LORD ILLINGWORTH: [Sees Mrs. Arbuthnot’s letter on table, and takes it up and looks at envelope.] What a curious handwriting! It reminds me of the handwriting of a woman I used to know years ago.
MRS ALLONBY: Who?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Oh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance.
(The exchange at the end of Act 1, when Lord Illingworth recognises the handwriting of the woman he separated from 20 years earlier, and which gives the play its title)
‘A Woman of No Importance’ is commonly thought the least successful of Oscar Wilde’s four social comedies, certainly the least performed or revived. This is probably because it combines the worst of both worlds: there are long passages of non-stop, clever one-liners which after a while glut the imagination; and then, in the last act, the already earnest and melodramatic situation topples over into a world of Victorian pieties and platitudes. So at the same time it contains the most Wilde quotes and is the least performed of his plays. It turns out that ‘Nothing succeeds like excess’ is the opposite of the truth.
‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, the first of Oscar Wilde’s four great social comedies is set firmly in the upper-class London of Mayfair. Maybe as a deliberate contrast, Wilde set this, the second one, in the country – obviously not the country of Thomas Hardy and rural yeoman, but at Hunstanton Chase, the grand country house of an aristocrat, Lady (Jane) Hunstanton, who has invited a number of similarly aristocratic friends and acquaintances (an MP, a friend’s young son who works in a bank) for a country house party.
Thus the first act opens with characters sitting under a large yew tree on the lawn in front of the terrace at Hunstanton, her stately home, a scene which could come from an Ivory-Merchant movie depicting the aristocracy in stately rural relaxation. Wilde’s milieu is the upperest of the upper classes.
Once again the play rotates around a woman ‘with a past’, as ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ did. In this case one of the late-arriving guests, Mrs Arbuthnot, who only appears in Act 2, turns out to be the estranged wife of another guest, Lord Illingworth, the typical Wilde lead with, as the more conventional characters out it, such a wicked reputation.
Her appearance is all the more piquant because in Act 1 Lord Illingworth has just appointed young Gerald Arbuthnot, currently working in a bank, to be his private secretary. It is only with the arrival of Mrs Arbuthnot in Act 2, that Lord Illingworth realises that young Gerald Arbuthnot is his own son for they separated soon after he got her pregnant.
This central revelation plays out amid several other storylines. The main one is Lord Illingworth’s bantering flirtations with another guest, Mrs Allonby, his equivalent and equal in making witty paradoxical remarks (‘She lets her clever tongue run away with her sometimes.’). Their exchanges include loads of set pieces designed to display Wilde’s ironic and paradoxical wit at its shiniest. As Lord Illingworth remarks at the end of their sustained repartee which closes Act 1, ‘You fence divinely.’
Another plotline is the presence of a young, 18-year-old visitor from America, Miss Hester Worsley, the orphan daughter of an American millionaire. Her presence allows countless jokes at America’s expense but also some sharp comments from her about British society.
Lord Illingworth and his witty sparring partner have a cynical bet that he will be able to seduce this stern young American within the week, and this turns out to play a pivotal role in the plot.
Brits satirising Americans
LADY HUNSTANTON: He [Gerald] has just gone for a walk with our pretty American. She is very pretty, is she not?
LADY CAROLINE: Far too pretty. These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the Paradise of women.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.
LADY CAROLINE: Who are Miss Worsley’s parents?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents.
LADY UNSTANTON: She dresses exceedingly well. All Americans do dress well. They get their clothes in Paris.
MRS ALLONBY: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
LADY HUNSTANTON: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Oh, they go to America.
Note how all the jokes are set up by the other characters for Lord Illingworth to deliver the witty punchlines.
Hester Worsley’s big anti-British speech
HESTER: We [Americans] are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, on a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how to live – you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.
She is similar to Lady Windermere in that she starts the play young and pitiless in her Puritan moralising. Later this is made unambiguously clear:
HESTER: A woman who has sinned should be punished, shouldn’t she?… She shouldn’t be allowed to come into the society of good men and women… And the man should be punished in the same way… It is right that the sins of the parents should be visited on the children. It is a just law. It is God’s law.
