Self-Revelation In An Ideal Husband

Abstract

DESPITE ITS APPARENT OBJECTIVITY, An Ideal Husband is self-revelatory. In a letter to his friend Reginald Turner, written in 1899, Wilde said: I read a great deal, and correct the proofs of An Ideal Husband, shortly to appear. It reads rather well, and some of its passages seem prophetic of tragedy to come. A sense of damnation, a foreboding of tragic failure, is to be found in the writings of Oscar Wilde long before it is sounded in An Ideal Husband. It is the theme of the sonnet Helas! as it is of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The motive of the outcast is conspicuous in Wilde's two previous comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance, where both Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Arbuthnot describe in moving words the lot of an outcast; but it reaches an ominous significance in An Ideal Husband, written shortly before Wilde's own fall. One cannot avoid the impression that An Ideal Husband is an oblique expression of Wilde's inner torment, using Sir Robert Chiltern as a mask. Wilde has described in Chiltern's person his own fear of an imminent scandal. Charles Ricketts remembers Wilde saying of the play when he insisted on Ricketts being present at the first night: "It was written for ridiculous puppets to play, and the critics will say, 'Ah, here is Oscar unlike himself!,—though in reality I became engrossed in writing it, and it contains a great deal of the real Oscar." Mrs. Cheveley, while threatening Sir Robert, actually presages with amazing accuracy one prominent feature of Wilde's downfall, when she says