A husband's tragedy: the relationship between art and life in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

After Oscar Wilde completed An Ideal Husband, his third drawing-room comedy, he said of it to a friend, the artist Charles Ricketts, "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" (Ellmann 410). A careful reading of An Ideal Husband confirms this remark. It is a truism that every writer puts something of himself into everything he writes, but frequently it can be risky to try to determine which elements of a literary work come from the writer's psychology and personal experience and which elements are created mostly from his imagination. In the case of Oscar Wilde, though imagination certainly plays a large role in his work, it is sometimes possible to link elements in it to his personal conflicts. Of all his drawing-room comedies, An Ideal Husband seems to have the most obvious link to the events of his life at the time of its creation, so much so that Rodney Shewan has described the plight of the Chilterns, the political couple who are the play's central characters, as identical to "the plight of the Wildes of Tite Street" (178).

The similarity remarked on by Shewan is at first glance not apparent to the casual reader or playgoer. Like other literary works that reflect events in their creators' lives, the central situation in An Ideal Husband--the husband's fear that an old political misdeed that he had committed will be revealed--is only a transposition into more acceptable terms of Wilde's own trepidation about his secret homosexual life. Such transpositions in a writer's work of personal issues into something similar but less personal usually allow the writer to examine those issues more objectively, often finding discoveries and insights that he might otherwise not have. In the case of An Ideal Husband, the appropriation of what was then a popular dramatic theme--the theme of the politician facing disgrace--allowed Wilde to deal with his guilt concerning his neglect of his wife, Constance, in favor of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the rentboys both frequented. Most plays on the same subject had the politician appease public morality by resigning at the end; that Wilde does not have his main character, Sir Robert Chiltern, do the same shows, in my opinion, both his desire to continue with his double life and to retain the love of his wife in spite of it.

Kerry Powell in his book Oscar Wilde and the theatre of the 1890s notes that political plays of the time such as Arthur Wing Pinero's The Cabinet Minister (1890) reflected an ongoing debate about the different standards of conduct for the sexes and whether this ought to be resolved by eliminating notions of womanly "virtue," or by applying the same restrictive standards to men. The advocates of doing the latter were not concerned only with male sexual conduct, but also with more general issues, in particular what they saw as the male misuse of power, both personal and political. Plays on the subject like Pinero's typically presented a husband who, while being idolized by his wife for his supposed virtue and honesty, is in fact hiding a past or present misdeed from her. The dramatic tension resulting from the danger that he will be found out is typically resolved, as noted above, by the husband's withdrawal from public life, masculine waywardness thus coming under the control of the feminine virtue symbolized by the wife. In some of those plays, such as Sydney Grundy's A Bunch of Violets (1894) the husband pays for his misdeeds even more dearly by committing suicide, a device ironically reflecting traditional notions of what should befall an erring woman.

The motif of the erring husband can be seen as an attempt by the mostly male playwrights of the time to resolve the debate about male virtue in a way that accommodated those asking for a single standard while not displeasing more traditional playgoers. As Powell points out, Wilde's originality in adapting the same theme is to subvert the audience's expectations by having his erring husband consider retirement only to reject the idea, choosing instead to remain in public life and take the Cabinet post which has been offered to him. In doing so, Wilde was not only making an ironic comment on public morality but also offering a psychologically astute observation on the necessity of moral compromise from the standpoint of a man who had long had to perform a similar balancing act in his own life. In this context even the play's title carries ironic implications, for the perfection Lady Chiltern expects from her husband is not humanly possible. Wilde extends the note of irony to the name of his main character: traditionally, the term "taking the Chiltern Hundreds" meant a politician had decided to resign. (Since British Parliament members technically cannot resign, certain Crown lands, called the "Chiltern Hundreds" are reserved for the nominal stewardship of members who are compelled to leave; after their release the lands are returned to the Crown for the next disgraced member to make use of).

The circumstances of his life during the time he composed An Ideal Husband suggested that Wilde was well aware of those ironies. He was into the second year of his affair with Douglas and was beginning to feel the strain of both Douglas's emotional instability and financial extravagance and of the ongoing quarrel between Douglas and his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, a quarrel in which Wilde found himself increasingly embroiled and which eventually would prove to be his undoing. An anecdote from the summer of 1893, when Wilde was beginning the play, illustrates the sense of unease he felt. At the time he was staying with Douglas at a summer house in Goring-on-Thames and entertaining a number of visitors, one of them being the young poet Theodore Wratislaw, who later recorded Wilde's words when, during a walk in the woods, the two men came to a blind turn in the path they were following. Wilde stopped and said, "There! That is as far as I ever wish to see in life. Let me be satisfied with what I can see. I do not want to know what lies beyond the turning a few paces ahead" (qtd. in Ellmann 401). The anxiety Wilde clearly felt undoubtedly worked its way into the play, and despite the stagy conventions and stock situations on which the play is based, gives it much of its emotional force.

