The Function of Decorum at the Present Time: Manners, Moral Language, and Modernity in "an Oscar Wilde Play"

Abstract

In the distinctive, epigrammatic idiom of his society comedies, where dialogue is shaped by the formulae of conventional instructional maxims about what one should and shouldn't do, Oscar Wilde inverts and aestheticizes the assumed ethical basis of a code of conduct that relies on the language of decorum. His drama suggestively articulates a considerable degree of slippage between manners, on the one hand, and morals, on the other. This essay argues, in fact, that Wildean aphoristic speech playfully rewrites late-Victorian etiquette literature, exploiting the ironic distance between moral assumptions and a more formulaic reality.