In the decade beginning around 1990, publication of criticism not only increased but became even broader and more comprehensive in subject matter and approach. For several years, perhaps longer, studies involving the subject of Wilde as a homosexual had been emerging into the mainstream of Wildean criticism. The summaries included in the present account do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this many-faceted, important activity, but instead have the more limited goal of examining representative instances of writing specific to The Importance of Being Earnest, along with references to related studies useful for context. What can be covered appropriately here may nevertheless ring true, consistent with what Richard Ellmann said about Wilde’s writing and his character itself when he was still at the early point of testing the waters of his new critical ideas: “for his own reasons and in his own way he laid the basis for many critical positions which are still debated in much the same terms, and which we like to attribute to more ponderous names.”^[1]

Several articles appearing within a few years of each other beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s pursue Wilde’s writings and in some cases The Importance of Being Earnest itself from a gay vantage point, often with substantial success. One realizes it would be no surprise to encounter an article that offers detailed exegeses of Teleny, said by many to have been written by Wilde, and of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed Cohen’s “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” which appeared in 1987,^[2] approaches both texts as among “the most lasting icons of male homoerotic desire,” advocating their recognition not simply as texts but “as contexts.” He concludes that pursuing this strategy to understand the two works has the larger advantage and aim of putting “male desire for other men into discourse,” so that the investigation of historical forms taken by male-to-male relations begins to open up an ever wider and more promising field.

Two years later Cohen followed suit himself with an important historical study of the subject,^[3] which he then applied more particularly, in a separate, subsequent article, to The Importance of Being Earnest. In “Laughing in Earnest: The Trying Context of Wilde’s ‘Trivial’ Comedy,”^[4] Cohen advances a concerted attempt to show how the trials that soon followed on the production of what would become Wilde’s last play “changed the meaning of his play by changing how the play could be made meaningful.”^[5] Initially, reviews of the play after its premiere on 14 February 1895 indicate how very amusing it was to a very large audience—the humor arising from complications ensuing from simultaneously invoking and violating “normative marriage codes.” Cohen brings into context feminist efforts to repeal a set of bills referred to collectively as the Contagious Diseases Acts, which they viewed as endorsing a double standard by allowing men to lead “double lives.” The C. D. Acts were at length repealed, but they led to the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, broadening the application of the law to “acts of gross indecency,” under which Wilde was eventually convicted, forcing the withdrawal of the two plays of his that were such great but short-lived successes (An Ideal Husband and Earnest).^[6] Cohen pursues this contextual interpretation by identifying the operative term in the play, “Bunburying,” as applicable to the double life Wilde himself was leading. One may plot his movements, Cohen explains, between “two morally over­determined locations,” the “Christian idealism” of the family home in Tite Street and the “pagan naturalism” of “the hotel rooms in which he received his male lovers.”

Cohen acknowledges that this admittedly anachronistic interpretation was not available at the time of the play’s opening. He cites A. B. Walkley’s review of the play and Walkley’s notion of the source of its amusement (the simultaneous response to the play as “absurd” and “natural”) as “whimsicality.” Cohen counters that Walkley’s insistence on what he believes Wilde is not doing exposes something that the author is or could be doing, ironizing ideologies that create contradictions. Cohen’s argument, detailed and complex, needs to be read carefully and pondered. He nevertheless is able to show that Edward Carson’s defense of the Marquess of Queensberry against the charge of criminal libel was to argue that Wilde’s texts taken as Art serve to single out the aesthetic “as a realm of social instability”; separated from the ideal of art as healthily influenced by morality, it becomes “simply a catalogue of degenerative pathology.” The consequence for such arguments in the courtroom was that the meaning of Wilde’s writings could be “evaluated in light of his transgressive sexual activities.”^[7] A long assessment of the verdict against Wilde in the next day’s Daily Telegraph clarified even further the ramifications of the judgment in the court of public opinion. Wilde had allegedly caused the greatest possible damage he could against the world at large, said the Telegraph, and not merely by his own reprehensible behavior. The verdict rendered the day before must be understood to include the tendency of Wilde’s entire career to embrace “those shallow and specious arts by which he and his like have attempted to establish a cult in our midst”:

The superfine “Art” which admits no moral duty and laughs at the established phrases of right and wrong is the visible enemy of those ties and bonds of society—the natural affections, the domestic joys, the sanctity and sweetness of the home. . . . A nation prospers and profits precisely by those national qualities which these innovators deride and abjure. It goes swiftly to wreck and decay by precisely that brilliant corruption of which we have just had the exposure and the demonstration.^[8]

Cohen perceives this condemnation of Wilde and his works as an embodiment of a new social context in which a “serious interpretation of Wilde’s verbal play occludes the levity that had facilitated its dissemination.” This new context brought home a fresh, threatening understanding of Wilde’s play, which now was perceived to be attacking “the domestic ideologies that many perceived to hold the Empire in place.”^[9]

Given the retrospective “contextual” views proposed by Cohen and other like-minded readers, a broader critical field was evidently now available, whether critics chose to explore it or not. In any case, it is clear that the greater availability of the journals in which contemporary criticism now sought to publish its views implicitly encouraged their readers to undertake wide research in order to discover how their own views might fall into the enlarged context of current critical writing.

A pair of articles published at about the same time as Cohen’s studies focuses directly on The Importance of Being Earnest from this increasingly salient point of view as propounded by Cohen and other contemporary writers. In “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest,”^[10] Christopher Craft perceives Wilde’s last play as “a self-consciously belated text,” arriving on the very edge of catastrophe. Craft describes the play as simultaneously two quite different, indeed opposite things, perhaps most succinctly summed up in the phrase “serious Bunburyism.” That is, it proves to be “a parodic submission to heterosexist teleology” in which Wilde submits his pairs of lovers to the “closure” of marital bliss, while at the same time it is by implication “a jubilant celebration of male homosexual desire.” Meanwhile it offers a devastating critique of a political idea emergent in the 1890s, that sexuality, whether inverted or not, could be “natural” or “unnatural” at all.^[11] To be sure, Craft acknowledges that Wilde’s fictional writings have consistently been “transparently heterosexual texts.” Praising two recent essays by Cohen and Dollimore,^[12] Craft explains that Cohen shows how Wilde explored strategies to express concerns not voiced within the dominant culture. In a parallel essay, Dollimore explicates the “transgressive power of the Wildean text” operating within structures of “legitimation and domination.”

