“You Will Call Me Sister, Will You Not?”: Friendship, Solidarity, and Conflict between Women in Wilde’S Society Plays

  • Helen Davies
Chapter

Abstract

In her chapter on “queer tutelage” in The Importance of Being Earnest, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick implores us to “Forget the Name of the Father. Think about your uncles and your aunts.”1 She explores how the play’s representation of alternative kinship ties that are not shackled to biology—or the Oedipal triangle—can offer possibilities for thinking beyond the logic of patriarchal, heteronormative constructions of gender and sexuality. However, while she notes briefly that the ending of Earnest situates Jack and Algernon in a sibling network,2 she stops short of considering how the discourse of sibling relationships is also invoked in relation to the bonds between women in the play. When Algernon questions Jack as to Gwendolen’s perspective on his “excessively pretty ward,” Cecily, Jack remarks airily, “Cecily and Gwendolen are perfectly certain to be extremely good friends. I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.” In response, Algernon cautions, “Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”3 Of course, both men’s predictions on how Gwendolen and Cecily will interact come to fruition: after their initial hostility motivated by believing that they are both engaged to the same man, the women bond over the “gross deception” that has been enacted upon them, with Gwendolen asking Cecily, “You will call me sister, will you not?”4

Keywords

Double Standard Sibling Relationship Patriarchal Society Sexual Double Standard Attractive Woman 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 3.
    Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Tamest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 269.Google Scholar
  3. 5.
    See, for example, Teminist Nightmares: Women At Odds, ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), for a selection of essays that critique the inclusive notion of “sisterhood” for ignoring inequalities between women.Google Scholar
  4. 6.
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Copyright information

© Michael Y. Bennett 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Helen Davies

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