Incest and the Trafficking of Women
in Mrs. Warren’s Profession:
“It Runs in the Family”
Petra Dierkes–Thrun
California State University, Northridge
Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), the third play in George
Bernard Shaw’s Plays Unpleasant trilogy, provoked Victorians by putting not one, but two taboo topics on the public stage: prostitution and
incest. Instead of unequivocally condemning the individual figure of
the prostitute as a scapegoat for moral hypocrisy and sexual promiscuity, the play critiqued the ideological and economic system that produced her, attacking the problematic double standard of male privilege
and the deeply entrenched objectification of women, which Shaw saw
pervading all levels of Victorian society down to its most basic nuclear
element, the family. While the controversial representation of prostitution as a dramatic topic in Mrs. Warren’s Profession is clearly the major
reason the play remained banned from the British public stage until
1925 (even though Shaw never actually used the words “prostitution” or
“prostitute” in it), its incest theme contributed strongly to the brewing
controversy concerning Shaw’s Fabian socialist and feminist literary
stance. The reviewer for the New York Herald, for instance, wrote that
the play was “morally rotten,” “defend[ed] immorality” and “glorifie[d]
debauchery,” and stressed that “worst of all,” it “countenance[d] the
most revolting form of degeneracy, by flippantly discussing the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter.”1
According to the social reformer Shaw, it was one of the most
important tasks of the modern dramatist to put such uncomfortable subjects in the public pillory. In a 1907 letter to The Nation, in
which he protested the dramatic censorship of such taboo material as
­nonconformist sexuality, crime, and disease, Shaw argued that “it is
futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representa-
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tion and discussion of illegal operations, incest and venereal disease. If
the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity and prostitution, it must be thrown open to
all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation.”2
To Shaw, incest and prostitution both exemplified the victimization of
young women and girls, not just in brothels but also in private lives, to
which society conveniently turned a blind eye.
While Shaw’s stance on prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s Profession has
been extensively discussed by scholars, the play’s incest theme has
received surprisingly little critical attention, despite its clear role in
earlier manuscript versions (toned down for the 1898 publication).3 Its
comparative dismissal as a major dramatic element in its own right
is exemplified by a brief comment Dan H. Laurence makes in a recent
article, where he argues that the “presence of incest, as Shaw slips it
in, is just sufficient to remind the audience that incest is a natural consequence of an iniquitous system tolerated by a profit-minded society.
Promiscuous sexual intercourse must inevitably result in the raising
of insoluble questions of consanguinity.”4 Laurence is of course correct
in suggesting that in Mrs. Warren’s Profession incest and prostitution
are inextricably intertwined. But the incest theme is more than a mere
supporting tool for Shaw’s criticism of nineteenth-century prostitution:
just as the selling of women’s bodies has directly or indirectly touched
the lives of all the characters in the play and makes them appear interconnected in deeply ambiguous and problematic ways, suggestions of
incest and forbidden erotic entanglements extend far into the complicated social and erotic network of relations that touches and preys on
Vivie and Mrs. Warren.
The incest theme in Mrs. Warren’s Profession exists on two levels: biological incest (such as the suggested blood relation between Frank and
Vivie, and possibly between Vivie and the lecherous Sir George Crofts),
and impure desire that cuts across multiple relationships between the
two women and two generations of male lovers and suitors. Shaw’s
play casts a deliberately wide net around several possible fathers and
lovers for Vivie who are, incidentally, all erotically or romantically connected to Mrs. Warren as well, so that the differences between the two
individual women, prostitute and New Woman, mother and daughter,
are virtually erased under the calculating gaze of the male characters,
an erasure and substitution of the one woman for the other that feels
incestuous in its all-too-smooth transfer of erotic interest. For the purposes of this analysis, I thus want to widen the definition of incest from
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actual consanguinity to “incestuous” social relations. The etymological
root of the word—from Latin incestus, “impure, unchaste”—admits a
wide range of contaminated and contaminating erotic desires, some of
which may be social as well as sexual. The phenomenon of intergenerational, doubly incestuous, simultaneous desire for mother and daughter manifests itself tangibly in the various erotic triangles into which
all the male characters have entered (or wish to enter) with both Mrs.
Warren and Vivie. These complex triangles—among Mrs. Warren and
the Reverend Samuel Gardner, Sir George, the enigmatic Praed, and
Frank on the one hand; and Vivie and Frank, Sir George, and Praed
(who might as well be hiding his erotic interest in the two women behind the mask of platonic “friendship,” “beauty,” and “romance”) on
the other—are entwined to a point that presents the mother and the
daughter as almost indistinguishable and interchangeable objects of
desire. The two women get passed around, fought over, and redistributed among past and former lovers, suggesting their ruthless objectification in a male-dominated social and cultural machinery.
While the play shines a glaring spotlight on the material and social
conditions behind prostitution that drove desperate women and girls
into selling their bodies and souls for money, and often prompted former victims to become perpetrators in turn, it is also a drama of lost,
hidden, or suspected family connections, which are perversely suffused
and hypercharged with erotic interests, forbidden desires, uncertainty,
and emotional ambivalence. As we know, the fundamental irony of Mrs.
