Compare and contrast Raina and Louka - Arms and the Man - The Uncovered English

Arms And The Man

Play by George Bernard Shaw

Compare and contrast Raina and Louka

In Arms and the Man we find that Raina and Louka are two young women belonging to different social positions in life. Raina is the daughter of a Major, a high army officer. They have got a position there and they are well known throughout the whole of Bulgaria. Louka is the daughter of a poor farmer. She has no education or culture nor has she any romantic illusion. She works as the maid-servant of the Petkoffs. Shaw introduces a strong parallelism in their situation by presenting both as the objects of love to the romantic Sergius, and here the differences between the two are uppermost.

One is the mistress and the other is the maid, but their lives come into conflict when Louka designs to marry Sergius who is betrothed to Raina. Both of them are almost same age and are equally beautiful. Raina has natural charm which has been enhanced by proper care while Louka has the impressive beauty of the unsophisticated peasant girl. Sergius falls a prey to Louka's charm; even Bluntschli pays it a compliment. Both are essentially feminine in their vanity, lobe and fashion and jealousy where love is concerned and ambition for high marriage.

Raina is a romanticist at the start and a disillusioned realist at the end. On the contray, Louka is out and out a realist from beginning to end. In the early part to the play Raina lives entirely in a dreamland of romantic fancy, "On the balcony a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the right, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty are part of it, is gazing at the snowy Balkans." She reads Byron and Puskin and goes to the opera at Bucharest. Louka all along lives in a world of reality and is not sentimental like Raina. Louka differs from Raina in having strong commonsense and practical wisdom. She has a sense of reality which is wanting in Raina.

While Raina is gentle and polished, Louka is shrewd and defiant. Raina is timid, but Louka is fearless. Raina sees Sergius flirting with Louka, but she has not the courage to speak straight to Sergius. She timidly asks him in playful manner, "have you been flirting with Louka?" But there is no fear Louka. After showing his weakness for Louka when Sergius speaks of decency and culture, Louka tells him plainly, "I've found out that whatever day I'm made of, you are made of the same."

Both Raina and Louka are proud girls. Raina is proud of her family status, social position and wealth. She tells Bluntschli that her family has a library and that people of her position, "wash their hands everyday." But Louka is proud in a different sense. She shows her pride while she defies the false culture of persons like Sergius and Raina and denounces the salvish mentality of servant like Nicola.

Raina has a dreamy short of character, full of speculative idealism and emotions. She has developed two false conceptions that rule over her till she comes under the influence of Bluntschli's concrete realism. Louka is entirely different from Raina. She is a stem realist. She never looks at the world and life through the rosy spectacles of romance. Of course, she has come sort of vanity in her-she is ambitious and desirous of rising higher in the social status. She is a servant without the soul of a servant.

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