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Article: The Dramatist as Historian: Oscar Wilde's
Society Comedies and Victorian Anthropology

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 CHAPTER NINE

THE DRAMATIST AS HISTORIAN:

OSCAR WILDE'S SOCIETY COMEDIES
AND VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

YUSUKE TANAKA

I
In 1892, after the publication of four books in the preceding year, which
include The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions, Oscar Wilde (1854-
1900) initiated a series of society plays for the fashionable theatres of
London's West End: Lady Windermere's Fan (St James's, 20 February
1892), A Woman of No Importance (Haymarket, 19 April 1893),An Ideal
Husband (Haymarket, 3 January 1895), and The Importance of Being
Earnest (St James's, 14 February 1895).The upper class generally enjoyed
these plays, not only because the plots and details were familiarly
represented, but also because the conservative denouements supported the
social expectations of such an audience: For instance, at the ending in
Lady Windermere's Fan, the Windermeres settle their matrimonial
disputes while Mrs Erylnne, Lady Windermere's secret mother and
outsider in the high society, goes into exile in the Continent.
On the other hand, we can discern a certain amount of criticism against
the upper classes. When the audience heard the lines of the Duchess of
Berwick in Lady Windermere's Fan and Lady Bracknell in The
Importance of Being Earnest, who are extraordinarily meticulous in
selecting their daughter's groom, they must surely have become rather
uncomfortable. It is natural that Wildean comedies suggested not
innocuous sarcasm but radical criticism, since the author recognises plays
as "[a] work of art" (2007, 258) in his essay "The Soul of Man under
Socialism" (1891). According to him, the theatre was a place for artistic
experimentation in which the spectator should not judge plays according to
their own standards of taste but should try to understand the intentions of
128 Chapter Nine

the creators, including Henry Irving, the eminent Shakespearean actor and
manager, whom Wilde appreciated as a sort of avant-garde artist (2007,
257). Indeed, there has been a consistent trend amongst critics of stressing
the radical or subversive nature in Wilde's comedies. Based on the
persuasive arguments of Sos Eltis and others, this chapter will investigate
the mode of this element with the conservative implications in his dramas.
At the same time, it will analyse his standpoint beyond Regenia Gagnier's
theoretical framework of theatrical strategy in the capitalist marketplace,
by which the author could paradoxically criticise and attract the upper
classes.
True, the themes of marriage and sexual morality in his plays were
ones shared by other contemporary dramas as well as traditional comedies
of manners, and these themes became the central topic for Kerry Powell's
discussion in Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (1990). As they
were also common themes within Victorian novels. we need to examine
Wilde's plays beyond the scope of theatrical representation. Our viewpoint
is that, first of all, Wilde aimed at objective descriptions of society as did
Victorian realist novelists, irrespective of whether or not he intended to
present any political arguments. We notice that he could tum his power of
radical criticism to the ends of popular creativity by placing himself in the
neutral position of writing scientifically. His objective observation did not
mean there would be fragmentary or partial portrayals of superficial
fashions in order to flatter the audience. We basically agree with Peter
Raby' s view of interpreting his plays "as essentially ironic exposures of
English society" with "the detached, or semi-detached, perspective of his
Celtic mind and imagination" (1997, 158-59). However, this chapter will
emphasise his former commitment to academic disciplines more than the
two mentioned factors. For Wilde, "society" was also a collective whole as
defined in modem scholarship. Although in Culture and Society Raymond
Williams classifies Wilde as one of "new aesthetics" who mostly denied
society ([1958] 1983, 175), we will analyse his visions of a complete
social system in his comedies, namely, the products that should have been
inspected closely in the book.

