Oscar Wilde as dandy has become by now a familiar theme, both in biographies and in criticism of his plays. “The Divided Self in the Society Comedies of Oscar Wilde,”^[1] by Arthur Ganz, is the first of two essays by Ganz and several pieces by other contemporary critics on this important subject. In fact, Ganz is writing centrally about The Importance of Being Earnest as well as about the three society comedies. The great difference between the society comedies and The Importance, in Ganz’s view, is that the society comedies contain two worlds, set off in contradistinction to one another—the Philistine and the dandiacal—whereas The Importance is set fully and solely in the latter. In order to achieve the unity of this play, Ganz argues, Wilde had to suppress “half his nature.” That other half may be discovered in the Philistine world of the society comedies.

That world is one of sentimental plots, in which ladies with mysterious pasts make commanding speeches and where “fates of empires hang on intercepted letters and stolen bracelets.” In opposition to that world the members of the dandiacal world are witty, elegant persons tossing off Wildean epigrams but taking scant interest in the action going on about them. Each of the three plays contains a crucial character, the woman with a past. And in each, Wilde arranges for the redemption of that woman. Ganz sees reflected in her Wilde’s own homosexuality; she shares with him the secret situation “forced upon Wilde” and so benefits from “the plea for acceptance and forgiveness” that ultimately emerges through the character who has most to learn. Ganz cites the contemporary French critic Robert Merle’s study of Wilde, who suggests this point, but who also makes the strongest case for Mrs Arbuthnot, the mother in A Woman of No Importance, because “her sin, like his, is sexual.”^[2] Ganz goes on to show how the three crucial characters in each of the three plays are dramaturgically parallel, though An Ideal Husband introduces a variation, in which Mrs Chevely is made the villainess, Sir Robert Chiltern is the sinner who must be pardoned, and the Puritan who must undergo conversion is his wife. As for Lord Goring, he is at the last the mess­enger of love and forgiveness.

At this point Ganz reminds us that his subject is the Wildean divided self, and that the Philistine and dandiacal worlds in conflict in the three society plays are a reflection and indeed are “deeply expressive of the isolation of an artist and an individual man.” Providing a coherent summary of the evolution of the dandy and the theory of dandyism as a philosophy of life, Ganz explains how symp­athetic dandyism was for Wilde and how it underlay his individualism and its first condition of absolute freedom. He reviews this value as it emerges in the three comedies, including in the character of Mrs Allonby, who like the dandy seeks out of life “a series of exquisite sensations to enjoy.” Ganz proceeds with a convincing exposition of how the dandy makes his (or her) way through the treachery and tedium of the Philistine world, representing “the dominance of aesthetic form,” but he emerges there also in the person of the Wildean Philistine, the exiled artist who has sinned and seeks forgiveness for rejecting the mores of society. Still uncorrupted at heart, he may beg society “for pardon and acceptance”; and yet, speaking contradictorily as his dandiacal self, he can still disdain that society, demanding absolute freedom for self-expression. The existence of evil and good are a phantasm; the only realities are “ugliness and beauty.” Ganz believes that Wilde never thought through, never realized how persistent and significant this pattern had proved to be in his plays. Perhaps he never realized as well that only in The Importance of Being Earnest did he overcome the pattern and produce “a work of pure dandysm.”^[3]

Ganz’s interest in Wilde’s dandyism continues in a sequel, “The Meaning of The Importance of Being Earnest.”^[4] In pursuit of dandyism as a philosophy of life, Ganz traces its development from the Romantic age—Brummel, Byron, d’Orsay, Disraeli, and the two writers whom Wilde had read carefully for this idea, Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire. Wilde was certainly aware of the historical aura attendant on dandyism, framed most explicitly by Baudelaire in Le peintre de la vie moderne, as the exercise of heroism in an age past its prime. Dandyism, as both Baudelaire and Wilde understood it, was no mere affectation of elegant dress; these things were mere symbols for the cultivation of originality, of individ­ualism. Dandyism is the expression of an attitude hostile toward the society one lives in, an “effete and unworthy age.” Baudelaire even went so far as to consider dandyism “a sort of religion.”^[5]

