the disagreement between Doctor and Mrs. Strong, which none of the other characters can fix. The kite’s carefree simplicity mirrors Mr. Dick’s own childish innocence, and the pleasure the kite offers resembles the honest, unpretentious joy Mr.
Dick brings to those around him.
Important Quotations Explained 1 . I wonder what they thought of me! David expresses this feeling of curiosity in Chapter XI while relating his boyhood trials working in the wine factory. Specifically, the adult David thinks back on how the people near the public house must have perceived him, a young boy eating his bread alone. As the narrator, looking back on his life in retrospect, David often makes such remarks, indicating how pathetic he finds himself as a small boy with nothing to eat, nowhere to go, and no one to care for him.
The adult David feels sympathy for himself as a young, abused boy, and as he writes, he often reflects both on his own failings and on the cruelties the world visits on him as a boy. This introspection shows how the older David has learned from the experiences of his life. In particular, the early period of David’s life described in this passage closely mirrors the life of Dickens himself, who may have written these lines in honest self-reflection, picturing himself alone in London at age twelve, left alone to fend for himself as best he could. . If anyone had told me, then, that all this was a brilliant game, played for the excitement of the moment . . . in the thoughtless love of superiority, in a mere wasteful careless course of winning what was worthless to him, and next minute thrown away . . . I wonder in what manner of receiving it my indignation would have found a vent! As narrator, David uses this remark from Chapter XXI to comment on Steerforth’s ability to seduce the Peggottys upon meeting them for the first time. The sentiment reflects three crucial elements of the novel.
First, it shows how artless and naive David is in his attitude toward Steerforth until Steerforth’s ultimate crime is revealed. This absolute trust on David’s part comes across in all his interactions with Steerforth, including this one, as David is charmed by Steerforth’s ability to make friends with the Peggottys. Second, the quotation exemplifies the foreshadowing Dickens uses throughout the novel. The comments the adult David makes about Steerforth just playing a game alert us to the fact that Steerforth is up to something.
This foreshadowing ratchets up the suspense about Steerforth’s intentions and makes us wonder how these intentions will affect the other characters. Third, David, as an adult narrator, reveals in this quotation more than young David himself knows at the time—a disparity that creates dramatic irony by giving us more knowledge than the characters themselves have. The adult perspective of the narrative voice also highlights how much David matures before the end of the novel, for it demonstrates that he recognizes the errors of his youthful perceptions and conclusions.
Although the adult David, as narrator, rarely disparages his younger self, he reveals the flaws in his ways of thinking through asides such as this one. 3 . “Ride over all obstacles, and win the race! ” Steerforth, having just returned from Yarmouth in Chapter XXVIII, makes this remark as he relays to David the news of Mr. Barkis’s illness. Steerforth has just taken the crucial step toward the seduction of Little Em’ly, although David is unaware of it. In his remark, Steerforth is more likely encouraging himself than trying to console David about Mr. Barkis’s impending death.
The devil-may-care attitude Steerforth expresses in this statement is typical of him: he believes that as long as he himself is happy, nothing else matters. Steerforth is willing to sacrifice his friendship with David and the happiness of the Peggottys, including that of Little Em’ly, simply to obtain the momentary pleasure of having Little Em’ly for his own. This overarching and unjustified pride renders Steerforth repugnant once his true attitude becomes plain. 4 . My meaning simply is that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well . . I have always been thoroughly in earnest. The adult David offers this statement in an aside toward the end of the novel, in Chapter XLII. As David matures, his narrative style also matures, for David is the lens through which the events of the novel are described. As a result, the later parts of David Copperfield are filled with these kinds of musing asides. As David matures, his narration focuses more on his life and emotions and less on the subplots swirling around him. In this remark, David mentions his efforts to be earnest.
Indeed, throughout the novel, Dickens portrays earnestness as a morally good characteristic that usually wins out over scheming and sophistication. The characters who bare their hearts and who keep their hearts constant prevail at the conclusion of the novel, while those who plot, contrive, and conceal their true intentions suffer at the novel’s end. Dickens uses both plot elements and these kinds of narrative asides to emphasize the importance of this kind of moral ordering, to imply that we, like David, should try to live our lives in earnest.
If we do, Dickens suggests, we will be richly rewarded with happiness. 5 . “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose. ” Annie Strong makes this remark to her husband, Doctor Strong, in Chapter XLV, when Mr. Dick brings the couple together again after Uriah Heep’s deviousness has torn them apart. Annie’s words haunt David in his new marriage to Dora, as he slowly realizes that his and Dora’s characters are irreconcilably different. Dickens indicates that true love must rest on an equality between souls, while equality of age and class is less significant.