Warren’s Profession is Vivie’s realization that her own professionalization and gentrification through a Cambridge education (the basis of
her New Womanhood) has been funded by the oldest profession in the
world, as embodied by her mother, the former “Miss Vavasour,” who has
worked her way up from practically minded lower-class prostitute to
international, capitalist brothel entrepreneur, managing her profitable
empire of sex for the benefit of her daughter’s social prospects. But as
the play progresses, Vivie also unexpectedly finds herself enmeshed
in a web of problematic family connections, inappropriate sexual desires, and unwelcome suitors, one of whom just might be her biological father. In Act II, for example, Sir George, Mrs. Warren’s longtime
“partner” both in bed and the brothel business, proposes marriage to
Vivie, even though he suspects she might be his daughter; and in Act
III, Vivie is confronted with the shocking revelation that her “good-fornothing” beau Frank Gardner might possibly be her halfbrother (the
son of one of Mrs. Warren’s former lovers, the pompous neighborhood
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hypocrite Reverend Samuel, who is another candidate for fatherhood).
Interestingly though, the biological incest plot is never truly unfolded
or resolved, since none of the characters knows for sure who Vivie’s
father is, including Gardner, Crofts, and even Mrs. Warren herself. The
“old roué” Sir George is plagued “by a continual doubt as to whether
the heroine may not be his daughter,” and the Reverend Samuel, “an
outrageous clergyman, is in the same perplexity, he also being an old
flame of the mother’s,” as Shaw wrote in a letter to Janet Achurch (the
actress he wanted to play Vivie in the first production).5 Although Mrs.
Warren swears to Vivie in Act IV that Sir George is not her parent, and
neither are “any of the rest that you have ever met,”6 Shaw himself
imagined Mrs. Warren herself to be quite ignorant of Vivie’s parentage.
According to Shaw’s letter to Achurch, Mrs. Warren is “uncertain who
the girl’s father is,” but conveniently “keeps all the old men at bay by
telling each one that he is the parent,” turning ignorance into a powerful tool for her manipulation of the male characters.7
Far from being grounds for dismissal, the lack of resolution of the
biological incest plot in Mrs. Warren’s Profession turns our attention
to the larger functions of incestuous desire in the play. The nonchalant
way in which Shaw suspends any final knowledge about the alleged
or suspected consanguinity between Vivie and Frank, or Vivie and Sir
George, highlights the incest theme’s central importance for Shaw’s
wide-ranging critique of the sexual as well as social trafficking of women which affects both Mrs. Warren and her daughter, and sharpens
the play’s focus on social and sexual justice. Modern social and sexual
relations in the immediate and extended patriarchal “family” in Mrs.
Warren’s Profession are not only coextensive with the practice of prostitution, as scholars have suggested, but the resultant social economy is
necessarily also an “incestuous” one. Since women are freely exchanged
and interchanged without regard to their individuality or ties to one
another, they are always potentially related to each other, or to the
male subjects of desire.
Feminist critic Gayle Rubin (following Claude Lévi-Strauss) has
called the phenomenon of the commodification of women in patriarchal society “the traffic in women” (a term first introduced by the nineteenth-century feminist and antiprostitution activist Emma Goldman),
a metaphor that seems particularly apt in the context of discussing
Shaw’s theme of the physical circulation of women in Mrs. Warren’s
Profession. In her landmark 1975 essay, which contains a still unsurpassed conceptualization of Lévi-Strauss’s incest taboo in the context of
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social and feminist theory, Rubin has analyzed the pattern of economic
and erotic exchange of women for money, sex, and each other, in a cultural and political kinship system based on male superiority and dominance. Extending Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the exchange of women as
a basis for a society operating through kinship relations deriving from
the concepts of gifts and the incest taboo, Rubin argues that “the social
relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in
their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to
themselves or to their male kin,” meaning that in such a system “women do not have full rights to themselves.”8 Not surprisingly, in Shaw’s
play the male characters often discuss Mrs. Warren and Vivie behind
their backs, as if it does not really matter what they feel or think; their
discursive circulation largely takes place without the women’s say.
When we apply the suggested wider definition of incest as impure,
unchaste, and contaminating desire across the network of sexual and
social relationships past and present (both among actual family members, and their physically unrelated friends and lovers), the incest
theme in Mrs. Warren’s Profession raises three important questions
for which Rubin’s feminist theory as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
analysis of social and erotic exchange in Between Men will provide
useful grounds for inquiry. These are, first, what role the interchangeability of male desire for women (mother and daughter) plays in Mrs.
Warren’s Profession; second, how the relations of the male characters
to one another can be understood as taking place in a sociosexual male
economy based on the exchange of women, a phenomenon with important homoerotic components for which Sedgwick has coined the term
homosociality; and third, how Mrs. Warren’s and Liz’s outrageous complicity with the system that commodifies women as objects of exchange
sets up an important reading foil for a new and different type of “family” suggested at the end of the play, one based on voluntary intellectual
affiliation rather than physical filiation and family romance. Each of
these aspects will be discussed before returning to the question of the
incest theme’s larger function in Shaw’s endorsement of the independent New Woman, Vivie Warren.
