The Concept of ‘New Woman’ as a struggle of women in Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Abstract

This paper studies George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ as a true picture of Victorian patriarchal society. The paper uses non-empirical methods of Textual Analysis and Close Reading Method to analyse the play from textual and thematic point of view. The feminist approach of ‘New Womanhood’ by W. H. Cooley (1904) as a theoretical framework is used to analyse the selected play and the characters in it. The paper intends to uncover the position and status of women in Victorian society by analysing the female characters in the play as unconventional and un-Victorian in attitudes, interests, preferences, values and ways of lives. The paper aims to highlight the hypocrisy and monstrosity of socially powerful capitalist class the way play portrays it. The paper proposes to find out the elements of new womanhood in female characters, Mrs. Warren and Miss Vivie Warren. The study interprets the struggle of female characters as rebel to liberate themselves from the patriarchal pseudomorality, male-chauvinistic conventions, male-oriented values, institutions and tenets of society. The themes of prostitution, poverty, starvation, hypocrisy, rotten morality and values of patriarch society, individuality, overthrow of authoritative powers, and relationships or understanding between two different generations are intended to be studied and discussed in context with the selected work in this paper. This paper may be helpful to unfold the idea for readers that the fall of women is actually the fall of society and is a real tragedy.