Equality of purpose is essential for two people to join their lives, fortunes, and futures. Without equality there can be only misunderstanding, and with it a dynamic in which one partner dominates and the other suffers. The most prominent examples of good marriage in David Copperfield are the Strongs’ marriage and David’s marriage to Agnes, both of which exemplify marital bliss in that both couples yearn for mutual happiness and act generously toward each other. Narrator · an older David Copperfield narrates the story of his childhood from his happy home in London.
Point of view · David writes in the first person, limiting his viewpoint to what he sees in his youth and his attitude at that time. Tone · David reflects upon his youth fondly and remembers his naive youth wistfully. Setting (time) · 1800s Setting (place) · England Protagonist · David Copperfield major conflict · David struggles to become a man in a cruel world, with little money and few people to guide him. Rising action · David loses his mother and falls victim to a cruel childhood but then has a happier youth with Miss Betsey and Agnes.
Climax · David realizes, while watching the reconciliation between the Strongs, that marriage cannot be happy unless husband and wife are equal partners. This realization forces David to contemplate his marriage to Dora in a new light and reconsider most of the values he has held up to this point. Falling action · The various subplots involving secondary characters resolve themselves. David realizes his love for Agnes, marries her, and comes to grips with the treachery and death of his good friend Steerforth. oreshadowing · The opening scene’s observation that David’s birth is inauspicious; the adult David’s remark that Little Emily would have been better off if the sea had swallowed her as a child; Agnes’s distrust of Steerforth; Agnes’s blush when David asks her about her love life Study Questions 1. How does the idea of constancy of emotion and love figure into the novel and illuminate David’s character? For Dickens, constancy of heart is a sign of single-mindedness, which is one of the most positive characteristics a person can possess. The happiest characters in the novel are those whose affection is unwavering.
Chief among them is Agnes, whose quiet faith and calm love sustain her through Uriah’s attempts to seduce her and ruin her father. Agnes’s devotion to her father, which she exhibits throughout the novel, is evidence of her stability, as is her persistent love for David. Her constant good eventually leads her to happiness, as she restores her father to his previous glory and marries her true love. Dora, by contrast, represents the flighty heart, whimsical and impulsive. She comes across as childish because of her fickle desires, and her unhappiness in her marriage to David is the direct result of this inconstancy.
Although Dora loves David, her inability to control her emotions prevents her from enjoying married life. The failure of David and Dora’s union, contrasted with the success of David and Agnes’s, conveys Dickens’s belief that constancy and fidelity of emotion are among the most important moral qualities. The most significant element of David’s process of maturity is his learning to control his emotions and keep a steady heart. Early in the novel, David’s emotions get the better of him. As a boy, David bites Mr. Murdstone’s hand out of hatred.
As a young man, he falls into excesses of alcohol and infatuation, as we see in his dinner party with Steerforth and his obsession over Dora. Before David can obtain true love, he must learn to curb these excesses and master his own emotions. As he brings his heart under the control of his intellect, David finally realizes his love for Agnes. By strongly believing in this love even though he does not believe that she loves him, he ultimately wins her. 2. How does the fact that the novel was published serially affect its structure? What devices does Dickens use to make the novel coherent for readers who received the text piecemeal?
Like many of Dickens’s other works, David Copperfield was originally published in serial installments, small sections that appeared in magazines over the course of many months. Dickens employs several methods to make the novel flow smoothly and to sustain his readers’ interest over the novel’s publication period. First, he uses strong imagery to make each character’s physical appearance and qualities easy to remember. Uriah Heep’s red hair, for example, reminds us of his fiery personality, while Dora’s silly dog, Jip, reminds us of Dora’s impetuous mannerisms.
Also, the names Dickens gives his characters serve as keys to their personalities. Agnes, for example, whose name is rooted in the Latin word for “lamb,” is gentle and soft-spoken. Similarly, Miss Murdstone, whose name has a hard, metallic feel to it, is mean and petty. Dickens also holds his readers’ interest by making the novel suspenseful, particularly through the use of foreshadowing. Because he was writing in installments and wanted to keep his readership hooked, Dickens ended each section with a strong hint of what was to come in the next section.
