A ‘Modern’ Approach to Prostitution: George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession

You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet.

Mrs Warren’s assessment of Victorian society—that commonly-held morality is a pretence, a cover for the ‘way things really are’—is one shared by many 21^st-century commentators on the period. The modern novels I’ve read as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series are obsessed with showing the depravity below the façade—child abuse, racism, pornography and, most frequently, prostitution, the subject of George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 and the eponymous Mrs Warren’s profession.

Felicity Kendal as Mrs Warren

The Victorians of our cultural imagination are table leg covering prudes or sex-crazed bodice rippers (most often, hypocritically, both), but, in our obsession with the lascivious and scandalous, are we missing the point? Shaw’s play, banned at the time for its subject matter, may also ascribe to this narrative of repression and duplicity, but for him the truth about prostitution is more based in economics, than eroticism.

This is what prostitution means to Mrs Warren:

It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of servants; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means everything you like, everything you want, everything you can think of. 

So far this seems like the standard seduction speech, as Mrs Warren lays out the contrast between the opulent way of life provided by sex work and her daughter Vivie’s existence now:

And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year.

Yet, in the play’s last moments, the argument between the two women becomes something much more interesting than a confrontation between vice and virtue, riches and poverty. Mrs Warren tells Vivie that it isn’t just the money that attracts her (after all, she could have retired from this life long ago but continues to run a network of brothels):

I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn't do it somebody else would; so I don't do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money.

Mrs Warren wants to work, and her claim that she is fit for no other profession is more of an assessment of the employment options open to women in the period than a commentary on her own moral character.

Vivie tells her mother that they are more alike than her mother imagines—that there is a point of similarity between the ‘modern’ Cambridge-educated girl and her mother, a bawd:

No: I am my mother's daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend.

And Vivie does not reject her mother on moral grounds. The decision to cut her off is purely pragmatic:

I don't think I'm more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I'm less. I'm certain I'm less sentimental.

At the end of the play Vivie decides she will never marry, but will instead be an accountant. Her choice mirrors her mother’s almost exactly, except that Vivie’s profession a) will be sanctioned by society and b) won’t subject her to the possibility of motherhood (the cause of Mrs Warren’s sentimentality).

Shaw may share his subject matter with many of today’s neo-Victorian writers, but the difference is he doesn’t explore sex work in order to titillate. He uses prostitution as a lens through which to explore the selfishness of a capitalist system, painting a dark view of society, even as women’s employment options improve within it.

What would you like the Secret Victorianist to blog about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Nineteenth-Century Settlement Houses - Jane Addams’s Hull House, Chicago

Settlement houses, often pioneered and headed by women, were a key feature of social reform efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so, when visiting Chicago a couple of weeks ago, the Secret Victorianist took the opportunity to visit one of the most famous – Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.

All that now remains of Hull House, located in the city’s Near West Side, is two buildings, overshadowed by the very modern neighbouring campus of the University of Illinois. Inside a miniature model gives you an idea of its previous scale - by 1911 there were 13 buildings, home to a community of university-educated reformers who believed communal living between the middle class and the poor was one of the best ways of curing society’s ills.

The Secret Victorianist at Hull House in Chicago

The House, from its inception, was ‘open’ to the immigrant communities surrounding it. In 1889, Italian immigrants were the most common, but a series of 1920s maps on display in the museum show just how diverse the neighbourhood was to become. The middle class ‘residents’ of the House aided these communities in numerous ways – from acting as midwives to providing childcare, from running pottery and bookbinding classes to staging amateur dramatics.

The majority of the residents were single women, with the kind of social and educational values associated with the New Woman movement of the 1890s. Notably, and similarly progressively, Hull House was also secular in its ethos, unlike other similar institutions with strong links to religious institutions. Addams’s doctrine was comprised of three Rs - Residence, Research, and Reform. She worked for ‘close cooperation with the neighbourhood people, scientific study of the causes of poverty and dependence, communication of these facts to the public, and persistent pressure for reform’ at a legislative and social level.

