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$Title{Plays of Oscar Wilde
Critical Commentary}
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$Author{Wilde, Oscar}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Hunter College}
$Subject{wilde
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society
victorian
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life
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Title:       Plays of Oscar Wilde
Book:        Study Guide
Author:      Wilde, Oscar
Critic:      Schwartz, Grace Horowitz
Affiliation: Department Of English, Hunter College

Critical Commentary

     As we try to come to an understanding of Oscar Wilde's place in English
literature, we must begin with the realization that he is not what we call a
major writer. This is stated or assumed by most critics. By a major writer
we mean one who has produced a substantial body of work, which is of uncommon
quality, revealing exceptional gifts of thought, observation, and expression.
Among British dramatic writers, of course Shakespeare stands in a class by
himself. Nobody else is comparable to him. But Christopher Marlowe, William
Congreve, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O'Casey
perhaps belong in the first rank of dramatic writers if we eliminate
Shakespeare from consideration. Oscar Wilde does not have such an exalted
place.

     Yet, if Wilde is not the very greatest of writers, he is still an
uncommonly interesting one. His biography alone has an enduring fascination.
His extravagant behavior and quotable wit are the stuff that anecdotes are
made of. Some of Wilde's work may fade into oblivion, but the stories about
him have a quality of lasting vitality. Many a person who has never read a
word of his writing knows about the man who wore a huge sunflower in his
lapel, who once said he had stayed up all night with a sick primrose, who told
a customs officer that he had nothing to declare except his genius.

     Wilde's life also has a deeper significance. His story illustrates
perfectly some of the most important characteristics of Victorian society.
Wilde's family was colorful and talented, but it was not a part of the high
nobility. However, in the years when Wilde flourished, he associated mainly
with aristocratic Englishmen. These were leisured people with inherited
wealth, cultivated tastes, and beautiful homes. In the select and severely
limited society of these aristocratic families Wilde visited, drank tea,
dined, danced, and above all talked. The lords and ladies were delighted
to have him. They had enough education and taste to appreciate him. The
fine old houses in London, the great houses in the country, all were open
to him.

     We must realize that this was the only society that had a place for a man
like Wilde. While it is true that Wilde had little respect for the nouveau
riche capitalists, these wealthy newcomers had little interest in him either.
Wit, gaiety, and the appreciation of beauty had no place in the lives of mine
and factory owners who were enjoying wealth for the first time. As a group,
they were smug and materialistic. They spent their wealth on things that could
make them comfortable and on things that would show they were rich, but they
were not patrons of the arts. They did not yet understand that way of spending
money. The appreciation of the arts as a part of an attitude toward life -
this was still the province of the old aristocrats.

     We may say, therefore, that if Wilde was a snob - and he was - he had
little choice in the matter.

     There is an enlightened discussion of Victorian snobbery and Victorian
capitalists in Parrott and Martin's A Companion to Victorian Literature. This
modern American work (1955) is in refreshing contrast to some of the older
British critics; many of them are convinced themselves that a "good family"
is the most valuable thing a man can have. Inherently snobbish themselves,
they can only defend Wilde's snobbishness passionately rather than examine
it objectively.

     Wilde began as a novelty in Victorian high society. He ended almost as
a god. His words were sought and treasured. His witticisms were published.
Even an insult from him was enough to give distinction to the one who received
it. The delight which he inspired seemed boundless. In 1895, his fatal year,
a brilliant society audience laughed at and cheered The Importance of Being
Earnest. Never had an opening night been more wildly successful.

     Within that same year Wilde was ruined. The very people who had cheered
him most loudly turned on him most viciously. Little help or sympathy was
given by his former friends. With horrible relish, they enjoyed each detail
of his disastrous libel suit and his subsequent trial. They took pleasure in
his humiliation and outdid each other in inventing ways to increase his
misery-all in the name of righteousness.

     The analysis of this behavior is what interests us, rather than Wilde's
own sordid, commonplace history. What made a whole society act with such
ferocity? In part it can no doubt be explained as the cruel pleasure people
sometimes take in seeing anyone who is high and admired brought low. But more
important was the nature of Victorian society, with its worship of
respectability - not virtue, but a systematic concealment of weakness. For the
Victorians, hypocrisy was an accepted morality. Therefore, when a hidden evil
became known, it was natural for them to denounce it vigorously, to make up
for the fact that many of them had their discreditable secrets too. People who
have guilty secrets are extra loud in denouncing one among them who has been
unlucky enough to get caught. This is well known to students of psychology.
Thus Wilde was a sort of human sacrifice for the Victorians. By destroying him
they celebrated the fact that they themselves were still safe.

     The impact of Wilde's disaster on Victorian mores is carefully discussed
in Hesketh Pearson's biography, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. Frances Winwar
fills in the background details of Victorian society in Oscar Wilde and the
Yellow Nineties. We should also note in passing Frank Harris' biography of
Wilde. Harris was an interesting writer who was a friend of many famous men,
but he was naturally incapable of telling the truth. All his books are
untrustworthy, none more so than his work on Wilde.

