How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (27 page)

Wilde identified the Greek aesthetic as “essentially modern,” and inasmuch as he, in his Greek mode, became the first popular modern writer to attempt to divorce aesthetics from morality, he was accurate. The Wilde we love, the Wilde of the epigrammatic wit, the Wilde who so devastatingly skewers puffed-up convention by turning his fictive worlds inside out, is the pagan, the Greek Wilde. The forms with which we identify him today—epigram, satire, the conventionalized situational comedy—are classical forms. The Romantic Wilde, the deeply nineteenth-century Wilde, the Wilde of the cloying sonnets and the highly perfumed blank verse of early plays like
Véra
,
or The Nihilists
and
The Duchess of Padua
, we tend to ignore. It was—significantly—only after his disgrace, in the bitter, belated paroxysm that was eventually published as
De Profundis
, that Wilde (who'd once remarked that the chief argument against Christianity was the style of Saint Paul) championed spirituality in its traditional “medieval” forms, emphatically rejecting his erstwhile allegiance to classical style, to

Indeed, even in the Wilde that we do treasure, particularly the three English-language plays that precede Earnest—
Lady Windermere's Fan
(1892),
A Woman of No Importance
(1893), and
An Ideal Husband
(1895)—it's clear that the author belonged as much to the dying century as he did to the one that lay ahead. The spirit of these works, which seek to subvert stuffy conventions, may look forward to the twentieth century, but the plays themselves are, essentially, clanking nineteenth-century melodramas, with their illegitimate births suddenly revealed, their plots that hinge on stolen jewels and letters, their eleventh-hour revelations. Even Wilde's contemporaries were able to see this. After attending a 1907 revival of
A Woman of No Importance
, Lytton Strachey described the play to Duncan Grant as “a complete mass of epigrams, with occasional whiffs of grotesque melodrama and driveling sentiment…. Epigrams engulf it like the sea.” In almost every dramatic work but
Earnest
, we feel the two Wildes—the sentimental, “Gothic” Wilde, and the crisp, classical Wilde—at war. It was only in
Earnest
, with its architectural symmetries, its self-consciously toy-like, artificial characters, its bejeweled style, that he achieved the ideal “Greek” harmony in which form and content were entirely at one.

 

Still, if
Earnest
is a perfect vehicle for the expression of Wilde's intellectual and aesthetic concerns, it can also be read as an allegory for the writer's life—one that was torn between a hunger for acceptance and a flair for subversion. (“
Le bourgeois malgré lui
” was Whistler's canny description of his onetime friend.) Like the drama of his life, much of the drama that Wilde wrote was concerned with the tension between the public masks we wear and the messy private impulses that they often hide; with sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute recognitions; with true natures—and true identities—ruefully revealed at the last minute. This is particularly true of the two works whose debuts early in 1895 marked the apogee of his professional life and the onset of his personal disintegration:
An Ideal Husband
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
. The former premièred to delirious reviews in January 1895; the latter, on Valentine's Day of the same year. Four days later, the marquess of Queensberry, Bosie's father, left his famously misspelled call
ing card, which referred to Wilde as a “somdomite”; two months later, Wilde had been condemned for “gross indecencies.”

Unsurprisingly, both plays use the same structural devices (switched identities, long-buried secrets) and both treat identical themes (the catastrophic tensions between public and private selves), and yet they are radically different in tone, temperament, and style.
An Ideal Husband
seems, indeed, to belong to the nineteenth century, and looks backward to what we may call the “Gothic” Wilde. Its interest lies, if anywhere, in its imperfections: the famous epigrams (“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance”) sparkle brightly, but are at odds with the melodramatic structure and patent sentimentality—and with overwrought passages in which the playwright seems to be using his characters as mouthpieces for personal concerns. When the play's tortured main character, a man revealed to have a terrible secret in his past, addresses a series of lengthy, impassioned, and nakedly illogical pleas for sympathy to his wife—a woman whom he goes on to chastise for having insufficient sympathy for his flaws—it is impossible not to think of Wilde himself.

Earnest
, on the other hand, has the high aesthetic elegance and irrefutable mechanical efficiency of a theorem: in this case, a theorem about art and society. Here, significantly, all emotion, all feeling—all real “life”—have been purposefully pared away. With its nihilistic inversions of surface and content, attitude and meaning, triviality and seriousness, the play flashes and gleams dangerously like the scalpel it was meant to be, the instrument with which Wilde dissected Victorian ethics, thereby making twentieth-century aesthetics—an aesthetics divorced from false sentiment—possible.

The story of the paradoxical process by which Wilde evolved from a poseur who put life before art into a real artist, from the composer of florid poems on ostentatiously lofty themes into the author of comedies whose flippancy concealed a serious intellectual and critical purpose, is a fascinating one. So it is a great irony that Wilde's life story has come to overshadow his work in a way that has blunted our understanding of just what it is that made him an interesting artist. Today we think of Wilde as an icon of martyrdom in the cause of sexual freedom; and yet our seeming familiarity with him—our sometimes too-hasty sense
that we know what he's about, which happens to be something we're interested in today—has dulled our appreciation of his creations. This is nowhere more apparent than in the recent film version of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. It was directed by the Englishman Oliver Parker, who also directed the 1999 film version of
An Ideal Husband
; in both films, a knowing familiarity with Wilde the icon has all too frequently transformed his artistic creations into the opposites of what they were intended to be.

