The Nature and Significance of Gender Relations in Mrs. Warren’s Profession

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Recommended: Life during the Victorian era

Mrs. Warren’s Profession is one of three plays that feature in George Bernard Shaw’s collection titled “Plays Unpleasant”, each of which Shaw indicated “force the spectator to face unpleasant facts”. Shaw was an early advocate of feminism, so he wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession to highlight the capitalist and chauvinist society and challenge how people view the role of women within society. The play takes a critical look at the male double standard and how women are objectified. Victorian society created a rigid outline where the roles of women and men were clearly defined. Through the use of characterisation Shaw manages to emphasise the controversies that affected Victorian society; this is achieved mainly through the relationship of Kitty Warren and her daughter Vivie. The plays themes and motivations led to the Lord Chamberlain’s decision to ban the play on the grounds of its frank discussion and portrayal of prostitution. Shaw claimed that no respectable women who could earn a decent wage would become whores and no woman would marry for money if she could marry for love.

Kitty Warren epitomises this very idea in her conversation with Vivie;

Why shouldn’t I have done it? The house in Brussels was real high-class; a much better place for a woman to be in than the factory where Anne Jane got poisoned. None of our girls were ever treated as I was treated in the scullery of that temperance place, or at the Waterloo bar, or at home. Would you have had me stay in them and become a worn-out old drudge before I was forty? (Mrs. Warren's Profession.ii.248)

Shaw manages to recognise the importance of the female role model; the four male characters within the play appear only to satellite the two female leads. Kitty Warren not only occ...

... middle of paper ...

...Greco, Stephen. "Vivie Warren's Profession: a New Look at "Mrs. Warren's Profession" The Shaw Review 10.3 (1968): 93-99. Print.

Laurence, Dan H. "Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren's Profession." SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24.1 (2004): 38-45. Project MUSE. Web. 24 Feb. 2011.

"Mrs. Warrens Profession." Mrs. Warren's Proffesion. Ed. Michael Lupu. The Guthrie Theater. Web. 24 Feb. 2011. .

Powell, Kerry (2004). The Cambridge companion to Victorian and Edwardian theatre. Cambridge University Press. p. 229. http://books.google.com/books?id=ICi7QY_VSA8C&pg=PA229.

Shaw, Bernard, and Dan H. Laurence. "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Plays Unpleasant. London: Penguin, 2000. 181-286. Print.

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