Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht

Unexpectedly perhaps, we begin this film in a crypt of mummies. These are not the stoic regents of Ancient Egypt who know they will rule in the afterlife as they have on earth. No, these relics seem to have suffered horrible and painful deaths before their unwilled preservation. They are filmed in ascending age to show that death does not distinguish between old and young. Indeed, apart from their physical size the only differences among these cadavers is the unique agony shrieking across each face. Even the most ignorant moviegoer knows what type of beast has borne the moniker of nosferatu for more than a century, but we are not dealing with vampires. That is to say, we do not believe our mummies the victims of those bloodsucking fiends whose sleekness, pallor, and hunger have catapulted to new heights within the last ten years of young adult fiction (vampirism being an apt cautionary allegory for sexual desire). We will learn, however, that they are and they aren't Dracula's victims. The ageless Romanian Count has become synonymous with a far greater scourge: that of the Black Plague itself.

One amendment: we do not know whether this Dracula (an iconic Klaus Kinski) is actually Romanian or even a proper nobleman. True, he resides in a gloom-laden Transylvanian castle, surrounded and perhaps somewhat abetted by another set of outcasts, the Roma. Yet he is more the shiftless ghost than the dashing Byronic predator who has dominated the innumerable variations since Stoker's novel, imbuing them with sex appeal and courtliness untenable in Herzog's version. As with all first-rate works, Nosferatu's aim becomes clearer in retrospect. Multiple viewings enrich the film because there is so much to notice apart from what actually propels the thin dinghy of a plot forward (a first viewing will also inevitably distract those who have seen the original). So is it with the struggle between Dracula and our ostensible hero, Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz). Harker may have an English name, but he is German in speech, manner, and residence, his home Wismar closely akin to the Wisborg of Murnau's production, complete with canals and Hanseatic primness. Dreams of a giant bat plague his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), who is visibly upset when her spouse announces a business trip to Transylvania that, he snickers, will be teeming with "wolves, bandits, and ghosts." Right before he leaves, they go to the beach where they first met and Lucy confesses that she is overcome by "a nameless, deadly fear." This would all be perfectly acceptable dialogue in any lesser film about impending atrocities, and Ganz and Adjani are, as always, excellent and subtle actors – but this is quite beside the point. What awaits the Harkers is evil, fathomable but unstoppable evil, although not tinged with glamour or seductiveness like so many modern-day children of the night. Herzog has no abiding interest in Gothic romance. His monster simply possesses irresistible power, most evident when Dracula approaches his victims, who can only stare back in horror like snake-bait rodents. There will be no enticement to collaborate with these dark forces, nor will anyone wonder long about the residue of humanity in the Count's soul. That he still assumes the general contours of a human will be understood as more of a convenience than a true reflection of his essence.

Does that mean that Harker is our knight, brazenly determined to thwart a thousand-year-old dragon (Dracul's meaning in his alleged native tongue)? Not quite, or, I should say, not at all. As opposed to other portrayals of Harker, Ganz's law clerk has nothing in the way of charm or elegance in his manners; in fact, all of him screams petit bourgeois (he longs "to buy Lucy a bigger house" even though they have no children and plenty of space). Like his adversary, Harker has only traces of humankind: his role is plain, simple, and terrifyingly banal. He will represent 'life' as understood by a mindless Philistine who has never really lived; Dracula will represent death as someone not allowed to die. He observes that Renfield (Roland Topor), the solicitor who dispatches him to Transylvania and the one person who appears to have been in contact with the Count, is at best mischievous and scheming, and at worst homicidally deranged, but accepts the task anyway for the money involved. Critics have commonly emphasized the loneliness – not so much the humanity as the pathos – of Kinski's vampire, a marvelous deception of directorial genius amplified by Harker's development. This contrast, coupled with the shift from vampiric infection as a means of enlisting an army of monsters to its allegorizing the Black Death, has fooled reviewer after reviewer into believing Herzog wished to portray a more human Dracula "who could not die." It gives nothing away to reveal that, towards the end of the film, Wisborg has been ravaged by the plague, and many of those afflicted decide to banquet publicly with friends and family, living out their last few days in full as an accelerated version of life itself. It also gives nothing away to mention that what Harker experiences in Castle Dracula has nothing of the Gothic nightmare and far more greatly resembles modern horror. Harker's steps become bold because the castle's inside is awake, white, and fully lit, like a gleaming skeleton. Vast cobwebs strangle chairs, recalling the Count's dagger-like fingers clutching at a hapless victim. As it becomes more obvious that he will never escape unharmed, Harker begins a journal to Lucy, whom he cannot reach by normal post. His confessions are tempered by a thick tome he receives in the inn at the foot of the castle's mountains that will also be passed down to her, a text about the whole legend that has become reality. And what is his reality? One identical to what screaming young victims encounter in contemporary slasher films: being trapped in a hideous maze with a madman whose only wish is to make you suffer for as long as your soul and body can endure.

