Who Is “A Good Woman” In Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About A Good Woman?

Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About A Good Woman is a play in which Oscar Wilde twists all the clichés of a melodrama, such as unknown parents who are revealed at one point, or romantic love triangles which result in tragedy.

In the age the play was written, the Victorian Period, society cherished “morality” and the status of one a lot. People were expected to act according to social codes of behaviour and always “look good” because the opposite of this would be a reason for rumours, and rumours would damage one’s position in society. This kind of thinking caused people, especially women, to be divided strictly as good and bad because of trivial reasons such as being divorced or having gotten married more than once. Oscar Wilde, a writer who rejected the norms of morality that were valued by Victorian society, questioned this division between good and bad by giving examples of characters whose part in the spectrum is unclear in his play Lady Windermere’s Fan. Thus, the phrase “a good woman” refers to neither Lady Windermere nor Mrs Erlynne; it refers to the idea of a good woman as it is accepted by society, and how incorrect and blurry of a concept it is when one digs into it.

At the beginning of the play, Mrs Erlynne is seen by many people, especially by women and Lady Windermere, hearing about the rumours about her husband and her, as a loose, even a bad woman because of her acquaintance with men. Yet, after these women meet her, they decide that she is not a bad woman at all, and at the end of the play, Lady Windermere changes her idea of her because of her sacrifice. On the other hand, Lady Windermere exists as an example of “a good woman” as it is stated by many characters in the play, and yet only because her fan was found in Lord Darlington’s room she returns from the threshold of being labelled as a bad woman and losing everything she has. This shift in the attitude of the characters indicates that the actions one takes in their life, like having acquaintances, are merely choices on lifestyles and do not determine one's place on the scale that defines good or bad. Moreover, it suggests that the amount of information you have about someone is one of the factors impacting your perception, which means an outsider's opinion on one's morality is irrelevant and unreliable. Thus, there arises a question for the readers/audience, especially of the age the play was written in, concerning whether these women are good or not.

In the case of Lady Windermere, she acts refined and “morally” until she makes a mistake by deciding to leave his husband and run away with Darlington because of a misunderstanding resulting from rumours. One might call her bad because she was about to leave her family behind and make the same mistake her mother did, and another might call her good because her sudden anger and jealousy are understandable by most people and her motivation was not to do a wholeheartedly wicked deed. The same thing goes with Mrs Erlynne’s mistakes. She left her daughter and husband for her lover and became “an outcast” as it is stated by herself in Act III. To regain her previous societal position, she blackmailed Lord Windermere and used his love for his wife. Now, these seem enough to label her as a wicked person, but according to Lady Windermere’s words at the beginning of the play:

LADY WINDERMERE. Yes. Nowadays people seem to look at life as a speculation. It is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice. (Wilde 167)

In Lady Windermere’s eyes, sacrifice is purification, and this is what Mrs Erlynne does at the end. Her sacrifice purifies her bad deeds. At the very beginning, she aims to redeem herself and thus threatens Lord Windermere. By the end, she achieves her goal by sacrificing herself for her daughter, which changes her image both in Lady Windermere’s and the readers’ eyes. Just as it does in Lady Windermere’s case, it gets hard to identify this character as good or bad. 

With all these different points of view, different parts of these women’s personalities and incidents they took place in, the readers cannot conclude who the good woman that is mentioned in the title refers to in the play, they can understand that it does not define one of the characters’ personality traits; that it defines the general idea of a good woman and Wilde’s view on it by showing good and bad as two sides of a coin, which is the true nature of humans and real life.