The Resurgence of Ideology in Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)

Abstract

In the last of his Plays Unpleasant, Shaw delves into the economic roots of prostitution, deconstructing the woman-with-a-past sham and its underlying conservative ideology. The socialist playwright and theorist seeks to lay the blame on the capitalist system and on a middle-class public all too eager to ascribe prostitution to merely individual villainy. Echoing the standpoint of Victorian social reformers, Mrs Warren’s Profession explodes the well-made play pattern to shatter commonplaces and pave the way to a drama of ideas. Yet this aesthetics also points to the Fabian paradox of moral conversion as a prerequisite to action.