Social Class and Status in A Woman of No Importance Sean Organ College

Social class, in its simplest terms, is a way to divide a populace into strata based on their wealth, or access to power, or some combination of the two. It is also a subjective measurement which often needs only to be implied to exist, so while to a certain extent one's social class is inescapable, in anothe it can be easily falsified. Ultimately, this has resulted in many texts in which upper-class people live as lower classes or similar. Within A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde, characters fantasise about the the lives of classes other than their own, enabling Wilde to offer an especially pointed commentary on class relations near the end of the 19th century.

At the beginning of the play, Lady Caroline establishes herself as representative of the more vocal aspects of wider Victorian society at the time, which is to say that she is a snob. She is quick to assume that America has few country houses because there is no country, rather than that their culture may be different. This reveals her snobbish view even of upper-class society to be very rigid, and that she assumes all upper-class cultures are the same or perhaps merely that Britain's is the best. Indeed, her later comments about Lady Hunstanton “mix[ing] too much”...