Week 13, Oscar Wilde

Notes on Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay Of Lying” (Edition: Etext)

35. “What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design…. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.” Nature is no model. Coleridge had written in “Dejection: an Ode” that “In our life alone does Nature live,” and Wilde gives us a decadent version of that statement. Nature is incomplete and gains completion only when we bring our interests and values to it. If, that is, we even find the project of completing nature worthwhile. Pater’s model of impressionistic success, as he sets it forth in his 1873 “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, counsels instead the endless enticements of suggestion over filling in the blank places of nature. It’s fair to say Wilde follows him in that regard. So in “The Decay Of Lying” as elsewhere, Wilde rejects nature (in any sense) as a saving category. His argument is modern in its insistent un-romanticism, its absence of sentimental attachment to nature as the source of what is best about humanity. To elaborate on Wilde’s view of nature: Wilde would probably argue that in terms of animal nature, we are unnatural because we are self-conscious. Human nature differs markedly from animal nature, so that in any but the most obvious things, we must discover and employ a language that responds to this distinction, be it a blessing or a curse. An author such as Dostoyevsky gives us a negative view of human eccentricity, but Wilde, following the Symbolists and Pater, offers a more optimistic assessment of human potential: it is our nature to be artificial, to construct our own identity and world, and continually transform them. Art is the central means whereby we may do such things.

36. “Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world….” If it’s possible for a being to do things unnaturally, nothing that being does is simply “natural.” Beavers don’t hold conferences to argue about the merits of different kinds of dam-building. Or if this example seems too glib, we might say that human activity can only be dealt with in a language that accommodates human sensibilities and priorities. Mediation is required between the grand laws of physics and evolution and more properly human social conditions and aspirations. Social science tries to mediate in this way, but art is another means. We need a world we can control to some degree, lest we be overwhelmed.

36. “How different [is the politician] from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind!” Nietzsche would agree with this idea: in “On Truth and Lying in an Ultra-Moral Sense,” that author describes “truth” as a species of useful error. Lying is intuitive, multifarious, and liberating—something that rescues us from the prison-house of representation and from vulgar utilitarian notions about pleasure and reductive political demands for truth.

39. “I have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the rage of Caliban on seeing his own face in a glass.” Realism, in Wilde’s view, simply reflects European societies’ ugliness back to them, and reaffirms life as it is. Whatever is, will stay that way if realist art has any say.

39. “M. Zola’s characters . . . have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. . . . In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.” Wilde casts the French novelist Émile Zola’s naturalistic works as part of an uglification campaign, one that promotes satisfaction with a world made by and for brutes. Mere imitation of such a world doesn’t help us transform it; Zola’s kind of writing offers no vision of Utopia to guide our efforts. Wilde sees literature as a vehicle for self-transcendence, both individual and collective. Realism and naturalism, by contrast, as Wilde writes on page 38, both “find life crude, and leave it raw.” This may all sound rather elitist, and to some extent it probably is; but we might also suggest that Wilde distrusts artists who bring us the “east end” raw because they might just be suggesting that there’s no need to change anything there: that is, it might be argued that realism and naturalism confound ugly reality with authenticity: the way things are with the way they ought to be. (One may wonder what Wilde and his fellow aesthetes would say of certain kinds of modern expression, such as rap and hip-hop—I mean the kind that its adherents justify on account of its propensity to “tell it like it is” for people caught in violent, poor neighborhoods in the big city. Fundamentally, Wilde questions “telling it like it is” when the way it is shouldn’t be that way.)

40-41. “As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.” Wilde’s Balzac is more of an impressionist than a realist, so he earns praise.

39-40. [W]hat is interesting about people in good society . . . is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff…. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals…. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.” Wilde shows his disdain here for any theory or kind of art that would reduce us to our common humanity because that common humanity is what we need to transcend, not take satisfaction in.

