The Importance of Lady Windemere's Fan

Here is a re-release of an example of what used to be called “close textual analysis”, which meant that the entire resources of literary criticism, such as symbolism, plot, irony, character analysis, dramatic reversals and dramatic parallels, were used to unfold the meaning of a piece of literature, assuming that the work operated as a singled whole. It is a skill that still applies as well to politics and everyday life.

What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.

Neither Mrs. Erlynne nor Lord Windermere will break the fateful news to Lady Windermere. For this, there is always an excuse. Someone has come into the room and interrupted the conversation. There is some other immediate concern to be addressed. But why such reluctance when so much is at stake? If people would only speak clearly, so many calamities would be averted. It is not enough to say that the entire play is about how people keep things from one another. That does not explain what is happening.

The truth is that the taboo, the shame, of being the daughter of a fallen woman and then of having her brought into your presence is so great that it is to be avoided if at all possible and it is to be avoided, this being a comedy, after all, and not a melodrama, where bad things always do come out and are entitled to come out, whether in the Brontes or in “Great Expectations” or in Raymond Chandler. In comedy, the audience becomes inured to the complexities of life, to the way settlements with the truth have to be made so that people can get along and be happy. It happens in “As You Like It”, when Beatrice and Benedict learn to get along because they love one another, or in “Waiting For Godot”, where the characters push on because what else is there to do but make the best of life.

Here, in “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, the comic tone and ending are accomplished by the perpetuation of a pretense. Mrs. Erlynne, Marjorie Windermere’s mother, will get married to the bumpkin she wanted to marry after all, despite a new disgrace, but she and he will go abroad (as did Anna Karenina and her lover) and so live outside proper society. Lady Windermere will continue to think fondly and idealistically of a mother she thinks dead and also be spared the shame of also having been so indiscrete as to try to run off with an acquaintance of her husband’s. Lord Windermere is, for his part, left permanently in the dark about his wife’s secret, which is known only to herself and to her mother. Women keep their secrets and that is the way of the world, the same message conveyed by that Congreve play of two centuries before. That is the only comedy since Shakespeare to be in the same class as the four Wilde plays of the 1890’s.

The most important secret the play reveals is not a plot device. It is its theme which, like that of many a Restoration comedy, is that sex is the main thing that motivates both men and women and that honor and station are covers for that fact. The play features nobility and wealth but that is because this is the state upon which passion can be dressed up and presented to an equally dressed up audience. There are no disparities in the class of the lovers to complicate matters, as is the case in Shaw and Shakespeare. Mrs. Erlynne was as well bred as any of them, just someone who made poor choices. Nor are there, as also happens in Shaw, complications created by the social structure of inequality and upbringing. There is only the straightforward matter of how women and men are attracted to one another and weave webs that complicate that story. This is more “Cosi Fan Tutti” than Shakespeare.

How challenging this theme and moral of finding a way to deal with passion and jealousy was to Oscar Wilde’s audience can be seen by comparing “Lady Windermere’s Fan'' to a play produced on the London stage only a few years before. Arthur Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” deals with the same theme of how to deal with a sexual past but it does so very differently. The theme of the earlier play was also sex, there treated as the token of the breakthrough into the modern, a topic of great interest to Lady Windermere’s friends, just as sex was the topic that always comes up as the marker of a shift from one social dispensation to the next. It worked that way for Shakespeare, for the French enlightenment and for an American youth generation obsessed with Frank Sinatra. It had worked that way for Jane Austen. Fanny Price, in “Mansfield Park”, turns down an agricultural modernizer as a suitor, which is only one of the many clues about how retrograde the protagonist of the novel is.

