In order to analyze Wilde’s works profoundly, I organize some critics’
viewpoints in chronical order and divide them into several categories. In this way, I can understand the trend and the changes of analyzing Wilde’s two plays in past decades, as well as attain abundant perspectives to reframe my arguments with these significant research results. It is no doubt that critics in different periods have different points of views regarding women in Wilde’s works. The main reason is due to the women’s movements, since women’s social position has progressed from the 19th century to the 21st century. During Wilde’s time, people regarded fallen women as imperfect women, but as time passed by, some critics started to view these fallen women differently, claiming that these women were trying to be unconventional, or even radical. Recently, the researches on Wilde also prove that his works always include some hidden messages to fight against the society and the norm.
Among the variety of critiques critiquing Wilde’s plays, I have decided to review William Tydeman, Kerry Powell, Sos Eltis, Ian Small, Neil Sammells and Margaret Diane Stetz’s works, because their works are specifically dedicated to Wilde’s plays
Lady Windermere Fan and A Woman of No Importance in depth. In addition, their
works also offer plentiful analysis of the women characters in Wilde’s plays.1. Fallen women are imperfect women
Lady Windermere’s Fan is actually not the first play which inscribes the story of
- 6 -
fallen woman. In fact, Wilde consulted many other plays in his time to reorganize the plot and his characters5. Unlike other playwrights who gave their fallen mothers miserable endings, Wilde gave Mrs. Erlynne a husband, and he reconciled Mrs.
Erlynne and Lady Windermere’s misunderstanding (even though Lady Windermere still does not know the truth that Mrs. Erlynne is her real mother) in the end of the play. Even though Lady Windermere’s Fan shared the similar plot with many other plays, critics in the 19th century seemed to show interest towards this play. However, many of the professional critics in the 19th century viewed Wilde’s work as a mixture of “charlatan and clown” (Tydeman 11) and even thought Wilde molded his plays into a distinct genre to make money. Regardless, they all agreed that the discovery of Mrs.
Erlynne and Lady Windermere’s relationship was truly the climax. Still, the critics had very different opinions about Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windermere. It is very interesting that the critics in Wilde’s time seldom talked about Mrs. Erlynne; instead, they focused more on Lady Windermere’s growth process. They focused on how Lady Windermere transformed from a naïve young lady into a mature lady who understands her responsibility, and they praised her for her decision of returning back to her family.
Since the play was called “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” most of the 19th century critics6 regarded the relationship between Lady Windermere and Lord Windermere more important than the relationship between Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windermere.
Therefore, they only mentioned Mrs. Erlynne briefly in the critiques. As a result, Mrs.
Erlynne’s identity as a mother is barely discussed during that period of time; but, it is
5 In his research, Kerry Powell lists a lot of plays and theatrical contexts which have the similar situation of the fallen women and the unmotherly mothers who abandon their children when they are young, just like Mrs. Erlynne does. (see Kerry Powell’s article “Lady Windermere’s Fan and the Unmotherly Mother” in his book Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s.)
6 William Tydeman collected many 19th century critics’ critiques whether on the newspapers or the magazines in his book. As many critiques of the 19th century were hard to find due to the time period, his book provides many fruitful sources of the 19th century critiques of Wilde’s plays. Tydeman arranged these critiques in the chronical order, and separated them according to the different names of Wilde’s plays.
- 7 -
an issue which can be discovered.
Similarly, Mrs. Arbuthnot did not receive many positive critiques either. As a critic in Wilde’s time, William Archer gave his comments about Mrs. Arbuthnot in the magazine World, on April 26, 1893. He applauded the “natural and dignified revenge [Mrs. Arbuthnot] takes in declining to marry [Lord Illingworth]” (qtd. in Tydeman 55).
However, Archer also doubted why Wilde created his character with such “emphatic personage,” and with such agony and hatred (qtd. in Tydeman 55). Following his train of thought, it is not hard to notice that many critics like William Archer in the Victorian age thought women should not be too emotional despite being in great pains or even when experiencing the betrayal of their love. Most of the 19th century critics criticized Wilde’s writing style of the plays; moreover, they criticized how women reacted in the plays. They seemed to have stricter standards when discussing the female roles of being a daughter, a wife and a mother. Victorians were uncompromising when it came to the stereotypes about women because they had the doctrines on how to be a woman: as a lady, as a wife and as a mother. During Wilde’s time, Mrs. Erlynne was not the subject of critics’ discussion compared to other characters in the play, but she definitely caught the audience’s attention—as a woman and as an unmotherly mother. On the other hand, Mrs. Arbuthnot seemed to fail as a woman and as a mother as well in the audience’s sight. She failed her duties as a mother, and she failed to be tender to her son and ex-lover as a woman. Both women were not perfect in the eyes of the 19th century critics.
