Reversing the Conventional Patterns: Shaw's First Attempt at Repudiation to Social Norms
Azeez Jasim Mohammed

Abstract
To be a real playwright or to leave playwriting at all is George Bernard Shaw’s turning point in the beginning of his playwriting career and Widowers’ Houses, his first play, is a challenge after his failure in his previous five novels. The playwright criticises the magnates' sources of income and the negative effect of this income on the matrimonial life. With the help of William Archer, Shaw defies all the vows of Victorian norms and portraits his new logocentric thinking. The dramatist calls for woman's repudiation to social norms whereas his example of woman in this play exceeds his expectations and she manages to achieve her ends in the society she lives in successfully. Woman character in this play is not only supported to liberate herself and to become free woman in a patriarchal society but also she is enlisted to save her father and fiancé from the curse of their ‘tainted’ income. She challenges the conventional patterns and she flips them upside down in a way seemingly to say that social norms are what can be accepted rationally and what cannot, will be reversed so as to make it acceptable in a rational way.

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