Fog-Clearing and the “Irish Dimension” in Oscar Wilde’s Th ree Society Plays

: Despite growing scholarly interest in how Oscar Wilde’s Irish heritage shaped the form and content of his creative works

Over the past three decades, academic attention to Oscar Wilde's nationality and its in uence on his creativity has steadily grown 1 . is increasing interest includes scholarly debate concerning how best to identify "Irish dimensions" in "Irish dimensions" in Wilde's creative works 2 . In his essays and speeches, letters and lectures, reviews and interviews, Wilde explicitly addressed Irish a airs, but in his poetry, drama and ction he did not. Consequently, one technique for disclosing allegedly hidden "Irish dimen-sion[s]" in Wilde's creative pieces became popular: treating the works as if they were intentionally constructed allegories, whose supposedly encoded content the ingenious critic decoded 3 . e most frequent candidates for this millennia-old methodology (formerly called (formerly called hyponoia hyponoia, more recently termed 'allegoresis') have been e Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), e Happy Prince (1888), A House of Pomegranates (1891) and e Importance of Being Earnest (1895) 4 . In the latter, Gwendolen begs Jack to stop mentioning "the weather" because "[w]henever people" bring it up, she is sure "they mean something else," which causes her to feel "so nervous"; Jack replies, "I do mean something else" (Wilde 2019, 776). For critics in search of an "Irish dimension" in e Importance of Being Earnest, e Picture of Dorian Gray, and the short stories, the "something else" usually means concealed political commentary. Nonetheless, recent Hibernicizing-via-allegorizing critics have paid surprisingly little attention to Wilde's society plays, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895), perhaps because their comparative realism (in plot, setting, and characterization, if not dialogue) a ords greater resistance to allegoresis than the fairy tale and Gothic milieux of much of his ction 5 . Responding to the imbalance in critical attention, this essay seeks to answer several questions. Do the society plays possess a distinctive and substantive "Irish dimension"? "Irish dimension"? If so, where can it be found, and how extensive is it?
A useful starting-point for addressing these issues is W.B. Yeats's review in United Ireland of Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891). Yeats cites Wilde's claim (from the revised, expanded e Picture of Dorian Gray) that " [b]eer, [the B]ible, and the seven deadly virtues have made [our] England what she is" (Yeats 1970, 110-111, citing 2005,335). In words that anticipate fellow countryman George Bernard Shaw's 1895 review of An Ideal Husband, Yeats claims that "part of the Nemesis that has fallen upon" England "is a complete inability to understand anything" Wilde states, but " [w]e [in Ireland] should not nd him so unintelligible -for much about him is Irish of the Irish" (1970,111). As Shaw does later, Yeats sees in Wilde's "life and works an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity", in which he "peppers John Bull with his peashooter of wit" (ibidem). Commenting on the title story of Wilde's volume, Yeats nds in it "something of the same spirit that lled Ireland once with gallant, irresponsible ill-doing, but now it is in its right place making merry among the things of the mind, and laughing gaily at our most rm xed convictions" -and Yeats locates this same "spirit" in   band (2000, 563) 7 . Given these plays' thematic and stylistic di erences, what might unify them su ciently for Wilde to believe they formed a national "School"? Wilde's letter to Shaw three months earlier provides a possible answer: "we are both Celtic, and I like to think that we are friends" (554) 8 . After praising Shaw's e Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) ("such a delight to me that I constantly take it up, and always nd it stimulating and refreshing") and saluting Shaw's critique of "the ridiculous institution of a stage-censorship" (from which Wilde had su ered the previous year, with the banning of performances of Salomé), he declared, "England is the land of intellectual fogs but you have done much to clear the air" (ibidem) 9 . For Wilde, then, key goals of the "Celtic" or "Hibernian" (but, interestingly, not Irish) "School" included celebrating Ibsen, deprecating "stage-censorship", and extirpating the English "intellectual fogs" of Philistinism and Puritanism 10 . Building on Wilde's implicit mission statement, this essay argues that the "Irish dimension" in his society plays turns out to be relatively modest in scale and consists not of the allegorically encoded political commentaries previous critics claimed to discover in Wilde's ction and e Importance of Being Earnest but instead strategies of plot, characterization, and dialogue designed to alert England to the urgent need "to clear" away its "intellectual fogs".