Armed with this double perception of a play that is simultaneously two opposite things—only one of them perceivable to an ostensibly official heterosexual readership or audience—Craft conducts a long, brilliant analysis, not easily summarized, of what one of his sources calls “the social function of secrecy.”^[13] One of his most insightful explanations, under the general rubric of what he calls “Termination,” is the simultaneously cultural and linguistic conjoining of “ends” of various kinds. The term “Bunbury” enfolds an obscene homosexual pun. Lady Bracknell’s devastating comment about Jack’s being found at Victoria Station and so having an origin that was also a terminus adds value to the analysis. And the term “trivial,” as used in the subtitle of the play itself and frequently throughout the text, has an early meaning that refers to a place where three roads meet, and so becomes a terminus of a similar kind. The etymological appropriateness is quite charming. As Craft explains, “the trivial is the locus of a common or every day convergence: a site where paths (of meaning, of motion, of identity) cross and switch, a pivot in which vectors (and babies) enter in one direction and exit in another.” And, of course, the pun on Ernest / earnest operates, Craft observes, “exactly in the manner of a railway terminal.”^[14]

The accessible ending of Wilde’s play—the explosion of Bunbury and the discovery of Ernest John Moncrieff—results not only in the accomplishment of an exceedingly funny farcical comedy, but in an effective, delightful duality, what Craft explains is Wilde’s invention of a third term, “eccentric, extraordinary.” This is “a third, ternary, and trivial term in which oppositional meanings are not synthesized or sublated so much as they are exchanged, accelerated, derailed, terminated, cross-switched.” The term itself emerges only under the alias of two farcical pseudonyms: one of them is “Bunbury,” the second is “Ernest John.” Craft knows he is onto something here, and he explicates it extensively in the most delightful way. It is this formidably doubled-over pun, finally, that makes up Wilde’s bequest to a posterity that is only now “learning how to receive so rare a gift.”^[15] Craft’s “insider” approach to Wilde’s rich, evidently multivalent play rewards the thoughtful, persistent reader, who begins to realize how deeply considered and gracefully explained are the valences that make up the stuff of Craft’s persuasive argument.^[16]

Patricia Flanagan Behrendt’s carefully thought-out book Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics^[17] approaches Wilde’s writings from the double standpoint of their engagement with an age-old notion of ambiguous sexuality and their modern embodiment of their author’s liminal notions of art. Homoeroticism is a dominant theme throughout, and Behrendt shows how it consistently emerges at the borderlines that mark the limits of social propriety. For example, she reads the dialogic form of the artful conversations that make up the parts of Intentions as enabling a sort of “playful intellectual bullying” in which the elder, more authoritative speaker asserts ideas previously formulated and cleverly defended against the responses of his younger counterpart, who is no match for him. Wilde’s particular manipulation of the dialogue, however, “amounts to a specific subtext which both reinforces ideas about the relationship between art and life put forth in the dialogue and reveals the psychological mechanisms which define same-sex attraction between the two men.”^[18] In this way, as Behrendt reads it, these dialogues reveal a theme of self-centered eros that she has already identified in the early poetry and plays, and also in the characterizations of Dorian Gray and Salome. And yet the primary inheritors of these conversational strategies, which she describes as “analogues of erotic seduction,” are the dandies of Wilde’s social comedies.

It is a bold strategy to approach all four of Wilde’s comedies centrally in terms of the characterizations of their dandies and their consequent function in the action of their respective plays. This centrality, all the same, has a long history in previous criticism, as we have seen, for studies of the Wildean dandy may be traced back several decades to the work of Alan Harris in the 1950s and his successors.^[19] Behrendt declares that the governing critical idea behind her approach is that Wilde’s works as a whole during the decade from 1880 to 1890 reveal a central concern with “the conflict between biological drives—primarily erotic impulses—and conscious intellectual perceptions in the development of personality.” Wilde’s premise, as perceived by Behrendt, is that it is the male who “reconciles the conflicts between passion and reason.” She has been accused of taking a somewhat mysogynist view of Wilde’s attitude toward women; all the same, she insists that it is the intellectual inequality between men and women (as Wilde allegedly believed) that accounts for the woman’s “inability to transcend her emotional nature,” a condition rooted in biological instinct. This condition, Behrendt implies, lies behind the characterization and dramaturgical function of the dandies in the comedies that follow. The first three plays generally correspond in dramatic structure, and in each the dandy—who in each case is a member of the peerage—plays a catalytic role. Pivotal though the role of the dandy is in the resolution of the action, as seen by previous criticism, it has never specifically confronted the part that homosexuality plays in relation to the meaning of the role.^[20]

At the same time, Behrendt identifies two previous critics, Ian Gregor and Rodney Shewan, whose analyses of dandiacal characters tended toward a broader definition of dandyism in which it transcends gender, and the characterization betrays “amoral actions and attitudes often revealed in the language of witty epigrams and of paradoxes.” Gregor and Shewan associate the dandy’s voice with that of Wilde himself—an association made also by some reviewers of the first production.^[21] Behrendt sees these observations as a step in the right direction, but she complains that previous criticism has never entertained the notion of the “role of homosexual Eros” in the persona of the dandy. And she adds:

Only by revealing the homosexual aspects of the Dandy can criticism demonstrate that Wilde accomplished the greatest coup de théâtre of the late nineteenth century by giving the homosexual subculture a voice and a public forum in the persona of the stage dandy.^[22]

