An Ideal Husband (Criticism)

Criticism

Carol Dell'amico

Dell'Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, Dell'Amico considers Wilde and his play within the context of Irish-British colonial relations.

The country in which Oscar Wilde was born was, for many centuries, a territory of the United Kingdom (Britain). Ireland was, then, a colony of Britain, a situation of enforced dependence that most Irish deeply resented. Uprisings against British rule were common until, finally, Home Rule was established in 1921. After this date, most major Irish-British skirmishes pertained to the contested territory of Northern Ireland, a portion of the Irish island that Britain retained owing to Northern Ireland's large number of ethnic and religious Britons. (Northern Ireland is still British land to this day.)

Of interest to critics lately, in terms of Irish writers such as Wilde, James Joyce, and others, is how these authors' works might evince patterns of anti-imperial expression. In other words, even if the work in question has little obvious, or no evident, political content relating to the Irish-British relations, how might the writing still be somehow colonial? What might the writing of the colonial writers of the world's empires have in common?

As of a few decades ago, anybody who thought of Wilde probably thought of him as an English author. Yet, a more accurate description of him, perhaps, is that he is an Irish writer writing in the language of the empire to which his country belonged. Indeed, if it were not for British imperial ambitions, Wilde might have spoken and written in Gaelic, the predominant Irish language that British rulers suppressed. (School children in Ireland now learn Gaelic, but English is still the dominant language in the country.)

While Wilde had political convictions, he did not write much that was overtly political. Yet, he did grow up in a household taken with the cause of Ireland's quest for independence. His mother was an extremely well known and influential political organizer and writer on the side of Irish independence. She published many books on Irish history and folklore, and, under the pen name of Speranza, she wrote a great deal of political material for the independence movement.

Still, even taking into account his mother's profound patriotism and his own support of Irish independence, Wilde does not present himself as an obvious candidate to be studied as an Irish writer. He chose to live, after all, in London, the center of the empire; then again, this would be the likely destination of many ambitious writers of the time who were writing in English. Another interesting detail complicating Wilde's identity and status is that his family was Protestant. That is, they shared Britain's brand of Christianity, not Ireland's (Catholicism).

Nevertheless, certain critics have embraced Wilde as a colonial, Irish writer, and what might be anti-imperial about An Ideal Husband will now be addressed in what follows.

One of the most significant aspects of Wilde's art for colonial critics is the particular nature and focus of Wilde's wit and favorite themes. His wit, critics say, would have encouraged contemporary audiences not simply to think, but to question the notions that enabled them to construct the secure imperial identities they presumably had. How might a populace support the vast imperial cause of Britain — the imperial project that at one point encompassed colonies stretching around the entire globe? For starters, colonial critics say, Britons had to be very sure of their cultural values and identity, and that these particular values and ways were superior to others: one did not colonize simply for financial gain; one colonized to bring to foreign peoples one's superior way of life.

How, then, to encourage British audiences to think flexibly about their identities and to question the spreading of British culture? Well, one thing would be to highlight the problem of identity as such; in this regard, Lord Goring's posing is significant (indeed, the fact that Wilde's most entertaining characters all believe in the pose is significant). To adopt a pose means to choose how one wishes to come off. It means that there is no real, true self (identity) that one cannot help but express; it means that one can perform and create the self one pleases, that one can create a self from scratch. This notion of making-the-self invests the individual with great critical and moral power. It substitutes the individual for the social body: each person must decide who he or she wants to be, and each person must create his or her own identity. People who believe that they have the power to choose their beliefs are likely to be people who are critical of public opinion, or at least always willing to question it, and public opinion in Wilde's time, in England, was decidedly on the side of the empire.

In An Ideal Husband, there are a number of instances where Wilde's wit takes as its target the notion that there is no true and inevitable self to be expressed. The best and clearest example is near the beginning of the play, in an exchange between Sir Robert Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley. Chiltern has asked Cheveley if she is a pessimist or optimist, to which she replies that they are both just poses. Chiltern then says, "You prefer to be natural?" Cheveley replies, "Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up." Here, Wilde makes it clear that there is no such thing as being natural, as being oneself. In other words, one is always what one chooses to be.