1. Lady Windermere's Fan: "London is too full of fogs" e letter to Shaw was far from Wilde's rst reprimand of English attitudes and practices. On several occasions during his 1882 North American tour, he condemned England's Philistinism, Puritanism, and political oppression of Ireland, and he maintained these stances in a number of book reviews and by joining the Liberal and pro-Home-Rule Eighty Club in 1887 11 . Wilde's censuring of England (and, especially, its newspapers) intensi ed rapidly in response to the harsh reviews e Picture of Dorian Gray received after its June 1890 publication. Over the next eleven months, he criticized England's national character, its journalism, and its Philistinism and Puritanism in letters to the St. James's Gazette, Daily Chronicle and Scots Observer; in the essay " e Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891) and in revisions to e Picture of Dorian Gray and to his essays in dialogue " e Decay of Lying" (1889; 1891) and " e Critic as Artist" (1890; 1891) 12 . Since " e Soul" appeared in February 1981, the revised e Picture of Dorian Gray in April, and the revised " e Decay of Lying" and " e Critic as Artist" in May (as part of Intentions), e Picture of Dorian Gray controversy was still relatively fresh for Wilde during the summer of 1891, when he wrote Lady Windermere's Fan. e play's primary satirical targets are Puritans and "London Society", which the play treats as two avatars of English national character (Small 1999, xix) 13 . Yet, whereas Lady Windermere's ethical reeducation constitutes a rebuke to Puritanism's prioritization of medieval morals over modern manners, London Society's deceitful values prove more impervious to change, as revealed when Mrs Erlynne decides to return abroad, after ensnaring her new husband, Lord Augustus Lorton (Small 1999, xxxii-xxxiii).
To reproach Puritanism, the play shows how Lady Windermere's close-call in avoiding an adulterous elopement with Lord Darlington catalyzes a character change: she transforms from someone possessing "something of the Puritan", who permits "no compromise" "between what is right and what is wrong", into someone who no longer believes "people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate races or creations" (Wilde 1999, 9, 73-74) 14 . Nevertheless, she still prefers to venerate certain "ideals" (including her herhagiographic recollection of the mother she believes dead) rather than to embrace fully the "[r]ealities" that Erlynne (her disguised -and distinctly unsaintly -mother) recommends (83). After Lady Windermere declares, "[i]f I lost my ideals, I should lose everything", Erlynne decides to let her daughter retain those necessary "illusions" (84, 80) 15 . is decision lends dramatic irony to one of Lady Windermere's renunciations of Puritanism. When Windermere tells her that "you and she [Erlynne] belong to di erent worlds", since "[i]nto your world evil has never entered", Lady Windermere replies, "[t]here is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand" (87-88) (87-88). But it is not quite "the same [epistemic] world for all" (ibidem), since Lady Windermere never learns that her mother abandoned her, Windermere never learns that his wife (temporarily) abandoned him, Augustus never learns that Erlynne manipulated him, and Darlington never learns that Lady Windermere visited him 16 . Erlynne alone knows all of the secrets. e implication that keeping certain secrets is vital to London Society's smooth functioning (and that revealing them is dangerous) forms a key part of the play's satire of the dominating social order. "I don't know what society is coming to", the Duchess of Berwick tells Lady Windermere, since "[t]he most dreadful people seem to go everywhere" (14). She then reveals the secret "[t]he whole of London" and "everyone in London" knows: Windermere has been visiting the notorious Erlynne frequently and protractedly (8,22). When Windermere subsequently pressures his wife to invite Erlynne to her twenty-rst birthday party, he emphasizes that she "wants to get back into society" and this requires invitations "to houses where women who are in what is called Society nowadays do go" (24). Still in Puritan mode at this point, Lady Windermere retorts that "[i]f a woman really repents, she never wishes to return to the society that has made or seen her ruin" (25; my emphasis). At this early stage in her ethical journey, the potential irony of the phrase "made or seen" escapes her.
