Collection of Plays from Oscar Wilde

From this collection, I read The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, The Ideal Husband, and Salome. A common and obvious theme of gender roles appears quite a lot in all five of the plays. This leads me to believe that in many others of Wilde’s plays he mentions women’s role in society also. What surprised me was the progressiveness aspect of the ideas. I had the impression that many of the ideas are really revolutionary for Wilde’s time period. Ideas such as a woman’s ability to make decisions for herself and woman’s importance to the society were hinted at throughout. I could not help but notice that Wilde included characters that represented the portion of society that thinks more traditionally of women. Most of the time, the characters were elderly women who favored the old traditions. My favorite play out of the five was The Importance of Being Earnest. I think this is because the play was the most light-hearted, humorous, and enjoyable by far. It has one of the common plots where a series of entertaining misunderstanding create a huge mess, but a big scene resolves everything in the end, pleasing everyone. I now realize that all the present day books and films that follow this pattern could be based on this specific play, or something even earlier than Wilde. My least favorite was Salome. Maybe it was the length that prevented me from connecting with the characters or pulling me into the plot, I just did not enjoy it as much. But overall, I am glad I had a chance to explore the famous Oscar Wilde’s works.