Modern Ontologics and the Impotence of Being Earnest

Abstract

In a note pitching The Importance of Being Earnest to producer-director George Alexander, Oscar Wilde describes what he admits is a “slight” if “adequate” plot. “The real charm of the play, if it is to have charm,” Wilde writes, will be in dialogue and will consist largely of what he refers to as “Fin-de-Siècle talk.”³ Blithely attaching the term “fin-de-siècle” to what is clearly his own form of talk, Wilde implies that his talk is what is currently in style, or should or will be.

Just now the whole of society is engaged in inventing Oscar Wildeisms, just as a few months ago they were employed in discovering the missing word in competitions. It is the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is to form an obvious untruth into a false epigram.

—Critic Clement Scott¹

A nation prospers and profits by precisely those national qualities which [Wilde and his fellow] innovators deride and abjure. It goes swiftly to wreck and decay by precisely that brilliant corruption of which we have just had the exposure and demonstration. All the good literature and the noble art in our own and other countries has been sane, moral and serious in its object; nor can life be wholesomely lived under guidance of brilliant paradoxes and corrosive epigrams.

—Press commentary on Wilde’s trials, 1895²