The Wasp — 1893 — page 556: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon satirizes a scandal involving the de la Montanya case. The dialogue reveals the joke: one woman asks if the other is named in the celebrated de la Montanya case as a correspondent. The response indicates that while the plaintiff has only named San Francisco society defendants so far, the questioner—living in Oakland—remains unnamed but implicitly implicated. The satire targets wealthy Bay Area society women entangled in what appears to be a divorce or infidelity scandal. The cartoon mocks both the salacious legal proceedings and the social pretensions of elite women worried about public exposure. The fashionable dress and waterfront setting emphasize their privileged status while their furtive conversation suggests guilty involvement in the scandalous affair.