“Classical Ideals and Late-Victorian Society in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband”

Amongst Wilde’s society plays, An Ideal Husband is probably the most underrated one in terms of the author’s definition of his political and aesthetical principles. Although one cannot speak of it as a “minor” work, An Ideal Husband is however still regarded as one of those “abortive attempts still entangled in melodrama or unproductively torn between the perspective of the dandy and a more conventional morality” (Anthony Lane, 1990). My paper aims to read the play as an expression of radicalism on both political and aesthetical level. Recently Deaglán Ó Donghaile has argued that Wilde’s subversive opinions on the problems posed by capitalism, property and empire consistently oppose the bourgeois-imperial authority in the late Victorian Britain (Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, 2020). However, in his study Ó Donghaile does not take An Ideal Husband into consideration for his own purposes. Instead, I will investigate the relationship between Wilde’s aestheticism and his support for social reforms that is clear in a plot which discusses how political power and personal morality coalesce underneath a surface of triviality and humor. The comedy, in fact, uses the ideas of art and civilization, the suggestions and symbols from the classical world to invite audiences to share Wilde’s political and aesthetical thought as we find in his best-known essays (The Soul of Man under Socialism, The Critic as Artist), lectures (The Value of Art in Modern Life) and poetry (“Sonnet to Liberty”).