Behrendt acknowledges that The Importance of Being Earnest does not have the structure that requires the presence of a dandy to save the day, but Wilde’s distribution among the four principal characters of dandiacal behavior and epigrammatic wit suggests that it is Wilde himself who is the dandy “manipulating characters and audience alike.” In this kind of language, “in which humour belies the desire to dominate and to control,” the dandy viewpoint is more openly on view than in any of the other plays. Despite the fact that in some cases Behrendt tends to overstate her arguments, fails to provide sources for what are doubtful homosexual slang words or phrases, and sometimes allows conjecture to harden into fact, there is no doubt that she offers many fresh, valuable insights into the fraught contours of meaning in these works, which increasingly seem only partly visible, even to the most intelligent and culturally sophisticated of readers. In particular, her analysis of the dandy, although it requires a sure hand and is liable to be magnified out of dramaturgical context, still provides what feels like a promising approach to Wilde’s comedies, as well as to other works—one that appears to capture, beyond mere coincidence, the vision of himself that Wilde claimed, in his long letter to Douglas, as someone who took the drama, the most objective of all dramatic forms, and made it as personal and private as a lyric or a sonnet.

In 1991 Peter Raby announced an exciting discovery. Working in the archives of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, he had come upon a copy of the original proposal for The Importance of Being Earnest, drafted by Wilde in the summer of 1894 and sent to George Alexander. Raby’s announcement was published in the Times Literary Supplement; an expanded version later appeared in Modern Drama.^[23] This discovery served to fill a notable gap in Wilde studies, and it also served to renew the interest of Wilde scholarship in sources, manuscripts, and the evidence they offered of Wilde’s compositional habits.

In this same year Joseph Bristow published a new collection more well focused than most. The Importance of Being Earnest and Related Writings^[24] consists of Wilde’s last play, augmented by the so-called “Gribsby Episode,” “The Critic as Artist,” “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated,” and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” Bristow’s editorial intention is evidently to provide a set of contextual source materials to accompany the study of Wilde’s last play. Surely a real convenience for the student, this combination of documents offering the potential for making interesting, significant connections with Wilde’s play follows a comprehensive biographical and critical introduction by Bristow. Presenting a deeply considered point of view on Wilde as a “man of many parts,” Bristow’s view of him is predominantly as someone who “stood in forceful and often dangerous opposition to the reigning morality of late Victorian Britain.”^[25] Showing how he asserted himself in this way across a great range of activities and writings, Bristow maintains a dispassionate tone and an intense pace, adducing telling details and including a section on “Politics” and another on “Degeneration.” The latter section pursues the publication in 1895 of Max Nordau’s book of that title, whose subject concerns “moral corruption, racial impurity, lack of sanitation among the working classes,” and, most controversially, “homosexuality”—a term not yet in common use, but for which Nordau’s term “degeneration” was a widely known euphemism.

Even before arriving at this section, Bristow’s concern with politics has identified Wilde’s play as one that “makes a mockery of conventional attitudes to courtship and marriage, and of the class system as a whole.” Some of its jokes might have passed its original audience by, Bristow speculates, because they alluded, if only covertly, to homosexuality. This is true to such an extent, Bristow believes, that the play could be said to contain “the beginnings of a homosexual politics.” And so when his introduction reaches its last section, on “Earnest and the Theatre,” it does not surprise the reader to find an approach to the play that is uniformly serious and indeed fairly negative. It misrepresents the reviews of the first production as “grudgingly sympathetic,” adducing three or four reviews that reflect this characterization and repeating certain reviewers’ complaint that all the characters talk like Oscar Wilde, but without analyzing the simplistic nature of the charge. On the contrary, Bristow says the play constitutes such a radical departure from earlier dramatic forms that one may find in it “the beginnings of a theatre of ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’.” The characters, like other characters who speak with the rapid delivery of farce, are “superficial”: they “have no psychological depth, no place in a world of human sympathies.”^[26] For all this, at bottom the play contains a serious criticism of life.

Bristow brings a broad and deep understanding to his subject, and his perception of Wilde’s homosexual character and its relationship to his writings brings organization, insight, and a consistent point of view to his approach. Yet, at the same time, his appreciation of Wilde’s last play proves, somehow, to be insistently humorless. To criticize the characters of The Importance of Being Earnest for lacking psychological depth and for being entirely bereft of human sympathy registers a misreading of a play known first and foremost for the laughter it ignites in its audiences, as every good farce succeeds in doing. It is one thing to be serious about Bunburying, as Algy declares himself to be. It is quite another to be serious about everything, as Algy accuses Jack of being—unfairly, but he has a point. In the course of the play we discover that Jack is certainly not, despite Algy’s accusation, someone with an absolutely trivial nature. But the reader of Bristow’s intelligent, compact yet comprehensive overview may remain, at the end, suspicious that, in the present case, the subtitle of the play has had little beneficial effect on its editor.

In the same year of 1992 Christopher Innes published a comprehensive study of an entire century of British drama. Modern British Drama 1890–1990^[27] pursues a most thoughtful, well organized approach to a large company of dramatists whose collective accomplishments Innes compares to dramatists of the Elizabethan Age, in the variety and quality of their work and its deep impact on audiences. He sees the fountainhead of this vitality in the person of George Bernard Shaw, who as Innes views him dominates the period in question to the end of the second world war. Separating the dramatic production of the century beginning in 1890 into three major categories—social themes and realistic formulae, comedy in tradition and innovation, and poetic drama—he places Shaw in the first category and Wilde mostly in the second. These categorizations of individual dramatists’ work, each begun with a checklist of major plays, are treated in chronological order over the hundred years. For the most part a successful arrangement, Innes’s categories sometimes require the awkward fragmentation of a dramatist’s oeuvre into separate discussions, sometimes hundreds of pages apart. Such is the case with Wilde’s Salome, placed in its obvious category of poetic drama but many pages away from the rest of Wilde’s major plays, which head off the section on comic drama.

