A Woman of No Importance
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
At a fashionable London party, a cynical older man dispenses his form of counsel to an earnest young man.
Now read on:
Lord Illingworth: Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world unless he has got women to back him; and women rule society. If you have not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be a barrister, or a stockbroker, or a journalist at once.
Gerald: It is very difficult to understand women, is it not?
Lord Illingworth: You should never try to understand them. Women are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to her.
Gerald: But women are awfully clever, aren't they?
Lord Illingworth: One should always tell them so. But, to the philosopher, my dear Gerald, women represent the triumph of matter over mind--just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Gerald: How then can women have so much power as you say they have?
Lord Illingworth: The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
What we love about this passage...
It's a classic example of the witty exchanges that made Wilde's plays famous. Sometimes these dialogues contain gems of insight that subvert the status quo. Lord Illingworth ('ill of worth', or worthless) is one of Wilde's wittiest dandies, but ends up getting put in his place by none other than his former lover, a 'woman of no importance' and the mother of Gerald--who, it turns out, is the son she had out of wedlock with Lord Illingworth. So while the audience is drinking in this sparklingly witty scene, they soon come to see Lord Illingworth's true nature and the moral ambivalence that lies behind these damning remarks about women.
About the author
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist, editor, and essayist best known now for his farce The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the peak of his fame, he was arrested and tried for 'gross indecency' with men, homosexuality at that time being a criminal offence in England. After a highly publicized trial, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison. He conveyed the extreme harshness and suffering of his imprisonment in his poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (1898).
To read alongside...
Elizabeth Robins's 1907 play Votes for Women! also features London society wittily discussing worldly issues, but she deliberately updates her friend Oscar Wilde's method by harnessing the wit to overtly political purposes--the fight for women's suffrage. Many of George Bernard Shaw's plays likewise deploy humour for political ends, disarming the audience by the sheer virtuosity of the wit being displayed, for example in Pygmalion (1912), the story of Eliza Doolittle's rise through the British class system, from flower girl to aristocrat.
Wilde's wit owes much to Restoration comedy. Try William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) for its delightfully sharp, sparkling exchanges between Mirabell and Millamant, who profess to hate each other but (as with Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and Elizabeth and Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice) gradually fall in love by matching wits and word play.
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