Dowdies and Dandies: Oscar Wilde's Refashioning of Society Comedy

Dowdies and Dandies: Oscar Wilde's Refashioning of Society Comedy JOSEPH BRISTOW I "London Society," according to Mrs Cheveley in An Ideal Husband (1895), is "entirely made up of dowdies anddandies."J Reported by Mrs Marchmont to Lord Goring, Mrs Cheveley's words have a far greater function than simply making her the centre of attention among this group of gossipy aristocrats and their various hangers-on. Her acute observations of London Society disclose that this particular milieu is dull and yet dazzling. Rather like the interest she manages to generate around her own persona, Mrs Cheveley's insights about this contrastive culture of"dowdies and dandies" have an element of sparkling wit about them while appearing not a little predictable to at least one of their company. For although Lord Goring tells Mrs Marchmont that Mrs Cheveley is in principle "quite right," his dandiacal instincts compel him to qualify how one might affirm this lively view of London Society. "The men are all dowdies ," he says, "and the women are all dandies" (152). By this point, Mrs Marchmont is unsure whether or not she ought to agree. "Oh!" she exclaims, after a pause, "do you really think that is what Mrs Cheveley meant?" (152). I begin with this exchange because it foregrounds at least two of the main issues &t stake in Wilde's contentious handling of the late-Victorian Society comedy. The first is that these dramas constantly thrill the audience with their spectacular displays of the wealth enjoyed by these generally idle characters, only to reveal how grayly monotonous their everyday lives truly are. This play, after all, begins with Mrs Marchmont complaining that the Hartlocks give "Horribly tedious parties" (133), a view with which Lady Basildon wholly concurs. "Horribly tedious!" she exclaims. "Never know why I go. Never know why I go anywhere" (133). Yet the repetitious lifestyles of these people are framed by the grandeur of the stage setting which places them in a richly tapestried environment that cannot but impose its aesthetic qualities upon us. The dreary day-to-day rounds of the Season may well make Mrs Marchmont and Lady Basildon look rather bored with their world yet in spite Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 53 54 JOSEPH BRISTOW of this - if not because of it - the stage directions insist that their "affectation ofmanner has a delicate charm." For all their superficality, it is still the case that "Watteau would have loved to paint them" (133). Similar comparisons with the work of favoured artists extend to practically all of the men and women in the play. Lest we might think that these stage settings have a purely decorative function, Ian Small reminds us that Wilde's selection of these specific art-objects "implicate[s] the political values which are so central to the play's development." Thus Watteau immediately encodes a sense of "delicate eroticism.,,2 If these luxurious descriptions were not enough to emphasize the visual allure and social glamour of this drama, then there is the whole question of the role of the London fashion houses that used the West End stage to advertise their creations. For, as Joel H. Kaplan has remarked, Wilde collaborated with up-and-coming designers of haute couture in order to "tum [those] icons of midcentury melodrama - the Magdalen, the Adventuress, the Puritan Wife - into fashion 'statements' that cut provocatively across moral and generic boundaries."3 So even if the routines of Society make this world seem, as it were, dowdyish, these women none the less inhabit an environment that one might, at the risk of straining a metaphor, describe as dandiacal. Its attractiveness refashioned how an audience could and should look at Society. The second, and equally important, point that emerges from Lord Goring's response to the lives of these "dowdies and dandies" is that the meaning of the original observation is far from cut and dried. By transforming the men into the usually feminine "dowdies" and representing Society women as the conventionally masculine "dandies," Lord Goring employs one of Wilde's most characteristic tropes. This is the figure of peripety - or the dramatic reversal in fortune - where a given structure is rapidly turned upside down...