41. “The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.” No doubt this eponymous “somebody” is none other than Immanuel Kant, who characterized aesthetic judgment as a matter of “dry liking” and as thoroughly “disinterested,” i.e. free of mere sensuous gratification or personal bias. Matthew Arnold borrowed the Kantian term “disinterestedness” and used it to carve out an autonomous sphere of operations for art and culture. Of course, as an artist and critic, Wilde does engage with commonly received ideas, if only to invert them or inflect them.

42. “Nature is always behind the age; and as for Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.” The modern world has left behind simple instinct, and modern life is destructive of art. So art must find its own way.

42. “If we take nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. If, on the other hand, we regard nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.” Wilde declares outright that nature isn’t our source at all; mind is pre-eminent.

42-43. “Art begins with abstract decoration . . . . This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. . . . The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.” Realism and science, then, are decadent, so an art that holds the mirror up to nature can’t change anything. Realism is the demand of a decadent society, one with an imitative and basely materialistic model of human nature: market society and the vulgar, selfish politics based upon it.

43. “[T]he object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty. . . . Art herself is simply a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” Art, then, is complex, and a matter of exaggeration; this formulation resembles Pater’s privileging of intensity.

43. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything.” I think Vivian is wrong on this point—I don’t buy the argument that Shakespeare ever loses sight of his art’s demands, even when he’s using naturalistic dialect or dealing with “low” characters. There are legitimate criticisms to make of Shakespeare—his plots are sometimes loose, and he makes sloppy anachronistic references. These things may bother some play-goers, though on the whole they aren’t much trouble. But Vivian’s consideration isn’t apt, in my view, and it’s telling that Wilde offers no example of Shakespeare’s supposed shortcoming in the regard specified. What Vivian says about C19 drama makes more sense, I think: “The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it . . . they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage.” He is talking about English melodrama, of course. This sort of realism in drama, Vivian implies, tries to reproduce life itself or reduce it to stale fixities. The mind that demands this reduction from art is debased and might as well go directly to life itself. Still, it’s possible to credit the better kind of realism with making an effort to get people to see what they refuse to see in spite of its obviousness. Consider the modern example of photographic realism: taking pictures of war’s violence, or capturing on film the sufferings of poor Americans traveling west to escape the Dust Bowl during the 1930’s, might be said to do something more than “copy” human suffering: you’d think it would be ridiculously obvious that war causes terrible human suffering, but governments that wage war today seem determined to give us mostly tolerable images of it, lest the effort lose our support.

44. “[T]he proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.” Art, in Wilde’s view, is an autonomous undertaking and realm. But it’s also true that he has no trouble making the further case that its autonomy and integrity lead to effects beyond the realm of art; in this claim Wilde, for all his elitist posturing, is the true successor of the English and German Romantics. At its best, Wilde suggests, art a “disturbing and disintegrating force,” as the author calls individualism in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” It breaks up dull utilitarian and Tory ideology, while seemingly useless talk and behavior (as well as the inversion of social/sexual conventions) turn out to be highly charged with social and political implications.

45-46. “Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cave-men at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave . . . we cannot tell. . . . [H]e was certainly the true founder of social intercourse.” “Lying” or fiction-making is the province of “style,” which for Wilde is truth’s proper sphere: “truth is entirely . . . a matter of style.” Truth and Nature—especially in their meanings according to modern scientific usage—are enlisted to justify an aggressively hostile campaign to declare the status quo correct; they are tools of bourgeois ideology and economic interests. For example, we might refer to Herbert Spencer’s naturalization-cum-legitimization of class inequality in First Principles: Miners in a given locality follow “the law of the direction of motion” down into unhealthy, dangerous holes wherein they labor to produce what everyone else needs. Wilde’s mention of Spencer on page 46 is no accident.

46. “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” Wilde is by no means the only Victorian to appeal to our need for the mysterious—it is a mainstay of Carlyle’s post-Romantic prescription for a workable society. Wilde’s direction is Paterian: concealment is a vehicle of self-development, and personalities are enhanced and diversified from “behind the veil.”

