Lies in George Bernard Shaw’s play, "Mrs. Warren’s Profession"

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You can tell a lot about a person by the way they dress, by the cars they drive, and by the people they associate themselves with. You can also learn a lot about a person by what they say, because their honesty, or lack-there-of, shows the type of person they are. When a person is forthright, it is easy to believe and trust the person; however, when the person has tendencies to be misleading or manipulative, the trust is not as evident. To lie, according to www.answers.com, means to present false or invalid information with the intent of deceiving or misleading another person. Choosing to lie to people is a self-dilemma that one has, and this act may alter the relations they have with the people they lie to. Some lie and completely change the information they are spreading, altering the story for some reason or another. Other people simply leave a couple of facts out, speaking carefully and holding back parts of the story for their own benefit or to make the listener think differently. It is a question as to whether either method is good, and what could happen by speaking in such ways to another person. In George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Mrs. Warren is careful when she speaks to Vivie so she can keep parts of her life hidden from her daughter; by not stating all of the facts, one may wonder if Mrs. Warren is lying to Vivie, or simply leaving out information.

Mrs. Warren could easily be accused of lying to her daughter Vivie. Vivie was brought up to be a respectable and well-informed young woman, without the help and teachings of her mother. She spent much of her life away from her mother and in the care of others, because her mother was always traveling and busy with work. Vivie explains this to ...

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...uth to Vivie; however, this thought is quite wrong. Mrs. Warren did care that she was not telling her daughter about her life as a prostitute, yet she did not want Vivie to get any ideas and she did not want Vivie to think differently of her. This is a difficult predicament for Mrs. Warren, and she tried to handle it as well as she could. The other extreme, of Mrs. Warren simply leaving out information, is how others think of the situation between a mother and her daughter. Mrs. Warren knew she would tell Vivie about the past in due time, but she wanted to protect her daughter and keep her sheltered as long as she possibly could. When looking at the situation from this view it is easy to see how Mrs. Warren was not out of line by keeping the secret from her daughter. There are some stories that are supposed to be shared, but some things are better off unknown.

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