Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw

First published: 1898, in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

First produced: 1902, by the Stage Society, London

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1890’s

Locale: England

Principal Characters:

• Mrs. Warren, the owner of a chain of brothels in Europe
• Vivie Warren, her daughter
• Sir George Crofts, her friend and business partner
• The Reverend Samuel Gardner, a clergyman
• Frank Gardner, his son
• Praed, a friend of Mrs. Warren

The Play

Act 1 begins on a summer afternoon in a cottage garden near Haslemere, Surrey, not far from London. Vivie Warren, a middle-class, well-educated young woman, sits on a hammock reading and writing, with a pile of serious-looking books nearby. Praed, a friend of her mother, arrives and tells Vivie that her mother is coming down from London. Vivie hardly knows her mother, who lived abroad while the girl was sent away to school and college in England. Through the ensuing conversation, the audience learns of Vivie’s success in gaining a high mathematics degree at the University of Cambridge, and that she intends to use her expertise by securing employment in London, as either an actuary or an assistant to a barrister. Praed expresses regret that she appears not to have any romance or beauty in her life. She replies that she does not care for either.

Mrs. Warren arrives with her longtime companion, Sir George Crofts, a successful businessman. Immediately attracted to Vivie, Crofts asks Praed who her father is, but Praed does not know. Crofts is concerned that he may himself be her father. Young Frank Gardner, a charming but idle young man who is also keen on Vivie, joins the group and then sidles off to engage in some disrespectful banter with his clergyman father, the Rev. Samuel Gardner, a bustling, seemingly important man who is, however, incapable of winning anyone’s respect. It is revealed that Frank’s father was something of a rake in his youth and wrote some compromising letters to a woman; he warns Frank not to fall into the same trap. The act ends when the Rev. Gardner meets Mrs. Warren, who, to his great embarrassment, recalls him enthusiastically from days gone by.

Act 2 begins that evening in the cottage. There is a dispute over Frank’s wish to marry Vivie, which is opposed by his father (partly because he fears that he may be her father) and by Crofts. Mrs. Warren rebukes Crofts for his interest in Vivie and rules out Frank’s suit when she discovers that he has no money. Frank, however, is undaunted by her refusal. The climax of the act is a long discussion between Mrs. Warren and her daughter. Vivie declares her intention of earning her own living, but she wants to know about her mother’s occupation and who her father is. Mrs. Warren denies that her father is Crofts, but in a manner that does not reassure Vivie. Vivie’s attitude is dispassionate and indifferent, refusing to acknowledge her mother’s authority over her. Mrs. Warren talks about her own upbringing. She had been a scullery maid and a waitress, until she and her sister Liz became partners and operated a brothel in Brussels. Mrs. Warren justifies herself; her work was not pleasant, but the women were better treated in the brothel than they would have been in a factory. It is not possible, she argues, to maintain self-respect in starvation and slavery (one of her sisters had worked for many years at “respectable” jobs that barely paid a living wage). Mrs. Warren is proud of the independence she has won and the fact that she had been able to give her daughter a good education. After these revelations, Vivie regards her mother with new respect, although she is disturbed by what she has heard.

Act 3 takes place the following morning. Crofts proposes marriage to Vivie, but she immediately rejects him. He counters by explaining how much Mrs. Warren owes him: He had put forty thousand pounds into her business. Then he reveals that the business is still in existence and yields an excellent profit. Vivie, who thought that the business had been wound up, is horrified, and she surprises Crofts by her knowledge of what the business is. Pointing out that the proceeds have paid for her education, he justifies his investments by saying that everyone makes money in a tainted way—from the Church of England, which allows some of its properties to be used for questionable purposes, to those who make money from employing people at starvation wages in factories. Vivie is shaken; she insults Crofts and he is furious. Frank appears with a rifle and taunts Crofts. Crofts hits back by saying that Vivie is Frank’s half sister. Frank aims his rifle at the retreating figure of Crofts; Vivie grabs the muzzle and turns it against herself, and Frank drops the gun immediately. She pushes Frank away and goes off to work in the legal offices of her friend Honaria Fraser in Chancery Lane, London.

In the final act, Frank calls on Vivie in London. He declares once more his romantic feelings for her and also says that he does not believe they are related. Vivie agrees with this, but does not return his love. She tells both Frank and Praed, who is on his way to Italy and has called to say good-bye, what her mother’s profession is. Praed is amazed but declares his respect for Vivie; Frank says that he cannot now marry her, because he could not use her money and he is incapable of making any himself.