47. “Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The function of art, in Vivian’s Wildean view (which enlists the Greeks’ concern for aesthetic experience), is to provide beautiful patterns for us to live by. If we insist on imitating life, we give up all hope of transforming it for the better. This belief is the source of Wilde’s overturning of Arnold’s great dictum about the critic’s task being “to see the object as in itself it really is.”

48. “The imagination is essentially creative and always seeks for a new form.” This remark is derived from philosophical idealism, which posits that the mind at least partly generates or participates in the making of what we call reality. Kant’s version of this claim is rather cautious, while the claims made by Fichte, Schelling, and other German Idealists are bolder. (Coleridge’s Idealism is of the latter sort.) Wilde’s Vivian says further in speaking of Hamlet that “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” That’s a grand claim, but it makes sense: no doubt art gives us some of our most memorable renderings of important attitudes, ideals, and events. The uses to which those renderings are put is another matter, of course, since artists can’t control how people will receive their creative work.

49. “In the year 1879 . . . I met . . . a lady who interested me very much. . . . She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of many types.” This emphasis on Protean capacity for change resembles Pater’s praise of a “quickened, multiplied consciousness” in his Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

50. “Scientifically speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it—is simply the desire for expression, and art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.” Aristotle’s formulation towards the beginning of The Poetics was that “we learn our earliest lessons from imitation” and that “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure.” Wilde replaces “learning” with “expression” as humanity’s prime directive. His doctrine of forms implies that multiplication of the self is the goal of life. This emphasis on self-diversification differentiates Wilde’s (and Pater’s) concept of the individual from that of the English Romantics, who stress the integral quality of the self, its wholeness.

51. “Art never expresses anything but itself.” Art is entirely self-referential. That’s the source of its great power. It resists dilution at the source by other areas of life, and therefore retains the power to transform them. The question people understandably ask about aestheticist claims of any sort is whether they might lead to a more enlightened and tolerant community, more humane institutions, and so forth, or whether they justify an irresponsible withdrawal from the fray of ordinary existence. Wilde certainly advocated social progress of the sort that some realist authors would approve, but the remark Vivian has just made about art’s self-referentiality may actually be the strongest arrow in the quiver of pro-aesthetical arguments, and as we might expect it takes the form of a paradox: only by not reaching out to the ordinary is art of any value to the ordinary realm and its denizens. This is not unlike the argument Matthew Arnold had made in the 1860’s about criticism and its disinterested attempts to “see the object as in itself it really is.” Wilde, a sometime follower of Pater, may not be as heavily or consistently invested in dispassionate engagements as Arnold was, but the affinity of his dialogical character Vivian’s paradoxical claims to Arnold’s is nonetheless striking. Wilde’s Vivian talks about art here in a way that may remind us of John Keats’ Grecian urn, with its message that its own beauty is the only truth “ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” We can always go back to the urn, so to speak, and reconnect with a kind of purity that the rest of life probably can’t give us.

51. “The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols, her reflections, her echoes.” This is an extreme statement of aesthetic autonomy, and as such it derives from authors like Friedrich von Schiller, who counsels in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that artists must withdraw from the immediate flow of life in order to preserve itself from corruption and mere political or social utility. In Vivian’s view, art rejects human burdens and is neither the bearer of ideology nor a vehicle for near-term social reform, or anything of the sort. It owes nothing to anybody. In this view he is affined with the Symbolist poets and theorists. Matthew Arnold is another inheritor of the post-Kantian notion of aesthetic autonomy, and we find many formulations of this interesting, if troubled, notion all through the nineteenth century and through the twentieth. Keats’ mysterious tease the Grecian Urn, with its assertion that beauty is the only reality we can really count on, is one, and Yeats’ early poetry as well as some of his mature efforts (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” for example) play upon it.

