Here I mark my salutation again; Oscar Wilde is a remarkably witty genius, a true observant and a sly story teller.How easily he read not only the lips of society but the rationale hidden in their words, the cause for the effect and how beautifully he reverberates in his witty words, the incomprehensible fillers we miss in the thoughts behind the mouthing of the gaudy characters to submerge their ostentation and bring out the real ugliness or the real goodness. How sharpened his skills were as an observer, every character lying naked to the soul in his presence. He was a cynic who understood the value of everything.I had read somewhere once, “If people saw in the mirror their true characters rather than their images, there wouldn’t have been many mirrors left in the world”.This short play undulates between trust, deceit and forgiveness. Mrs. Erlynne, out of nowhere has pronounced her presence in the lives of Lord and Lady Windermere and her bearing is having a catastrophic effect on their love and relationship. Love, the overrated emotion has its own trying asks and one may spend his whole lifetime just proving it. Who is this scandalous seductress who is so popular among the men, where has she come from and why is she imposing herself on their lives, what are her intentions?We all err, but only the one who gets caught is termed a thief, gets beaten up and is scarred for life. Oscar Wilde drives home the point that even the best of persons cannot be a Puritan in society for long, we all are misled sometimes and we all shed our values sporadically for our situational conveniences, we have to! It is a mental flaw to label someone as good or bad; even the worst of people have done some goodness in their lives and the best of people have been uglier. Patience is a virtue and to find goodness is another. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.I had watched the movie ‘A Good Woman’ featuring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson and had liked it immensely but didn’t know that it was based on this play, now I do!Some witty excerpts from the play: “Lord Darlington: Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. They are either charming or tedious.”************************** “Cecil Graham: Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.”************************** “Cecil Graham: Now, my dear Tuppy, don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if, we are good, when they meet us, they don’t love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.”*************************** “Dumby: In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!”
Well, it seems that my liking of Wilde's works follows a graphic like this one:I am not kidding you. Every time I read another play, I think it's better than the one I read before. Perhaps I'm reading them in some particular order unknown to me, or my opinion is starting to get biased. In any case, I enjoyed this immensely.This one involves more drama and problems than the plays I read previous to this one. It has a jealous wife, there's blackmailing, there are some misunderstood things that lead to more problems, etc. In short, it was brilliant.My favourite of these plays keeps being The Importance of Being Earnest, even when I said my enjoyment for them has been growing exponentially.In the end, I recommend this wholeheartedly. It's really funny, cynical, satirical and easy to read. There's none of that complex or dense writing that characterizes many Victorian works. Plus, it's written by the one and only Oscar Wilde. Need I say more?List of quotes:“Ah, now-a-days we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.”“I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”“Men become old, but they never become good.”“I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly ; but I don't see any chance of it just at present.”“It's wrong for a man to abandon his wife for a shameless woman. It is wrong for a wife to remain with a man who so dishonors her.”“Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now I never moralize. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.”“Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they are better.”And yeah, I am perfectly aware that the list of quotes is longer than my “review.”
What do You think about Lady Windermere's Fan (1995)?
Not Wilde's best. The plot was pretty lame - done before, and with lots of those rom-com situations where you think "This would all be cleared up if they'd just talk to each other like normal humans" - but it's still Wilde, so it's still plenty fun to read and has lots of things you probably would have put as your high school yearbook quote if you'd read it back then. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." "Experience is a question of instinct about life.""There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about."
—Alex
Reading an Oscar Wilde play is sort of like life being perfect. The structure of the work is faultless, the dialogue is uber-clever and fantastic. What's wrong with Wilde? Nothing. He's perfect. I can't imagine any writer who wrote so beautifully in his native language. There are some people who are born with 'it' and Wilde is one of them. Of course for someone so perfect he would have to get involved in some nasty social business via his decade. But when you look back at Wilde, one realizes that he is someone from the 19th Century who is saying goodbye to the Victorian era and culture. It's like he couldn't wait to jump into the 20th Century. Which makes it sad that we didn't accept Wilde with our open arms. We killed the thing that was so beautiful and right. Wilde was born in 1854 and died in 1900. I was born in 1954 and was convinced I would be dead by the year 2000 - just because of Wilde. It's silly and egotistic on my part, yet it also shows how much I love Wilde.
—Tosh
Oscar Wilde is as perfect, sarcastic wise and eloquent as they get. Lady Windermere’s Fan, (Wilde never ceases to amaze me) is life lessons disguised as a play, one of the most important ones is, don't judge anyone before knowing the whole story. my only problem was that i've seen the movie "a good woman" too many times to count, i didn't know it was based on this play ( it takes place in a different era but same characters and plot ) so after page 10, it clicked and i already knew the ending ( tragic i know) . But that didn't stop me from enjoying the outstanding dialogue and characters. my favorite quote : “I don’t think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women, as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice.”
—Hajer Elmahdi