In the Pinero play, a course woman is married by a widower but introducing her into his family is so unsettling that it drives her to suicide, which is just as well, because it has become clear, at least to her husband, that she was not fit company for his daughter by his first wife. All of the widower’s friends are against the arrangement. He should not have given in to his passions. It is as simple as that. Tanqueray loses his friends. “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is light years ahead of that, and not just because, for Wilde, sex is about sex and not a token of the rise or fall of social structures. Lord Windermere’s friends are won over by Mrs. Erlynne’s charm and beauty once she has been allowed to come to the ball. The plan has succeeded. It is only the principles that struggle with principal, which in the case of Lord Windermere is how to reconcile the woman who had fallen with the woman who is, and in the case of Lady Windermere, how to reconcile the woman who is with the woman of whom she is jealous but who has given no hint of any cause for jealousy. 

The production of the play I saw some years ago did not help its audience see the subtleties of the characters because it was so concerned to make it look properly Edwardian. The stage design copied both Whistler and Sargent. There is too much posing, as if this was a vivant tableau, and no talking was necessary. Wilde, however, does not need visual assistance to explain himself. He gives words to the age even as painters provided it with its characteristic poses. The first act of this production was played for its melodrama so as to suggest that there are deep matters afoot, and only the second act is played as a comedy. That is not to trust Wilde to establish seriousness all on his own.

Some of the lines in the play can be read flat or badly and so the audience cannot take note of their resonance. That happens in the very first moments of the production of the play that I saw. Lady Windermere is fixing the roses when Lord Darlington’s presence is announced. She tells him that she cannot take his hand because they are wet from the roses. Get that? She is wet from being as dewy and fresh as roses. This line is read as a throwaway even though it is clear from the ever economical Wilde that she does not want Lord Darlington to take her hand because he has already been too forward and so should be held at a distance, given no encouragement, even a bit of a rebuke, through her forbearance of a pleasantry. She might even sound a bit arch when announcing her excuse. Yes, she is just of age, but old enough and experienced enough and sophisticated enough to be sardonic and suspicious of someone who announces he is bad so that you won’t believe it or, worse, is announcing that he is bad because he really is bad, which is what happens later on when he declares his love for her and asks her to run away from her husband.

Never let appearances go untrusted, Wilde is saying. That lesson we have already learned from Shakespeare. The usurpation of the throne by Claudius in “Hamlet” certainly appears to be that and it takes a while for Hamlet to form a conviction that what appears to be is true. And neither Othello nor Shylock nor Richard III is to be trusted because the first is a Moor, the second is a Jew, and the third is a crookback. Their inner natures will come out.  Wilde uses the same device of someone announcing himself to be a friend in “An Ideal Husband”. There the person who announces he is a friend is a loyal one, the joke being that he is also a fop, while in “Lady Windermere’s Fan” friendship is announced by a self proclaimed bad guy so that the friendship, the audience knows, will be betrayed.

Lady Windermere must be substantial if she is to hold the sympathy of an audience who will find her to be priggish and judgmental and untrustful. The audience can well say that the world is not much to be trusted except for the best and only reason, which is so as to get on with a satisfactory and emotional life. After all, while still early in the first act, Lord Darlington asks Lady Windermere about her view that women are either good or bad, and so should remain ever faithful. Darlington asks if men should also remain subject to the same standards. In this production, the audience sees her as if she is struggling to make her principles consistent with what she knows to be common opinion. But just suggesting that line of argument should be enough to gain some laughter from the audience. How ridiculous to think that men can remain virtuous! That is not the way they are! What the line shows is just how ridiculous Lady Windermere’s idealism is. It is prudish. It reduces her to absurdity and shows how hard won is her view at the end of the play that there is good and bad in everyone, the general moral condition a euphemism for strictly sexual behavior and feelings, and that people should not consign others to one side or the other of a moral wall.

Mind you, according to this play, sexual immorality does exist. This is no H. G. Wells going on about free love or Theodore Dreiser allowing passion to do what it will. Rather, adulterous behavior by a woman is so vile that it should be roundly condemned and there is no reason not to ostracize the woman. It is just that after much remorse and a life spent in the backwaters of respectability, she can be restored to society so long as she is now and has been for a very long time blameless. Redemption is a long road. So Lord Windermere thinks as he begrudgingly aids Mrs. Erlynne, only to be disappointed by what seems another fall of hers from grace.

