Oscar Wilde

This beach I read loads of Oscar Wilde:

The Importance of Being Earnest is just one of my favorite things in the world. It's incomparably funny. It's funny both in its overall themes and in each small sentence in the same way--the character (or play itself, as the case may be) says something that sounds silly and shallow and trite but actually contains truth--they speak truer than they knew, as it were. So Jack actually was Ernest, and Algernon actually was Jack's brother--the silly lies turn out to be the truth. This is far and away my favorite of Oscar Wilde's plays.

Salome couldn't be more different from The Importance of Being Earnest--written in King James-ish English, it is the (somewhat incestuous) tragedy of Herod and his wife's daughter (I'm not gonna lie, though--Wilde's telling of it made more sense to me of that story of John the Baptist's head than just the straight-up telling in the Bible did). Honestly, aside from the fact that Wilde was riffing on a pre-made myth, I would say that that play itself is a pretty great creation of a myth.

Lady Windermere's Fan deals with a weak person who makes a heroic sacrifice. It's certainly less funny than The Importance of Being Earnest and more serious. And it's a little nerve-wracking. Great lines: Lord Darlington: "I can resist everything except temptation."

Cecil Graham: "My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only gossip."
Lord Windermere: "What is the difference between scandal and gossip?"
Cecil Graham: "Oh, gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now I never moralize. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain."

Oh, Oscar Wilde, how right you are.

An Ideal Husband is a nice combination of the trivial charmingness with a meaningful truth--that moralism in a relationship is seriously inferior to love that really accepts the other person. Lord Goring seems to be a shallow fop, but is really the most insightful person in the play. Lord Goring: "It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next."

Most interesting and opaque to me may have been A Woman of No Importance. The main thrust of this play is similar to that of An Ideal Husband: moralism in relationships can't work, while accepting love wins the day. An American visitor named Hester (super subtle there!) is rather puritanical--she judges sin harshly, but learns in the progress of the play that this won't work. Hester comes to see that love is more important than judgement. What is complex in this play (and in Wilde's other plays as well) is its take on women's role: Hester argues that men and women treated equally, although for her this means that they ought to be equally judged. Other characters praise men and women being treated unequally, maintaining either that women worship men or that men worship women. I'm still not sure where Wilde himself comes down on women's role--he's always ironically saying that women ought to stay in the private sphere. On the other hand, you don't see women in Wilde's plays doing anything other than accepting or turning down proposals. Either way, in A Woman of No Importance the dandiest dandy in the play is critiqued, which is unusual for Wilde. Wilde does this without making the play into a moralizing tale.


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