When the Duchess of Berwick tells Lady Windermere about Lord Windermere's alleged affair, Lady Windermere initially refuses to believe that her husband could be unfaithful to her. The Duchess recounts having made the same discovery about her own husband, using a metaphor to describe his behavior in their first year of marriage.
[...] and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material.
In this line, the Duchess compares the women her husband pursued to petticoats, which are undergarments that women used to wear beneath their dresses and skirts. The metaphor has several purposes, one of which is simply humor. She makes the audience imagine the absurd scene of her young husband running after a varied selection of anthropomorphized women's undergarments. This humorous tone and imagery allows the Duchess to emphasize her nonchalance regarding her husband's infidelity. This nonchalance further communicates her modern worldview. She differentiates herself from the young and serious Lady Windermere, who she implicitly charges with naïveté, and flaunts her own progressive pragmatism.
In addition to the purpose of humor, the metaphor is useful in the way that it allows the Duchess to discuss her husband's infidelity in veiled terms. Her comment leaves neither Lady Windermere nor the audience with any doubt regarding the Duke's pursuit of extramarital affairs. Nevertheless, the Duchess communicates this potentially humiliating fact without being forced to say it outright. By expressing this admission through figurative terms, and overlaying it with humor, she simultaneously relieves herself of the burden of spelling it out and suggests that she ultimately doesn't care.
The Duchess uses the metaphor to indicate her superiority vis à vis other women. The first of these is Lady Windermere, who the Duchess finds idealistic and ignorant. Moreover, she uses the metaphor to dehumanize the objects of her husband's affections. By reducing them to their petticoats, she implies that their sole purpose in the Duke's life came down to what lay beneath their clothes. The petticoats her husband runs after may come in every color, shape, and material, but they are all the same in her eyes—women worth less than herself.
After discussing marriage and affairs in a one-on-one conversation with Lady Windermere, Lord Darlington shares a reflection on the same topic with the Duchess of Berwick. He uses a metaphor, comparing marriage to a game of cards:
It’s a curious thing, Duchess, about the game of marriage—a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion—the wives hold all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick.
Lord Darlington's diction reveals that he isn't comparing marriage to just any game, but to whist. In this English card game, which was popular in the nineteenth century, rounds are called tricks and the court cards are called honours. By saying that wives hold all the honours, Lord Darlington states that the wives have a very strong hand. Despite this strategic advantage, however, wives don't always win. The Duchess asks whether "the odd trick" is a reference to the husband, and he states that it "would be rather a good name for the modern husband." The Duchess exclaims, evidently with some pleasure, that he is "thoroughly depraved."
Lord Darlington uses the metaphor to discuss extramarital affairs, and specifically to allude to the affair he believes Lord Windermere is having. This aim is related to the fact that whist is a four-player game. Someone with a more traditional view of relationships than Lord Darlington might compare marriage to a two-player game. However, as he believes that lovers are an inevitable part of married life, it makes sense that he would invoke a game that requires more than two players in his marriage metaphor.
Although Lord Darlington technically addresses the Duchess in this line, the audience knows that his reflections on marriage are just as much directed at Lady Windermere. No matter who he is speaking to, however, a Victorian audience would have found it transgressive for a bachelor like Lord Darlington to frankly (not to mention negatively) discuss marriage with two married women—both of whose husbands are absent from the room.
Throughout the play, characters consistently use the same figurative language to describe female ruin. Mrs. Erlynne, who has been through it herself, especially uses words like brink, precipice, abyss, pit, and falling to describe what happens when a woman leaves her husband. Degradation as a depth and shame as a pit return repeatedly as motifs.
The metaphor of shame as a hole women fall into appears for the first time in the third act, when Mrs. Erlynne goes to Lord Darlington's place to retrieve Lady Windermere. She warns Lady Windermere that she is "on the brink of ruin" and "on the brink of a hideous precipice." Soon after, she says there is "nothing in the world" she would not dare to do to save her "from the abyss into which [she] is falling."
Mrs. Erlynne's entreaties form some of the most stirring moments in the whole play, as the audience knows why she's so familiar with this so-called brink—not to mention why she's so attached to Lady Windermere's wellbeing. Although the older woman has until this point been characterized as cynical and scrupulous, this part of Act III shows that she has a soft, self-sacrificial interior. She can't reveal her secrets to Lady Windermere, but she puts great effort into convincing her that she knows what she's talking about:
You don’t know what may be in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don’t know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast!