§ § §
The interchangeability of mother and daughter, their treatment as
freely tradable commodities by the principal male characters, and the
conceptual slippage between their male suitors’ past and present desires, provides an important undercurrent in Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
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The triple gaze at Vivie (directed at her by the playful young Frank and
the old playboy Sir George, as well as by the artist figure Praed) mirrors and repeats the hyperbolic erotic embroilment that exists between
Mrs. Warren and these very same admirers. Switching their affection
back and forth between the daughter and the mother, the male protagonists turn the women into variable female placeholders or inhuman ciphers, devoid of individual traits other than their femininity
and imagined sexual availability. In Act II, this interchangeability of
the two women as objects of male desire is highlighted as Frank, entering the cottage with Mrs. Warren after their evening walk and finding
himself alone with her, unabashedly starts wooing and seducing her,
“gallantly giving her shoulders a very perceptible squeeze” as he takes
her shawl:
Mrs Warren: … I’m beginning to think you’re a chip off the old block.
Frank: Like the gov’nor [Frank’s father, the Reverend Samuel], eh?…
Mrs Warren: I know you through and through by your likeness to your
father, better than you know yourself. Don’t you go taking any silly ideas
into your head about me. Do you hear?
Frank [gallantly wooing her with his voice]: Cant help it, my dear Mrs
Warren: it runs in the family.
She pretends to box his ears; then looks at the pretty laughing upturned
face for a moment, tempted. At last she kisses him and immediately turns
away, out of patience with herself.
Mrs Warren: There! I shouldnt have done that. I am wicked. Never mind,
my dear: it’s only a motherly kiss. Go and make love to Vivie.
Frank: So I have.
Mrs Warren [turning on him with a sharp tone of alarm in her voice]:
What!9
This dialogue between Frank and Mrs. Warren is suffused with suggestions of taboo desires—an older woman desiring a younger man
who reminds her of his father, a young man seducing the mother of his
girlfriend. History threatens to repeat itself across generations and
with exchangeable partners: like father, like son; like mother falling
for a “good-for-nothing” chap, like daughter. Mrs. Warren seems not
only attracted to Frank because of his youth, beauty, and love of life
(his “pretty laughing upturned face”), but because she is reliving her
long forgotten affair with Frank’s father, Sam Gardner. Multiple erotic
desires and generations, the past and the present, are superimposed
on one another in this scene: we imagine a youthful Sam and a young
Miss Vavasour as we watch the young Frank and the now older Mrs.
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Warren; we are aware of the “babes in the wood” Vivie and Frank
as we see the mother of Vivie give the son of Sam Gardner an erotic
kiss, which she quickly tries to downplay as “only a motherly kiss.”
The present is tainted because the past is impure; former, present, and
future lovers vying for attention are enmeshed in an endless array of
erotic and sexual possibilities, memories, and courtship rituals revolving around Mrs. Warren on the one hand, and Vivie on the other.
Frank is the character who most embodies the versatility and impersonality of this erotic economy, as he moves easily back and forth
between mother and daughter, without a clear preference other than
the money which he hopes Vivie will bring into a marriage with him.
Although Mrs. Warren refrains from her flirtation with Frank after she
has learned that Frank and Vivie are already romantically involved—
evidently not wanting to injure her daughter—Frank does not seem to
care either way: he continues his erotic preying on daughter and mother simultaneously, moving back and forth between them like a mischievous imp. As he prepares to leave in Act III and is denied “Kissums”
by Vivie, Frank immediately turns to Mrs. Warren; while Vivie busies
herself with her books and papers, he proceeds to resume his flirtation with the mother: “He kisses her hand. She snatches it away, her
lips tightening, and looks more than half disposed to box his ears. He
laughs mischievously and runs off, clapping-to the door behind him.”10
Despite his rejection by both women in this scene, Frank continues
trying to play them both, engaging them in a titillating erotic triangle
against their wills. Another such triangular relationship is attempted
by Sir George in the immediately preceding scene, in which he urges his
“business partner” and presumably longtime lover, Mrs. Warren, to sell
her daughter to him in marriage: “No other man in my position would
put up with you as a mother-in-law. Why shouldnt she marry me?…
Look here, Kitty: youre a sensible woman: you neednt put on any moral
airs. I’ll ask no more questions; and you need answer none. I’ll settle
the whole property on her; and if you want a cheque for yourself on the
wedding day, you can name any figure you like—in reason.”11 Similar to
Frank, Sir George transfers his erotic interest from one woman to the
other quite easily, evidently not seeing anything wrong with his outrageous (and possibly incestuous) business proposal. When Mrs. Warren
angrily declines to prostitute Vivie, the one girl she has always tried to
protect from such a life, Sir George immediately proceeds to proposition Vivie, who rejects him equally firmly.12
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The second aspect of the incestuous economy of male desire in Mrs.
