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W I L D EM E NBY CONTRIBUTING DRAMATURG LAURA HOPEPictured: Oscar Wildeas Salomé.When Oscar Wilde first penned LadyWindermere’s Fan, he referred to the playunder the working title, A Good Woman.A great deal of attention has been givento this notion of “the good woman”in the play, and the ironic competitionbetween mother and daughter for thistitle. (See Resident Dramaturg PhilippaKelly’s article on the preceding pages ofthis program.) But what about the men?If middle-class and aristocratic womenin Victorian England were repressed andchafing against the bonds of patriarchalsociety, the men of those classes were, inresponse, one big, hot mess. Oscar Wildeand the men of Lady Windermere’s Fanwere no exception. It’s hard to have yoursocial power challenged—it’s harder stillwhen the devices with which others challengeyour power base consist of your ownrhetoric and hypocrisy.Lady Windermere has been raised in thebelief that she should be pure, associatingonly with morally upstanding people.Her husband is so dedicated to keepingher this way that he tries to “protect her”against the knowledge that her mother isalive, and even allows his wife to thinkhe is having an affair with the mysteriousMrs. Erlynne rather than tell her the truth.Her purity cannot be tainted and, by extension,it is implied that certain types ofknowledge are the exclusive realm of husbands.Purity was a big deal for Victorianmen. They were obsessed with it in theirwomen, and they had unresolved anxietiesabout it in themselves. As ProfessorJan Marsh has noted, “Male anxietiesin relation to both physical and mentalhealth in the Victorian era often seemto have concentrated on the supposedlybaleful effects of masturbation, which wasalleged to cause a wide range of physicaland mental disorders, and on venerealdiseases, especially syphilis.” Aristocraticladies were meant to be pure and entirelyignorant of sexuality. Their husbands,meanwhile, were expected to fool around.Some aristocratic men wore special metalanti-masturbation devices, which madecheating on your wife extremely difficult todo physically, if not morally and emotionally.The paradox constructed by the differentexpectations of men and women in marriageis explored by Wilde in an exchangebetween Lady Windermere, the Duchessof Berwick, and the alleged bad boy LordDarlington in Act One:Lady Windermere: …I will have noone in my house about whom thereis any scandal.Lord Darlington: Oh, don’t say that,Lady Windermere. I should never beadmitted!Duchess of Berwick: Oh, men don’tmatter. With women it is different.We’re good. Some of us are, at least.But we are positively getting elbowedinto the corner. Our husbands wouldreally forget our existence if we didn’tnag at them from time to time, justto remind them that we have a perfectlegal right to do so.Lord Darlington: It’s a curious thing,Duchess, about the game of marriage—agame, by the way, that isgoing out of fashion—the wives holdall the honors, and invariably losethe odd trick.Duchess of Berwick: The odd trick?Is that the husband, Lord Darlington?Lord Darlington: It would be rather agood name for the modern husband.encoreartsprograms.com 13