Without directly referencing it Ganz looks back to his earlier article in College English, where he describes the conflict of two separate worlds, Philistine and dandiacal, in the social comedies—Philistine being a world, though often spoken of, entirely absent from The Importance of Being Earnest. Satire is broadly present in this play, but Wilde makes an important distinction between satire and dandyism. To take one example, “Where the satirist makes fun of the abuses of marriage, the Dandy criticizes the institution itself.” Second-rate champagne in married households is a sign of the demoralizing condition of marriage. Lady Bracknell, arch-Philistine that she is, nonetheless imitates Algernon’s dandiacal point of view on more than one occasion. She visits the newly widowed Lady Harbury and finds her greatly changed: “she looks quite twenty years younger.” Doctor Chasuble takes the same point of view, including himself in the list of a human kind full of faults: he admits he is “very susceptible to draughts.” These characters, and most of the others, as Ganz proceeds to show us through pointed quotation from the play, are “dandies by indirection.” Ordinary morality whenever it appears “is made to seem ridiculous.”

An additional way in which the play invites analysis for its dandiacal qualities is the manner in which it prizes sensation, the more unusual and original the better, for its own sake. When Algernon, masquerading as Jack’s younger brother Ernest, is about to appear to Cecily, she expresses her fear that this reputedly wicked person will look just like anyone else. When Algernon enters, “very gay and debonair,” she disappointedly exclaims “He does!” Still more important than sensation to the dandy, an idea evidently derived from Pater and his famous conclusion to The Renaissance, is “the superiority of aesthetic form.” One finds this, in perhaps the single best example of the notion, in Gwendolen’s statement, “In matters of grave importance, style not sincerity is the vital thing.” It is an attitude deeply and influentially present throughout the play. (A memorable example from another play, An Ideal Husband, is the butler Phipps, who, Wilde explains in a stage direction, “represents the dominance of form”).^[6]

And so it is this “absolute faith in pure aesthetic form . . . that makes the Wildean dandy unique,” Ganz explains, and so makes the play itself unique:

It stands alone among English comedies, not only because of the quality of its wit, but because it is an expression of Wilde’s theories and attitudes, and no other writer has approached the theater with a comparable point of view. It stands alone among Wilde’s plays because the dandiacal element in The Importance, unlike that in the society comedies, is not in open conflict with a Philistine element and limited to its own sections of the play, but appears everywhere and makes of the entire work a kind of dandiacal utopia, a world of perfect form.

Ganz feels concerned that he will seem to have been arguing for Wilde’s play as a piece of disguised art criticism. And yet it remains true, he asserts, that art was at the center of Wilde’s life, and almost everything he wrote was in a sense “disguised art criticism.” A reader might add that he maintained this dandiacal attitude even in—perhaps especially in—his trials, where he maintained that books are not moral or immoral; they are either well-written or badly written. That is all.^[7]This, says Ganz, made him “the supreme example of the critic as artist.”^[8]

Several other articles emerge in the 1960s making complementary claims to interest. E. B. Partridge, in “The Importance of Not Being Earnest,”^[9] attempts to define the function of wit in the play, to show how it combines a “unique fusion of wit, nonsense, parody, and burlesque.”^[10] Three years later, Harold E. Toliver, reviewing Ganz’s and other recently published articles, argued for a superior understanding of Wilde’s play, in “Wilde and the Importance of ‘Sincere and studied triviality’.”^[11] Toliver’s title and his subject itself derive from a remark Wilde made to a journalist, explaining that his play “is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy,” but that it has its philosophy: “that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”^[12] Tolliver’s article follows a delightful arc of analysis showing that Wilde’s philosophy is simultaneously, and paradoxically, trivial and serious. Again and again, in a series of easily accessible examples, he shows the truth of Wilde’s statement, even while persuading the reader that true earnestness, as the title will have it, may be achieved only with a proper perception on the part of the audience that this “delicate bubble of fancy,” by its very nature a burlesque of all that is serious, shows us how to take seriously that it is style (as Gwendolen insists), not seriousness, that is the vital thing. Toliver’s article could not survive the seriousness of its subject were it not for the playful tone that characterizes it throughout. Not all articles whose intention is to explain the wit, the humor, the comedy of Wilde’s play have been astute enough, as has Toliver’s, to escape an unfortunate overbalance of sincerity.

