NON-AFRICAN DRAMA BERNARD SHAW: Arms and the Man Comment on the relationship between the Petkoffs and their servants.

Answer Details

The relationship between the Petkoff family and their two servants, Nicola and Louka, is one of the richest strands in Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Through it Shaw examines class, ambition and the shifting social order of Bulgaria, and he uses the servants to puncture the pretensions of their supposed betters.

Masters proud of a shaky superiority. Major Paul Petkoff and his wife Catherine are eager to be thought aristocratic and modern. They boast of their library, their electric bell and their newly acquired "civilisation", and they expect deference from their servants. Yet Shaw exposes the thinness of their gentility; their claims to rank are as much a pose as Raina's romanticism.

Nicola: the model of calculating servility. Nicola, the manservant, embodies the old servile ideal. He preaches the "soul of a servant", teaching Louka that the way to prosper is to please one's employers, keep their secrets and never presume above one's station. His submission, however, is shrewd and self-interested; he hoards knowledge of the family's affairs and plans to use his savings to open a shop and be served in turn. His deference is a business strategy, not humility.

Louka: the rebel against class barriers. Louka, the maid, is Nicola's opposite. Proud, ambitious and defiant, she resents servitude and refuses to accept that birth must fix her place. She is contemptuous of Nicola's cringing and openly challenges the family's superiority. She knows their secrets, mocks their affectations, and aims to rise.

The collapse of the class barrier. The most striking feature of the relationship is that the barrier between master and servant finally breaks down. Louka, once engaged to Nicola, sets her sights on Major Sergius himself and wins him, so that a maidservant marries into the officer class. Nicola, far from being jealous, gracefully releases her and shifts to the role of a shrewd future tradesman. Shaw thereby shows the rigid social hierarchy giving way to a new order in which ability and boldness, not birth, decide one's fortunes.

Servants as agents of satire. Because they know the family intimately, Nicola and Louka see through the Petkoffs' vanity and the officers' false heroism. Their clear-eyed comments deflate their masters and reinforce the play's realism.

Conclusion. The Petkoff-servant relationship moves from apparent deference to open transgression of class lines. Nicola's calculating servility and Louka's ambitious rebellion together dramatise Shaw's theme that the old aristocratic order is a pretence, and that a new, self-made class is quietly overturning it.