A Change of Persona
Oscar Wilde’s instinct for the ever-shifting nature of social masks is one reason why he remains indispensable.
Naples 2016
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In the opening of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, we hear a line with a bit of context underneath its wit:
Algernon: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
Lane: I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.
As the scene continues, we begin to grasp how the relationship between these characters has rather delicate boundaries—through subtly, misdirection, and the occasional slip of honesty. Of course Wilde’s instinct for the ever-shifting nature of social masks is, in fact, one reason he remains indispensable, and an ingredient to some of his most memorable lines.
Because you do speak differently during a dinner with your family than during a lunch with your colleagues; because you do have one tone that emerges during a job interview, and another, later, that emerges to tell your friends about that job interview. Maturity is partly about possessing this versatility, about your knack for lugging around various selves, about whether you have the footwork and finesse and flair for seamless transitions. But is shapeshifting dishonest? Or misleading? Even unethical? Perhaps it is dishonest if you assume there’s a constant, intransigent self underneath all of your masks. Because otherwise you’re left with the frustration of reconciling a rather peculiar bind: which self is the dishonest one? Any self that you dismiss as the actor is still, of course, part of you.
But just as honesty doesn’t imply blurting out every word that pops into your mind—in an endless cascade of haphazard, irrelevant thoughts, with the recursive, entropic flow of a child’s story—authenticity doesn’t necessitate an inflexible self. You seesaw, for instance, between emotions, among states of hunger, from alertness to sleepiness, and the result is never anything less than you. This isn’t a grand claim, and most people are aware of these dynamics, though they typically prefer to keep the conclusion at a distance—there’s an implicit sense that anything fickle is dishonest. The words that appear are shifty and evasive and slick. However, we also know that the reverse—an ossified self—is itself deficient. As the person who is always blunt, always funny, or always anything at all, lacks a necessary social dexterity. Put another way: the manners you use to tell a joke to a six year old aren’t the same manners you use to enter a plea in court.
Algernon: Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.
Lane: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of first-rate brand.
Algernon: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?
Lane: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.
Algernon: [Languidly] I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.
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If the subject is the mercurial, impermanent self, and the variety of masks we wear for our variety of situations, then the real credit should go to Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the modern essay, and perhaps history’s most famous capricious writer:
I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal…
This comes from Montaigne’s essay Of the Inconsistency of our Actions, though that title fits nearly all of his work. Here is a writer who fiddled with his lines for decades and left us no definitive proofs.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.
Because Montaigne contradicted himself on the page, and happened to leave multiple versions of his essays, he has left centuries of readers confused, thrilled, angered, irked, delighted, and shocked—with his pen coming across as somehow both cryptic and forthright. All of his backflips and reversals and turnabouts reveal new selves, ponder his various masks, and that means that pretty much whatever you want to write about Montaigne can be justified; his mutability permits any conclusion that you desire. Of course for many readers that’s a posture that feels amiss, because a self that’s constantly shifting must be hiding its true foundation, which is perhaps similar to how Lane’s deferential pose in The Importance of Being Earnest comes with a tone that feels remarkably like deceit. If we could only remove those masks, this thinking goes, we could reach what must be genuine. Thus readers squint at the words they find in Wilde and Montaigne, both fascinated and repelled, in a breathless search for just one spot of stability, but they always fail to find any sense of self that’s clear and authentic and consistent—which means that nearly everyone discovers a mirror.
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