2. Fallen woman as unconventional mother
Kerry Powell states in Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s that Mrs.
Erlynne is an unmotherly mother. Using “a mother does not abandon her children”
(qtd. in Powell 14) as an epilogue from The Cross of Honour (1892), a play by Arthur
- 8 -
Shirley and Maurice Gally; Powell compares Mrs. Erlynne to mother characters in other plays during the 19th century. Powell tries to prove that Mrs. Erlynne is not the only character who has that improper and challengeable behavior. Like mother characters in other plays during the Victorian age, the playwrights tried to create mothers that were delinquent and had abandoned or neglected their children, just like Mrs. Erlynne; therefore, Mrs. Erlynne was apparently not the first “bad mother.”
However, as Wilde strongly emphasizes the issue of people being “good” and “bad”
in the play, Lady Windermere did come to the conclusion that Mrs. Erlynne was a good woman, in which she only “marginally more informed than her earlier opinion that she was ‘bad’” (26). Still, Powell considers that Wilde has something new to say in the play but uncovering it would mean “extravagant and even damaging concessions to sentiment, self-sacrifice, and all the other mangled values of a society that worshipped at the shrine of Victorian motherhood” (31). Therefore, Wilde chose not to reveal it.
On the other hand, Powell states that the last scene of Mrs. Arbuthnot striking Lord Illingworth with the glove and claiming that he is “a man of no importance”
(Act IV) was a threadbare material to the critics, and the ending scene was not like Wilde’s style of writing because this play was “morally innocuous” (66). Nevertheless,
“Mrs. Arbuthnot revolts against the ideal of womanhood which the nineteenth century enforced, one which demanded she marry the man whose son she gave birth to” (67).
Mrs. Arbuthnot refuses to repent because she thinks that if she does, she will have to admit that giving birth to her son is a sin; however, she considers giving birth and having her son is the most wonderful thing in the world. Thus, Powell claims that she is a “defiant and unconventional woman, but there are moments—critical ones—in which Mrs. Arbuthnot seems as if suddenly possessed by one of the queens of melodrama who preceded her” (69). That means, “[h]er independent point of views on
- 9 -
marriage and maidenhood are incompatible” (69) and would not be accepted in the Victorian age.
3. Radical Wilde with radical women
In her book Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, Sos Eltis explores how Wilde tries to loosen social and family structure during his time. Through his plays, Wilde intends to make a move and to change some of the rigid structures of 19th century society, which Eltis calls him an anarchist, socialist and feminist. Although there are proofs that Wilde uses some elements of the former plays in his time, Eltis thinks Wilde “drew his play further and further from its origins” (60) and he “carefully [altered] characters and dialogue to undermine the assumptions on which the more traditional dramas were based” (60). However, it was impossible to
“challenge society’s sexual mores openly on the Victorian public stage” (61) and Wilde’s “subtlety and circumspection were as much a necessity as an artistic indulgence” (61). Eltis thinks the ending scene of Mrs. Erlynne is a reward for her, as Mrs. Erlynne “breaks every rule, for she scorns repentance, rejects motherhood as demanding too great a sacrifice of self, and yet, in spite of all this, ends the play triumphantly in possession of a husband” (80). On the other hand, Eltis comments on how Mrs. Arbuthnot is a “passionate woman whose strict moral sense is constantly at war with her own deepest emotions” (106). She, unlike Mrs. Erlynne, “does not reject the morality which condemns her but rather continues to wrestle with laws too restrictive to allow room for her own natural passions” (107). Eltis thinks both women in the plays are radical, but the mother-child relationships were not analyzed in detail.
However, I believe we can extend this idea further, that Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs.
Arbuthnot are radical women not only because of their identity of being women but also due to their identity of being mothers.