Old Testament fundamentalism.
The tragic woman
As in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, at the centre of the play is an ‘anomalous woman’, a woman standing outside society’s values, and also unexpected scenes of real emotional anguish.
In the earlier play it was Mrs Erlynne, who had broken convention by running off and abandoning her husband and child. The genuine anguish was experienced by Lady Windermere who experiences the anguish of believing her husband is unfaithful to her, compounded by the agonising decision she makes to run away with the man who would be her lover, the charismatic Lord Darlington.
In this play it is Mrs Arbuthnot. In the recognition scene between her and Lord Illingworth we learn they have both changed their identities. When they first met they were both 21 and he was the brilliant young man about town George Harford with not a penny to his name and she was named Rachel (I don’t think we learn her surname). As the last pages of Act 2 reveal, the pair had an affair and she got pregnant. She accuses him of rejecting her and her baby but he argues that he was penniless and could have done nothing for them. He reminds her that his mother offered to settle £600 a year on her, which she scornfully refused. She reminds him that his father insist that he do the decent thing and marry the woman, which Lord Illingworth rejects with a joke but which was, as far as I can see, the decent thing to do.
The crux of the thing now, in this play, is that Illingworth has offered her/their son, Gerald, an offer of a leg up in the world, and now he knows he is his son is all the keener to do it, while she fiercely refuses the offer, at first on principle (she wants nothing to do with the man who abandoned her) but then, more pitifully, because Gerald is all she has. When they put the choice to Gerald (completely innocent of the real situation) he of course chooses the job offer and he and Lord Illingworth exit, leaving Mrs Arbuthnot a solitary figure on the stage, ‘immobile with a look of unutterable sorrow on her face.’
These plays have moments of surprisingly piercing emotional anguish.
Act 3
Act 3 is set the same evening after dinner and opens with a barrage of witticisms and paradoxes from Lord Illingworth, delivered to the adoring audience of dowdy old ladies who barely understand what he’s on about (Lady Hunstanton, Lady Caroline, Lady Stutfield) and so are very passive comic foils.
LADY HUNSTANTON: I am so glad I don’t know what you mean, dear. I am afraid you mean something wrong.
After all this fol-de-rol is the central event of the act which is that Mrs Arbuthnot tells her son why Lord Illingworth is so wicked, giving a lot more detail about how he seduced a poor, naive 18-year-old (herself), got her pregnant, promised to marry her, then abandoned her.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: She suffered terribly — she suffers now. She will always suffer. For her there is no joy, no peace, no atonement. She is a woman who drags a chain like a guilty thing. She is a woman who wears a mask, like a thing that is a leper.
But Gerald horrifies her by saying (in his innocence) that he can’t feel sorry for the woman in the story because obviously no nice girl would leave her family, abandon herself to such a waster, and live with him out of wedlock. Crushed by the realisation of how he would think of her, Mrs Arbuthnot withdraws her objections to her son going abroad with Lord Illingworth, and Gerald gushes that he is so happy, Lord Illingworth is such a model, he can do no wrong.
Which makes it all the more melodramatic and comic when the fierce young American lady comes running in from the terrace where she claims Lord Illingworth has just ‘insulted’ her by trying to kiss her. Young Gerald leaps to his feet because, I haven’t had time to explain that in the middle of his interview with his mother, he mentioned that he is deeply in love with Miss Worsley.
Now Miss Worsley runs to the protection of his arms as Gerald leaps to his feet and threatens to kill Lord Illingworth, really meaning it, ready to rush across the stage and strike him. At which crucial moment Mrs Arbuthnot tells him that…Lord Illingworth is his father and falls to the floor. Staggered, Gerald loses all his anger, helps his mother to her feet and then offstage. Curtain down on this melodramatic moment!
