The Importance of Being a Wit by Oscar Wilde

Edith Evans was the daughter of a minor civil servant, and was apprenticed to be a milliner at the age of fifteen. But such a response is entirely uncritical of the contextual reality. This to a certain extent remains a definitive version of the representation of this character. The best-know example is the actress Edith Evans’ delivery of Lady Bracknell’s line “A handbag?” from 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

Such attitudes have been reinforced by conventions of interpretation and performance.

This determination to view Wilde’s dialogue merely as a series of bons-mots creates a profound blindness: to the relationship between background and foreground, social circumstances and social interaction between dialogue and character and particularly between language and intention. So fixated in the popular imagination is the idea that Wilde’s dialogue must be witty if nothing else that critiques of this piece have dismissed the first one-and-a half-acts as simply verbal fireworks, establishing the dramatic tone. Particularly instructive in this regard is an examination of both the general circumstances and a close reading of certain scenes of A Woman of No Importance (1893). So extreme does this make the verbal pronouncements of such characters – and there are many in Wilde – that they can only be made palatable to the popular zeitgeist by re-defining them as too outrageous to be serious. This is the world of Henleigh Grandcourt in Eliot’s 'Daniel Deronda': he says – and does – exactly what he likes, whenever he likes. It understood perfectly the issues being discussed, and the freedom available to those with unquestioned social power to speak of anything in whatever way they pleased, with no accounting for lower-middle-class sensebility. Wilde’s primary audience was small, and socially elevated.

The Importance of Being a Wit by Oscar Wilde