Eng426 20th century english literature

UNIT 2: George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Content

1.0 Introduction
2.0 Objectives

0. 
   Main Content
   
1. 
   George Bernard Shaw
   
2. 
   Mrs. Warren’s Profession
   
3. 
   Themes in Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
   
4. 
   Characterization in Mrs. Warren’s Profession
   

4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Summary
6.0 Self- Assessment Questions
7.0 References/ Further Reading

1.0 INTRODUCTION

George Bernard Shaw was interested in how people survived the harsh economic realities of the modern world. As a successful playwright, Shaw depicts life as he knows it and attacks social hypocrisy while disregarding conventional approach to writing.

0. OBJECTIVES

At the end of this Unit you should be able to:

• 
  Discuss the treatment of female characters in the play
  
• 
  Relate the themes in Mrs. Warren’s Profession to modernist concerns.
  

0. MAIN CONTENT

0. 
   George Bernard Shaw
   

George Bernard Shaw was born in July 1856 in Dublin, Ireland to George Carr Shaw who was a civil servant and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, a professional singer. He was the youngest child of the family and though he was first tutored by his Uncle who was a cleric, his education was irregular. He developed an early animosity to schools and schoolmasters, tagging the school as a prison and turnkey meant to prevent the children from disturbing their parents. He was not a successful novelist but made his mark as a successful playwright. He was a dramatist, literary critic and social propagandist. George Bernard Shaw stood out in the period for his role in portraying the economic hardship and social imbalance of the time with a vein of humour. He was an ardent socialist who decried the exploitation of the working class. He was known for expressing his views in uncompromising language, a quality which made him a controversial person. Despite his concerns with ideas and issues, Bernard Shaw’s plays are vital and absorbing and are
spiced with memorable characterisation, a brilliant command of language and dazzling wit. In 1898 his early plays were published as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. The plays in the ‘unpleasant’ section were Widower’s House (1892) which focused on rural or slum experiences with landlords; The Philanderer (written in 1893 and produced later in 1902); and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in 1893 and also produced in 1902). The plays in the ‘pleasant’ section were Arms and the Man (1894) which satirized the romantic attitude to love and war; Candida (1893); and You Never Can Tell (written in 1895). These early plays introduced the British world to the activist in Bernard Shaw. The ‘unpleasant’ plays focused basically on lampooning the experiences of the working class of the society and aimed a veiled attack at the societal system which condones the misbehaviours of the upper class.

In 1901, he published Three Plays for Puritans. The plays in the volume were The Devil’s Disciple (1897), a play which focused on the American Revolution and was successfully produced in New York City; Caesar and Cleopatra (1899) which clowned historical figures; and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900).

It was in the early Twentieth Century that Shaw wrote his greatest and most popular plays. These plays are: Man and Superman (1903), which focused on how an idealistic, cerebral man eventually succumbs to marriage (the play advanced an explicit articulation of a major Shavian theme—that man is the spiritual creator, whereas woman is the biological "life force" that must always triumph over him); Major Barbara (1905), which focuses on the fact that poverty is the cause of all evil; Androcles and the Lion (1912; a short play), the play is a charming satire of Christianity; and Pygmalion (1913), a play which satirized the English class system using the story of a cockney girl's transformation into a lady at the hands of a speech professor. Pygmalion has proved to be Shaw's most successful work—as a play production, as a motion picture, and as the basis for the musical and film “My Fair Lady” (1956; 1964).

Among Shaw's later plays, Saint Joan (1923) is the one which is the most memorable; it argues that Joan of Arc, a harbinger of Protestantism and nationalism, had to be killed because the world was not yet ready for her. In 1920 Shaw, much criticized for his antiwar stance, wrote Heartbreak House, a play that exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for World War I.
Among Shaw's other plays are John Bull's Other Island (1904), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Fanny's First Play (1911), Back to Methuselah (1922), The Apple Cart (1928), Too True to Be Good (1932), The Millionairess (1936), In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), and Buoyant Billions (1949). Perhaps his most popular nonfiction work is The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928).
A major characteristic of George Bernard Shaw’s works is that despite the fact that he writes about the harsh realities of life and on very serious topical issues, he presents them with a tone of humour in his plays. His plays use efficiently the comedy tool to show
people their experiences and in some situations proffer solutions to the problems in the society. He mocked historical figures pointing out their faults which he does not support and sometimes extolled them. His strong use of language presented in a funny way without losing the message or toning down the effect made him a renowned writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and died in 1950.

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