The clear advantage of Innes’s organizational decision is that it depends upon concise, insightful criticism of each dramatist’s major plays, sustained over nearly five hundred pages. Innes meets this challenge with remarkable consistency. In a mere eight pages of discussion of Wilde’s three comedies and a single farce, he summarizes a useful and important critical insight into each work, at the same time relating their consistent attributes so as to make his comments even more coherent and meaningful. This economical approach is at the same time flexible enough to bring to bear essential observations by the authors themselves or notable contemporary critics. For example, in a speech before the Royal General Theatrical Fund in 1892, protesting against the charge that he had ever called a spade a spade, Wilde had this to say:

The man who did so should be condemned to use one. I have also been accused of lashing vice, but I can assure you that nothing was further from my intentions. . . . [I]f there is one particular doctrine contained in [my play], it is that of sheer individualism.^[28]

Innes proceeds to make Wilde’s acknowledged dependency on individualism the capstone of his criticism of all four works. He emphasizes individualism as a key factor in the author’s aestheticism, identifying it as an ethical force and the very opposite of “the materialistic and moral principles that governed and justified social norms.” Rather, its essential content was “the self realization which (by definition) society denied through rules and prohibitions.” And so the function of art was “to promote this personal liberation.” Consequently, when Innes comes to The Importance of Being Earnest, he explains that the technique of reversal, admittedly a stock element of farce, becomes not only the paradoxical inversion of standard assumptions that underlie verbal humor, but the basis for social criticism, “Incorporated in this ambiguously subtitled ‘Trivial Comedy for Serious People’.” He credits Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker as being the first to perceive an underlying seriousness in Wilde’s last play. The key to that seriousness is Gwendolen’s insight that “In matters of great importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” Wilde “shows up social hypocrisy by trivializing earnestness.” At the same time, he also reveals that “what society dismisses as trivial” is in truth meaningful, not only in this Gilbertian topsy-turvey world but in actual life, where individualism is the basis for self-realization and no less than the end purpose of life.

And so the achievement Wilde realized in this “trivial” farce happened by means of the very fact that his audience failed to realize how the play trivializes the values that it appears to compliment the audience for upholding. In this way the Victorian audience “unconsciously displayed the accuracy of his attack.”^[29]

As plans at Oxford University Press were going forward to publish a multivolume scholarly edition of the complete works of Oscar Wilde in the Oxford English Texts (OET) series, Ian Small, originally co-general editor of the series, took the initiative to complete an earlier effort aimed at conducting sufficient research to put the OET project on sound footing.^[30] The result was his Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials & Methods of Research.^[31] Several years in the making, and involving extensive travel to major libraries, archives, and research centers, Small’s book became a true vade mecum, not only for the editors who would undertake producing the several volumes in the OET series (still ongoing), but for anyone who needed information and support for any scholarly purpose relating to Oscar Wilde and his works.

Oscar Wilde Revalued, over the course of nearly three hundred pages, ranges far and wide over the history and development of Wildean biography, criticism, and scholarship. Small is especially good at describing the changes in attitudes toward and revaluations of Wilde and his writings from the early part of the century to the remarkable expansions of various kinds that occur beginning in the 1970s. At every turn he is able to cite a specific work to support his observations, insights, and critiques. He augments these categorized narratives with finding guides to letters and manuscripts, helpfully organized by archive or by specific work, as appropriate. Added to these materials are discussions of literary histories, major critical studies, general critical studies, editions, and bibliographies. The inclusion of a general bibliography for reference purposes allows him the useful economy of referring to any work in that bibliography simply by citing the author’s name and year of publication. A generous means of support and encouragement for scholars and for scholarship, Small’s Oscar Wilde Revalued implicitly and ironically records the sad state of Wildean research and scholarship for many long years, while at the same time providing innumerable reasons for latter-day response to the increasingly obvious fact of Wilde’s status as the last major Victorian writer to achieve appropriate recognition in scholarly and critical ways—a process that still remains incomplete.

Given the remarkable outpouring of scholarly and critical activity in the 1980s and early 1990s, so extensively documented by Small, in 1994 the editors of the journal Modern Drama decided that the time had come to publish a special issue devoted entirely to the works of Oscar Wilde. They asked Joel H. Kaplan to oversee the issue.^[32] In his introduction, Kaplan summarized the striking advances in Wilde studies that prompted the editors of Modern Drama to organize a special issue on Wildean topics. In the past decade, he said, Richard Ellmann had published his eagerly awaited biography; Rupert Hart-Davis had issued his second, supplemental volume of the letters; Kerry Powell had brought out his study of Wilde and the nineteenth-century theatre; Russell Jackson and Ian Small had edited the first scholarly treatments of major Wilde plays for the New Mermaid series; and pioneering studies by various critics had focused on Wilde’s relationship to the new areas of gay and gender studies.^[33] Meanwhile, the professional stage had witnessed a series of high-profile productions in West End and provincial theatres, and in spring 1993 two international conferences on Wilde had been held, at the University of Birmingham and the Princess Grace Irish Library, in Monaco, which drew a large representation of literary critics, social historians, and theatre scholars “to debate Wilde’s significance for our time as well as his.”^[34]

Several contributors to the special issue described discoveries or offered new ideas on The Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Raby expanded his discovery of Wilde’s earliest surviving scenario of the play into a full-fledged account called “The Origins of The Importance of Being Earnest.”^[35] In a brief piece about Wilde as a writer, written jointly by Russell Jackson and Ian Small, the authors point to Richard Ellmann’s biography as lacking in coverage of Wilde as an actual writer, a composer of a series of widely varied works who spent inordinate amounts of time working and reworking manuscripts in order to make things come right. They offer as one example Wilde’s close attention to the page proofs of the first, 1899 edition of Earnest. There, Lady Bracknell’s reaction to Jack’s admission of having lost both of his parents emerges as “Both? — That seems like carelessness.” In correcting the typescript that Wilde had obtained to prepare copy for the edition, he had altered the fuller reading there—‘‘Both? — To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune — to lose both seems like carelessness.” Jackson and Small point out that in Robert Ross’s collected edition (1908) the line is restored to its more expansive state. It remains unclear what text Ross consulted to find this fuller version. Regardless, among the myriad copies of Wilde’s play now or formerly in print it is easy to tell which text is being used: the seemingly “authoritative” first edition of 1899 (“Both? —That seems like carelessness”) or the longer version, granted an ex post facto authority by decades of actual use in the theatre. The authors conclude that textual differences like these do not make their way into the “teleological” narrative published by Ellmann, who, they say, “tells us almost nothing about Wilde’s actual practices of writing.” And they point to the disparity that exists in modern scholarship between those scholars who, like their Victorian predecessors, cling to the teleological narrative instead of adopting “the more modern, consumerist paradigm so fruitfully exploited by Wilde himself.”^[36]

