An Ideal Husband Context
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to two accomplished parents, his mother being a respected poet and translator and his father a knighted surgeon. Wilde won prizes in classics throughout his youth and received prestigious scholarships to Trinity and then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won further prizes for his poetry. While at Oxford, he came under the influence of aestheticians Walter Pater and John Ruskin, and joined them in becoming a key figure in the founding of the Aesthetic Movement. After university, Wilde moved to London, where he insinuated himself into London's most glamorous drawing rooms as wit, dandy, and high aesthete. In 1881 he published a volume of poetry and left for an American lecture tour on the arts the following year, during which he met Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Walt Whitman. Upon returning to London, he married, fathered two sons, and published several collections of children's stories and Irish folktales. In 1887 he also took a post as editor of Woman’s World magazine.
The period from 1890 to 1895 brought Wilde to the height of his writing career. The Picture of Dorian Grey appeared in 1891, shocking the public with its homoeroticism. A string of hugely successful plays followed: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Scandalous in their assault on Victorian mores, Wilde's new comedy of manners conquered the London stage. Wilde also spent part of this period in France, befriending members of the Symbolist and Decadent movements and writing his French short drama, Salomé (1891). This period also marked the beginning of Wilde's ill-fated love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, which would soon prove to be his downfall. In 1895 Douglas' irate father, the Marques of Queensbury, left a card at Wilde's club addressed: "To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite (sic)". Getting the point, Wilde sued for libel but dropped the charges when the sensational trial turned in his disfavour. He was then arrested and convicted of homosexual practices and sentenced to two years hard labour. Wilde would later write of his time in prison in his last major work, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898). Broken by his public disgrace, Wilde spent the last years of his life sick and poor, wandering Europe and sinking into drug addiction. Ultimately he died of cerebral meningitis in a Paris hotel in 1900.
Biographers suggest that a number of private events foreshadowing Wilde's downfall may inform An Ideal Husband. Around the time of its writing, Lord Alfred had given a suit to his friend, Alfred Wood, who discovered a love letter from Wilde carelessly left in its pocket. Wood confronted Wilde with the intention of blackmail, but the unconcerned author was able to appease the would-be extortionist over dinner. Unfortunately Wood had also given a copy of the letter to two professional thugs, who also approached Wilde with demands for payment. Wilde nonchalantly dismissed them as well, however, reportedly telling the men that he found the idea of such a price being proposed for a piece of his writing quite the compliment.
With respect to historical context, Wilde wrote An Idea Husband during the decade known as the "Yellow" or "Naughty Nineties", the twilight years of England's Victorian era. In schematic terms, this period was distinguished by England's growth as an industrial and imperial giant and an increasingly conservatism in social mores. Imperial expansion, foreign speculation, and the period's rigid system of mores--involving, for example, notions of familial devotion, propriety, and duty both public and personal--provide the backdrop for Wilde's play. As a primary propagator of aestheticism, Wilde rebelled against Victorian sensibilities, calling for a world judged by the beauty of its artifice rather than its moral value. The aesthete opted to forgo his dreary duties to society in the name of individual freedom, social theatricality, and the pleasures of style and affectation. Ideal Husband dramatizes this clash in value systems rather explicitly, continually posing the figure of the dandy--a thinly veiled double of Wilde himself--against a set of more respectable, "ideal" characters.
In terms of dramatic history, An Ideal Husband should be situated in tension with the popular melodramas and farces that dominated the Anglophone stage of Wilde's day. These melodramas find their roots in the tradition of the "well-made play", a French model of theatre elaborated by Scribe and Sardou that emphasized craftsmanship over content. As the name suggests, audiences could count on the well-made melodrama to offer them stock characters (i.e. the "other woman", the virtuous wife, the husband with a secret past) in stock storylines that would culminate in the reaffirmation of pure and undying love--the so-called "happy ending". As we will see, An Ideal Husband's genius lies in the repetition of the melodramatic formula to ironic ends, one that thoroughly subverts what the melodrama would accomplish through its games of Wildean wit.
Key Facts
→
FULL TITLE · An Ideal Husband
AUTHOR · Oscar Wilde
TYPE OF WORK · Drama
GENRE · Romantic melodrama; farce; "satire" of popular Victorian society dramas (i.e. the formulaic "well-made play," which emphasized stock characters, situations, and themes emphasizing bourgeois morality)
LANGUAGE · English
TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · Written in 1894 in London; staged immediately prior to Wilde's most successful play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895
DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1895
PUBLISHER · L. Smithers
NARRATOR · None
CLIMAX · An Ideal Husband has no clear climax, but relies a series of complications and crises. There are numerous climatic speeches and climatic reversals at the end of each act (i.e. the revelation of Sir Robert's secret, Mrs. Cheveley's theft of Lady Chiltern's letter, etc.). The most climatic confrontation is probably between Mrs. Cheveley and Lord Goring at the end of Act III
PROTAGONISTS · Sir Robert Chiltern, Lady Chiltern, and Lord Goring
SETTING (TIME) · 1895; thus, first staged in "the present." The time of the play's action is twenty-four hours.
SETTING (PLACE) · London
POINT OF VIEW · Point of view is not located as there is no narrator figure
FALLING ACTION · Falling action comes at the end of Act IV, where Sir Robert accepts his Cabinet post and reconciles with his wife; subsequently, Mabel and Lord Goring announce their engagement
TENSE · The play unfolds in the time of the present
TONE · Tone is differentiated according to character. For example: Mrs. Cheveley displays an acrid wit; Mabel Chiltern is pert and flirtatious; Lady Chiltern and Sir Robert are prone to moments of high moralistic pathos; Lord Goring is a master of irony, sarcasm, etc
THEMES · The ideal marriage; the ideal woman; Aestheticism and the art of modern living
MOTIFS · Wit, irony, paradox, hyperbole; the melodramatic speech
SYMBOLS · The Rococo tapestry; the diamond brooch
FORESHADOWING · There are two notable examples in terms of plot: the speech by Lady Chiltern at the end of Act I that prefigures Sir Robert's fall and Lord Goring's vague remarks about the diamond bracelet and his past engagement to Mrs. Cheveley in Act II
Plot Overview
An Ideal Husband opens during a dinner party at the home of Sir Robert Chiltern in London's fashionable Grosvenor Square. Sir Robert, a prestigious member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Gertrude Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor and close friend to the Chilterns, his sister Mabel Chiltern, and other genteel guests.
During the party, Mrs. Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern's from their school days, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley's dead mentor, Baron Arnheim, convinced the young Sir Robert many years ago to sell him a Cabinet secret, a secret that suggested he buy stocks in the Suez Canal three days before the British government announced its purchase. Sir Robert made his fortune with that illicit money, and Mrs. Cheveley has the letter to prove his crime. Fearing both the ruin of career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands.
When Mrs. Cheveley pointedly informs Lady Chiltern of Sir Robert's change of heart regarding the canal scheme, the morally inflexible Lady, unaware of both her husband's past and the blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert renege on his promise. For Lady Chiltern, their marriage is predicated on her having an "ideal husband"—that is, a model spouse in both private and public life that she can worship: thus Sir Robert must remain unimpeachable in all his decisions. Sir Robert complies with the lady's wishes and apparently seals his doom. Also toward the end of Act I, Mabel and Lord Goring come upon a diamond brooch that Lord Goring gave someone many years ago. Goring takes the brooch and asks that Mabel inform him if anyone comes to retrieve it.
In the second act, which also takes place at Sir Robert's house, Lord Goring urges Sir Robert to fight Mrs. Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. He also reveals that he and Mrs. Cheveley were formerly engaged. After finishing his conversation with Sir Robert, Goring engages in flirtatious banter with Mabel. He also takes Lady Chiltern aside and obliquely urges her to be less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Once Goring leaves, Mrs. Cheveley appears, unexpected, in search of a brooch she lost the previous evening. Incensed at Sir Robert's reneging on his promise, she ultimately exposes Sir Robert to his wife once they are both in the room. Unable to accept a Sir Robert now unmasked, Lady Chiltern then denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him.
In the third act, set in Lord Goring's home, Goring receives a pink letter from Lady Chiltern asking for his help, a letter that might be read as a compromising love note. Just as Goring receives this note, however, his father, Lord Caversham, drops in and demands to know when his son will marry. A visit from Sir Robert, who seeks further counsel from Goring, follows. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cheveley arrives unexpectedly and, misrecognized by the butler as the woman Goring awaits, is ushered into Lord Goring's drawing room. While she waits, she finds Lady Chiltern's letter. Ultimately, Sir Robert discovers Mrs. Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced of an affair between these two former loves, angrily storms out of the house.
When she and Lord Goring confront each other, Mrs. Cheveley makes a proposal: claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Sir Robert's letter for her old beau's hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction and ruining the Chilterns' marriage. He then springs his trap. Removing the diamond brooch from his desk drawer, he binds it to Cheveley's wrist with a hidden device. Goring then reveals how the item came into her possession: apparently Mrs. Cheveley stole it from his cousin years ago. To avoid arrest, Cheveley must trade the incriminating letter for her release from the bejewelled handcuff. After Goring obtains and burns the letter, however, Mrs. Cheveley steals Lady Chiltern's note from his desk. Vengefully she plans to send it to Sir Robert misconstrued as a love letter addressed to the dandified lord. Mrs. Cheveley exits the house in triumph.
The final act, which returns to Grosvenor Square, resolves the many plot complications sketched above with a decidedly happy ending. Lord Goring proposes to and is accepted by Mabel. Lord Caversham informs his son that Sir Robert has denounced the Argentine canal scheme before the House. Lady Chiltern then appears, and Lord Goring informs her that Sir Robert's letter has been destroyed but that Mrs. Cheveley has stolen her letter and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. At that moment, Sir Robert enters while reading Lady Chiltern's letter, but he has mistaken it for a letter of forgiveness written for him. The two reconcile. The ever-upright Lady Chiltern then attempts to drive Sir Robert to renounce his career in politics, but Lord Goring dissuades her from doing so. When Sir Robert refuses Lord Goring his sister's hand in marriage, still believing he has taken up with Mrs. Cheveley, Lady Chiltern is forced to explain last night's events and the true nature of the letter. Sir Robert relents, and Lord Goring and Mabel are permitted to wed.
Character List
Note: Critics often describe Wilde's characters as one-dimensional. This one dimensionality is on the one hand an effect of Wilde's borrowing from stock characters of the popular theatre and, as discussed in the Context, his emphasis on artifice on the other. Notably, with regards to the latter, Wilde introduces his characters through playful references to art objects and aesthetic stereotypes. We will report on his characters accordingly.
He is an accomplished government official, considered by all as an ideal husband and model politician. As described in the stage notes, Sir Robert has effected a violent separation of thought and emotion in his personality; moreover, he suffers from divided loyalties. Though a portrait of distinction and good breeding, Sir Robert conceals a blemished past. Extremely ambitious, he succumbed to the nefarious advice of his mentor, Baron Arnheim, in his youth, coming to hold power over others as life's primary pleasure and wealth as the age's weapon toward winning it. To some extent, Sir Robert holds wealth and power in similar esteem today. At the same time, Sir Robert has had to conceal his past from his wife in hopes of keeping her love. As detailed below, Lady Chiltern's love is predicated on the worship of his perfect image; so desperate is Sir Robert to remain in her esteem that he will even agree to resign from government in Act IV. Torn between his true and ideal selves, Sir Robert suffers from a nervous temperament throughout the play.