By creating a number of intriguing plot strands involving various characters, he generated a devoted readership that waited expectantly to see how these multiple subplots would resolve themselves and how these familiar characters would end up. To contribute to the intrigue of each section, Dickens focuses chiefly on plot elements rather than character development or setting. As a result, David Copperfield is almost always lively and energetic—the kind of story a reader would want to continue to reading over an extended period of time. 3. How does Dickens use contrasting pairs of characters to illustrate good and evil in the novel?
Many of the characters in David Copperfield have foils—similarly situated characters whose characteristics contrast with, and thereby accentuate, those of other characters. One such pair of foils is Agnes and Steerforth, who are both well situated in society. Whereas Agnes shows complete devotion to her family and remains constant in her affections, Steerforth is ever-shifting in his allegiances. In the end, Agnes’s wholesome steadfastness gains her David’s love, while Steerforth’s restless, misdirected energy brings him an untimely death.
By placing Agnes and Steerforth in close proximity in several places throughout the novel—as, for example, at the theater on the night of David’s dinner party—Dickens implicitly contrasts the two, creating an opposing pair that illuminates his view of good and evil. Similarly, Miss Betsey and Miss Murdstone, both old ladies in a position of authority over David, represent good and evil, respectively. Whereas Miss Betsey, for all her tough exterior, is caring and loving toward David, Miss Murdstone treats him cruelly. In these and other pairs of characters within the novel, the ontrast between figures illustrates the contrast between good and evil characteristics. Arms and the Man: Theme Analysis |The Reality of War | |The play opens with a romantic view of war held by the Bulgarians, especially the young Raina and Sergius. They will learn from | |experience and their lessons from Bluntschli that war is not glorious. | |Raina and Sergius have learned their ideas of war from books. They speak of knights and ladies and the combat of honor between | |equals.
Sergius says that war is like a “tournament” (Act II, p. 31). His idea of leading the victorious cavalry charge was a | |mistake from the point of view of modern warfare, for horses cannot override cannon and guns. Sergius resigns from the regiment, | |disillusioned that the other soldiers do not take him seriously. He refuses to play the modern game of war; it is for a | |“tradesman,” he complains (Act II, p. 29). | |Catherine Petkoff is even more locked into an old-fashioned conception of war and patriotism.
She is upset when peace is declared| |and asks her husband if he couldn’t have “annexed Serbia and made Prince Alexander Emperor of the Balkans” (Act II, p. 24). Major| |Petkoff explains they would have had to subdue Austria first (the allies of the Serbs). Catherine has no idea what war is or what| |it costs. Her ideas are as flimsy as Raina’s. The two women are excited as they hear about the victory at Slivnitza and that | |Sergius is a hero. Catherine wants to worship Sergius and tries to persuade her husband about his promotion.
Major Petkoff | |remarks that Sergius will not be promoted because everyone knows he is rash and incompetent. | |Bluntschli tries to shock Raina into reality by reminding her that if the Bulgarians find him in her room, they will butcher him | |before her eyes. There will be blood everywhere. He appeals to the mother in her by asking for a place to sleep and food to eat. | |He admits he is frightened for he has had no sleep in three days. At this point, she heroically makes an effort to save him. | |The Bulgarians are shown as naive about war.
Major Petkoff admits that neither the Bulgarians nor Serbs knew anything about war | |until their officers (the Austrians for the Serbs, and the Russians for the Bulgarians) taught them. Petkoff says, “there’d have | |been no war without them” (Act II, p. 29). Russia and Austria were considered Great Powers, more advanced and powerful countries | |that exerted a political influence on lesser powers. They jumped into the border dispute between Serbia and Bulgaria because they| |were worried about the balance of power. The Serbs and Bulgarians had once been friends.
Neither were experienced with modern | |warfare. | |As a professional soldier, the Swiss mercenary, Bluntschli, is the last word to his Bulgarian friends on the sober reality of | |war. He describes the soldier’s point of view of how to stay alive by carrying more food than ammunition, and by avoiding the | |front lines. He beats Major Petkoff at horsetrading. Bluntschli is scorned at first because of his middle-class notions of war, | |but his practical knowledge of how to move troops and keep them supplied is soon appreciated by Sergius and Petkoff.
Bluntschli | |as a Swiss Republican has modern democratic ideas that contrast sharply to the older feudal ideas of aristocracy held by the | |Bulgarians. They are used to a society of privilege and class stratification. They are impressed, however, by Bluntschli’s modern| |power, knowledge and wealth. Unlike them, he holds no lingering feuds after the war, but is more interested in managing his | |hotels. Business can be a force of economic stability across national boundaries, more powerful than war. He is ready to sign on| |Nicola, a former enemy, as one of his managers. | |The Ideal vs.
