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Shaw’s Way with Fabian Permeation in Mrs Warren’s Profession

By Charles A. Carpenter

Bernard Shaw joined the Fabian Society in September 1884 and flung himself into promoting every phase of its socialist program. In the same year, he touched off what would be his most distinctive contribution to that program by beginning to write his first anti-capitalist drama, Widowers’ Houses. Shortly after its premiere in 1892, he published the text complete with preface and appendices, one of which states a specific permeative goal: the play ‘is deliberately intended to induce people to vote on the Progressive side at the next County Council election in London.’1

Fast forward to 1893, after Shaw had been a Fabian workhorse for nine years. In the midst of one of the Society’s busiest periods, he began writing Mrs Warren’s Profession. After its performance in 1902, he published a long ‘Author’s Apology’ directed at the critics who castigated the play. Far from apologizing, he chided them:

Can I be expected to refrain from laughing at the spectacle of a number of respectable gentlemen lamenting because a playwright lures them to the theatre by a promise to excite their senses in a very special and sensational manner, and then, having successfully trapped them in exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignore their senses and ruthlessly improve their minds?2

Boldly using ‘the fascination of the abomination’ (in Joseph Conrad’s memorable phrase) to ‘lure’ spectators in a meliorist direction is a striking example of his permeative ploys. To Shaw ‘propagandistic dramas,’ as he called them, were an integral part of his own many-faceted effort to advance the Fabian cause through the strategy of permeation.

Before discussing Mrs Warren’s Profession in some detail, a brief introduction to this strategy is in order, as Shaw and his Fabian colleagues applied it to the goal of establishing an Independent Labour Party. The members of the Fabian Society were highly motivated intellectuals and professionals whose educative and organizing proficiencies were second to none among English socialist groups. Their replacement of Marxist agitation with Fabian permeation quickly became the trademark of the group. The Society began to develop the strategy in late 1885, soon after committing itself to evolutionary rather than revolutionary methods of reform, and constitutional rather than catastrophic means to achieve its goals.

Beatrice Webb, who teamed up with Sidney Webb and Shaw as three of the most industrious and effective Fabians, chose a felicitous metaphor when she described permeation as a ‘policy of inoculation, of giving to each class, to each person, that came under our influence the exact dose of collectivism that they were prepared to assimilate’ (my italics).3 Shaw put the general goal succinctly: permeation was ‘the policy of propagating Fabian ideas outside the Society wherever there was a human brain for them to lodge in. Our idea has not been to reform the world ourselves, but to persuade the world to take our ideas into account in reforming itself.’4 Shaw’s rhetorical gifts, tinged with a demonic ability to prod and provoke, made him an outstanding contributor to this effort.

His most distinctive effort to enhance the permeation program, the Fabian-infiltrated plays, can best be illustrated by focusing on the strategy at work in Mrs Warren’s Profession. The center of that focus will not be the usual Mrs. Warren, but rather her daughter Vivie. Kitty Warren is primarily Shaw’s instrument of Fabian education (which Shaw would call ‘propaganda’), a deliverer of truths about the underlying causes and extended significance of prostitution. Vivie absorbs these searing truths recounted by her own mother from first-hand experience and reacts in a series of shocks, bouncing from extreme to extreme until she is able to come to a firm resolution about how her life will proceed. Hence Vivie is Shaw’s chief instrument of Fabian permeation.

As Kitty’s authoritative tirade in Act II conveys, prostitution is not the real subject of Mrs Warren’s Profession; it is only a glaring symptom of a pervading disease. That disease is the particular mode of conduct fostered by the capitalist ethic, the idealized worship of Mammon, which accepts proprietary respectability as its goal and reward. In the play, by blending the repugnance spectators associate with Kitty’s profession into the sympathy or apathy they feel toward the forms of prostitution that enjoy good reputations, Shaw attempts to blacken the capitalist ethic itself.

