Mr. Warrens Profession

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Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw Mrs. Warren's Profession is a socially introspective and morally thought-provoking play that was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1898. The play reflects on several important themes concerning life in Victorian society. Through the characters of Mrs. Warren, whose fortune turns out throughout the story to be found on the management of high-class brothels, and her daughter Vivie, whose rejection of the gender standards of the Victorian era make her 'unfeminine' by society's standards, one comes to comprehend the gender and economical class structure of this era better. As Shaw himself stated with regard to the play, prostitution is not caused by the depravation of the female or the lust of the male, but simply by "underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together" (Powell 229). In short, Mrs. Warren's Profession is a reflection, through the main characters, on the era's class, gender, and economical structure that together fuel corruption and immorality in society. Mrs. Warren's profession is a play that illustrates in clarity how powerful class divisions can be to the contribution of spreading vice in society. As Bernard Shaw remarked in the "Apology" from Mrs. Warren's Profession: As long a poverty makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket money of rich bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their [moralists] daily hand-to-hand fight against prostitution . . . will be a losing one (Shaw 23). In other words, not only are the rich and poor classes in society interdependent, but their interactions are the outcome of the pursuit of a need that the economical structure brought about. The consequences of poverty are neediness whilst the results of wealth are an overabundance of sources used to pursue selfish desires that
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