Universität Bielefeld
Seminar: Short Writings by Oscar Wilde

Recurring Images of Women in Oscar Wilde’s Comedies

von: Britta Fokken

Reading the four comedies by Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, one finds that the women figures in these plays seem to resemble more or less. Wilde appears to like the use of simplified and stereotyped characters like the often occurring womanwith- a-past, some late Victorian domineering matron or the Puritan. With the impression these give, the reader comes to wonder how Wilde himself thought of them and why they are such recurring motifs. Might they be a mirror for the women in his own life or would that be too far-fetched?

I will try to proof in this essay that even though these four plays by Wilde as well as his woman figures give the impression as if they were really similar, they are at most alike, and the characters not easily comparable to persons in Wilde’s life. The first three comedies all deal with someone who committed a secret sin in their past and is now confronted with this by meeting an old acquaintance. Though sinners they are in the end pardoned, because they remained good and pure in their hearts, which has to be proved most by Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan. She left her husband and baby to lead a life full of pleasure and returns half a year before her daughter’s coming of age, drawn by the wish to join or rejoin society and pressing money from Lord Windermere. He allows this because Lady Windermere would lose all her ideals if she found out about the true fate of her mother, whom she glorified all her life supposing she was dead. Mrs Erlynne sacrifices her reputation in Act III to save her daughter’s one, reminded of her own fault twenty years ago and motherly feelings having awoken not wanting her daughter to do the same mistake. Mrs Erlynne: “I feel a passion awakening within me that I never felt before. What can it mean? The daughter must not be like the mother – that would be terrible. How can I save her? How can I save my child?”

Though she finds that she has a heart opposing her illusion, she still does not want her daughter to know her real identity, stating in Act III “No, as far as I am concerned, let your wife cherish the memory of this dead, stainless mother. Why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own. I lost one illusion last night. I thought I have no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere.” Oscar Wilde breaks with theatrical rules of the Victorian age, in which the fallen woman could only be sympathized if she is repentant, by making his Mrs Erlynne win a husband, “the one prize conventionally denied to the fallen woman”1. She does have motherly feelings, but staying with her daughter revealing the truth would make her life of freedom and pleasure impossible, even more because these motherly feelings occur to her to make her suffer too much. Mrs Arbuthnot from A Woman of No Importance led – after having committed the sin of bearing an illegitimate child - a completely different life from Mrs Erlynne’s. She sticked to the rules and devoted herself to good works and charity, which Mrs Erlynne even mocks by saying

“I suppose, Windermere, you would like me to retire into a convent or become a hospital nurse, or something of that kind, as people do in silly modern novels. That is stupid of you, Arthur; in real life we don’t do such things.”

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1 Sos Eltis, p. 58