This study examines the destabilization of Victorian moral certainties in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest through a postmodern deconstructive lens. It explores how both playwrights, writing within the constraints of Victorian society, anticipate postmodern concerns by challenging dominant ideologies of morality, identity, and social structure. Emerging during a period marked by rigid social hierarchies, strict gender expectations, and an intense emphasis on public respectability, both plays expose the contradictions embedded within Victorian moral discourse. The study is situated within broader debates on literature and ideology, particularly the relationship between social performance, moral authority, and the instability of meaning in literary texts. The central hypothesis is that these texts deconstruct moral absolutes by exposing their contradictions and performative nature, a position consistent with Jacques Derrida’s assertion that meaning is never fixed but always deferred (Of Grammatology 158). Drawing primarily on Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, and supported by Michel Foucault’s critique of power and discourse as well as Jean Baudrillard’s insights into bourgeois simulation, the study adopts a qualitative textual analysis method. Through close reading, comparative literary analysis, and critical interpretation of selected scenes and character constructions, the research investigates how the plays of the authors undermine claims to moral stability and social authenticity. The study demonstrates how Shaw interrogates capitalist and patriarchal structures through the commodification of women’s labour, while Wilde satirizes the superficiality, hypocrisy, and self-fashioning that underpin middle-class respectability. The analysis shows that both plays undermine essentialist notions of truth, virtue, and identity, revealing moral norms as unstable constructs rather than universal absolutes. By and large, the research concludes that these late Victorian dramas not only critique the ideological foundations of their own society but also anticipate central postmodern concerns regarding fragmentation, performativity, and the indeterminacy of meaning. Through their dramatic strategies, Shaw and Wilde expose morality as a socially constructed and deeply contested concept rather than a fixed ethical reality.
Divine Njong (Tue,) studied this question.