Gender In Mrs Warren's Profession

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Gender in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession Mrs. Warren’s Profession is play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1894. Shaw covers many social aspects in this play. One of these aspects is gender during the Victorian Era, which I want to emphasize in my work. There are two different types of women presented in the first two acts of the play. On the one hand we have the well-educated young girl Vivie, and on the other hand her mother, Mrs. Kitty Warren. First I want to cover if and in what sense the two different women fit in the conventional thoughts of women in the Victorian age. In a second step I want to analyze the strange relationship between mother and daughter, which is anything else but easy. The character of Vivie Warren represents a rare group of women during the mentioned period of time. She is a young self-confident woman who exactly knows what she wants from her life, and she does not want anyone else to determine her life for her. She has a high-class education from Newnham, a women’s college in Cambridge. She refuses to act in a traditional feminine way, e.g. thinking about love, romance and about settling down with a man to have a family of her own. She always speaks her mind and expects from others to treat her as an individual. It is precisely these attitudes of her which do not fit in the scheme of a typical Victorian woman. The other image of a woman which is presented in Shaw’s play is that of Mrs. Kitty Warren. Mrs. Warren is Vivie’s mother, a middle-age woman, who achieved a lot in her life, although not in a socially accepted way. She became a prostitute in her younger ages and now runs a few high-class brothels in some European cities. With her income she could allow her daughter Vivie to live a free life and gave her the opportunity to study at a prestigious college. In a way she wants her daughter to have a life which she herself
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