In Act II, the infatuated Augustus asks Windermere to help Erlynne enter "this demmed thing called Society" (33). Later, when Darlington begs Lady Windermere to run away with him, since she now knows of her husband's apparent in delity, he does not pretend that "the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society", since "[t]hey matter a great deal" -in fact, "far too much" (42). Similarly, although Erlynne is initially " " ' 189 happy to "see that there are just as many fools in society as there used to be", she is surprised and chastened by the sudden maternal feeling that compels her to protect her daughter's reputation at the risk of her own recently reclaimed one (47). Consequently, she tells Lady Windermere that she plans "to live abroad again" because "[t]he English climate doesn't suit" her and her "heart is a ected here" (75). She prefers "living in the south" because "London is too full of fogs and -and serious people"; she is unsure "[w]hether the fogs produce the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs", "but the whole thing rather gets on my nerves" (76) 17 . Erlynne's indictments of "the English climate" and London's "fogs" and "serious people" anticipate Wilde's claim to Shaw that "England is the land of intellectual fogs" (2000, 554), but the play's satire of London Society nevertheless constitutes a much milder critique of the reigning social order than either the more direct (and less commercially successful) denunciations of Shaw and Ibsen, or the critiques contained in several of Wilde's 1890-1891 publications (see Small 1999, xxiv, xxvii-xxix, xxxii-xxxiii) 18 . Whereas Wilde's "Soul of Man" calls for English society's complete restructuring, Lady Windermere's Fan advocates for signi cant ethical change not in the larger system but only in the lives of speci c individuals (xxxii-xxxiii). us, if we treat Wilde's critique of England as a valid "Irish dimension" in his work (as his invocation of an "Hibernian School" and a "Celtic School" suggests we should), then it operates at a scale that is much smaller in Lady Windermere's Fan than in Wilde's book reviews and essays and in the revised e Picture of Dorian Gray. is reduced scale (along with the play's resistance to allegoresis) may explain why Wilde's recent Hibernicizing critics have shown less interest in analyzing the society plays 19 .
In ironic contrast, however, an "Irish dimension" more speci c than anything in Lady Windermere's Fan emerges in Charles Brook eld and Jimmy Glover's e Poet and the Puppets: A Travestie Suggested by "Lady Windermere's Fan", which premiered in May 1892, three months after Wilde's play (Ellmann 1988, 369-370;Sturgis 2018, 447-448). In addition to burlesquing his career, his literary creations, his alleged plagiarism, and his supposed condescension to actors and audience, the travesty sought to sink Wilde's social status by restoring to him the Irish accent he said he had lost at Oxford (Ellmann 1988, 38). Brook eld and Glover's parody opens with "[m]ysterious music which gradually resolves itself into an Irish jig" (2003,217), and the Poet (Wilde) then sings, to the tune of "Saint Patrick's Day": When rst I was hurled on the face of this world People thought 'twas a thunderbolt fallen. But when they found who had arrived a Hurroo! Rent the air -faith 'twas something appalling! en a crowd came along many thousand men strong To gaze on this wonderful child. 17 Lord Augustus, happy to accompany Mrs Erlynne abroad, also decries the "demmed climate", along with "[d]emmed clubs", "demmed cooks", and "demmed everything" (Wilde 1999, 88). 18 As Matthew Sturgis argues, the play's "distinction was not just its scintillating dialogue but also its blithe dissection (and acceptance) of society's convenient hypocrisies and double standards" (2018, 424; my emphasis). See also Williams 2020, 103-104. 19 Noreen Doody sees in the Act Two exchange between the Duchess of Berwick and the Australian Mr. Hopper "a double laugh for the colonized listener at the grand dismissiveness and disregard of the imperialist for a whole continent and its people" (2018, 76). However, as Josephine Guy notes in her "Commentary" on Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde included a "pejorative representation of Australia" in several of his works, so the humor here is more likely to be at Australia's expense rather than in its defense (2021, 546).
For they knew by his cry and the re in his eye It was neighbour O'Flaherty's child. (Brook eld, Glover 2003, 217;Ellmann 1988, 369-370) After Brook eld and Glover read Wilde the script (at his request), he displayed patronizing indulgence, but he felt considerably less tolerant a few weeks after the travesty's premiere, when England's play licenser E.F.S. Pigott banned performances of Salomé (Ellmann 1988, 372-373;Sturgis 2018, 454-456). In an interview with e Pall Mall Budget to protest this "most contemptible" act, Wilde indignantly compared Pigott's consent for "the personality of an artist to be presented in a caricature on the stage [the travesty]" with his refusal to "allow the work of that artist to be shown under very rare and very beautiful conditions" (Wilde 1979d, 188). When writing to William Rothenstein about the ban, Wilde was su ciently incensed to insert three exclamation marks: "at the same moment when he [Pigott] prohibited Salomé, he licenced a burlesque of Lady Windermere's Fan in which an actor dressed up like me and imitated my voice and manner!!!" (Wilde 2000, 531-532). He also lamented the absence of protest against such "censorship" by any actors or theater critics except William Archer: "[t]his shows how bad our stage must be, and also shows how Philistine the English journalists are" (533) 20 .
