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Oscar WildeA Woman of No Importance
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1893A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, and novelist who lived from 1854 to 1900. He was one of Victorian London’s most successful playwrights and was known for his wit and social commentary. During the 1890s, Wilde wrote four comedies—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—and these propelled him to fame. Wilde was a notable member of the Aesthetic Movement in the arts, valuing the beauty of artistic works over their function as moral lessons. His harsh criticisms of Victorian morality—both in his life and in his work—made him a controversial figure, and he was influential in fashionable circles while also being derided as a “dandy” or overly stylish man.
Wilde was married to a woman named Constance Lloyd, and they had two sons; however, he preferred men sexually. Wilde had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, and their relationship led him to hire male sex workers. Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, disapproved of their relationship; he frequently threatened Wilde and warned him to stay away from his son or face exposure. Eventually, the Marquess publicly accused Wilde of sodomy, which was a crime in England at the time, and Wilde sued him for defamatory libel. After the trial resulted in the exposure of Wilde’s affairs with male sex workers, he was put on trial again and convicted of “gross indecency,” which referred to gay sex without proof of intercourse. As a result, he was sentenced to jail and incarcerated from 1895 to 1897. After his release, he relocated to France, where he lived in poverty until his death from meningitis at the age of 46.
Literary Context: Drawing Room Plays
Drawing room plays are a genre of theater wherein the action of the play occurs within a drawing room, which is typically the area of a home where guests were received and entertained. The genre originated in Victorian England. Notable writers of drawing room plays include Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, and T. S. Eliot. Typically, the genre of drawing room plays overlapped with comedies of manners, which satirized contemporary behavior, social conventions, and fashions of their time. Comedies lampooning social behaviors originated in Ancient Greece and continued to influence theater through the Restoration period (1669-1710) and after; they became popular in Europe in the 18th century through the works of playwrights such as Molière.
A Woman of No Importance combines the satiric intent of the comedy of manners with the private domestic setting of the drawing room play. Through witty dialogue, it reveals how members of the upper classes could be hypocritical about sexual morality. Notably, Wilde’s play debuted during a time when theater had transitioned from being a populist and often disreputable form of entertainment to a far more respectable and highly regarded pastime for the upper classes. His work reflects this shift, since he wrote comedies in which the characters are from the aristocracy. While Aristotle defined classical Greek comedy as being about lowly characters, the drawing room comedy entertained and gently mocked the upper classes.
Social Context: Fallen Women
The fallen woman was a common literary trope in 19th-century literature, and it depicted women who had sex outside of marriage. In Victorian England, women were prohibited from most forms of employment, so they had to turn to either marriage or sex work in order to support themselves financially. As London became increasingly industrialized and urbanized, more women became sex workers in the city, prompting social reformers and Christian groups to attempt to campaign for their moral reform. Wealthy philanthropists often sponsored homes meant to provide shelter and rehabilitation to these women, although these organizations could often be strict and abusive.
Many 19th-century artists and writers depict the plight of fallen women, often with a mixture of sympathy and condemnation. Writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Louisa May Alcott wrote about the hardships faced by women who were forced into sex work and dishonor by abusive men and corrupt societies; they argued that fallen women should be given compassion and the opportunity for redemption. In A Woman of No Importance, the character of Mrs. Arbuthnot shares many similarities with these literary heroines who are fallen women. However, Wilde notably suggests that she requires no redemption in the course of the play, having already proven her moral superiority through her devoted love for her son.
Related Titles
By Oscar Wilde
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