Lady Windermere's Fan and Stigma

When we read literature, we can make conclusions about the setting, the location event took place in, and we deduce some certain customs and norms of a society, and these custom generally show their way of living. However, the norms most of the works reflect are based on restriction on women in society. These restrictions do not only limit women’s actions, but cause their name get damaged and stigmatized also, but they are only applied to women.

The play Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde takes place in London and reflects limitations that are imposed to women in London, by showing it through Lady Windermere, women around her and her mother who left her when she was a child. Lady’s mother meets with Lady’s husband secretly and society only calls her names, and not the husband who is married to a woman and meets another woman secretly to whom he gives money.

As handled in the play Lady Windermere’s Fan, city of London had stigmatized women as subject to men, and men only but nothing else. We do not have to limit it with London, but ever since men had footed on earth, societies tried to categorize, stigmatize women and did nothing for men. Women were accepted as angel in the house, and the moment they did anything against it, they were named as fallen women, wicked women. In Lady Windermere’s fan, Lady Windermere does not want to be limited and titled by the society, but wants to have her own meaning. She says “London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them. They look so thoroughly unhappy and I do not want to be one of them,” she does not want others to name her neither as angel in the house nor as a fallen woman, she wants to stay as Lady Windermere. Additionally, she implies that women who trust their husbands are cheated on and people are able to recognise those women who are cheated on by their husbands, and Lady’s lines highlights society’s acceptance of high infidelity of men. Lines such as “None of us men do look what we really are,” and “Men become old, but they never become good,” show how men are allowed to do anything but women are not. They normalized men cheating on his wife, stick around, hang out with friends or other women, but women’s priority is accepted as taking care of the house, children and pleasing the husband. Even duchess of Berwick says that wicked women show wives’ worth to husbands, she implies that men go out there hang out with other women in order to realise their wives’ importance, and they view this as super normal. They do not tag names to men who do these unacceptable and disrespectful things, but they stigmatize women as “angel in the house” or whoever does, even mere things, and are against it as “fallen woman”. Mrs Erlynne is accepted as a fallen woman because she has a past, she is a women with past who left her home and daughter for her lover, and showed up years after and lets her groom to give her money and visit her at her house.

City of London is ruled by gossips, so the words spread all over London and Mrs Erlynne gets named as “that woman, wicked woman,” but no one says anything for Lord Windermere, which also shows the hypocrisy of the society. They name call Mrs Erlynne when she gets caught in Lord Darlington’s home, but nothing happens for Darlington, no one titles him as anything, but it is Mrs Erlynne who becomes the bad person and anti-hero of the play, according to society.

In conclusion, the play Lady Windermere’s Fan reflects how society perceived and viewed women, how they stigmatized women when they did something, which is considered as unacceptable by society. Even though they did something, they still did it with men, but they received no backlash while women had to go through harsh criticism and humiliation of society.