 

To get
The Importance of Being Earnest
right—to convey the danger, as well as the delight, inherent in those artfully constructed double lives; danger and delight that Wilde himself knew so well, and which ultimately destroyed him—you need to maintain its artificiality, the self-conscious conventionality of form that the playwright uses to highlight his ideas about the artificiality of social and moral conventions. In Anthony Asquith's flawless 1952 film version of the play, the director emphasizes the theatrical nature of his material: the movie opens with an image of people being seated at the theater, followed by the appearance of a title card reading, “Act 1. Scene 1. Ernest Worthing's Room in the Albany.” The performances themselves—particularly those of the incomparable Joan Greenwood as Gwendolen and Dorothy Tutin as Cecily—are shaped to be as robotic as possible. The young women tinkle their slyly nonsensical lines (“Mamma, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted”) like the windup toys they are.

In his new film version of
Earnest
, by contrast, Oliver Parker does what many filmmakers do when translating plays onto celluloid, which is to attempt to “open out” the work. This allows him to present many splendid images: of the grotesquely ornate residence in which Lord and Lady Bracknell live; of Jack's impressive country seat, where Algy arrives by means of a hot-air balloon; and of Lady Bracknell's awesome hats, which appear to have decimated more than one aviary. But film's inherent tendency to naturalize what it shows us works, if anything,
against the grain of the play—as does the inevitable tendency of film to translate into images motifs and ideas that are conveyed onstage by means of words. The latter is particularly unfortunate when treating the work of a great talker; the visual temptations of film make nonsense of some of Wilde's sharpest and best-known lines. “I never travel without my diary,” Gwendolen famously says with glacial sweetness on meeting Cecily at Jack's country house. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Parker's film makes you wonder just when she gets to read that famous document, since in this version she prefers to motor down from London in a clanking automobile which she can barely keep on the road. This makes for visual interest, but destroys the comic point.

It may be that the purpose of showing Gwendolen's perilous drive is to demonstrate her independence of mind. (Parker writes in a scene in which we see her having the name “Ernest” tattooed on her derrière—a vulgar and otiose intrusion.) But, of course, Wilde's Gwendolen has no “mind,” or at least not in the sense Parker thinks she does. The most salient aspect of Gwendolen's character is, if anything, her artificiality of mind: it is her and Cecily's inane, lifelong yearning to marry men named “Ernest” that drives the perverse action of the play, forcing both Jack and Algy to maintain their elaborate double lives as Ernests. Indeed, Parker's eagerness to give his characters inner lives often means that his direction is at odds with the directions Wilde provides. Like all of
Earnest
's females, young Cecily is as tough as nails beneath an elaborate, doll-like politesse; this is part of Wilde's satire of contemporary expectations that high-born girls be hothouse flowers. Jack understands his creator's important point, and goes so far as to articulate it—one of the rare moments in the play when a character says, and means, something that happens to be true: “Cecily is not a silly, romantic girl, I am glad to say. She has got a capital appetite, goes on long walks, and pays no attention at all to her lessons.” Parker, however, has ideas of his own. His Cecily is the opposite of Wilde's—a dreamy young thing who, during long, beautifully photographed fantasy sequences, imagines herself as a misty Burne-Jones heroine, decked out in medieval gowns while tied to a tree awaiting rescue by hunky knights. Wilde's point is that contemporary artistic fantasies of young maidenhood run counter to some tough natural truths; Parker's joke is that—well, there is no joke.

Of course, the two young women are merely embryonic versions of the most artfully constructed of all of Wilde's females, Lady Bracknell, that epigram-breathing dragon of self-assurance. Like all great humor characters, she is utterly without a past or future, without motivation or reason of any kind: like the mandarin systems of class and taste and privilege that she represents, she merely, monstrously, is. Parker, however, gives her a sordid past as a lower-class showgirl who (as we see in a flashback) entrapped Lord Bracknell into marriage by getting pregnant—a scenario as unlikely as it is, ultimately, unilluminating. However clever, such details undermine the entire project of Wilde's dramaturgy, which always proposes as being quite “natural” that which is the most artificial of motivations, and vice versa.

 

Parker's failure to understand the structures and meanings of Wilde's play is clearest in his direction of the final scene—the dénouement in which Miss Prism tells all, and all ends happily. At the end of the play, after it is established that Jack is the long-lost child of Lady Bracknell's sister—and hence is Algy's brother—there is a frantic scrambling to find out what his real given name had been. (Remember, Gwendolen will only marry an “Ernest.”) All that Lady Bracknell can recall was that the child was named for its father, the late General Moncrieff, whose first name she can no longer remember. Jack eagerly consults the Army Lists, where he triumphantly discovers thay his dead father's name had, in fact, been Ernest John, and hence that both his real and his assumed names are, indeed, “true”: so that Jack has been both Ernest and “earnest” all his life. “It is a terrible thing,” he declares at this revelation, “for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” It is this discovery that prompts his newfound aunt's withering final observation: “My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.” The disdain she evinces for the discovery of this authentic “Ernest” mirrors Wilde's disdain for all that is “earnest.”

Bizarrely, Parker contorts this concluding moment, with its typically Wildean condemnation of earnestness, into its exact opposite. In his cinematic
Earnest
, we see Jack's finger going down the list of entries in the Army Lists and landing on the name “Moncrieff,” but the first name here, as we can all too clearly see, is simply “John.” Nonethe
less—in order to win the hand of Gwendolen—Jack announces to everyone that his late father's name was Ernest. Lady Bracknell sees and comprehends the deceit, but still goes on to make her disdainful closing remark about her nephew's “signs of triviality”: the result is that in this version, her barb is directed not at Jack's “earnestness,” but at his deceitfulness, which she alone has glimpsed. For her to condemn deception rather than sincerity doesn't merely miss the point, it inverts it: Parker's film ends up implicitly endorsing the conventional morality that the play—a drama, let us not forget, by the author of “The Truth of Masks” and “The Decay of Lying”—so hilariously lampooned.