A GOOD WOMAN : ESSAY HELP

In A Good Woman, the filmmakers have updated Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, to the
1930s and relocated it from London to Italy’s Amalfi coastline. Director Mike Barker has borrowed a line
from another of Wilde’s plays, A Woman of No Importance, as the film’s epigram: “The only difference
between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.”

A Good Woman chronicles a series of deceptions and misunderstandings in American and European high
society. It treats an upper crust whose respectable and genteel world masks deep wells of hypocrisy,
brutality and emotional repression. An elite that, while never questioning or criticizing itself, is preoccupied
with admitting or excluding people from its ranks, on the most arbitrary or unworthy grounds.

Surrounded by gossip and leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills, Mrs. Stella Erlynne (Helen Hunt) is chased
out of New York City for preying on wealthy, married men. Mrs. Erlynne’s reputation follows her to
Amalfi, a playground for the wealthy and aristocratic. “The Romans called it the land of the sirens,” says
Stella cryptically, as if she herself comes from that ancient mythical sisterhood.

Rumors abound as Stella’s fortunes improve in the wake of her acquaintance with a newlywed American
couple, Meg (Scarlet Johansson) and Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers). She steers Robert away from
purchasing expensive jewelry for his wife’s 21st birthday, suggesting instead a beautiful heirloom fan. (“A
man should never buy a woman jewelry—it makes her wonder what he’s bought his mistress.”)

Meanwhile, the bachelor/lothario Lord Darlington (“Modern marriage thrives on mutual deception”),
believing the gossip about Robert Windermere and Stella Erlynne, feels justified in pursuing Meg. Through
some prompting from Darlington, Meg discovers a series of checks written by Robert to Stella, and suspects
the worst. (“Too much rouge, not enough clothing, she appeals to the worst in men.”) Stella is blackguarded
by all except the rich Lord Augustus, or “Tuppy” (Tom Wilkinson), who is smitten and presses for
marriage—an act that would “legitimize” the American temptress.

At one point, Tuppy says to Stella’s detractors: “You’re so fond of gossip, you don’t give truth time to put
its pants on.” And again, defending himself from those who warn against the risks of being involved with a
“tainted” lady, he retorts, “I’ve begun too many romances out of sentiment. They’ve all ended in
settlement.”

The reality is that Robert has been giving Stella money in order to protect his wife from the truth about
Stella Erlynne’s identity. No longer trusting her husband, Meg perilously places herself in the hands of
Darlington and the rest of the tongue-waggers until Stella intervenes, prepared to sacrifice everything,
including Tuppy, for Meg’s future and happiness. After rescuing Meg from the brink of ruin—“the brink of
a hideous precipice”—Stella encourages her to “pay [her] debt by silence.” Stella knows the hard-learned
fact that the truth is often twisted in order to punish and ostracize. Clearly, a genuinely “good woman” is at
odds with a corrupt society. Stella Erlynne puts it another way: “If we were always guided by other people’s
thoughts, what’s the point in having our own?”

Barker’s film is intelligent and well made, bringing Wilde’s acute social criticism to bear on the present. At
one point, in a remark that seems oddly relevant, a secondary character quips: “I like America. Name
another country that went from barbarism to decadence without bothering to create civilization.”

Explaining why the filmmakers chose to make certain adjustments to Wilde’s play, screenwriter Howard
Himelstein states in the film’s production notes: “Unlike Wilde’s other filmed plays, which are of the period
and very English, Lady Windermere’s Fan has a more universal appeal. Although technically a period piece,
the story possesses enough modern sensibilities and humour to attract 21st Century audiences. I chose to set
the film in the 1930s because in many respects, it was an era that closely mirrors today—a time deeply
divided by the have and have-nots.”
The extraordinary beauty of the natural and cultural setting appears as a forceful argument against a
spiritually depleted and parasitical elite. This point about the elite is continually driven home, often
humorously, for example, as in Tuppy’s comment about his sister-in-law’s reaction to widowhood: “Her hair
turned quite gold with grief!”

Also, lifting the story out of the confines of Wilde’s parlors seems to demonstrate more effectively that the
interactions at the top of society are vulgar and crude, despite all the pomp and splendor of villas and yachts.
It serves to better highlight the operations of a class that equates communication with vicious and unfounded
innuendoes, and whose bonds are essentially self-serving and opportunist. (“Worse than being talked about
is not being talked about.”) It underscores the reality that the mode of existence of this stratum is to lie, to
conceal, and to suppress true feelings, as purity of heart results in disqualification. And furthermore, one
notices that those obliged to cater to this class are aware of its innate malevolence and hypocrisy.

It is in this hothouse atmosphere that the actors bring urgency and feeling to their performances, with the
remarkable Wilkinson as Tuppy contributing a great deal of emotional depth. Finally breaking with his
closed-status milieu, Tuppy follows Stella into the unknown, taking a gamble on the love of an independent
woman. (About his play, Wilde said: “If there is one particular doctrine contained in it, it is that of sheer
individualism. It is not for anyone to censure what anyone else does, and everyone should go his own way,
to whatever place he chooses, in exactly the way he chooses.”)

Using Wilde to criticize present day social relations is entirely appropriate. In this regard, the film’s
limitations “vis à vis” the original work emerge, for example, in its treatment of the two central female
characters. While Meg Windermere remains a naïve ingénue throughout Barker’s film, the original Lady is
far more a product of her class and environment: more complex and more unforgiving. When Lord
Darlington asks her if “women who have committed what the world calls a fault” should ever be forgiven,
Wilde’s original Lady Windermere replies in the negative. In fact, until she becomes the beneficiary of Mrs.
Erlynne’s unselfish deed, she is quite nasty and intolerable.

In his biography, Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellman points out that the young aristocratic woman is prepared to
run off with a lover rather than allow someone of “ill-repute” to attend her ball.

While the film is murky about Mrs. Erlynne’s past, Wilde makes clear that she left her family 20 years ago
for some of the same reasons now propelling Lady Windermere. Wilde’s Mrs. Erlynne, whose
condemnation by society and whose life as an outcast are a travesty, is a more nuanced and colorful
character than Barker’s Stella. She has gained more knowledge about the role that hypocrisy plays as the
glue of relationships, and is more adept at using this knowledge for her own purposes.

In the movie, Stella Erlynne’s role as Robert Windermere’s blackmailer does not jibe with her life-long
sorrow and guilt from having abandoned her daughter. Whereas, in the Wilde original, Mrs. Erlynne’s social
exclusion has made her colder and more self-possessed. Wilde, in other words, does not prettify the
persecuted; he shows more clearly the scars of persecution. The one moment in which his Mrs. Erlynne
allows her maternal instincts to override her self-interest is a moment for her of unendurable pain. Her
emotional floodgates open when Lady Windermere accuses her with vitriol of being a woman who is
“bought and sold.” This generates one of the play’s most impassioned and moving speeches, delivered by
the distraught woman, in favor of tolerance and understanding:

“You don’t know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an
outcast! To find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest
the mask should be stripped from one’s face, and all the while to hear the laughter, the horrible laughter of
the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You don’t know what it is. One
pays for one’s sin, and then one pays again, and all one’s life one pays.”

Despite the film’s dilutions, the creators of A Good Woman, driven to shed light on today’s searing
inequities, have generally modified Wilde with integrity and sensitivity.