In e Pall Mall Budget interview, Wilde sounded a similarly anti-English note, declaring that he did not wish to call himself "a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in its artistic judgement" and that he was "not English" but "Irish -which is quite another thing" (1979d, 188). To a French interviewer, he stated that English "people are essentially anti-artistic and narrow-minded"; that he has "English friends to whom [… he is] attached [,] but [he does] not love […] the English" people as a whole; that "[t]here is a great deal of hypocrisy in England"; and that "[t]he typical Briton is Tartu e seated in his shop behind the counter" (190). Lady Windermere's Fan lacks this kind of explicit anti-English hostility, but Wilde had voiced similar sentiments in the expanded Dorian Gray, so it is unsurprising that A Woman of No Importance, begun a few weeks after the Salomé ban, draws heavily upon dialogue from e Picture of Dorian Gray (Small 1993, xxix-xxx;Ellmann 1988, 381).

A Woman of No Importance: "like a dead thing smeared with gold"
Wilde's anger at caricature and censorship fueled this most anti-English of his society plays, yet its harshest critique is voiced not by the English dandy Lord Illingworth (a variation on Dorian Gray's Sir Henry Wotton) but the American Puritan Hester Worsley. After overhearing what Wilde's draft notes call a " n de siècle conversation on marriage" among Lady Hunstanton's female guests, Hester expresses disapproval and distinguishes between English society and "true American society", which "consists simply of all the good women and good men we have in our country" (Small 1993, xxxvi;Wilde 1993, 43). Seeking to smooth things over, Hunstanton concedes that "in England we have too many arti cial social barriers", but Hester remains unmolli ed: You rich people in England, you don't know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacri ce, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don't know how to live -you don't even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you e rst-night audience subjected to this reproof included Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary of Ireland, and the Liberal Unionist MP Joseph Chamberlain, but the lines were cut from later performances, perhaps in response to some jeers accompanying the applause at the nal curtain (Ellmann 1988, 381;Sturgis 2018, 478). Wilde retained Illingworth's censure of "the British intellect", which echoes passages in " e Decay of Lying" and e Picture of Dorian Gray, but Hester's and Illingworth's critiques of English society and national character are ultimately weakened because Hester (like Mrs Erlynne) plans to depart England at the play's end (accompanied by her ancé Gerald Arbuthnot and his mother Mrs. Arbuthnot) and also because Illingworth is nally portrayed as a callous, controlling "man of no importance" (Wilde 1993, 20, 112;2005, 320;2007, 101) 22 . In addition, as with Lady Windermere's Fan, at the play's close the established social order dominates still 23 .
Nonetheless, like the earlier play, A Woman of No Importance includes a sustained repudiation of Puritanism, both English and American. With respect to the English brand, A Woman of No Importance mocks the pompous M.P. Mr Kelvil, who spends the mornings during his stay at Hunstanton Chase "writing" on "Purity", his "usual subject", since he believes "the poorer classes of this country display a marked desire for a higher ethical standard" (Wilde 1993, 13-14). Kelvil laments that Illingworth appears "lacking in that ne faith in the nobility and purity of life which is so important in this century" and "does not appreciate the beauty of our English home-life", "the mainstay of our moral system in England" (Wilde 1993, 21-22). Unsurprisingly, the play's two dandies, Illingworth and Mrs Allonby, scorn Hester as a Puritan, and Allonby's dare to Illingworth to kiss Hester sets in motion the climax of Act III, in which Mrs Arbuthnot, to prevent Gerald from striking Illingworth (for assaulting Hester), reveals to Gerald that Illingworth is his father (27)(28)(29)(87)(88).
Yet, by forcing himself on Hester in Act III, Illingworth wrong-foots the play's previous pro-dandy and anti-Puritan stance, and this may explain why Wilde removed from an earlier draft Illingworth's shrill and extended condemnation of English Puritanism, which had been originally placed in the same act (119-20) 24 . In contrast, Hester's reeducation constitutes a more successful critique of Puritanism: like Lady Windermere, Hester switches from maintaining that "the sins of the parents" being "visited on the children" represents "a just law" and "God's law", to admitting that she "was wrong" and that "God's law is only Love" (80, 102). Her new perspective explains why, a little earlier, she de es her ancé Gerald and encourages Mrs Arbuthnot not to marry Illingworth, since "[t]hat would be real dishonour" and "real disgrace" (100). e scale of her peripeteia is highlighted when Illingworth asks which " nde-siècle person" persuaded Gerald to stop pressuring his mother to marry Illingworth; Mrs 21 Michael McAteer links the "leper in purple" and "dead thing smeared with gold" similes to ornate diction of Salomé (2016, 28-29).