In the same year of 1963 the British Council published a revised edition of James Laver’s notable overview, Oscar Wilde, as much as anything else a reconsideration of Wilde’s swiftly recovering reputation.^[13]An elegant and wide-ranging but flawed survey of Wilde’s life and writings, Laver’s account devotes major attention to The Picture of Dorian Gray and what he characterizes as a kind of aftermath, in Wilde’s fateful meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas and all that followed. Confronting what he views as a central issue raised by this book, which bears an “unimpeachable” moral but whose tone, indeed whose “whole mental climate,” is “quite otherwise,” Laver uses Dorian Gray to identify the theme of homosexuality in Wilde’s life, and concludes that he was bisexual, of which his marriage and the birth of two sons provides, in Laver’s view, “sufficient proof.”^[14] Laver proceeds to link together the burgeoning success of Wilde’s career beginning in 1891 and Wilde’s meeting with Douglas. It was Douglas, in Laver’s view, against whom the most serious charge was not that he moved the elder man to waste his money but that he wasted his time. Yet it may have been Douglas also who “forced Wilde to try his hand at that literary form which was . . . the only way in which a writer can make money quickly; the theatre.” Laver makes it sound as if Douglas was the prime motive force for Wilde’s astonishing success on the West End stage. When Laver comes to the series of trials that eventually brought about Wilde’s downfall, he explains that times have changed since then; most people now “are familiar with the idea of sexual inversion” and understand that it is “rather the concern of the psychiatrists than of the lawyers.”^[15]

Laver’s views of the subject of homosexuality, now a half-century old and evidently dated, are perhaps best taken as an early recognition of a subject urgently in need of a clearer, more enlightened approach. A further question arises about his views of the plays themselves. Laver sees the first three major plays as “artificial” (there is no mention of Salomé), but The Importance of Being Earnest “soared beyond artificiality into the realms of fantasy.” Paradoxically, the play is more “naturalistic” than its predecessors: there are “no set speeches, no asides,^[16] no ‘strong’ scenes, no ‘curtains’” It would seem that Laver underestimates how close Wilde’s last play comes to features of nineteenth-century farce and melodrama that it so expertly parodies, or mocks through calculated omission. All the same, Laver offers interesting insight into the relationship between character and wit in Wilde’s play. As in the case of Lady Bracknell—”a real creation,” a “late Victorian grande dame”—the wit “is not merely attached to the characters; it flows out of the situations,” bespeaking a unified effect on a delighted audience by a work “still as fresh and amusing now as when it was first written.”^[17]

In the same year, W. H. Auden brought out a long, thoughtful review and summary of Wilde’s life, on the occasion of the publication of a superb edition of his letters by the English publisher and scholar Rupert Hart-Davis.^[18] With space for only a single paragraph on The Importance of Being Earnest, Auden brought real understanding to Wilde’s play:

Wilde succeeded—almost, it would seem, by accident, for he never realized its infinite superiority to all his other plays—in writing what is perhaps the only pure verbal opera in English. The solution that, deliberately or accidentally, he found was to subordinate every other dramatic element to dialogue for its own sake and create a verbal universe in which the characters are determined by the kinds of things they say, and the plot is nothing but a succession of opportunities to say them. Like all works of art, it drew its sustenance from life, and, speaking for myself, whenever I see or read the play I always wish I did not know what I do about Wilde’s life at the time he was writing it—that when, for instance, John Worthing talks of going Bunburying, I did not immediately visualize Alfred Taylor’s establishment. On rereading it after his release, Wilde said, “it was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that Tiger Life.” At its conclusion, I find myself imagining a sort of nightmare Pantomime Transformation Scene in which, at the touch of the magician’s wand, instead of the workaday world’s turning into fairyland, the country house in a never-never Hertfordshire turns into the Old Bailey, the features of Lady Bracknell into those of Mr Justice Wills. Still, it is a masterpiece, and on account of it Wilde will always enjoy the impersonal fame of an artist as well as the notoriety of his personal legend.^[19]

There are few such perspectives on Wilde and his writings that give pride of place to neither the artist nor the play, but instead manage to encapsulate the permanently fraught relationship between the two.

By the 1960s publication in paperback was becoming an ever-increasing and relatively inexpensive way of presenting classics to the public. Wilde’s play was no exception. An “authoritative text version” with appropriate ancillary material was brought out in 1965 by Avon Books, edited by the New York drama critic Henry Popkin.^[20] Like many other texts published for popular consumption, Popkin’s was not based on the first edition of 1899 but rather on the Methuen edition of 1908, edited by Robert Ross, and its many presumable successors, all of which may be easily distinguished by a prominent textual variant concerning the crucial fact about Jack’s parentage.^[21]

Popkin’s Introduction, briefly yet broadly characterizing Wilde’s play in several significant contexts, historical and otherwise, also calls attention to advances in the last decade in our knowledge of textual matters: the discovery by Wilde’s younger son Vyvyan Holland of a German translation of the play, Ernst Sein! (1957) and the publication by the New York Public Library the year before of facsimile texts of early holograph and typescript versions of an existing four-act predecessor of the three-act play everyone knows.^[22] Popkin’s publisher evidently allowed him to expand the compass of his edition, surrounding the text of the play with transcribed excerpts from the Public Library facsimile versions and relevant excerpts from the letters, and augmented by commentaries by Shaw, Beerbohm, Hankin, and Agate, excerpted from their reviews of the first production (Shaw), the 1902 revival (Beerbohm), the first collected edition of 1908 (Hankin), and (although tonally much different) Agate’s 1947 denigration of the man and the writer.^[23] For all of the book’s diminutive size and modest appearance, Popkin’s notion of the proper way to offer the text of a classic farcical comedy to a modern audience and readership while simultaneously providing additional material to help understand and appreciate it set a new, enlightened standard for how to approach the needs and interests of what might be seen generally as a mass market readership—or perhaps a subset of school and college students who might be more attracted than put off by being told that what they were about to read was the “authoritative text version” of a famous work by a controversial author. Evidently, even by the mid-1960s, the range of attraction of such an author as Oscar Wilde—perhaps more so than almost any other author—was great, and striking.^[24]

At the same time, Wilde’s play was attracting thoughtful essayists who could offer sophisticated insights into the form, meaning, and aesthetic bearings of a farce that had evidently reached a very wide theatrical audience and readership. In 1966 the Sewanee Review, a highly regarded literary journal, published “Comedy and Oscar Wilde,” by Ian Gregor, one of the most valuable and interesting pieces to date.^[25] Unusually well written, and with a title that perhaps deliberately overgeneralizes its coverage, Gregor’s essay proves to be a deep, cogent piece about Wilde as a dandiacal playwright who includes a series of dandies as characters in his four major comedies and mounts a series of attempts to use their dramatic presence “to resolve a particular clash between manners and morals, between style and content, between the author and his characters.”^[26] The central problem Wilde was addressing, Gregor argues, was the specific one of “finding a world fit for the dandy to live in.”

