The Fall of the House of Wilde (50 page)

The play sprang from the author's life; Oscar had started to use male prostitutes, and to take lovers from ‘the lower' social orders, spending large sums on lavish gifts as recompense – we will return to this. Enough of himself went into the composition of Mrs Erlynne to allow us to borrow Flaubert's quip, ‘
Madame Bovary, c'est moi
,' and to say on behalf of Oscar, ‘Mrs Erlynne, it is I.' That the play approves of her conduct, declares itself the champion of what he called ‘wicked women', was scarcely noted in 1892. On the contrary, one critic commended him for ‘lashing vice', a misunderstanding Oscar promptly trounced.
³

Perhaps this misunderstanding had something to do with the way the play enacts a shift in categories of what constitutes the good and bad woman. Oscar initially intended to call the play
The Good Woman
. And when he came to publish it as a book, he retained this as a subtitle, calling it
Lady Windermere's Fan, A Play About a Good Woman.
Whether or not Jane's opinion on the title was persuasive, she certainly hated it. She wrote before the play opened, in February 1892, ‘I do not like it – “a Good Woman”. It is mawkish. No one cares for a good woman.'
⁴
She had not read it when she wrote this and so could not have known it is a play where the categories of good and bad lose their meaning.

Mrs Erlynne is not a ‘fallen woman', as many critics, including Richard Ellmann, have described her. This misses the play's meaning; it makes her a passive victim of society. She is quite other. She ‘looks like an
édition de luxe
of a wicked French novel, meant especially for the English market'. She is essentially a
courtisane
,
joueuse
,
lionne
,
amazone
,
demi-mondaine
, her names in French are various, but they have the same significance. Their meaning hinges on a difference between the
courtisane
and the prostitute. The
courtisane
was what could be represented of prostitution on the West End stage.

The
courtisane
is expected to be beautiful and Mrs Erlynne was – not least of her attributes was ‘an extremely fine figure', as we are told. Hence she commands a high price – a house in Curzon Street in Mayfair, from where she ‘drives her ponies in the Park every afternoon', all given her by Lord Windermere alongside sums of £600, £700 and £400, as Lady Windermere discovers, to her horror. Uninvited, Mrs Erlynne makes a grand entrance to Lady Windermere's party in Grosvenor Square, ‘very beautifully dressed and very dignified'. Her presence ruffles Lady Windermere, who ‘clutches at her fan, then lets it drop to the floor' while Mrs Erlynne ‘sails into the room'. Like a magnet, she immediately draws men, many of whom are her clients. As Cecil Graham remarks in the play, ‘That woman [Mrs Erlynne] can make one do anything she wants.' She is one of those women who make ‘brutes of men and they fawn and are faithful'. Her power is likely to cretinise the men. She conned Lord Augustus Lorton into a promise of marriage, and tricked Lord Windermere into pledging £2,500 as payment for favours rendered.
⁵

Domination and deception are what Mrs Erlynne has to offer. They both come from her role as the embodiment of desire. Desire dominates these men and deludes them and, accordingly, so does she. She passes herself off for a young woman when in truth she exceeds forty. She wears clothes that could have been designed by Charles Frederick Worth in Paris, so indistinguishable are they from those worn at Grosvenor Square. She soaks up the limelight and scatters the women into corners, where all they can talk about is Mrs Erlynne. Even her name, ‘Mrs' Erlynne – ‘That's what everyone calls her' – is doubtful.
⁶
It is part of her charm to be spurious, enigmatic, unclassifiable; everything about her is false. She is the embodiment of Oscar's theory of the mask.

She is also money in fleshy form. She is, as Lady Windermere says, one of those women who are ‘bought and sold'. Oscar in this play shows the invasion of money and its restructuring of private life and personal expression, as evidenced in the punning on the word ‘pay' and the frequent references to ‘debt' and ‘owe'. His drama indicates a new phase in the commodification of whole areas of social practice. The Empire took pride in making money visible. That was its special glamour as an age, and a value Oscar relished. The comparison was often made between prostitution and high finance, and the metaphor of scheming men and unscrupulous women trading as experts, with money calling the tune, is also alluded to by Oscar when Lady Windermere says, ‘Nowadays people seem to look on life as a speculation.'
⁷
If the game of buying and selling sex could be represented thus, as a game played by wily experts, then it posed no threat to society's self-esteem. But if prostitution escaped from the public world, invaded the private and soaked up the family fortune – as Mrs Erlynne threatened to do – then such an image of capital could not be countenanced.