22 Lord Illingworth's line "Discontent is the rst step in the progress of a man or a nation" (Wilde 1993, 60) is, according to David Alderson, an implicitly Irish challenge to "the restrictive English puritan mentality" (1997,52). 23 However, the fact that Lord Illingworth is portrayed negatively by the play's end may (or may not) transform his earlier defense of society into Wilde's muted critique of it: "[t]o be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. Society is a necessary thing" (Wilde 1993, 68). 24 e excised speech drew heavily on anti-Puritan passages from the revised e Picture of Dorian Gray. 192 Arbuthnot replies, " e Puritan", at which Illingworth "[w]inces" (110). us, as in Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's e ort to dispel English "intellectual fogs" is more successful with Puritanism than with the ruling social order, even though the Puritan in this case happens to be American.
As also happened with Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance's success generated satiric pushback, some of which again featured an anti-Irish component, including cartoons in Punch and e Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News that depicted Wilde and the play's characters as members of a Christy minstrelsy troupe (Mendelssohn 2018, 238;Plates 44 238; Plates 44 and 45 and 45). Michèle Mendelssohn has linked these caricatures to minstrelsy routines that Wilde may (or may not) have witnessed or read about a decade earlier during his USA tour, some of which were designed to satirize his aesthetic creed and Irish heritage, and she argues that the memory of these routines helped in turn to shape his society plays: "[e]xposure to Irish and black caricatures taught Wilde what he needed to know to turn his eye on n de siècle Anglo-American socialites, and turn them into characters who quipped like minstrels" (238). She acknowledges that "[n]owhere did he mention that […his dramatic techniques] were also hallmarks of Christy minstrelsy" (231) and also that he "didn't mention these satirists in his correspondence", but she believes "it would be absurd to imagine that he didn't know about them" (239). Mendelssohn's argument that Wilde's artistic "approach" in the society plays was "minstrel-inspired" and resulted in "his own kind of whiteface theatre" relies on indirect rather than direct evidence (ibidem). is indirect evidence includes the comparisons that reviewers in Punch, Judy, and e Guardian newspaper made between A Woman of No Importance's dialogue and Christy minstrelsy exchanges (237). (237). Yet, as John Cooper notes, "there is no evidence that Wilde's staging of comic repartee was intentionally imitative of interlocutor minstrelsy"; Cooper also highlights another crucial factor: "the comic press" were seeking "to denigrate Wilde by suggesting such a connection" (2019 n.p.). With similar impulses to belittle, Brook eld and Glovertoo had included a Christy minstrelsy sketch in their travesty of Lady Windermere 's Fan (2003, 237-240). Mendelssohn notes the minstrelsy section in e Poet and the Puppets but misses a key related question: since satirists and hostile reviewers were using minstrelsy to mock Wilde, why would he then borrow from it for his own work? (2018,(227)(228). us, as with the relationship between Lady Windermere's Fan and e Poet and e Puppets, the satiric response to A Woman of No Importance in the reviewers' use of minstrelsy comparisons actually constituted an "Irish dimension" (in the form of anti-Irishness) as large in scope as anything in Wilde's play itself.

An Ideal Husband: "you know what your English newspapers are like"
As in the two earlier plays, a key plot strand of An Ideal Husband traces the ethical reeducation of a Puritan, in this case Lady Gertrude Chiltern: she changes from someone who adores "ideals" and imposes them on her husband Sir Robert (who nds her "pitiless in her perfection -cold and stern and without mercy"), into someone who learns (in Lord Goring's words) that "[n]obody is incapable of doing a foolish thing" or "a wrong thing", and "that life cannot be understood […] cannot be lived without much charity" (Wilde 2013, 45, 81-82, 99, Wilde 2013  Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues -and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins -one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. 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. (32)(33) Nevertheless, as was the case with Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, Cheveley's negative characterization ultimately weakens the play's overall denunciation of English Puritanism.