II
The success of Lady Windermere's Fan brought the author a great deal of
money, even if it was relatively modest in terms of commercial theatre
revenue in the 1890s (Guy and Small 2001, 107-11). When she negotiates
with Lord Windermere about her "settlement" (2008, 32), Mrs Erlynne
says, "In modem life margin is everything. Windermere, don't you think
 The Dramatist as Historian 129

the world an intensely amusing place? I do!" (33). The lines seem to
anticipate Wilde's exhilaration at his first financial triumph. The word
"margin" suggests that she recognises she can gain an ex gratia income
based on her capital as Lady Windermere's unbeknown true mother. As
the undisclosed mother of his beloved wife, Mrs Erlynne blackmails Lord
Windermere, wanting him to offer a certain sum of money. The deposits
are recorded in his confidential bankbook, which Lady Windermere finds
and considers as evidence of his supposed adultery. The transfer of money
and the revelation represent the core events in the plot.
In Act I, the topic of money is described negatively by Lady
Windermere herself: "Yes. Nowadays people seem to look on life as a
speculation. It is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is Love. Its
purification is sacrifice" (9). She opposes her own puritan ideal of life to
the monetary worldview of other people, which was represented by the
financial term "speculation." When she opposes "love" to "speculation,"
she appears to associate money implicitly with something "tainted,"
implying sexuality. She reproaches her husband in the following
statement: "You can't realize how hideous the last six months seems to me
now-every kiss you have given me is tainted in my memory" (17). She
can thus interpret retrospectively any expression of matrimonial love as
being "tainted" because the material evidence of records in the timeline of
her husband's bankbook seems to mark the regularity of not only his
payments but also his adultery. She intends to defend her life within the
ideal sanctuary of her family, from which the threatening element
represented by Mrs Erlynne, who symbolises the fluid energy of money
and sexuality, must be excluded. On the other hand, as Lady Plymdale
suggests, she is "useful" since she is the sort of women who forms "the
basis of other people's marriages" (27). As a form of currency, she
eventually functions to contribute to the established social system through
her mobile effectiveness.
Lord Darlington asserts that most women are "rather mercenary" (10).
Dumby also asserts a similar sentiment: "Awfully commercial, women
nowadays" (42). These realistic male observations are justified when we
read the line by Duchess of Berwick: "No nice girl should ever waltz with
such particularly younger sons!" (21). She admonishes her daughter
Agatha to not dance with a man with no prospects of inheritance, and this
motherly reproach reflects not so much a universally acknowledged truth
as a historically defined fact that a martiage among the English
aristocracy, which had faced "the challenge to landed wealth that was
gathering momentum in Britain during the 1880s" (Cannadine 1992, 27),
was a central concern for their financial survival. The late Victorian idea
130 Chapter Nine

of daughters as capital differs from that in Georgian England, which we

find typically in Jane Austen's novels, since by the later period, fmance
had become a power which a woman could manage by herself after the
enforcement of the Married Women's Property Act (1882), which had
granted married women the rights to control their own wealth, independent
of the oversight of their husbands. On the other hand, Georgian women
primarily relied on the interest derived from lands owned by men.
The financial nature of Mrs Erlynne can be judged to accord to the
societal norms of the times. Accordingly, at the end of the play, a woman
with a monetary strategy illuminates a naive one about how to deal with
worldly affairs. It is significant that this lesson is conducted between the
secret mother and her abandoned daughter. It is thus not a gratuitous
donation but an equal exchange to the extent that the mother receives a fan
with the inscription "Margaret," their common name. Via the material
medium of this fan, she is believed to have hoped to make her act as not a
form of inheritance in wisdom, but a kind of a commercial deal. However,
regarding the transfer of the fan as a reversed inheritance, we can consider
that it is presumed to be an opposite correspondence to a male inheritance,
which is expected to occur in the future as the other gift, the photograph of
her daughter and her grandson, illustrates. The family estate is an
innnovable property that would be inherited under the family name
according to a legitimate male line, while the fan is a movable one that can
be exchanged under the pretext of the apparently coincidental but in fact,
necessary correspondence between their first names. The accidental but
fatal transfer of the latter property can therefore emphasise the relative
insignificance of the natural but void one of male inheritance.
In the next play, A Woman of No Importance, the possibility of a male
inheritance is destroyed by the power wielded by an important woman.
Wishing Gerald to be his private secretary, Lord lllingworth discovers
later that the young man is his own son and insists on his desire more
strongly. Mrs Arbuthnot, his ex-lover and Gerald's mother, who abhors
Lord lllingworth, wants her son to remain living with her.

