What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.