Abstract
“Wilde’s Personal Drama” studies the drama of Oscar Wilde’s first two commercially produced plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893). I suggest that Wilde both borrowed from old performance genres and revised them. He drew motifs from familiar varieties of comedy and melodrama, often following the expected patterns only to reverse them at the last moment. Viewing life itself in theatrical terms, he presented social performances such as afternoon calls and country house parties as theatrical genres, often conflating these performances with scenes more traditionally associated with the stage. In appropriating scenes from stage and fashionable drawing room, he mocked the rigid assumptions about marriage and morality on which these genres were based.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
For performance-oriented readings of Wilde’s trials, see Shoshana Felman, “Oscar Wilde’s Performance on the Witness Stand”; and Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde.
- 2.
For discussions of Earnest and its possible allusions to homosexual identity and subculture, see Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920; and Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde.
- 3.
For analyses of Wilde’s plays and their development through early drafts, see Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde; and Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde.
- 4.
Alan Bird, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde, suggests that the subtitle of Lady Windermere’s Fan —A Play about a Good Woman—might itself be an echo of A Pure Woman, the subtitle of Tess. Like Hardy, Wilde invokes a familiar moral ideal in order to subvert it and call for a redefinition (The Plays of Oscar Wilde, 113).
- 5.
Powell suggests that Wilde may have signaled the resemblance to East Lynne even in the name of the erring mother, Mrs. Erlynne (Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, 31).
- 6.
In particular, Ahmed describes shame, especially when publicly acknowledged, as a social performance sometimes used symbolically to cancel out a past shameful action: “[P]ublic expressions of shame try to ‘finish’ the speech act by converting shame to pride…. [W]hat is shameful is passed over in the enactment of shame” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 120).
- 7.
As Sos Eltis has pointed out, Lady Windermere’s final judgment of Mrs. Erlynne’s “goodness” marks not only the young woman’s increased experience and discernment but also the limits of that discernment: she no longer automatically dismisses Mrs. Erlynne as “bad” simply based on her sexual past, but she continues to use simplistic moral labels, which Mrs. Erlynne herself has discarded, and she would probably withdraw her verdict of “goodness” if she knew Mrs. Erlynne’s relation to herself (Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, 82).
- 8.
See, for example, Patricia Behrendt and John Clum. Both cite Lytton Strachey’s facetious synopsis, written after seeing Beerbohm Tree’s 1907 revival of the play: “Mr. Tree is a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests—a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, she sees his Lordship and recognizes him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was—the handsome young man. She appeals to Lord Tree [sic] not to bugger his own son. He replies that it is an additional reason for doing it (oh! he is a very wicked Lord)” (qtd. in Patricia Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics, 156; and Clum, The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present, 34).
References
Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Archer, William. “A Woman of No Importance.” In Victorian Dramatic Criticism, edited by George Rowell, 228–31. London: Methuen, 1971.
———. The Old Drama and the New. Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1923.
“At the Play.” Hearth and Home, May 4, 1893.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Bird, Alan. The Plays of Oscar Wilde. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977.
Brookfield, Charles H. E., and J. M. Glover. The Poet and the Puppets. In Victorian Theatrical Burlesques, edited by Richard W. Schoch, 216–46. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
Clum, John M. The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Craft, Christopher. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Davidoff, Leonore. The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1973.
Eltis, Sos. Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Felman, Shoshana. “Oscar Wilde’s Performance on the Witness Stand.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 55 (2009): 300–16.
Gilbert, W. S. Patience: Or, Bunthorne’s Bride. In The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, edited by Ian Bradley, 265–354. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Grein, J. T. “Wilde as Dramatist.” In Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, edited by Karl Beckson, 236. London: Routledge, 1970.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
Holland, Merlin. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
Jones, Henry Arthur. The Renascence of the English Drama. London: Macmillan, 1895.
Kaplan, Joel H., and Sheila Stowell. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
“Lady Windermere’s Fan.” The Era, February 27, 1892.
Marcus, Sharon. “Salomé!! Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and the Drama of Celebrity.” PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011): 999–1018.
“Metropolitan Notes.” The Nottingham Evening Post, January 16, 1884.
Moyle, Franny. Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde. London: John Murray, 2011.
“Mr. Oscar Wilde’s Play.” The Pall Mall Gazette, February 22, 1892.
“Occasional Notes.” Edinburgh News, June 5, 1884.
Palmer, T. A. East Lynne. In Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Adrienne Scullion, 295–346. London: Everyman, 1996.
Pearson, Hesketh. Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter. London: Methuen, 1956.
Powell, Kerry. Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
———. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Schnitzer, Carol. “A Husband’s Tragedy: The Relationship Between Art and Life in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.” The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 2006): 25–29.
Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Shaw, Bernard. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable, 1932.
“St. James’s Theatre.” The Standard, February 22, 1892.
“The Call Boy.” Judy: The Conservative Comic, March 2, 1892.
“The London Theatres.” The Era, April 22, 1893.
Thomas, W. Moy. “A Woman of No Importance.” The Graphic, April 29, 1893.
———. “Mr. Oscar Wilde’s New Play at the St. James’s Theatre.” The Graphic, February 27, 1892.
Voskuil, Lynn. Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
———. “Wilde and Performativity.” In Oscar Wilde in Context, edited by Kerry Powell and Peter Raby, 356–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Walkley, A. B. “Introduction.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 7: ix–xiv. New York: Doubleday, 1923.
Wilde, Oscar. Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters. Edited by Merlin Holland. London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
———. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. 12 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1923.
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Wood, Ellen. East Lynne. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Christian, M. (2020). Wilde’s Personal Drama. In: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40639-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40639-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-40638-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-40639-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)