53. “It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.” As one of Wilde’s aphorisms has it, “Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.” He consistently derides the public’s judgment as utterly devoid of wisdom or even competence. The artist’s task is certainly not to please the public or flatter its tastes—that is a recipe for disaster. Of course, it became increasingly difficult to make this claim with hope of success as the nineteenth century wore on: the great middle class has long had its own ideas about what it wants, and generally feels no need to ask literary or cultural elites for their definitive pronouncement in matters of taste or, indeed, in any other matters at all. This smugness is what John Stuart Mill laments about the middle class in On Liberty—he calls its results a “hostile and dreaded censorship” that threatens to snuff out the vitality of English intellectual life.

54. “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is . . . lying in Art.” Wilde’s Vivian has been promoting “Art for Art’s Sake,” and, like other proponents of this doctrine, he insists that only by preserving its integrity can art shelter its potential to transform us. Like Matthew Arnold, who was accused of promoting a religion of culture, Wilde’s Vivian says art’s independence is the most promising thing about it. Art should be an untainted storehouse of new forms for imagination to work with. Kant had said that in making aesthetic judgments about beautiful things (in art or nature), we experience our freedom in a most pleasing way. Aestheticism is a bold extrapolation of this basic postulate of Kantian aesthetics.

55. First doctrine summary: “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.” Art does not accommodate itself to our petty desires and beliefs. To approach art on its own terms is to keep open a space for the transformation of the human spirit.

55. “The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals.” Some critics would call this claim reification or even see it as fetishistic. Why should we grant that art is an autonomous, apolitical thing? Well, I suppose Wilde would say that it takes a power we can posit as above ourselves to draw humanity beyond what it presently is. Blake’s God, Arnold’s Culture, and the Artifice of the Symbolists and Wilde seem designed to serve as this “something beyond us.” In a sense, the process we are describing here is fetishistic: in social science, that term applies to the making of objects by human beings who then invest those objects with a power transcending mere humanity. A totem pole comes to represent “the dead ancestors” and is no longer just a piece of nicely carved wood, and so forth. That is what the Symbolist claims about the poem’s sacred Words, and what the aesthete or art-for-art’s-sake proponent urges us to believe about all fine art. We make something with our own minds and our own hands, and then we come to think that it has slipped beyond our own limitations, biases, and desires. There are dangers lurking in this process, but it would be unwise to dismiss its value or condemn it out of hand in favor of “engagement” and “responsibility.” People who insist on the latter have sometimes done great harm in the world.

55. “The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” With regard to Wilde’s expressive theory, what is expressed isn’t simply emotion; it isn’t (for the most part) what Wordsworth would call the “essential passions of the heart.” Wilde is instead a Paterian in matters pertaining to the self: we create our own nature. Life is mostly a matter of style (or rather a multiplicity of styles), and by style we live. This concept, like that of the Symbol in Coleridgean criticism, goes far beyond its usual rather limited meaning. Coleridge’s symbolic utterance isn’t a mere literary device (such as metaphor); it’s a mode of language all its own. So too does “style” take on broad significance in Wilde’s critical vocabulary. Wilde’s Oxford professor, Walter Pater, seems to have derived his ideals about the value of aesthetic experience in part from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who praised “freedom and variety of situations” as essential to humanity. But there’s an important difference between this philosophical progenitor and Wilde and Pater: for the former, human nature is treated as organic, while for the latter, it is synthetic, more an effect than an integral cause or foundation to which we may return. There is no return to an originary self; there are only styles, ways of perceiving and feeling and registering things, and the point is to get through as many of them as possible in the time given us. That is what Pater advocates in his 1873 Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Finally, both Pater and Wilde tend to describe their aesthetic doctrines with reference to the ancient Greeks, whose courage in facing up to a harsh cosmos they admire, and whose openness to experience impresses them. Kant had encapsulated the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment ideals in the phrase “dare to know.” Pater seems to urge upon his readers the phrase “dare to know your own impressions,” encouraging them to get clear about how they as individuals perceive worthwhile things, personalities, and events, and then to express that clarity as precisely as they can in their respective media, or in the way they live their lives as a whole. The questions that are bound to arise when we speak of aestheticism are simple to state but not so easy to answer satisfactorily: to whom, and to how many, were/are appeals to aesthetic experience made? To what extent can “art-for-art’s sake” resist modern life’s commodification and co-optation of its pure ideal? (We live in a society, after all, that turns yesterday’s revolutionary ideals into harmless Che Guevara tee-shirts.) To what extent does it amount to an all-but-permanent (and irresponsible) withdrawal from the rest of life? Wilde would probably insist in his defense that his ideas about the self-sufficiency of art and the permeable, malleable nature of human beings cannot ultimately be considered in isolation from his strong belief in individual and social progress.