The role of the dandy in Wilde’s four comedies—Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance (1893), Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband (1895), and John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—is “largely defined by his alienation,” Gregor explains. He refers not only to the dandy’s social alienation but to a fundamental kind of dramatic alienation, realized to the extent that he is shown to be “self-consciously static” and so to exist largely outside the action of the play. Of course, he cannot exist completely outside it, and so his position is compromised, to the extent that he becomes involved in the plot and proves to be an agent either for good (Darlington, Goring) or ill (Illingworth). It is fascinating to follow Gregor’s skillful close reading of each play in turn, exposing the details of the compromise. Illingworth’s is probably the greatest, insofar as Wilde uses him ever more as an agent of the machinations of the plot, deserting him as a meaningful dandy and thinking of him “in the wicked role in which he has cast him.” Indeed, the more Illingworth becomes enmeshed in the plot, “the less Wilde cares about what he says.” And so, as he departs, in the last act, leaving Mrs Arbuthnot behind, he descends into “all the clichés of phrase and attitude of the stock-in-trade villain,” capped by Wilde’s even greater retreat into the melodramatic scene, in which Mrs Arbuthnot strikes Illingworth across the face with his glove. We may see from this how divisive it is for Wilde to bring his play to an ending in which he reveals how little his attention is engaged with the moral questions that the plot seems genuinely to raise. In this play the dandy, from the beginning a faithless lover, has been “degraded into a melodramatic villain.”^[27]

Wilde achieves greater success maintaining his dandy as a semi-reclusive, static individual in his next comedy, An Ideal Husband. Lord Goring is, Gregor argues, a much more satisfactory portrait of a dandy, unconfused by the plot. And yet the plot itself presents significant limitations, in this play of political intrigue in which Goring turns out to effect two decisive actions. His first action is to expose the treacherous Mrs Cheveley’s plans for blackmail—an action having nothing to do with Wilde’s characterization of him as “the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.” His second accomplishment is to persuade Lady Chiltern to allow her husband to remain in public life and to accept the cabinet post that he surely deserves. And so Wilde has finally found in Goring a dramatic voice for himself—but has not succeeded in constructing a world where that voice can have a truly “appropriate dramatic effect.”^[28]

One sees at this point where Gregor’s argument is aimed, and one appreciates the ingenious strategy in which he shows that Wilde has now reached the point at which he is able to realize that the dandy’s mastery of the world can occur only in “a world of his own making”:

Only in a world of dandies will his voice and actions become harmonious: a world where the categories of serious and frivolous will no longer apply, where every character can speak like the author and the author like every character, where everything that can be seen is harmonious and there is nothing that cannot be seen. The dandy can exist fully only in a world of idyll, of pure play.

Gregor now proceeds to a long final section in which he comments closely on the way Wilde makes a very pleasing, satisfying, and “completely realized” idyll in the form of his last play.^[29] There is no useful summary that might take the place of reading Gregor’s happy account of Wilde’s brilliant dramaturgy here. Gregor’s essay, unlike many written as independent attempts to capture the real essence of Wilde’s play, has sustained itself over time and remains one of the most perennially useful and satisfying approaches, accessible to undergraduate students as well as to the most sophisticated and experienced of readers.

Two years after Popkin was attracting a growing audience with an expanded presentation of Wilde’s classic play, an ambitious, well-timed study of virtually Wilde’s entire oeuvre appeared. Entitled The Art of Oscar Wilde, by Epifanio San Juan, Jr, it attempted to take the measure of important cultural and literary change while drawing close attention to the character of Wilde’s writing. San Juan is aware that at the present time “antithetical features” exist side by side in it, creating “a massive and complex structure of dispositions, attitudes, and values which defy any simple categorical accounting.”^[30] In the context of a concise yet wide-ranging introductory survey of earlier and recent writing about the late Victorians, a needed revaluation of Wilde’s works appears to San Juan to indicate that “continuing vitality and cogency” lie nowhere else except in the “moral discriminations” Wilde imposed on his subjects. This is so regardless of genre, San Juan contends. If it seems a considerable stretch to include in this revaluation a trivial farcical comedy such as The Importance of Being Earnest, to San Juan’s eye Wilde remains permanently preoccupied “with the human condition” as it coalesces around two themes: sin, and an experience of “doubt and dread arising from the clash between pagan appetite and Christian morality.”^[31] What is presently called for, then, above all, is “critical scrutiny of the individual works and an appreciation of the vision of truth embodied in forms which are significant and enduring.”^[32]

