The first novel that we are going to study is A Woman of No Importance, written in 1893.
Wilde powerfully displays 19th century society’s views towards women – how a man can be deceitful yet admired but a woman who is unmarried and unchaste is a woman of no importance. Lord Illingworth is pompous and self-indulged yet the other characters almost worship him. Where as Mrs. Arbuthnot has a son, Gerald, who was born out of wedlock and for this she is eschewed. However, without revealing the twist, Wilde shows how preconceived views can be wrong.
It also criticises how 19th century viewed women as rebellious. Hester, a ‘Puritan’ American, expresses different views from the society’s about how women should act; for this she is seen as ‘different’. The views she express are very liberal for the time which the other characters mock. For a current audience this is quite humorous and displays some dramatic irony as Hester’s views almost align with society today.
As Philip Fisher summarizes: «A Woman of No Importance primarily focuses on the differences between men and women and, more importantly, the way in which Victorian society treated its ladies. Wilde shows feminist leanings as he attacks the injustice of a society that condemns a «fallen» woman while admiring the cause of her downfall.»
Another review from What’s on Stage agrees with the previous short synopsis: «As with Wilde’s other plays, A Woman of No Importance takes place in the gilded world of 19th-century English aristocrats and seeks to expose the hypocrisies at the heart of their shallow society. In this case, the setting is Lady Hunstanton’s country estate where, in between wooing the ladies, devilish Lord Illingworth is keen to appoint young Gerald Arbuthnot as his personal secretary, not realising that Arbuthnot is in fact his own illegitimate child.»
Niamh Jiménez says in his opinion article that «This play is interesting as it expounds upon the idea that woman can be subjected to the harshest of punishments, while man walks away untarnished; both parties may be equally culpable, and yet, man evades spiritual and social contamination on the grounds of his supposed male superiority. Elements of this play are undoubtedly fine fodder for the feminists, as it contains references to women as «playthings», as well as Lord Illingworth’s arrogant assumption that he possesses the power to defile the purest of women, Hester Worsley, by kissing her. Lord Illingworth fails to besmirch Hester’s character, or intercept her staunch conformity to the ideals of moral conduct; this is a triumph for the self-possessed, independent woman, who exercises her own morality and acts independently of man.
Wilde’s criticism of the upper class is wildly entertaining in this comedy of manners, containing some traces of farce. He is particularly successful in portraying the triviality of the women’s conversation and conduct. Lady Caroline is tyrannical in her marriage to Sir John, as she treats him as if he were and infant, depriving him of any entitlement to independent thought or competence: «I think I had better look after John.» […] The women’s inclination to compete with their fellows and the overly zealous vigilance paid to other women’s looks exposes a shallowness, insecurity, and almost self-deprecatory belief that physical attractiveness is woman’s sole qualification.
By the end of the play, Mrs Arbuthnot and the American, Miss Worsley, choose to disassociate themselves entirely from the false pretensions and perverted mores of this upper class society. Miss Worsley and Gerald Arbuthnot are united in their love for one another: a pure, unalloyed attachment uncorrupted by prejudice or imposture.»
As the Poetry Foundation says, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband deal, in varying degrees of seriousness, with Wilde’s favourite themes of the loss of innocence and the assertion of individuality.
Then, Michael Billington states in his article for The Guardian that Wilde criticizes the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian Era: «Wilde proffers attitudes. That is not to say Wilde’s play is without interest: above all, it attacks the sexual hypocrisy by which women are punished for their sins while men are applauded for them. […] For the first two acts, people stand and deliver witty, applause-begging remarks. For the next two, they engage in sentimental pieties on the lines of «How could repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit?», that would not be out of place in East Lynne. Having attacked Victorian morality, Wilde succumbs to its lust for melodrama.»