Mrs Erlynne is a woman who threatens the social order. She fled husband and child and ran off with her lover many years ago. Far from representing the ‘fallen woman', Mrs Erlynne is shown as a superior being whom we can assume recovered extramaritally the adulthood she forfeited at the altar. Her worldliness, impersonality and individuality give her a magic scent the compliant Lady Windermere lacks. A want of courage is what keeps Lady Windermere in a sham marriage. Oscar penned the inevitable epitaph of his own marriage when the character Lord Darlington says of Lady Windermere's relationship with her husband, ‘You would have to be to him the mask of his real life, the cloak to hide his secret.'
⁸
Lord Darlington is trying to persuade Lady Windermere to break free of her sham marriage.

Lord Darlington
:  There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely – or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

Lady Windermere
:  I have not the courage.

Lord Darlington
:  . . . Be brave! Be yourself! . . . You would stand anything rather than face the censure of a world whose praise you would despise.
⁹

This is as close as Oscar had come to describing the dilemma of his own marriage. One part of him did not care a fig for what society thought; another part craved its adulation. He had ‘come out' sexually to a select few, had the courage to ‘be himself', but not the courage to let Constance know. He once said that ‘be yourself' is the portal on the door of the modern world, as ‘know yourself' had been for ancient Greece. And following that maxim, he winds up
Lady Windermere's Fan.
Mrs Erlynne quits the game of duplicity, the allure of money, the promise of society's acceptance, and intends to go abroad – alone.

But not before she disturbs the categories of good and evil. Her good act is to purloin the letter Lady Windermere wrote to her husband of her intention to leave him for Lord Darlington. Mrs Erlynne's reason for intervening has nothing to do with social or moral proprieties; it is to prevent Lady Windermere, whom the audience discovers is Mrs Erlynne's daughter, from leaving her child as she herself had done. Through her action she also prevents Lord Windermere from knowing his wife intended to leave him for Darlington, and saves Lady Windermere from social disgrace. She thus wins the admiration of Lady Windermere, who changes her opinion of Mrs Erlynne: ‘There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women!' But, in so doing, Mrs Erlynne precludes her daughter from acting freely, which she does out of maternal protection, we can assume. But she herself did not want to be encumbered by husband and child, and remains unrepentant about having walked out. Indeed, she is honest enough to admit to no enduring maternal feelings. To Lord Windermere, she says, ‘I have no ambition to play the part of a mother. Only once in my life have I known a mother's feelings. That was last night. They were terrible – they made me suffer – they made me suffer too much. For twenty years . . . I have lived childless – I want to live childless still . . . No – what consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.'
¹⁰

Mrs Erlynne confirms the suspicion that marriage is no place for the spirit who values individual freedom, the freedom to ‘be yourself'. Oscar saw her as ‘a character as yet untouched by literature'.
¹¹
This is not the case; she had many sisters in Europe: Ibsen's Nora, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Proust's Odette, for instance.

An ovation on the first night brought Oscar on stage. Some impulse prompted him to burlesque the occasion. So rather than come on stage with humility or gratitude, he made an ostentatious entrance, armed with cigarette, his signature mauve gloves and an artificial carnation dyed green in his buttonhole, and proceeded, according to Alexander, with the following accentuations:

Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening
immensely
. The actors have given us a
charming
rendering of a
delightful
play, and your appreciation has been
most
intelligent. I congratulate you on the
great
success of your performance, which persuades me that you think
almost
as highly of the play as I do myself.
¹²

The audience did not like it. Addressing them with a cigarette was considered offensive, though one memoirist put it down to ‘nervousness'.
¹³
Moreover, his extreme display of vanity naturally provoked opposition in a people nurtured, as the English are, to show a self-deprecating modesty. What prompted Oscar to act accordingly? Was it ad lib? Or planned? Was it manic assertion? Or absolute letting go? Was the speech a strong sign of Oscar not wanting to make his peace with society? There is also the question of whether it laughs itself to scorn.