LORD ILLINGWORTII. Well. Rachel, what is over is over. All I have got
to say now is that I am very, very much pleased with our boy. The world
will know him merely as my private secretary. but to me he will be
something very near, and very dear. It is a curious thing, Rachel; my life
seemed to be quite complete. It was not so. It lacked something, it lacked a
son. I have found my son now, I am glad I have found him.
MRS ARBUfHNOT. You have no right to claim him, or the smallest part
of him. The boy is entirely mine. and shall remain mine.
 The Dramatist as Historian 131

LORD ILLINGWORTH. My dear Rachel, you have had him to yourself

for over twenty years. Why not let me have him for a little now? He is
quite as much mine as yours. (2008, 126)

Gerald is clearly regarded as the object of his respective parents' right of

property. Lord lllingworth's attachment to Gerald is difficult because the
reason for it must have transformed through three stages. At first, when he
is unaware of Gerald's identity, he is attracted to him because of his charm
and talent. Then, after realising Gerald being his own son, he proposes the
following:

LORD ILLINGWORTH. According to our ridiculous English laws, I can't

legitimise Gerald. But I can leave him my property. Illingworth is entailed,
of course, but it is a tedious barrack of a place. He can have Ashby. which
is much prettier, Harborough, which has the best shooting in the north of
England, and the house in St James Square. What more can a gentleman
require in this world?
MRS ARBUTHNOT. Nothing more, I am quite sure.
LORD ILLINGWOR1H. As for a title, a title is really rather a nuisance in
these democratic days. As George Harford I had everything I wanted. Now
I have merely everything that other people want, which isn't nearly so
pleasant. Well, my proposal is this. (Ibid., 153)

Lord Illingworth offers to yield some country estates and a town house to
his newly-found son, although the estate with his title is to be inherited by
another relative after his death; that with the closest legitimate affiliation
to him. He envisages providing private wealth for his son because of his
personal affection. Parenthood enhances his passionate insistence even
more. However, arriving at the last stage, his contempt for the aristocratic
male inheritance of a title, which might have arisen from his accidental
succession as a younger son, collapses when he accepts his son's request
of marrying his mother. The marriage to Gerald's mother would mean his
acquirement of a legitimate heir to his entailed estate as well as his title.
However, the evanescent possibility of an authentic inheritance for Gerald
disappears as Mrs Arbuthnot declines the proposal. Even if Lord
Illingworth, a hedonistic individualist who distances himself from the
ideals of an English home, will not seek a legitimate successor positively,
he needs to conform to the situation for the maintenance of authenticity, as
he has accepted the status of an aristocratic inheritor himself. The fragility
of the inheritance system at the time, which had been essentialised as part
of English tradition, is thus represented in the playas a sociography.
132 Chapter Nine

