What is satire?

It is very difficult to define satire, as we use it in literature. The Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines it as a "form of writing holding up a person or society to ridicule or showing the foolishness of an idea, custom, etc." It aims at the correction of the follies and vices of mankind. As we can disscuss satire definition is that It tries to show up the disparity between man as he is and what he ought to be. But it differs from comedy, which laughs at the foibles and follies of human beings without being indignant, because satire is an active protest against anything falling off the moral standards of mankind.

Satire means to hold a vice or folly to ridicule with the purpose of reforming. The dramatist ridicules the romantic views of life—love and war and marriage, habits of uncleanliness, and snobberies of master and servant.

Satire in the Play

Raina and Sergius not only love each other but also worship each other, and that too to the point of idolatry. He is her medieval knight, king, lord, and even god. She is his medieval lady, queen, and even goddess. They swear by their higher love for each other. He wants her to be quick to get her hat. He says, "If you are away for five minutes, it will seem like five hours." She runs to the top of the steps and turns there to exchange looks with him and wave him a kiss with both hands. He looks after her with emotion, and his face is radiant with the 'loftiest exaltation'. The next moment, however, he turns slowly away when, all at once, his attention is attracted by the tail of Louka's double apron. He takes a stealthy look at her, twirls his moustache mischievously, strikes the ground with his heels in something of a cavalry swagger, strolls over to her, communicates to her that the higher love is a very fatiguing thing to keep up for any length of time, and feels the need for some relief after his play at keeping up the higher love. He calls himself the apostle of higher love but has the shamefacedness to flirt with the maidservant. Within a few hours, he calls Love a fraud and a hollow sham, and Raina a viper and a tiger car. He even revels in his love affair with Louka.

Satire Example

Raina: I saw something I did not understand then. I know now that you were making love to Louka.

Serius: (with grim humor) You saw that?

In this respect, Raina is a worse offender. As she goes upstairs for her hat, she looks out of the window to have another sight of her hero. On return with her hat, Gaily asks him if he had been flirting with Louka but is ashamed of herself and asks his forgiveness when, with a sense of injured innocence, he asks her, "How can you think such a thing?" Soon after, when he is called away by Catherine, she feels disappointed and says to him, "I shall go round and wait in full view of the library windows. Be sure you draw my father's attention to me. If you are a moment longer than five minutes, I shall go in and fetch you, regiments or no regiments." She watches him until he is out of her sight. Then, with a perceptible relaxation of manner, she begins to pace up and down the garden in a brooding study. What she tells her mother is not only a piece of cool impertinence but also an index of her mind. "I sometimes wish you could marry Sergius instead of me." Again, "I always feel a longing to do or say something dreadful to Sergius—to shock his propriety and scandalize the five senses out of him. I don't care whether he finds out about the chocolate cream soldier or not. I half hope he may." or "Oh, poor father! As if he could help himself." And yet, when she guesses the truth about Sergius's flirting with Louka, she has the shamefacedness to exclaim, "Oh, what sort of god is this that I have been worshipping?"

Thus, the romantic attitude towards higher love is being satisfied.

what is satire?

The romantic attitude towards war is also being satirized. The fugitive makes fun of the magnificent cavalry charge and calls the national hero a coward, a pretender, and a mad man. War is no longer found to be a glorious thing.

The romantic attitude towards life does not escape the dramatist's satire. Sergius says, "The glimpses I have had of the seamy side of life during the last few months have made me cynical." Again, he says, cynically, to Raina, "Our romance is shattered. Life's a farce."

The romantic view of marriage is that it is the marriage of a beautiful heroine and a handsome hero in a lifelong romantic dream. However, the romance is completely shattered, and Raina marries an anti-romantic soldier, while Sergius marries a maidservant.

The other two aspects satirized are the Bulgarian habit of uncleanliness and the snobberies of the Petkoffs and Nicola. Hence, the play may also be called a satire.