After all, her daring action (luckily never completed) is based entirely on the mistaken belief that her husband is unfaithful. Lord Darlington, urging her to leave her husband, offers her his love and this encouragement:

I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a great deal. They matter far too much. But 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. You have that moment now. Choose! Oh, my love, choose.

She does briefly leave her husband, taking refuge in Lord Darlington’s apartment, but she is persuaded to return to her husband by Mrs. Erlynne, and since it turns out her flight to Darlington was in any case based on a misunderstanding (Lord Windermere has been constant to his wife), Lord Darlington’s unorthodox views are undercut. Any resemblance to Ibsen thus soon disappears. What Shaw rightly saw as “the technical novelty” of the new, Ibsenite drama was the scene of discussion toward which a play moved (e.g. Nora and Torvald sitting down to talk things over near the end of A Doll’s House), but the passage from Lady Windermere is spoken early in the play and the issue is never really analyzed any further. And as has been mentioned, though Lady Windermere at the end of the play takes an altogether different view from the puritanical speech quoted a moment ago, she does so in ignorance of the facts: Mrs. Erlynne’s past is still a secret unknown to Lady Windermere. In this play, then, the topic of infidelity is, so to speak, flirted with but never consummated. Scandal-mongering and hypocrisy are rebuffed, and a sinner is forgiven, but none of this represents a challenge to the settled views of the audience. A play that at first may seem, especially in Lord Darlington’s words, to challenge society, ends up, after some melodramatic moments, with all the usual values intact. The play never faces the question of what is the right, or even the duty, of a wife whose husband is indeed unfaithful. Lady Windermere’s Fan thus toys with social issues, especially with the double standard in sexual morality, but it remains in large measure a comedy (with melodramatic passages) about the usual stuff of comedy, misunderstandings. Although Wilde might have been surprised to learn that his play is conventional, he would not have regarded such a judgment as calling attention to a weakness in the play, and it does not: the job of a playwright, he would have said, is to create a work of beauty, not a work of social criticism.

Here we can return to the role of the dandy held first by Lord Darlington and later by others, including (though it is not immediately obvious) Mrs. Erlynne. “Manners before morals,” she coolly says to the indignant Lord Windermere, thus summarizing the apparent creed of the dandy. Mrs. Erlynne has for the most part the admirable poise of the dandy, except when her daughter’s welfare is at stake, but in the last scene she outdoes herself:

I suppose, Windermere, you would like me to retire into a convent, or become a hospital nurse, or something of that kind, as people do in silly modern novels. That is stupid of you, Arthur; in real life we don’t do such things—not as long as we have any good looks left, at any rate. No—what consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. And besides, if a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dress-maker, otherwise no one believes in her. And nothing in the world would induce me to do that. No; I am going to pass entirely out of your two lives. My coming into them has been a mistake—I discovered that last night.

Clever speech and reserved feeling here, of course, are the mask (to use a term from Wilde’s critical writings) that allows her to perform what in the context of the play is the best thing to do.