Another contributor, Karl Beckson, in “Narcissistic Reflections in a Wilde Mirror,” pursues the theme of narcissism in the society comedies and in The Importance of Being Earnest.^[37] In the comedies it is the dandiacal character who uses a mirror, literally or figuratively, to indulge his sense of his own ideal character. The dandiacal Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, Beckson believes, should spend the scene with his butler Phipps before a mirror, while the butler himself reflects a faithful image of his master by perfectly agreeing with everything he says. Goring’s final line, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance, Phipps,” a clear expression of “narcissistic self-love,” allows Wilde to fuse this character with the classical embodiment of the Narcissus myth, characterized by Beckson as “a fable of self-destructive homoerotic desire.” In using this myth for the stage Wilde does not allow his dandies to reveal homoerotic tendencies. Yet despite his allowing Goring “to lapse into sentimentality and melodrama” by capitalizing on the character’s previous relationship with Mrs Cheveley in order to neutralize her threat, he achieves the establishment of Goring, in Peter Raby’s words, as “morally, intellectually and aesthetically superior to everyone else.”^[38]

Wilde achieves similar success, Beckson argues, in the case of Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance. It is a more complex instance of the dandiacal character because Illingworth is the villain of the piece. His offer to marry Mrs Arbuthnot, as Norbert Kohl suggests, is an offer to a fallen woman which serves to shatter “one’s previous conception of his character.”^[39] Still other variations occur in Salome, where various Narcissus-like characteristics of several characters are on show, but most especially in Salome herself. Narcissistic motifs are also discoverable in Wilde’s earliest comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan. The Importance of Being Earnest is a different and separate case, however, Beckson asserts, for in this “great hall of mirrors” multiple reflections are on view throughout. In this play all the characters create “self-idealized visions,” and they inhabit “a utopia in which perfection of style is the vital thing.” Narcissistic doubling is everywhere, beginning with two pairs of lovers, and extending even to the seemingly incidental fact that Canon Chasuble will be baptizing twins that very afternoon. One might have hoped for a more conclusive argument at the end of this interesting essay on narcissism in the plays, but Beckson’s analysis provides a helpful reminder that dandiacal self-sufficiency is one of the most potent and telling of all the masks that the author of these plays used in order to tell a recondite truth.

Of the contributions to this special issue of Modern Drama, two are directly concerned with productions of the major plays, including The Importance of Being Earnest. In “Wilde Interpretations” John Stokes identifies Peter Hall’s National Theatre production of Earnest in 1982 as having influenced a series of prod­uctions that share some important characteristics. Of these, “extreme adventur­ousness” in design and costume and consistent attempts to take theatrical advantage of biographical connections between the author and the work are perhaps the most prominent; but other qualities, notably making the most of the elements of melodrama that these plays surely contain. The result of this melodramatic emphasis has been that important lines are “expressed in a highly emotional and pictorial manner.” This shift in delivery turns out to be no mere stylistic matter; rather, it points to “issues of social and sexual ethics” that lie at the very center of Wilde’s plays. Stokes makes his stepping-off point commentaries by the stage director Jonathan Miller, who takes the view that the fast pace of contemporary life results in differences between now and even the recent past that excite our interest in interpretation as never before.

Stokes reviews various recent productions of A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and Earnest, first in the 1990s. Then, for purposes of historical comparison, he returns to the 1890s and subsequent times. Beginning by taking just one prominent example from Nicholas Hytner’s 1993 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Maggie Smith’s performance of Lady Bracknell, Stokes concludes that she offered “an exact study in the mores of the English class-system.” The review of the production in the Independent made her interpretation only too clear:

The titled monster may be dead set against her daughter forming an alliance with a parcel, but you could deduce, from this production, that her own lofty social position has come about only thanks to Lord Bracknell’s willingness to form an alliance with a parvenue. In which case, his wife’s tireless penchant for making dogmatic discriminations emerges as the compulsive behaviour of the arriviste turned beady-eyed expert at border-control.^[40]

Stokes’s precise clarification of critical responses to Maggie Smith’s performance entails his quoting from reviews several passages quite delicious in their descriptive values, but he uses them to make the important point of revealing a definite opposition between critics sharing a minority view that Smith “had indulged her technical skills at the expense of the role” and a majority which “saw nothing but creative comedy of a high order.”^[41]

Stokes proceeds to differentiate not only between decades but between impersonators of Lady Bracknell over the years, showing at the same time how biographical factors then and now—”now” being the period following on the 1988 publication of Richard Ellmann’s best-selling biography and the access it gave a wide public to the details of Wilde’s life—could make substantive differences in how his plays might be interpreted. Stokes is brilliant on this subject, clarifying subtle but telling differences from production to production and from actor to actor, in an article that remains a revelation and a delight to read.

