Society and the Concept of Truth in the Selected Plays of Oscar Wilde: The Postmodern Aesthetics

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays originated at the end of the nineteenth century, revealing the whimsical, unsettled and often contradictory nature of the fin de siècle Victorian society. Yet, apart from their entertaining purpose, Wilde’s Society Plays offer a profound commentary on the complexities of life and human nature reaching beyond the dualistic notions of good and evil. While this aspect of Wilde’s plays used to be disregarded, with the main focus usually placed on witticism and epigrammatic nature of his works, it is, in fact, the transformative and multidimensional nature of one’s personal truth that is emphasized in such plays as A Woman of No Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). These two works offer an engaging case study of Wilde’s almost postmodern notion of the aesthetics of art as well. In both plays, the concepts of truth, identity, naming and one’s place in society are presented as transformative experiences enabled through language. Consequently, in A Woman of No Importance, characters such as Hester Worsley or Mrs Arbuthnot cannot be easily defined as black or white figures, while their relationships with society reach beyond the dualistic moral framework, defying traditional expectations of Victorian audience. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Gwendolen’s and Cecily’s seemingly absurd desire to marry a fictitious man called Ernest transforms into a liberating notion of selfhood and separation from limiting social expectations. Moreover, it allows the male characters in the play – Algernon and Jack – to revisit and gain new identities, thus showing that the transformative power of language lies in its aesthetic and artistic potential celebrated by Wilde. Characters in both analyzed plays – especially women – act as mirrors reflecting and responding to social expectations at large, while each character’s truth is molded by their perspectives and individual appeal to language. Thus, A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest reach beyond a mere witticism and play on words, touching upon fundamental notions of truth and one’s linguistic power to create an identity enabling personal freedom and separateness – the very notions inherent in Wilde’s postmodern aesthetics of art and language.