Sir Robert is a fairly static character, undergoing little development and ultimately receiving salvation through the machinations of Lord Goring. He does, however, give way to one major outburst once the balancing act between his secret past and ideal persona becomes untenable. Unmasked by Mrs. Cheveley at the end of Act II, he curses Lady Chiltern's impossibly worshipful love as causing their ruin: in other words, because of her worship he could not descend his pedestal, so to speak, and admit his crimes to her earlier. Sir Robert considers himself a victim of what he identifies as "feminine" adoration. In contrast, he loves in a "masculine" fashion—that he can love his lover's human imperfections and then forgive her faults. Sir Robert thus becomes the vehicle of one of the play's primary pronouncements on the theme of marriage. Like his wife, his is largely a melodramatic voice, the conventional nature of his speech—that is, conventional in terms of the popular Victorian stage—reflecting the conventional nature of its content.
Lady Gertrude Chiltern - A woman of grave Greek beauty and twenty-seven years of age, Lady Chiltern embodies the Victorian new woman: upright, virtuous, educated, politically engaged, and active in her husband's career. She is the play's sentimental heroine, a sort of moral absolutist who worships her ideal husband and cannot brook the revelation of his secret past. In terms of Wilde's other plays, Lady Chiltern recalls the puritanical Lady Windermere.
Lady Chiltern is the play's upright and earnest heroine, embodying the ideal of Victorian new womanhood Wilde elaborated while editor of the Women's World magazine in the late 1880s. This new woman was best represented by an educated wife involved in women's issues and supportive of her husband's political career. Lady Chiltern certainly embodied these characteristics, and unlike Sir Robert, Lady Chiltern is not self-divided, but perfectly virtuous. Though a poised, charming, and dignified society wife, Lady Chiltern is naïve when it comes to the machinations around her. In this sense, she is Mrs. Cheveley's ready victim.
Lady Chiltern undergoes a rather simple development through the course of the play, specifically with respect to the theme of marriage and, more precisely, the question of how women should love. Toward the end of Act I, she melodramatically delivers a speech to Sir Robert that introduces the idea of the "ideal husband" and establishes the nature of her love, a love described from the outset as "feminine." As a woman, Lady Chiltern loves in the worship of an ideal mate, a mate who serves as model for both her and society at large. Thus she rejects Sir Robert upon the revelation of his secret past, unable to brook neither his duplicity nor the justification of his dishonesty as necessary compromise.
Ultimately she will learn from her counsellor, Lord Goring, that the loving woman should not so much idealize the lover as forgive him his faults. Goring will also teach her that Sir Robert—as a man—lives by his intellect and requires a successful public life. Thus Lady Chiltern will forgo her rigid morals and allow her husband to continue his career despite its ill-gotten beginnings.
Mrs. Cheveley - One of the play's wittiest and most well dressed characters, Mrs. Cheveley is the vicious and opportunistic villainess, a disciple of the deceased Baron Arnheim who values wealth and power above all. She stands as foil to the virtuous and earnest Lady Chiltern, being cast throughout the play as a sort of monstrous femme fatale. Notably, Mrs. Cheveley is continuously imagined as the product of "horrid combinations" that evoke her duplicity. To take a few examples of how the play constructs her double-dealing: one character in Act I describes her as the "unnatural" union of daytime genius and night time beauty. More viciously, Act III describes her as Lamia-like—that is, reminiscent of a female demon, half woman and half snake. One could perhaps draw parallels between Mrs. Cheveley and the adventuresome Mrs. Erlynne from Lady Windermere's Fan.
Foil to the earnest Lady Chiltern, Mrs. Cheveley is the play's femme fatale: bitingly witty, fabulously well dressed, cruel, ambitious, opportunistic, and, above all, duplicitous. Repeatedly the play describes her as the product of "horrid combinations," evoking her dangerous deceitfulness. Thus Lady Basildon recoils from her "unnatural" union of daytime genius and night time beauty; later, Cheveley appears as a "Lamia-like" villainess—that is, part woman and part snake. Whereas Lady Chiltern is pure and undivided, Mrs. Cheveley is defined by deception, artifice, and falsehood.
Cheveley returns from Vienna as a sort of ghost from the past, at once an old enemy of Lady Chiltern's from their school days, the traitorous fiancée of the young Lord Goring, and a disciple of the deceased Baron Arnheim, Sir Robert's seductive corrupter. Even more than Sir Robert, she fiercely subscribes to Arnheim's philosophy of power and gospel of wealth, treasuring the domination of others above all. Thus she unscrupulously wreaks havoc in the Chiltern's married life to secure her fortunes and dismisses marriage as a mere transaction. Thus, within the moral scheme of the play, she stands opposed to the sentimental notions of conjugal life embodied by the Chilterns and Lord Goring.
With this in mind, Mrs. Cheveley's undoing in Act III avenges her crimes against the conjugal household. Called to account for a past crime, she finds herself trapped for a stolen wedding gift—the diamond brooch—by her ex-fiancé. The poetic justice in her arrest is clear. Moreover, this undoing also unmasks her as a monster. Once trapped by Lord Goring, Cheveley dissolves into a "paroxysm of rage" her loss of speech giving way to an agony of terror that distorts her face. For a moment, a "mask has fallen," and Cheveley is "dreadful to look at." Her veneer of wit and beauty thus give way to the hidden beast.
Lord Goring - Of impeccable dress and inimitable wit, Lord Goring is the play's thirty-something dandified philosopher, an idle aristocrat who serves as a thinly veiled double for Wilde himself. Irreverent, wry, and dangerously clever, Goring "plays with the world" and in doing so rejects ideals of duty, respectability, and responsibility. As with Wilde's other dandies, he functions as a figure for modern art of living and the aestheticist creed, particularly in his encounters with his stuffy father, Lord Caversham . Expounding a philosophy of love and forgiveness, Goring also figures as saviour and helpmate to the Chilterns, teaching Lady Chiltern in particular of the dangers in idealizing one's husband. In terms of Wilde's other plays, Goring recalls the dandified Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance.
Described as the first well-dressed philosopher in history, Goring is the dandified hero of the play and a thinly veiled double for Wilde himself. As the stage notes from Act III indicate, he is in "immediate relation" to modern life, making and mastering it. He thus serves as bearer of Wilde's aestheticist creed stressing amorality, youth, pleasure, distinction, idleness, and onward in rebellion against Victorian ideals. An Ideal Husband emphasizes Goring's modernity by posing him in a number of comic dialogues with his father, Lord Caversham—in which the former urges his son to marry and claim responsibility while the latter outwits him with his repartee.
Within the play's moral scheme, Goring delivers a number of the play's more sentimental pronouncements on love and marriage, serving as helpmate to the Chilterns and teacher to the impossibly upright Lady Chiltern in particular. Thus he extols the importance of forgiveness and charity in married life, reconciling the Chilterns' marriage according to new ideals of man and wife. At the same time, however, his own union with Mabel Chiltern is far less conventional, dispensing with the questions of duty, respectability, and the ideal roles of man and wife entirely. Alike in their amoral posture, Goring and Mabel thus stand as foils to the Chilterns and their newly ideal marriage.
Mabel Chiltern - An exemplar of English prettiness, Mabel, Sir Robert's younger sister, embodies what Wilde describes as the "fascinating tyranny of youth" and "astonishing courage of innocence." Pert and clever, Mabel flirtatiously matches Lord Goring's wit throughout t he play and their somewhat unconventional union serves as a foil to the other marriages and would-be engagements that compose the plot. Mabel acts much like Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Lord Caversham - Father to Lord Goring, Lord Caversham, described as a "fine Whig type," is a stuffy, serious, and respectable gentleman who is firmly opposed to the excesses of his dandified son. Continually he urges his son to marry and adopt a career, posing Sir Robert as model. Caversham appears as a figure for the old-fashioned against a son who makes and masters the art of modern living.
Lady Markby - A pleasant and popular woman with "grey hair à la marquise and good lace," Lady Markby appears at the dinner party in Act I and visits Lady Chiltern in II, both times with Mrs. Cheveley in arm. Lady Markby is emblematic of an older generation of Society women, bemoaning the effect of politics and the higher education of women on married life. In this sense, she counterpoises the Victorian new woman embodied by Lady Chiltern.
Lady Basildon and Mrs. Marchmont - Lady Basildon and Mrs. Marchmont are described as "types of exquisite fragility" with an affection of manner of delicate charm, ideal subjects for the French Rococo painter Watteau. Never developed into major characters, these women frivolously banter on a number of topics throughout Act I; notable ones include the dreariness of politics, being serious, education, and so on. Like Watteau's figures, they are perhaps more decorative than anything else, though—as the insightfulness of their conversations ns suggests—one can never underestimate the decorative on Wilde's stage.
Vicomte de Nanjac - Vicomte de Nanjac, attaché at the French Embassy in London, is a young man famous for his ties and Anglomania. He appears in Act I at Sir Robert's dinner party as a sort of comic figure, his malapropisms and awkward speech posed against the polished d repartee of the other guests.
Mr. Montford - A "perfectly groomed" young dandy and secretary to Sir Robert. He appears briefly in Act I and escorts Mrs. Marchmont to dinner.
Phipps - A "mask with a manner" who serves Lord Goring. Phipps is the ideal butler. Absolutely impassive, he reveals nothing of his intellect or emotions and "represents the dominance of form." Phipps appears briefly at the beginning of Act IV in a comic interlude e with Lord Goring.
James - A minor character, James is Lord Goring's footman and appears to show Mrs. Cheveley into Lord Goring's library in Act III and withdraws when Phipps gives him a glassy stare.
Mason - Butler to Sir Robert Chiltern, Mason is another minor character who announces each guest at the dinner party in Act I.
Harold - Sir Robert's footman. He appears briefly in Act IV.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
As the title might suggest, An Ideal Husband's primary theme is marriage, a common premise for the potboiler melodramas of Wilde's day. To recall our discussion of the play's Context, the Victorian popular theatre provided stock storylines of domestic life that, after various crises, would culminate in the reaffirmation of familiar themes: loyalty, sacrifice, undying love, forgiveness, devotion, and onward. More often than not, this reaffirmation also involved the re-establishment of the conjugal household.
Though An Ideal Husband adopts these motifs, it also mocks, parodies, and ironizes them with its more decadent and dandified characters. Thus we can organize the play's treatment of marriage according to the "poles" these characters might represent.
Lady Chiltern, for example, would predicate marital life on worship, posing her husband as a pristine ideal in both public and private life. Notably this love is explicitly gendered as "feminine." As the play progresses, Lady Chiltern's love comes to appear unreasonable and—once Sir Robert's secret sin is revealed—dangerous to the health of the domestic household. This opinion emerges most explicitly from Sir Robert and Lord Goring, who offer a competing model of marital love that the two identify as "masculine." If a woman loves in the worship of an impossible ideal, a man loves his partner for its human imperfections; his love includes charity and forgiveness whereas the woman's does not.
Thus the play calls for the tempering of the woman's overly idealizing and morally rigid love for one that can pardon human fault. Somewhat paradoxically (but all too unexpectedly), it will ultimately assign the role of pardoner to the woman; as Lord Goring tells Lady Chiltern in Act IV, "Pardon, not punishment, is [women's] mission" in love. Thus the play, miming a conventional narrative arc of the Victorian popular theatre, in some sense ruins the ideal husband only to win his forgiveness from his virtuous wife. Re-establishing the conjugal household, this resolution numbers among the more sentimental and conservative of Wilde's day. Obviously, its gender politics are unfortunate to say the least.