Act 4
Act 4 switches location and scene altogether, switching from the grand house at Hunstanton Chase to the much more modest sitting-room of Mrs Arbuthnot’s house in the nondescript Midlands town of Wrockley.
Gerald is writing a letter asking his father to marry Mrs Arbuthnot. Lady Hunstanton and Mrs Allonby arrive on a visit to Mrs Arbuthnot, commenting on the good taste of her drawing room but leaving when the maid tells them that Mrs Arbuthnot has a headache and won’t be able to see anyone.
When Mrs Arbuthnot enters the drawing room, Gerald tells her that he intends to give up being Lord Illingworth’s secretary and has asked him (Illingworth) to come to their house and ask for her hand in marriage.
As you might expect, the pair then argue about this, Gerald claiming that the marriage is her duty while Mrs Arbuthnot insists that she won’t make a mockery of the marriage vows by marrying a man she despises. She describes how she devoted her life to being a single mum and raising Gerald and is too proud to accept Illingworth.
Now, as in the way of stage comedies (or farces) Hester had arrived outside the door and heard this entire exchange. She now runs over to Mrs Arbuthnot, says how moved she was by her story, and offers to use the wealth she’s about to inherit to take care of 1) the man she loves (Gerald) and 2) the mother she never had. After this flurry of excitement, Gerald and Hester go out into the garden, conveniently leaving Mrs A alone.
At which point the maid announces the arrival of Lord Illingworth who, despite Mrs A’s forbidding, forces his way into the drawing room. Here he tells Mrs Arbuthnot that he has decided he ought to provide financial security for Gerald and has decided to assign him some of his (Illingworth’s) several properties.
Mrs Arbuthnot shows him Gerald and Hester in the garden and tells Lord Illingworth that she no longer needs help from anyone but her son and his fiancée.
But…Illingworth then sees the letter Gerald was drafting at the start of the act and reads it, the one in which Gerald insisted Lord I marry his mother. Lord Illingworth tells Mrs Arbuthnot he is prepared to marry her in order to be with his son.
But Mrs Arbuthnot not only refuses to marry him and but tells him that she outright hates him, throwing in for good measure the idea that her hate for Illingworth and her love for Gerald sharpen each other. And that it was Hester, in the exchange we’ve just witnessed, that decisively turned Gerald against his father.
Defeated on every front and nettled by Mrs A’s unremitting hostility, Lord Illingworth lets his mask slip. He states that Mrs Arbuthnot was only ever a plaything in their affair and calls her his ‘mistress’. He is going on to call Gerald his ‘bastard’ but Mrs Arbuthnot slaps him with his own glove before he can get the word out.
Dazed, insulted, realising all is up, Lord Illingworth takes a final look at his son through the window, then stalks out. As women do in such melodramas, Mrs Arbuthnot then falls onto the sofa sobbing. Prompt as clockwork Gerald and Hester re-enter from the garden. Gerald runs over to comfort his crying mother who asks Hester if she really would be prepared to have this weeping failure of a woman as a mother. When Hester assures her that she would the circle of forgiveness and new life is complete.
And then the punchline. Gerald notices his father’s glove on the floor and, when he asks his mother who’s been visiting, Mrs Arbuthnot delivers the play’s withering final line, a clever inversion of Lord Illingworth’s dismissal at its start – she says, ‘A man of no importance.’
Thus is the biter bit. Thus are the roles reversed. Thus the central female figure goes from powerless victim to empowered victor.
Themes
Critics always have to be po-faced about any work of literature, obliterating the light and entertaining with commentaries which pull out dire and earnest ‘themes’. And it’s true that words have meanings and if you’re setting out to create three hours of people talking you have to give them something to talk about. But it’s obvious that many of these ‘themes’ only really exist to provide talking points between the characters (to fill the time) which, in Wilde’s hands, mainly exist as scaffolding for his brilliant jokes and one-liners.
