The issues that George Bernard Shaw raises in his interesting "secrets and lies" early play (only his third) Mrs. Warren's Profession are as relevant today as they were more than a century ago. Even today for too many women, careers in the sex industry offer a lifestyle of luxury far in excess of anything they could expect from other work. But this is not simply the matter of Shaw's play. It is also about the relationship between mother and daughter when the daughter has been raised in an affluent and educated environment which in turn can cause her to despise her own mother, whose efforts have paid for that education. It is about control and disaffection (Meisel, 31).
Shaw, who was famously a Fabian Socialist also looks at the hypocrisy of society, the ethics of capitalism where all riches are perceived to be the result of exploitation. He examines the role played by men. . Each of his male characters are representative of a type: the aesthete and artist Mr. Praed, the feckless young man Frank Gardner, the unscrupulous capitalist, Sir George Crofts and the hypocritical vicar, Reverend Samuel Gardner. These male characters are both strength of the play and its weakness. Shaw's perception of Victorian society draws all these men as caricatures and all of them are nasty.
The women however, are more complex. Vivi is a blue stocking, imbued with a work ethos in her ambition to earn a living as an actuary. She lacks an interest in culture and the arts. Her mother Mrs. Warren is full of contradictions: victim and exploiter, kind hearted but manipulative and embarrassingly vulgar (Dukore, 9).
Mrs. Warren has never disclosed to her Cambridge graduate daughter Vivi who Vivi's father is and how she earns her money. At a cathartic stay at her mother's house, Vivi is told that her mother is a member of the "oldest profession".
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