The main obstacle to this reconciliation of married life, Mrs. Cheveley, the play's villainess, would subordinate and reduce to marriage to mercenary transactions. Schooled in Baron Arnheim's gospels of power and wealth—gospels that privilege the domination of others over all else—she has no qualms blackmailing Sir Robert and potentially destroying his conjugal bliss to secure her financial investments. Moreover, we come to learn that she engineered a false courtship with Lord Goring in their youth to swindle him out of a settlement. Finally, she will offer to exchange her evidence against Sir Robert for Goring's hand in marriage; Goring will then roundly condemn her for defiling the ideas of love detailed above. With these offences in mind, Mrs. Cheveley's ultimate capture by a stolen wedding present—the diamond brooch—would revenge her crimes against marriage.
In contrast to both the Chilterns and Mrs. Cheveley, however, the play features a number of characters and conversations—especially those involving "banter" and other apparently frivolous speech—that mock its more conventional thematics. In particular, Goring and Mabel Chiltern function as foils to the upstanding Chilterns. Throughout the play the pair assume an amoral pose, disparaging the demands of duty and ironizing social convention. Notably then do the penultimate lines of the play, spoken by Mabel Chiltern upon accepting Goring's proposal, dispense with the notion of ideal husband altogether. "An ideal husband!" she exclaims. "Oh, I don't think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world." Goring is to be what he wants while Mabel would only be a "real wife." In this sense, Mabel and Goring playfully reject the moral thematics described above, unconcerned with the question of what a man and wife should be ideally.
Though the title invites speculation on the ideal husband, different figures of womanliness appear throughout the play as well. Once again, we will consider this thematic structure by contrasting a few principle characters. An Ideal Husband relies on a simple opposition between the virtuous Lady Chiltern and the demonic Mrs. Cheveley, the latter's wit and villainy making her a far more pleasurable character. Lady Chiltern appears as the model Victorian new woman, which Wilde elaborated while editor of the Women's World magazine in the late 1880s: morally upstanding, highly educated, and actively supportive of her husband's political career. By Act IV, she will also emerge in the role of forgiver and caretaker (again, "Pardon, not punishment, is [women's] mission"), and thus meets the more conventional demands of Victorian womanhood as well. In terms of generational differences, she stands out against the old-fashioned Lady Markby, the embodiment of an older group of society wives.
Lady Chiltern's primary foil, however, is of course the "Lamia-like"—that is, half-snake and half-female—Mrs. Cheveley. Whereas Lady Chiltern is naïve, candid, and always in earnest, the witty and ambitious Mrs. Cheveley is characterized by a sort of duplicitous femininity. As described in Act I, she is a "horrid," "unnatural," and—as quickly revealed—dangerous combination of genius and beauty. Having revealed her capacity to manipulate in Act I, the play dramatically unmasks her as a monster in Act III. Trapped by Lord Goring, Cheveley dissolves into a "paroxysm of rage, with inarticulate sounds," her loss of speech giving way to an agony of terror that distorts her face. For a moment, a "mask has fallen", and Cheveley is "dreadful to look at." Her veneer of wit and beauty thus give way to the hidden beast.
We should also note that the play relates Mrs. Cheveley's duplicity with the artifices of the dandy, Lord Goring. Like Cheveley, Goring is artificial, amoral, cunning, and irrational, traits associated with the feminine. The two great wits and most flamboyantly dressed characters of the play, Goring and Cheveley are doubles for each other: their face-off is something of a climax. Indeed, Goring is Mrs. Cheveley's only match because he can play her game of wiles, just as the Chilterns are doomed to be her victims in their hapless earnestness. Notably, it also takes little for Sir Robert to conclude that they are co-conspirators.
With these parallels in mind, one might thus note that Goring might share an unnatural or monstrous femininity with Cheveley as well: the dandy is, after all, often considered the paragon of the effeminate male. The important difference, however, lies in Mrs. Cheveley's unmasking. If Mrs. Cheveley's mask is ultimately torn aside—in an echo, perhaps, of Dorian Gray—to reveal her cruelty and ambition, Goring largely keeps his on, maintaining his dandified pose for most of the play.
Comments on what Mrs. Cheveley at one point describes as the "fine art" of living run throughout the play. The dandified Lord Goring of course exemplifies this stylization of life as art, emphasizing the beauty of youth and artifice, the importance of idleness, fashion, and social theatricality, and the ironization of existing social conventions. Once again, we can pose the fine art of living against the sombre respectability and moral strictures of the Victorian age.
Wilde's plays are often read for their witty epigrams; indeed, these epigrams are what make his plays "subversive." "Wit" is defined here as the quality of speech that consists in apt associations that surprise and delight or the utterance of brilliant things in an amusing fashion; the epigram is a brief, pointed, and often antithetical saying that contains an unexpected change of thought or biting comment.
Delivered in a social intercourse that consists of rapid-fire repartee, the tone of Wilde's epigrams are often "half-serious," playing on the potential for the listener's misunderstanding—for example, taking a phrase literally, too seriously, or not seriously enough. Rhetorically, they tend to involve a combination of devices: the reversal of conventionally paired terms, irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, and paradox. Take then, for example, Lord Goring's rejoinder to his father, Lord Caversham, when the latter accuses him of talking about nothing: "I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about." At one level, Goring's epigram is clearly sarcastic; at another, it is paradoxical, as in a sense one cannot know anything about nothing. The epigram also shifts between conventionally valorised terms: whereas most people would hope to have something substantive to talk about, Goring loves to talk about nothing.
As one might imagine, the "threat" in these games of rhetoric is the concomitant shift in the values—aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, or otherwise—taken up in conversation. Consequently, the apparently frivolous epigram becomes the primary vehicle by which the play mocks the values and mores of the contemporary popular stage.
In contrast to its witty, epigrammatic banter, An Ideal Husband also makes extensive use of the melodramatic speech. Such speeches reflect more conventional dialogue from the Victorian popular stage. Notable examples include Lady Chiltern's plea to Sir Robert at the end of Act I, their confrontation in Act II, and reconciliation in Act IV. These rousing speeches—far longer in length than most of the dialogue—involve innumerable apostrophes ("Oh my love!" and so on), exclamations, and lyrical entreaties. Laden with pathos, they radically transform the tone and mood found in the scenes involving epigrammatic banter, representing moments in which poised and polished characters find themselves overcome with sentiment. If the epigram is the means by which the play subverts thematic conventions, the melodramatic speech tends to reaffirm it, serving as vehicle for the play's pronouncements on love and marital life.
Act I takes place against the backdrop of a Rococo tapestry, a representation of François Boucher's "Triumph of Love" (1754). The "Triumph" allegorizes the victory of love over power: Venus points to Vulcan's conquered heart, and the god gazes up at her like a love-sick boy.
Though the most obvious reading might consider the tapestry as prefiguring the defeat of Mrs. Cheveley and reconciliation of the play's lovers, the significance of the allegory is not so self-evident. Indeed, it takes on a number of meanings. In the story the tapestry tells, Venus conquers Vulcan only to commit adultery with his brother, Ares. In this sense, Love's triumph is more Mrs. Cheveley's than the Chilterns', the former having similarly betrayed Lord Goring in their youth.
Within the action of the play itself, the tapestry takes centre stage, so to speak, at the end of Act I, when the audience has just witnessed an argument that appears to foretell the doom of the Chilterns' marriage. Horrified, Sir Robert sits in the dark, the tapestry left lit by the chandelier. In this case then, the image of Love's victory is ironic as it would seem that intrigue is poised to ruin conjugal bliss.
We can chart one more mention of the Boucher tapestry in Act II. Telling Lady Chiltern of her plans for the day, Mabel will jest about standing on her head while playing tableau in the "[t]riumph of something." This joke perhaps prefigures Mabel's own turning of love upside-down in her rather unconventional courtship with Lord Goring: recall that Goring and Mabel resist notions of love as duty and dispense with the questions of ideal marital life that consume the Chilterns.
The play's other notable symbol is Mrs. Cheveley's diamond brooch. Like the tapestry, it takes on multiple meanings through the course of the play. First, as a diamond snake, it symbolizes the evil woman—a woman who resembles a skin-shedding reptile in her duplicity.
The brooch also functions as an agent of vengeance. Ultimately revealed as a wedding gift Mrs. Cheveley stole in her youth, the brooch returns as evidence of a past crime, entrapping a woman who would manipulate past wrongs to her own advantage and wreck marriages. The "poetic justice" in her arrest is clear.
Finally, one might comment on the "duplicity" of the brooch. As Goring notes, the brooch is nothing less than a "wonderful"—or, in modern parlance, "fabulous"—ornament, a luxurious object that metamorphoses into a trap. As noted above, the dandy operates by trickery and artifice—not force—and always with style. In this sense, the brooch is the only "weapon" one can imagine the dandy putting to use, emblematizing his artfulness and guile.
Act I - Part One
An Ideal Husband is at times a difficult play to summarize as much of its "plot" happens through rapid-fire, epigrammatic dialogue. Indeed, the pace and subtlety of these turns-of-phrase are what make plot so easy to miss. When summarizing the story, one finds oneself paraphrasing the repartee (repartee is defined as a smart, ready, witty reply or a conversation distinguished by witty responses). To do so, of course, is to kill its wit and humour.
The following summary divides Act I into two parts, the first extending from the beginning to the fatal conversation between Sir Robert Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley, the second starting from that conversation to the end. Act I opens with a dinner party given by Sir Robert in his fashionable Grosvenor Square home; thus it begins with a series of light-hearted conversations between the bantering guests. The entire act takes place in the brilliantly lit Octagon Room.
The first scene shows Lady Chiltern posed at the top of a large staircase greeting the guests. A tapestry representing Boucher's "Triumph of Love" hangs on the back wall. Sitting on a Louis Seize sofa, Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon share the first conversation. Mrs. Marchmont declares that she has come to the soiree to be educated, and Lady Basildon replies that she abhors education. Mrs. Marchmont concurs but jestingly protests that their hostess—Lady Chiltern—is always urging her to find one "serious purpose" in life. Looking around the room—that is, both at the cast and audience—through her opera glasses, Lady Basildon notes that she hardly sees anyone whom one could call a serious purpose around here.
Act I similarly introduces its other players through such instances of banter, each new guest being announced by the butler Mason from the top of the stairs. Throughout this first scene, dialogue is occasionally punctuated by the malapropisms (the ludicrous misuse of words) of the Vicomte de Nanjac, a young anglophile whose awkward English serves as a comically distorted reflection of the group's polished repartee.
The following conversation involves Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert's sister, and the elderly Lord Caversham, father of Lord Goring. Caversham bemoans the idleness of his son and the excesses of London Society. Along with introducing the old-fashioned Caversham, this conversation offers a glimpse at Mabel's affection for the dandified lord.
Suddenly Lady Markby and Mrs. Cheveley—sporting scarlet lips, a heliotrope gown, Venetian red hair, and rather assertive fan—enter the room. Upon their introduction, Lady Chiltern reveals coldly that she knows Mrs. Cheveley from their school days, and Mrs. Cheveley, having spent many years in Vienna, all too sweetly expresses her eagerness to meet Sir Robert. Lady Chiltern assures her she has little in common with her husband and moves away.
After a comic interlude with de Nanjac ("Ah! You flatter me. You butter me, as they say here."), Sir Robert enters and meets Mrs. Cheveley. Mrs. Cheveley slyly reveals that she knows a man—Baron Arnheim—from Sir Robert's past. She also poses herself against the dreary demands of marriage (the London season, for example, is far too "matrimonial"; Arnheim travelled like Odysseus without the disadvantage of having a Penelope waiting for him, etc.).