The moral of the play is, as Lady Windermere says, that there is good and bad and no one is so totally one or the other that they are to be judged by some single act alone. The theme of the play, however, is that lust is everywhere, just a glance away, and everyone knows this, men and women, young and old, married and unmarried, sophisticates like Mrs. Erlynne, and naïve ones, like Agatha, who knows what she wants and gets Mr. Hopper to give it to her, which is to get away from her mother and so join him in Australia where people are less accessible than they are in England, according to him, even though that is contrary to the usual view of the provinces to the homeland, Oscar Wilde, as usual, telling only the truth in his clever sayings.

Here is another place in the production I saw where a line could have been read more cleverly. The running gag is that Agatha offers an affectless “Yes” to whatever her mother says, as “Yes” is also her answer to Mr. Hopper’s proposal, as is her answer to her mother on whether she had accepted his proposal, all these building to the punch line, which is her “Yes” to whether she was going off to Australia with him, which is very much not to her mother’s liking. The motif does earn the playwright laughter. Wilde had milked his joke, just one of a number that he sprinkled in more for their amusement than for any advancement they make of the plot. Though it could be argued that Agatha is in fact showing off Wilde’s sense that women get what they want and can do so in very few words. That point would have been made more clearly if Agatha had been more sardonic or assertive in her offering of her various “Yeses”, or even if she had said each of them differently, so as to indicate that she was a master of communication.

The short term running gag is clever enough to show that Wilde can invent whatever he needs to, even though in gags not required by the plot, though that does not mean they cannot also be milked for meaning. Women get their way, never mind that morality is always on the side of men, whether they honor it or not, or just invoke it for their purposes. Women have the burden of being capable of dishonor and so that is what creates the topic of the play: that lust rules the world as much as it does any Restoration comedy even if the sides are not as equally armed as they are in Congreve. That is a very harsh message and it is one that this production very handily evokes, whatever its deficiencies in reading one or another line may be. The battle of the sexes, according to Wilde, is difficult, protracted, nasty and mean. It is a wonder that any one survives with any emotions intact. Sex is what everyone thinks about—the old biddies whose eagle eyes suppress it, the young people who turn it into love, and a person who has been wounded in the sexual wars and, in this case, comes to the rescue of someone in danger of also being seriously wounded.

Wilde does not treat sex as Freud will. It is not an underground psychic force ever distorted into new forms. Nor is it even what “La Ronde” makes of it: an irrepressible impulse which marks one as a deviant. Rather, sex is to be managed whether by propriety or morality or good sense. It is just a fact of life even as it gives rise to sublime as well as dastardly motives. And Wilde makes sense of its universal pull as well as the subterfuges needed to satisfy it through the creation of yet another scene where dramatic invention does what paintings cannot do, which is to reveal in a set of implicit contrasts yet another facet of the drama that has forever enclosed men and women.

That is the scene that occurs after the grand scene at the ball when everyone has explained themselves: Agatha to her mother, Mrs. Erlynne and Lord Windermere to one another and to the audience, and Lady Windermere to Lord Darlington. One might have expected that the following scene would be a change of pace, a time to absorb what has gone before. This visit to Lord Darlington’s rooms, however, creates its own drama, even if slower paced; it is heavy with ironies unannounced as the ones in the previous scene had been highlighted by the dialogue.

The two women, Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne, have been discussing why Mrs. Erlynne thinks that Lady Windermere, who is not at all resolved to stay and become Lord Darlington’s mistress, should leave immediately and so not have her reputation ruined. (Notice that immorality is always a matter of reputation rather than fact. There is no explaining why people’s passions take them to do one thing or another.) They are interrupted by Lord Worthington and his friends returning to his rooms because he is following Mrs. Erlynne’s instruction not to allow Lord Windermere to return home and find out that his wife is not there. (This plot has been worked out in every detail. Oscar Wilde does not let his characters just spill over, the plot merely an excuse for their speeches, which is the case with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. For Wilde, as in Chekhov, a plot is like a puzzle; there cannot be a piece left over.)

