Lady Windermere’s Fan Study Guide

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to parents who were both writers: his mother was a poet, and his father was a scholar as well as a prominent surgeon. As a young adult, Wilde attended a series of elite British educational institutions, where he excelled as a poet and scholar. By the early 1880s, Wilde was well known in London’s literary and artistic circles as a clever, flamboyant individual with a passion for aesthetics and art. He was also a prolific journalist during this period. In 1884, he married Constance Lloyd, with whom he had two children. Wilde wrote and published most of his most prominent work in the last ten years of his life, including the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play The Importance of Being Earnest. In the early 1890s, Wilde was charged with sodomy due to rumors of his relationship with the young nobleman Lord Alfred Douglas and was ultimately sentenced to two years of hard labor. The only work Wilde completed after his imprisonment was a treatise on inhumane jail conditions, and he died suddenly in 1900 of meningitis.

Like Wilde’s other comedic plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan is deeply rooted in the upper-class English society of the late Victorian era. The play satirizes the hypocrisy of this society by revealing how shallow its outwardly strict moral rules really are. In particular, Wilde’s work interrogates and exposes the real-life gender expectations and imbalances of the world in which he lived. This aspect of the work may have been informed by his own homosexuality, which was considered scandalous at time and even led to Wilde’s imprisonment. Additionally, this work is related to Wilde’s passionate commitment to the Aesthetic movement of the late Victorian era. Following the core tenet of “art for art’s sake,” participants in this movement believed that art could and should exist on its own aesthetic merit, rather than needing to fulfill a social or political purpose. While Lady Windermere’s Fan is certainly grounded in social issues, its exuberant wit and carefully honed dialogue also suggest Wilde’s commitment to the pure aesthetic joy of his craft.

Although Wilde wrote three previous plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan was his first play to see commercial and critical success. As such, it laid the groundwork for his other successful comedic plays to come, most notably An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Both of those later works satirize upper-class English society and its morality in much the same way that Lady Windermere’s Fan does. This play is also related to other stage dramas of the same era. In particular, it echoes the themes of Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, A Doll’s House, in which a woman in a rigid society leaves her husband to pursue independence. Notably, however, Ibsen’s play is dark and dramatic, where Wilde treats similar themes as light and comedic. Wilde’s work is also connected to that of his contemporaries and mentors in the Aesthetic movement. In particular, he cited the writing of Walter Pater as crucial in his understanding of art and its aesthetic value.