III

In the last scene of Lady Windermere's Fan, we recognise the supremacy

of secrecy and ironical maternal love, which can help conserve the security
of a household, a matrix based upon male succession. Wilde seemed to
underline the functional ingenuity of the intimate relationship between
mother and daughter by contrasting it with the apparent innocence of the
patriarchal English society. At the ending of his next play, A Woman of No
Importance, he chose to highlight the interference of maternal power with
the established patriarchal system.
Patrick M. Horan has inspected the maternal presence in Wilde's
works, mainly in terms of his personal relationship with his own mother,
Speranza. However, the forceful love in his plays involves a personal and
psychological dimension, as well as a collective and sociological one,
because it is regarded as a power corroding the familial succession based
on the relationship between father and son, an axis of social constitution.
Accordingly, Powell (2009) and others have examined Wilde's images of
women in the context of contemporary feminism. We will attach great
importance to his conunitment to academic discourse rather than to
political movements, since his dramaturgy was intended to be objective
and politically neutral, presenting "a problematic picture of femininity"
(Dierkes-Thrun 2015, 76). In Wildean comedies, we cannot help but detect
the substantial presence of "matriarchy" submerged under patriarchal
society.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "matriarchy" can be
defined as follows: "A form of social organization in which the mother or
oldest female is the head of the family, and descent and relationship are
reckoned through the female line; government or rule by a woman or
women. Also (in Cultural Anthropology), a culture or community in which
such a system prevails; a family, society, organization. and others,
dominated by a woman or women." The first recorded nser in 1885 of the
term was James William Redhouse (1811-1923), a pioneer in Turkish
lexicography, who "made a few remarks with reference to a paper he has
prepared for the Journal of the Society . . . '[o]n Matriarchy, or Mother
Right.'" The above description in the OED omitted a phrase, "in the reply
to the views of Prof. E. B. Tylor." Although the word is found neither in
his Primitive Culture (1871) nor his Anthropology: An Introduction to the
Study of Man and Civilization (1881), it was thought to appear in the
anthropological debate led by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) on a
social organisation that was based upon the familial supremacy of the
mother in the middle of the 1880s. Wilde had never explicitly used the
 The Dramatist as Historian 133

term, but we notice the recognition of the concept of "a matriarchy" in his
earliest essay "The Rise of Historical Criticism" (1879).

[T]c take one instance, which bears a good deal on modern questions, we
find in the works of this great traveller [Herodotus] the gradual and
progressive steps in the development of the Family Life clearly manifested
in the mere gregarious herding together of the Agathyrsi, their primitive
kinsmanship through women common, ... and the rise of a feeling of
paternity from a state of polyandry ... a tribe stood at that time on that
borderland between umbilical relationship and the Family which has been
such a difficult point for modem anthropologists to solve. (2007, 21-22)

In the phrase of "their primitive kinsmanship through women common,

and the rise of a feeling of paternity from a state of polyandry," Wilde
indicates a historical development from a matriarchal society to a
patriarchal one.
In the saroe article, arguing for the emergence and development in
Greek thought of historical criticism with an awareness of scientific
methodology based upon rational grounds, Wilde positioned Aristotle as a
great thinker of "nature, including the development of man" (32) or "the
gradual and rational evolutiou of the iuevitable results of certaio
antecedeuts" (32). His frequeut use of the words, uaroely, "development"
and "evolution," could have derived from his knowledge of scientific
evolutionism supported by Herbert Spencer (1820--1903) and Thomas
Huxley (1825-95), as David Clifford and others have pointed out.
However, we need to consider another scholarly discipline that specifically
stresses the progress of social institutions.
As George W. Stocking Jr pointed out in Victorian Anthropology
(172), "development" and "evolution" were similar keywords for early
British anthropologists including Tylor, John Ferguson McLennan (1827-
81), and John Lubbock (1834--1913), who were all influenced by Ancient
Law (1861) by Henry Jaroes Maine (1822-88) as well as On the Origin of
Species (1859) by Charles Darwin (1809-82), who later published his
anthropological work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
Sex (1871).
As the above cited passage suggests, Wilde shared an interest in "the
development of the Family Life" and the idea of "primitive kinsmanship
through women in common" with contemporary anthropologists:

Another important question respects the universality of kinship through

females only. The strong a priori presumptions in favour of that, as the
most archaic system of kinship, backed by so much evidence as we have
been able to adduce, seem to us satisfactorily to establish the position
134 Chapter Nine

which we have taken up. On the other hand, much labour and investigation
will yet be needed to show clearly that that kinship was not merely a
concomitant of exogamy and polyandry, should cases occur in which it
must be held that neither polyandry nor exogamy was primitive custom.
Assuming the universality of that kinship, the question remains: What were
the stages of development of the family system, founded on the principle of
agnation, as at Rome? Some of these questions we have grappled with; at
others we have done little more than glance. (1865, 289-90)