The Real | |Raina lives in a make-believe world, and she is aware of it, though she believes it is a more noble world than the one other | |people live in: “the world is really a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance” (Act I, p. | |4). She and Sergius declare one another knight and lady, an example of the “higher love” (Act II, p. 31). Raina is always found | |posing, dreaming, or making a dramatic entrance. Her mother and father note her uncanny bility to come into a room at the right | |moment: “Yes, she listens for it,” Catherine says (Act II, p. 28). Life for Raina is what she picks up at the opera season in | |Bucharest. Extending sanctuary to an enemy was in the opera she saw, and so she saves Bluntschli’s life. | |Bluntschli believes Raina is underage because of her romantic pretense. He is surprised to learn she is twenty-three. He admits | |he admires her thrilling voice, but he cannot believe a single word she says, he declares to her. He points out in his direct way| |in Act III that her life is a lie.
Raina is relieved to be accepted as she is, a real person with faults. She is surprised to | |find she has more affection for her “chocolate cream soldier” who admits to hunger, cold, fear, and cowardice than for Sergius, | |who is full of noble bombast. She tells her mother to marry Sergius, because he is more to her taste. | |Both Raina and Sergius find it fatiguing to keep up their higher love. Each of them is a secret realist at heart. Shaw makes the | |case for love being simple and real. Louka and Bluntschli are the antidote both romantic characters need.
Bluntschli’s ability to| |do away with romantic nonsense with common sense is good comedy and underscores Shaw’s animosity towards Victorian melodrama, | |which gave audiences a distorted view of life. | |Class Prejudice | |The tension of class rivalry is present throughout the play. Shaw treats it playfully, though it is a serious topic for him as a | |socialist dedicated to doing away with class injustice. | |The Bulgarian society is pictured as a primitive holdover of the feudal class structure that Europe was slowly doing away with. |England, for instance, was dealing at the turn of the century when Shaw was writing, with melting class distinctions. The working| |classes had gained the vote and the right to education. Improvement of slums, improvement of factory conditions, and greater | |representation of the lower classes in government signaled the democratic reform going on in advanced countries. In addition, it | |was a time of the rising power of the middle class, with the entrepreneurial spirit reigning as the force of the future. |Bluntschli represents the middle-class business spirit of Europe; the Petkoffs are the aristocratic great landowners of the past;| |Nicola and Louka represent the old peasantry, bound to the land and landowners. | |In the Bulgaria Shaw portrays, the higher classes hold the lower classes in subjugation through power, fear, and custom. Nicola | |warns Louka that the Petkoffs could destroy her if she defies them: “you don’t know the power such high people have over the like| |of you and me when we try to rise out of our poverty against them” (Act II, p. 2). Nicola is cunning, but he accepts being the | |scapegoat of the family because they pay him off. He has dreams of rising out of his position as Louka does. He will buy a shop | |in Sofia to be independent, but even then “I shall always be dependent on the good will of the family” (Act II, p. 22). She | |accuses him of “selling his manhood for 30 levas” (Act III, p. 55) and swears that “You’ll never put the soul of a servant into | |me” (Act II, p. 23). | |Louka’s ambition is higher than Nicola’s: she wants to marry into the aristocracy.
She plays on Sergius’s sense of rebellious | |individualism to get him to defy social convention. She shows him that underneath his noble rhetoric, they are both human and | |made of the same “clay” (Act II, p. 35). Nicola gives Louka lessons on how to change classes through her thinking and actions. He| |teaches her to stop wearing false hair and make-up, to trim her nails and keep her hands clean. He tells her a lady must act as | |if she will get her own way. He lies to Sergius and says that Louka has been reading in the library, trying to get education | |above her station. |Sergius himself points out that class discrimination spills over into military life. Both the upper and lower classes fight the | |enemy with equal courage. The poor soldiers, however, fear their own upper class officers who can keep them in their place: | |“they put up with insults and blows” (Act III, p. 58). | |The Petkoffs are initially contemptuous of Bluntschli’s middle-class or bourgeois background. He is no gentleman. Sergius calls | |him a “commercial traveler in uniform” (Act II, p. 30). Raina accuses him of having a “low shopkeeping mind” (Act III, p. 3). | |They change their minds when he turns out to be a problem solver (getting the troops home), and rich (inherits hotels). Petkoff | |says he must be the Emperor of Switzerland, but Bluntschli points out that “my rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a | |free citizen” (Act III, p. 72). If Louka is the rebellion of the lower classes demanding equal treatment, Bluntschli is the force| |of democracy. He congratulates Louka on her engagement with “the best wishes of a good Republican” (Act III, p. 69). | Romanticism of War
In line after line, 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. Late in the play, Shaw throws in a gruesome report on the death of the man who told Bluntschli's secret about staying in Raina's bedroom; there is nothing comic or heroic about being shot in the hip and then burned to death.