In a very artistic way, Herzog ranks among the most political of directors (witness his turn in the last twenty-five years towards 'real life' documentaries) but his politics do not adhere to any ballot or banner. His champions are neither underdogs nor the gods of genius. What he enjoys is oddity, difference, and originality, even if, as in many of his duller non-fictional pieces, the fine line between originality and triviality is blurred. No one had ever bothered to make the Dracula legend into a severe indictment of life's randomness and meaninglessness, because that is not how the figure lives on in the popular imagination, a realm that Herzog openly despises. Herzog's accomplishment is to take the material completely seriously, without the slightest indication of kitsch (apart from the goofy silence of the gypsies in the inn, although that may be imputed to his fondness for non-professional actors). The fundamental problem of the Dracula legend, however, remains unsolved. No one, as it were, not even Stoker, has ever satisfactorily clarified why Dracula wishes to leave his ghastly ancestral home in the first place. Coppola's gorgeous version suggests the move is Dracula's destiny so as to reunite him with the love he lost hundreds of years before, the love that led him to forsake his faith. But all we find in Nosferatu is death. From the magnificent coffin gathering in the town square, to Dracula's appearance in Lucy's bathroom, to the oddest of scenes, that of a ghost ship sloshing into the canals of Wismar, we have no hope for redemption. Is that why, at one crucial point, we cannot but notice a stone high-relief frieze (a Romanesque carving of what appears to be a Barbary ape) by the fireplace precisely between man from vampire? A very odd form of evolution indeed.

The Dream Woman

Anyone who bothers to remember his nightly peregrinations will assure you, even if he knows not why, that our dreams may prefigure our lives. More than occasionally we are stopped by reality's eerie coincidences, feelings of having experienced a particular moment at least once before, and odd bends and breaks in logic that seem reasonable to us because reason knows no greater bugbear than the megrims of the sleeping human mind. I often begin to write down pieces of my other existence, but my thoughts are betrayed by captions of waking notions. These are two separate lives, and when they begin to merge we may get something akin to the events of this story.

Our protagonist is Isaac Scatchard, a plain man of middling education and no luck in any field. Events have conspired time and again to relegate him to menial work that never pans out into a more permanent station, and while he is diligent and true, he always seems to be too late for the job. As might be expected of a man nearing the middle of life's generosity, he resides with his mother who makes a point of celebrating her son's birthday as if he were still a child. This whole setup is intended neither as farce nor an opportunity for psychobabble and mindless theories about the familial structure. Its distinct purpose is not to paint the picture of a soul howling in the caverns of the night to a God who has forsaken him, but of an average man who has little recourse but to accept his lot. Two days before his birthday, Isaac sets out on a day's journey for another possible job at a stable. Even before he takes a step in that direction, we know two things: the job will be gone when he arrives and his return home will be complicated by an obstacle, if true tragedy is meant, then a self-imposed one. Sure enough, after yet another disappointment in what is turning into a hideous pattern, Isaac makes inquiries and learns that "he might save a few miles on his return by following a new road." All good works of horror append a scene in which the character is allowed the option of retreat or of following sage and time-tested advice, advice he will invariably reject out of hubris or personal convenience, thus making him deserving of his gruesome fate. That Isaac seeks out an alternative to his long hike simply because he wishes to be home in time for his birthday meal can only bode poorly.