Mason then announces Lord Goring, a witty and ironical dandy who, as the stage notes indicate, would be annoyed if considered romantic. Mrs. Cheveley precisely describes him as such upon discovering he is still a bachelor; apparently the two have met before. Mrs. Cheveley and Sir Robert exit, and Goring saunters over to Mabel Chiltern. The two exchange in flirtatious repartee; De Nanjac then kidnaps Mabel to the music room.
After a brief exchange with his father, Goring turns to Lady Basildon and Mrs. Marchmont for a discussion of married life. Bemoaning the unendurable faultlessness of their husbands, Mrs. Marchmont comes to exclaim: "We have married perfect husbands, and we are well punished for it." They then go on to gossip about the scandalous Mrs. Cheveley.
As discussed in the Context, Wilde's later plays both mirror the conventional themes of the Victorian popular stage—such as loyalty, devotion, undying love, duty, respectability, and so on—and undermine them through their brilliantly choreographed banter. The first half of Act I consists almost entirely of this deceptively frivolous party talk.
Wilde's banter is written in witty, epigrammatic repartee. "Wit" is defined here as the quality of speech that consists in apt associations that surprise and delight; the epigram is a brief, pointed, and often antithetical saying that contains an unexpected change of thought or biting comment. The tone of the epigram is often "half-serious," playing on the potential for misunderstanding. Notably, Act I begins by declaring the absence of any serious purpose in the room; one could say that epigrammatic repartee is speech that refuses to speak seriously. Moreover, as this "half-serious" tone is often ironic, such repartee is often speech that the speaker does not speak in earnest either.
Rhetorically, the epigram is usually dependent on a combination of devices: the play between conventionally paired terms, irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, and paradox. Take then, for example, Lord Goring's rejoinder to his father, Lord Caversham, when the latter accuses him of talking about nothing: "I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about." At one level, Goring's epigram is sarcastic; at another, it is paradoxical, as one cannot know anything about nothing. The epigram also shifts between conventionally valorised terms: whereas most people would hope to have something substantive to talk about, Goring loves to talk about nothing.
As one might imagine, the "subversive" potential in these conversational games is the concomitant shift in the social values up for discussion. Thus Goring assures Mabel that his bad qualities are quite dreadful: "When I think of them at night, I go to sleep at once." In this example, Goring revises the meaning of "bad," moving from "bad" as in flawed or even reprehensible to "bad" as in boring. In doing so, the question at hand is no longer one of good and bad character traits, but whether a given trait is—to invoke a famous Wildean phrase—charming or tedious.
Wilde's excessively playful repartee is scandalous as it continually undermines the attempt to have a "serious conversation." Moreover, such speech is also scandalous in that it stands to expose the absurdity of a socially conventional statement, flout convention entirely, or reveal a conventional opinion's true meaning. One might translate the case of Goring's retort to Mabel, for example, with the following: why do good and bad character traits matter when what's truly important is whether these traits are entertaining? Or: perhaps when people describe an individual's good or bad traits, they really mean to say whether they find him amusing or dull. As we proceed to the development of the play's "serious" themes regarding conjugal life, duty, respectability, and so on, we must thus always keep the banter that undermines the ideas presented in mind.
Act I opens at a dinner party, and so we might note that repartee is only possible in social intercourse—what one might describe as the social theatre. As members of London Society, Wilde's characters are extremely concerned with their "performances" at various gatherings and how they "look" in various social circles. As a result, their speech is very much part of their social personas—what we might call their "masks" or "poses." We will discuss masks (and unmaskings) in more detail as we go on. Mrs. Cheveley introduces the motif of social theatricality here when she declares that what Sir Robert describes as the "fashionable religions" of optimism and pessimism to be "merely poses"; of course, for Mrs. Cheveley, being natural is a pose as well.
Act I involves a number of conversations on gender as well. These conversations are crucial as one of the play's primary themes consists of varying conceptions of womanliness. Of particular note is a conversation between Sir Robert and Mrs. Cheveley that relates aestheticism and a certain vision of femininity. As discussed in the Context, aestheticism, a doctrine often abbreviated as a philosophy of "art for art's sake," insists on art being judged by the beauty of artifice rather than that of morality or reason. Beauty is irrational, artificial, amoral, terms conventionally associated with the feminine. Here Mrs. Cheveley poses woman as a sort aestheticist art object. She tells Sir Robert that while men can be analyzed, women are to be merely adored: herein lies their strength. Like art, they resist judgment according to rational or moral categories. They embody the irrational (or at least when well-dressed), and are thus powerful, perhaps even dangerous. Mrs. Cheveley herself is one of these dangerously well-dressed and irrational women.
Act I - Part Two
As the other guests go to dinner, Sir Robert and Mrs. Cheveley return to the Octagon room. Shifting their conversation to more practical subjects, Mrs. Cheveley raises the issue of an Argentine Canal scheme, a development fiasco in which she has heavily invested on the advice of their mutual friend: the recently deceased Baron Arnheim. Sir Robert is about to deliver the report of his special investigative commission to the House of Commons unmasking the affair; Mrs. Cheveley insists that he must not only withdraw the report but lend his support to the scheme as well or suffer the consequences. Mrs. Cheveley is blackmailing him.
Mrs. Cheveley's power over Sir Robert is her knowledge of the secret of his fortune's origins. As a young secretary, Sir Robert sold a Cabinet secret to Arnheim that enabled him to invest in the Suez Canal before the government announced its own purchase; Mrs. Cheveley holds the incriminating letter in her possession. Thus, after a few hopeless attempts at resistance, Sir Robert agrees to exchange his support for the piece of evidence.
Sir Robert then exits, and the guests return. Mrs. Cheveley triumphantly announces to Lady Chiltern that she has succeeded in winning her husband's support for the canal scheme; moreover, she and Sir Robert share a secret together. Sir Robert arrives and announces Mrs. Cheveley's carriage, and the latter then sails out on his arm.
In the following exchange, Mabel Chiltern, bantering with Lord Goring, comes upon a diamond brooch—shaped like a snake with a ruby on its head—on the sofa. Enigmatically, Goring insists that it is also a bracelet. Coolly he takes the brooch, puts it in a green letter case, and replaces the case in his breast pocket. He then asks Mabel to keep his possession of the brooch secret and inform him if anyone comes to claim it. Apparently, he gave it to someone many years ago.
Once all the guests have exited, Lady Chiltern confronts Sir Robert on the topic of the canal scheme. Though Sir Robert ambiguously protests he has only made a politically necessary compromise, Lady Chiltern demands that he write to Mrs. Cheveley, withdraw his support, and never see her again. She implores him to remain her ideal husband or else confess any secret disgraces from his past so that they may begin to drift apart. Unable to confess his crime, Sir Robert complies, and the two declare their love for each other. Lady Chiltern exits; Sir Robert commands Mason to put out the lights, leaving the chandelier illuminating the "Triumph of Love" in the background.
The second half of Act I introduces the play's primary theme—that of marriage—distributing a number of commentaries on married life among its various characters. We will begin with its heroes: the Chilterns.
This section of Act I drastically shifts the tone of the play, moving from the banter of the dinner party to the Chilterns' maudlin confrontation. While the transition from dinner party is gradual, the encounter between the Chilterns' is ultimately so different—in both length and style—from the dialogue thus far as to constitute a new melodramatic "mode" on stage. Note the devices that make up their exchange: Lady Chiltern's lyrical entreaty to her ideal husband ("Oh! Be that ideal still"), Sir Robert's near-confession when Lady Chiltern implores the latter to reveal any past disgraces, the dramatic irony produced when she declares the past the means by which one judges others, and the apparent doom foretold when Lady Chiltern sorrowfully declares that she and a husband who had deceived her would necessarily drift apart. These devices serve to raise the suspense and tension of the exchange; from a party of clever and ironic wits we have moved to an intimate scene between two characters overcome with emotion. Unlike Wilde's inimitable banter, this dialogue directly borrows from the conventions of the Victorian popular stage.
Thematically this exchange addresses ideals of marriage, love, and morality, introducing the notion of the ideal husband. Here the conventionally melodramatic dialogue serves as vehicle for a similarly generic discussion of love. Tellingly, this discussion describes love in explicitly gendered terms. As a woman, Lady Chiltern loves Sir Robert as an ideal husband, a man worthy of worship for the example he sets privately and publicly. As a result, she cannot accept Sir Robert's protestations regarding the need for practical compromises; she will have her ideal spouse or none at all. Sir Robert will confront his wife on the dangers of idealizing one's lover in the following act.
Act I also places a critique of Lady Chiltern's severe sense of morality, however, in the mouth of the villainess, Mrs. Cheveley. Prior to the exchange between the Chilterns, Mrs. Cheveley ventures a biting critique of Victorian society, decrying its "modern mania for morality." Whereas scandals once lent charm to a politician, they now spell his ruin. Ultimately, of course, for Mrs. Cheveley it takes little more to assuage those of rigid morals than a few insipid homilies. As she remarks: "In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin."
More humorously, Lady Basildon and Mrs. Marchmont mock the notion of the ideal husband while bantering with Lord Goring. Bemoaning unendurably ideal husbands as dreadfully dull, they declare themselves "martyrs" of married life. Their conversation thus perhaps ironizes Lady Chiltern's worship of her ideal mate and her imminent martyrdom as a deceived wife.
Finally, we should also note the introduction of two objects on stage: the letter that returns from Sir Robert's past and the diamond bracelet. Such lost, misplaced, and waylaid objects are also familiar devices from the Victorian stage, serving to complicate plot and produce moments of dramatic irony.
Act II - Part One
Act II begins in Sir Robert's morning room with Lord Goring in the midst of advising him on a plan of action. He insists that Sir Robert should have confessed to his wife long ago and promises to talk to her about her unyielding morals. Throughout the scene, Goring will—in a marked shift in his apparently flippant tone and amoral pose—also point out the gravity of Sir Robert having sold himself for his fortune. Sir Robert recounts his mentorship by Baron Arnheim when he was a young and poor cabinet minister, well born but penniless. He succumbed to Arnheim's gospels of wealth and power, coming to see wealth being the most important weapon of the modern age and power over others as life's utmost pleasure. At some level, Sir Robert still subscribes to these doctrines.
Goring takes stock of the situation: a public confession remains impossible as it would ruin Sir Robert's career, and the two agree that Sir Robert should fight it out, though—in another suspense-building device—the latter still refuses to tell his wife. Also, Lord Goring delicately reveals that he and Mrs. Cheveley were once engaged. As their first plan of attack, Sir Robert decides to write the Vienna embassy to investigate Cheveley's life; Lord Goring is nonplussed by the proposal as he suspects Mrs. Cheveley is a woman who finds scandals as becoming as a new bonnet.
Lady Chiltern then enters the room, having come from a meeting of the Woman's Liberal Association. After some banter about bonnets and a farewell between Goring and Sir Robert, the latter leaves the room, and Lady Chiltern takes Goring aside to discuss the recent conflict. When she asks Goring if she is right in her opinion of her ideal husband, Goring, gesturing toward Sir Robert's past, warns that all men must at some point compromise themselves in public life and that life can neither be lived nor understood without charity. The lord then pledges his assistance to a Lady Chiltern shocked by his sudden seriousness and perplexed by his apparently unwarranted advice.
The first half of Act II is something of an interlude after the climatic conclusion of Act I, providing the background of Sir Robert's secret scandal and introducing Lord Goring into the play's intrigue. Beginning with the story of Sir Robert's "tragic" fall, it presents Sir Robert's views of modern life and poses Lord Goring as a sort of helpmate to the Chilterns: counsellor to Sir Robert and teacher to the virtuous Lady Chiltern.
