" (Eksteins, 1994)

Eksteins writes that Britain had "in the last century...damned her great poets and writers, Byron had been chased out of the country, Shelley forbidden to raise his children, and Oscar Wilde sent to prison." (1994) Pearce (2003) states that Wilde "was a major symbol of the sexual anarchy that threatened the purposive and reproductive modes of the bourgeois family. Algy mocks the utilitarian nature of modern marriage thus: The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public." (Shoewalter, 1992; in Pearce, 2003)

The narratives of this period were realist in nature and such that centered around "marriage and inheritance were giving way to fantastic 'finde siecle' tales about split personalities. (Showalter, 1992: in Pearce, 2003) Many of Wilde's plays were a "critique of the naturalization of bourgeois relations"...
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