Richard Allen Cave takes a complementary approach to Wildean productions. In “Wilde Designs: Some Thoughts about Recent British Productions of His Plays,”^[42] Cave proposes to scrutinize Wilde’s own part in the stage designs for his plays and claims for him, despite the unlikeliness, “a pioneering status in the field of stage design.” He identifies two basic sketches for settings in Wilde’s own hand, and a further sketch for a stage setting of Salome in the hand of Charles Ricketts, made while in conversation with Wilde. If these three documents seemed to offer scant evidence for claiming Wilde as an innovator in stage decor, they are nevertheless important contributors to any assessment of Ricketts’s work as a designer. The designs for Salome are of great interest but outside the compass of the present volume. Farther afield, though nominally topical in Cave’s scheme, are settings by Bob Crowley for Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest (Aldwych Theatre, March 1993). The massive, stage-height portrait of Algernon in evening dress, reminiscent of John Singer Sargent “at his most flamboyant,” dominated the scene of Algy’s morning room, Act I, ever more inappropriate as the act proceeded through Jack and Gwendolen’s marriage proposal scene and followed by Lady Bracknell’s interview with Jack. The garden scene of Act II was no more successful, presenting a giant hedge of roses sculpted into the outline of a peacock, its tail fully spread. In the background, a three-dimensional doll-house-size depiction of Woolton seemed at best an inapt metaphor, merely reductive in its comic application to the action. The setting for Act III was a beige and white box set; a bay window looked out on a terrace, and a wall of bookcases stretched their length toward the ceiling; the furniture was entirely covered with dust sheets. Consequently, no effort had been made from the standpoint of design to comment on the action or the characters themselves. The result, Cave determines, was that it seemed necessary to close one’s eyes in order to inhabit the world of the play without making conscious efforts to resist the designer’s attempt to control his audience’s responses, to no helpful result. Cave concludes that Crowley’s was “a major failure not only of taste and judgement but of integrity as a designer,” reducing the clarity and appropriateness of Wilde’s own scene descriptions “to the limitations of Crowley’s own vision.”^[43]In the Act II tea scene of The Importance of Being Earnest, Gwendolen, introducing herself to Cecily, explains that her father is Lord Bracknell. Presumably Cecily has never heard of him, because he is quite unknown outside the family circle. Gwendolen is quite sure that the home is the “proper sphere for the man,” for, once a man neglects his domestic duties, “he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?” She does not like that, Gwendolen goes on, because “It makes men so very attractive’”^[44] The gender-related references in Gwendolen’s speech are deceptively easy to misconstrue. In his book The Wilde Century, first published in 1994, Allan Sinfield writes that in the 1890s the phenomenon of effeminacy along with the term itself did not convey what it does today.^[45] The dandy’s effeminacy, Sinfield explains, is based on a class perception and does not specifically connote same-sex passion. Perhaps it was a possibility, but by no means a conclusive one. Sinfield traces the history of effeminacy from the rake, the fop, and the man of feeling to the Wildean dandy, who not only did not look like a queer but who was “distinctively exonerated from such suspicions.” Because of the class to which he belonged or aspired, he “above all need not be read as identified with same-sex practices.” As Sinfield perceives them, Jack and Algy in Wilde’s play are “thoroughly effeminate young men”:

This includes their leisured idleness, their indifference to moral conventions, their exploitation of and romantic devotion to women, and suggestions of diverse further profligacies.^[46]

All the same, Sinfield appears to take the view that Jack and Algy would not have been seen by the play’s first audience as having mutual same-sex inclinations. But he goes on to explain that the trials in which Wilde was involved just a few months later widely changed general attitudes toward effeminacy, linking this leisurely style of life with homosexual connection.

Much has changed in the years since Sinfield published his book, yet it remains a foundational work holding an important place in the history of gay studies and their connection with Wilde. For example, it is useful to read Sinfield as background for interpreting productions of The Importance of Being Earnest that feature such business as an exchange of kisses between Algy and Jack on the first entrance of the latter in Act I, or the casting of a male actor in the role of Lady Bracknell. In another way, reading Sinfield can productively complicate our understanding of what Gwendolen, in a context that she herself establishes, refers to as behavior that is “painfully effeminate.”

Mikhail Bakhtin’s late book Rabelais and His World is entirely concerned with elaborating theories of carnival as it emerges in medieval and Renaissance culture—seemingly a world away from Wilde’s farcical comedy of 1895. And yet, as Ronald Knowles makes abundantly evident, looking at The Importance of Being Earnest through the striking lens provided by Bakhtin’s study of the elements of carnival in that early period illuminates a vital quality connecting Wilde’s attitude toward his subject with Bakhtin’s interpretation of “moral and social inversion” in a world “turned upside down.”^[47]. The world of Rabelais, Bakhtin explains, is defined partly by an oppositional folk culture whose expression was humorous and based on laughter. It came out of a long tradition existing in all the countries of medieval Europe, and was “sharply distinct from the serious, official, ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonials.” These traditions came together as “a second world in which all medieval people participated more or less” and in which they lived for a period of time each year.^[48] Knowles explores two related ideas in particular, the significance of eating and speech. The public. collective form of eating is feasting or banqueting, an essential element of carnival; it is like a “materialist parody of the Eucharist.” Eating and speech are connected in public ways through the presence of simultaneous eating and talk, in the “public squares of the festive Middle Ages” and “the private dining rooms and exclusive clubs and hotels” common in Wilde’s time.

But there is much more commonality between medieval carnival and the modern age of Wilde, Knowles argues, for as he sees it the “dominant characteristic of Wilde’s verbal wit is its carnival inversion.” Moreover, Wilde’s “outrageous iconoclasm is doubly subversive,” because the impulse emanates from within the ruling class. We see this, for example, very early in the play in Algy’s reflection on Lane’s seemingly callous indifference toward the institution of marriage. If the “lower orders” don’t “set us a good example,” Algy muses, what use are they? “They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.” This kind of witty inversion appears again and again in the play. Even Lady Bracknell falls into this pattern of reversal, considering the fact that Jack smokes to be an approved occupation, as opposed to the many men in London who remain idle. Implicitly,Wilde’s inversive strategy goes a good bit deeper, however. For ‘as a temporarily compromised symbol of carnival inversion, the legitimacy of a whole ruling class is glimpsed as not organic, ordained and necessary, but quite arbitrary’. And there is more. When Lady Bracknell asks Jack whether he knows everything or nothing, and he feels forced to say that he knows nothing, his admitted ignorance allies him with the lower classes. Evidently he has been the object of a calculated set-up. Lady Bracknell asserts her pleasure over his predicament, for in her view the entire theory of modern education is “radically unsound”:

Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.^[49]