Warren’s Profession is the paradoxical homosocial bond that the objectification of both Vivie and Mrs. Warren creates. The three principal
men in the play—Sir George, Frank, and Praed—all need to arrange
themselves with one another and with Mrs. Warren, as each works
out his individual relation and attraction to Vivie. What Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick calls the homosocial bonds among men in a heteronormative, male-dominated society exists not despite but precisely because
of men’s shared interest in the object of their desires, and its arrangement and distribution among themselves.13 According to Sedgwick,
the erotic triangle emerges as a privileged literary “figure by which
the ‘commonsense’ of our intellectual tradition schematizes erotic relations,” especially patriarchal relations.14 Not surprisingly, in Shaw’s
play the trope of the erotic triangle is the dominant metaphor of the
homosocial relationship between Sir George and Praed.
The homosociality theme in Mrs. Warren’s Profession surfaces early,
in a conversation between Sir George and Mrs. Warren’s more gentlemanly friend Mr. Praed in Act I; Crofts wonders aloud whether Vivie
might in fact be his, or perhaps Praed’s, daughter. The ensuing dialogue establishes and acknowledges the two men’s common interest in
Vivie, illustrated by Crofts’s genial use of the pronoun “we” in addressing Praed: “Look here: did Kitty ever tell you who that girl’s father
is?… it’s very awkward to be uncertain about it now that we shall be
meeting the girl every day. We wont exactly know how we ought to feel
towards her.… If you do know, you might at least set my mind at rest
about her. The fact is, I feel attracted … it’s quite an innocent feeling.
Thats what puzzles me about it. Why, for all I know I might be her father.… I suppose she’s not your daughter, is she?”15 Praed denies this
possibility, but also insists on his own interest in Vivie, “in a parental
way.”16 At least publicly, Praed does not acknowledge any sexual relations with Mrs. Warren (he seems to be genuinely surprised at being
told about Mrs. Warren’s true occupation in Act IV), but he does seem
to have had some knowledge of Mrs. Warren’s questionable past. Being
quizzed by Crofts about his possible fatherhood, Praed insists, “I have
nothing to do with that side of Mrs. Warren’s life, and never had. She
has never spoken to me about it; and of course I have never spoken to
her about it. Your delicacy will tell you that a handsome woman needs
some friends who are not—well, not on that footing with her.”17 Still,
it is unclear whether Praed might not be lying about his past involvement with Mrs. Warren, as well as his secret romantic interest in Vivie:
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he does seem to woo her subtly in Acts II and IV (taking a one-on-one
walk with her that prompts Frank’s jealousy), and eventually invites
her to travel to Europe with him to “saturate [herself] with beauty and
romance,” perhaps a clever attempt at winning Vivie for himself while
away from all the others.18
The present, past, and future homosocial relationship between Sir
George and Praed is a tangible undercurrent of their negotiation in Act
I. Sir George tries to establish a friendly basis with Praed by insisting
that he means “No offence” to Praed; that, in fact, such a frank conversation about a common “object” of interest is “[q]uite allowable as
between two men of the world.” The potentially contentious situation is
resolved when Praed concludes the conversation good-naturedly, “Well,
as you are, at all events, old enough to be her father, I don’t mind agreeing that we both regard Miss Vivie in a parental way, as a young girl
whom we are bound to protect and help. What do you say?”19 What this
scene illustrates is the active and successful negotiation of male rivalry
for Vivie’s affections: the two men work out their mutual attraction to
and “fatherly” feelings for Vivie by establishing a common claim to her
and agreeing to stay on peaceful terms with each other. This transaction leaves Vivie herself entirely out of the picture: she appears here as
an object of interest, not a subject or person with her own thoughts and
feelings, a fact that is also illustrated through Vivie’s absence in this
scene. Despite their uncertainty about Vivie’s parentage and the open
question of how she might actually feel about either one of them, Sir
George’s and Praed’s bartering ends with a peaceful establishment of
their own triangular relationship with Vivie, and effectively with each
other as rivals. The result is a truce, which allows both men independently to remain sexually or romantically interested in their daughterlover: Sir George works up his nerve to propose to Vivie, while Praed
continues to play the role of the bohemian artist-romantic. The secret
status of their fatherhood (and hence their possible violation of the
incest taboo) is apparently a topic fit to be discussed between two “gentlemen of the world” without shame, as long as they have a common
interest at heart. Another passage at the opening of Act III underscores
the importance of men talking about their common erotic interest in
a woman behind her back; the woman in question in this case is Mrs.
Warren. With Frank listening in, the Reverend Samuel and Sir George
have shared raunchy stories about their respective intimate acquaintance with Mrs. Warren, resolving their awkward triangular relation-
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ship and possible past rivalry through a night of heavy drinking and
“awful” anecdotes, presumably at Mrs. Warren’s expense.20
In the suggested triangular relationship among the three pragmatic,
smart, and hardworking “businesswomen” Mrs. Warren, her sister Liz,
and their daughter and niece Vivie, Shaw at first seems to establish an
interesting parallel to the homosocial bonds among the male characters, founded on the premises of familial love and a strong sense of family resemblance that would strengthen the alliance. According to Mrs.
