Wilde AO5 Flashcards
Allen
Wilde flouted Victorian pieties and flaunted his daring.
He played with paradoxes and behaved as though life was something of a joke and had nothing to fear from anyone.
The prime target of Wilde’s moral barbs was predictably the Victorian code of earnestness.
Angerson
The flirtatious relationship between Mabel and Lord Goring does not have the same high moral expectations that threaten to destroy the relationship of the married couple.
Wilde explores the serious question of the relationship between political power and personal morality.
Cohen
It is an eloquent plea for individual expression in the face of Victorian conformity.
Eltis
Like the brooch which transforms into a bracelet, or Lady Chiltern’s letter which takes on different meanings according to its addressee, AIH is a deceptive and indeterminate play, which can offer different meanings according to the assumptions of its audience members.
Wilde’s drama plays with the issues surrounding women’s political activism but leaves the individual audience member to negotiate the complexities of the arguments and draw their own conclusion.
Green
On The Woman’s World: At times its contents were almost radical in their support for the advancement of women. Much of its content was proto-feminist.
Gregor
Paradox is central to the figure of the dandy. It is the characteristic language of the dandy.
Wilde’s four main plays attempt to resolve a clash between manners and morals.
If Lord Goring is to be in love it will be with a minor figure of the play, and his ‘love’ will simply be there to testify his status as hero.
A man’s profession is central to the play.
Goring resolves the problem in the play, certainly, but this is because Wilde has endowed him with an effortless superiority over everyone else.
Kohl
Wilde’s characterisation when it comes to females is inconsistent.
Layton
Wilde satirised 19th century political life, the way in which private and public morality inter-related and the emerging phenomenon of the new woman.
Madden
The male characters of AIH are able to exert agency over their material representations, whereas the female characters are trapped by object-representation.
The plausibility of Mrs Cheveley’s story relies upon the patriarchal society she occupies. AIH’s narrative confirms the tragedy that she perceives as she is, quite literally, unable to escape her past.
Mendelssohn
Wilde has been celebrated as a transgressor of gender boundaries yet acted as an advocate of gender boundaries in ways that significantly challenge this reputation.
Nethercot
Along with his other female characters, Lady Chiltern is conventionally admirable and to some extent, portraying his own wife.
There is a Wilde and there is an anti-Wilde.
Lady Chiltern is a Puritan who eventually sees the error of her severe and uncompromising morality.
Nordau
Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin, and crime.
Showalter
New Woman and male aesthetes redefined the meanings of masculinity and femininity discussing late 19th century.
Szanter
Mabel Chiltern is the character through which Wilde grappled with questions of the private versus the public self.
Wilde
Too much speech and too little action.
