Oscar Wilde Beyond the Page and Stage: Objects, Craft and the Performance of Identity.

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s society comedies are reconsidered through the lens of material culture and theatrical craftsmanship. By treating Wilde not simply as a dramatist but as an artisan who fashioned identities through objects, I argue that props, costumes, and stage conventions in Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest function as agents of subversion rather than decorative accessories. Far from being ornamental, objects in Wilde’s theatre become central to the destabilization of gender, morality, and social truth. Wilde’s contemporaries often failed to recognize the radical implications of this dramaturgy, dismissing his epigrams and props as trivial. Yet these very devices anticipate modern theories of performativity and the agency of things. By situating Wilde’s comedies in dialogue with contemporaneous figures such as Ibsen, Shaw, and French melodrama, as well as with later critical traditions, this study demonstrates how Wilde’s artistry transcends the limits of Irish and British literature. His plays remain crucial not only to theatre history but to broader interdisciplinary debates on aesthetics, identity, and cultural performance. In this sense Wilde’s dramaturgy speaks in dialogue with contemporaneous figures such as Whistler and Beardsley in the visual arts, Ruskin and Morris in debates on craft, and with later theorists from Benjamin and Barthes to Latour and Butler. His works, like theirs, show how objects and surfaces become philosophical problems as much as artistic ones.