Warren, Vivie has Liz’s practical business sense, her belief in bettering
her position in life through her own brains and hard work: “You remind
me of Liz a little: she was a first-rate business woman….”21 Mrs. Warren is proud of this resemblance, as she sees Liz as the ultimate model
for attractive femininity and business success: “I used to be so pleased
when you sent me your photos to see that you were growing up like
Liz; youve just her ladylike, determined way.”22 The New Woman Vivie
paradoxically shares with both Mrs. Warren and Liz “the enjoyment of
work, the appreciation of financial independence, and the value placed
on choice of lifestyle,” not to mention a strong predilection for Scotch
whiskey.23
But interestingly, Shaw builds some subtly incestuous overtones into
Mrs. Warren’s prostitutive alliance with Liz by subtly eroticizing their
solidarity, and linking motherly pride in Vivie to the relationship with
Liz. Not only does Mrs. Warren’s obvious admiration for her sister, her
wish to be close to her, and her desire for Liz’s luxurious lifestyle—the
furs, the money, the house right next to the cathedral, Liz’s paradoxical
place in good society—provide the initial motivation for Mrs. Warren’s
decision to become a prostitute herself, but they also provide a strange
undercurrent to her careful grooming of Vivie. Vivie is supposed to
emulate Liz’s example and become a true society “lady,” not by prostituting herself, but via the education that her mother’s prostitution
has been able to buy for her—a motherly-sisterly desire that Vivie will
ultimately reject. Inviting Vivie into her own family romance with aunt
Liz, Mrs. Warren’s dream of a female triangle of three successful “businesswomen” who are incidentally all very much alike in their pragmatism and manners, reinforces Shaw’s focus on the incestuous and prostitutive entanglements of a society in which women become not only
instruments but executors of patriarchal power, but tempt one another
with the promise of becoming or staying “one of the family.”
When Mrs. Warren finally relates her own history to Vivie in Act II
and highlights the intersections of prostitution and class destitution
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(working-class poverty) as determining factors in the two sisters’ family background, Vivie at first admires her mother. In a speech leveled at
Vivie in Act II, Mrs. Warren has tried to justify and defend her choices
from a rational or “business point of view,” which indirectly anticipates
Foucault’s theory of docile bodies—the desire by subjugated bodies
to participate in the very economy that suppresses them, and hence
achieve a certain amount of power and autonomy within that system:24
“All [Liz and I] had was our appearance and our turn for pleasing men.
Do you think we were such fools as to let other people trade in our
good looks by employing us as shopgirls, or bar maids, or waitresses,
when we could trade in them ourselves and get all the profits instead of
starvation wages? Not likely.”25 The New Woman Vivie cannot help but
sympathize with her mother’s and aunt Liz’s former lack of economic
and intellectual opportunity, the sense of entrapment, and identify
with their decision to take fate into their own hands.
But just as the solution to the play’s mother-daughter conflict seems
possible and Vivie and Mrs. Warren start to reconcile, Shaw again subtly invokes the homoerotic incest theme, this time via the language
of pathology, to immediately suggest the relationship’s unstable and
inherently offensive nature. In Act III, when things go wrong for Frank
and both Sir George’s excessive wooing and Vivie’s newfound intimacy
with Mrs. Warren threaten to diminish his own importance, Frank exclaims that the display of such affections physically “revolts” him, to
the point that they make his “flesh creep”: “Dont it make your flesh
creep ever so little? That wicked old devil, up to every villainy under
the sun, I’ll swear—and Vivie—ugh!… Look: she actually has her arm
round the old woman’s waist. Its her right arm: she began it. She’s
gone sentimental, by God! Ugh! Ugh! Now do you feel the creeps?”26 As
Frank urges Vivie to give up the thought of living with her mother, now
stressing the impossibility of a familial-erotic triangle which he himself
had playfully begun in an earlier part of the play (“Little family group
of mother and daughter wouldn’t be a success. Spoil our little group …
Frank and Vivie”27), his pathological representation of the blossoming
love between mother and daughter in this scene already foreshadows
and suggests that the two women’s relationship may ultimately prove
unhealthy and “unnatural” as well. Shaw thus makes it clear early on
that the experimental filiative alliance between mother and daughter
will probably not provide a viable alternative to the incestuous social
and sexual economy of the play. And indeed, when it turns out that Mrs.
Warren has not only continued to prostitute herself beyond the point of
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economic necessity but literally bought into the exploitative business
for her own gain, actively encouraging and proliferating the trafficking
of other innocent women, Vivie’s admiration turns to disgust, and she
decides to break off the relationship with her mother.
Whereas Mrs. Warren never extricates herself from the exploitative
traffic in women but instead plays along with it for profit and power,
Vivie Warren finally finds it in herself to make a clean break—but not
before the biological incest plot surfaces fully. In Act III, the meanspirited Sir George drops the bomb by telling Vivie and his competitor,
Frank, that Frank is romancing his halfsister: “I’ll just tell you this
before I go. It may interest you, since you are so fond of one another.
Allow me, Mister Frank, to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest
daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss Vivie: your half-brother. Good morning.”28 As J. L. Wisenthal has pointed out, Shaw arranges
the incest revelation in a decidedly bathetic manner; the possible ensuing melodrama of innocence and love destroyed is immediately dispersed and done away with through Vivie’s and Frank’s reactions. When
Frank points his rifle at the retreating Crofts, Vivie “seizes the muzzle
and pulls it round against her breast”—not to suggest a sentimental
Liebestod, however, but simply to prevent Sir George from getting shot.
