29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
We should celebrate Oscar Wilde as a mould-breaking feminist
One a playwright adored by society and then destroyed by its hypocritical condemnation of his homosexuality; the other the first socialite to appear on stage, who captivated and scandalised in equal measure (this included her affair with the Prince of Wales – complete with sojourns in a Scottish love nest).
They were powerhouses for change.
Wilde gave us the self-actualised female protagonist who apologises to no one. What's more he approached the female characters in his plays from all different angles.
Some are martyrs (The Duchess of Padua), some are righteous warriors (Vera); some are ridiculous (Lady Bracknell), some are conniving (Mrs Cheverly) or vindictive (Salomé); some are philosophical (Mrs Allonby), some are frivolously shallow (Mabel Chiltern); many buck conventional domesticity and reliance on a husband; all are fiercely independent thinkers, like his own mother, Lady Jane Wilde, a poetess 'who was considered to be the most ardent and hot-headed of Irish Nationalists'.
It's difficult to overstate how important this was for modern theatre and literature.
Soon other playwrights followed suit by portraying women as individual beings untethered to husband or family.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession soon after seeing the opening performance of Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, and the similarities in social politics and the nonconformist mother roles are undeniable.
August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov subsequently adopted the style of creating more psychologically complex female characters at the turn of the 20th century. The direction of Western theatre and literature irrevocably shifted.
Wilde gave audiences a multitude of memorable characters and quotes such as Mrs Cheverly's quip in An Ideal Husband: 'The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed; women… merely adored.'
Contrasts between the sexes are a common theme in his social comedies: In A Woman of No Importance, Mrs Allonby ironically argues against the conjecture that wives' frivolity were what made marriages unhappy: 'How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she was a perfectly rational being?... We have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. We saw its dangers from the first.'
Something else I realised in the nine years I've spent researching Wilde was that his impact on the role of women wasn't restricted to fictional worlds.
His relationship with Langtry was crucial to her rise to stardom, and she in turn influenced his poetry and playwriting.
He dedicated poems to her and based the character of Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan on Langtry's life experience. And Langtry's life and personality were every bit as outsized as Wilde's characters.
Both deserve wider recognition. This is something I hope to contribute to at the Edinburgh Fringe with my one-woman play Wilde Women which celebrates how they strengthened women's voices on the stage using humour, grit and grace.
Krista Scott is the writer and performer of Wilde Women, which she is presenting at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She is a well-known actor, director and dialect coach and Professor of Theatre at Texas Christian University in the USA.
