Deconstructive Strategies in Wilde’s Social Comedies: From Melodrama to Deconstruction

Abstract

Wilde has been identified more than once as an author whose work and ideas anticipate ways of thinking that would become widely current following the advent of post-structuralism in the late 1960s. Writing in 1989, Terry Eagleton observed how astonishingly Wilde’s work prefigures the insights of contemporary cultural theory. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that such theory, for all its excited air of novelty, represents in some ways little advance on the fin-de-siècle. Language as self-referential, truth as a convenient fiction, the human subject as contradictory and “deconstructed,” criticism as a form of “creative” writing, the body and its pleasures pitted against a pharisaical ideology: in these and several other ways, Oscar Wilde looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes.¹