Wilde’s Personal Drama

Abstract

“Wilde’s Personal Drama” studies the drama of Oscar Wilde’s first two commercially produced plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893). I suggest that Wilde both borrowed from old performance genres and revised them. He drew motifs from familiar varieties of comedy and melodrama, often following the expected patterns only to reverse them at the last moment. Viewing life itself in theatrical terms, he presented social performances such as afternoon calls and country house parties as theatrical genres, often conflating these performances with scenes more traditionally associated with the stage. In appropriating scenes from stage and fashionable drawing room, he mocked the rigid assumptions about marriage and morality on which these genres were based.