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A Dialogue L AU R E L B R A K E In a suggestive essay in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Richard Cave explores“some lines of influence”of Wilde’s drama on twentieth-century theater, but for some reason Cave judges W. Somerset Maugham’s and Noel Coward’s conscious reworking of Wilde’s comedies as superficial and thus fit to set aside.₁ I argue, however, that the line from Wilde to Maugham is especially strong and complicated and that Maugham adopted Wildean structures as well as diction in The Constant Wife (1926) to critique twentieth-century social values no less profoundly than Wilde probed those of the nineteenth century in An Ideal Husband (1895). When Maugham began his career as a playwright just before the turn of the century (from 1898 onward), he looked to Wilde’s theatrical models, ones described by Anthony Curtis as“temporarily out of service”at the time.² After Maugham’s first commercial success in 1907 with Lady Frederick, Maugham decided to go for a structure more free of melodrama and farce than nineteenth-century models offered,³ but long after this date—in the 1920s—he still engaged in a robust dialogue with Wilde. This intertextuality helps define the continuation of a Wildean tradition of drama, apparently unscathed, surviving the trials, Wilde’s imprisonment, and death and moving smartly into the twentieth century in Maugham’s Penelope (1909) and its redaction, The Constant Wife. 209 8 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. In particular, my discussion focuses on the ways in which Maugham’s great 1926 drama crafts a playful inversion of aspects of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. Maugham produces a wry and searching investigation of constancy in wives set in the 1920s that complements Wilde’s focus on the ideal husband in the 1890s. But even as Maugham’s play regenders An Ideal Husband, it also imitates another work—one planned by Wilde and realized by Frank Harris—in which Wilde directly points the way to Maugham’s cameo of constancy in modern women. While it is possible, as Curtis suggests, that Maugham’s choice of title of The Constant Wife echoes George Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (1699), Maugham is more likely to have drawn on a combination of Wildean models for the titles and substance of his two constant wife plays.⁴ In this regard, numerous similarities between the playwrights and the 1895 and 1926 dramas immediately spring to mind. This is a dialogue between male authors who, in their 1895 and 1926 works, are idiosyncratic in their representation of gender difference and largely sympathetic toward the advancement of women. Moreover, both of these playwrights were bisexual, both married, and both, at these dates, were not (in our idiom) “out.” Gerald Kelly’s portrait of a dandified Maugham in 1911 suggests the younger man’s identification at the time with a Wildean persona (see fig. 28).₅ Likewise, both plays are drawing-room comedies, produced for the commercial theater, and both of these works are inter alia about marriage as well as the woman/man question. Wilde produced his play in the immediate wake of what had just been named the“New Woman”₆ and following long-standing debate in the press about the social, intellectual, and legal status of women and about the nature of marriage. At the same time, nineteenth-century writers (from George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley onward, including Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, and John Henry Newman) were envisaging the lineaments of masculinities, both homosexual and heterosexual . Wilde was not unique in this respect; among his contemporaries,Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Thomas Hardy, and others were engaged in rethinking masculinity during the fin de siècle, while Maugham’s 1909 and 1926 plays on marriage, sexuality, and gender sit among other modernist texts and images that take up these subjects, including those of Pablo Picasso, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, to name but a few. If one compares the lists of dramatis personae, then the relation of echo and inversion of Wilde’s 1895 drama in Maugham’s 1926 play is unmistakable, if not obvious.At the center of each work is a married couple, but in An Ideal Husband 210 Laurel Brake You are reading copyrighted...

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