Lady Windermere's Fan Analysis

Lady Windermere’s Fan is Oscar Wilde’s first successful play and it took the London theatregoers by storm when it was first staged at St James’s Theatre on 20 February 1892. Seeking to tell the story of an estranged mother and her innocent daughter it probes the Victorian society’s cruel treatment of women who exercised their will and sought life outside home with men of their choice. The men concerned often cheated and eventually abandoned these women and society for its part treated them with utter contempt. Given this situation these unfortunate women had no go other than becoming street walkers or join the notorious work houses. Prostitution entailed many health hazards and social risks. If these women became pregnant the problem further aggravated. The Victorian society, especially the privileged members of the upper class, chose to believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that everything was fine with the world and that women of this kind were an aberration in need of the severest punishment in social and economic terms. It never occurred to them that these women might be victims, often unwittingly so, of the social codes and moral norms operative amidst them and that they indeed needed to be sympathised with and supported so that they would rejoin the mainstream society and get a second chance to become useful and productive members.

The unfriendly Victorian social environment and moral apparatus, coupled with certain vested interests, are squarely to blame for this sad state of affairs. Prudery, sexual repression, prevalence of Puritanical attitudes that privileged the institution of family and projected marriage as something sacred to be preserved no matter how much the women had to suffer -- all th...

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...ho ill-treats her so badly and so openly. She might think that her husband is living with her every moment but he is in reality only pretending and playing fraud on her.

Works Cited

Guy, John. Victorian Life. London: ticktock Publishing Ltd., 1997. Print.

Raby, Peter. “Wilde’s Comedies of Society.” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 143-60. Print.

Sigsworth, Eric M., ed. In Search of Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. Print.

Walkley, A.B. “A.B. Walkley on Lady Windermere’s Fan.” Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Karl E. Beckson. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. 133-35. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. Lady Windermere’s Fan. Ed. Jim Manis. State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2006. An Electronic Classics Series Publication. PDF file.