An analysis of the play, its events and structure, will illustrate both its relevance to the events in its creator's life and the differences between those events and those in the play, which are also telling. Sir Robert Chiltern, a wealthy, up-and-coming politician who has already attained the position of Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, finds this position threatened when Mrs. Cheveley, a notorious adventuress, uses her knowledge that Chiltern once sold a state secret to compel him to support a fraudulent canal scheme in which she has invested. Chiltern knows that if the truth is revealed he risks losing the love of his wife, Gertrude (like Wilde's own wife, an active feminist), since it is based on her idea of him as the "ideal husband" of the title. Curiously, the Chilterns are described as being childless, unlike the Wildes, who in real life had two sons. The plight of the fictional couple is thUS freed from the complications that would ensue when scandal overtook Wilde and his family, and his wife and children, along with Wilde himself, were made to suffer for his sins. The absence of children is of course not the only difference between the Wildes and the Chilterns; the difference between Chiltern's public misdeed and the private homosexual transgressions of Wilde, which according to Victorian morality were literally unspeakable, has already been noted. Also notable is the fact that Chiltern's secret involves a single act that took place well in the past, before he married; except for that he really is the upstanding husband and public figure he appears to be. Wilde, on the other hand, had to deal with an ongoing secret life that he could not reveal to his wife, but that had corroded the fabric of what had once seemed a happy marriage, to the extent that the two had become largely estranged even before the scandal that would destroy it. The problems the Chilterns face are thus a simplified and stylized version of the real-life dilemma Wilde was grappling with--a theoretical model, so to speak, which allowed Wilde to express his feelings and attitudes concerning trust in marriage.

The action of the play is compressed into twenty-four hours, during which time Chiltern is threatened by Mrs. Cheveley, is rejected by his wife when she discovers his secret, and finally is accepted by her again after she is persuaded to do so by Chiltern's friend, Lord Goring. The introductory description of Chiltern in the stage directions in the published version of the play, revised by Wilde after his release from prison, revealingly alludes to the "almost complete separation of passion and intellect" in his face (485). It is tempting to connect this apparent proof of Chiltern's repression of his less socialized self to Wilde's belated realization of the similar split between his respectable roles as paterfamilias and literary lion and his secret sexual life. During the conversation later on in the first act between Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley, who has accompanied another character, Lady Markby, to a party at the former's house, she reveals the fact that she and Chiltern have a common acquaintance, Baron Arhneim. Baron Arhneim, it turns out, is the person to whom Chiltern, at the beginning of his career, sold information about the government's involvement in the Suez Canal project; his profit from this single dishonest act allowed Chiltern to set himself up in Parliament and established his later success. Mrs. Cheveley informs Chiltern that she has learned of this act and tells him she will expose him if he does not back her own scheme. During her argument, she makes an astute comment about the standards of public morality of the time: "Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you.... Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man--now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal. You couldn't survive it.... Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do" (495-496). She goes on to predict what might happen if Chiltern's misdeed were leaked to the press in terms eerily prescient of what would in fact befall the playwright:

   ... Suppose that when I leave this house I drive down to
   some newspaper office, and give them this scandal and
   the proofs of it. Think of their loathsome joy, of the
   delight they would have in dragging you down, of the
   mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the
   hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article,
   and arranging the foulness of the public placard. (496)

Chiltern, understandably horrified by this picture, agrees to Mrs. Cheveley's terms. Later, in Act Two, he tells Lord Goring (who has warned him that "no man should, have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out" [503]) about the circumstances surrounding his misdeed and the forces that had compelled him to commit it. He describes his meeting with Baron Arhneim at the latter's house in terms that seem curiously emotionally charged:

   I remember so well how, with a strange smile on his pale,
   curved lips, he led me through his wonderful picture gallery,
   showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels,
   his carved ivories, made me wonder at the strange loveliness
   of the luxury in which he lived; and then told me that
   luxury was nothing but a background, a painted scene in
   a play, and that power, power over other men, power
   over the world, was the one thing worth having, the one
   supreme pleasure worth knowing, the one joy one never
   tired of, and that in our century only the rich possessed it. (505)

