Love is Important... Wider Reading 11: A Woman of No Importance

A Woman of No Importance" is witty Victorian writer Oscar Wilde doing what he does best - portraying gatherings of 19th Century high socialites delivering egocentric quips on the trivialities of their daily lives, with an omnipresent underlying commentary on society's often dubious morals and ethics. The members of the party accumulate to engage in frivolous commentary on themselves and each other, determined to outwit one another while maintaining an air of boredom at all times. Sometimes described as Wilde's weakest, yet unfailingly most famous dramatic works, the play is bursting with dramatic irony, rhetoric strategies and humorous witticisms. Oscar Wilde produces a great play with subtle sentiment and an underlying theme of good triumphing over bad.

The main theme is obviously that of the "fallen" woman who becomes, in the eyes of society, "a woman of no importance." It is a subject which often occupied other Victorian writers and artists, such as Christina Rossetti and Mary Gaskell. They were acutely aware that the men who seduced and abandoned often naïve girls were still welcomed into society, while for the woman it meant social and often financial ruin. If she was pregnant, her child would be illegitimate, and she herself disgraced. Wilde felt strongly that men and women should be treated equally when it came to sexual matters. It is a main topic of "Lady Windermere’s Fan" as well as here. As several writers have suggested, it is not difficult to see that a concealed sin and a plea for forgiveness might well reflect Wilde’s own situation in a society where his homosexuality ultimately made him an outcast.

There has been criticism levelled at Wilde about this play which suggests that the witty, clever repartee of the society characters sits very uneasily with the impassioned rhetoric of the ‘moral’ characters, and that either the drama drives out the wit or the epigrams are somehow passing the time for the audience in between the dramatic episodes. Some modern critics, however, have shown that because Wilde’s dialogue is both clever and enjoyable, it is possible to miss the underlying satirical implications that fit in very well with the more serious themes of the play. For example, Lord Illingworth’s apparently trivial comments, if analysed, contain echoes of the situation in which he left Gerald’s mother – out of society – but there is also a foreshadowing of the ending of the play in which the power of women and the need for their backing is amply demonstrated. This careful crafting so that moral and social comment are masked by seemingly trivial cleverness, is true of much of this type of dialogue, which is used to reveal characters and attitudes.

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A Woman of No Importance - Quotations