Money, Gender, and Conscience in Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London

This essay argues that Robert Wilson's play The Three Ladies of London presents a conservative view of men being corrupted by women's temptations. In the process, however, Wilson at once reveals and obfuscates the irony of metaphorically feminizing the damaging practices of men in order to present men as helplessly drawn into female vice. He demonstrates the surprising symbiosis and relationships of the supposedly antithetical character groups of Love and Conscience on the one hand and Lucre and her henchmen on the other. Wilson thereby delineates his society's destruction of the ideals of London, citizenship, and Englishness, a dramatic tour de force of mimetic representation that pushes the limits of his allegorical mode.