Another critic, Colin Dabkowski, mantains more or less the same about the aristocrats of the late-Victorian London, as we can see here: «Of course, the well of literature about upper-class absurdity is practically inexhaustible, but there is something particularly satisfying about “A Woman of No Importance.” Wilde gets straight to the heart of the dramatic impulse among the aristocrats of late-Victorian London, which seems to arise as much from boredom as from cluelessness or cruelty. Left to their own devices, as Wilde constantly implied across his brief and wondrous career, monied men and women will amuse themselves by trying to destroy one another. And we will happily watch.»
And to finish talking about the first book, here I have the review of Christine Markwart. As we will see later, she has done a fantastic essay that analyses some of the Wilde’s plays, and here I have put a fragment so that you can see and understand a little more about «A Woman of No Importance«, a play where the role of women is to seduce and take control over men.
«Wilde’s play about a fallen woman, however, has some significant differences from its predecessors. The most obvious difference is that Mrs. Arbuthnot neither dies tragically in the end, nor repents her loss of innocence. In accordance with melodramatic convention, Wilde has Mrs. Arbuthnot confess her past misdeeds to her son. Yet this confessional scene is anything but conventional. Indeed it is the point in the play where Wilde breaks most clearly with melodramatic convention.
Mrs. Arbuthnot tells Gerald a story about an unfortunate young girl, without
owning it as her own. In this narrative she emphasizes the girl’s innocent lack of
knowledge of the world, placing all the blame on Lord Illingworth who ‘knew everything [about life]’.
Mrs. Arbuthnot does not relate this story in search of absolution. She is not the confessee seeking forgiveness and penance. Mrs Arbuthnot does not say that the girl fell in love with him, but rather that ‘he made this girl love him. He made her love him so much that she left her father’s house with him one morning’. […] In a traditional melodramatic confession scene, Gerald would function as the witness to his mother’s confession and would assume the role of confessor, the one who judges the sinner and proscribes penance and grants absolution. But Wilde was careful not to let that tradition prevail in A Woman of No Importance. Here his fallen woman, Mrs. Arbuthnot, masterfully constructs her quasi-confession as a plea for sympathy and a condemnation of her seducer. No guilty sinner is absolved and purified in A Woman of No Importance. The balance of power is not transferred from the one confessing to her confessor, and the play ends with the woman having used her confession to tighten her stranglehold of control over her son, since throughout the play Mrs. Arbuthnot views Gerald as a possession, a pawn to own and control.
Wilde referred to the play as a woman’s play but that is not to say that it gives a
flattering depiction of women. A Woman of No Importance is a play about the sinister side of women who seek to seduce and emasculate men. The Victorian cult of the home pervades the opening scene, but in Wilde’s play home is not a refuge and place of moral renewal. In A Woman of No Importance, home represents a secluded domestic realm that is so feminised that men are stifled and emasculated in it. The women in the play are not feminists arguing for equal rights. They are simply interested in dominating and controlling men.
«Mrs. Arbuthnot is a woman struggling to be consistent in her defiance of
convention. She is an individual, for she dares to keep the child and, consequently, she must live a limited life though she finds this terribly irritating. She has a limited but independent life which includes her son and doing some charity work through the church. But her melodramatic ranting reveals a woman who is tremendously bitter at the social limitations of her life.»
Now we are going to pass to the second book: An Ideal Husband, first performed on January 1895 .
An Ideal Husband is a play in which Wilde pokes fun at the society and encourages the people to set high expectations for each other, they are more concerned about their image than their personality, it is a kind of hypocritical play like almost all of them that Wilde writes and satirizes. An Ideal Husband is almost a farce, but the dialogues and the japes aimed at the society offer also a more critical reading of the play and its characters.
As we will see later in The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband also talks about love, and especially in the hypocritical sense of it as we see in the Victorian Era.
