SATIRE AND SOCIAL VISION IN OSCAR WILDE’S DRAMA

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Résumé

This article analyses Oscar Wilde's comedies of manners as a slantwise challenge to the Victorian gentry’s social mores. The paper stresses Victorian society’s
unrealistic expectations of the individual which ultimately results to deceitful engagement in a double life in order to satisfy conventions. In the four plays explored , such manners as class-consciousness, idleness, hypocrisy, and cant are light-heartedly exposed and vilified. It concludes that, as a social critic, Wilde skillfully questions or undermines the conventional values of Victorian society through witty dramatisation of the misconduct and deviation of the protagonists in the four plays scrunitised.

Mots-clés

British aristocracy, comedy of manners, Oscar Wilde, Satire, social vision