The stage notes of An Ideal Husband are another place where Wilde conveys the idea that people are what they make of themselves, and, hence, that people should think carefully about what they want to believe in and who they want to be. This is conveyed in the many times that Wilde compares his characters to works of art, to reverse the maxim that "art imitates life." In other words, when thinking of art, people tend to think that artists take life as their subject: art imitates life. What so many of Wilde's stage notes humorously suggest to the contrary is that "life imitates art." Why? Because for Wilde, it would be much better for someone to read a book or see a painting and get an idea and decide to apply it to his or her own life than for an artist to observe and simply replicate what he or she has observed. In other words, Wilde wants an audience who is always willing to adopt new ideas, discard old ones, and so forth. To put this another way, Wilde insisted that people should approach themselves as "works of art," as wholly "artificial" and made-up things — as nothing but bundles of "artiface." Thus, for example, Wilde's description of the Earl of Caversham: "A fine Whig type. Rather like a portrait by Lawrence." Of Mabel Chiltern he writes, "To sane people she is not reminiscent of any work of art. But she is really like a Tanagra statuette, and would be rather annoyed if she were told so." Of Mrs. Cheveley, the following: "A work of art, on the whole, but showing the influence of too many schools." The message is clear: art is the original thing, humans are the copy, and people should look for good art to imitate! Of course, with this Wilde knew that he was being both provocative and funny. Then as today, common wisdom has it that "artificial" persons are less admirable than persons who are somehow "just themselves."

Another aspect of An Ideal Husband that undoubtedly pertains to Wilde's status as a colonial is the way the play makes fun of the Victorian tendency to devote a great deal of time to doing good works. That is, throughout the play, Wilde's socialites and dandies praise the lazy and deplore the active. As a colonial, Wilde would be interested in questioning the Victorian commitment to ameliorative work because what was motivating the empire was the notion that the world outside of England needed to be saved from itself. In spreading British culture and ways, the English believed that they were doing the world a good turn (they were doing good work). For example, they thought of themselves as persons bringing Christianity to those they thought of as "heathens" (non-Christians), no matter that the "heathens" of the world had their own religions and cultures. So, Wilde asks, is your good work truly good? Do the recipients of your help truly appreciate it? Do perhaps the recipients of your help think of it as an imposition or even an unwelcome evil? Thus, for example, the following types of comments in An Ideal Husband: "Sir John's temper since he has taken seriously to politics," says Lady Markby of her husband, "has become quite unbearable. Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm"; Lady Markby again: "I assure you my life will be quite ruined unless they send John at once to the Upper House. He won't take any interest in politics then, will he?"; again, Lady Markby: "Shall I see you at Lady Bonar's to-night? She has discovered a wonderful new genius. He does nothing at all, I believe. That is a great comfort, is it not?" There is also Mabel Chiltern's joke about where the proceeds of a theatrical event are going, another shot at Victorian high-mindedness: "But it is for an excellent charity: in aid of the Undeserving, the only people I am really interested in." She also jokes in reply to the Earl of Caversham's declaration that his son Lord Goring leads an "idle" life: "How can you say such a thing? Why, he rides in the Row at ten o'clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season."

The eminent critic and scholar Terry Eagleton sums up the politics of Wilde's art and life as follows:

If Wilde is not usually thought of in Britain as Irish, neither is he commonly seen as a particularly political figure. Yet Wilde is political in all kinds of ways, some of them fairly obvious and some of them not. He wrote finely about socialism, spoke up for Irish republicanism when the British sneered at it, and despite his carefully nurtured flippancy displayed throughout his life tenderness and compassion toward the dispossessed, who no doubt plucked some faint chord in himself. But he is also political in some more elusive senses of the term — political, for example, because he is very funny, a remorseless debunker of the high-toned gravitas of Victorian England. The Irish have often found the high seriousness of the English irresistibly comic. Wilde is radical because he takes nothing seriously, cares only for form, appearance and pleasure, and is religiously devoted to his own self-gratification. In Victorian society, such a man did not need to bed the son of the Marquess of Queensberry to become an enemy of the State, though it can't be said to have helped. If he sometimes displays the irresponsibility of the aesthete, he also restores to us something of the true political depth of that term, as a rejection of mean-spirited utility, and a devotion to human self-fulfilment as an end in itself.

Wilde's affair with the son of the Marquess did lead to his trial and imprisonment and, eventually, his downfall. But, as Eagleton intimates, many already considered Wilde an "enemy of the State" before this; he was tried because the state knew it had a great deal of support for its actions. How could a man who wrote plays so seemingly harmless and delightfully idiotic as An Ideal Husband be considered a danger to the British state? Because Wilde's wit both on and off the page was as threatening and dangerous as any sword, gun, or army. Wilde relentlessly exposed the hypocrisy of the British ruling classes, even as he flattered them and loved and admired England and the English for many good reasons. His plays suggest that the members of these ruling classes were all a bit like Sir Robert Chiltern: loud in proclaiming their goodness, but quiet about their self-interested pursuit of power and wealth — wealth that so many of them accumulated, as Wilde well knew, in the great, lucrative business that was the vast British empire.

