Wilde’s Comedic Takes on the New Woman: A Comparison with Ibsen and Shaw

Abstract

Oscar Wilde was already a convert to women’s cultural and social causes when he started writing his popular society comedies in the early 1890s. Wilde may not have marched with the suffragettes or given lectures to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, but he actively supported women’s advances in the arts, culture, and society. As the editor of The Woman’s World, the periodical he helped transform into an “organ of women of intellect, culture and position,” he developed an intellectual playground for women that extended far beyond ladies’ fashion and society gossip to literature, culture, and hot-button issues such as women’s work and female suffrage.¹ Wilde expressly solicited the works of contemporary women writers for the magazine, including authors who were or would soon become well known, such as Amy Levy, Ouida, Edith Nesbit, Dinah Mulock Craik, Constance Naden, Michael Field, and Olive Schreiner, and he personally reviewed many lesser-known ones in his editorial “Literary and Other Notes,” such as Margaret L. Woods and Phyllis Browne. Together with his wife, Constance, Wilde also campaigned for women’s rational dress reform throughout the 1880s and 1890s (an interest that merged neatly with his lectures on aesthetic dress and house decoration).² In addition, he counted numerous progressive women among his correspondents and friends, some of whom, like Sarah Bernhardt and the Ibsen actress Elizabeth Robins, were outspoken advocates of women’s rights.