What I have been doing in these notes is partly to place Wilde in the tradition of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics: art is a realm wherein we experience our freedom and are transformed into something better than what we were. Culture indirectly shapes and improves human beings, rather than simply telling them they are fine as they are. I have also emphasized that Wilde’s views (at least insofar as we may take Vivian’s statements as fair approximations of what Wilde himself believed) respond to the ascendancy of the middle class: his aestheticism, his praise of “lying” and Protean self-transformation, his bent for unsettling people’s most dearly held convictions and notions—all these strategies bespeak a conception of art as a “disturbing and disintegrating force” in English life. He is more of an artistic anarchist than a late Romantic who would have us return to the supposed bedrock of our simple passions or to the verities of physical nature.

Notes on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

Introduction to the Main Types of Comedy

Old Comedy: This is satirical comedy that “ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks deviations from the social order by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners” (Abrams 29). The Greek playwright Aristophanes (circa 456-386 BCE) is the first great satiric comedian. If you’ve ever read or seen a comedy by Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata, The Birds, etc.), you know that it’s rough stuff—mainly topical satire about famous politicians and philosophers. The Clouds, for example, is about Socrates as proprietor of the Thinkery or Think-Shop, where all sorts of ridiculously improbable notions are propagated for the benefit of fools. Outrageous, bawdy, bubbly humor is the essence of such plays, and they can pack a genuine political wallop as well: Lysistrata sets forth a plot in which Greek women withhold sexual favors from men until they agree to put an end to the ruinous Peloponnesian War. On the whole, characters are ridiculous in Old Comedy—a main subject is the perennial nature of human folly, selfishness, and vice. Among the Elizabethans Ben Jonson is perhaps the greatest comic satirist. In his Volpone, things end badly for the play’s main character Volpone (i.e. “the fox”), but the play as a whole is still comic because Jonson (after some initial identification) makes us despise Volpone, not sympathize with him. So the aim in satiric comedy is mockery of a given society or of those who break its rules.

New Comedy: The Greek playwright Menander (circa 342-291 BCE), and his much later Roman followers Plautus (circa 254-184 BCE) and Terence (circa 190-158 BCE), offer a different brand of comic play that will later serve as the basis of Shakespeare’s comic plays and Restoration comedy of manners (Congreve’s The Way of the World, for example; Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost also make fine comedy of manners). The emphasis in New Comedy is on domestic matters rather than broad political issues. Love, or at least sexual desire treated sympathetically, is central to the action, and there’s also some concern for the relationship between the older generation and the younger, particularly between a father and his son, as well as some interest in relations between people of different status, such as masters and their clever slaves. Still, there’s plenty of fun at the expense of fools, dupes, lovers too old for the person they desire, etc. As M. H. Abrams explains in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 th edition, the Roman comedies “dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what became the stock types of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival.” English comedies, by contrast, tend towards “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society, relying for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match—and to a lesser degree, on the ridiculous violations of social conventions and decorum by stupid characters such as would-be-wits, jealous husbands, and foppish dandies” (Abrams 29).

Some major authors of English comedy of manners are Congreve, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Pinero. New Comedy and its developments are seldom rigorous in their morals: the characters who win out tend—surprise!—to be the ones the playwright reckons the audience will like. Sympathy trumps propriety. The popularity of comic mix-ups and disguises suggests that identities can be swapped at will, and because considerations such as wealth and social status are so important in structuring others’ perceptions of a given character, the new identity will be accepted long enough to get the job done.