Source:

Carol Dell'Amico, Critical Essay on An Ideal Husband, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Curt Guyette

Guyette, a longtime journalist, received a bachelor's degree in English writing from the University of Pittsburgh. In this essay, Guyette discusses how Wilde uses scathing wit to create a play that, ultimately, espouses tolerance and compassion.

In An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde stitches together multiple and varied elements to produce a seamless work that remains relevant more than a century after it was written. The playwright combines scintillating wit with both farce and melodrama, creating a piece that, over the course of its four acts, offers biting social and political commentary while espousing a philosophy that has the primacy of love and compassion as its focal point. Taken together, these elements compel Wilde's audience to consider what, exactly, makes a person truly moral.

"Deliciously absurd, morally serious, profoundly sentimental, and wickedly melodramatic, it is primarily a comedy of manners about political corruption, and love" is the way Barbara Belford describes the breadth of this play in her book Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. And, as Mark Nichols points out in his book The Importance of Being Oscar, George Bernard Shaw lavished praise on An Ideal Husband when it first hit the stage, declaring: "In a certain sense Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre."

Wilde's stiletto wit is on display throughout the play. Seemingly without effort, he produces one epigram after another. These concise, pithy, often paradoxical statements are uttered by minor and major characters alike and give An Ideal Husband an entirely playful sheen. Nichols notes in his book that Wilde's son Vyvyan once wrote that his father viewed words as if they were "beautiful baubles with which to play and build, as a child plays with coloured bricks." It is an apt analogy. Wilde's wordplay provides an iridescent foundation, each epigram indeed like a beautifully colored brick that helps form the base that An Ideal Husband is built upon.

The baubles are indeed splendid, providing such delight that they would make this play a memorable experience no matter what plot line is constructed around them. Nichols, in fact, spends no time analyzing the story line of An Ideal Husband. Instead, he is content to reel from one epigram to another, as if intoxicated by each indelible line, such as the one uttered by the character Lord Goring, who observes, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."

Among the targets skewered by Wilde is the world of high society. Take, for example, this choice remark from the character Mabel Chiltern, who says, "Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be." As rich a subject as that might have been at the end of the Victorian era, it took some nerve for Wilde to sling verbal barbs at social circles he himself was in. This play, though, is substantially more than a collection of witty one-liners and has more philosophical meat to chew on, as well. Part of the main course, so to speak, is the issue of hypocrisy, especially as it applies to the world of politics.

Wilde's gateway into the rich turf of the political arena is the character Sir Robert Chiltern, a high-ranking official who built a sterling career by constantly seeking the moral high ground. His integrity is beyond reproach, and his wife Gertrude idolizes him for his goodness, honesty, and dedication to principles. But, beneath all his respectability is a dirty secret: Chiltern's wealth, and the career in public service it afforded him, derived from Chiltern selling a state secret many years before when he was still a young man. The threat of that secret being exposed by Mrs. Cheveley forms the basis of the plot for An Ideal Husband.

Cheveley, in possession of a highly incriminating letter that proves Sir Robert's crime, wants Chiltern to lend his support, and the credibility that goes with it, to a scam that would bilk the public treasury. She attempts to blackmail him, threatening to expose his sordid actions if he does not provide assistance for her scheme, an action that would have him betray the public trust he has otherwise so rightly earned. The woman delights in taunting him. In doing so, she makes an observation regarding politics that still rings true today.

'Nowadays,' she chides,'with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues — and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins — one after the other.'

Politicians today are still expected to be without moral flaw, even though it is a recognized impossibility since they are only human. When those flaws are exposed, they are subjected to public humiliation and scorn. As the character Lord Goring observes, admitting one's weaknesses and failures does nothing to appease a public that demands the impossibility of moral perfection from its politicians. Confession would be fruitless, says Goring, explaining

And if you did make a clean breast of the whole affair, you would never be able to talk morality again. And in England a man who can't talk morality twice a week to a large popular immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician.

