This study explores how Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray portrays marriage and womanhood in late Victorian society, revealing upper-class hypocrisy through Paula Tanqueray, who follows her moral convictions over social expectations. Paula’s suicide becomes the central image of moral failure and the impossibility of redemption in a society bound by rigid virtue codes. Focusing on the framework of sin and punishment, this study argues that Pinero transforms the domestic problem play into a modern tragedy of redemption. His portrayal of moral transgression and social condemnation functions as a means of ethical self-awareness rather than mere punishment. Ultimately, Pinero presents the unconventional woman as both the subject and victim of society’s moral order, turning personal tragedy into social critique and revealing the moral anxieties of nineteenth-century British drama.
Keumhee Jang (Sun,) studied this question.