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[عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابطللتسجيل اضغط هنا]
The passages below are taken from Questia.com
A Woman of No Importance, in which Wilde breaks a lance in behalf of even justice at the hands of society for men and women who have committed indiscretions. His play is the embodiment of his conviction that it was ‘a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women. ’ In answer to the complaint of the critics that
Lady Windermere’s Fan was lacking in action, Wilde wrote the first act of
A Woman of No Importance. ‘In the act in question, ’ said Wilde, ‘there was absolutely no action at all. It was a perfect act!’ In his plays, he always sought to throw the stress, not upon its mere technique, in which he was lamentably inept, but upon its quality of psychological interest. With Wilde, temperament is the primal requisite for the artist: and the proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art. ‘Nobody’s else work gives me any suggestion, ’ he once basely prevaricated. ‘It is only by entire isolation from everything that one can do any work. Idleness gives one the mood, isolation the conditions. Concentration on one’s self recalls the new and wonderful world that one presents in the color and cadence of words in movement. ’ Wilde seeks to supply all deficiencies in the action by dazzling brilliancy in the dialogue. It is typical of Wilde’s comedies that, whereas everything is always discussed, nothing is ever done.
The mother and son and the Puritan maidens in
A Woman of No Importance discredit virtue and seriousness by their hopeless inferiority in interest to the vicious and frivolous of the company. The Puritan maiden delivers a Dumasian tirade against English society, with variations by Wilde (‘It lives like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold’) which is not only rhetoric, but ‘twopence coloured’ rhetoric. For mark the peculiar penalty of insincerity: it not merely makes a nonentity of the author’s personage, but ruins his style!
In his second play of modem life Mr. Oscar Wilde has, in our opinion, blighted some of our great expectations. We do not deny that, in a certain way,
A Woman of No Importance is a play of distinction: its dialogue is polished; there are here and there little traits of observation which are uncommonly striking; it is full of humour, and many of the conversations are brilliant with flashes of caustic wit, qualities which, united as they are here, are all too rare in native English plays. But as a work of art we find
A Woman of No Importance unsatisfactory. It is patched up with reminiscences of a school which is now, if not quite dead, moribund. We mean the romantic period of the days of Theodore Barrière, of Thiboust and de Leuven, when
La Voix du Sang played such a great part in the romantic drama of France, and filled the spectators with wild delight. It is also disappointing, because the story of the woman who has been abandoned by her lover, who has borne him a child, and meets him afterwards when that son is grown up, has been often told before, and told with greater effect and more sincerity than Mr. Wilde has done. The conflict between father and son, when the father has insulted the girl of his son’s choice, would be interesting if it had not been brought about by such artificial, stagey ways, and we should have felt greater sympathy for the forsaken woman if her real character had been drawn with more depth, with more feeling. In this play all the personages make on us the impression of a set of wonderfully clever people, who say wonderfully clever things, couched in a grace of language that their very distinction becomes tedious, because there is no soul, no real sentiment behind their talk.
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05-09-2010, 10:49 PM
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