Where Wilde Hits a Few Targets

A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty entertaining play with a couple nuggets of truth well worth finding out, and it's filled with sayings that amuse but probably distract from what's at the heart of the play more than they add to it. IMO. But the play is more successful than not, especially if one is inclined to like Wilde, as I am, and would like to see it performed.

But it seems like Wilde let loose with the aphorisms that look like they mean something but probably don't. I got tired of that. Lots of "women do this and men do that," including the famous bit about women becoming like their mothers being their tragedy and men not becoming like their fathers being theirs. That's the best one. Among the rest, some draw blood; others are too by-the-numbers to feel like they truly say anything. Probably got laughs, I suppose.

It takes a while to figure out who the play is about and what's happening with them. The story of Mrs. Arbuthnot and her adult son, who's being offered an amazing position with Lord Illingworth, emerges from a lot of random dialogue in the first act, where a number of guests at Hunstanton Chase are talking about nothing in particular. Much of it tends toward the behavior of men and women, but all with a jaded, insincere, ironic tone. Lady Hunstanton, explaining why a particular young lady didn't receive an offer of marriage from Lord Illingworth: "But I believe he said her family was too large. Or was it her feet? I forget which." That's funny, and shows how ridiculous marriage had become among the upper classes of England, but it's also pointless conversation. Later: "Poor Lord Belton died three days [after eloping] of joy or gout. I forget which."

It's all just fodder for endless, pointless conversations, where the details hardly mattered. That's a critique of the institution, but the reader also begins to feel that nothing means anything; nothing they say is worth attending to. When asked about uneducated people voting, Lord Illingworth says he thinks they are the only people who should. Then he cautions against taking sides, because that "is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore." Later he says that he adores simple pleasures, adding "they are the last refuge of the complex." Maybe that means something. I can imagine something deep there, but I got the feeling that even Wilde was just tossing out jokes, hoping they sounded significant. The whole conversation seems to be just setups for clever bon mots that don't really mean much, and I started to wonder if anything would happen in the story.

But we find out that there are secrets and connections and a history between people, and the story does get interesting. It's all about how women get squashed by society for sexual impropriety, but men never have any consequences. It's disappointing that religion and strict morality are taken for granted here, and the prevailing perspective, as a result, is that men should suffer as much as women do, not that women should not. That feels like a missed opportunity, even considering the time of publication. However, you can read the ending as supporting that notion, of treating "sinners" (if you must) charitably, with forgiveness, especially since the least judgmental person in the play is the religious American woman who is often referred to as "the Puritan," and she refuses at the end of the story to hold a woman's past against her.

So maybe I should let that perspective get the final word on the topic.

For too long, I thought we were supposed to see Illingworth as the lovable cad, like Rupert Everett's Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. (I haven't read that play yet--it's just the movie for me so far.) Turns out--spoiler--Illingworth's just a cad. His wordplay is self-serving, not self-deprecating, and his apparent immorality is who he actually is. TBH, it all makes a lot more sense when you read the beginning the second time, supplied with backstories and true natures. I wonder if people went multiple times to the play back in the day...

My favorite character, in the end, is the earnest and mocked young American woman. I don't know how she would have been received by Wilde's contemporaries, but she's just alright with me. Direct. Sincere. Forgiving. Good stuff.

Lots of it is funny, and I like the story. Wilde can absolutely do "clever." Just a bit more heart early on and it would have really worked for me. Still, 4 stars--it comes close.

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