교훈적 경향을 초월한 예술성 : 쇼의 ？워렌부인의 직업？ 읽기

Abstract

“Art over Didacticism : Reading Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Since Mrs. Warren’s Profession is one of the most openly didactic of Shaw’s plays, this article examines its achievement as art over didacticism to assess the extent to which Shaw’s role as a dramatic propagandist limits his accomplishment as an artist. This play evolves on three levels with a high degree of success. First, a moral allegory polarizes around Vivie, providing both thesis and action with much of the archetypal energy of a morality play. Second, a firm realistic level polarizes around Mrs. Warren, developing the problem of the individual’s adjustment to society. And third, a deep-seated comic-ironic perspective emerges through the adventure of the morality play and beneath the tragedy of the realism, leavening both and putting them in greater touch with reality. Each of the three levels of moral allegory, realism, and comedy in Mrs. Warren’s Profession has its own integrity and consistency while it compromises and qualifies the others. The scope and depth of Shaw’s artistic achievement, the play’s final effect, lies in the aesthetic tension of these divergent forces.