The chief function that Vivie serves in the play is that of ‘audience surrogate,’ Martin Meisel’s term for a generally sympathetic character ‘with much to learn, innocence to lose, and a choice to make on the basis of knowledge acquired in the course of the play.’5 The drama unfolds in increasingly ugly stages for both Vivie and the audience. Suspicions are voiced about Kitty’s past, especially about the male who fathered Vivie. When she is seen accompanied by a callous-looking man-about-town whom she calls one of her oldest friends, Sir George Crofts, grim speculations arise about what she is doing at present. Vivie concludes tentatively that her mother must be ‘a waster, shifting along from one meal to another with no purpose, and no character, and no grit’ (300). She has yet to learn that Kitty has been shamefully promiscuous, which is reserved for the dramatic crescendo and educational center of the play, Kitty’s tirade. Vivie undergoes a genuine conversion of attitude when she learns two things: that the capitalist system rather than a ‘waster’s’ inclinations is to blame for Kitty’s choice of profession, and that a prostitute can indeed be a woman of character. In fact, the agent of Shaw’s propaganda brazens her way through her series of revelations so forcefully that she carries her daughter overboard into diametrically opposite judgments. Far from considering her mother a waster as she did before, Vivie is jolted into viewing her as ‘stronger than all England’ (315). (Imagine the conventional Victorian’s response to that!) And far from regarding her choice of profession as a conclusive sign of weakness, she finally attributes it to circumstances arising from the nature of society.

In Act III, Vivie abruptly reverses her second judgment after the shock of learning the most appalling truth of all about her mother’s life: Kitty’s decision to become a manager of brothels in several European cities, which was not determined by circumstances but by free choice. As a byproduct, the self-righteous girl understands that she is implicated in ‘Mrs. Warren’s profession’ simply because she has been living, and living well, on her mother’s lavish earnings. The empathetic members of the audience are also stunned, and at some stage of reflection perhaps ask themselves if they too might be implicated in an analogous capitalist horror. Vivie learns these things from Crofts, who tries to convince her that the world is like that, bad or good. What he means is that in a capitalist system, this is simply the inevitable, unchangeable state of affairs. Shaw sets the audience to cheering Vivie at this point by directing her indignation in the meliorist path momentarily. She tells Crofts, ‘When I think of the society that tolerates you, and the laws that protect you! When I think of how helpless nine out of ten young girls would be in the hands of you and my mother!—the unmentionable woman and her capitalist bully— ‘ (332). Later, Shaw doubles the impact when he has Vivie tell Praed, ‘If I had the courage I should spend the rest of my life in telling everybody—stamping and branding it into them until they all felt their part in its abomination as I feel mine’ (343). Vivie does seem like the kind of New Woman who has the courage to do this, but disappointingly for the audience and unfortunately for England she suppresses impulses of this sort. Why? Partly because she can make a decent living within the existing structure of capitalist society even without accepting any of her mother’s money, but also because she has become tainted by the pessimistic outlook toward the improvement of society that pollutes such people as Crofts and her mother. Near the end of the play she acknowledges rather morosely that ‘life is what it is’—a clear echo of Crofts—and that she is ‘prepared to take it as it is’ (340). She has already announced that she intends to enclose herself in an accounting office ‘for the rest of [her] life’—a clinching repudiation of her hopeful statement to Praed (334).

This climaxes Shaw’s protracted strategy of permeation in the play. Vivie’s final actions convey an almost palpable sense of wasted vitality and promise. After she dismisses Praed, Frank, and her mother, all justified moves that fully resolve the audience’s expectations, her vigorous plunge into actuarial calculations leaves a marked residue of frustration. Two feelings are evoked: admiration for her energy and distaste at its specific application. (She could have been a reformer!) The resulting dissatisfaction might spur some members of the audience to recall that her choice of profession, like her mother’s original one, derived sheerly from typical capitalist ‘circumstances.’ Vivie has told Praed in Act I that winning honours at Cambridge prepared her for a career in ‘nothing but mathematics’ (277); they hear Mrs. Warren in Act IV say that she is prepared for her own way of life ‘and not for anything else’ (353). The play’s near-equations of prostitution and capitalism culminate in near-equations of Kitty and Vivie.

Charles A. Carpenter is Professor Emeritus of English at Binghamton University and the author of Bernard Shaw & the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays, Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966-1990: An International Bibliography (2 vols.), Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945-1964, and many other books and articles.
His website is http://pods.binghamton.edu/~ccarpen/author.htm.

NOTES

1. Shaw, ‘The Author’s Preface (to 1893 edition [of Widowers’ Houses]),’ The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1970), I, 46.
2. Shaw, ‘Preface [The Author’s Apology from Mrs Warren’s Profession],’ The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, I, 248. All subsequent quotations from Shaw’s plays and prefaces in this volume will be cited by page number in the text.
3. Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), II, 66.
4. Shaw, interviewed by Percy L. Parker, ‘What is it to be a Fabian? An Interview with Mr George Bernard Shaw,’ in Young Man, April 1896, repr. in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, ed. A. M Gibbs (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 67.
5. Martin Meisel, ‘John Bull’s Other Island and Other Working Partnerships,’ SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 7 (1987): 129.