Sir Robert developed his views on modernity while under the tutelage of Baron Arnheim, a mysterious foreign aristocrat perhaps analogous to Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray. Notably Sir Robert's corrupter—one he shares with Mrs. Cheveley—is shrouded in erotic connotations (recall Mrs. Cheveley's ambiguous remark to Sir Robert in Act I: "The Baron taught me that among other things"). Indeed, in remembering how the Baron—with a "strange smile on his pale, curved lips"—lead him through his gallery of treasures, Sir Robert describes an enchantment with his old mentor that could be read as an erotically-charged seduction. One wonders what exactly the Baron taught his student. It is not for nothing then that Sir Robert's relations with Arnheim predate his respectable marriage and must remain secret.
Arnheim expounds a "philosophy of power" and "gospel of gold." Though ostentatious with his fortune, the Baron dismisses luxury as mere backdrop: power over others remains the only pleasure worth knowing. Toward these ends, wealth is the weapon of the age and the prime mover of modernity. For Lord Goring, Arnheim's is a "thoroughly shallow creed"—a somewhat paradoxical critique since the dandy would revel in the shallowness of appearances, luxury, and artifice. Perhaps what the dandified Goring criticizes is Arnheim's subordination of luxury and its pleasures to those of domination. To recall our discussion of dandyism from the Context, Arnheim's doctrines are clearly anathema to the dandy's idle and light-hearted lifestyle. If Arnheim would conquer the world, Goring would—as the stage notes from Act I indicate—play with it.
Though ever playful, Goring nevertheless remains passionately loyal to rather sentimental notions like love, pledging to do all he can to assist his friend and sway the morally inflexible Lady Chiltern. As Goring tells Lady Chiltern, love, (and not German philosophy) that "explains" and determines the human world, should trump her obsession with having an ideal husband. More specifically, the love Goring praises to Lady Chiltern emphasizes charity and the forgiveness of faults and errors. Thus in their exchange we see a number of poles emerging around the theme of love and conjugal life, Lady Chiltern's adoration for her ideal mate being posed against the ideas offered by her counsellor. As we will see in Act IV, the woman's proper role in love will ultimately become what Goring describes, that of the forgiving caretaker.
Finally, we should note that Goring remains mischievous even in his quite moving gravity, interrupting the dialogue with an occasional joke or repartee. At one point, for example, he declares that truth is a bad habit; after advising Lady Chiltern, perplexed by his sudden seriousness, he denies that he precisely understands what he is talking about. Thus Goring himself would warn his listeners against taking his advice in earnest. His banter continually defuses attempts to engage him in "serious" conversation and provides mild comic relief.
Act II - Part Two
Mabel Chiltern then enters the room, chastising her sister-in-law for complimenting Lord Goring's uncharacteristic seriousness. Mabel and Goring then engage in flirtatious banter. Goring requests a list of last night's guests and, having reconfirmed a riding date tomorrow with Mabel, leaves the scene. Mabel then recounts the travails of her courtship by Sir Robert's secretary, Tommy Trafford, to her sister-in-law, mocking his endless proposals and the ideals of husbandry.
Suddenly, Lady Markby and Mrs. Cheveley appear. After some banter, Mabel excuses herself to go play tableaux at Lady Basildon's. The unexpected visitors then explain that they have come for a diamond brooch of Mrs. Cheveley, which she lost the evening before. Of course, no one has reported it being found. After a conversation on the education of women, married life, and a number of marriage scandals, Lady Markby briefly leaves Mrs. Cheveley in Lady Chiltern's charge to pay a visit to her friend, Lady Brancaster. Though Cheveley rather pointedly attempts to extricate herself from the situation, Lady Chiltern insists that she stay.
Once alone, Lady Chiltern ends the banter abruptly, and the two confront each other. Upon discovering that it was the Lady Chiltern who made Sir Robert refuse her proposal, Mrs. Cheveley ominously demands that she have him reverse his decision; once again she asserts that she and Sir Robert make a good pair as they share a secret sin. As Lady Chiltern orders her to leave, Sir Robert enters from behind. Pointing at him with her outstretched finger, Mrs. Cheveley reveals his secret to a horrified Lady Chiltern; Sir Robert rings for Mason and has her shown out.
Though Sir Robert immediately attempts to console her, Lady Chiltern fiercely rejects him, bemoaning the unmasking of her ideal husband and death of her worshipful love. Sir Robert dramatically responds by accusing her of turning him into a false idol, making it impossible for him to confess his dark past, and thus ruining his life. He then contrasts male and female love. Whereas women demand lovers who serve as impossible objects of worship, men allow for their lovers' imperfections. For Sir Robert, true love should always forgive. Accusing Lady Chiltern of ruining him with her demands for perfection, he rushes from the room and shuts the door. Lady Chiltern pauses in horror, her fingers outstretched, and flings herself down beside a sofa, sobbing like a child.
As we are tracing the theme of marriage in this play, we can once again structure our analysis of this act according to the various commentaries on marriage delivered by its different characters. We will begin with the Chilterns.
As in Act I, the playful conversational banter in the second half of Act II ultimately gives way to a confrontation between Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern upon the revelation of latter's secret by Mrs. Cheveley. Once again, their melodramatic dialogue serves as vehicle for a discussion of love that reaffirms the conventional social values of the Victorian stage. This encounter also describes love in gendered terms, and the gender politics of this discussion are unfortunate to say the least.
Recall from Act I that Lady Chiltern loves Sir Robert as an ideal husband, a man worthy of worship for the example he sets privately and publicly. Protesting his rejection by his wife, Sir Robert poses what he identifies as a "masculine" form of love against Lady Chiltern's ostensibly feminine adoration. Man's love allows for or is even predicated on human imperfections. In an unwitting echo of Lord Goring, Sir Robert argues that true love aims to cure the lover's wounds and pardon his sins, not mount the lover on an impossible, indeed "monstrous," pedestal.
Looking toward the play's resolution, however, we might note here that forgiveness will ultimately not appear as a masculine attribute. As we will see, though in this instance the capacity to forgive is associated with the male lover, Sir Robert's speech is less a description of "masculine love" than an injunction to his wife. The play will conclude that it is actually the woman's role to forgive and nurture her husband in affairs of love: as Lord Goring will tell Lady Chiltern in Act IV, "Pardon, not punishment, is [women's] mission." The assignment of this love to the Lady will thus reaffirm a familiar model of Victorian womanhood, one that casts her as healer and caregiver to her husband.
Along with this thematic development, the revelation of Sir Robert's secret speaks to the motif of masks and social theatricality described above. Here, Sir Robert loses his social face—his image as an honourable public figure and husband. Thus Lady Chiltern describes this scene as an unmasking: "Oh, what a mask you have been wearing all these years! A horrible painted mask!" The importance of this confrontation between the Chilterns notwithstanding, a number of more humorous commentaries on marriage run through the second half of the act as well. One might, for example, consider the interlude between Mabel, Lady Chiltern, and her guests. In particular, Mabel makes an especially telling joke regarding a game of tableau—that is, a game in which players re-enact scenes from famous paintings. Informing her sister-in-law of her plans to play tableau at Lady Basildon's, she announces that she will be standing on her head in the "Triumph of something." One can only recall the tapestry—the "Triumph of Love"—that frames Act I. This joke thus perhaps prefigures how Mabel will turn love on its head in her somewhat unconventional union with Lord Goring in Act IV, a union that dispenses with the question of what spouse should be ideally.
Mabel also ridicules courtship and marriage in the caricature of her suitor, the hapless Tommy Trafford, and his innumerable proposals for her hand in marriage. Her mockery of the earnest Trafford not only provides comic relief but, as in the banter from Act I, playfully shifts the conventions by which one would evaluate a potential husband. For example, Mabel complains that Tommy's romantic whispers make him sound like a doctor; his attempts at intimacy only fail to produce some effect on the public. According to this ironic jest then, it is not so much the suitor's sincerity that matters as his sense of publicity. The effect, of course, of this and Mabel's other parodistic remarks is to make Trafford's solemn proposals and courtship rituals absurd.
To take another example: When Lady Chiltern protests that Tommy has a bright future ahead, Mabel declares she could never marry such a man. Such geniuses talk too much and always think of themselves, whereas Mabel requires a husband who will think only of her. Mabel's delightful retort is both irrational ("geniuses always think of themselves") and brazenly unfair: the genius is to be faulted for an egocentrism that prevents him from satisfying Mabel's. Mabel is not looking for an ideal husband; she'd rather have a good admirer. Clearly she pursues romance on terms that diverge sharply from those of the Chilterns.
Lady Chiltern, Lady Markby, and Mrs. Cheveley also converse on married life. Notably, Lady Markby bemoans the talk of government her husband brings home, criticizing the House of Commons as the worst blow to marriage since the Higher Education of Women. Having just come from a meeting of the Women's Liberal Association, Lady Chiltern gently disagrees. She thus comes to embody the model Victorian new woman, a figure of great interest for Wilde during his editorship of Woman’s World magazine in the late 1880s. Such an ideal wife is both involved in public affairs and particularly "women's issues" and active in her husband's political career. In contrast, Lady Markby appears emblematic of an older and more conservative generation of London Society. We will take up another generational conflict in the following act, in which Lords Goring and Caversham confront each other on the merits of the modern dandified lifestyle.
A final aside on this generational divide: in Act I, Lady Markby makes a number of questionable references to race, stock, and intermixing and, in Act II, jokingly proposes a scheme of "assisted emigration" to rectify overpopulation in London's newly mixed social circles. Her rather questionable sense of humour—distasteful to a contemporary reader—also identifies her with more conservative circles.
Act III - Part One
Act III opens in Lord Goring's library with an impeccably dressed Goring and his impassive servant Phipps, named in the stage notes as the ideal butler. A short exchange ensues, in which Goring, trying on a new buttonhole, delivers a series of epigrams regarding fashion, vulgarity, falsehood, and self-love to the yes-saying Phipps. Phipps then brings Goring his letters, and the Lord discovers that Lady Chiltern has sent him a note on pink paper imploring him for help: "I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you." Though it is signed Gertrude, it is addressed to no one.
Though it is late, Goring prepares for her arrival. Phipps, however, abruptly announces the arrival of his father, Lord Caversham. Goring receives him and the two discuss the prospect of Goring's marriage and his adopting a serious career, Caversham posing Sir Robert as an ideal model. Sending Caversham to the smoking room, Goring quickly tells Phipps that he expects a female visitor and instructs him to show her into the drawing room.
Suddenly a bell rings, and Goring moves to answer but is intercepted by Caversham and must accompany him to the smoking room. Mrs. Cheveley then appears on the scene; Phipps informs her of Goring's instructions and shows her into the drawing room. Pleased at the prospect of catching him out, Cheveley rifles through his papers and discovers Lady Chiltern's letter. Just as she moves to steal it, Phipps enters and shows her into the drawing room. Upon his departure, she re-emerges and creeps toward the writing table anew, but must retire upon hearing the voices of Goring and Caversham.
After a brief exchange on marriage and common sense, Goring leads Caversham to the door, only to return, somewhat haplessly, with the unexpected Sir Robert. Sir Robert reports that Lady Chiltern knows all; moreover, the Vienna embassy has failed to excavate any secret scandal from Mrs. Cheveley's past. Goring keeps Lady Chiltern's request for assistance secret.