As I spoke before about her, Christine Markwart has done a great thesis talking about this theme and I want you to look at it because she talks about the play in a very interesting way analysing the hypocrisy of each one of the most important characters in the play:
«The focal point of An Ideal Husband lies in the power relations between Lady and Lord Chilton. Wilde foreshadows the discussions of idealized marital relations in the dialogue between the mino characters Mr’s. Marchmont and Lady Basildon early in the play. The pair wittily present the unsentimental view that an ideal husband is someone who gives them great freedom, is not boting and expects little of them. This sentiment is contrasted by Mabel, who is single and says that she wants a husband who will always be thinking of her. Curiously Wilde portrays Mabel as having the «modern» notion that she will catch a suitable husband by giving him much freedom and expecting little for herself.
Lady Chiltern, on the other hand, is a woman who wants to believe that her husband is perfect and has never done a morally reprehensible act. It is an image that she so desperately would believe rather than know the truth. When she is alone with her husband and it would be natural to let his character indulge in a confessional scene to seek absolution and support from his wife, but Lady Chiltern rigidly moralizes. Then, as if she does not belive in his innocence, she exclaims «tell me it is not true»(Act I). Such a plea, of couse, makes a confession difficult, and consequently Chiltern, as his wife requests, denies that there is anything to hide. When Mrs. Cheveley does reveal Chiltern’s secret, again Lady Chiltern persists in asking him to lie to her. Finally Chiltern does own up to his misdeeds but similar to his confessional scene with Goring, Chiltern does not ask for absolution, nor is he sorry. Instead he emotionally complains about how women expect too much of men by idolizing them.»
By saying this, Christine reflects what happens in «The importance of Being Earnest» because it happens the same, Gwendolen creates a man that is ideal and when this changes she feels disappointed.
«Similar to Lady Windermere before her, Lady Chiltern is arguably the worst hypocrite in the play because, for all her talk about ideals and high moral principles, Lady Chiltern has an even more desperate need to mantain the façade of perfection that to hear the truth. […] The romance between Goring and Mabel Chiltern also strikes a discordant note. It is presented as a match based on love, yet this is difficult to believe. Instead it would seem more plausible that marrying Mabel is Goring’s social alibi to please his father, for despite his calm collectedness in other scenes, Goring regresses into playing the sulky son when his father visits him and encourages him to marry. […] Mabel is a single woman whose duty is to get married. Then the scene with Lady Chiltern, Lady Markby and Mrs. Cheverley reminds us that to be married was not enough, one must marry someone of the same social standing in order to not create a society scandal. […] The play ends on a morally ambiguous note with the realisation that when imperfect people with a degree of moral conscience leave politics, the political arena is left to even more unscrupulous individuals.»
After analyzing the character’s view about love and marriage, we can see what Christine had analized about the use of language and the characters and how a critic of that times thought that Wilde didn’t create nothing innovative but only characters that was not real to that times, so we can see that Wilde satirized the characters so that people could laugh and amuse themselves by seeing this critiques of the society without really knowing that Wilde was criticizing a lot of their values:
«While the critics noticed Wilde’s use of epigrammatic dialogue as a distinctive trademark none of them were willing to allow that this was a stylistically innovative use of language. Archer, of couse, was primarily concerned with the play’s realism and character development. Walkley too in his review of An Ideal Husband claims that the characters lack realistic psychological development. He starts by criticising the play since it will not aid in the evolution of the English theatre. Then he comments on Wilde’s relationship to his audience and how Wilde flatters his public, since his characters are not realistic:
«The truth is, he is far from being a realist; actual people neither talk nor behave like his stage-personages. […] Wilde flatters the public, presents it with a false picture of life which it likes to fancy true, thinks its thoughts, conforms to its ideals, talks -yes, talks its talk. […] The public talks commonplaces, and so does Mr. Wilde. It is true that his are inverted commonplaces; but the difference is immaterial, for not the nature, only the position, of a thing is altered by its being turned upside-down, these inverted commonplaces are Mr. Wilde’s distinctive mark.»
In his excerpt, Walkley points out the vicarious narcissism of Wilde’s plays, flattering the public with an idealized version of how upper-class society liked to view itself.
