Raby: Wilde, and How to Be Modern

Question 1

Wilde in literary criticism of Victorian England

Answer 1

• Within the continuing debate about the state of modern British drama in the 1890s, William Archer, a Scottish writer and theater critic, had recently given up
• he states in his article in the Fortnight Review, that “one simple and significant fact is: During the past six months not a single serious play has been produced with success. Under the term ‘serious play’ I include everything that is not farce, burlesque, or (…) melodrama; so that, in other words, every play of the smallest artistic pretension produced between Oct 1st, 1893, and April 15th, 1894, has been a more or less flagrant failure
• Archer’s attitude to Wilde was ambivalent
• In Archer’s review of A Woman of No Importance, Archer had written: The one essential fact about Wilde’s dramatic work is that it must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama, and furthermore, that it stands alone on that plane. In intellectual calibre, artistic competence, and in dramatic instinct to boot - Wilde has no rival among his fellow-workers for the stage”
• But Archer later offered his advice as to how Wilde should achieve “serious art on the higher plane”
• “Mr Wilde would have to conquer his fatal fastidiousness, not to say indolence. Only then would he achieve a play of European merit”
• Provoked by Archer, Wilde rose to the challenge: to write a play lacking “real interest”, lacking in apparent seriousness, very much fin-de-siècle, but resolutely refusing to engage with contemporary issues

Question 2

The modern character of The Importance of Being Earnest

Answer 2

• Wilde wrote Earnest during a family summer holiday at Worthing, its locality has given Jack Worthing his name
  > Wilde, surrounded on the south coast by Victorian farce and seaside entertainment, created a farcial comedy of elegance and decorum
• by embracing the trivial, he contrived to capture the texture of late-Victorian society, transforming its relentless observation of convention into a comic but unnerving masquerade, through which the characters pursue their ideals of form and style, manipulating circumstances to fulfil their desires
• by substituting fiction, or imagination, or invention, or lying, for fact, he effortlessly called into question the whole fabric of society
  > for the serious, William Archer, thirsting for plays of European significance, Wilde offers a trivial comedy
• in Earnest, Wilde caricatured social life, birth, baptism, betrothal, marriage, and death as glittering farce
• Wilde’s explosion of English social life was conducted through language, through his ability to replicate and distort the infinitely nuanced weapons of conversation
• he creates a false lanuage - artificial, theatrical, entertaining, but not quite real
  > it is Wilde’s embracing of farce, and of insincerity, in this play that gave him new freedom
• Earnest concludes with a spectacular set piece of pleasure and affirmation, in which the self-created John Worthing christens himself to his own immense satisfaction
• this is Wilde’s image of unity, of harmony, of family life: the importance that being Ernest brings him, the knowledge of who he is and of who his parents were, a brother, an aunt, a bride
  > by avoiding so-called serious issues, he creates a new kind of comedy, in which his characters, impatient with society, invent themselves on the other side of the looking glass