In the conclusion of Primitive Marriage (1865), McLennan also explored

the problem of ''the stages of development of the family system" while
arguing "the universality of kinship through females only." In their
examination of the social institution of marriage and family as a historical
construct, there emerged the significance of familial kinship among
females and multiple forms of marriage including "exogamy" and
"polyandry":

On the whole however, for I have quoted these two instances to show the
unscientific character of early philology],'] we may say that this important
instrument in recreating the history of the past was not really used by the
ancients as a means of Historical criticism. Nor did the ancients employ
that other method, used to such advantage in our own day by which in the
symbolism and formulas of an advanced civilization we can detect the
unconscious survival of ancient customs: for where. as in the sham capture
of the bride at a marriage feast, which was common in Wales tin a recent
time, we can discern the lingering reminiscence of the barbarous habit of
exogamy [emphasis added], the ancient writers saw only the deliberate
commemoration of an historical event. (2007, 23)

In ''The Rise of Historical Criticism," Wilde referred to Tylor's ideas,

particularly the methodology underlying works such as Primitive Culture
(311 -12). However, in his work, Tylor never used "exogamy," a word
meaning the custom by which a man is bound to take a wife outside his
own clan or group. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us the early usages
of the word in Primitive Marriage by McLennan and On the Origin of
Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870) by Lubbock, while
we can fmd in the seventeenth century examples of the word "polyandry,"
which means a form of polygamy in which one woman has two or more
husbands or male sexual partn~rs at the same time. The neology also
indicates that Wilde was well versed in not only Tylor's prominent work
but also the broader context of Victorian anthropology.
In another part of the essay, we find the names of these few
anthropologists:
 The Dramatist as Historian 135

And indeed as regards the working of the speculative faculty in the

creation of history. it is in all respects marvellous how that the most
truthful accounts of the passage from barbarism to civilisation in ancient
literature come from the works of poets. The elaborate researches of Mr
Taylor and Sir John Lubbock have done little more than verify the theories
put forward in the Bound Prometheus and the De Natura Rerum. Yet
neither JEschylus nor Lucretia.'> followed in the modern path, but rather
attained to truth by a certain almost mystic power of creative imagination,
such as we now seek to banish from science as a dangerous power, though to
it science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities. (2007, 27)

A note in the newest Complete Works identifies "Mr Taylor and Sir John
Lubbock" as astronomers, Thomas Granville Taylor (1804-48), and Sir
John William Lubbock (1803-65) (2007, 317). Considering the author's
intellectual interest, we think the identifications were incorrect and "Mr
Taylor" is, in fact, a misprint of "Mr Tylor." Our alternative identification
is justified by the juxtaposition of Lucretius and Tylor in Wilde's Oxford
Notebooks (1989, 130).
It is sure that Wilde read neither Das Mutterrecht (1861) by Johann
Jakob Bachofen (1815-87) nor Der Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884) by Friedrich Engels (1820-95),
whose influences were pervasive, spreading the idea of the historical
significance of matriarchy. However, he could have received Bachofen's
idea of "Mutterrccht" through his readings of English contemporary
anthropologists.

Bachofen, M'Lennan, and Morgan, the most recent authors who have
studied this subject, all agree that the primitive condition of man, socially,
was one in which marriage did not exist, or, as we may perhaps for
convenience call it, of communal marriage, where all the men and women
in a small community were regarded as equally married to one another.
Bachofen considers that after a while the women, shocked and scandalised
by such a state of things, revolted against it, and established a system of
marriage with female supremacy, the husband being subject to the wife,
property and descent being considered to go in the female line. and women
enjoying the principal share of political power. The first period he calls that
of 'Hetairism", the second of 'Mutterrecht', or 'mother-right.' In the third
stage he considers that the ethereal influence of the father prevailed over
the more material idea of motherhood. Men claimed pre-eminence,
property and descent were traced in the male line, sun worship superseded
moon worship, and many other changes in social organisation took place
-mainly because it came to be recognised that the creative influence of
the father was more important than the material tie of motherhood. The
father, in fact, was the author of life, the mother a mere nurse. ([1870]
1882, 98-99)
136 Chapter Nine