Parody and travesty are alive and well in the iconoclasm that Lady Bracknell practices, here and throughout the play, in ways that are strikingly akin to the characteristics of carnivalistic reversal described by Bakhtin. Such “mockery of both liberal and conservative positions,” Knowles explains, “provides a dizzying pastiche of carnival counterpoint which is ultimately licensed by the form and occasion of the comedy itself.”^[50]

Knowles goes on to a comparably detailed analysis of a great deal of eating in Wilde’s play, from cucumber sandwiches and bread and butter prior to the teatime scene in Act I, to the stark alternatives of cake or bread and butter and the quarrel over muffins and tea cake in Act II. For good measure, in the four-act version of the play the Solicitor Mr Gribsby arrives at the Manor house prepared to attach Algernon, masquerading as Jack’s younger brother Ernest, for debt, Earnest having run up a bill for suppers at the Savoy Hotel of £762. 14. 2. Wilde cheerfully includes carnivalesque excess as it applies to the over-the-top behavior of his characters when it comes to eating well.

“Carnival laughs at death,” Knowles reminds his readers. And so we are not terribly surprised when Jack appears in the Manor house garden, dressed out in funereal black, intending to kill off his inconvenient younger brother, while the audience knows full well that this fictitious brother, extravagantly impersonated by the Bunburying Algy, is in the house eating and pursuing romance with Cecily. Algy is caught out, but the play succeeds in laughing in full carnivalesque fashion at the very notion of dying—for the time being, at least, as long as the play lasts. While it lasts, Wilde functions as the licensed Lord of Misrule, the “clown-king of carnival.” But in the fullness of time carnival must come to an end, and so it did, sadly, in Wilde’s case. Not only were Ernest Worthing and the perpetual invalid Bunbury killed off, but Wilde’s play itself had to be taken off. The Saturnalia was at an end. Staged inversion could for a while be tolerated, but sexual inversion could not, Knowles concludes. It remains true nonetheless that Knowles offers a fascinating study of how the comic spirit manages to assert itself time out of mind, despite remarkably wide differences in time, style, form, and public circumstance—but not in ethos, and certainly not in vital importance.

One of the most imaginative approaches to Wilde’s last play in this period is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest.”^[51] Sedgwick pursues a deconstructive argument whose purpose is frankly to open up Wilde’s play to an unorthodox latter-day analysis. Were any reader rash enough to protest against such a seemingly anachronistic approach, her rejoinder would surely be that Wilde’s play, for all its well-rooted place in the culture of its own day, affords simultaneously an almost magical opportunity for modern-day analysis by like-minded students of Wilde’s private views, beliefs, and intentions.

Beginning with the ponderous fact of the search for the “Name of the Father,” which brings the play to its end, Sedgwick’s multivalent argument posits the greater priority of the “avunculate,” her convenient general term for the various members of a complex family, not only uncles and aunts but brothers and sisters, parents and siblings, cousins, and even people who might pass for relatives because of their chummy or otherwise close relationship with this nearly amorphous yet cohesive “family.” Sedgwick playfully insists that the closing sequence at the end of Act III “places the sibling plot in many ways prior to, and hence more tellingly in question than, the marriage plot.” She quotes convincingly from the text:

LADY BRACKNELL  You are the son of my poor sister, Mrs Moncrieff, and consequently Algernon’s elder brother.
JACK  Algy’s elder brother! Then I have a brother after all. I knew I had a brother! I always said I had a brother! Cecily,—how could you have ever doubted that I had a brother? (Seizes hold of ALGERNON) Dr Chasuble, my unfortunate brother. Miss Prism, my unfortunate brother. Gwendolen, my unfortunate brother. Algy, you young scoundrel, you will have to treat me with more respect in the future. You have never behaved to me like a brother in all your life.
ALGERNON Well, not till to-day, old boy, I admit. I did my best, however, though I was out of practice.^[52]

To Sedgwick’s mind, what lies behind this potent, unpredictably complex avunculate is the opportunity it provides for children to have intimate access to familial adults aside from their own parents—to “aunts and uncles,” some of whom “have the office of representing nonconforming or non-reproductive sexualities to children.” She speaks, it appears, in her own person and out of her own experience: “We are many, the queer women and men whose first sense of the possibility of alternative life trajectories came to us from our uncles and aunts,” even though the stories these younger persons heard of these elders were “almost unrecognizably mangled, often in demeaning ways,” by the “heterosexist hygiene of child-rearing.”

This highly personal approach of Sedgwick’s to Wilde’s play might well leave an unsympathetic reader unsure whether her essay is about the play that Wilde wrote or about the quite subjective opportunity it provides for the author of this essay to find in it an odd, unusual verification for her claim to be as much a part of the audience as anyone else. Sedgwick does not step back from any such challenge, but rather seizes substantial footholds in the text itself. Singling out the word and the notion German—a term mentioned several times in the course of the play—she points to the important instance of cousin-germans (a more precise term for first cousins), which in fact Jack and Gwendolen turn out to be. In 1895, the date of Wilde’s play, homosexuality was not yet referred to as “le vice allemand,” but in the four-act version of the play Miss Prism extols the German language as one “whose grammar displays such interesting varieties of syntax, gender, and expression.” She reminds Cecily that her Uncle Jack “always lays stress on your German when he is leaving for town.” In discussing the music for her impending reception with Algernon, Lady Bracknell says she prefers German songs to French, because “German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, I believe is so.” Algy’s Aunt is instantly recognizable even from the way she rings the doorbell: “Ah, that must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.” Sedgwick adds a long paragraph in which she explains how Wagner’s music was claiming an ever greater priority even as the newly crystallized German state was experiencing “newly insistent, internally incoherent but increasingly foregrounded discourses of homosexual identity, recognition, prohibition, advocacy, demographic specification, and political controversy.” What was happening, she explains, is that “competing, conflicting figures for understanding same-sex desire . . . were coined and circulated in this period in German and through German culture, medicine, and politics.” She adds that while Wilde and his work were in eclipse in other European states at this time, his popularity in Germany “was undimmed. In this context, it is not surprising that the first translation of Wilde’s play into German was published, as Ernst Sein, in 1903.^[53]

Some of Sedgwick’s instances of corroborating detail may stretch the argument a bit far, but there is still sufficient evidence to indicate that, examining an over-familiar text with fresh eyes and bringing to bear a wide, detailed historical knowledge of the period, she is able to persuade even a reluctant reader to agree that there is much in Wilde’s text that allows a deft, persistent “deconstruction” in favor of a deep, recondite same-sex reading. There is even more matter in Sedgwick’s approach to The Importance of Being Earnest that deserves consideration, and more to say also about what may be the felt risks on Sedgwick’s part in taking this provocative and perhaps in some ways dangerous approach to a time-honored play so beloved by general audiences round the world. There is no doubt, all the same, that approaches of the kind represented by Sedgwick’s confident and appealing writing become ever more frequent as the century nears its end, to the clear enrichment of criticism.