Neither Vivie nor Frank fits the bill of the heroic romantic characters
needed for such a melodramatic turn of events; as Frank hastily drops
the rifle, he exclaims, “Stop! Take care. Oh, youve given your little boy
such a turn. Suppose it had gone off! Ugh!” If nothing else, the incest
allegation has thoroughly disillusioned Vivie about romance; dramatically speaking, it is important because it gives her the needed impetus
to finally overcome her weakness for Frank. When Frank pleads for
her to acknowledge their newfound connection (“Remember: even if the
rifle scared that fellow into telling the truth for the first time in his life,
that only makes us the babes in the wood in earnest. [He holds out his
arms to her.] Come and be covered up with leaves again”), she breaks
away from him disgustedly: “ah, not that, not that. You make all my
flesh creep.”29
Similar to Laurence, Wisenthal dismisses the play’s incest revelation
as ultimately “insignificant in the development of Shaw’s play. Shaw
raises the issue of incest in order to tease the audience by dropping it
as trivial and irrelevant. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, after the ‘final curtains’ of the second and third acts, proceeds to its main business, Vivie’s
self-liberation in Act IV.”30 However, the play’s incest theme is intricately intertwined with Shaw’s critique of the trafficking of women,
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and hence not at all “trivial and irrelevant” to the purpose of the play,
especially not as a central lead into Shaw’s finalization of Vivie’s New
Woman character in the play’s last act. Instead, it actually constitutes
a strategically placed springboard for Vivie’s determined jump into independence. In other words, the climactic surfacing of the incest theme
in Act III (prepared all along by intricate allusions to incestuous desire
across a wide spectrum of relationships among various characters) centrally enables and reinforces Shaw’s development of Vivie into a fully
committed, resolute New Woman. As Frank gives her the sentimental
“babes in the wood” number again and offers her his (now incestuous)
love against all odds, Vivie determines on the spot that she must leave
for “Honoria Fraser’s chambers, 67 Chancery Lane” where she intends
to spend “the rest of [her] life.”31
For Shaw, the only viable solution to Vivie’s erotic and economic
dilemma seems to be this radical break with family and illusion. As
Martin Meisel puts it, “[s]ince real prostitution is so inextricably involved with the entire social fabric, piecemeal reformism on this favourite ground is invalidated as a solution; only total transformation will
serve.”32 In cutting herself loose from all the emotional and financial
ties that bind her to her mother, her lover/brother, and the mother’s
ready money supply that flows through the veins of her life just as
unwantedly as the blood she shares with Mrs. Warren and possibly
with Frank, Sir George, Praed, or the Reverend Samuel, Vivie Warren
decides to sever the incestuous social and erotic bonds that fetter her
to her mother’s loathed brothels, and to the various male suitors in
the play. She is not willing to prostitute herself for money or for others, neither her mother (who wants a daughter), nor her halfbrother
(who wants a wife): “Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and
Frank wants a wife. I don’t want a mother and I don’t want a husband.
I have spared neither Frank nor myself in setting him about his business. Do you think I will spare you?”33 The brief moments of tenderness Vivie shared earlier with both—kisses, cuddles, and “babes in the
wood” fantasies with Frank, the mother-daughter embrace at the end
of Act II—are eclipsed by this decisive gesture of rejection at the end.
As Vivie “matter-of-factly” says good-bye to her mother and Mrs. Warren slams the door behind her forever (a scene ironically reminiscent
of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, with the significant difference that the young
lady in question stays and makes everybody else leave), her relief and
happiness are immediately apparent: she has turned a new leaf and
cannot wait to settle down to her new life and work. According to the
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stage direction, “[t]he strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half
sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her writing table,” and after she has read and torn up Frank’s note “without a second
thought,” “goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed
in its figures.”34
The relative ease with which the determined Vivie is able to cut herself off completely from her two sources of economic and emotional support—for family, sex, money, and “love” are all interlaced in this play, as
we have seen—indicates that physical blood relationships matter far
less to her than the intellectual, freely chosen affiliation with the new
symbolic family of Vivie Warren and the appropriately named Honoria
Fraser. We assume that these two New Women will break new, “honorable” ground together, living an economically independent and intellectually self-sustained and contented life. Vivie’s and Honoria’s alternative social arrangement at the end of the play marks a refusal by
the New Women to be circulated, to be rendered mere objects of desire:
Shaw effectively redefines family as a new kind of homosocial bond
between professional women, who can support, nourish, and learn from
one another without commodifying their bodies. The new economic and
professional bond between New Women is based on the production and
exchange of female mental labor and knowledge, not bodies that function as mere ciphers of an exchange between men. Not surprisingly,
Mrs. Warren’s Profession places a strong emphasis on the joys of intellectual work and learning, on young women teaching one another: a
new love for books, knowledge, and gender solidarity opens up new
alternative worlds of happiness and contentment, while it shuts the
doors on oppression masked by the smokescreen euphemisms of sexual
love and family romance.
