The Divided Self in the Society Comedies of Oscar Wilde

THE DIVIDED SELF IN THE SOCIETY COMEDIES OF OSCAR WILDE IT IS USUALLY SAID that Oscar Wilde's society comedies have foolish plots and brilliant dialogue, and as.far as it goes this critical commonplace is true. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband do in fact have foolish plots and brilliant dialogue. But the foolishness of these plots does not prevent them from expressing Wilde's personal and artistic positions, while the brilliance of this dialogue has often obscured both its value and its meaning. These are the things that I wish to demonstrate here. This dichotomy between plot and dialogue which mars the society comedies does not appear in Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earne8t. But to achieve the unity of The Importance Wilde had to suppress half his nature. That suppression constitutes a kind of deception, for we are given only a part of Wilde's reaction to his world. If we wish to understand fully what Wilde put into The Importance , we must also understand what he left out. But however useful the society comedies are as an explication of The Importance, their real significance lies in themselves. Each of these plays contains two worlds, not only contrasting but conflicting. One is the world of the sentimental plots, where ladies with mysterious pasts make passionate speeches and the fates of empires hang on intercepted letters and stolen bracelets. This is the world I will call Philistine. Opposed to it is the dandiacal world, where witty elegants lounge about tossing off Wildean epigrams and rarely condescend to notice, much less take part in, the impassioned actions going on about them. The tension between these two worlds gives to the society comedies their peculiar flavor, their strength, and unfortunately their weakness. Our first impulse is to admire the charm and wit of Wilde's dandies but to insist that while the shabby mechanisms of his well-made plots might have been suitable for our grandfathers, they will not pass muster with us. In justice to late Victorian literary taste, it should be pointed out that this was precisely the attitude of our grandfathers. William Archer thought he had discerned an English Ibsen in· the author of A Woman of No Importance and even Bernard Shawfelt that Sir Robert Chiltern of An Ideal Husband had struck "the modem note" in defending his wrongdoing, but these ex~ples are exceptional. 16 1960 DIVIDED SELF IN CoMEDIES OF OSCAR WILDE 11 Most of the Victorian critics grudgingly admired Wilde's wit and pointed out that his plots were compounds of varioUs well,worn devices .1 What was said about the society comedies when they first appeared is, for the most part, what is said about them today. Such judgments are true enough, but to deny the Philistine parts of the society comedies the highest literary merit is not to deny them meaning. If we look closely at these plays, we see that each of them repeats the same pattern of action. A writer of Wilde's obvious gifts is not likely to indulge himself in such a repetition unless it is, for him at least, a meaningful one. In each play the central character is someone who has in his past a secret sin. Mrs. Erlynne, who has alienated herself from good society by running away from her husband, fills that role in Lady Windermere 's Fan. The motive force in the play is Mrs. Erlynne's desire to re-enter that society and be accepted by it. Although she knows the weaknesses of Philistine society, Mrs. Erlynne suffers from her ostracism and warns her daughter against a similar fate: MRS. ERLYNNE: You don't know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at-to be an out-cast! To find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous by-ways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter, the horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You...