Hull House, Chicago

Yet in another way, Addams’s community was also founded on an idea that was recognisably Victorian, and even conservative – that women have an essential role as carers and peacekeepers. In 1931 she became the first American women to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her life’s work, but that was only after her insistence on peace had seen her branded by some of her countrymen as unpatriotic.

Visiting Hull House today gives you little idea of the bustling community it must once have been. There are index cards describing the numerous residents – many of them noteworthy in their various fields - and some material vestiges of the organisation, like the first sets of keys, furniture from its nursery school, some signage and ephemera. Addams’s bedroom exists as it would have looked in her time and acts a strange, solitary memorial – with the house and even the museum’s name (Jane Addams Hull House) making it come across as the hosting the story of an individual, rather than a long line of interesting people (residents and immigrants) who benefitted from its existence.

Jane Addams's bedroom in Hull House

Rotating exhibitions do try to nod to how the idea of reform as a continuing mission. When I was there, I saw a room dedicated to the importance of work/life balance and the long American working week, linking the desire for a universal living wage to the opportunities for play and entertainment Hull House provided in its heyday. But, with the Hull House organisation having closed itself in 2012, this is all tinged with more than a hint of sadness. A building that was once beyond anything useful, has now become a relic – and not because the work of communal integration and the eradication of poverty in the US is over.

Have you ever visited Hull House or other nineteenth-century settlement houses? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: What’s Bred in the Bone, Grant Allen (1891)

Last week one of my Facebook fans recommended I read perhaps the craziest nineteenth-century novel I’ve ever come across –Grant Allen’s 1891 What’s Bred in the Bone. If you’re after a novel with identical twin heroes who get toothache simultaneously, a heroine who struggles to overcome an overwhelming desire to dance with snakes (or feather boas), murder, illegitimacy and a rather morally dubious spell of diamond-hunting in South Africa, (after all who isn’t?!) then this one’s definitely for you. Thanks for the recommendation, Brian! 

The Snake-Charmer, John Evan Hodgson

For general readers: Allen wrote this novel as a competition entry and it’s not difficult to see why he beat 20,000 other entries to pocket the sizeable £1,000 prize money. What’s Bred in the Bone is ridiculous but also ridiculously fun, and well-written enough to be incredibly readable. The novel isn’t one which leaves readers guessing – it’s apparent to us immediately who the father of the Waring twins must be and, later in the novel, that neither of them is responsible for murder – but it is difficult to guess exactly how everything will work out, especially as the odds mount against the ‘good’ characters. The plot is well thought through (if coincidence-laden), although the central moral – that the pedigree of your breeding will shine through in your actions – may seem a little unsavoury. The ending ties everything together nicely, although I was left with a few important questions. How is Elma an abbreviation of Esmeralda? Did Gilbert Gildersleeve QC ever see his wife do the crazy snake dance? And did Cyril get rid of his snake?! 

For students: I think this is definitely one to throw into an essay to impress and amuse your lecturers. What’s Bred in the Bone is interesting in its treatment of criminal justice, Africa and the diamond trade, foreign blood (described as Romanian, gypsy and Oriental), and railway accidents (of which there is a particularly dramatic example in the opening pages). The importance of marital records, level of detail as regards transportation times and written correspondence and trial scene also link the novel to many of the tropes of sensation fiction.

Canadian born Grant Allen is largely under-studied today, apart from his 1895 novel The Woman Who Did (an example of New Woman literature), and What’s Bred in the Bone would be a lively example of some of his lesser-known work. Allen’s prominence as a scientific writer and proponent of evolution is also a notable context for the rather more dubious scientific claims made at times in the novel, which could merit from further study.

Have you read any Grant Allen? Do you know of an even stranger nineteenth-century novel you’d love the Secret Victorianist to review? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: Q is for Quiz!

'Q' means quiz time in my Victorian Alphabet series. What type of nineteenth-century novel should YOU be a heroine in?