As it turns out, poorly would have been far more pleasant. Losing his way on this new road – the symbolism is blunt but appropriate – Isaac is obliged to spend the night as the solitary guest at a family inn. Usually an early sleeper, he stays up well past his normal hour; and when he retires to the humble guest room he notices "with surprise the strength of the bolts and bars, and iron-sheathed shutters." Why would any simple innkeeper have such an outlay in home protection? An explanation is given that cannot be true, but which suggests that our Isaac has, by his own will naturally, stepped into a realm of which he should want no part. What happens to him that night will not be revealed here; suffice it to say the sequence remains one of the most terrifying you will ever encounter in a text of this caliber. Isaac beats a hasty path homeward from these premises and soon enjoys what must be considered for him exceptionally good luck. This little streak lasts, we are told, seven years, and consists of steady work for one master and a "comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for saving his mistress's life in a carriage accident." If all this strikes you as more than a little curious, you will not be greatly astounded by what ensues shortly before another of Isaac's birthdays: 

Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a bottle of tonic medicine which she was accustomed to take, and in which she had fancied that a dose or more was still left, happened to be empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist's and get it filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the road-side inn. On going into the chemist's shop he was passed hurriedly by a poorly-dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the doorsteps. "You're noticing that woman?" said the chemist's apprentice behind the counter. "It's my opinion there's something wrong with her. She's been asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master's out for half an hour, and I told her I wasn't allowed to sell poison to strangers in his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she'll be disappointed. It's a case of suicide, sir, if ever there was one yet."

This fantastic passage precipitates yet another choice, namely to accost a woman who seems to have been on the verge of committing that most cardinal of Catholic sins. Although our poor Isaac has finally gained in luck and finances after almost four decades of hardscrabble denigration, he has yet to learn much about the fairer sex for his own purposes. That may account for, we suppose, his gallantry towards a wounded soul. And yet in an interview the woman reveals nothing that would require his intervention:

He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet; then moved under a lamp so as to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face. "I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don't I?" she said, with a bitter laugh. She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies' lips. Her slightest actions seemed to have the easy, negligent grace of a thorough-bred woman. Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Has Isaac found beauty pure and unblemished or something much more malevolent? Is it telling that the young woman, whose name is Rebecca Murdoch, asks Isaac to a meadow for their first private meeting? And what then of the editorial insert about "a man previously insensible to the influence of women" – and it is best to end our interrogation right here.

While the profundity of Collins's contributions to English literature could be questioned, his style and ability to enthrall are glorious. I fear that only his two most famous novels are read with any regularity, as much a testament to our unlearnedness as to the fleeting caress of literary enamourment. This much-adapted work concludes disappointingly because the evildoers are revealed somewhat too early along, and the value of this magnificent novel lies more in its innovation than its perspicacity. Nevertheless, the reading of even one of them should assure the student of literature that he is dealing with a heavyweight. What is particularly superb about The Dream Woman is how neither of the main characters' actions require any explanation or motive. Skeptics may claim that short stories necessarily predicate a single decision, gesture, or even a word, because there is little time for anything else. But in the hands of first-rate writers even short stories may make their ensembles live. And why then did our dream woman not bother to complete her sin? There is only one plausible reason, but I will leave that discovery to the curious among us who are still not afraid of turning on the light in the wee hours just to take a look around the room. Sometimes ignorance is both bliss and salvation.

Mr. Justice Harbottle

There is a tinge to tales of the morbid that appeals both to the vulgarian and those of elevated sensibilities. The vulgarian, of course, will enjoy first the trepidation and the terrorizing and lust secretly for disembowelments; those of finer mind will be able to read the same pages with the same words and detect a design far more sinister than plain brutishness. Is this why I have always loved ghost stories? Is this the vulgarian in me or someone striving towards greater understanding of our realm through the prism of art? Whatever the case, those of faith know hooves when they see them dragged through the dirt. Which brings us to this horrid little gem. 

Our titular character is not a merry old soul, and never a merry old soul could he possibly have been. He is, however, a man of particular sway since his bench has wrought the most death notices of any other under the crown – well, actually, that matter may be implied but not confirmed. A description of our judge during his last living year suggests something of the Dickensian tyrant laden with terrible auspices:

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years.  He had a great mulberry-colored face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the bench. This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, authorities and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him.