When Raina expresses horror at such a death, Sergius adds, 'And how ridiculous! Oh, war! War! The dream of patriots and heroes! A fraud, Bluntschli, a hollow sham. ' This kind of description caused Shaw's critics to accuse him of baseness, of trying to destroy the heroic concept. That a soldier would prefer food to cartridges in his belt was considered ludicrous by critics, but in the introduction to Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, Shaw was reported to have said that all he had to do was introduce any doubters to the first six real soldiers they came across, and his stage soldier would prove authentic.
It is also noteworthy that Catherine is dissatisfied with a peace treaty because, in her unrealistic vision of glorious war, there is supposed to be a crushing rout of the enemy followed by celebrations of a heroic victory. Shaw's message here is that there can be peaceful alternatives to perpetual fighting. He was dedicated throughout his life to curbing violence, especially that of wars, and Arms and the Man was one of the vehicles he used to plead his case. Romanticism of Love Shaw was a master flirt and he enjoyed the playful farce of romantic intrigues. But he recognized that playing a game differed from serious love, nd he tried to convey as much in Arms and the Man, which is subtitled 'An Anti-Romantic Comedy. ' In the play, Raina and Sergius have paired themselves for all the wrong reasons: because their social status requires a mate from the same social level; and because Sergius plays the role of the type of hero that Raina has been taught to admire, and Raina plays the role that Sergius expects from a woman of her station. The problem is that neither is portraying his/her real self, so their love is based on outward appearances, not on the true person beneath the facade.
They are both acting out a romance according to their idealized standards for courtship rather than according to their innermost feelings. Just as the cheerleader is expected to fall for the star quarterback, Raina has fallen for her brave army officer who looks handsome in his uniform. When Bluntschli and Louka force Raina and Sergius to examine their true feelings, Raina and Sergius discover that they have the courage and desire to follow their hearts instead of seeking to meet social expectations. Class Discrimination As a socialist, Shaw believed in the equality of all people and he abhorred discrimination based on gender or social class.
These beliefs are evident in the relationships portrayed in Arms and the Man. Shaw allows a maid to succeed in her ambitions to better herself by marrying Sergius, an officer and a gentleman. This match also means that Sergius has developed the courage to free himself from the expectations of his class and instead marry the woman he loves. The silliness of Catherine's character is used to show the illogical nature of class snobbery, as she clearly makes divisions between her family and the servants, even though, or perhaps because, the Petkoffs themselves have only recently climbed the social ladder.
The play also attacks divisions of rank, as Captain Bluntschli has leadership abilities that the superior-ranking officers, Majors Petkoff and Saranoff, do not have, illustrating the fact that ability has little to do with rank. Ability also has little to do with class, as exemplified by the character of Nicola, who is declared the ablest, and certainly the wiliest, character in the play. Idealism Versus Realism Arms and the Man illustrates the conflict between idealism and realism. The omantic ideal of war as a glorious opportunity for a man to display courage and honor is dispelled when Sergius admits that his heroic cavalry charge that won the battle was the wrong thing to do. His notable action does not get him his promotion and Sergius learns that '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. ' Sergius and Raina must face the fact that their ideals about love are false.
Fortunately, both of them are actually released by this knowledge to pursue their true loves. But first, Sergius goes through a period of despair in which he questions whether life is futile if the ideals by which he has set his standards of conduct fail to hold up when exposed to reality. This question is an underlying current throughout the play. Shaw gives a happy resolution, but it is a serious question that most people must face in life. Much is made of Bluntschli's realism — i. . , keeping chocolates instead of ammunition in his cartridge belt, showing contempt for sentimentality, and reacting in a practical manner to his father's death. However, Nicola is the consummate realist in the play. Nicola's message is: adapt, exploit, survive. Bluntschli proves to have a romantic side, after all, and thus is the most balanced character in the play in that he seems to know when to temper his romanticism with realism and when to stick to his ideals.
Author: Frank Frazier