Mrs. Warren enters, distraught, and tries to win Vivie back. Vivie announces that she intends to support herself in the future. Mrs. Warren attempts to persuade her that she is throwing away her chances for no good reason; she does not realize the hypocritical way the world operates. Vivie says that she would feel bored and worthless if she took her mother’s money and asks her mother why she does not leave her business behind her, as her sister Liz had done. Mrs. Warren replies that she needs work and excitement; she is suited to the life. Vivie, unmoved, says they must part, and she gets Mrs. Warren reluctantly to acknowledge that her decision is the correct one. Mrs. Warren leaves angrily, and Vivie is relieved. She tears up a note which Frank had left, turns to her work, and is soon absorbed in it.

Dramatic Devices

Following the model of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whom George Bernard Shaw admired, Shaw attempted to create plays in which the central interest lay in dialogue rather than action. He thought that the dialogue should revolve around ideas, in such a way that the audience would have their habitual opinions and attitudes challenged. Shaw achieves the effect he wanted primarily in the two confrontations between Mrs. Warren and Vivie, which conclude acts 2 and 4. He does this even while making concessions to the stage conventions of the day: Progressive revelations about guilty pasts and shady associations, as well as hints of incest and some odd coincidences, keep the action moving and satisfy the audience’s need for surprises, although the facts that unfold are anything but conventional.

The emotional center of the play is reached at the end of act 2. In the early stages of the discussion between Vivie and her mother, it appears that Vivie’s view will easily prevail. Her rational assurance seems to carry moral authority with it. In two significant stage directions, however, Shaw suddenly shifts the balance of the argument. After chiding Vivie for her heartlessness, Mrs. Warren “suddenly breaks out vehemently in her natural tongue—the dialect of a woman of the people—with all her affectations of maternal authority and conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of true conviction and scorn in her.”

This sudden eruption of deeply felt emotion has considerable force. It shifts the sympathies of the audience in the direction of Mrs. Warren, and when her spirited defense of herself follows immediately after, the audience is less sure of its own moral positions. The effect is compounded by the next stage direction, in which Vivie, moved by her mother’s explosion of true feeling, is to sit “down with a shrug, no longer confident; for her replies, which have sounded sensible and strong to her so far, now begin to ring rather woodenly and even priggishly against the new tone of her mother.” Having established some measure of equilibrium in the tension between opposing views, and broken down some of the prejudices of the audience, Shaw can then drive the wedge in further in the remainder of the play, as he continues to expose the many layers of hypocrisy on which he believed capitalist society rested.

Critical Context

Mrs. Warren’s Profession was first published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). It was George Bernard Shaw’s third “unpleasant” play, following Widowers’ Houses (pr. 1892, pb. 1893), which dealt with the problem of slum landlords, and The Philanderer (pb. 1898, pr. 1905), about marriage and the restrictions it imposed on women. The plays were described as “unpleasant” because they attack existing social conditions in a way that forces the audience to question their own basic assumptions. “I must . . . warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures,” Shaw wrote in his preface.

There are similarities between Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. In the earlier play, Harry Trench hears that his independent income is in fact derived directly from the profits made by Sartorius, the slum landlord, his prospective father-in-law. This puts him in a situation similar to that of Vivie Warren. Later in Widowers’ Houses, it transpires that Sartorius’s mother had been an exploited washerwoman—an explanation in part for his later attitudes, just as Mrs. Warren’s profession resulted (in her opinion) from her early experiences as a victim of an unjust system. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, however, is a more powerful drama than the earlier play, particularly in the skill with which Shaw handles the two confrontations between Vivie and Mrs. Warren in acts 2 and 4.

Because Mrs. Warren’s Profession deals with prostitution and hints at incest, it was for many years banned from public theaters. It was first performed in 1902 by the Stage Society, a private club that gave a performance for its own members and so escaped the censorship imposed by the Lord Chamberlain. The play was performed in New York in 1905 but was closed down immediately by the police; the producer and the entire company were arrested, although they were later acquitted and the play was allowed to continue. It was not until 1925 that the play received its first legal public performance in England, at the Regent Theatre in London. As late as 1955, the play was banned in Paris because it was considered “amoral.”

Sources for Further Study

Bertolini, John. The Playwriting Self of George Bernard Shaw. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Bloom, Harold. George Bernard Shaw. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1987.

Davis, Tracy. George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Ervine, St. John. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends. New York: Morrow, 1956.

Greene, Nicholas. Bernard Shaw: A Critical View. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1988.

Hugo, Leon. Bernard Shaw: Playwright and Preacher. London: Methuen, 1971.

Page, Malcolm, and Margery Morgan. File on Shaw. London: Methuen, 1989.