The modern situation comedy—Seinfeld would be a sophisticated example—is remarkably like New Comedy: a number of silly but mostly sympathetic characters get themselves into and out of preposterous scrapes from one episode to the next in a competitive world, and through it all they don’t change much. They get insulted, taken advantage of, take advantage of others (though not mean-spiritedly), fall in and out of love, misunderstand one another at every turn, get jobs and get fired from jobs, obtain pleasure and ease and then throw it all away on a whim or through error, and they’re ready for the next absurdity life brings. Comedy reminds us that we seldom learn as much as we should from our mistakes, but it also gives us credit for being optimists and opportunists in spite of the misfortunes life throws our way. There’s a bit of Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner in many a comic character: that fur-bearing evildoer Wiley Coyote isn’t going to keep the “poor little Roadrunner” from its appointed rounds (BeepBeep!), nor is Elmer Fudd going to stop Bugs from doing whatever the wascally wabbit wants to do. In comedy, desire is subject to deferral and detour, but not to permanent frustration. The comic orientation towards time is a favorable one: time and chance (accident) are on our side, at least if we are amongst the likeable or generous. In comedy, life is rich and full of opportunities—la vita è bella, as the Italians say. This attitude contrasts markedly with that of tragedy, where the world is stark and unforgiving, and our attention is riveted upon the thoughts and actions of a superior character in confrontation with that stark world.

Structure. The general (Terentian) structure of New Comedy is as follows: A. First comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established. This stage corresponds roughly to the first act of a modern five-act play. B. Then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated. This stage corresponds roughly to the second and third acts of a five-act play. C. Next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a false climax. For example, in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio marries Kate towards the end of Act 3, but that important event hardly concludes the story: Kate must still be “tamed.” D. Last comes the real climax, the catastrophe, which in comedy turns out to be a happy ending, often a marriage or even a set of marriages.

A Note on Shakespearian Comedy. According to Northrop Frye, the structure of Shakespearean comedy often involves the main characters leaving their corrupt city or realm and entering a magical “green world,” from whence they emerge renewed and ready to return to civilized life. As You Like It is a fine example since Rosalind, Orlando, and other characters betake themselves to the Forest of Arden. The Tempest offers a variation, with Prospero exiled from Milan and subsequently resident on a strange but wonderful island. In The Winter’s Tale, much of the action takes place in a pastoral setting where Leontes’ and Hermione’s daughter Perdita resides, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course, offers a remarkable nature-kingdom ruled by Oberon and Titania. In tragedy, the protagonist’s aim is to gain perspective on the disaster that has occurred and what brought it on; as Northrop Frye would say, a tragedy is oriented towards death and draws its meaning from that event. But in comedy, whose initial aim is to amuse the audience with tribulations giving way to a happy ending, the deeper aim is broadly social and oriented toward the renewal of life over generations. The kingdom or other city space may at first be badly ruled or in turmoil for some reason—perhaps the values and institutions of the citizens and/or rulers are in need of some re-examination. What is the basis of those values and institutions—can people live comfortably or at all within them?

Next, the main characters most often leave the city setting (willingly or otherwise) and end up in the countryside. This pastoral setting is often an enchanted space that allows for the necessary reexamination of values and social roles. Magical transformations of characters occur; they are put in situations that could not occur in the city or the kingdom, and the forest or countryside’s magic opens up new possibilities to them. As Meyer Abrams writes in A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 th edition (1993), in a romantic comedy, “the problems and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved, enemies reconciled, and true lovers united” (29). After the necessary reappraisal and readjustment period has been completed, the main characters come together—the young by marriage, the foundational institution of the civil order and its only hope for regeneration. Finally, the characters return to the kingdom proper or are about to return when the play ends. The key to Shakespearean comic structure is political and social regeneration, continuity for the ruling order. The question to be explored is, “How does a given society preserve order and its values from one generation to the next?”

Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

This play is a fine comedy of manners that borrows something from Shakespeare’s emphasis on the relationship between the town and country in that the play begins with the characters in the city, moves them toward the countryside to straighten out the mess they’ve got themselves into, and points them toward city life again by the play’s end. As usual in comedy, events turn upon the attempts of the play’s lovers (there are two main couples in this one) to get together and on the many obstacles they must first overcome. So the structure of Wilde’s play is traditional. As for the play’s subject matter and dialogue, they certainly meet Abrams’ criteria for comedies of manners: IBE takes for its most basic subject “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society”—indeed, Lady Bracknell calls the late Victorian Era “an age of surfaces.” The dialogue also largely fits the bill: the play is full of “wit and sparkle,” and it has its fair share of what Abrams would call repartee: “a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match.” Many of the characters box their way through the play with quick linguistic jabs, some of them much like the kind of sharp, opportunistically intelligent remarks that made Wilde himself London’s social lion until his downfall in 1895.

Structurally, the play is traditional in yet another sense: it follows the basic Terentian drama: a) first comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established: in IBE, we meet Jack and Algernon, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell. b) then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated: in IBE, the characters’ competing erotic and class interests involve them in a tangle of deceptions and schemes. c) next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a false climax. In IBE, all seems to have been resolved amongst Jack and Gwendolen, Algernon and Cecily, but then Lady Bracknell arrives in the countryside and new difficulties arise. d) last comes the real climax, the catastrophe: in IBE, Jack discovers that he was always “Ernest/Earnest” after all, and the marriages may proceed.

Act One Synopsis: Jack Worthing, a young Justice of the Peace in rural Woolton, is an upper-class character of no background. When he wants to go out on the town, he uses his alternate self, brother Ernest, as a dodge. Algernon and all the big-city folk, therefore, know him as Ernest Worthing. This Jack/Ernest is in love with the Honorable Gwendolen Fairfax, daughter of Lady Bracknell. Gwendolen, a perfect product of the best fashion magazines, is just as much in love with the name “Ernest” as Jack is with her. If Jack wants to embody the Victorian “age of ideals” for Gwendolen, however, he must overcome a few obstacles. Firstly, his name is not Ernest, at least so far as he knows—which isn’t much. His second problem in Act One is Lady Bracknell and her strict requirements for any man who will marry her daughter: Does he smoke? Is he sufficiently ignorant? Is he sufficiently rich? Does he have a townhouse in the fashionable quarter of London? These are formidable demands, but Jack meets them all; he smokes and is indeed ignorant and rich. As for the townhouse in the fashionable quarter, either the townhouse or the quarter, or both, can be altered to suit Lady Bracknell’s liking. In spite of all these qualifications, however, Jack suffers from one flaw that keeps him off Lady Bracknell’s list of eligible bachelors: he was discovered, and for all intents born, in an ordinary handbag, stashed in the cloakroom, Brighton railroad line. This is inexcusable. If Jack has no better origin than this, he had better go out and find one, says Lady Bracknell. Compared to this hostility, the mild razzing Jack undergoes from Algernon is pleasant chatter. Algernon has apparently found his friend’s cigarette case, inscribed with a message from Cecily Cardew to “Uncle Jack.” Jack tries to lie his way out of the embarrassing situation by evoking the picture of a nice plump aunt, but Algernon easily infers that Aunt Cecily is some attractive young woman in the countryside. In a sense, that is true—since Jack was discovered by Mr. Thomas Cardew, it was only proper that the old man should make him the guardian over his granddaughter’s morals. The need to escape from this heavy responsibility was instrumental in Jack’s invention of the great escape hatch, Ernest. The first act ends with Algernon scheming to visit the country address he has copied from the cigarette case.