Chiltern's account, phrased in the exotic language of Wilde's novel Dorian Gray, sounds more like a seduction than anything else; like Dorian Gray, the young, naive Chiltern, was initiated into forbidden pleasures by the older, more knowledgeable one, a process that made his eventual capitulation to the Baron's request for information inevitable. It is perhaps relevant at this point to note that in late-Victorian England the word strange, used twice by Wilde in the foregoing passage to describe the Baron and his way of life, often had homosexual overtones. Thus initiated by the Baron, Chiltern in his turn can enjoy the privileges that only money and rank can buy, privileges that Wilde in his own private life tried to buy with the literary fame and success he had craved--as he bought boys with silver watches and cigarette cases--learning too late that immunity from public judgment was reserved only for those born to privilege. Through Chiltern, Wilde unconsciously anticipates experience, and he also acknowledges in another speech of Chiltern's to Lord Goring his hidden conflicts in deciding to follow his desires:

   I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires
   strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all
   one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one
   throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care
   not--there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a
   terrible courage. (506)

Immediately after he counsels Chiltern to tell his secret to his wife, Lord Goring remarks, "Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious." (503). Especially after he became involved with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's conduct was increasingly reckless and obvious, but it is uncertain how much of the truth his wife suspected before the trials. As noted earlier, husband and wife, who had been close and loving in the marriage's first years, had become increasingly estranged to the extent that Wilde had virtually moved out of the house living instead in a succession of hotel rooms and rented lodgings, ostensibly for privacy in his work, but really so that he could entertain Douglas and his other young companions. By 1893, the year in which Wilde began An Ideal Husband, he and Constance had grown so far apart that one day when she arrived at the hotel where he was staying with Douglas (in a room with one double bed) to give him his mail and to ask him when he was coming home, he pretended to have forgotten the house number (Ellmann 394). This uncharacteristically cruel behavior on his part might have been inspired by guilt at his neglect of Constance. After Sir Robert Chiltern upbraids his wife for rejecting him when she finds out the truth about him, he admits to Lord Goring, "I was brutal to her this evening. But I suppose when sinners talk to saints they are brutal always" (529). Constance's own high morality, as well as her loyalty to her husband--which lasted until after his release from prison--must have made Wilde feel extremely guilty at times, causing him to attack her in much the same way that Chiltern attacks Gertrude.

What he could not admit in private, though, he put in his play, the observations of which about honesty in marriage were evidentally very important to him. When asked in an interview which point in the play he thought the critics had missed, he identified it as "the difference in the way in which a man loves a woman from that in which a woman loves a man"--that is, the ideal a wife has of her husband contrasted with "the weakness of a man who dares not show his imperfections to the thing he loves" (Mikhail 241). He described this point as comprising the "entire psychology" of the play (Burgess 241). Chiltern's speech to Gertrude at the end of the second act is a plea for understanding, written by a man who knew he could not expect that from his own wife if she knew the truth about him: "Why can't you women love us, faults and all? ... We have all feet of clay, women as well as men.... It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love" (521). He goes on to say, "You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses" (521). Chiltern's speech is as much about Wilde's "inner torment," as E. H. Mikhail puts it (180), as it is about the now long-forgotten debate about male virtue. It is here that the irony of the play's title is underlined: like Chiltern, Wilde had to play the role in his public and family life of a person who in fact did not really exist, hiding his true self.

Up to a point Chiltern's dilemma closely resembles that of his creator. Wilde, however, is able to achieve in fiction what he could not in real life, allowing his politician at the end of the play to keep both his family and his career, after he has come perilously close to losing them. The incriminating letter that Mrs. Cheveley has in her possession, which forms the basis of her threat to expose Chiltern, is destroyed by Lord Goring--luckily for Chiltern, who has gone ahead and condemned her financial scheme in Parliament in defiance of her threat. Though he considers resigning anyway, in the play's final scene he is dissuaded by his wife, who has been persuaded by Lord Goring that to do so would be playing into the hands of the moralists, and that Chiltern should be allowed to fulfill his ambitions. The speech in which he does so has attracted a fair deal of comment--much of it negative, since in it Wilde, in contradiction to the feminist statements he had made earlier in his career, has Goring make assertions about the roles of the sexes that were retrograde even in the 1890s:

   Women are not meant to judge US, but to forgive us when
   we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their
   mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin
   done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew
   himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's.
   It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A
   woman's life revolves in curves of emotion. It is upon
   lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. Don't make
   any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can
   keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all
   the world wants of women, or should want of them. (548)