Phipps then enters, and Goring, taking him aside for further instruction, learns that the lady he expects waits in the drawing room. He decides to give the would-be Lady Chiltern a lecture through the door, prompting Sir Robert to declare his love for his wife and suggesting that she has already forgiven him. Just as Sir Robert is about to reveal what he plans to tell the House regarding the canal scheme, he hears a chair fall in the next room. Though Goring hopelessly tells his friend no one is in the next room—this deferral of the inevitable raising the scene's tension—Sir Robert bursts through and of course discovers Mrs. Cheveley. He curses the unsuspecting Goring for his treachery and storms out; Mrs. Cheveley emerges, beaming with bemusement.
One can divide this part of Act III according to its two major exchanges: one between Lord Goring and his butler Phipps and another with between Goring and his father, Lord Caversham. Both comment on the dandy lifestyle.
The opening exchange Goring and Phipps is a comic interlude, coming on the heels of the wrenching confrontation between the Chilterns. Phipps is described in the stage notes as a "mask with a manner," a man less communicative than the Sphinx. Representing the "dominance of form," such a figure is a familiar comic device, producing a certain "dead-pan" humour that requires such an impenetrable, impassive facade. The scene is structured by an exchange between Goring's pronouncements and Phipps' repeated response in the affirmative.
Goring's epigrams concern the "lifelong romance" of narcissism, reducing a number of oppositions (fashionable/unfashionable, refined/vulgar, true/false) to one between "other people" and "oneself." Thus the vulgar is what others do, the unfashionable what others wear, and the false what others hold true. This exchange artfully reinforces Goring's narcissism with an interlocutor who responds with an indifferent "yes." Thus the butler serves as a sort of mirror to Goring's narcissism; as it is certain that his interlocutor will agree with him, Goring is even more "talking to himself" than if in soliloquy.
Goring's narcissism is significant in terms of the mores of his age. As discussed in the Context, the dandy stands in rebellion to the values of the Victorian era, an era defined by a devotion to family life, public and private responsibility, and obedience to law. Dandyism dispensed with these duties in the name of individual freedom and a self-cantered concern with the frivolous (fashion, style, and so on).
At the same time, Phipps reflects his master imperfectly. Not only does he fail to notice his lord's dress, he also gets the last laugh of the scene at Goring's expense, remarking stoically that the lower classes are "extremely fortunate" in losing their familial relations. Phipps's joke introduces the second exchange of this scene: a confrontation between father and son over the latter's bachelorhood and irresponsible way of life. The exchange between Goring and Caversham reveals the dandy in vexed relationship with the figure of paternal authority, particularly when the latter would correct the dandy's behaviour. As Goring remarks in the following act, fathers should be neither seen nor heard in family life (mothers, on the other hand, are "darlings").
As Goring is a figure of the new—presented in the stage notes as a man in "immediate relation" to modernity, making and mastering it—and Caversham the emblem of a generation past, their meeting represents a clash between modern and past lifestyles. Mrs. Cheveley's remarks from Act II have prefigured this showdown long before—namely, that nowadays fathers have much to learn from their sons with regards to the art of living, the only fine art modern times have produced.
For Wilde, the modern lifestyle is precisely that of the dandy, eschewing duty and respectability for the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, pretence, wit, idleness, irrationality, and affectation: in short, everything Caversham abhors. In the encounter dramatized here, Caversham assaults Goring with fatherly advice, arguing that he cannot continue living for pleasure and that he should imitate Sir Robert's success: in light of Sir Robert's scandal, the irony of his counsel is not lost on us. In particular, Caversham insists that Goring find a proper marriage—that is, one that considers position and property before sentiment. As with all things for Caversham, it is a matter of "common sense." Obviously Goring cannot comply with his father's wishes.
Underlying this generational clash is also dandyism's veneration of youthfulness as part of modern life. As Goring tells his father when the latter denounces his affectation of youth: "Youth isn't an affectation. Youth is an art." At the same time, the dandy is also often middle-aged: though he never admits it, Goring himself is in his mid-thirties. To some extent then, Goring appears as the overgrown child in his conversation with his father, refusing to take up the responsibilities of adulthood and living past his time as a young man. One wonders, moreover, if the dandy must always fear the threat of becoming outmoded: as Lady Markby notes earlier, the danger of being too modern lies in growing old-fashioned quite quickly.
Along with these differences in values, what sets father and son apart is a marked difference in their speech, Goring running circles around his father with his wit. Caversham will continually request serious conversation, fall into senile—rather than affected—self-contradictions, and find himself unable to follow Goring's repartee.
For example, at one point Caversham condemns one of Goring's expressions of sympathy, saying there is too much sympathy going on these days. Goring concurs, replying: "If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world." Thus Goring wilfully misapprehends his father's rebuke—that the modern world is overly sentimental—and plays on its literal meaning, taking the vague phrase to one of its ostensibly logical conclusions. The effect is to reveal the absurdity in Caversham's pronouncement.
Caversham, of course does not know how to take his son's reply. Having not gotten the joke but noting the sophistry in his son's logic, Caversham responds: "That is a paradox sir. I hate paradoxes." Of course, Goring's repartee is less an example of paradox than the playful logic of the dandy. Thus son replies with a further set of twists: "So do I, father. Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious." The term "paradox" as a structure of rhetoric now refers to paradox as a description of character. Moreover, being paradoxical—usually connoting obscurity and so on—becomes dull and obvious as an affectation "everyone" has come to adopt. To translate: it is quite boring that everyone you meet has become a paradox. If everyone is a paradox, then everyone is obvious. As with Goring's joke on sympathy, his dizzying repartee is not only surprising and delightful, but perhaps an occasion for insight—in this case on London Society—as well.
Speaking ironically, sarcastically, hyperbolically, or paradoxically, Goring is—as he himself notes in Act II—quintessentially "liable to be misunderstood." Indeed, the capacity to cause and manipulate such moments of confusion is one of Goring's greatest powers. As the stage notes from Act I indicate, Goring is fond of this liability as it gains him "post of vantage" in the social arena; again, through his speech, he "makes and masters" modern social life.
Act III - Part Two
Mrs. Cheveley and Lord Goring confront each other, the former having come to trade Sir Robert's letter for Goring's hand in marriage. Their conversation reveals that during their courtship many years ago, Mrs. Cheveley seduced Goring to swindle him for a settlement. Now, however, Cheveley declares that Goring is the only man she has ever cared for. In any case, Goring refuses harshly.
Cheveley reasserts her intention to ruin Sir Robert, justifying her scheme as a mercenary transaction; Goring accuses her of defiling a sacred love, an act for which there can be no forgiveness. Coyly defending herself, Mrs. Cheveley protests that she only came to expose Sir Robert while visiting the Chilterns to retrieve her brooch. Goring then casually retrieves the bracelet from his writing table and, informing her that it can only be worn as a bracelet, suddenly clasps it on her arm. Calmly he reveals that he gave the brooch/bracelet years ago to a cousin as a wedding present and now knows that Mrs. Cheveley was guilty of its theft. Claiming that he has heard her confession, he will deliver her to the police unless she gives him Sir Robert's letter. Desperately, Mrs. Cheveley tries to rip the handcuff from her arm; Goring taunts that she cannot without releasing its secret spring.
Fearing arrest, Mrs. Cheveley surrenders the letter. As Goring burns it, she catches sight of Lady Chiltern's letter on the writing table. Asking Goring for a glass of water, she snatches the letter and puts it in her pocket. She then announces to Lord Goring that Gertrude's confession of love to her paramour has come into her hands. As her final act of vengeance, she plans to send it— misconstrued as a love letter addressed to Goring—to Sir Robert immediately. Goring moves to wrest it from her, with force if necessary; Mrs. Cheveley rings the bell and triumphantly has Phipps show her out. The act ends with Goring alone, lighting a cigarette and biting his lip.
In some sense the play's climatic moment, the face-off between An Ideal Husband's most active characters—Mrs. Cheveley and Lord Goring—is particularly rich. We will consider it in three parts. Continuing with the theme of marriage, we will first examine Mrs. Cheveley's attitudes toward courtship and conjugal life. Second, we will take up Mrs. Cheveley's unmasking as a "monster" and Goring's relation to the feminine. Finally, we will briefly consider the various objects that change hands in the course of this showdown.
It is in this scene, with her proposal to Goring, that Mrs. Cheveley—to use Lord Goring's term—most explicitly defiles married life. Already we know that she has ruthlessly wreaked havoc in the Chilterns' household; we now learn that she swindled Goring with a false courtship in their youth. Thus Mrs. Cheveley offers a condensed version of her philosophy of marriage in a clever epigram: "Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement." Ever the opportunist, Cheveley would thus substitute the "settlement"—that is, financial gain—for romance's "sentiment." Accordingly, she makes her proposal to Goring a vulgar transaction, offering to trade Sir Robert's letter for his hand. At the same time, whether Cheveley truly still loves Goring is unclear: her uncharacteristic pauses after Goring's insults remain ambiguous.
Notably, Act III avenges these crimes against marriage through the diamond brooch. Revealed as a wedding gift Mrs. Cheveley stole in her youth, the brooch returns as evidence of a past crime, entrapping a woman who would manipulate another's past wrongs to her own advantage and ruin his conjugal bliss. The poetic justice in her arrest is clear.
Along with staging this scene of revenge, Act III involves a case of mistaken identity—more precisely, the case of the woman behind the door. Indeed, one of the most ironic events in the act is that the villainess stands in the place of her foil, the consummately virtuous heroine. This confusion of women notwithstanding, however, it is here that the villainess will be definitively unmasked as a monster. Once trapped by Lord Goring, Cheveley dissolves into a "paroxysm of rage, with inarticulate sounds," her loss of speech giving way to an agony of terror that distorts her face. For a moment, a "mask has fallen," and Cheveley is "dreadful to look at." Her veneer of wit and beauty thus give way to a hidden beast.
Mrs. Cheveley's monstrosity is intimately related to what one might describe as her "bad" femininity, the femininity that belongs to the femme fatale. Whereas the play's "good woman"—a naive, candid, and earnest Lady Chiltern—embodies the virtues associated with womanliness, the witty and ambitious Mrs. Cheveley is characterized by what are conventionally considered feminine vices. Most notable is her duplicity. Throughout the play, Mrs. Cheveley appears as the product of "horrid combinations" that evoke her dangerous deceitfulness. In Act I, for example, Lady Basildon recoils from Mrs. Cheveley's "unnatural" union of daytime genius and night time beauty. Here the stage notes describe her as "Lamia-like"—that is, part woman and part snake in her treacherous and deceptive nature. Lord Goring goes so far as to call her womanliness into question, remarking that for a fascinating woman such as her, sex is a challenge, not a defence. Mrs. Cheveley is aggressive and ambitious like a man; her sex is an obstacle to her desires. Horrid and unnatural, she is a monstrous woman.
Mrs. Cheveley's unmasking aside, the face-off between Goring and Cheveley also provides an opportunity to consider how the dandy might be associated with the notions of the feminine described here. Certainly the dandy is a figure of questionable masculinity, indeed often considered the paragon of the effeminate male. Lord Goring is no exception. In the previous section, we quoted Goring as declaring that "mothers are darlings," a remark that aligns him with women in familial life at least. His truer female double, however, is Mrs. Cheveley herself. Like Cheveley, Goring is artificial, amoral, cunning, duplicitous, irrational, and flamboyantly well dressed: all the traits associated with her dangerous and "unnatural" femininity. Goring is Mrs. Cheveley's only match because he can play her game of wiles. In light of Wilde's sodomy trials and interest in the homoerotic, one could speculate on how these motifs of unnatural and monstrous femininity that apply to the dandy might serve as ciphers for male effeminacy, gay or otherwise. As an additional observation in this vein, we might also note how Goring drops his "social face" in the encounter with his enemy. Strangely, at the end of the act, Goring, the consummate dandy-gentleman, will desperately threaten Cheveley with violence when she takes Lady Chiltern's letter. The usually cool Goring loses his sense of decorum, a loss that compromises his manliness even further.