- 10 -
4. Female victims under morality
In his introductions, Small analyzes the women in Lady Windermere’s Fan and A
Woman of No Importance. He claims that “Mrs. Erlynne, disgraced and excluded as
she is, now becomes a scapegoat, and her reputation is ‘sacrificed’ to save Lady Windermere’s honour” (LWF, xxv). This means that Mrs. Erlynne, “the stereotypical villainess, is ultimately judged to be as good as the nominally ‘pure’ Lady Windermere” (xxv). Based on this observation, Small believes that this play breaks the definition of good or bad during the 19th century, telling people that it cannot be defined narrowly. Also, Small compares the first draft and the revised edition of the play, and discovers that as “Mrs Erlynne is revealed to be a mother, so the scene takes on a character much more usual in Victorian melodrama—that of a parent protecting a child” (xxv). A parent protecting a child is the scene which turns the whole play into a surprise. “As a consequence, rather than evoke sympathy for the social outcast or the social victim (a theme common in Wilde’s short fiction) the play becomes more guarded in its social criticism” (xxv). Therefore, Small also points out that the revised play “does set the selflessness of parental love against the selfish and destructive nature of sexual love” (xxviii), that these too are familiar themes in Wilde’s other works, “and the change has the effect of making individual behavior as much a moral as a social issue” (xxviii). Moreover, Small thinks Oscar Wilde gives Mrs. Erlynne the
“dubious reward of a marriage to Lord Augustus” (xxxii) but is still condemned for the same fault—her heroic sacrifice, since everyone thinks it is extremely improper for her to visit a man’s house especially deep in the night. On the one hand, Lady Windermere’s honor is preserved; but on the other hand, “Wilde refuses to stereotype the ‘fallen’ women as the repentant sinner” (xxxii). That is to say, Wilde does not change her into a conventional “good” woman or mother; instead, he keeps her personality as a woman who pursues her desires. Mrs. Erlynne refuses to be a mother
- 11 -
because she thinks parenting is just not her style of living. She tells Lord Windermere that she doesn’t think being a mother suits her. As a result, Mrs. Erlynne cannot live in London because Oscar Wilde does not make her a saint. “Her goodness might be apparent to Lady Windermere and to the audience, but it is not allowed to threaten the stability of London Society” (xxxii). Hence, Small thinks that Wilde makes a comical ending in which “his characters are all allowed a second chance to make amends for past mistakes; it is also satiric in the sense that it inverts the theatrical conventions with which he was working but it is far from optimistic” (xxxii). It means that Wilde did think about inverting the conventional traditions during his time, but he also had other considerations in which he kept his unique Mrs. Erlynne away from London society to decrease the harsh judgement from the audience.
Small is also concerned that in A Woman of No Importance, Wilde tries to reveal the image of woman with a past. For example, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mrs.
Erlynne has a secret past, while in A Woman of No Importance, Mrs. Arbuthnot also has a secret past. Moreover, “on both occasions that past involves an illegitimate child whose future would be compromised were the facts of its parentage to be revealed.
Both plays treat this topic of sexual ‘sin’ sympathetically but realistically” (AWON, xxvi). Therefore, due to their past revelation, both women decide to leave the country, Mrs. Erlynne moves to the Continent with Lord Augustus while Mrs. Arbuthnot moves to United States with her son and Hester. Hence, Small brings up the issue that there is a domestic conflict of the unequal treatment between men and women in A
Woman of No Importance in the matter of sexual morality. Wilde provides elements of
seduction, extra-marital sexual relationships and illegitimacy in the play to reveal the
“gross discrepancy of Victorian society’s double standard” (xxvi). That is, “both Hester and Mrs Arbuthnot are victims of social hypocrisy” (xxvii), but this leads to
“Lord Illingworth’s continued social celebrity, despite his sexual philandering in the
- 12 -
past” and the phenomenon illustrates “the perverse nature of Victorian society’s values” (xxvii). Small concludes that this serious plot is “profoundly realistic in that it refuses to offer the victimized woman any redress or even solace” (xxvii).
5. Wilde and his purpose of fighting against the society
In his book Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde, Sammells directly states that Wilde’s plays actually contain more issues than they reveal. Thus, Wilde’s plays always mix many elements together. Therefore, he thinks Wilde tends to convey important topics which do not appear on the surface of the plays. In her article “Oscar Wilde and Feminist Criticism,” Margaret Diane Stetz explores a very interesting point that if the feminists embrace Wilde so late, they can blame it on Virginia Woolf because it was Woolf who did not speak for Wilde and created the trends that allow others to believe that Wilde was not one of the feminist critics. Since Woolf was a key figure in feminist movements and feminist criticism, she had power in her writing and comments; however, her comments on Wilde were few and brief. “She treated him as a minor phenomenon and relegated him to a place on a list of past oddities” (225).
However, Wilde liked strong women and was attracted by their heroism (232). Stetz thinks Wilde actually spoke for women since he was familiar with many women activists and kept good relationships with them. This fact proves that Wilde was not an anti-feminist. The reason that he did not approve of women so outwardly was because there was still the pressure coming from the society.
After reviewing the critiques of Wilde’s two plays, it is clear that the Wildean critics change viewpoints from time to time: from viewing the mothers as imperfect women to the radical women, from regarding them as the victims under the morality to the women fighting against the society. Although Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Arbuthnot are fallen women who do not follow conventional doctrine during the 19th century in
- 13 -
most critics’ eyes, it is undeniable that they are the women who bravely step out of the frame of being stereotypical Victorian women, and they boldly pursue their happiness.
Moreover, they still maintain their mother identity and teach their children the value of life. I think the previous research of Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No
Importance neglected the mother-child relationships. I would like to extend the
critics’ perspectives to carefully examine the mother identity and the mother-child relationships. Only by taking account the issue of maternal identity will the research regarding Wilde’s plays be more complete.