Thus the plays is packed with characters delivering jokes and witticisms and one-liners and clever paradoxes about: America; the current state of politics, the Houses of Commons and Lords; the condition of England; middle class concern for the poor and many more, but their primary purpose to provide the butt of gags is plain to see:
KELVIL: May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: A much better institution, of course. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Men and women
GERALD: Well, men are different from women, mother. It is natural that they should have different views.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I was very young at the time. We men know life too early.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: And we women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
I would say there is a central theme which is so large it is more like a premise of the play, which is the enormous chasm between men and women, in particular husbands and wives, which the characters bring out at almost every turn. In mixed company the characters make sweeping generalisations about each other’s gender and the whole opening scene of Act 2 is devoted to the women guests sitting by themselves making numerous generalisations about their menfolk and men in general.
MRS ALLONBY: The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
As I remarked of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, this doesn’t necessarily reflect any ‘reality’. These plays were designed to be entertainments, to be theatrical successes, to make money for Wilde who had, up till this point, not been particularly successful in financial terms. And what comic topic is more guaranteed to raise a laugh in all times and places than women characters moaning about men and male characters moaning about women, husbands complaining about wives and wives complaining about husbands?
GERALD: But women are awfully clever, aren’t they?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should always tell them so. But, to the philosopher, my dear Gerald, women represent the triumph of matter over mind — just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
Or, on the more serious note struck by Mrs Arbuthnot:
You talk of atonement for a wrong done. What atonement can be made to me? There is no atonement possible. I am disgraced: he is not. That is all. It is the usual history of a man and a woman as it usually happens, as it always happens. And the ending is the ordinary ending. The woman suffers. The man goes free.
In this respect Wilde’s comedies are not very different from the fundamental premise of thousands of sitcoms and stand-up routines. ‘Men this…women that…my husband this…my wife that…’ – rock solid crowd-pleasers which never go out of fashion, as guaranteed to raise a laugh in 2024 as in 1894, as central to the banter in the Restoration comedies of 1694 as it is to the gender comedy in the comic Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence in 194 or 94 BC.
GERALD: It is very difficult to understand women, is it not?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You should never try to understand them. Women are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means – which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do – look at her, don’t listen to her.
Which doesn’t mean that any of it is true, should be taken at face value or used as historical or sociological evidence for anything. All it’s proof of is the kind of tropes and jokes which made for success in the theatre, in front of an audience who want easily understood, easily recognisable, easily entertaining clichés and platitudes. Rather as attacks on the death star make for exciting climaxes to Star Wars movies. The appearance of a death star in several movies, or aliens in half a dozen Aliens movies, doesn’t mean there is a death star or aliens. These are the just tropes and conventions appropriate to their genres, space opera and sci fi horror, respectively. In the same way the endless generalisations about men and women and husbands and wives spouted in these social comedies represent no truth about society or people, but are the witty variations on the conventional tropes appropriate to this genre.
In this respect, individual lines of Wilde may play with convention – by describing the leading man as frightfully wicked or having him banter about how hard he’s worked to acquire a bad reputation – but everyone knows this is just banter.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: To win back my youth, Gerald, there is nothing I wouldn’t do – except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
Or when he says things like:
A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.
The audience enjoys being scandalised but nobody believes this, mainly because it’s so obviously twaddle. Wilde leaves the fundamental tropes of this kind of comedy (the men/women, husbands/wives binaries) untouched.
And, despite the bombardment of superficial cynicism in the form of Lord Illingworth’s endless apothegms, in his structural use of the ideas of marital fidelity, social disgrace and ostracism, and even deeper, the notion of redemption, Wilde wholeheartedly complies with the social values of his time.
MRS ALLONBY: Then you should certainly know Ernest, Lady Stutfield. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.
LADY STUTFIELD: I adore silent men.
MRS ALLONBY: Oh, Ernest isn’t silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don’t know. I haven’t listened to him for years.
Boom boom! Change the social stratum and the accent and it could be Les Dawson.