The two women retreat to the rear of the apartment. That means they can overhear what the men are saying. That is notable. Wilde is invoking the Jane Austen problem, which is that she never writes a conversation where a woman is not present because how is she to know what it is men say to one another when they are not speaking in front of women? What secrets would such conversations reveal? Do men think differently when with one another, or make plots, or speak more coarsely of women than they do when in their company? This last might be suspected because men did so just a few generations ago. More importantly, will the men reveal different motives than they let on to in mixed company? The two women will be able to hear the truth and the audience will be able to hear what men say and what the women make of that.

This is a dazzling expectation, however brief the period during which the audience has to contemplate it, but much to be savored in recalling the action of the play. The expectation is very quickly disappointed because the truth is that the men themselves are neither dazzling in their wit (Wilde must have worked to suppress his talents) nor engaging even in foul or malign banter. They are a dull lot, far less interesting than the women who are now off stage but not out of mind. The men in this production are quite properly portrayed, I think, as just deflated by the absence of women. They have little to say to one another which is not a repetition of what they said at the ball. They whine about how women get the best of them and so see themselves as henpecked just the way they jovially remarked themselves to be at the ball, where it might be thought an affection assumed to lighten the mastery of men over the situation, when it is just the clear truth of the matter. So what is the truth of the Jane Austen problem? When men are off with their horses and doing the town, they may be more grubby, but no more astute than they are when in the company of women. Mr. Higgins, why can’t a man be more like a woman?

This is also the scene where Lady Windermere drops her fan and so her presence in Lord Darlington’s room would have been discovered and created a great scandal were it not that Mrs. Erlynne steps into the breach, allowing herself to be the one to have been caught being in the wrong place. The fan has the name “Marjorie” on it because it was a present to Lady Windermere from her husband, given her earlier in the day because she had just come of age, as she was to come of age in this very long day in the sense of catching on to the ways of the world. (Take note that Wilde observes the unity of time so well that it is easy to forget that the entire play takes place in less than twenty four hours.)

But remember that Mrs. Erlynne shares the same Christian name, as she points out. How do we not know that it was not she who dropped a similar fan? This thought is neither necessitated by nor useful in understanding the plot. Wilde does not use symbols that way. Shaw does have things take on importance in that way, as when the burning of the library in “Caesar and Cleopatra” is an event in the play and also a symbol of the end of a civilization. But Wilde, for his part, treats symbols as things in themselves, to be handled and inspected for what they tell about the plot, not about how they move it along. Here we are left to think our Wilde inspired thoughts and then go on to the plot, the reality of what is being presented.

Lady Windermere's fan can be thought of as a symbol of duplicity. People drop their fans or raise them when they are lying or cannot come up with a lie. Or else one can think of the fan as the apparatus one uses so as to make an appearance in public. The fan is the symbol of one’s public persona. A woman has composed herself so as to make a good impression, which means in part to be taken as an attractive woman who is yet a bit remote so as to remain respectable. The fan attracts and yet separates.

There is another level on which the fan operates. It may not be Mrs. Erlynne’s fan but it might as well have been. The two Marjorie’s share not just blood but inclination: they are capable of great indiscretion and the younger Marjorie comes to decide that any woman can become some other woman. So the fan is a symbol of the identity of women in general and of these two women in particular, the good one and the bad one. Whose fan it is is of little consequence so long as one woman helps out another.

The single Marjorie was divided into two parts long ago. Indeed, one Marjorie is the mother of the other Marjorie, and so why would one be surprised that the younger one is in danger of falling into the same sort of life as the older one? The two are doppelgangers; their fates are intertwined and the two lives cast both light and shadow on each other. This is not an unusual conceit in Victorian fiction. Willkie Collins does it with the two women in white in the novel of that name. Mark Twain does it all the time. Huck and Tom, the prince and the pauper are both paired people, as is the slave and the young master in “Pudd’nhead Wilson”. The only difference here is that the Corsican Brothers are mother and daughter.