On the other hand, Wilde's critique of "London Society" builds to some degree upon Cheveley's negativity. Lady Markby congratulates herself on her "small shred of decent reputation", which is "just enough to prevent the lower classes making painful observations through the windows of the carriage", and she contends that "our Society is terribly overpopulated" and "someone should arrange a proper scheme of assisted emigration"; agreeing with her, Cheveley comments that, on returning to London after several years, she nds "Society has become dreadfully mixed", and "[o]ne sees the oddest people everywhere", a comment with which she unknowingly criticizes herself (71) 26 . Lord Caversham, who is depicted much more positively than Cheveley, anticipates the irony of this critique by declaring he is "[s]ick of London Society" (8) for being insu ciently exclusive and for consisting of "a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing" (21). Nevertheless, Caversham's critiques are challenged by the play's two most positively depicted characters: Goring, Caversham's son, tells his father that he "love[s] talking about nothing", since "[i]t is the only thing I know anything about"; and Mabel Chiltern professes to "love London Society" because "it has immensely improved" and "is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics", which is " [j]ust what Society should be" (2, 8). e play's unstable critiques of English Puritanism and "London Society" are matched d "London Society" are matched by its con icted depictions of English national character. Cheveley voices the most negative by its con icted depictions of English national character. Cheveley voices the most negative observations about the English, but (as noted) she is also the play's least positively portrayed observations about the English, but (as noted) she is also the play's least positively portrayed character. She claims that "a typical Englishman" is "always dull and usually violent"; and earlier, character. She claims that "a typical Englishman" is "always dull and usually violent"; and earlier, after denouncing English Puritanism, she reminds Robert of "what your English newspapers after denouncing English Puritanism, she reminds Robert of "what your English newspapers are like" and asks him to "[t]hink of their loathsome joy", of "the delight they would have in are like" and asks him to "[t]hink of their loathsome joy", of "the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in", and of "the hypocrite with dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in", and of "the hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard" his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard" (78, 33-34) (78, 33-34) 27 27 . e play supplements this critique . e play supplements this critique of English newspapers with Robert's claim that "spies are of no use nowadays", since "[t]he newspapers do their work instead", to which Goring replies, "And thunderingly well they do it" (97). However, Robert's guilty past undermines to some degree the ethos of such denunciations, as can be seen when he issues a haughty dismissal: "[y]ou have lived so long abroad, Mrs Cheveley, that you seem to be unable to realize 26 e reference to a "scheme of assisted emigration" may (or may not) disclose another "Irish dimension" to the play. 27 As Eltis points out, these remarks appear to refer to scandals involving Sir Charles Dilke and Charles Stewart Parnell (2013, xx), which makes the Parnell allusion another, if minor, "Irish dimension". Similar allusions to the Parnell and Dilke scandals occur in " e Soul of Man Under Socialism" (Wilde 2007, 255-256, 575-576). Wilde 2007, 255-256, 575-576 that you are talking to an English gentleman"; she replies, "I realize that I am talking to a man who laid the foundation of his fortune by selling to a Stock Exchange speculator a Cabinet secret" (31). Later, she sarcastically describes Robert to Goring as "so upright a gentleman, so honourable an English gentleman" (113). us, the "Irish dimension" inherent in the play's critique of Englishness and English newspapers is undermined to some degree because it is primarily voiced by ethically compromised characters like Cheveley and Robert.
At the same time, a counter-current of dialogue explicitly and implicitly praises Englishness and the Empire. Goring tells Robert that to confess to his crime means Robert "would never be able to talk morality again. And in England a man who can't talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician", with "nothing left for him as a profession except Botany or the Church" (54-55). Yet Goring prefaces this anti-English critique by saying "one of the best things" about "the English" is that they "can't stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits that he has been in the wrong" (54) 28 . In addition, Caversham, described as "[a] ne Whig type", approvingly quotes e Times' praise of Robert as one who " [r]epresents what is best in English public life" and who makes a "[n]oble contrast to the lax morality so common among foreign politicians"; Caversham later claims that Sir Robert has "got what we want so much in political life nowadays -high character, high moral tone, high principles" (7,117,131). is might initially be viewed as dramatic irony, but Robert ultimately preserves his secret and salvages his career, and the play does not appear to disapprove of his decisions to reject confession and resignation 29 .
