Vivie is visibly impressed, and herein Shaw shows his skill in laying open the human animal. His iconoclasts sometimes go to mass and his saints sometimes sin, exactly as saint and sinner sin and pray in real life. Vivie, we learn in the end, is the real sham-smasher of the two, but in this scene she seems to change places with her mother. Mrs. Warren, alert to the slightest advantage, drives home her logic. It is a scene that exhibits the play of mind upon mind as no other scene in a contemporary play exhibits it, saving only that marvellous one between Marikka and George in “Johnnisfeuer.” Mrs. Warren’s picture of the forces that overcame her, her sturdy defense of her philosophy of life; her contempt for those who fear to risk their all—it would take a girl more than human to resist these things.
But the season of sentiment and pathos is destined to be brief. Crofts, who is Mrs. Warren’s partner in her chain of brothels, resumes his siege of Vivie. Even Mrs. Warren grows nauseated and Vivie’s own disgust is undisguised. Then, for a moment, Crofts becomes the conventional villain and hurls the sins of the mother into the daughter’s teeth. It is all melodrama here—Crofts grows “black with rage,” and Frank, bobbing up, rifle in hand, proposes to shoot him. And then comes the climax.
“Allow me, Mister Frank,” says Crofts, “to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss Vivie: your half-brother. Good morning.”
As he turns on his heel, Frank raises the rifle and takes aim at his back.
“You’ll testify before the coroner that it’s an accident?” he says to Vivie.
She “seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast.”
“Fire now,” she says. “You may.”
After that the play goes downhill to its inevitable conclusion. Vivie, admitting her mother’s justification, revolts against her effort to distort it into a grotesque sort of respectability. So there is a parting and the daughter goes off to London, to begin life anew as a public accountant and conveyancer. Mrs. Warren, now sunk to the wailing, snivelling stage, follows her. The final scene between mother and daughter is strangely impressive. Mrs. Warren pleads and begs and screams. At the end of her rope she turns, and like an animal at bay shows her teeth.
“From this time forth,” she shrieks, with the air of a tragedy queen, “I’ll do wrong, and nothing but wrong! And I’ll prosper on it!”
“Yes,” said Vivie philosophically, “it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed another.... That is why I am bidding you good-bye now....”