Social judgments in Earnest aren't as severe as in these three earlier dramas where the upper classes are brutally revealed in all their sha1lowness, immorality, and snobbery. Here the woman with a past is Miss Prism and not an unwed mother, though Jack gamely offers to forgive even this. Marriage, materialism, education, and the church too are criticized. Not a member of the English aristocracy, Wilde ensured his place there by becoming its provocateur, a career begun at Oxford as he shed his Irish accent and donned the clothes that made his fame as a dandy. On the lecture circuit, in drawing rooms, and at dining tables, he delighted and enraged, by drawing attention to forms devoid of sense.
All women become like their mothers.
That is their tragedy. No man does. A flamboyant dresser, poet, and speaker, Francesca Speranza Wilde was often quoted. You always find out that one's most glaring fault is one's most important virtue. You have the most comforting views of life.