Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren's Profession

2004; Penn State University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/shaw.2004.0012

1529-1480

Dan H. Laurence,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Victorians Unveiled:Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren's Profession Dan H. Laurence (bio) According to the critic William Archer,1 the great distinguishing mark of the Victorian Anglo-Saxon was his ability to be shocked. And shock was the prime weapon in Bernard Shaw's arsenal of rhetorical munitions. The play Mrs Warren's Profession, as the drama critic Clive Barnes remarked some years ago, is Shaw at his best, "with his prejudices bared and his hatred rampant."2 It is a frontal attack on a smug, greedy society of prostitutes, not merely of whores who provide sexual gratification for a fee, but industrialists, politicians, clergy, press, country squires—all reaping benefits from the working prostitute without sharing the labor, and earning knighthoods, baronies, and social prominence in the process. Some are active investor-partners; others cash in surreptitiously, or accept the profit without regard for the source. Harlotry, long recognized as the oldest profession, has throughout recorded time been encouraged, fostered, demanded by a profit-motivated economic system. And still is. When as recently as 1967 the city council of New York removed licensing requirements for massage parlors, many landlords in Midtown and on the East Side leased their property to whoremasters in the face of rising vacancy rates and foreclosures in a weak economy. By 1976 there were almost a hundred parlors in the area of Times Square alone. In a frustrated attempt to rid the city of a plethora of white slavers, the mayor's staff surreptitiously distributed to the press a list of respectable institutions and corporations that, through building rents, were garnering [End Page 38] enormous profit from the prostitution rings that leased the properties. The list disclosed a number of highly embarrassed central pillars, ostensibly including clerical dioceses and universities.3 Shaw, who resided for a dozen years in central London, just north of Soho, was accustomed to being accosted by prostitutes in the street as they plied their trade. Moreover, from his extensive daily perusal of newspapers in the British Museum and from his committee involvements in the St. Pancras Vestry and, later, the Borough Council, he was thoroughly familiar with the vastness of prostitution as an international venture for profit, like any other form of commerce, enormously lucrative to the great city estates in London as well as to the Church of England through rents of houses in which it was practiced. In 1857, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that one house in every sixty in London was a brothel, and one female in every sixteen (of all ages) was a whore.4 On this basis there would have been more than 6,000 brothels in London and about 80,000 prostitutes. Prostitution flourished as well in London's music-halls, notoriously in the Empire, Leicester Square, a whoremarket patronized by young blades and military cadets, where girls, who (if experienced) could earn no more for factory and shop labor than the eighteen shillings a week set by the London County Council (with novices lucky to earn more than five shillings), could earn twenty to thirty pounds a week operating from the Empire's lounges: over a thousand pounds a year. When the authorities shuttered the Empire in 1894 until the management agreed to eliminate the wet bars by erection of canvas barriers, indignant young patrons of the bars attacked the barriers, ripping down the canvas. Leading the assault was a twenty-year-old Sandhurst cadet, who celebrated the victory with a loud exhortation: "You have seen us tear down these barricades tonight. See that you pull down those who are responsible for them at the coming election!" The cadet, who six years later made his maiden speech in parliament, was the Honorable Winston Churchill.5 The press, too, capitalized on prostitution. In New York in October 1905, when Mrs Warren's Profession achieved a single performance before being unceremoniously padlocked by the police, the most flagrantly abusive newspaper among those calling for the suppression of the play was the New York Herald, which, in a front-page review,6 scourged it as "Morally rotten . . . and degenerate." The only way one could expurgate it, the editor harangued, was "to cut the...