Introduction
Shaw was an Irish playwright and has won a Nobel Prize for English Literature in 1925. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was published in 1898 but it was banned as soon as it was published. It was enacted for the first time publicly in 1925. Shaw’s most famous plays Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, were a criticism of a special phase that is the capitalist phase of the modern social organization. During the Victorian Age, prostitution was a wide-scale ‘problem’ in Britain due to its ignorance of recognizing the society’s capitalist nature as its main reason. The very essence of it went against every moral value that was promoted during this time. Values such as chastity, prudence and grace were dismissed and disregarded by ‘fallen women’. These women were led into prostitution for varying reasons, the most prominent being social and economic concerns. Shaw’s main aim was to unmask the double-faced societal thought that gained profit on one hand and slammed Prostitution on the other hand. The connection between the solid pillars of the middle-class and prostitutes was that they supported (from behind) and profited from industrial enterprises which employ women and girls on wages which are insufficient to support them. Shaw posits that real immorality is not in sex trade but the poverty that forces a woman to take that path. Shaw in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism writes, “The word ‘Prostitution’ should either not be used at all, or else applied impartially to all persons who do things for money that they would not do if they had assured means of livelihood” (30). Punishing the men who bought prostitutes was not an option and punishing a prostitute was not necessary because the amount of shame and admonition that resulted in a woman becoming a prostitute was an enough punishment. But there was no amount of shame levied on the men, only the women. If the act of selling sex was immoral, surely the act of buying sex was immoral as well. The women who were rescued from a life on the streets were forever labelled as outcasts and never accepted back into the fold of society. And yet the men whose money and sexual desires facilitated the women’s demise are free of shame and legal repercussions. According to Cheng, “Shaw’s play is one of the most powerful and shocking plays, dealing with the theme of prostitution as big business in bourgeois society, which gives a sharp and bitter attack upon the very foundation of the so-called ‘civilized’ capitalist world” (Selected reading of British dramas 438).
Influenced by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Shaw employed the themes of socialism and realism in his plays. Hence, he challenged the Victorian stage, which was mainly dominated by the musical comedies and melodramas for the entertainment of the theatre goers. The political and social ideas expounded in his plays required a certain intellectual stimulation that permitted him to leave a mark on Western theatre. In line with his attachment in the Fabian society and socialist ideas, Shaw not only witnessed the suffragette movement in Britain, but also supported the women struggle. Hence, due to this, he presented challenging female characters that question the stereotypical woman images in the Victorian era.
Shaw criticizes the thought about ‘morality’ in the minds of people in Victorian society as prostitution was considered to be a ‘filial’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘immoral’ and a ‘corrupt’ act. After the feudal society went out of order, the Bourgeois led the foundation of the capitalist world. The new formation of the ‘machine-oriented’ government, led to high scales of unemployment in the society. In this struggle of survival, women faced a ‘diabolic nature’ of struggle. This led few of them to choose prostitution which would at least end their ‘finding for bread’. Prostitution was a part of the ‘labor market’ as many women working in the factories were also ‘trafficked’. Shaw, as a socialist, uses the path of prostitution to indict capitalism.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession deals with Kitty Warren who was once herself a Prostitute and now runs a brothel along with George Crofts who has a major share in her business. Mrs. Warren chose this path to quench her thirst of survival while she was working in a restaurant in Waterloo. Eventually she turns herself into a business woman who is aware of the social conditions of the era and the possibility of her survival.
Shaw has indeed portrayed Vivie as a ‘New Woman’ figure but he did not abduct her from ‘stereotypical social’ thought. She adhering to the qualities of it fails to understand the society’s differences leading to rejection of her mother at the end. Vivie underlines the importance of having a choice to her mother: “Everybody has some choice, mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between rag picking and flower selling, according to her taste. People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they cannot find them, make them” (Mrs. Warren’s Profession With the Author’s Apology, II. 64).
Shaw’s arguments are a major step forward in the fight for women’s rights in the Victorian time. The characters of the play can be seen as largely either prostitutes or their clients and Shaw wants to show us how entangled the whole Victorian society was in the prostitution commerce.
Conclusion
The way of looking at Prostitution has not yet changed in the Modern Era also, though the centuries have passed. We can find ‘Miss Vivies’ many more still now. A. Heywood comments “Like the modern-day radical feminist, Vivie seems to be struggling toward an understanding of gender as the most fundamental of all social divisions, not only in politics and public life or in the economy, but all aspects of social, personal and sexual existence” (Political Ideologies 235). Prostitutes are deprived of every Constitutional law in all countries. Prostitution is looked down upon with ‘an equal eye of hatred’ by educated as well as non educated people. Modernism changed people’s views but it could not change the ‘adjective’ of prostitution. Through the mother-daughter relationship in this play, Shaw presents a highly complicated case regarding the rights of women. Modernism is equivalent to social freedom but for that the society must first come out from the ‘basic stereotypical’ ideas about various evils of the society. Prostitution should not be taken as an ‘act’ rather it should be taken as a real ‘job’ just like other white collared jobs of the society. A tolerable society can only be advocated when men and women are comfortable in the society with their actions, leading to non-corrupted judgments.
Works Cited
- Carpenter, Charles. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Print.
- Greceo, Stephen. “Vivie Warren’s Profession: a new look at Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” The Shaw Review 10.3 (September, 1967): 93-99. JSTOR. Web. 12 Apr. 2018.
- Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies. London: Macmillan, 1992. Print.
- Holroyd, M. Bernard Shaw: A biography (Vol.1.). New York: Random House, 1988. Print.
- Marker, Frederick Jr. “Shaw’s Early Plays”. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
- Powell, K. “New women, new plays and Shaw in the 1890s”. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
- Shaw, Bernard G. Mrs. Warren’s Profession With the Author’s Apology. Washington: Watchmaker Publishing, 1902. Print.
- Shaw, Bernard G. (2000). “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”. Selected reading of British dramas. Ed. X.M. Cheng. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press, 2000. Print.
- Shaw, Bernard G. The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. New York: Bretano’s Publishers, 1928. Print.
- Winnifrith, Tom. ‘Dickens’ in The Fallen Women in the Nineteenth Century. London: St Martin’s Press, 1994. Print.
- Weintraub, R. Fabian Feminist: Bernard Shaw and Woman. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Print.