Along with raising these gender issues, Act III also brings together the series of transactions that organize the play, transactions that involve three objects: Sir Robert's letter to Baron Arnheim, Mrs. Cheveley's diamond brooch, and Lady Chiltern's pink note to Lord Goring. In this scene, all pass through the hands of Mrs. Cheveley and Lord Goring at some point, once again emphasizing how the two are the play's most pivotal characters and positioning their face-off as the play's climax. As the "causes" of complication in the plot, it is fitting that all these objects emerge at the plot's most tense moment.
The central object of this encounter is of course the brooch/bracelet-turned-handcuff. As a symbol, it suggests numerous interpretations. A diamond snake, it is easily stands in for the evil woman, a skin-shedding villainess defined by duplicity and subterfuge. It is also a fitting weapon for our dandy-hero—that is, a luxury item that relies on guile rather than force and entraps its victim with style. This "wonderful"—or, in modern parlance, "fabulous"—ornament thus emblematizes the artistry and cunning of the dandy as much as it does the evil woman.
Act IV
Act IV returns us to Sir Robert's morning room with Lord Goring standing alone and looking bored. He rings the bell, and the footman informs him of his friends' whereabouts: Lady Chiltern has yet to leave the room, Mabel has returned from riding, and Lord Caversham has been waiting for Sir Robert in the library. Caversham emerges and raises the question of marriage anew, encouraging him to propose to Mabel even as he remains certain she will refuse. He also reveals that Sir Robert has roundly denounced the Argentine Canal scheme in the House of Commons, the press marking it as a turning point in his career.
Mabel then appears and, ignoring Lord Goring for his failure to make their riding appointment, banters with Caversham at his expense. Upon Caversham's departure, Goring asks her hand in marriage. Notably, Goring's proposal shows him overwhelmed, imploring Mabel to be serious and revealing his fear of her refusal. Having made Goring beg, Mabel exclaims that all of London knows of her adoration for him and accepts; the two embrace and share a moment of bliss.
Lady Chiltern then enters, and Mabel flees to the conservatory. Alone with Gertrude, Goring informs her of last night's events and warns her of Mrs. Cheveley's scheme regarding her pink letter. Once again Goring urges his listener to tell their spouse the truth; Lady Chiltern refuses and demands that the letter be intercepted.
Just as they devise a scheme to waylay the letter, Sir Robert climbs up the stairs, note in hand. He misreads it entirely, believing it addressed to him. At Lord Goring's silent plea, Lady Chiltern accepts her husband's error; Goring passes into the conservatory. She then informs Sir Robert that the infamous letter has been destroyed, safeguarding his reputation forever. With great anxiety, Sir Robert haltingly proposes that he now retire from public life, and, to his dismay, Lady Chiltern eagerly lends her support to this moral sacrifice. Goring returns from the conservatory, reconciles with Sir Robert, and is about to ask for Mabel's hand when Lord Caversham comes on the scene.
Caversham thoroughly congratulates Sir Robert on his recent speech against the canal scheme and informs him that the Prime Minister has offered him the Cabinet seat Caversham has just vacated. In other words, Sir Robert, with what Caversham describes as his "high moral tone," is the successor Goring could never be. Having just promised an early retirement to his wife, however, Sir Robert sadly declines, and Lady Chiltern glowingly urges him to write the Prime Minister immediately with his regrets. The two leave the room together. Goring sends his disapprovingly bewildered father into the conservatory, explaining that Sir Robert's decision exemplifies his "high moral tone." Comically, Caversham balks at this "newfangled" phrase, noting that in his day it was simply called "idiocy."
Lady Chiltern returns to the morning room. Goring then accuses her of "playing Mrs. Cheveley's cards," thrusting her husband from public life just when they have saved him from public dishonour. He goes on to deliver an extended speech on the appropriate roles of man and wife to dissuade her. Sir Robert then emerges from off-stage and presents his letter; Lady Chiltern takes it and tears it up, repeating Goring's words. She has learned her lesson.
The Chilterns share their own moment of bliss, and Lord Goring finally asks for Mabel's hand in marriage. On account of his discovery of Mrs. Cheveley at Goring's last night, however, Sir Robert cannot consent; Goring is left silent. Dramatically, Lady Chiltern thus reveals that Lord Goring expected her in his drawing room last night and that she authored the pink note as a request for his assistance. All reconcile, and Lady Chiltern writes Sir Robert's name at the top of her "love letter."
Mabel and Caversham then enter and, much to the latter's surprise, she announces her engagement with Goring. Caversham commands his son to be for Mabel an ideal husband at the risk of disinheritance; jokingly, Mabel recoils. "An ideal husband!" she exclaims. "Oh, I don't think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world." Goring can be what he likes; Mabel, overcome, only wants to be a "real wife" to him.
All exit except for Sir Robert, who sits alone pensively as at the end of Act I. Lady Chiltern returns, and he asks if she loves or merely pities him. Lady Chiltern pledges her love and the beginning of a new life for them both.
As with the popular domestic comedies upon which An Ideal Husband is based, Act IV brings us to a culminating restoration of married life. All is set right: Sir Robert preserves his public image and indeed even advances in his career; the Chilterns' reunite; the young lovers, Goring and Mabel, come together as well. Rather than adhere strictly to a model of rising, climatic, and falling action, the act concludes the play with a series of dizzying complications—a misread note, a complex choreography of entrances, exits, and private conversations, confessions—that only resolve themselves at the very end.
As we recall from Act III, Lady Chiltern naïvely writes her note to Goring as a plea for help: "I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you." Notably, Mrs. Cheveley mocks this pink note as resembling the start of some "middle class romance," suggesting Wilde's self-irony regarding his use of this stock device. Ultimately it comes to serve as a sort of second marriage certificate, symbolizing, with the inscription of Sir Robert's name, a restoration of the Chilterns' married life. Though Goring jokingly moves to reclaim the letter, it is clearly no longer meant for him. This restoration of the conjugal household occurs on rather conventional moral terms. Once again, the language of melodrama intervenes: there is a profusion of exclamations, sighs, and somewhat trite appeals to faith, love, charity, devotion, and onward as characters succumb to emotion. Lord Goring especially delivers these pronouncements on conjugal bliss. In particular, he makes a rousing speech to Lady Chiltern upon Sir Robert's decision to withdraw from public life that establishes the proper roles of man and woman in married life. We will sketch it briefly here.
First, Goring argues that men and women alike are not worthy of sacrifices as terrible as the one Sir Robert faces. Lady Chiltern cannot allow Sir Robert to resign from public life especially, however, because Sir Robert is a man. Man's life remains of wider scope, deeper issues, and greater ambitions than woman's. Whereas a woman's life revolves in "curves of emotions," man's progresses in "lines of intellect." Consequently, women are not meant to judge men but to forgive them ("Pardon, not punishment, is their mission"). Thus Lady Chiltern must assume the role that defines Victorian womanhood in its most conventional form: that of a forgiving and anodyne caregiver.
Moreover, by demanding that Sir Robert exit public life, Lady Chiltern, according to Lord Goring, "[plays] Mrs. Cheveley's cards"—that is, she plays the part of the villainess rather than that of the heroine. What Goring means precisely by this accusation is somewhat unclear. Is the supposed fault she shares with Mrs. Cheveley is her use of love to bend her husband's will? In any case, Goring's speech leaves the audience with firmly established gender roles in the marital household that, to a contemporary reader especially, are quite disappointing. As noted above, Lady Chiltern will repeat his speech to Sir Robert verbatim, indicating that she has learned her lesson well.
At the same time, as with the entire play, Act IV offers a critique of marriage that undermines this sentimental resolution. More precisely, Goring and Mabel's marriage serves as a sort of foil to the Chilterns'. As Mabel declares in one of the penultimate moments of the play, the "ideal husband" belongs to the next world; in their marriage, Goring can be whatever he wants. She, on the other hand, promises to be a "real wife."
Thus Mabel and Goring negotiate a union that dispenses with question regarding the ideal behaviour of the married couple. Indeed, throughout the play they have assumed an amoral pose, disparaging the demands of duty and respectability. Earlier in the act, for example, Mabel remarks to Goring how "on principle," she never does her duty; it always depresses her. She thus teases the lord with what one might describe as a "false paradox"—that is, a statement that is taken or misunderstood as amusingly paradoxical even as the terms involved ("duty" and "principle") are not necessarily contradictory. Read literally, Mabel's witticism suggests that the principles of these lovers demand precisely that they resist the notion of duty. Clearly then does Mabel end up on different footing than her sister-in-law, who has finally come to learn her duties to her husband.
A Note on Aestheticism
One cannot read An Ideal Husband without reference to the Aesthetic Movement of the "Yellow Nineties," a movement with its roots in dandyism and decadence. The figure of the Dandy dates back to the early nineteenth century and the fashionable English playboy Beau Brummel. Celebrated in several essays by the French poet Baudelaire in the 1860s, the Dandy, a consummate man of fashion, evolved into a figure of exaggeration, moral liberty, and the art of preteens.
Decadence grew out of English imitations of French visions of artistic autonomy. Modelled especially on the ideas of Baudelaire, Decadence emerged in England in the 1860s with the writing of Algernon Swinburne. It flaunted the pursuit of forbidden experiences—from homosexuality to hashish—while asserting the superiority of artifice over nature. One was expected to be irresponsible, witty, artificial, and languorous, while always exhibiting astonishing superiority in style and dress.
As articulated by Wilde, Aestheticism was a rebellion against the sombre respectability of Victorian ideals and moral strictures. Art must be loved for its own sake, judged by the beauty of artifice rather than that of morality. As with dandyism and decadence, the Aestheticist movement venerated individual freedom, modernity, and social theatricality.
Important Quotations Explained
LORD CAVERSHAM: And if you don't make this lady an ideal husband, I'll cut you off without a shilling.
MABEL CHILTERN: An ideal husband! Oh, I don't think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world.
LORD CAVERSHAM: He can be what he chooses. All I want is to be to be oh, a real wife to him.
LORD CAVERSHAM: Upon my word, there is a good deal of common sense in that, Lady Chiltern.
The title phrase, "an ideal husband," appears in the penultimate dialogue of Act IV as the last joke of the play. Mabel Chiltern and Lord Goring have just announced their engagement, and Lord Caversham—emblematic of an older generation of London Society—issues the threat quoted above to his dandified son. At the same time, Mabel and Goring have negotiated a union that dispenses with question regarding the ideal behaviour of the married couple. As Mabel protests, the "ideal husband" belongs in heaven; Goring can be whatever he wants while she wants to be his real wife who decidedly belongs to this world. Indeed, throughout the play they have assumed an amoral pose, disparaging the demands of duty and respectability. Their union thus in a sense counterpoises that of the upright Chilterns, who have just reconciled and are also on the scene.
Humorously, Caversham concurs with his future daughter-in-law. His comment on "common sense" recalls a comic interlude from Act III, in which he identifies common sense as a property of men. Moreover, unbeknownst to him, he has addressed his comment to the character who above all has learned the dangers of attempting to create an ideal spouse, Lady Chiltern.