For Oscar was thoroughly in two minds about this sort of art. He was still the man who advocated art for art's sake – that is, a reunification of all arts and their materialisation: this type of drama would have involved a stress on the musicality of language and the visual stage, with the audience immersed in the sensorium. And imagining the improbable, as in
Salomé.
Could Oscar do these drawing-room comedies without bad faith? All we can know for certain is that money and fame entered the realm, with Oscar's name blazoned in the West End.
Lady Windermere's Fan
ran from 20 February 1892 till 29 July, then it went on tour until 31 October, after which it returned to London until 3 December. The play gave George Alexander a net profit of £5,570, and whatever the exact figure of Oscar's takings, said to have been around £3,000, he lost all notion of the value of the pound.

The play received enthusiastic reviews. Most critics marvelled at the language, at the clever use of paradox, and at the dialogue – and noted a language perfectly matched to social type. There were detractors. Henry James thought it ‘infantine . . . both in subject and form'.
¹⁴
What was new, though not mentioned by the first reviewers, was the use of language rather than plot to advance the drama, and the use of paradox to advance social criticism. Oscar employed paradox to throw up the contrast between appearance and reality: to point to truth. The focus on conversation rather than plot, apart from playing to Oscar's strengths, allowed him to air his views – on the individual in society, on marriage, on capitalism, on morality, on the relations between women and men. The theatre writer Eric Bentley put it well when he said of Wilde's work: ‘What begins as a prank ends as a criticism of life. What begins as intellectual high-kicking ends as intellectual sharp-shooting.'
¹⁵

Jane did not attend the opening. She preached the gospel of self-belief – ‘I believe in you & in your genius,' she wrote in February 1892 before the opening – and then combed the press for reviews, and sent the good ones to Willie in America. Constance watched
Lady Windermere's Fan
from a box where she sat alongside her aunt, Mary Napier, and the solicitor, Arthur Clifton. After the show Oscar and Constance went their separate ways. There were issues with the drains at Tite Street, but the problem with Tite Street went deeper than the plumbing. The house more often than not stood empty, as Constance and Oscar found endless excuses to avoid the place that had once been their haven of Aestheticism. On this occasion Constance went to stay with Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount Temple, widow of the deceased Whig statesman and philanthropist William Francis Cowper-Temple, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Oscar checked into the Albemarle Hotel and spent the night there with his then-lover, Edward Shelley, a publishing clerk.

That Constance and Oscar preserved any kind of bond would have seemed improbable, judging by the length of time they spent apart. During the latter half of 1891 they scarcely saw each other. There was, for instance, an arrangement that Oscar, then in Brighton, would join Constance at a social gathering in Dorking to celebrate his birthday on 16 October, but he failed to catch the right train, and came back to London, only to leave for Paris a few days later. Absence seemed to curdle guilt and Oscar tried to make amends by writing copious letters to Constance, almost every day. This epistolary exchange is lost, but references to the letters crop up in Constance's correspondence with Lady Mount Temple, as detailed by Constance's biographer, Fanny Moyle.

Constance found in Lady Mount Temple, many years her senior and recently widowed, the maternal love she lacked. Constance wandered in and out of Georgina's house in nearby Cheyne Walk, or stayed with her at Babbacombe Cliff. By the end of 1890 they had grown so intimate that Constance called Georgina ‘mother'. Among the many letters she wrote during these years, those to Georgina come closest to showing Constance's mind. When Oscar was in Paris writing
Salomé
, Constance wrote to Georgina, ‘Oscar writes in very good spirits from Paris, and never leaves me now without news, which is dear of him after all my grumbles.' A few days later she wrote ‘he is really very good in writing', as if she were trying to reassure herself. While another woman might have harboured suspicions of another lover or doubted the sincerity of Oscar's commitment, Constance appeared to do neither. She had set her mind against what she called ‘this terrible passion of jealousy' and determined that ‘the only way to conquer it is to love more intensely; love will swallow up even the pangs of jealousy'.
¹⁶