'Lady Windermere's Fan': Modernist aesthetics meets the aesthetics of fashion (Oscar Wilde, Ireland)

Oscar Wilde was a popular modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and theater industries. Wilde was extremely active among these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Woman's World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright. His work is therefore popular.; It is also modernist. His aesthetics is non-mimetic, it is about a surface that distorts and lies. It is an aesthetics that rejects the notion of an authentic self, and that focuses attention on the woman of fashion/female-aesthete. This figure represents, in late Victorian Britain, a kind of cultural switching station between the world of high culture and mass consumer culture. The protagonist of Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Mrs. Erlynne, is a female aesthete.; Also, I see Wilde's contribution as important because, by theorizing fashion and popular theater in terms of an aesthetics of surface, Wilde is able to conceptualize superficial ornament and public image in positive terms. He therefore enables a type of "modernist" art that can find a congenial setting in modern commercial culture. By looking at Wilde as a popular modernist, we can make sense of the curious fact that this bohemian anarchist ended up writing West End comedies about high fashion and elite society.