There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what else is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
Sir Robert makes this speech to Lady Chiltern at the end of Act II when Mrs. Cheveley reveals his secret past to the Lady and the latter rejects Sir Robert in horror. It is a melodramatic speech, drawn from the popular stage of Wilde's day; in this sense, it is conventional in both content and style. A key passage in the play's treatment of the theme of marriage, it establishes a difference between masculine love, which allows for or is even predicated on imperfection, and feminine love, which mounts the lover on "monstrous pedestals" for worship. As it is directed toward imperfect—and not ideal—beings, one might consider this masculine form of love as more "human." For Sir Robert, masculine love is love in its proper form, love that can cure the lover's wounds and forgive his sins.
Of course, the play ultimately does not assign this form of love to the man. Sir Robert's speech is less a description of "masculine love" than an injunction to his wife. With the reconciliation of the Chilterns in Act IV, the play will conclude that it is actually the woman's role to forgive and nurture her husband in affairs of love, thus reaffirming a familiar model of Victorian womanhood. As Lord Goring will tell Lady Chiltern in the final moments of the play, "Pardon, not punishment, is [women's] mission." Stylistically, Sir Robert's outburst exemplifies Wilde's use of melodramatic speech, a type of speech that dramatically departs his use of banter and repartee. Note the typical devices: the anaphoric sentence structure ("There was your mistake. There was your error."), antitheses (perfect/imperfect), and exhortations that build from the one previous. Such devices function to increase the pathos of Sir Robert's tirade, showing him overcome with emotion.
Perhaps most important stylistically, however, is the speech's tone. Notably, Sir Robert breaks into more epigrammatic prose in the latter half of the passage ("All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon."). Such epigrams use the same rhetorical structures (reversals, antitheses, etc.) that make up Wildean banter; as a result, one could, for example, imagine these lines being spoken ironically at a dinner party. Sir Robert's desperate tone—and the crisis at hand, of course—completely changes how his speech is received, stirring the spectator with a surfeit of pathos and emotion.
LORD GORING: You see, Phipps, fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: And falsehoods the truths of other people.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
One should pause on this apparently frivolous comic interlude at the beginning of Act III as it provides a short manifesto for the dandy-philosopher (even as on principle a dandy never makes his ideas manifest). More precisely, this scene brilliantly dramatizes the dandy's narcissism. It is structured as an exchange between Goring and his butler, in which the former delivers a series of scandalous epigrams while the latter concurs impassively. Spoken by a man in the throes of a lifelong romance with himself, Goring's epigrams convey his egocentrism, reducing the oppositions at hand (fashionable/unfashionable, refined/vulgar, true/false) to one between "other people" and "oneself." Thus the vulgar what others do, the unfashionable what others wear, and the false what others hold true. This exchange artfully reinforces Goring's narcissism with an interlocutor who indifferently responds in the affirmative. Thus the butler serves as a sort of mirror to Goring's Narcissus; as it is certain that his interlocutor will agree with him, Goring is even more "talking to himself" than if in soliloquy.
Goring's narcissism is significant in terms of the mores of his age. As discussed in the Context, the dandy stood in rebellion to the values of the Victorian era, an era defined by a devotion to family life, public and private responsibility, and obedience to law. Dandyism dispensed with these sombre duties in the name of individual freedom and a self-cantered concern with the frivolous (fashion, style, and so on).
MRS. CHEVELEY: Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
SIR ROBERT: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS. CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT: And women represent the irrational.
MRS. CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.
This exchange takes place toward the beginning of the dinner party in Act I before Mrs. Cheveley moves to blackmail Sir Robert. As one of the primary themes of the play consists of competing visions of womanliness, it is of interest in that relating aestheticism with a certain conception of femininity.
As discussed in the Context, aestheticism, a doctrine often abbreviated as a philosophy of "art for art's sake," insists on art being judged by the beauty of artifice rather than that of morality or reason. Beauty is irrational and amoral, and the aestheticist who worships beauty indulges in excess and exaggeration to flout his age's standards of respectability (i.e. "proper" thinking, proper aesthetic and moral judgments, etc.).
Typically one imagines the (male) dandy as the epitome of the aestheticist credo: artificial, amoral, and irrational. At the same time, like the dandy, these terms are often associated with the feminine. Here Mrs. Cheveley poses woman as a sort aestheticist art object. Like art, women can only be adored—that is, not analyzed—and herein lies their strength. As objects of admiration, women resist judgment according to rational or moral categories. They embody the irrational (or at least when well-dressed) and are thus powerful, perhaps even dangerous. Mrs. Cheveley herself is of course one of these dangerously well-dressed and irrational women.
If female strength lies in the irrational, one might note that Mrs. Cheveley's wit draws from the irrational as well. In this instance, irrationality inheres primarily in her use of hyperbole and false logic: if men can be analyzed, women can only be adored; science has no future in the world. Such irrational speech is what makes Mrs. Cheveley such a mighty conversational foe, poised to manipulate her interlocutors and misconstrue situations to her own advantage.
Who on earth writes to him on pink paper? How silly to write on pink paper! It looks like the beginning of a middle-class romance. Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
Mrs. Cheveley exclaims these observations to herself in Act III upon discovering Lady Chiltern's letter among Lord Goring's papers. Thematically, this passage is significant in that it condenses Mrs. Cheveley's philosophy of romance in the cleverly rhyming epigram, the "settlement" substituting for romance's "sentiment". Love is a science and aims toward material gain, subordinate to the gospels of power and wealth—a philosophy that privileges the domination of others over all else—Mrs. Cheveley learned from Baron Arnheim.
The passage is also significant as a commentary on the play itself. As discussed in the Context, An Ideal Husband adopts many of the conventions of the Victorian middle-class melodrama—the stolen letter being a foremost example. One might thus consider Mrs. Cheveley's jab at Lady Chiltern as referring to the play reliance on these conventions as well, Wilde mocking his own use of this stock device. Lady Chiltern's note is certainly "pink"—as in embarrassing—in both its melodramatic content ("I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you.") and generic nature even if the spectator sympathizes with her plight.
Study Questions and Essay Topics
Take a short, humorous example of Wildean banter and explain why it is funny. What literary devices (irony, sarcasm, paradox, etc.) make the joke possible? What, if any, is the joke's insight? How might it function in the larger context of the play? If applicable, also consider the use of facial expressions, gestures, stage movement, and so on.
Joking with Lord Goring and Lady Basildon on the travails of having unendurably faultless husbands, Mrs. Marchmont at one point exclaims: "My poor Olivia! We have married perfect husbands, and we are well punished for it." Lord Goring replies: "I should have thought it was the husbands who were punished."
As with many of Wilde's jokes, Mrs. Marchmont's relies on a scandalous reversal of expectations: the marriage of a perfect husband is less a boon than a bane, the ensuing married life being the wives' punishment. To translate further: the perfect husband may be morally upstanding but is a dreadful bore. The ironical Mrs. Marchmont is only half-serious in tone, but one might take her joke seriously in light of a play that concerns itself with the dangers of the ideal spouse. Thus Mrs. Marchmont's frivolous jest might in a sense "laugh off" the more sombre discussions of ideal husband that appear through the play. Ever the wit, Lord Goring matches Mrs. Marchmont by reversing the terms of her lament: the husbands, and not the wives, are the true victims of punishment. These continuous reversals and improvisations define what Wilde describes as the wit's "playing" with the world.
Additional Note: Tellingly, Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon will subsequently declare themselves martyrs to their perfect husbands as well. Thus their exchange perhaps mocks Lady Chiltern's impassioned speech and emergence as a martyred wife at the end of the act.
Discuss how objects in circulation (letters, etc.) function in the play. What might they suggest about characters, plot structure, etc.? What might they symbolize?
Stolen, mislaid, and misaddressed objects are stock elements of the Victorian popular stage, serving as devices for the complication of plot and development of dramatic irony. Despite the conventional nature of these devices, however, how these objects circulate and what they might symbolize invite further interpretation.
An Ideal Husband features three notable objects in circulation, each playing fateful roles in the plot: Sir Robert's letter to Baron Arnheim, Mrs. Cheveley's diamond brooch, and Lady Chiltern's pink note to Lord Goring. Notably, all at some point pass through the hands of Mrs. Cheveley and Lord Goring, emphasizing how the two are the central actors of the play. Indeed, all three objects change hands between them at their confrontation in Act III, what one might identify as the play's climax. As the "causes" of complication in the plot, it is fitting that all these objects emerge at the plot's most tense moment.
These objects are also rich in symbolic properties. To elaborate on a few that relate to the primary theme of marriage: the brooch, for example, is an agent of vengeance. A stolen wedding gift deployed by her ex-fiancé, it traps Mrs. Cheveley in blackmail, avenging both her near-destruction of the Chilterns' marriage and betrayal of Lord Goring in their courtship.
If the brooch avenges Mrs. Cheveley's crimes against conjugal life, Lady Chiltern's pink note attests to marriage's restoration. Though written as a plea for help to Lord Goring, Sir Robert mistakes it as being a love letter addressed to him, facilitating his reconciliation with his wife. Tellingly, in the final scene, it serves as a sort of second marriage certificate, Gertrude putting Sir Robert's name down as its addressee.
Compare and contrast the different notions of love proffered by the players, both major and minor. Contextualize these opinions within the larger moral scheme of the play. You may want to isolate two characters or couples for comparison.
One could draw an obvious contrast between the ideas of love presented by Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern and in particular by isolating their confrontation at the end Act II. In this scene, both Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern assume melodramatic voices—their speech suddenly characterized by exclamations, apostrophes, and lyrical entreaties—that mirror the conventional dialogue of the Victorian popular stage. Accordingly, their melodramatic dialogue serves as vehicle for a similarly generic discussion of love that reaffirms the social values of the Victorian stage. Tellingly this discussion describes love in explicitly gendered terms. As a woman, Lady Chiltern loves Sir Robert as an ideal husband, a man worthy of worship for the example he sets privately and publicly. In contrast, Sir Robert describes a masculine love that allows for or is predicated on human imperfection. Human require a love that can cure their wounds and forgive their sins, rather than exalt them as moral exemplum. Once again, in terms of the play's moral thematics, one might group their rousing confrontation with the characters, plotlines, and other elements that mirror the mechanics of the popular theatre in contrast with those that might undermine these theatrical conventions.
In Act I, Mrs. Cheveley's tells Sir Robert: "Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are." In Act II, Goring tells Sir Robert: "It is always worthwhile asking a question, though it is not always worthwhile answering one." With these quotes in mind, discuss how moments of interrogation function in the play.
In Act III, Lord Caversham tells Lord Goring that he hates paradox. In what ways does Goring use paradox in his speech? What are the effects of such use?
Discuss Wilde's techniques of characterization. How does he make use of art work in drawing the introductory "portraits" of his players? How does he make use of costume? What are the differences in the speech of individual characters? You may choose to focus on two or three characters to make comparisons.
Discuss how the play constructs Mrs. Cheveley's femininity. For example: why is she described as Lamia-like? You may want to consider her dialogue, dialogue about her, her costumes, etc.
Source: http://wingateenglish.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/5/23652066/an_ideal_husband_spark_notes_study_guide.doc
Web site to visit: http://wingateenglish.weebly.com/
Author of the text: indicated on the source document of the above text
If you are the author of the text above and you not agree to share your knowledge for teaching, research, scholarship (for fair use as indicated in the United States copyrigh low) please send us an e-mail and we will remove your text quickly. Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)
The information of medicine and health contained in the site are of a general nature and purpose which is purely informative and for this reason may not replace in any case, the council of a doctor or a qualified entity legally to the profession.
The texts are the property of their respective authors and we thank them for giving us the opportunity to share for free to students, teachers and users of the Web their texts will used only for illustrative educational and scientific purposes only.
All the information in our site are given for nonprofit educational purposes