Kerschen is a school district administrator and freelance writer. In this essay, Kerschen examines the elements of the play that convey Shaw's socialist feelings about class structures and stereotypes.
Although the dominant themes of Arms and the Man are the foolishness of romanticized love and of glorified war, there is another theme concerning social classes. Shaw was one of the key figures in the establishment of the Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that believed reform should come through the gradual education of the people and through changes in intellectual and political life, not through revolution. One of the reforms sought by the Fabian Society was the establishment of equality, legally and socially, for all people. Therefore, in Arms and the Man, as with the stereotypes that Shaw targets concerning heroes and the conventions of romance,.....
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