Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

98 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
ters happen to be involved, in one way or another, in the business of prostitution.
Unlike Maupassant’s Obardi, who makes money and love by instinct,
like an animal, Mrs. Warren treats her business as if it were a shoe
shop. Yvette wants marriage and is denied it; Vivie is offered marriage and
rejects it in disgust. Maupassant’s story ends with a woman helplessly submissive
in the arms of a worthless man; Shaw’s play concludes with the
young woman coolly dispensing with a worthless man together with love,
romance, and filial obligation as she starts out on her independent way.
Shaw avoids making “a heroine of a culpable prostitute” by presenting the
prostitute as frowsy and distinctly unseductive. He carefully makes it clear
that her vulgarity is not a diagnostic trait of her profession, for Mrs. Warren
has a sister, also a former prostitute, whose ladylike ways have won
respect for her in a cathedral town.
The Hypocrite in Spite of Herself
Archer had complained of the character drawing in Shaw’s first play that it
is not realistic to place naked souls onstage. People in real life, he objected,
take as much trouble to hide their souls as their bodies (Evans 52). To show
the whole truth, he felt, one must display the raiment of hypocrisy while
also revealing the contours of the body beneath. Presumably Archer believed
that Pinero had achieved such a portrait of transparency in Paula
Tanqueray, but simply to show the contrast between the profession of conventional
ideals and their actual violation implies acceptance of the ideals,
and Shaw wanted to transcend the moralist point of view entirely. He did
not want to expose how people fail to live up to conventional ideals; he was
trying to paint people “from their own point of view,” which is to say from
the point of view of their own genuine motivations. But the sort of people
he was portraying in the unpleasant plays are self-deceiving, rather than
cynical, hypocrites; they do not themselves acknowledge “their own point
of view” in the sense that Shaw meant the phrase. How, then, can one
portray them honestly without falling into the trap of accepting the moralistic
judgments of an idealistic society? Can one paint them honestly
from their own perspective when they themselves accept the falsifying
judgments of society?
Shaw avoids the trap in Mrs. Warren’s Profession by telling us about
the successful hypocrisy of sister Liz in her cathedral town and showing us
the apparently frank Mrs. Warren, who blurts out the truth, not because
she is honest but because her hypocrisy lacks art. In the end we see that she