It is a paradox that Wilde, because he happened to be gay or bisexual, has been held up as an icon by LGBTQ+ activists and yet, when you actually read his actual works, he is intensely, intensely heteronormative: his plays depend entirely for their effects on the most conventional possible gender stereotypes:
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You women live by your emotions and for them. You have no philosophy of life.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: You are right. We women live by our emotions and for them. By our passions, and for them, if you will.
Similarly in his social satire. The entire setting of the plays among the idle English aristocracy, and the characterisation of pretty much all the characters, amounts to fairly harsh satire of an entire class. Critics at the time and literary critics since, tend to pick up on the cynicism and paradoxical remarks of the Wilde figures (Lord Illingworth in this play) who are given line after line designed to invert conventional ‘values’, make light of conventional morality and so on.
But to anyone outside the charmed circle of theatre goers, many of whom presumably included the kind of idle aristocrats he mocks, surely they all look the same. Surely the Lord Illinghams and Lord Darlingtons are the logical evolution if an aristocratic class which justified its immense privilege and amazing lifestyles by claiming they provided some kind of service to the nation and empire.
But from the perspective of real social critics like William Morris or Keir Hardie, the Fabians, the Socialists, the communists, the entire class was damned and the kind of ‘critique’ which critics like to find all through Wilde’s writings, are just the bickerings of a condemned family.
I would argue that not very far beneath the shiny veneer and the oh-so-risque attitudinising of his plays (and novel and stories) Wilde was, in fact, a deeply conservative writer. This explains why, when truly radical art came along in decade after his death, Wilde was dropped and forgotten as irrelevant and out of date, a man more associated with the aestheticism of the 1880s which went completely out of fashion in the decade of the Fauves and German Expressionists and the first stirrings of literary Modernism.
Comic dialogue
LADY CAROLINE: Have you any country? What we should call country?
HESTER: [Smiling.] We have the largest country in the world, Lady Caroline. They used to tell us at school that some of our states are as big as France and England put together.
LADY CAROLINE: Ah! you must find it very draughty,
LADY CAROLINE: He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one’s life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.
LADY HUNSTANTON: Lord Illingworth may marry any day. I was in hopes he would have married lady Kelso. But I believe he said her family was too large. Or was it her feet? I forget which.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
LADY HUNSTANTON: I am sure, Lord Illingworth, you don’t think that uneducated people should be allowed to have votes?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I think they are the only people who should.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Silliest word in our language, and one knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
KELVIL: Do you take no side then in modern politics, Lord Illingworth?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
LADY STUTFIELD: It must be terribly, terribly distressing to be in debt.
LORD ALFRED: One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.
MRS ALLONBY: Lord Illingworth, there is one thing I shall always like you for.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Only one thing? And I have so many bad qualities.
MRS ALLONBY: Ah, don’t be too conceited about them. You may lose them as you grow old.
MRS ALLONBY: Do you like such simple pleasures?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
MRS ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself. And one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Yes; I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
LADY STUTFIELD: And what have you been doing lately that astonishes you?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I have been discovering all kinds of beautiful qualities in my own nature.
MRS ALLONBY: Ah! don’t become quite perfect all at once. Do it gradually!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I don’t intend to grow perfect at all. At least, I hope I shan’t. It would be most inconvenient. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: There is no secret of life. Life’s aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough. I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful.
LADY HUNSTANTON: I don’t believe in women thinking too much. Women should think in moderation, as they should do all things in moderation.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.
MRS ALLONBY: I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime. I think seventy an ideal age for a man.
A woman’s lot
HESTER: [Waving him back.] Don’t, don’t! You cannot love me at all, unless you love her also. You cannot honour me, unless she’s holier to you. In her all womanhood is martyred. Not she alone, but all of us are stricken in her house.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: But we are disgraced. We rank among the outcasts. Gerald is nameless. The sins of the parents should be visited on the children. It is God’s law.
Hester. I was wrong. God’s law is only Love.
This, the ‘moral’ message of the play, could come from a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Books & Boots 