I’ve recently finished reading Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan for the third time in less than two days, and I felt the need to share my thoughts about it.

• I found it absolutely brilliant. Not only that Wilde’s dialogues are pure perfection (as usual, so I’m not gonna dig into that). It’s also wonderful how, in less than 100 pages and with his characteristic hedonistic humor he gets so far deep into THE moral dilema of Good vs. Bad, that through poignant dialogues he carries me over from hate to love and then to hate again towards Mrs. Erlynne just to discover once I’ve finished the book that she is nothing more than a reflection of mine (as happened to Lady Windermere too). I find out that there’s no such thing as a limit between the good and the wrong. All acts and thoughts are in the essence born from the same place as equal things. Is the society the one that tags those things into the one or the other side. And it’s our job as individual people to doubt ‘stablished morals’ to discern by ourselves if they really belong to their assigned side, or are trapped there just because ‘it’s like that’.

• Extending that thought, it’s also fantastic how the whole drama set by the gossiping, the cheap chatting and the anguishingly importance of social image can be linked to these days with the explosion of the social media, an era were the ‘what-would-they-say?’ is heavier than the ‘what-I-have-to-say?’ (although it was written more than 100 years ago).

• And one last though is about Wilde himself. I found a passage that in my opinion not only resumes Wilde’s work, but Wilde’s lifestyle, and is this one:

«Why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own. I lost one illusion last night. I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old. [Takes up hand-mirror from table and looks into it.] And it spoils one’s career at critical moments.»

What do you think about that? I think this is one of Wilde’s richer texts because of the moral dilema he puts on the table. So if you read it what impression or thoughts did it leave on you?

(Sorry if my post is messy, I was just spitting out my thoughts. And also I’m not a naturally English speaker so that adds more mess.)