The trouble with Oscar · Sun May 13, 19:24 by Eleri Straker
I’ve been teaching my Yr 12 Literature group Oscar Wilde’s ‘A Woman of No Importance.’
It’s not his best play or the most well known. But it’s clever and it’s funny and an awful lot of
Wilde’s famous one-liners seem to come from it.
The class generally like the play. It’s easy to read and the wit is sparkling and biting. However, I have one student who is convinced that the play has a gay subtext. This weird idea rose from the fact that she learned that Wilde was gay. To prove her point she showed me an extract of the play which she claims a gay friend of hers told her was proof of the play being full of homosexual subtexts. The extract she showed me was of Lord Illingworth (main character) speaking about the power of women and that to get on in society, a man needed their support.
This apparently is a gay sentiment.
When I pointed out that it was actually simply a very insightful and intelligent comment and that Victoria was Queen at the time, she simply told me that I was missing the point!
When I then suggested that in order to understand the play that she needed to get past
Wilde’s sexuality, she told me that I shouldn’t have told her that he was gay!
When I reminded her that this information was actually in the introduction of the text and that anyone studying Wilde would discover that particularly well-known fact about him.
She then said that knowing this affected the way one looked at the play.
So I asked her if knowing that Dylan Thomas spent most of his adult life in an alcoholic haze affected the way one looked at his work. Or did the fact that he was a drunk mean that everything he wrote had a ‘drunk’ subtext?
She gave me a very funny look. Of course not, she said. Why not? Because it’s different.
I don’t believe that this girl is homophobic, what she has done is to focus closely on one thing. The result of this is that she has lost perspective on the play.
So I spent two hours last week in an after-school session with her discussing the themes about which Wilde is writing, to get her to regain that perspective and to stop her panicking.
After about an hour and forty-five minutes, she suddenly said, “It’s all linked!”
“What is?” I asked.
“Everything,” she replied. “All the themes are linked. His comments on men and women, politics, hypocrisy, honour, morality….the lot. They’re all linked.”
I cheered; because of course she was right.
What she had done was de-focus. She’d pulled back from this narrow point on which she had focused all her attention and the moment that she had done that, the whole play became clear. She was suddenly able to see the play as a whole. She was able to see that the fact that Wilde was gay was really pretty irrelevant when looking at the point he was making in the play.
It was as if a dark cloud had lifted. She was suddenly smiling as she had finally got past the intellectual block that was blighting her view of Wilde’s work.
I was mightily relieved I can tell you as it’s only a couple of weeks until the ASs!
But then, better late than never I suppose!