In On the Origin of Civilization, paraphrasing Bachofen's "Mutterrecht,"

Lubbock described the gradual process from the first stage without
marriage to the last patriarchal one, a framework in which the second stage
is interposed with "a system of marriage with female supremacy, the
husband being subject to the wife, property and descent being considered
to go in the female line, and women enjoying the principal share of
political power." This English anthropological work could have been one
source from which Wilde drew his clear understanding of the academic
concept of "matriarchy." In his comedies, he represented the predicaments
of upper class families from the viewpoint of relativised patriarchal social
systems because he had obtained this historically-derived conceptual
knowledge about "a system of marriage with female supremacy."

IV
We have argued that the social idea of modem "matriarchy." evident in
Wilde's comedies, could have originated from his earlier anthropological
interests. We need to add that, as the cited passages suggest, he eventually
evaluated that the achievements of classical philosophers and historians
rather than those of anthropologists, including Tylor and Lubbock;
philosophers or poets, such as Locretias, "attained to truth by a certain
almost mystic power of creative imagination" (2007, 27), which
anthropology as science had banished as a dangerous influence. However,
he did not oppose "poetry" to "science." As the additional clause "though
to it [poetry] science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities"
(ibid., 27) indicates, the problem was that scientific discourse had ignored
the significance of the "mystic power of creative imagination" even if
splendid results could be built upon it.
In his plays, Wilde did not reject anthropological viewpoints but
applied the objective methodology thoroughly to the observation of
contemporary upper class society. He created characters as representative
types belonging to the established social classes, which he had been
watching in detail. His fictional world could be called meta-
anthropological, because the characters themselves do not stop relating
observations of characteristics about certain contemporary human groups:
"men," "women," "girls," "bachelors:' and so 00.

ALGERNON. Lane's views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really. if the

lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
(2008,254)
 The Dramatist as Historian 137

MRS CHEVELEY. So do 1. Fathers have so much to learn from their sons

nowadays.
LADY MARKBY. Really, dear? What?
MRS CHEVELEY. The art of living. The only really Fine Art we have
produced in modem times. (ibid., 207)

In the former citation from The Importance of Being Earnest, "the lower
orders" are regarded as people who should teach the upper classes a
paraduxicallesson of amorality, while in the latter citation from An Ideal
Husband, "[flathers" are considered to be a collective who will learn the
"art of liviug" frum "sons." Although we might be attracted to the
surprising rhetoric of inversion, we should focus on the author's
observation demarcating the latest traits common to every social group. In
Wilde's comedies, the high society of London was not a local arena
habited by extraordinary human beings but a microcosm of contemporary
British society. His methodological vision of "society" was based on "the
conception of a society as a sort of human organism whose parts are
indissolubly connected with one another and all affected when one
member is in any way agitated" (2007, 51). In not indifferent but equally
affective relationship between "[flathers" and "sons," which could result
in inverted moral lessons, male succession turns into a formality, while
wumen become highly "commercial."

