Context

• Comedy of manners


  • Exploits for comic effect the distance between society's excessive concern communal respectability, on the one hand, and, on the other, the self-interested motives that drive individuals' actions
  • Focuses on members of high society
  • Revolves around love intrigues and verbal wit
• Wilde's philosophy of the play

  "That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously and all the serious things with sincere and studied triviality
• The New Woman

  • Free-spirited and independent, educated and uninterested in marriage and children, the figure of the New Woman threatened conventional ideas about ideal Victorian womanhood.
• fin de siecle


  End of a century - specifically new ways of behaving at the end of a century
• The Dandy/the New Woman

  • Such radical changes in behaviour caused outrage, with the social critic Max Nordau denouncing the abandonment of tradition and the feminisation of men and the increasingly mannish nature of women.
  • This he heralded as ‘The Dusk of Nations’ – the title he gave to the first chapter of his influential book Degeneration (1892).
  • Meanwhile Punch magazine made the New Woman a figure of fun, presenting her as an embittered, over-educated spinster perpetually stuck on the shelf.
• Mary Augusta Ward


  Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood.
• Origin of the New Woman

  • Sarah Grand and 'Ouida' wrote about it in the North American Review
• Farce

  • Provokes laughter using exaggerated characters and complicated plots
  • Mistaken identity is often an element of the plot
• Dandy

  • Gentleman who places particular importance on his appearance - his clothing, how he is publicly perceived etc
  • The dandy appears in the late 18th century and continues as a type through the 19th century
• The Rake

  • Stock character in Restoration comedies
  • Habitually immoral character, particularly in terms of sexual morality