The identity of the narrator is of little concern. Le Fanu used the papers of literature's first occult detective, Martin Hesselius, to achieve several degrees of separation and lend his tale what all good ghost stories need: the strength of hearsay. Hesselius lived well past the erasing of Roger Harbottle's traces from this earth, but a tenant known to a friend of his spoke of a "dark street in Westminster" and "a spacious old house" where one unforgettable night, two men emerged from a closet in a locked room and began to traipse insouciantly across his bedroom floor:

A slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tiptoe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy .... this direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope.

These specters "walked as living men do, but without any sound," and our judge, given what we learn later on, is clearly the older, scurvy-ridden of the two. And his dark, thin companion may very well be a certain Lewis Pyneweck.

Pyneweck was once a grocer in Shrewsbury, to become in the course of our narrative "prisoner in the jail of that town." His charge, perhaps ironically, is forgery. As in so many of the cases presided over by Judge Harbottle, the only questions to weigh are whether the charge is valid, and if so, whether the punishment meted out conforms to the dimensions of the crime – and here is where our narrative begins to swerve and slope. Harbottle is visited by a rickety old man, Hugh Peters, who warns him of a plot afoot against the judge by his peers. A few pointed remarks are bandied about before Harbottle has the mole followed by his footman, who will be surprised at his quarry's hidden talents. In time, it is also revealed that another mole resides in Harbottle's own home, his housekeeper Flora Carwell. Carwell is the maiden name, now reassumed, of the former Mrs. Pyneweck, and into this household she brought her only child in exchange for the silence of the Judge on what had previously occurred, what was occurring between two consenting adults, and what would occur to her husband, incarcerated and abandoned to the whims of injustice. Were Harbottle's promises just more taradiddle? Given his propensity for "jollifications," it would appear that Mrs. Carwell is at best a muted conspirator and at worst a galley slave. Imagine her horror, therefore, when she consults a Shrewsbury paper one May morning on the only Friday the 13th in 1746 to find her ex-spouse among the most recently executed.

Some may argue that Le Fanu's talents were wasted on the occult, yet I must dissent. Surely mystery and murder can be deemed a lesser genre than the pure pleasure of first-rate art; but as soon as genius decides for a more layered interpretation of reality, it may find the supernatural the most plausible of all phenomena. Harbottle is a baleful rogue, but he is not immune to logic or logic's fearful consequences. In this vein he reconsiders his guest that night and begins to doubt the senses he so loves to indulge:

I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlor were often in his memory. His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.

A quick check with prison officials confirms what cannot be reassuring: that Pyneweck has long been accounted for and has never once been released from his murky dungeon. And if you think this would be nightmarish enough among the waking, wait until you see what godforsaken corners our judge visits when he sleeps.

P.'s Correspondence

Were it only possible to find out who are alive, and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of my life, somebody comes and stares me in the face, whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted never more to be pestered with the sight and sound of him. 

The unreliable narrator has become a staple of postmodern writing, as unreliable a "movement" as you'll find in any human epoch, precisely because the "art" of the postmodern sits like a row house within the artfulness of the con. We have had interesting liars throughout literature; but the vast majority have lied for something noble, or something so dear that, for but a fleeting moment or two, they have even gained our pity. But how is one to pity a crook? What empathy resides in our hearts for those who wish to deceive simply for the sake of deception? Why should we care about those whose business is to hide their true feelings – if, of course, they had any true feelings to begin with? No, the best symbol of the postmodern is the labyrinth with no minotaur or treasure at the center, not even a path that leads back on its own pebbles. The reader has navigated the zags and zigs and come to the clearing. Here he finds a card, a simple paper card, blank and ornate, yet to the discerning eye very cheap, and he stops to pick it up. And it is then that he looks around the topiary trim and espies not shrubs, but large green cut-outs in plainest carton, all of which begin to collapse simultaneously like the house of cards the postmodern has always been. True art resides in the eternal genius of men, in their moral mettle, and in their sincere striving towards spine-tingling bliss – nothing more and nothing less. A fine introduction to this odd and seminal work.

Our narrator will pass the baton rather quickly to his beleaguered friend, the eponymous P., who "has lost the thread of his life," a wonderfully sad way to soften the report of creeping senility. If we were, that is, dealing with senility:

All this is not so much a delusion, as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon a stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence.

