An Ideal Husband - AO5

Class

• George Woodcock - 'An Ideal Husband' is an 'open attack on the social system' 

• Curt Guyette: ‘it took some nerve for Wilde to sling verbal barbs at social circles he himself was in’. 

• William Dean Howells - Wilde purposely leaves his characters hollow.  They are casts of a social group that was itself in many ways empty, trivial, and “idle” 

Religion and morality

• Peter Hall: ‘Through the character of Lord Goring, Wilde expressed his tolerance. “Nobody’s incapable of doing a foolish thing.”’ 

• Peter Hall: ‘The play lives on not because of its wit but because of its compassion’. 

Artistic fashions & affectations (e.g. fin de siècle decadence, ennui, aesthete poses) 

• Monica L. Miller - “Dandyism can seem frivolous, but it often poses a challenge to or a transcendence of social and cultural hierarchies” 

• Terry Eagleton: ‘If he sometimes displays the irresponsibility of the aesthete, he also restores to us something of the true political depth of that term, as a rejection of mean-spirited utility, and a devotion to human self-fulfilment as an end in itself.’ 

• Terry Eagleton - “the aesthetic, one might argue, is […] the very paradigm of the ideological. Ideology and style are the same thing.” 

• Vyvyan Wilde: His father viewed words as ‘beautiful baubles with which to play and build, as a child plays with coloured brick’. 

• Carol Dell’ Amico: Re. the stage directions (‘like a Tanagra statuette’): ‘Wilde compares his characters to works of art, to reverse the maxim that “art imitates life”. …both provocative and funny.’ 

Marriage

• George Bernard Shaw on Sir Robert - “mechanical idealism of his stupidly good wife”

Women and gender roles

• Bose - 'Lady Chiltern and Mrs Cheveley are moral opposites and have contrary motives but both pose threats to the world of the play by intruding into the traditional male, public, non-domestic sphere and trying to impose their will on it. 

• Bose - "traditional separate spheres remain inviolate" 

• Bose - 'villainy is even more shocking when perpetrated by a woman'. 

• Richard Dellamora – Mrs Cheveley is "bound by limitations that restrict other women in the play" 

• The original actress playing Mrs Cheveley had a dress covered in taxidermied swallows 

• Bose - 'The conservative rendering of women in the play suggests a conventionality Wilde mocks elsewhere'. 

• Kerry Powell - 'to defend his politician against radical demands for male purity, Wilde recultivated an eroding sexual stereotype of the Victorian' woman. 

• Bose - "Mabel may speak the language of the dandy but her naturalness remains unsullied"  

• Danson - 'Mabel is a New Woman posing as an ingenue'. 

Social ‘masks’ and façades (deception, posturing and theatricality) 

• Anni Aalto - "Wilde’s works enabled him to retain plausible deniability...the reader, not the author, was accountable for any immoral notions" 

• Terry Eagleton - "Most things about [Wilde] were doubled, hybrid, ambivalent" 

• Joseph Nechvatal - "Wilde’s nonchalant posturing contradicts his rigorous work" 

• Carol Dell’ Amico: ‘Goring’s posing is significant… To adopt a pose means to choose how one wishes to come off. It means that there is no real, true self…’ 

Ambition, worldly appetites, greed & materialistic values 

Peter Hall's 1992 production 

• Backed by a huge gold medallion stamped with a head of Queen Victoria 

• Set built from Perspex sheeting splattered with gold paint, which looked sumptuous at first glance but with subtle shifts of lighting could look tawdry and cheap 

The impact & uses of comedy and irony in Wilde’s theatre 

• Erin Thomson - The audience is a collective dunce because it laughs at itself without knowing; the critics’ intelligence wavers whilst they laugh knowingly (and in ill-humour) at themselves. 

• Terrence Dawson - '[Wilde's] characters escape the obligations of relationships by pronouncing witticisms from imaginary Olympian heights' 

• The Times review: ‘the play springs from a conventional device of the commonest order of melodrama. Mr Wilde’s ingenuity is verbal… a strained, inverted, but rather amusing idiom’. 

• Terry Eagleton: ‘despite his carefully nurtured flippancy’ Wilde is ‘a remorseless debunker of the heightened gravitas of Victorian England.’ 

• H.G.Wells - “But, taking it seriously...the play is unquestionably bad”