Michael Billington argues that the play attacts the Victorian values by creating characters that are different of what was seen as «good» in that times. We can see this in his article saying that «The play is unmistakably an attack on late-Victorian values. Its hero, Sir Robert Chiltern, is a rising political star whose twin gods are wealth and power. We discover, however, that in pursuit of them as a young man he rashly sold cabinet secrets to a stock-exchange speculator: a mistake that comes back to haunt him when an incriminating letter falls into the hands of the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley. But, if Sir Robert represents the hollow sham of public life, his adoring wife symbolises what Shaw called «the mechanised idealism of the stupidly good». The wisest words in the play are spoken by Viscount Goring, a dandified idler who recognises that life cannot be understood without charity and forgiveness.»
Another critic that talks about the virtue of forgiveness is Heather Lee, who says that the characters pretend to act like they don’t suffer from anything when actually they are fighting against the non-existence of perfection: «They pretend they don’t care about things they painfully care very much about. They profess their principles one way and then act differently… every character behaves «out of character» at least once in the play. Lady Chiltern at one point is chided by her husband for setting him up as an impossible ideal and loving him for his virtues, while he argues in his anguish that «It is not the perfect but the imperfect who have need of love.» It is perhaps time to consider how the virtue of perfection weighs against the virtue of forgiveness.»
Once again, we can see in another review that Roger Ebert wrote that the society that Wilde describes is one in which it is more important what the others think about you than to be really as you are, once more, a hypocritical society. He considers that «A play like Oscar Wilde’s «An Ideal Husband» works because it takes place in a society bound by inflexible rules and social inhibitions. Here is a story in which a marriage, a romance, a fortune and government policy all rest on such foundations as a man’s obligation to act like a gentleman. (Of course he doesn’t need to be a gentleman–that’s where the story comes in.) In the play, an incriminating letter is sent, in the belief that it will never be revealed. Suspicions are aroused, but they don’t inspire questions–because they involve matters it would be unseemly to ask of a gentleman. As long as everyone plays by the rules in public, they can be broken in private. But then an entire society is threatened by the willingness of one character to act as she should not.»
And later he speaks about women in the play saying that: «Women in the plays of a century ago were technically powerless; they lived through their husbands and spent much of their time speculating on what the men were really up to, or waiting for news. At the same time, the plays were really about them, and everything the men did was designed to win their love, admiration or forgiveness. It is important that we believe Lady Chiltern loves her husband but loves his upright character even more and will leave him if she discovers his sins. And it’s also important to believe that Mabel, Sir Robert’s sister, could fall in love with Goring in an instant. Well, of course she could. Modern critics who complain they fall in love too suddenly have forgotten that she would have spent months or years making up her mind about every eligible man in her universe.» and it is the idea that reappears in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’
Later on, Prof. D’Agostino from the Istituto Garibaldi, talks in a very short fragment about marriage and what it was about in that era and especially in the play: «Wilde treats marriage as a complicated and imperfect relationship and makes fun of the Chilterns’ attempt to create the perfect marriage. Lady Chiltern constantly states that her husband is perfect and represents the best of respectable English life. Lord Goring is the play’s champion of love, and his relationship with Mabel allows for imperfections rather than focusing on ideals. Mrs Cheveley tries to force Lord Goring to marry her, but she represents evil and self-interest. Thus, he does not even imagine accepting her suggestion, and maintains true to himself and his love».
After seen this two book we can pass now to the third and last one: The Importance of Being Earnest», first performed on 14 February 1895 .
As we have seen above, the status of women in the Victorian era was not as fair as it is nowadays: women did not have suffrage rights, the right to sue, or the right to own property, women couldn’t decide by themselves completely because they were subordinated first to their father and then when their father decided what man was better to his dauther’s future, they passed to be subordinated to their husbands. The ideal Victorian women was pure, chaste, refined, and modest. This ideal was supported by manners.
