Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries

2. Mrs. Warren’s Profession: The Walled Gardens

2 Mrs. Warren’s Profession The Walled Gardens Even more so than in Widowers’ Houses, Shaw relies heavily on the garden setting in Mrs. Warren’s Profession to accomplish his social commentary, and especially to attack hypocrisy as the underlying cause of society’s corrupt value system. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession the surface object of attack is different from that of his first play, and the garden is far more prevalent: Three acts out of four involve a garden. Thus the garden setting is fundamental to the social commentary and the meaning of the play as revealed through action, character, conflict, structure, and theme. No library is present. The play was written in 1893, but Shaw had to wait almost ten years before he could get a production of it, and that was only two private performances at the New Lyric Club by the London Stage Society on January 5 and 6 in 1902. The critics, of course, denounced the play for its decadence and immorality. In New York, when it opened at the Garrick Theatre on the night of October 30, 1905, the cast was arrested for disorderly conduct, the play was closed, and one review slammed it as “illuminated gangrene.”1 In more recent times, scholars generally have agreed that Shaw’s prostitution playultimatelyisnotaboutprostitutionatall.AsCharlesCarpenter puts it, “prostitution is his real subject only in the sense that it is a glaring symptom of a pervading disease,” and it is his subject “in the universal sense of selling oneself to make a living or buying those who must.”2 Dan Laurence calls it a “frontal attack on a smug, greedy society of prostitutes, not merely of whores . . . but [of] industrialists, politicians, clergy, press, [and] country squires . . . , all earning knighthoods, baronies, and social •· 23 · 24 · Shaw’s Settings prominence in the process”;3 he states that Shaw’s attack is “leveled at the social system,” that “all members of society are blameworthy,” and Kitty Warren is “an end product of society’s guilt,” a guilt based on greed for the material.4 Laurence also compares it to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, wherein all are “caught up in their hypocrisies, greed, lust, perverted sense of values, and superficialities.”5 Arthur Ganz points out that “for Shaw the heart of the matter is not sentiment but money,” that Shaw calls into “serious question theethicsofbourgeoissociety,” andthatthecapitalistsystem exploits not only female labor but the laboring class in general.6 Admittedly , as with so many of Shaw’s plays, the play is about many things— the evils of capitalism, the limited opportunities for women in Victorian society for self-sufficiency, the exploitation of those on the underside of society, tainted money, social conventions, and acceptability, among other things—but in all these cases, the practice of hypocrisy seems to drive all the other ills. Shaw was predictably bemused by the self-righteous outcry of his contemporaries .Wrotehe,“areallygoodperformancewouldkeepitsaudience out of the hands of women of the street for a fortnight at least.”7 While his quipsounds as though theplayhasthemoral intentofkeepingmen“outof the hands of prostitutes,” the vital point of his double-edged remark is that the people who were raising indignant voices against his play are the very ones who themselves are active customers of prostitutes. His comment, while aimed at defending the morality of his play, was more targeted at the widespread hypocrisy in society; it also expresses his intent to take the attack on hypocrisy beyond what he had done in Widowers’ Houses. Shaw is not concerned with the personal issue of prostitution for Kitty Warren (asLaurencesays,“ShawneitherdefendsnorcondemnsKitty”)8 butseeks to treat the pervasive presence of hypocrisy in all of society and to expose society’s habit of pretending one thing in order to hide something else; the garden becomes a primary instrument in helping him achieve this purpose. Three of the four acts are located in a garden or eventually involve a garden, and even the fourth gives us a reminder of the garden from which Vivie has escaped. The first words of the stage description establish the scene: “Summer afternoon in a cottage garden on the eastern slope of a hill.”9 Further directions emphasize that “a paling completely shuts in the garden, except for a gate on the right. The common rises uphill beyond the paling to the sky line.”10 Five features of this setting are repeated, for emphasis, in act 3: Mrs. Warren’s...