That a single person can have multiple identities and that different people can in some sense be the same person is a philosophical conundrum much spoken of nowadays by professional philosophers. It is important to recognize, however, that in Wilde’s time, when analytic philosophy was just finding its way. G. E. Moore was pressing his readers to engage in common sense queries that would make philosophical quandaries just disappear into thin air. Take that, dragon. Wilde purveys that same spirit when he has an audience wonder about not just whether the two Marjorie’s are alike or akin but substitutes for one another, the original having time traveled to her daughter’s generation. She had been out of touch for a while, hadn’t she? And yet she takes over the drama as soon as she makes her appearance. It is uncanny.

Wilde would go on to dazzle with his mastery of the philosophical argot in “The Importance of Being Earnest” where the key question is what is in a name: do things have essential names or are names arbitrary. How could Gwendolyn marry someone other than someone named Ernest? That is the name she has always associated with the man whom she will marry. He has to be an “Ernest” and it was under that name that Gwendolyn fell in love with him. The order of the universe is a matter of names, of finding the correct ones, even the correct proper nouns, for things, including lovers. It is a metaphysical order that is to be restored by Wilde’s comedy, not just propriety or rectitude.

That more complicated picture is foreshadowed in “Lady Windermere’s Fan” because all the women are spirits, as are all the men, each trying to cling to a social identity while still being flesh and blood, and that social identity consisting of their personal names as well as their collective gender, both of which are always up for grabs. This is not the Erving Goffman version of everyday life wherein people cling to making themselves socially acceptable so that they have an identity to cover their emptiness. Rather it is that they are firmly placed in gender and personhood but are flung about by their genders and personhood in ways they do not anticipate. The question is how the two Marjorie’s are to be restored to one another on a practical level—which means on the level of art, as the outcome of a comedy—rather than because there has been social change, as is always expected in Shaw, or through some new plumbing of the human condition, as might be the case in Chekhov or Ibsen. After all, Wilde and Beckett were both Irishmen. Comedy is the only freedom there is. Art is not for art’s sake; it is for humanity’s sake.

Re-release: Peter Brown's Christianity

I had the temerity of challenging the great historian Peter Brown on his own turf, which is late antiquity. Readers of the 2017 post, however, do seem interested in what I have to say and so I am re-releasing the post.

That extraordinary scholar Peter Brown’s latest book “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a magisterial account of the social, economic and theological structure of the late Roman Empire. His guiding thesis as he states it in his introduction is that as a result of that great outpouring of theological genius in the later part of the Fourth Century, the Church came from regarding wealth as a sin, which it was in the Gospels, to regarding contributions to the Church as justifying great wealth. Wealth was good when it went to the Church, and that explains the prevalence of the Church in the Middle Ages. I think this thesis basically wrong, first of all, because, as Brown himself shows in an early chapter, contributions of mosaics and other church naming occasions were already part of Church life right after Constantine converted to Christianity and, indeed, I might add, are part of every religion known to mankind, whether that means putting up a cathedral or getting a seat in a synagogue named after a deceased family member.

More important, the thesis is wrong because Brown imposes his thesis upon a description of social life where economic motivation is taken for granted as the reason for doing things, while the idea that people can earn favor with God by making contributions provides a motivation of the sort envisioned by Max Weber when he spoke of the decisive importance of the Protestant Ethic in liberating Europe to become capitalist, while Brown imagines that religious motivation for the accumulation of wealth results in the economic stagnation of medieval times, when it ought, by his logic, have led to capitalism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries.