Even more than the public disgrace, Chiltern fears the effect disclosure of his decades-old crime will have on his adoring wife, who, because of his perceived virtue, places him on a pedestal so high no man could ever really live up to it. Exposure of his dark secret, Sir Robert is convinced, would drive his wife away. "It would kill her love for me," he tells Goring, a character largely modeled on Wilde himself. Goring, described as a "flawless dandy" by Wilde, provides an interesting and highly instructive counterpoint to Sir Robert. The latter publicly portrays himself to be a man of the highest moral scruples while concealing a shameful incident from his past; Goring, on the other hand, is, on the surface, Chiltern's polar opposite. He makes no attempt whatsoever to hide what he openly admits to be his many flaws.

As Mabel Chiltern, the sister of Sir Robert who has a romantic interest in Lord Goring, says to the self-confessed gadabout, "You are always telling me of your bad qualities, Lord Goring." To which he replies, "I have only told you half of them as yet, Miss Mabel!" Unlike Sir Robert, Lord Goring is free of guilt. He never had to bear the heavy burden of going through life concealing an act for which he is deeply ashamed. As Sir Robert says himself, "I would to God that I had been able to tell the truth to live the truth. Ah! That is the great thing in life, to live the truth." It is just such a life that Goring has lived and is the happier for it.

Goring's father, the crusty and cantankerous Earl of Caversham, has not a single good word to say about his son. Caversham views his son as an idler who lives only for his own pleasure. Praising Sir Robert for his "high character, high moral tone, high principles," Caversham turns to his son and decrees, "Everything that you have not got, sir, and never will have." The irony is that when Caversham makes this observation, the audience knows just how wrong he is on both counts. Sir Robert is not quite as completely noble as the old earl believes and his son has proved himself to have a truly sterling character. He has shown himself to be a good and steadfast friend, doing all he can to help Sir Robert out of his dire predicament and asking absolutely nothing in return. Beyond that, he does his best to help Sir Robert's wife, Gertrude, see the error of her ways. First, at the point when he knows the truth of her husband's scandal and she does not, he encourages her to moderate her unrealistic view of Sir Robert as an absolute paragon of virtue, telling her that in "every nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness." Goring urges Lady Chiltern to gain some degree of compassion and not expect her husband to be flawless.

'All I do know,' says Goring, 'is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.'

Later, after Lord Goring has saved the day by thwarting Mrs. Cheveley's attempt at blackmail, Lady Chiltern, who has indeed followed Goring's advice and forgiven her husband for his moral lapse, nonetheless pushes Sir Robert to do what she considers the honorable thing and withdraw from public life. Again, Goring steps in and provides astute counsel, saying that her urging of Sir Robert to meet an impossibly high standard by abandoning all that he has worked for is a terrible mistake. Goring says to Gertrude

'Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success. Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment is their mission.'

She again takes his advice, and all ends happily. Sir Robert's political success is assured. He and Gertrude have grown closer than ever, their love all the stronger because it is based in reality instead of some idealized fiction. As director Peter Hall wrote in a 1992 piece he penned for London's The Guardian newspaper, Wilde made it clear that Sir Robert's crime was clearly foolish, but along with condemnation came forgiveness. "Through the character of Lord Goring," writes Hall, "Wilde expresses his tolerance: 'Nobody's incapable of dong a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing."' Noting that audiences continued to respond positively to An Ideal Husband a century after it was first staged, Hall concludes, "The play lives not because of its wit but because of its compassion."

Source:

Curt Guyette, Critical Essay on An Ideal Husband, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

What do I read next?

• The play The Importance of Being Earnest (1896) is Wilde's comedic masterpiece; it premiered a month after An Ideal Husband in 1895.
• The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) is Wilde's much admired first book of fairy tales.
• Translations (1981) is a play by the well-known Irish playwright Brian Friel. It takes place in 1833, dramatizing Britain's project of mapping Ireland and, in the process, substituting English names for the original Gaelic ones.
• The conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater conveys the aestheticist creed that so impressed Wilde.
• Like Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, The Way of the World (1700) by William Congreve is said to be one of the finest and funniest comedies of manners ever written in English.
• Literary scholar Terry Eagleton's forays into fiction include a play about Oscar Wilde, Saint Oscar (1989). This humorous, erudite play explores the nature of Wilde's art and place in British society.
• The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's most famous "problem play," A Doll's House (1889), revolutionized European theater at the end of the nineteenth century. It set a new serious standard for playwrights, moving away from the fantastical entertainments of melodrama in favor of a new social realism in which social and political problems of the day were addressed. A Doll's House takes on the issue of the "New Woman."
• Patience (1881) is a comedic operetta about aesthetes and dandies by the famed Victorian musical theater duo W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.