On Doing ‘Being Witty’: the performative construction of conversational dominance in Wilde’s society plays

In this paper, I analyse the function of breachings of the rules of polite conversation in Wilde’s society plays. In these plays, as will be argued, characters strive to achieve conversational dominance at each other’s expenses in order to increase their social capital as defined by Bourdieu, whose description of this facet of social identity, as I point out, is inherently relevant to queer theory because of its emphasis on its performative character. Focusing on key scenes of apparently idle chat between characters, I examine how certain violations of the implied rules of conversation, as described by several sociologists and philosophers of language (Garfinkel, Grice, Sacks), allow the characters to increase their authority (and therefore their social capital), by gaining the reputation of being brilliant and witty. This is achieved by forcing the other participants into a double bind situation where calling out the breaching is ineffective and potentially awkward, and not calling it...