These characters will turn out to be the major figures of English Romanticism, but let us take our cue from the date of P.'s letter, included integrally in the text, of February 29th, 1845. The date, as we know, is impossible; yet its impossibility prepares the reader to receive the text as the fantastic "moonshine" of someone who may not be able to separate our reality from the courtyard of his private dreams. P.'s own description of his environment does nothing to dispel this impression:

Sitting as I do, at this moment, in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of Queen Victoria – listening to the muffled roar of the world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London – with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why – would you believe it? – that, all this time, I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars – that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me.

Some would assume that time has so retrenched P.'s mind that he does not even realize the place of his own incarceration, likely an institution (he will recur to that "row of iron bars" towards the story's end) for those from whom reason has departed forever or in whom it never bothered to take root. We suspect, however, that neither condition truly befits our narrator. Not that this indeterminate state could stop him from strolling through an imaginary London peppered with more than a few imaginary literary acquaintances: Byron, now obese and, his newfound religion in mind, a violent bowdlerizer of the works of his juvenilia (the real Byron, as we know, enjoys eternal youth); Burns, senile and sentimental; Scott, nearly paraplegic, and empty of everything except what distinguished his particular adventures from everyone else's ("whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety"); Shelley, now a preacher; Coleridge, once of unlimited potential, now a mediocrity bereft of all traces of his mad genius; and Keats, the sole member of this unwilled fraternity who has survived both corporally and in reputation. Lesser lights also twinkle in P.'s dark evenings, but that is likely owing to his wish to incorporate all those past who influenced his own rapturous sighs. And despite the fact that most of the spectres are British, our text ends with two questions for this American diplomat who, like the rest of P.'s pantheon, has long since quit our green earth. 

Some believe that elements of our strange little story would furnish, a couple of generations past Hawthorne's own lifetime, that most nebulous and anti-intellectual of genres, science fiction, with a niche of beastly boringness known as alternate history. The chief difference being, of course, that P. is simply revisiting his heroes (both he and the addressee of his letter allude to P.'s failed literary aspirations), not transforming them into zombies, aliens, or rogue planets. What the space-and-race pundits omit to mention is that every literary man worth his salt will daydream in terms not unlike those P. so boldly lays out for his public. That said, the actual reimaginings of deceased writers now alive, if well past their literary primes, is not the usual manifestation; more common is a dialogue in which the dreamer revels in meeting his masters only to discover (if the dreamer is himself a first-rate genius) that the man whose work he has worshipped is a bore, and possibly also an unkempt and lumbering oaf. There is also the small matter of the moral pendulum of these same esteemed letters, an accusation he launches at a decrepit Scott ("the world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth, than he was qualified to supply"). It is therefore appropriate, one supposes, that Shelley, the most virulent opponent to society's mores, is accorded the keenest change of heart, and that his early works are explained thus:

They are like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole, as the highest and final one, resting upon the threshold of the heavens.

Shelley is still read in English survey classes, although he remains one of those authors one embraces when young and barely tolerates when older. Alas, not even such fame will ever be the lot of P.; although he will never stoop to the lows of anarchism and other such inanity, he will also never rise to the sublime perfection of this poem. "The reality – that which I know to be such," writes our resigned narrator, "hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably prominent illusion." Which is why some people never find themselves able to choose between the two.

Lady Windermere's Fan

That is the worst of women: they always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, then they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and leave us quite unattractively good.

There have been three periods of my life in which I read intensely: between the ages of four and eight, thirteen and fifteen, and twenty-one and twenty-three. What I devoured during those hungry times may surprise those who know my tastes now, although I developed an early antipathy to salty sea novels, crunchy westerns, and those bitter books about subjects like drug abuse and fractured families. For the last I have my own blissful childhood to thank; but for what I did appreciate and treasure there was little in common save an overarching sense of what I then may have called fairness, maybe justice, and what I now may term sound moral philosophy. What is sound moral philosophy ("unsound moral philosophy" has the defiant ultramodern ring of faux opposition)? In a nutshell, as well as in the nut itself, the difference between what is right and just and what a clear conscience cannot abide. And, as odd as it may seem, there is no better example of moral purity than the works of this writer of genius, as exemplified by this play.

