George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

by H. L. Mencken

Mrs. “Kitty” Warren, the central character of Shaw’s most remarkable play (and it is one of the most remarkable plays, in many ways, of the time) is a successful practitioner of what Kipling calls the oldest profession in the world. She is no betrayed milkmaid or cajoled governess, this past mistress of the seventh unpardonable sin, but a wide-awake and deliberate sinner, who has studied the problem thoroughly and come to the conclusion, like Huckleberry Finn, that it is better, by far, to sin and be damned than to remain virtuous and suffer. The conflict in the play is between Mrs. Warren and her daughter, and in developing it, Shaw exhibits his insight into the undercurrents of human nature to a superlative degree. Mrs. Warren, though she is a convention smasher, does not stand for heterodoxy. In truth despite all her elaborate defense of herself and her bitter arraignment of the social conditions that have made her what she is, she is a worshiper of respectability and the only true believer, save one, in the play. It is Vivie, her daughter, a virgin, who holds the brief against orthodoxy.

“If I had been you, mother,” says Vivie, in the last scene, when the two part forever, “I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am leaving you now.”

This complexity of character has puzzled a good many readers of the play, but though there is a complexity, there is no real confusion. Mrs. Warren, despite her ingenious reasoning, is a vulgar, ignorant woman, little capable of analyzing her own motives. Vivie, on the other hand, is a girl of quick intelligence and extraordinary education—a Cambridge scholar, a mathematician and a student of the philosophies. As the play opens Mrs. Warren seems to have all the best of it. She is the rebel and Vivie is the slave. But in the course of the strangely searching action, there is a readjustment. Convention overcomes the mother and crushes her; her daughter, on the other hand, strikes off her shackles and is free.

At the beginning Vivie is home from Cambridge, where she has tied with the third wrangler—for and in consideration of a purse of $250 offered by Mrs. Warren. For years she has seen very little of her mother, and now, on the eve of a reunion, she is curious and inquisitive. They set up housekeeping in a small cottage in the country, near the parsonage of the Rev. Samuel Gardner, “a pretentious, booming, noisy person,” and the friend of Mrs. Warren. There come, too, Sir George Crofts, “a gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man and man-about-town,” and one Praed, a sort of Greek chorus to the drama. The Rev. Mr. Gardner’s son, Frank, “an entirely good-for-nothing young fellow,” is attracted to Vivie, and so when Crofts casts his eye upon her, there begins the action of a drama.

Vivie, beginning by wondering at her mother’s long absence from home, ends by harboring a sickening sense of suspicion. The elder woman’s unconscious vulgarities, her bizarre view-point, her championing of Crofts—all add fuel to the flame of doubt. At first Mrs. Warren tries browbeating, after the orthodox custom of parents, but to her horror she finds that Vivie will not submit to such an exercise of authority. And soon they are face to face in a mighty struggle and there is no quarter on either side.

Finally Vivie demands to know the name of her father. Mrs. Warren blusters, threatens, begs, evades, lies—and ends by breaking down and telling the truth. Vivie is disgusted, horrified, appalled; Mrs. Warren, at first in tears, returns to her browbeating.

“What right have you to set yourself above me like this?” she demands. “You boast of what you are to me—to me who gave you the chance of being what you are....”

“You attack me with the conventional authority of a mother,” replies Vivie calmly. “I defend myself with the conventional superiority of a respectable woman....”

But for the present, it is Mrs. Warren who triumphs. She has reasons, arguments, causes, theories: Vivie’s shields are merely custom, authority, the law. Mrs. Warren sees her advantage and hastens to seize it. She tells Vivie all—of the squalor that she knew, of her temptation, of the lure of comfort—“a lovely house, plenty of servants and the choicest of eating and drinking”—and finally, of her strong and resolute determination to yield and of the fruits of her yielding.

“Do you think,” she says, “that I was such a fool as to let other people trade in my good looks by employing me as a shopgirl, a barmaid or a waitress, when I could trade in them myself and get all the profits, instead of starvation wages...?”