The dust jacket blurb for Michael Patrick Gillespie’s book Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity claims that it is the first full-length study of Wilde’s oeuvre to approach it from the standpoint of reader response theory.^[54] This helps to explain why the author finds it necessary to engage in extensive theoretical or at least highly general and abstract discussion of Wilde’s writings in the service of showing how “ambiguity” is the consistent operative means of generating true flexibility of meaning, apprehensible in unpredictably various ways by readers of every stamp. Frequent use of such alternative terms as “multiplicity” and “pluralism” also becomes necessary, as Gillespie attempts to explain how Wilde’s method of writing systematically discourages and frustrates any effort on the part of the reader to reduce the meaning of the work to a narrow, straight­forward simplicity. Such a reductive approach is anathema both to the compre­hensive Wildean notion that a truth in art has a contradictory that is also true and to Wilde’s related aesthetic principle that the experience of art should create the greatest amount of possible pleasure.

Gillespie generates interest in the conduct of his discourse through a determined effort to apply the theory of reader response systematically to the great range of Wilde’s writings, including the plays, whose audiences function, in their varied and individualized reactions, in the same way that individual readers do. Or so Gillespie believes. The difficulty of dealing with a produced play, as opposed to a reading of its text, is that a prior interpretation has been imposed on the production before an audience is able to view it. Gillespie’s application of reader response theory does not allow for understanding the text of the play as a kind of blueprint for production, because the format of play text, consisting merely of three elements—speech headings, speeches, and stage directions—logically requires the intrusion of a stage director and a production team to realize the perceived potential of the script, and then also the presence of actors personifying the characters of the play, before any meaning may be generated. In turn, the audience is made up of individuals whose interpretations, by Gillespie’s own acknowledgment, may vary widely. Reader response theory remains a widely applicable approach to works of art, highly interesting to discuss in abstract terms, but one wonders about the coherence and usefulness of its application to specific works, especially to works that require performance for realization.

The application of the theory to The Importance of Being Earnest brings out the best of Gillespie’s approach while revealing its limits as well. The two chapters of his book devoted to Wilde’s last play allow him to make much of the way Wilde’s irony serves to “facilitate the movement away from the conventional certitude that characterizes most melodrama.” In the hands of less sophisticated readers, Gillespie remarks, such rhetorical patterns of interpretation tend to presume a “linguistic stability” that can lapse into “binary, either/or viewpoints” that short-circuit the imaginative playfulness that characterizes the work overall. Gillespie says he advocates a response “more suited to the mutability of Wilde’s language,” an approach that

exploits the ambivalence of the title by incorporating pluralism into one’s initial linguistic response in a way that underscores the play’s self-conscious ambiguity.

One sees Gillespie’s point, here and elsewhere, and the “multifaceted aestheticism” that he consistently advocates is surely an intelligent and flexible way of reading this play along with other works. But it seems to be flexible to a fault. He identifies criticism based on ideas derived from very different approaches, such as feminism, deconstruction, Marxism, or psychoanalysis, which then become amalgamated, as part of a larger interpretive trend. Gillespie’s own use of concepts such as Victorianism, Modernism, and post-Modernism generates, he says, an interpretive power emergent from “common yet adaptable terminology.”^[55] And yet so much time is spent in ranging far and wide, at a highly theoretical level, invoking the great advantages of embracing flexible, alternative ways of determining meaning, that very little time is left for grappling with meaning itself as it may be derived from specific scenes or even exchanges of dialogue in the play.

Gillespie’s second chapter, on the dandy in Wilde’s play, proceeds in the same way as before, describing a “pluralistic image of the dandy” as “operating within the bounds of society and at the same time endeavouring to subvert some portion of its restrictions.” Gillespie’s persistent generalizations become more useful and interesting when he analyzes Wilde’s recasting of the features of the dandy in this play and also the features of the society in which the dandy exists. Gillespie makes sure we understand how Wilde’s application of the concept of the dandy “as a model for alternative interpretive approaches” forms a viable basis for “far more satisfying readings.” At long last, we come to an actual instance of interpretation on Gillespie’s part, when he explains his view that the play identifies Jack and Algy as two of the several dandies in the play, but who must undergo several stages of instruction from a series of tutors who “bring them within the bounds” of society’s approbation, not by transforming them into solid middle-class persons but by making them into “model dandies.” This view takes us through the reading of several specific scenes in which the education of the dandy takes place. Having made this meaning concrete and clear, Gillespie remains nevertheless adamant that interpretation of this kind must not “impose a form of closure upon interpretations.”^[56]

In respect of this original approach to a large range of Wilde’s familiar works, the author of this ground-breaking book provides a consistently thoughtful application of a theory that became popular in the 1960s in a wide range of studies, but was slow to be adopted in Wildean criticism. In his enthusiastic advocacy of the advantages of pursuing reader response theory, Gillespie has not paused to consider what its limitations might be. Indeed, his book tends to function partly pedagogically, teaching his readers the great disadvantage of pinning their certainty to a particular interpretation competitive with others. Rather, one should endeavor, Gillespie concludes, “by attending to the diversity” that a “best interpretation” accommodates, to draw the maximum amount of pleasure from the work.^[57]