LADY CAROLINE. In that case, Lady Stutfield, they shonld he married

off in a week to some plain respectable girl, in order to teach them not to
meddle with other people's property.
MRS ALLONBY. I don't think that we should ever be spoken of as other
people's property. All men are married women's property. That is the only
true definition of what married women's property really is. But we don't
helong to anyone. (2008, 113-14)

One of the most outstanding characteristics of modem society conceived

of by Wilde was how freely women talked about "property," as the above
conversation in A Woman of No Importance exemplifies. The phenomenon
emerged afrer the enforcement of the Married Women's Property Act
(1882). It was not only the legally defined social framework that
transformed the mores of women.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, when Jack tells Lady Bracknell,
whose daughter is his beloved, that his chief income is derived from not
land but investments, she says, "That is satisfactory. What between the
duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from
one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure"
(2008, 265). In the late Victorian Britain, the English aristocracy had
 138 Chapter Nine

become increasingly dependent on financial income rather than landed

interests. Although the value of land itself dwindled as an asset,
landowners as a wealthy class survived surprisiugly well "because their
scope for diverting resources into non-landed wealth was more extensive"
than lesser landowners (Harris 1994. 104). This socioeconomic change
undermined a traditional power structure based on the indivisible
inheritance of landed property, which was necessarily associated with
patriarchal political power.
Wilde defines his contemporary "matriarchy" as a social system of
surviving aristocracy in which women easily control finances as a source
of power. As we have discussed, Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan
and Mrs Arbuthnot in A Woman of No Importance epitomise female
characters that make use of financial power. In An Ideal Husband, Mrs
Cheveley, who is similarly well acquainted with monetary matters, has
insights into Lord Chiltem's past intrigue. Yet, she finally decides to gain
not an amount of money but the status of ladyship as Lord Goring's wife,
the eldest son of a wealthy upper class family. However, by the play's
ending, her ambition fails, with Lord Chiltern rather advancing his
political career with the support of his wife as well as Lord Goring, who is
happily married to Mabel Chiltern, the statesman's younger sister. In this
play, matriarchal power disappears in the following simplified divisions of
femininity: a good woman who supports the male-centred social system
and a bad woman who hopes to capitalise on the patriarchal structure and
is consequently excluded from it. Both types of women serve a function in
the established system of patriarchy. By his heroic speech in the
parliament, Lord Chiltern succeeds in preventing the British government
from investing in the development scheme of a canal, which could
establish a global trading network. The author appears to evince the
supremacy of traditional political power over the international commercial
and trading project, from which Mrs Cheveley intends to make profits.
We can discern the author's progress from a constative representation
of the contemporary trends of matriarchy in his earlier two comedies to a
performative construction of the conservative patriarchal framework in his
later two plays. In the last play, The Importance of Being Earnest, the
narrations by the characters staging the fictional personalities of Bunbury
and Ernest are interfused into the acting constitution of the real world
where the fantastically constructed world results in the realisation of ideal
marriages and the recovery of male lines of succession: Jack Worthing
proves to be the son of the late Ernest Moncrieff and the elder brother of
Algernon, whose real name is Ernest, to which his beloved attaches
importance.
 The Dramatist as Historian 139

The playful plot reveals not so much the positive substructure of strong
matriarchy as the negative substructure of weak patriarchy. The loquacious
figure of Lady Bracknell, who seems to be the authority in the matriarchal
modem society, elucidates rather the absence of Lord Bracknell. Jack and
Algernon's frivolous lives as celibates are distinguished by their father's
absence. In terms of family, the Bracknells have no son, while the
Muncrieffs have a yuunger son who has provisionally taken the position of
the lost eldest son. The precarious situation of male inheritance at the time
was based upon the desire for the preservatiou of the family name, which
is transfigured in this play into the strange passions for the same first name
among young females and the jesting stories about the fictional brothers
among young men. The potential anxiety submerged under their light and
merry communications is removed completely when Jack, as Ernest,
recovers his position as the eldest son of the Moncrieffs and gains his
inheritance rights as the male successor of Goring. Thus, the patriarchal
structure of traditional inheritance is expected to be sustained, but as a
vacuous, opulent socioeconomic framework based on playful contingency.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde portrays the characters not
as wilful individuals, such as Lady Windermere, but as typical objectives
determined in a specific historical context. Avoiding psychological and
subjective descriptions of them, he succeeds in spotlighting the social
background that could activate the tradition of English aristocracy. By
applying the objective and scientific methodology of anthropology in his
four plays, Wilde attained a certain form of historiography of the
contemporary society. His role of dramatist as a historian was prefigured
in ''The Rise of Historical Criticism." He contrasted the role of the ideal
philosopher with that of the ideal historian:

