Love' and 'Marriage' in the play Arms and the Man.,Comment on the significance of 'Love' and 'Marriage' in the play Arms and the Man./ Sergius Louka episode in the play

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Q.Comment on the significance of 'Love' and 'Marriage' in the play Arms and the Man./ Sergius Louka episode in the play

Ans :

Shaw is essentially a realist. He is more concerned with reason than with emotions and sentiments. The nineteenth-century dramatists introduced heroes performing marvellous deeds and incidents, seldom found in real life. Shaw discarded the old patterns and wrote plays based upon a realistic view of life. Like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, the neoclassical writers of the eighteenth century, Shaw advocated the domination of reason over emotions. He chose to be a critic of society with the ultimate aim of reforming it. He freed the British drama from romanticism. His plays, like Henrik Ibsen's, deal with real problems of humanity. His "drama of ideas" started a new trend in English theatrical history.

In Arms and the Man Shaw shatters the two illusions of life -war and marriage. While the entire Act I develops on the theme of war in the Second Act, the focus shifts to the exposure of romantic notions about love and marriage. To do so, Shaw first presents an exaggerated picture of romantic lovers. When Raina meets Sergius her romantic feelings are roused and both of them perform a cordial and cold exchange of hearts in a routine manner. They are more concerned about the rule of love than love itself. A little later. Raina and Sergius enact a scene of "higher" love. They indulge in a rather studied and distant embrace. Raina adores Sergius for his heroic action in the war and calls him "my hero, my king." Sergius kisses her on the forehead and calls her "my queen."

Love is not a favourite theme with Shaw. He ridicules love because its spring is in emotions, not in the intellect. Even marriage is not a realization of young heart's dream in his plays. After giving us an exaggerated picture of higher love, Shaw brings us back to the plane of reality. Since the love of Raina and Sergius does not stand on the solid ground of reality, it dies as soon as Louka and Bluntschli interpose. As Sergius confesses to Louka, Raina's pretty maid-servant, the higher love is "Very fatiguing thing to keep up for any length of time.... One feels the need of some relief after it". This higher love does not stop Sergius from a little flirtation with Louka. The spontaneous attraction to Louka makes him lose the pose of affection for Raina. With a very insincere protest, Louka lets Sergius take her hand.

Louka exposes higher love to ridicule. She shatters noble sentiments and sweet poses of Sergius and Raina. The apostle of higher love is flirting with Louka and the queen of Sergius is flirting with a Swiss soldier. Yet both of them profess their noble love for each other. Louka exposes their hypocrisy and dismisses the concept of higher love. Her judgement is very right when she says: "Miss Raina will marry him whether he ( Bluntschli) likes it or not."

Bluntschli and Louka are meant to represent the real thing in love, as against the noble-minded reactions of Sergius and Raina.

In the battle of love also, Bluntschli emerges as the winner. The realistic soldier is a realist in love too. Raina takes the initiative when she is alone with Bluntschli. Raina says that she has lied only twice in her life. Bluntschli tells her sceptically that two lies would not last him a whole morning. He frankly tells her: "Whey 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." Raina tries hard to sustain her heroic role but it collapses in the face of Bluntschli's frankness. His sensible matter-of-fact approach forces the romantic Raina to face the reality. She suddenly capitulates and, with a babyish familiarity, asks him: "How did you find me out?" Eric Bentley opines that with this query, Raina passes over forever from Sergius's world to Bluntschli's. (The Making of a Dramatist)

Shaw believed that woman is not the pursued but the pursuer, it is the man who is wooed and won. In this play, Louka is the first to be successful in winning her man. Louka leads Sergius into making what is practically a declaration: "If these hands ever touch you again, they shall touch my affianced bride." And a little later, she makes Sergius apologize to her by taking her hand and kissing it in the manner of a knight. And as soon as he does it, he is entrapped, for Louka declares: "That touch makes me your affianced wife."

Shaw even makes Bluntschli-Raina episode more interesting by introducing a different Bluntschli who turns out to be a romantic idiot: "I ran away from home twice when I was a boy. I went into the army instead of into my father's business. I climbed the balcony of this house when a man of sense would have dived into the nearest cellar. I came sneaking back to have another look at the young lady when any other man of my age would have sent the coat back."

Raina accepts Bluntschli not because of the fabulous wealth he has inherited but because she realizes that he will be a better husband for her and a better father for her children than Sergius. Bluntschli is a man of superior brain and so more likely to carry life a step forward on the road to the evolution of the Shavian superman. Reality triumphs over romanticism and she finds her real mate in Bluntschli.

By combining the two pairs in accordance with their new love inclinations, Shaw enforces his notion that marriage is not the combination of high flown ideals and romantic passion. Rather, it is a contract which is a means of bringing into being a new and better generation. The practical outlook of Bluntschli will check the artificial ways of Raina and their union will be a happy one. Sergius, on the other hand, has a better chance of happiness with Louka than with Raina. Marriage with Raina would have been happy initially but disillusionment would have crept in when the bubble of their romantic illusions. would have burst. By the end of the play, Raina understands that marriage is not the mating of a beautiful heroine and a handsome hero in a life-long romantic dream, and that Bluntschli's commonsense and six hotels in Switzerland will give her stability and comfort. G.K. Chesterton rightly calls the play the dialogue of a conversion: "By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns but because he faces facts" (George Bernard Shaw). The marriage of Raina and Bluntschli is not a marriage between two hot-blooded throbbing hearts but between two intellectual ideas. Raina, the symbol of domestic life, is Shaw's specimen of a married woman. Bluntschli is symbolic of Shaw's ideal soldier.