An Ideal Husband (Style)

Style

Wit

Wit as a type of humor is what Wilde is known for, both in his everyday life and in a number of his writings, including An Ideal Husband. Wit is clever humor — not bawdy, rude, silly, or visual funniness. Wit entails the delivery of an unexpected or surprising insight, or a clever reversal of expectations. For example, at one point in the play, Mrs. Cheveley says, "a woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker, isn't it? What the second duty is, no one has yet discovered." This would have provoked laughter because the popular saying she is reversing is as follows: "A woman's first duty is to her husband." Victorians were known for their commitment to duty and there would have been not one person in Wilde's audience who had not heard and read the popular axiom many, many times.

Epigram and Aphorism

Epigrammatic turns of speech are short and sweet, and they are somehow surprising or witty. Wilde's characters' wit is often epigrammatic. For example, as Mrs. Cheveley says at one point, "Oh! I don't care about the London season! It is too matrimonial. People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them." Mrs. Cheveley's purported reason for disliking the London social season is funny. Even funnier is that what makes the season "matrimonial" is not simply the search for husbands.

An aphorism is a brief statement containing an opinion or general truth, which might or might not be witty. Wilde excelled in wit in the form of aphorisms. Lady Cheveley, for example, delivers quite a few aphoristic witticisms in An Ideal Husband. For example, "Morality," she says, "is simply the attitude we take toward people whom we personally dislike." Or, as she says elsewhere: "Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are." There is also Lord Goring's opinion about good advice. In reply to Mabel Chiltern when she questions his having told her it's past her bedtime, Lord Goring says, "My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don't see why I shouldn't give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never any use to oneself."

Comedy of Manners

While Wilde has a serious plot and message in An Ideal Husband, the play is mostly comic. As such, it is close to a form of dramatic comedy known as the comedy of manners. Comedies of manners are mostly associated with eighteenth-century Europe, although they date back to the beginnings of European drama. A comedy of manners is a play whose purpose is to satirize human vagaries. They focus on a particular stratum of society and make fun of that group's pettiness, hypocrisies, vanities, failings, and so forth. In An Ideal Husband, for example, Wilde satirizes the hypocrisy of the English ruling classes through his portrait of Sir Robert Chiltern. Comedies of manners are also characterized by their wit, i.e., the way that the characters' dialogue is composed mostly of clever and funny bantering. This explains Wilde's attraction to the form.

Melodrama

Melodramas tell their stories through sensational and improbable characters and turns of event. For example, villains are thoroughly villainous in melodrama, and heroes and heroines are purity itself. Rings, letters, gloves and such items are lost and found in ways that lead to all sorts of revelations and complications of plot. Heroines often end up in terrible danger, but the hero always arrives at the last moment to save the day, and so forth. Wilde employs some stock melodramatic situations and events in An Ideal Husband. For example, the detail of the incriminating letter from the past and the blackmail scheme on which the plot turns are melodramatic flourishes.

Problem Play

What are called problem plays were first written in Europe in the late nineteenth century. They are called this because they tackle some pressing social development of the day. For example, the playwright credited with introducing the form in its purest, earliest form is Henrik Ibsen, whose A Doll's House took on the issue of feminism: the struggles of Europe's "new" women and their families. If critics have difficulty calling An Ideal Husband a comedy of manners, and some prefer the term "social comedy," this is because the play has a serious element to it. This serious component reflects Wilde's respect for the problem play.