Vivie thus chooses voluntary mental affiliation with Honoria over
the physical filiation with her mother and her aunt Liz, the two professional prostitutes whose work paradoxically enabled her to make
this choice in the first place. Ultimately, identifying and placing herself
within this genealogical line or filiative relationship with Liz and Mrs.
Warren is not an option for Vivie: outwardly these two women have been
socially and morally transgressive, but have not attempted to step out
of or leave behind the system of women’s sexual and economic exploitation once they earned their independence. Instead, they have continued to participate in the capitalist machinery and produced a surplus
unnecessary to survival, profiting by the exploitation and deception of
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others, Liz by merging into “respectable” society (she now owns a house
near the cathedral, the moral center of power), and Mrs. Warren by setting up more and more brothels throughout Europe. Vivie blames and
judges her mother not on traditional moral grounds, as could have been
expected, but precisely because she is “a conventional woman at heart”
who could have made a clean break with the life she despised once she
had achieved financial independence (but did not do so out of greed and
complacency). In Vivie’s eyes Mrs. Warren has turned into a hypocrite
“liv[ing] one life and believ[ing] in another”; and we already know that
this is not Vivie’s way.35 As Vivie states categorically, “Everybody has
some choice, mother.… People are always blaming their circumstances
for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get
on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they cant find them, make them.”36 Acknowledging the influence her mother’s genes have had on her, Vivie makes
clear her cultural difference: “I am my mother’s daughter. I am like you:
I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my
work is not your work, and my way is not my way. We must part. It will
not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: thats all.”37
The very last image we get of Vivie in Mrs. Warren’s Profession is
that of a self-assured professional woman in the making, earnestly and
happily going about her business, intuitively knowing that she will find
in it more happiness than in the empty shells of familial imbroglios,
love, romance, or dirty money. The final scene does not mark Vivie’s
“spiritual crippling” as a character “seared and maimed in her horror
of love and all that involves feeling”38 nor does it indicate that Shaw
ultimately despises Vivie’s “coldness and calculation, her immersion in
the practical side of life, her estrangement from what he would eventually call the Life Force.”39 In his chapter on “The Womanly Woman” in
The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), for example, Shaw had forcefully
argued that the cause of women’s emancipation entailed just such a
conscious cutting of cumbersome ties: the New Woman needed to decisively reject her own “womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her
children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself.”40 Generally
speaking, Shaw’s focus on Vivie’s isolation at the end of the play is not
surprising; the New Woman literature of the 1890s shows a distinct
clairvoyance not only regarding the necessity of such a radical practical break, but also its ultimately hopeful and positive impact. Writers
such as George Gissing (whose novel The Odd Women was published in
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the same year as Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1893) and Olive Schreiner
(whom Shaw knew well as a fellow socialist, feminist, and one of the
most celebrated New Woman authors of the time) were equally realistic and forthright about the fact that romance and marriage would get
in the way of the progressive cause, and had to be given up by women
engaged in it, often in favor of education and intellectual work.41
Like many literary New Women of the time, Shaw’s Vivie freely
chooses to disassociate herself from people who can only hold her back.
The truly transgressive nature of Mrs. Warren’s Profession is not only
Shaw’s unsentimental approach to the taboos of prostitution and incest, but the unequivocal commitment to the New Woman, Vivie Warren. Despite her businesslike pragmatism and realism—a quality inherited from her mother and from aunt Liz—there is a touch of the
idealist about Vivie, as there was to the progressive female characters
of Gissing, Schreiner, and other New Woman writers of the 1890s. Although she has been tempted by familial romance—both the erotic and
the genealogical-filiative kind, symbolized respectively by Frank and
Mrs. Warren—Vivie knows that in order to escape the social, familial,
and economic system that threatens to keep her firmly in its grasp,
she must have nothing to do with its promises of love and kinship, nor
the rotten smell of money ill gained. In rejecting Sir George, the aspiring husband-father, Frank, the halfbrother/lover, and the needy and
demanding mother-entrepreneur Mrs. Warren, Vivie manages to evade
physical and economic bondage of the most injurious kind and creates
a sphere of her own, in which talent and hard work signify the ascendancy of the New Woman to ostensibly “authentic” social and physical
agency. Vivie remains Shaw’s only positively transgressive character
in the play, as she decides to step out of the incestuous social and emotional trafficking of women and into a new, self-made future, finally
taking charge of her own body and mind.
Notes
I would like to thank Michelle Burnham, John Hawley, Herbert Lindenberger, and Roseanne Quinn
for their astute readings of earlier drafts of this essay.
1.Unsigned notice, New York Herald, 31 October 1905, 3; reprinted in Shaw: The Critical Heritage, T. F. Evans, ed. (London: Routledge, 1976), 139 f.
2. G. B. Shaw, letter to the editor, The Nation (16 November 1907), in Bernard Shaw: Agitations,
Letters to the Press, 1875–1950, Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau, eds. (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1985), 100.