Victorian men also expected women to possess feminine qualities like innocence; otherwise, they would not be of marriage potential. In Charles Petrie’s article, “Victorian Women Expected to be Idle and Ignorant,” he explains exactly what the Victorian man was looking for:
Innocence was what he demanded from the girls of his class, and they must not only be innocent but also give the outward impression of being innocent. White muslin, typical of virginal purity, clothes many a heroine, with delicate shades of blue and pink next in popularity. The stamp of masculine approval was placed upon ignorance of the world, meekness, lack of opinions, general helplessness and weakness; in short, recognition of female inferiority to the male (Petrie 184).
In Wilde’s play, he comically satirizes the name “Earnest,” through the representation of two dishonest men whom the women fantasize as being ideal men worthy of marriage. These two men claim to live up to the Victorian ideals, but then live another life outside of the community to escape the society’s pressures and responsabilities. From now on, in the play, the men fall under the pressure of women and Victorian ideals rather than staying true to their identity and personalities.
The pressure from the Victorian society influences the way Cecily and Gwendolyn view men.They dream of the perfect man to take them as their wife, and they believe it is the only way to satisfy the dream of marriage that Victorian women dream of since infancy, according to Petrie (Petrie 180). As they dream of the perfect man, Gwendolyn and Cecily have adopted the Victorian concept of the perfect man to shape their expectations of their potential husbands. Alan Ackerman argues the dangers in ideals, such as the ideal of a name: “‘The false ideal[s] of our time’ are shown to be disastrous in nearly every one of Wilde’s plays. ‘Ideals are dangerous things,’”(Ackerman 142). While the ideal of a name may not cause physical danger, it may affect a couple’s relationship emotionally because of the temptations to live up to the expectations of the partner, so that maybe Jack and Algernon, when the ladies of the play finally know them completely they were not what Cecily and Gwendolyn expected, maybe (surely) they were not the perfect man that they wanted to have as a husband.
It is known that a young girl was not expected to focus too obviously on finding a husband. Being ‘forward’ in the company of men suggested a worrying sexual appetite. Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction. One doctor, William Acton, famously declared that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.
Girls usually married in their early to mid-20s. Typically, the husband would be five years older. Not only did this reinforce the ‘natural’ hierarchy between the sexes, but it also made sound financial sense. A young man needed to be able to show that he earned enough money to support a wife and any future children before the girl’s father would give his permission. Some unfortunate couples were obliged to endure an engagement lasting decades before they could afford to marry.
Below they are speaking about the permission of the girl’s father to let some man marry their daugther, but in this play, when Jack asks Gwendolen to marry him, it is not her father who have to accept the petition but her mother, Lady Bracknell. It’s another, we can call it, irony that Wilde uses to criticize the Victorian society, but this theme is going to be discussed in the next section.
As we can see, marriage was seen as a business, to keep the family’s name or to improve some family’s statement. Women married for security. Even that it is seen as that during the Victorian era, there are different opinions in the play: Algernon has a very cynical view of marriage until he meets (and falls in love with) Cecily; Jack is the romantic through out the entire play up until the end – Gwendolen and Cecily are obsessed with marrying a man with the name of Earnest so that is not a real love but in a way it’s an obsession and Lady Bracknell thinks that marriage is a business.
The fact that both women have fixated on the importance of marrying someone called Ernest than other things like the feelings or anything else demonstrates Wilde’s attitude to the superficiality of Victorian morals around marriage. This is highlighted by the use of the joke around the name Ernest, when the two men pretending to be called Ernest are not being earnest, what means serious, sincere, but the opposite and it’s here where we can see the hypocrisy of the society that Wilde criticizes.
Finally it is important to consider that Wilde introduces through the characters marriage as something without importance, for some it is something about interests, but for the main characters, marriage has the same importance as choosing what they are going to eat(sometimes in the play food has even more importance than marriage, like the significance they give to the cucumber sandwiches and to sugar and cake) so for them to marry with someone is something that one can decide from one day to another, and that’s why the play is so trivial, in a way that makes the play to be hypocritical because of the character’s way of doing and speaking, and because of the importance they give to some things and not to other.