Act Two Synopsis: The second act opens with Miss Prism instructing Cecily on sentimental novels (one of which, ominously, she mislaid a long time ago), German, Geography, and political economy. She also engages in flirtatious metaphor-slinging with Canon Chasuble. Cecily soon grows tired of her lessons, but the servant Merriman enters with notice of “Ernest’s” arrival. One might call Algernon the impostor responsible for this intrusion on Jack’s country retreat, but then, “Ernest” never existed in the first place. Whatever Algernon’s status, Cecily decides that in spite of his alleged wickedness, the man looks like any other of his class. Soon, Jack makes his entrance in deep mourning clothes, if not spirit, only to be confronted by the all-too-living Algernon/Ernest. Jack wants him to leave at once, but Algernon, who has taken a fancy to Cecily, has no intention of leaving soon. This intransigence is only confirmed when he finds out that unbeknownst to him, he and Cecily have been courting each other for some time: all the action has taken place in her diary. Cecily’s one stipulation for a husband is the same as Gwendolen’s—she will marry no one but an Ernest. As luck would have it, this talk of marriage is followed by the unexpected arrival of Gwendolen, and the fireworks begin. When Cecily declares that she plans to wed “Ernest” (Algernon), Gwendolen is infuriated—she mistakes this Ernest for her own, the man we know as Jack Worthing in the country, Ernest in town. When Jack returns and is cornered into admitting his real name, the mix-up is cleared, but now the two men have a problem: neither of them is named Ernest. Gwendolen and Cecily march off together in a huff. The only thing the men can do for the remainder of the act is struggle over muffins and rechristening rights. Algernon wins the muffin contest and refuses to leave.

Act Three Synopsis: Cecily and Gwendolen take Jack and Algernon’s muffin binge as a sign of repentance, and are willing to be reconciled to their prospective mates so long as they are suitably rechristened. Just when it looks as if everything will go swimmingly, Lady Bracknell bursts onto the scene with all the force of Queen Victoria and Mother Grundy combined. Upon hearing that her nephew Algernon wants to marry the unknown Cecily, Lady Bracknell puts her qualifications to the test. Even though satisfied that the girl’s social status is not so “mobile” as Jack’s Brighton line, she balks at Cecily’s “incident”-crowded life and is about to depart when the phrase “hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the funds” strikes her ears. That is a presentable sum in this “age of surfaces,” so Lady Bracknell bestows her blessing on the newly charming Cecily. Unfortunately for Lady Bracknell, however, Jack won’t allow his ward to marry Algernon unless he gets permission to marry Gwendolen. Jack explains that according to the terms of her grandfather’s will, Cecily will not come of legal age until she is thirty-five, but Lady Bracknell will make no concessions and seems prepared to wait seventeen years for such a profitable match. The Lady’s wrath is even visited upon Algernon, who is forbidden to get himself rechristened “Ernest.” Just when things have reached a standstill, in rushes Miss Prism, who is promptly recognized as the very nurse who lost an infant attached to Lord Bracknell’s house some twenty-eight years ago. “Prism! Where is that baby?” demands Lady Bracknell. Miss Prism’s answer is that she accidentally placed her three-volume novel in the perambulator meant to accommodate the baby, and the baby itself, logically enough, wound up in the handbag that should have been used to hold the manuscript. This gives Jack an idea; he hurries out and comes back in with the handbag, which Miss Prism identifies as the same one she lost at the railroad station all those years ago. She has missed it bitterly. Even more importantly, though, Miss Prism’s recognition of the handbag leads Jack to his true origin as the son of Lady Bracknell’s own sister, Mrs. Moncrieff. It turns out, then, that old Jack has had a younger brother all along: Algernon Moncrieff. Only the name Jack now stands in Jack’s way, but that is cleared up when the Army Lists reveal that General Moncrieff’s first name was Ernest. Jack was always Ernest after all, and now realizes “the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” Algernon will doubtless overcome Lady Bracknell’s thin scruples about rechristening and cash in on beautiful Cecily’s fortune.