Taken in its turn is the last of the “comedies,” The Importance of Being Earnest, subjected by San Juan to an enlightened close reading which moves topically from idea to idea. Despite the unavoidable fact that the “unequalled farcical construction” of the play relies on premises that “beg for no serious consideration,” exhibiting a quasi-comic bravery San Juan proceeds in analyzing a plot made up of formulaic stock situations that work out the consequences of the sheer absurdity of a pair of female characters obsessed with marrying someone of the name of Ernest. The double meaning of the name and its homonym is developed incessantly, through to the end of the play and Jack’s concluding punning summary: “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” One detects a purposeful echo here from San Juan’s Introduction and its concern with “antithetical features” in Wilde’s works, which turns up almost everywhere in the play, as in the “twin brothers” motif, but overwhelmingly in verbal ironies, such as Miss Prism’s “The manuscript unfortunately was abandoned. I use the word in the sense of lost or mislaid.” The plot sequence is simple, San Juan asserts, for all the “constant digressions” and “fluent irrelevance of the dialogue,” whose “agility of pace” hides the playwright’s “skill of composition.” In fact, the alleged simplicity of the action (San Juan’s chapter is entitled “The Action of the Comedies”) undervalues his own emphasis on how the play, with almost mathematical precision, works out its tale of blithe mistaking, beginning with the governess’s fatal error, twenty-eight years before, in placing the manuscript of her three-volume novel in the bassinet and the baby in the handbag. Then, finally, when she is abjectly cornered by Lady Bracknell into confessing the truth of her unaccountable error, she somehow continues true to form, evincing no concern whatever for the mislaid baby but finding genuine delight in the restoration of the handbag.

Wilde’s double consciousness, his “bifocal vision,” captured again and again in his paradoxical epigrams, pervades the play, San Juan argues, achieving its function as “complex parody.” In this way, as exemplified centrally in Miss Prism’s language and behavior, the play attains a vital comic outlook on life and the world. San Juan sustains what amounts to a bravura piece through almost endless, precise quotation in support of a series of bright insights that carry the reader delightedly along. At a few junctures the author becomes overly rational in showing how the composition goes so perfectly together. In one example, when Miss Prism substitutes the baby for the manuscript in the handbag San Juan explains that “she commits an act that is the result of a disregard for the immediate and present actuality.”^[33] This seems too cold and calculating a way to describe the governess’s inexplicable failure to mind her business, nor does it acknowledge the patent absurdity that clings to all such fundamental farcical precedents. And yet Prism recognizes herself fully once again when, twenty-eight years later, she is asked to identify the bag. Those are her initials on the lock, she discovers: finally, a sure indication of her possession. She had placed them there “in an extravagant mood” (What? Miss Prism prey to an extravagant mood?)—an indelible mark of genuine human character that somehow rescues her and indemnifies her from the guilt and shame of her precipitating action.

In the end San Juan vindicates his ambitious goal to scrutinize Wilde’s writings at sustained close range while simultaneously setting them in a large historical continuum that extends for three-quarters of a century and more from the close of the Victorian era to San Juan’s own, greatly changed post-war time. That he seems to bring to the task the techniques of close reading common to the New Criticism of the period, now well entrenched, is more apparent than real, for he has articulated a well-developed, complex technique of his own, grounded in an incisive historical awareness that serves to place Oscar Wilde and his oeuvre at the forefront of contemporary views of literary worth. Compare San Juan’s book of 1967 with Edouard Roditi’s formally similar work of 1947 and one may realize the presence of an important example of flourishing Wildean criticism in the later twentieth century.