Most of all, why is it necessary to reconcile the remark about the camel and the needle with the practices of rich members of the Church? People join and support churches for a variety of reasons. They like the liturgy or they like feeling part of the community of respectable people. They can take theology or leave it. The New Testament has a great many passages that are in spirit contradictory. You are supposed to welcome the prodigal son, which is supposedly a tribute to the idea and feelings of family as well as an allegory for dealing with believers who stray, and yet Jesus also came to separate sisters from brothers. Which is it? A believer can live with the admonition about rich people because what he likes about Christianity is that it offers salvation to everyone, even including rich people, and maybe in a particular believer’s case, a depth of conviction must surely make up for the fact that the person is rich. Moreover, maybe the remark about rich people came from the looney or radical fringe of the movement-- though that is an insight that would come to a modern mind, one less trusting to texts than the great Fathers of the Church. At any rate, there is no need to pose this as a crucial matter, as Brown does, unless there is reason to think a doctrinal point is not only central but fraught with consequences, which is what Weber did when he said that a belief in good works was key to Protestant Christianity even if predestination ruled out those good works being the cause of salvation. Practice rather than meaning has consequences.

Seventh Century capitalism did not happen. What did happen, according to Brown’s brilliant interpretation, was that the Church had accumulated wealth and that made it powerful with a soft power that could counter the power of the state, which was the power of the various kingdoms that had arisen after the fall of Rome. It invoked this power in the name of the poor, which is to be taken to mean not only those in poverty but all those well into the middle class who were not part of the aristocracy or the wealthy. So the Church had a constituency to be looked after and its wealth made that possible, and that is what made it the dominant institution of the Middle Ages. That is very different from saying that the Church was the progenitor of a kind of capitalism, though this claim could indeed be made in that monasticism, which depended on generous contributions from the wealthy, did see the origins of a countryside based capitalism that did not survive for more than a few centuries before efficient economic activity was eventually moved from the countryside to the city in part due to the efforts of Pope Innocent III in the early Thirteenth Century.

There are structural consequences when the clergy become the repositories of wealth. They have to become part of what Brown calls “the otherness” of the clergy, as was symbolized by their adoption of the tonsure and of celibacy, something Brown thinks was something desired by the laity and only then enforced by the clergy. Celibacy was necessary because the priests were the people who handled the Holy Eucharist, and so had to remain pure. (Brown does not deal with the prior question of why sexual chastity is more pure than an occasional romp in the hay.) In these and in other ways, Christianity was transformed less by its organizational skills and its growing monopoly of learning than by the responsibilities imposed on it by its wealth. Other religions also create liturgy and a heightened sense of the holiness of their clergy, but the Catholic Church did all of this so well that it dominated Europe until the Reformation.  Brown offers up a panorama of Late Antiquity, something about which he seems to know everything. The reader is rewarded with a rich feel for the Late Roman Church. Brown explains how St. Augustine went down to meet the crowds that attended his sermons; he explains how barbarian armies were merely mercenaries recruited to deal with civil wars breaking out within the empire and these armies set up courts which local aristocrats found they could deal with as well as when Rome was in charge. 

The original thesis about religious ideology changing the Church so that it is in favor of wealth is, therefore, not Brown’s true thesis. The true thesis is one that he never overtly identifies, perhaps because he thinks that it is too obvious. That thesis, which makes much more sense and is far more significant, is that structural considerations are enough to explain the evolution of spiritual experience of the Church, an experience which would stretch to the end of the Middle Ages. This is a profound insight into the way Christianity and all other religions operate: that they are subject to the give and take of economic and political forces  but it takes no ghost come from the grave   to tell  me that Religion operates as do all other institutions.

As a sociologist, I have certain quibbles with Brown about his use of historical evidence. Early on, in his presentation of the economic and social situation in the early Fourth Century Roman Empire, he uses a farmer who eventually earned himself a position on the city council as illustrating the fact that power explained wealth rather than the other way around, though that is not what the instance he cites would support. You can’t be that loose. Moreover, as with most historians, Brown engages in anecdotal proof, however wide ranging and how many histories of particular communities he may draw upon. What is the basis for his generalizations other than that there are some places, even a great many, where what he says holds true? Now that may be the best evidence available, but it is not conclusive. But be that as it may, there is no gainsaying Brown’s mastery of and his deep insight into his material. This book stands as a worthy rejoinder to those, like me, who take the role of ideas as very important in expressing, creating and propagating new versions of old or eternal religious emotions, and who also think that the Protestant Ethic had always been there, latent in Christianity, and waiting upon events to bring it forward.