오스카 와일드의 희극성 = The Comedies of Oscar Wilde

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This is an attempt to study Oscar Wilde's early three comedies-Lady Windmere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband by a close examination of each play with special referance to plot, form and content. Many critics have complained about Wilde's indebtedness and adherence to a tradition that was already established in comic drama ; post-romantic French drama and the plays of his English contemporaries. Our superficial understanding of his plays might lead to the false conclusion that his achievement lay merely in putting together melodrama situations, using techniques from the well-made play, and projecting them on to a background of social criticism in the problem play. The real problem of his plays is the tension between the individual and society, between public and private life, between established norms and their deliberate violation. The subject-matter and the conflict in each of Wide's comedies lies in the struggles of the insiders to maintain their position or of the outsiders to break in, and of the individual's need to fulfil himself independently of this pressure to conform.
Despite the fact that Wilde continually touches on the conflict between public and private life, we cannot assign his comedies to the genre of the problem play. The tradition of problem play did not suit Wilde at all, for it ran contrary to his anti-realistic concept of art and he was not really interested in social reform. He adopted tile lofty detachment of the observer ridiculing the weaknesses and deficiencies of social man and his institutions without ever departing from them. In his plays he seeks to empower the dandies, and in his statements about the theatre. as about art and life in general, he constantly disclaims any pretensions to seriousness-as commonly defined. Through a series of highly cultivated speeches the dandies of each play challenge the moral and social expectations of his audience-in particular such good women as Lady Windmere and the Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windmere's Fan, Miss Hester Worsley in A Woman of No Importance and Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband. Wilde treats all his variations on these characters with a degree of irony by casting doubt on the self-righteous morality that underlies all their actions, resulting in comic effect. Even the irony of the title or sub-title revealed in the concluding part of each p]ay contributes to the comic effect of his comedies.
It should not be supposed that Wilde is attempting to imitate any one genre lather than another ; however, the individual kind of comedy which he initiated and developed has even stronger affinities with the English than with the French tradition. One striking principle of construction in his comedies, which corroborates such a view, is the way in which it is organized, in part, by means of hierachy of wit. Such a scheme would place the chief spokesmen of Wildean dandyism such as Mrs. Erlynne, Lord Darlington, Lord Illingworth and Lord Goring in the highest rank, their tone being echoed by choric figures and the sincerely earnest at the bottom. Unlike many dramatists he did not write a basic play which he later embellished with witticisms but from first to last he engaged his creative intellect on the theme so that, in effect, every joke, every epigram, almost every line of dialogue adds to the accumulative and total drama, resulting in a criticism of life and a criticism of the society of the day.
There is little denying that in his three comedies Wilde was burdened with the tradition of French thesis play. But compared with the theses of Dumas fils and Augier, Wilde's were less conventional. In all his three comedies there is a secret that either sets the plot in motion or at least has a decisive influence on its course. Futhermore, this secret always concerns something in conflict with social or moral conventions, that is, the indiscretions of Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Arbuthnot in Lady Windmere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance, and the corruption of Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband. In particular the moral scheme of the plot in An Ideal Husband has, demonstrably, some unusual implications, which reflect the tolerance and compromise of Lady Windmere's Fan rather than the moral absolutes of A Woman of No Importance. In Lady Windmere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance Wilde attacked an uncompromising attitude, such as Dumas and Augier took, towards the demi-mondaine, and in An Ideal Husand the demi-mondaine, though foiled, is not humiliated. But the relative unconventionality of Wilde's theses does not prevent their burdening the plays and from time to time clashes with the comic point of view that is the freshest element in each play. It is only with his escape from the thesis play in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Wilde made two vital contributions to the development of British drama : a new style of language and a new critical perspective. His alternation of techniques-non-commitment, witty aphorisms, paradoxes, hidden dialogue and direct expression-was the original feature that emanated directly from his own peculiar gifts. The new critical perspective consisted in his scepticism as regards the efficiency of communication, his focus on the dilemma of the individual seeking meaningful identity in the clash between public and private life, and his undermining of traditional conventions. Thus the work of T. W. Robertson, S. Grundy, H. A. Jones and countles, other nineteenth-century playwrights have been more or less forgotten, whereas Oscar Wilde's comedies have had an asset of tremendous value, that of appealing to the common man.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ 지금까지의 오스카 와일드에 대한 연구경향은
• Ⅱ 와일드의 희극에 대한 영향은 세 가지로 요약되고 있다.
• Ⅲ Lady Windmere's Fam은 근본적으로 멜로드라마로서 재치있는 대사가
• Ⅲ Wide의 다음 희극인 a waoman of No Importance는
• Ⅳ An Ideal Husband는 장르의 혼합에 가장 성공한 작품이다.
• Ⅴ 와일드의 모든 희극은 공사간의 갈등에 기초를 두고 있다.