Our characters are three mainly, a fourth partially, and a handful of hardly distinct cads and fools for whom epigrams have long replaced the normal feelings of a normal human heart. We begin with a triangle: Lady Windermere, a young mother, her husband Lord Windermere, a straight shooter perhaps ten years her senior, and her suitor, the very dashing and very preposterous Lord Darlington – his name says it all – in the same manner that any tale of budding adultery has ever begun, with the faults of one married member and the helplessness of his partner. Not much is made of Lady Windermere's child until a crucial juncture late in our work; yet her gentle comeliness cannot be overlooked by someone like Darlington, who habitually overlooks a woman's personality to scratch a recurrent itch. His approach is always truthful, if truth means doing those things whose pleasures can be quantified:

Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in the world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can't help belonging to them.

Like almost all of Wilde's heroines, Lady Windermere has an unusually acerbic tongue, but for this proclamation of wantonness she has no reply. What can be said when a station of our intellect understands morals and culpability as our downfall? Why does a stitch of truth line the little black book of every devoted debaucher? Perhaps because we are instinctively drawn to happiness, and just as instinctively to satisfaction, both of which often beget nothing more than a desire for more happiness and more satisfaction. Lady Windermere, however, has long since resigned herself to another fate. After her mother died, she was raised by a paternal aunt with the good values of Puritan etiquette: order, modesty, Godliness, family, and honor. Lord Windermere in his dull ways embodies all these characteristics, yet has enough affluence to secure them in elegant variation. And as the play opens on his wife's birthday, he gives her a fan with her name, Margaret, stenciled across, and leaves her to her thoughts and schedule. Much will occur that day, especially following the visit of the snobbish Duchess of Berwick and her daughter. But our play's name is quite significantly not The Duchess of Berwick.    

What the fan might mean and not mean should not concern us terribly. Film studies likes its McGuffins, and our fan is decidedly a McGuffin; it could just as easily have been a glove or a shawl. Although contemporary ears might detect a pun on an admirer or supporter of a famous team or person, we can rest assured that this could not possibly have been Wilde's intention. Our fan will serve a variety of McGuffinesque roles – weapon, gift, lost object – and one could argue that, apart from ventilation, its primary social function has always resembled that of a screen. But in the hands of a society lady, which for better or worse Lady Windermere has become, the fan allows its holder to concern herself only with herself. Even the wittiest of rakes will hardly slow down her wrists, because that would signify access to something no lady should ever concede. So when the Duchess mentions Lord Windermere in repeated conjunction with a fallen, somewhat older woman by the name of Ms. Erlynne, we understand our triangle is now a trapezoid. What ensues is the tedious unraveling of a plain plot, fettered only by a reader's inability to enjoy the stream of observations while awaiting the revelation – the very definition of a bad reader, but anyway. The best scene occurs when best lines often occur: among drunken, dissatisfied men in the wee hours of the morning. The succinct brilliance of these pages has few peers in literature of any form: "Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong"; "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality"; "Experience is the name every one gives to his mistakes"; "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing ... and a sentimentalist ... is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of a single thing"; "There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about." No purpose attends this scene other than the promulgation of Wilde's wit, which is reason enough to sit through the most imbecilic of plots, and we need say no more.

It is hard to review a work of Wilde's without quoting him extensively, because he says it so much better than most everyone else. Surely his plays have many characters, but they all speak with the same self-assurance. Namely, that of one who knows, mostly secondhand, the wickedness of his world and yet hopes for its redemption. Why mostly secondhand? Wilde's reputation as a decadent continues to be one of the greatest lies perpetrated by literary critics, because a true decadent would not wish for anything more than more decadence. Drugs usually just make you want more drugs, be those drugs synthetic substances, fleshly pleasures, or the addictive jolt of violent actions. More happiness and more satisfaction, that is all Darlington proposes when he proposes – and men of his caliber always seem to be proposing something – and if that is all one gets from life, then one has had no life to speak of. So many of Wilde's aphorisms, original or modified from classical sources, have entered our vocabulary that we would be hard pressed to pick his finest, although I think it appears in Lady Windermere's Fan as a careless aside. You might remember it. It begins with one tragedy and ends with a second.