Objects of desire: art and triumph in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I opt to use the date for which each respective play initially opened. Raby (1995b) notes that the print publications of Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance were produced “within eighteen months or so of their first productions” (xxvi). An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were not released in published form until 1899, roughly four years after their initial staged productions, due to Wilde’s imprisonment.

2 It is worth noting that male homoerotic bonds are a key component of my argument. Some scholars, such as Alan Sinfield (1994), have demurred from modern analyses that attempt to position Wilde and “his dandy characters” within modern definitions of homosexuality because they tend to be framed around problematic readings of “effeminacy” that forgo historical considerations and often border on homophobia and misogyny (37). Arthur Goring stands as the dandy character within An Ideal Husband. I agree with Sinfield that dandyism presents a number of complex social codifications, only some of which are sexual, that can quickly complicate sexual readings and often render them problematic. Frankly, however, Wilde gives us enough evidence of “unauthorized” desire in Goring that one need not resort to a consideration of dandyism.

3 Sos Eltis’s (1996) work has mapped Wilde’s exchanges with radical political activists of his day and the implications these relationships hold for thinking about his theatrical output. Wilde even sent a copy of An Ideal Husband to the anarchist Félix Fénéon in 1899 (17).

4 Martin Meisel (1983) groups An Ideal Husband alongside other nineteenth-century plays with “pictorial allusions whose regular function is thematic comment”; this differentiates it from other plays that followed the contemporary trend of situating actors on stage to “embody” an imminent “painting or engraving” (93).

5 In Materializing Queer Desire, Glick (2009) traces the way that Dorian Gray’s collection of rare commodities and original art pieces evinces a classist desire to “transcend the limitations of everyday consumption” and “shun” the types of “consumption of an increasingly massified society” (25). The dialogue surrounding Robert’s collection does not explicitly contain the same type of overt class snobbery, but it does allude to a desire for power fulfilled through Robert’s political ascent and his achievement of a higher social class. There is a sense that the personal ambitions Robert and Cheveley honed under the mentorship of Baron Arnheim were developed alongside a corresponding inculcation of the artistic tastes and desires enjoyed by the powerful and elite.

6 The term does not appear at all in The Importance of Being Earnest or Salome. It appears only once in passing in Lady Windermere’s Fan when Lady Windermere asks if Mrs. Erlynne wants an invitation to the dinner party because she would count it as “a triumph” (1995b, 18). Perhaps the most notable instances of the word in one of the other 90s plays appears in A Woman of No Importance. The term arises in a conversation surrounding gender dynamics and politics. Lord Illingworth remarks to Mrs. Allonby that successful men require women to support them, “except at the moment of triumph” (1995c, 111). Later, he tells Gerald that “women represent the triumph of matter over mind – just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals” – a comment that prompts Gerald to ask: “How then can women have so much power as you say they have?” (133).

7 It is also possible that Wilde opts for “Love” rather than “Venus” in Triumph of Love for the reason of obscuring the Roman influences in Boucher’s titles.

8 The objects and characters of An Ideal Husband are shot through with references to Greek life and art, a reflection of Wilde’s deep investment in Hellenism that is relevant to the themes of self-authorship that run throughout An Ideal Husband. From his childhood, Wilde was raised to feel a close affinity with ancient Greeks. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an amateur archeologist who traced architectural and ethnographical affinities between ancient Greece and the ancient Celts – even going so far as to argue that Celts and Greeks shared a common racial ancestor. Oscar Wilde came to think of Celtic culture as, as Ross (2013) puts it, “a second Greece” and to think of “the Greeks literally [as] his kin, and his encounter with them more an intuition of native affinity than a positivist examination of a culture radically separate in time and place” (18).

9 Eltis (1996) likewise draws parallels between “The Soul of Man” and Robert and points out how Wilde is careful to construct the character as “a true individualist, who sins in remaining true to his own ethos” rather than as a “modern criminal” (139).

10 As Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (2015) puts it, “Perhaps Wilde is suggesting that the moral idealism surrounding female sexuality is the most firmly entrenched ideal of all, and will be last to go” (127).

11 An Ideal Husband sublimates homoeroticism into material objects and the exchange of items. This codification complicates Richard Dellamora’s (2004) assertion in Friendship’s Bonds that the relationship between Robert and Arnheim is “sodomitic” primarily in the sense that “what Sir Robert comes to idolize under the baron’s influence is sodomy in its political meaning – that is, as the corrupting exercise of power by one man over another … which lodges the perversion directly in the world of ‘modern’ politics” (182). Dellamora’s reading is useful on many levels, but it may overlook a few worthwhile discernments in its dismissal of the relationship as solely political (or only secondarily sexual).

12 See Ross (2013), 133–134.

13 Wilde was quite sensitive to the intersections of fashion and politics. In fact, as noted by Stephanie Green (1997), during his time as the editor of The Woman’s World between 1887 and 1889, he “molded” the periodical, which was previously a fashion magazine, “into an exchange of ideas about femininity, dress, aesthetics, literature, and society” (102).

14 Pankhurst stated: “There can be no mating between the spiritually developed women of this day and men who in thought and conduct with regard to sex matters are their inferiors” (as cited in Bland 1995, 312).

15 The work of Angelique Richardson (2003) offers more on the eugenicist strands in Grand’s writing as well as the work of other New Woman figures.

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Tyler Groff

Tyler Groff completed his Ph.D. at Miami University in 2019. His dissertation, “Living with the Past: Extinction, Ethical Community, and the Literature of the Early Anthropocene,” attends to the ways that scientific discourse and the material conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shed light on the advent of mass anthropogenic extinction. He has presented his work at the North American Victorian Studies Association and Modernist Studies Association conferences.