3. On Shaw’s revealing changes to the incest theme in the manuscripts of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, see Brian F. Tyson, “Shaw Among the Actors: Theatrical Additions to Plays Unpleasant,” Modern
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Drama 14 (1971–1972), 164–75. Tyson points out that whereas the original manuscript took care “to
force the idea of incest home,” any direct references to incestuous desire, such as Sir George admitting to taking “a fatherly interest” in Vivie, were “entirely deleted before the 1898 printing” (274). As
Tyson shows, Mrs. Warren’s and Sir George’s exchange about Vivie in Act II of the original manuscript
raises the question of incestuous desire particularly clearly and provocatively: “MRS. W (lowering her
voice) How do you know that the girl maynt be your own daughter, eh? – CROFTS How do you know
that that maynt be one of the fascinations of the thing? What harm if she is?” (Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s
Profession: B.M. MS 50588 A, 86; cited in Ibid.). Noting further instances of Shaw trying to tone down
the incest theme for publication, Tyson also mentions an omitted later scene in which the Reverend
Samuel discovers he is Vivie’s father, “after he had tried to persuade Mrs. Warren to let her marry
Frank” (Ibid.).
4. Dan H. Laurence, “Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren’s Profession,” SHAW:
The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 24 (2004), 43.
5. G. B. Shaw to Janet Achurch, 4 September 1893, in Collected Letters 1874–1897, Dan H. Laurence, ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 404.
6. G. B. Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Plays Unpleasant, Dan H. Laurence, ed. (London: Penguin,
2000), 245.
7.Shaw, Collected Letters, 404.
8. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” The Second Wave:
A Reader in Feminist Theory, Linda Nicholson, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38 f.
9. Mrs Warren’s Profession, 231 f.
10.Ibid., 242.
11.Ibid., 240.
12.Ibid., 262.
13.In “The Traffic in Women,” Rubin argues that women in a patriarchal society based on the
kinship system are “being transacted” by men without any active role in the exchange, effectively
being denied “the benefits of their own circulation.” The women hence function as the mere “conduit
of a relationship” between the men themselves: “it is the [male] partners … upon whom reciprocal
exchange confers its quasi-mythical power of social linkage.… As long as the relations specify that
men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social
organization” (37). Paraphrasing Rubin and Lévi-Strauss, Sedgwick elaborates that “patriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women. It is the
use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the
bonds of men with men.” See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 26.
14.Ibid., 21.
15. Mrs Warren’s Profession, 223 f.
16.Ibid., 225.
17.Ibid., 224, my emphasis.
18.Ibid., 272.
19.Ibid., 224 f.
20.Ibid., 254.
21.Ibid., 248.
22.Ibid., 251.
23.Ellen J. Gainor, Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 37.
24. Foucault first formulated his theory of docile bodies in Discipline and Punish (originally published, 1975) and later modified it in favor of a broader inquiry into “technologies of the self.” See, for
example, Foucault’s essay “Technologies of the Self,” The Essential World of Michel Foucault, vol. 1,
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinovitz, ed; Robert Hurley, trans., et al. (New York: New Press,
1997), 223–51. I am not aware of any critical readings that approach the prostitution theme in Mrs.
Warren’s Profession from a specifically Foucauldian feminist perspective.
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25. Mrs Warren’s Profession, 249.
26.Ibid., 257.
27.Ibid., 259.
28.Ibid., 267.
29.Ibid.
30. J. L. Wisenthal, “Having the Last Word: Plot and Counterplot in Bernard Shaw,” Critical Essays
on George Bernard Shaw, Elsie B. Adams, ed. (New York: G.K. Hall, 1991), 166.
31. Mrs Warren’s Profession, 267.
32. Martin Meisel, “Shaw and Revolution: The Politics of the Plays,” Shaw: Seven Critical Essays,
Norman Rosenblood, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 117.
33. Mrs Warren’s Profession, 284 f.
34.Ibid., 286.
35.Ibid.
36.Ibid., 246.
37.Ibid., 284.
38. Meisel, 118.
39.Kerry Powell, “New Women, New Plays, and Shaw in the 1890s,” The Cambridge Companion to
George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Innes, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 78.
40. G. B. Shaw, The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, Ayot St. Laurence edition (New York: William H. Wise, 1930–1932), XIX: 44.
41.In George Gissing’s novel, for example, the enterprising New Women Rhoda Nunn and Mary
Barfoot run a successful business school that teaches young women vocational skills in order to enable their financial independence. Mary Barfoot’s motivational “four-o’clock address” to the school
echoes the conviction of Shaw and many 1890s progressive intellectuals and feminists that “[t]he old
types of womanly perfection are no longer helpful to us.… There must be a new type of woman, active
in every sphere of life: a new worker out in the world, a new ruler of the home.… Because we have to
set an example to the sleepy of our sex, we must carry on an active warfare—must be invaders” (The
Odd Women, Elaine Showalter, intro. [London: Penguin, 1993], 153 f.). Olive Schreiner’s stories, too,
foreground women’s need to actively invade traditionally male spheres by making an active and often
difficult choice in favor of independent life experience, work, and travel, instead of marriage or family.
See, for example, “Life’s Gifts” and “The Buddhist Priest’s Wife,” in Daughters of Decadence: Women
Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle, Elaine Showalter, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993),
317; 84–97.
310