[F]or the one [the ideal philosopher] stands aloof from the world storm of
sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and sunlit heights, loving
knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and wisdom for the joy of wisdom.
While the other [the ideal historian] is an eager actor in the world, ever
seeking to apply his knowledge to useful things. Both equally desire truth.
but the one because of its utility, the other for its beauty. The Historian
regards it as the rational principle of aU true history-and no more. To the
other it comes as an all pervading and mystic enthusiasm, 'like the desire
of strong wine, the craving of ambition, the passionate love of what is
beautiful.' (2007,59)

The historian should be "an actor in the world" who will always examine
the truth in contemporary and practical situations, while the philosopher is
an enthusiast who would pursue his own ideal truth and beauty beyond the
 140 Chapter Nine

current of the times. The "actor" might have a theatrical connotation as

Wilde used words and phrases about drama in other parts of the essay.

Now as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian being

contemporary with the events he describes [,J so far as the historian is a
mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true. But to appreciate the
harmony and rational position of the facts of a great epoch, to discover its
laws. the causes which produced it and the effects which it generates, the
scene must be viewed from a certain height and distance to be completely
apprehended. (Ibid., 57-58)

When he narrates actual events, the historian has to witness them at the
closest point. At the same time, he needs to distance himself from the
materials as a manager or a director positioning himself to oversee the
"scenes." Wilde seemed to consider the ideal historian as an actor and
manager, eminent examples of which embellished his contemporary
theatrical world. In constructing his ideal of history by modelling the
works of familiar talents including Irving, George Alexander, Herbert
Beerbohm Tree, and others, Wilde desired to be a playwright
incorporating the perspectives of an actor and manager. He did not fail to
underline the privilege of a dramatist: to create fictitious speeches.

Upon the other hand it must be borne in mind that these speeches were not
intended to deceive. They were merely regarded as a certain dramatic
element which it was allowable to introduce into history for the purpose of
giving more life and reality to the narration, and were to be criticised not as
we should, by arguing how in an age before short hand was known such a
report was possible or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition
could bring down such an accurate verbal account. but by the higher test of
their psychological probability as regards the persons in whose mouths
they are placed. (Ibid., 56)

When Wilde emphasised the function of truthful fictitious speeches as "a

dramatic element," he identified historiography with dramaturgy. He could
realise his ideal task as a historian by writing comedies, in which an
apparently imaginary world interwoven by various characters' speeches
could epitomise the historicity of contemporary English society. The seeds
of scholarly knowledge that he had sown in his young Dublin and Oxford
days blossomed splendidly, nourished by the culturally rich soil of the
theatrical world in the late Victorian London.
 The Dramatist as Historian 141

v
Wilde's four comedies written just before his imprisomnent have been
appreciatedas not only his masterpieces but also brilliant achievements
from the heyday of the Victorian theatre. True, they have ample theatrical
fascinationin their plots and lines. Yet, his maturity of literary technique is
magnified by his insightful sociocultural vision of the historical
transformationof the crisis evident in the existing "patriarchal" social
systemand the rise of the "matriarchal" system, which originated in his
earlier study of history, philosophy, and especially anthropology, the
newest science at that time. Thanks to his scientific recognition, he
conceivedthat women could change the English social constitution that
was traditionally based on inherited estates by deploying their own
financial power. Furthermore, he constructed as microhistories his vivid
plays, in which he featured several possible male and female types.
Nineteenth-centuryBritain, whose social figurations was delineated at the
startin both Walter Scott's historical novels and in Jane Austen's domestic
novels, closed appropriately with Wilde's dramas, which could convey
historically the specific realities through detailed descriptions of people
that were mutually connected in society.

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