Neither does the play challenge the positive image of the British Empire that Robert promotes. He describes the "Argentine [Canal Company] scheme" as "a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle", in contrast to the British Government's purchase of "Suez Canal shares", which was "a very great and splendid undertaking" that "gave us our direct route to India", and whose "imperial value" made it "necessary that we should have control" (28). is too might initially be treated as dramatic irony, but the play's ending implicitly confers approval on Robert's pro-imperial stance, as Caversham congratulates him on receiving a "seat in the Cabinet": "[i]f the country doesn't go to the dogs or the Radicals, we shall have you Prime Minister, some day" (140) 30 . e play's seeming complicity in imperialism and Machiavellianism raises questions for some contemporary critics: "[w]as Wilde satirising or attering the privileged elite? Was the play suggesting that moral probity was politically essential or distractingly irrelevant…?" (Eltis 2013, vii). Its sexism raises further questions: "[w]as the play suggesting […] that women were to be excluded from the political sphere, or that their contribution was an essential counterbalance to men's self-serving ambition?" (ibidem). e most pressing question concerns Goring's Act IV homily to Lady Chiltern, which sounds extremely sexist to many contemporary ears: 28 A similar mix of critique and praise pervades Lady Markby's comment to Mabel that she "will always be as pretty as possible", which "is the best fashion there is, and the only fashion that England succeeds in setting" (70). 29 Wilde's implicit indulgence of the aws of both Robert and London society emerges in an interview: "if Robert Chiltern, the Ideal Husband, were a common clerk, the humanity of his tragedy would be none the less poignant. I have placed him in the higher ranks of life merely because that is the side of social life with which I am best acquainted. In a play dealing with actualities to write with ease one must write with knowledge" (Wilde 1979c, 250; my emphasis). 30 Given Caversham's positive depiction, his remarks complicate both Michael McAteer's contention that the play is an "exposé of the corrupt nature of Imperial nance" (2016,34) and Sos Eltis's summing up of Robert as a "corrupt politician" and of the play as "Wilde's most pointed exercise in demolishing the language ofmoral superiority in the speci c context of English national identity" (2017,279).
' 195 You love Robert. Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? 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 emotions. 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. (Wilde 2013, 134-135) Soon after digesting this patriarchal advice, Lady Chiltern regurgitates it to Robert: A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacri ce to me, a useless sacri ce! (136) Seeking to salvage Wilde's radical reputation from such a reactionary episode, Sos Eltis points to problems in the play concerning coherence, contemporary performance decisions, and audience reception. Regarding the rst, she argues that "[t]he play does not establish a consistent viewpoint on the issues it raises" (2013, xv). She acknowledges that Goring's speech "is particularly problematic", since "it is positioned as the traditional raissoneur's nal verdict", but she maintains that it "comes as something of a surprise from the character who delivers it and is hard to read as the logical conclusion of the preceding action" (Wilde 2013, xvi).
Wilde 2013, xvi). is di culty supposedly arises because in Act II Goring "dismissed his friend's worship of wealth and power over others as 'a thoroughly shallow creed'", and "it is hard to see how the intervening action could have given Goring a higher opinion of his friend's desire for greater political power" (Eltis 2013, xvi, citing Wilde 2013, 51). Rega Eltis 2013, xvi, citing Wilde 2013, 51). Regarding performance issues, Eltis argues that "Lady Chiltern's unlikely word-for-word parroting of Goring's advice tends not to validate his words but rather to teeter on the edge of absurdity -an inherent instability which leads most directors to cut her speech drastically" (Eltis 2013, xvi). Finally, regarding reception issues, she concludes that "An Ideal Husband is a deceptive and indeterminate play, which can o er di erent meanings according to the assumptions of its audience members" (xxii) 31 .
Eltis's points regarding performance and reception are relevant, but the origin of the play's supposed puzzles can be accounted for just as parsimoniously by acknowledging our contemporary unease at its sexism and imperialism. Concerning the puzzle of apparent character inconsistency, a solution can be inferred from Eltis's recognition that "[g]oring separates male intellect from female emotion and apparently consigns women to a purely domestic and supportive role" (xvi). In other words, in Act II Goring speaks to Robert man to man, but in Act IV he speaks to Lady Chiltern man to woman. Between those conversations, he speaks to Cheveley and exonerates Robert's crime as "an act of folly done in his youth, dishonourable, I admit, shameful, I admit, unworthy of him, I admit, and therefore […] not his true character" (Wilde 2013, 107). us, contra Eltis's argument, the play actually does possess in Goring a coherent, stable, and determinate spokesperson -and one who also happens to speak for Wilde.