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
→
F U L L T I T L E · An Ideal Husband
A U T H O R · Oscar Wilde
T Y P E O F W O R K · Drama
G E N R E · 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)
L A N G U A G E · English
T I M E A N D P L A CE W R I T T E N · Written in 1894 in London; staged immediately prior to Wilde's most successful
play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895
D A T E O F F I R S T P U B L I C A T I O N · 1895
P U B L I S H E R · L. Smithers
N A R R A T O R · None
C L I M A X · 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
P R O T A G O N I S T S · Sir Robert Chiltern, Lady Chiltern, and Lord Goring
S E T T I N G ( T I M E ) · 1895; thus, first staged in "the present." The time of the play's action is twenty-four hours.
S E T T I N G ( P L A C E ) · London
,P O I N T O F V I E W · Point of view is not located as there is no narrator figure
F A L L I N G A C T I O N · 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
T E N S E · The play unfolds in the time of the present
T O N E · 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
T H E M E S · The ideal marriage; the ideal woman; Aestheticism and the art of modern living
M O T I F S · Wit, irony, paradox, hyperbole; the melodramatic speech
S Y M B O L S · The Rococo tapestry; the diamond brooch
F O R E S H A D O W I N G · 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
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
→
F U L L T I T L E · An Ideal Husband
A U T H O R · Oscar Wilde
T Y P E O F W O R K · Drama
G E N R E · 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)
L A N G U A G E · English
T I M E A N D P L A CE W R I T T E N · Written in 1894 in London; staged immediately prior to Wilde's most successful
play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895
D A T E O F F I R S T P U B L I C A T I O N · 1895
P U B L I S H E R · L. Smithers
N A R R A T O R · None
C L I M A X · 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
P R O T A G O N I S T S · Sir Robert Chiltern, Lady Chiltern, and Lord Goring
S E T T I N G ( T I M E ) · 1895; thus, first staged in "the present." The time of the play's action is twenty-four hours.
S E T T I N G ( P L A C E ) · London
,P O I N T O F V I E W · Point of view is not located as there is no narrator figure
F A L L I N G A C T I O N · 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
T E N S E · The play unfolds in the time of the present
T O N E · 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
T H E M E S · The ideal marriage; the ideal woman; Aestheticism and the art of modern living
M O T I F S · Wit, irony, paradox, hyperbole; the melodramatic speech
S Y M B O L S · The Rococo tapestry; the diamond brooch
F O R E S H A D O W I N G · 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