Kerry Powell has suggested that this speech reflects Wilde's desire to oppose feminist demands that men reform to suit them with a "new masculinism" (107) even if it meant having to assert old Victorian ideas about the separate spheres of the sexes. I believe that the impetus behind Goring's statement goes even deeper and is rooted in Wilde's experience as a homosexual man in the late nineteenth century, participating in both the visible heterosexual world and a secret, all-male world where women could not go and therefore could never fully understand. In this context, the political world in which Chiltern operates, also all-male in that time, may be a transposition into licit terms of Wilde's illicit homosexual world. Interpreted in this way, Goring's speech becomes a caution to Gertrude not to condemn or meddle in things she cannot understand as a woman; she can only accept them--and her husband--as they are. Gertrude's subsequent speech to her husband, though it is rendered not as convincingly as it might have been by her rote repetition of Goring's words, shows she has absorbed this lesson. In doing so, she shows considerable courage, more than her husband has shown in fearing to expose himself to his wife. The new relationship between the spouses, based on a honest awareness of each other's faults and virtues, rather than false ideas, is illustrated in the play's last few lines:

LADY CIllLTERN (leaning over the back of the chair): Aren't you coming in, Robert?

SIR ROBERT CIllLTERN (taking her hand): Gertrude, is it love you feel for me, or is it pity merely?

LADY CIllLTERN (kisses him): It is love, Robert. Love; and only love. For both of us a new life is beginning.

It is instructive to compare the Chiltern's fictional reconciliation with the estrangement in the Wilde's marriage, where such a "new life" was evidently not possible. Constance would not fully learn the truth about her husband until public scandal forced it on her. To her credit, she displayed remarkable loyalty toward Wilde, who may have felt he did not deserve it. Even after family advisers had finally persuaded her to break with him emotionally if not legally, she forgave him. Constance's plight resembled that of the wife in another play Wilde planned and started to write but never finished, which also showed his understanding of their marriage. It is not clear when Wilde wrote the manuscript which he entitled "A Wife's Tragedy"; it might have been any time from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, the period when he wrote most of his plays. The play--what there is of it--portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Gerald and Nellie Lovel, a young couple living in Venice. Gerald, a self-centered poet, is carrying on an affair with a European countess; when a visiting friend, Lord Mertoun, reproaches him for his neglect of Nellie, he retorts that he loves her. When Mertoun says, "'You don't show it,'" Gerald replies, "'It's very vulgar to show one's love for one's wife'" (Mikhail 99). During a later scene between Nellie and Mertoun, she remarks in words that might have been Constance's, "'... my husband has lost all love for me. We stand apart. But I cannot leave him. It is my duty to remain'" (123). Despite this sense of duty, she finally decides to leave with Mertoun, who has declared his love for her, and lashes out at Gerald: "'Why should I wreck my life for you? You always think only of yourself'" (127). The fragment ends with Gerald, by now abandoned by both Nellie and the Countess, longing for the wife whom he has lost.

The two plays, An Ideal Husband and the "Wife's Tragedy" fragment, thus illustrate the two contrasting scenarios in Wilde's mind when he imagined telling Constance the truth: either acceptance and reconciliation, or complete rejection. "Ah, that is the great thing, to live the truth" (510), Chiltern declares to Lord Goring after his confession to him, but the risks of "living the truth" were too great in Wilde's case for him to be able to consider it. Nevertheless, he was conscious of a regret that this was so, a regret that was connected to his understanding of the rift between him and Constance and the disadvantage her loyalty to him gave her in the face of his comparative indifference. "Loveless marriages are horrible," he has Chiltern say toward the end of An Meal Husband:

   But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless
   marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one
   side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on
   one side only and in which of the two hearts one is sure
   to be broken. (549)

Constance' s heart may have been broken by her marriage to a man no longer able to give her the love she needed, but in her continuing affection for him, Oscar Wilde was perhaps luckier than he knew.

Works Cited

Amor, Anne Clark. Mrs. Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1983.

Burgess, Gilbert. "An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket Theatre: A Talk with Mr. Oscar Wilde," in Mikhail, E. H. ed., Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 1. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Holland, Vyvyan. Son of Oscar Wilde. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.

Mikhail, E. H. "Self-Revelation in An Meal Husband." Modern Drama, 2 (1968): 180-186.

Nassaar, Christopher S. Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.

Powell, Kerry. Oscar Wilde and the theatre of the 1890s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Schmidgall, Gary. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. New York: Dutton, 1994.

Shewan, Rodney. Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977.

--. "'A Wife's Tragedy:' An unpublished sketch for a play by Oscar Wilde." Theatre Research International, 7:2 (Spring 1982): 75-131.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

--. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Carol Schnitzer

Indiana State University