There is no doubt that Mrs. Erlynne is to be viewed as highly moral. “I regret my bad actions,” she tells Lord Windermere, “you regret your good ones—that is the difference between us,” another statement that is thoroughly dandiacal in its flippancy and in its fundamental morality.

If we judge Lady Windermre’s Fan as though it were a play by Ibsen, or even by Shaw, it of course seems weak, though in a few passages the play seems to invite comparison.

LORD DARLINGTON.... Do you think seriously that women who have committed what the world calls a fault should never be forgiven?

LADY WINDERMERE. I think they should never be forgiven.

LORD DARLINGTON. And men? Do you think that there should be the same laws for men as there are for women?

LADY WINDERMERE. Certainly!

LORD DARLINGTON. I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

LADY WINDERMERE. If we had these “hard and fast rules” we should find life much more simple.

In Earnest, Algernon will say “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” And Lady Windermere will, by the end of the play, come to see that Mrs. Erlynne—though a liar—is not simply (as Lord Windermere says) “a very clever woman” but “a very good woman.” The weakness of the play is not that it fails to offer new, Ibsenite values (judged by this standard, most of Shakespeare’s plays would be found wanting) but that we are asked to take seriously some unconvincing, melodramatic speeches, such as Lord Windermere’s at the end of the first act, when his wife tells him that if Mrs. Erlynne enters the Windermere house she will strike Mrs. Erlynne with her fan. She strides out, and we are left with Lord Windermere:

LORD WINDERMERE (calling after her). Margaret! Margaret! (A pause.) My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman really is. The shame would kill her. (Sinks down into a chair and buries his face in his hands.)

Wilde took seriously the job of constructing a play. In his original version of Lady Windermere’s Fan the secret—that Mrs. Erlynne is Lady Windermere’s mother—was withheld until the last act. When the producer urged Wilde to let the audience in on the secret earlier, Wilde replied in a letter that to do so would “destroy the dramatic wonder” by making Mrs. Erlynne’s sacrifice natural rather than unexpected. After a few performances Wilde revised the play, putting the revelation earlier, but his original version, as well as many speeches in the final version, shows that Wilde was striving for melodramatic as well as for comic effects. That is, his comedy is cast in the form of the “well-made play,” the pièce bien faite as established by the French playwright Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), a cleverly plotted play with much suspense but little or no subtlety of characterization (the characters are more likely to be inconsistent than complex), a sort of melodrama with the fisticuffs left out. It can, in fact, be argued that Lady Windermere’s Fan is not really to be classified as a “comedy” but as a “drama,” though one with a good deal of witty dialogue.

Wilde continued to work in this genre in A Woman of No Importance (produced early in 1893) and An Ideal Husband (produced in 1895), but he abandoned it for what can be called pure comedy in The Importance of Being Earnest (written in 1894 and produced in 1895). For George Bernard Shaw, reviewing the first production of what was to be Wilde’s last play, the piece was “rib-tickling” but lacking in “humanity.” For most readers and viewers, however, The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde’s greatest work, the only play in which, freeing himself from melodramatic claptrap, he wrote a delightfully intricate plot (the four lovers are sometimes partners, sometimes competitors) with consistently witty dialogue. It is, so to speak, a play that is pure play. In Earnest there is, to be sure, the motif of the long-lost child that is found also in Lady Windermere and in A Woman of No Importance, but in those plays the identification was serious, whereas in Earnest the discovery that Jack is the long-lost Ernest, who as an infant had been absentmindedly misplaced in a handbag and left at a railroad station, is unambiguously comic. In his review Shaw conjectured that Wilde had refurbished an early work written under the influence of W. S. Gilbert, a work, Shaw said, “almost inhuman enough to have been conceived” by Gilbert. Shaw could not believe that Earnest represented Wilde’s mature artistic achievement. Some twenty years later Shaw again commented on the play, calling it “heartless,” and attributing to Wilde’s “debaucheries” the lack in Earnest of the “kindness and gallantry” that Shaw found in Wilde’s earlier plays. He did not specify any passages or episodes, but we might agree that when Jack’s “I have lost both my parents” gets as its response from Lady Bracknell, “Both? ...