This metaphor is related to the idea of the fallen woman. Mrs. Erlynne's warnings make it clear that, for women, a ruined reputation is irreversible. Once she has fallen into the pit, she will never make it out. Her serious, intense tone is worth contrasting with the light, playful tone of men like Cecil Graham when they joke about divorce in other parts of the play. While men have the privilege of discussing divorce with levity, women use dramatic metaphors to conceive of what faces them on the other side.
The metaphor of the brink also appears in a description of emotional ruin. When Lady Windermere tells Lord Windermere that she wants to see Mrs. Erlynne in Act IV, he warns her that she "may be on the brink of a large sorrow." This produces dramatic irony, as the audience has heard that word and idea repeated multiple times throughout the play. Unlike the audience, he doesn't know that he was recently on the brink of both sorrow and scandal. Lord Windermere's use of Mrs. Erlynne's term highlights his unwavering faith in his wife's goodness.
Lady Windermere herself turns to this motif in Act IV, when describing her new worldview to her husband. Unlike before, when she thought good and evil were distinct, easily defined categories, she now understands that "good and evil, sin and innocence, go through [the world] hand in hand." She says that shutting one's eyes to "half of life" in order to "live securely" is tantamount to blinding oneself in order to "walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice." She tells Lord Windermere that she herself "came to [the] brink" because she shut her eyes to life.
In the third act, the motif of the brink encapsulates the severe consequences women have to face when their perceived innocence has been compromised. In the fourth act, the motif comes to be linked to Lady Windermere's expanded conception of goodness.
Throughout the play, characters consistently use the same figurative language to describe female ruin. Mrs. Erlynne, who has been through it herself, especially uses words like brink, precipice, abyss, pit, and falling to describe what happens when a woman leaves her husband. Degradation as a depth and shame as a pit return repeatedly as motifs.
The metaphor of shame as a hole women fall into appears for the first time in the third act, when Mrs. Erlynne goes to Lord Darlington's place to retrieve Lady Windermere. She warns Lady Windermere that she is "on the brink of ruin" and "on the brink of a hideous precipice." Soon after, she says there is "nothing in the world" she would not dare to do to save her "from the abyss into which [she] is falling."
Mrs. Erlynne's entreaties form some of the most stirring moments in the whole play, as the audience knows why she's so familiar with this so-called brink—not to mention why she's so attached to Lady Windermere's wellbeing. Although the older woman has until this point been characterized as cynical and scrupulous, this part of Act III shows that she has a soft, self-sacrificial interior. She can't reveal her secrets to Lady Windermere, but she puts great effort into convincing her that she knows what she's talking about:
You don’t know what may be in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don’t know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast!
This metaphor is related to the idea of the fallen woman. Mrs. Erlynne's warnings make it clear that, for women, a ruined reputation is irreversible. Once she has fallen into the pit, she will never make it out. Her serious, intense tone is worth contrasting with the light, playful tone of men like Cecil Graham when they joke about divorce in other parts of the play. While men have the privilege of discussing divorce with levity, women use dramatic metaphors to conceive of what faces them on the other side.
The metaphor of the brink also appears in a description of emotional ruin. When Lady Windermere tells Lord Windermere that she wants to see Mrs. Erlynne in Act IV, he warns her that she "may be on the brink of a large sorrow." This produces dramatic irony, as the audience has heard that word and idea repeated multiple times throughout the play. Unlike the audience, he doesn't know that he was recently on the brink of both sorrow and scandal. Lord Windermere's use of Mrs. Erlynne's term highlights his unwavering faith in his wife's goodness.
Lady Windermere herself turns to this motif in Act IV, when describing her new worldview to her husband. Unlike before, when she thought good and evil were distinct, easily defined categories, she now understands that "good and evil, sin and innocence, go through [the world] hand in hand." She says that shutting one's eyes to "half of life" in order to "live securely" is tantamount to blinding oneself in order to "walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice." She tells Lord Windermere that she herself "came to [the] brink" because she shut her eyes to life.
In the third act, the motif of the brink encapsulates the severe consequences women have to face when their perceived innocence has been compromised. In the fourth act, the motif comes to be linked to Lady Windermere's expanded conception of goodness.
