Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde – A Book Review

           Here I mark my salutation again; Oscar Wilde is a remarkably witty genius, a true observant and a sly story teller.

How easily he read not only the lips of society but the rationale hidden in their words, the cause for the effect and how beautifully he reverberates in his witty words, the incomprehensible fillers we miss in the thoughts behind the mouthing of the gaudy characters to submerge their ostentation and bring out the real ugliness or the real goodness. How sharpened his skills were as an observer, every character lying naked to the soul in his presence. He was a cynic who understood the value of everything.

I had read somewhere once, “If people saw in the mirror their true characters rather than their images, there wouldn’t have been many mirrors left in the world”.

This short play undulates between trust, deceit and forgiveness. Mrs. Erlynne, out of nowhere has pronounced her presence in the lives of Lord and Lady Windermere and her bearing is having a catastrophic effect on their love and relationship. Love, the overrated emotion has its own trying asks and one may spend his whole lifetime just proving it. Who is this scandalous seductress who is so popular among the men, where has she come from and why is she imposing herself on their lives, what are her intentions?

We all err, but only the one who gets caught is termed a thief, gets beaten up and is scarred for life. Oscar Wilde drives home the point that even the best of persons cannot be a Puritan in society for long, we all are misled sometimes and we all shed our values sporadically for our situational conveniences, we have to! It is a mental flaw to label someone as good or bad; even the worst of people have done some goodness in their lives and the best of people have been uglier. Patience is a virtue and to find goodness is another.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

I had watched the movie ‘A Good Woman’ featuring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson and had liked it immensely but didn’t know that it was based on this play, now I do!

Some witty excerpts from the play:

“Lord Darlington: Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. They are either charming or tedious.”

**************************

“Cecil Graham: Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.”

**************************

“Cecil Graham: Now, my dear Tuppy, don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if, we are good, when they meet us, they don’t love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.”

***************************

“Dumby: In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!”

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * -10/10

Oscar Wilde

The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch – A Book Review

Is it good to be nice, nice alone, or is it nice to be good?

Come to think of it, our goodness almost at all times is an action, more so a reaction. It is for a purpose, it expects, it judges, it is hardly forthcoming and shies away from forgiveness. How miraculously difficult it is to be good to someone not so good to you and how difficult it is to be so when one is in control. As Murdoch quotes, “The only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every “natural thing”, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. The good has nothing to do with purpose”.

The protagonists of ‘The Nice and the Good’ are lively, except for the dead Radeechy of course, each managing through their intricate lives to communicate to the reader their plights. The story begins with the enigmatic suicide of Radeechy, a follower of necromancy and magic. This incident drags in John Ducane, a colleague of Radeechy, to investigate and unveil the cause of this suspicious death and to unfold if there is more to it. Octavian the Head of the Department has assigned this to Ducane; Octavian who has herded in his huge place by the sea many friends with broken hearts and broken lives; the same Octavian who willingly and uncomplainingly witnesses the infidelity of his wife Kate with Ducane. So, in the Trescombe cottage, we have the widowed Mary and her adolescent child Pierce who is madly in love with Barbara, the beautiful lass of Kate and Octavian, and there’s the divorced Paula with her twins, Theo, Octavian’s brother and Willy Kost, a sufferer of war, a liver in the past than now. Each one is fused but their eccentricities mark their individualism and beautifully so. It’s a story of their discoveries of their own selves, getting rid of the veils of niceness to discover the real good, the good for them.

John Ducane is a civil servant of high regard, who his friends and companions look up to, for his goodness, for his righteousness, his truthfulness. He unconsciously likes to be in control or rather people who know him place the reigns of their decisions and emotions in his trustworthy hands. As Ducane’s investigation progresses parallel to the not so eventful happenings at the Trescombe cottage, the lives of the sundry are strewn threadbare by their intimate confessions to Ducane. Dark secrets, blackmails and a murder are revealed. How much of it can Ducane make visible to others, how much is he ready to? Richard Biranne, Paula’s divorced husband lies at the mercy of Ducane’s decisiveness.

How difficult it is to choose right over comfort, over that little safety that everyone invariably desires to hide into, is something that Ducane will have to struggle with to keep his goodness alive. How easy it is to plunge into revenge, to shatter lives without a second thought when one is in control and how unmanageable is it to surrender oneself to goodness and protect and let go for the larger good, to see something as naïveté and give a second chance. Trapped in a cave by the sea to save Pierce from his unwarranted foolishness and almost thrown at the pangs of death, Ducane’s conscience makes some discoveries. Will Ducane succeed in sustaining his rightfulness?

To not realize love can well be termed as the ignorance of the mind than the heart but to suppress it is a crime. The characters in this story, and quite a few at that, ruefully and in some cases compromisingly bind themselves to what they think are the obvious loves of their lives; only to chaotically discover ultimately by the melancholic yet loud thundering of the right chords of their hearts that they have been strumming the wrong strings all this time and the symphony of mutuality lies somewhere else, with someone else. While the act of forgiveness is almost a myth in real life, it isn’t in Iris Murdoch’s story as at the very end everything and everyone falls in place and is on the verge of leading their ‘and they lived happily’ lives. Wish this resembled vividly to us puppets in real life too as we strain to comprehend our mere existence and the glories in the pain that we undergo to find true love and then sustain it.

The author writes in a simple manner and yet it has an enchanting effect. Not for a single instance, did I feel weary of any of the characters and their endless confusing emotions. The multitude of characters reminded me though of David Lodge’s ‘Small World’, since, like here, his stories also end in ‘All’s well, that ends well’, amidst a lot of confusion though!

A few days back, out of the blue, I saw a thick rainbow in the sky. Literally out of the blue! It was drizzling and the sky was a messy gray and then suddenly as I chanced to look out of the unclear glass window, a clearing blue appeared and then there it was, emanating from a tall concrete rise, this amative merging blue, cushioned between the consummating violet, indigo and the other colors of the palette that concluded it.  It reminded me of being in love, of a soothing gentleness, of happiness. That’s the goodness of nature. It surprises and amazes. Without a reason, without a purpose!

My Rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10

Iris Murdoch