The quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” from the 1893 play Lady Windermere’s Fan inspires optimism with its use of imagery. The imagery used in the quote provides a very vivid illustration of the author’s point of view. The meaning of the quote can be easily changed by who is reading it, and also whether it is in the context of the original script or on its own. The mental image of the gutter is quite striking. The gutter is dirty, damp, and undesirable. Wilde may have chosen the gutter to illustrate the hopelessness of the human condition because of the time in which he lived. Victorian London was over-crowded, it lacked proper disposal methods, and was a hot-bed of typhus, cholera, and influenza.
…show more content…
In the play, the quote is spoken by the character of Lord Darlington. Lord Darlington has just had his confession of love rejected by the unflinchingly moral Lady Windermere and he speaks the quote to another character in the story, Mr. Dumby. With a little bit of background information, the quote becomes rather affecting. One could see the heartbroken Lord Darlington as the gutter and the morally superior Lady Windermere as the stars, beautiful, ideal, and utterly unreachable. Darlington views himself as not only separated from her by distance, but also by his perceived unworthiness. This changes the meaning of the quote from being about an unpleasant situation that improves with a bit of celestial comfort and turns it into a statement of resignation that idealizes another person and distances them from the speaker in the most extreme sense, placing them millions of miles away in a place that the speaker will never be able to reach. The juxtaposition of the quote only intensifies this, placing Lord Darlington in the lowest place a person could be, the gutter, a place barely worthy of the vermin that inhabits it, and placing Lady Windermere in the highest place a person in the Victorian age could imagine, the stars, a spot in the sky that gleams with heavenly white light and a place that will never be touched by anyone who lies in the
In the play, the quote is spoken by the character of Lord Darlington. Lord Darlington has just had his confession of love rejected by the unflinchingly moral Lady Windermere and he speaks the quote to another character in the story, Mr. Dumby. With a little bit of background information, the quote becomes rather affecting. One could see the heartbroken Lord Darlington as the gutter and the morally superior Lady Windermere as the stars, beautiful, ideal, and utterly unreachable. Darlington views himself as not only separated from her by distance, but also by his perceived unworthiness. This changes the meaning of the quote from being about an unpleasant situation that improves with a bit of celestial comfort and turns it into a statement of resignation that idealizes another person and distances them from the speaker in the most extreme sense, placing them millions of miles away in a place that the speaker will never be able to reach. The juxtaposition of the quote only intensifies this, placing Lord Darlington in the lowest place a person could be, the gutter, a place barely worthy of the vermin that inhabits it, and placing Lady Windermere in the highest place a person in the Victorian age could imagine, the stars, a spot in the sky that gleams with heavenly white light and a place that will never be touched by anyone who lies in the