     Wilde wrote extensively, but he did it mainly to make money. His poetry
is verbose. It is a mixture of styles which he copied from many of his
favorite poets, especially Swinburne and Byron. Only The Ballad of Reading
Gaol (1898), that painful product of his imprisonment, has lasting value.

     Among his prose writings, the fairy tales are lovely, with a jewelled
artificiality that Wilde handled with much success.

     The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde's only novel, is interesting because it
shows clearly how much his work was modeled on French influences. A thorough
understanding of Franch literature is valuable in the study of English writing
in the eighteen nineties. We may say that without the poet Baudelaire and the
novelists Flaubert and Zola, Dorian Gray could not exist. The best explanation
of these French influences is to be found in Osbert Burdett's The Beardsley
Period.

     As a dramatist, Wilde accepted uncritically the popular practices of his
day. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband
are full of the apparatus so dear to hack writers-family secrets,
compromising letters, dilemmas, intrigues, and coincidences. All this material
was used abundantly by Scribe, Sardou, and quantities of second-rate English
writers now forgotten. Wilde adopted it uncritically. He was apparently not
offended by its unreality.

     Wilde was able to use this commonplace material efficiently. It was as
though writing a play was a kind of game and the use of the letters and the
secrets and all the rest was simply part of the rules.

     In the above-mentioned plays we also observe some effort to introduce a
serious problem, as if Wilde was conscious that a complicated plot was not
enough of an excuse for a play's existence. But Wilde was not successful as a
writer of problem plays. He did not have a probing, analytical intellect. His
"problems" were familiar ones, to which the answers were a foregone
conclusion. (Can a good woman who once made a misstep ever find forgiveness
and happiness?
Answer: Yes.)

     Osbert Burdett, in The Beardsley Period, discusses Wilde's use of
conventional formulae in writing his plays. He also shows awareness of Wilde's
intellectual limitations.

     A richly informative book on the drama of Wilde's time is Maurice
Valency's The Flower and the Castle. The book is not about Wilde, but about
the new drama of Ibsen and Strindberg and the changes it wrought in the
theatre. The theatre of Scribe and Sardou is described, so that the effect of
the daring Scandinavian geniuses is clearly understood in context.

     For the student who desires to understand more about the drama of the
late nineteenth century and Wilde's place in it, the study of a few plays
by Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw is recommended. For instance, consider Henrik
Ibsen's play Ghosts. In this play Ibsen examines the problem of a woman who
finds herself married to a dissolute man. She is unable to make him happy,
and his bad qualities become worse as a result. He is lazy, drunken, and
immoral. She is unspeakably miserable.

     Ibsen feels that such a marriage should be broken up. He demonstrates
that the child of such a marriage is bound to have a disastrous life. He
suggests that the wife should have had the courage to elope with another man,
whom she loved.

     To read this play with its angry, cranky, individualistic viewpoint, is
to gain insight into what the drama is capable of. It can be controversial,
profound, stimulating, even infuriating. One does not have to agree with
Ibsen to see that he has given the drama a new dimension. It becomes a forum
for human insights, experiences, and doubts.

     It is suggested that the student become acquainted with Ibsen's Ghosts,
A Doll's House, and An Enemy of the People, Strindberg's Miss Julie, and
Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Man and Superman, and Major Barbara.
This will give balance and substance to his reading.

     Most critics have noted that in Wilde's earlier plays (the ones we have
been discussing), the action occasionally stops to permit the insertion of
amusing minor characters and witty dialogue. We do not know exactly how
Wilde got the inspiration to use only amusing characters and witty dialogue,
and to turn the conventional plot into a burlesque of itself. The result was
The Importance of Being Earnest. No adequate study has ever been made of how
the themes and characters used by Wilde in the earlier plays reappear in The
Importance of Being Earnest. Some suggestions are to be found in this book, in
the chapters on the individual plays. The critics usually content themselves
with appreciation of the play's lightness and wit. Allardyce Nicoll, in his
valuable book, World Drama, remarks that Wilde's wit shatters the conventions
of society. He also points out that Wilde's fondness for paradox shows his
relation to another superlative Victorian humorist, William S. Gilbert,
librettist for the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Gilbert too portrays a
topsy-turvy world.

     Most critics note the frivolous portrait of society we find in The
Importance of Being Earnest. Maurice Valency points out that the portrait of
society found in all the plays bears little relation to real life. He also
observes that Wilde's frivolity is so determined that it suggests a kind of
despair.

     Indeed, Wilde's work does suggest a man making a perpetual effort to
escape from something he does not want to look at. He is a rebel against
Victorian life, every bit as much as William Morris or John Ruskin (see
Introduction), though his rebellion is largely unconscious.

