Lady Windermere's Fan

Wilde builds the play around a young wife's absolute moral confidence: Lady Windermere is a self-declared Puritan who tells Lord Darlington outright that she would strike a fallen woman across the face rather than shake her hand, and then spends the second half of the play nearly committing what her own code would call the identical sin, leaving her husband's house for another man's rooms over a jealousy she never bothers to verify. Wilde's structure is the argument: certainty about other women's failings is cheapest right before you discover how easily you could fail the same way yourself.

Mrs. Erlynne, the woman with a scandalous past whose reappearance in London threatens to expose a secret Lord Windermere has been quietly paying to protect, is written with more genuine feeling and sacrifice than anyone else on stage, and the dramatic irony, that the audience is invited to suspect Windermere himself of the affair when the truth is something else entirely, lets Wilde aim at his real target: a society whose whole vocabulary for sorting women into good and bad has nothing to do with who actually behaves well when it counts.

Wilde surrounds the central plot with a chorus of society wits, Cecil Graham, the Duchess of Berwick, who exist mainly to deliver the play's aphorisms about virtue, gossip, and the price of a good dinner, and that surrounding banter is doing real work rather than simply decorating the plot: it establishes, well before Mrs. Erlynne ever proves it in action, that the society passing judgment on her has never once organized itself around actual goodness, only around never being caught.

The title fan, a birthday present from Windermere to his wife, travels from ballroom to bachelor's rooms to a scene of near-exposure entirely through other people's decisions rather than its owner's. Wilde uses the object's blankness, a fan cannot testify to anything, to dramatize how thin the actual evidence behind a society scandal usually is, exactly the kind of ordinary object his later plays keep returning to: the more trivial the piece of material evidence, the more damage Wilde can show gossip doing with it.