The Analysis Of Female Characters In Bernard Shaw’s Social Problem Plays

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), an excellent British realistic dramatist who won The Nobel Prize because of the idealism and humanitarianism reflected in his works. As a realistic dramatist, he vehemently condemned the "well made" but cheap, hollow plays to meet the low taste of the middle class and believed that dramatists should reveal acute social problems actively and educate the common people. As an advocator of Western feminist movement, who shaped a lot of self-reliance, self-respect new women images in his plays. These works changed people’s view on the women’ social status and the roles that they used to play, enlightened western feminist movement, and also had a profound influence on the images shaping of women in literatures during the 20th century in England.This thesis mainly consists of three chapters:The first chapter mainly introduces Shaw’s feminist thoughts from the point of women with their love, marriage and job, and analyzes the subjective and objective reasons. The second chapter contributes to the analysis of the characteristics and problems in women’s images that Shaw created in his social problem plays, including five works of Window s Houses、Mrs. Warren’s Profession、Candida、Major Barbara and Pygmalion, they are all not good at dealing with the relationship with their parents though some of them have the strong will of self-reliance and self-respect and some of them have strong maternity feelings. At the same time, his writing standpoint of women is also analyzed in this chapter. The last chapter classifies the women in these five plays into three categories, respectively noble ladies, girls in middle class and the underclass girls according to their economical status. This chapter mainly analyzes their ethical choices that they made and also explores their attitude towards marriage and work that Shawn described in his discourse.Through detail analysis and discussion, this essay find that Shaw perceptively catch the fact that England women’s social status has been promoted between the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, which is frequently reflected in his theatrical works. These works imply an expectation for women from Shaw that women are stronger than men and they will be able to compete freely with men in society eventually. However, the women characters created by Shaw, a realistic writer, are fictitious because it is beyond their living reality of that time.