An ideal husbandOscar WildeOmniClassics · Literature
An ideal husband
Oscar WildeA politician's celebrated integrity becomes vulnerable when someone acquires evidence of the act that helped establish his success.
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About the book
Sir Robert Chiltern enjoys a public reputation and a marriage founded partly on his wife's belief in his exceptional moral character. Mrs Cheveley threatens that position by demanding political assistance in exchange for silence about his past. The crisis draws in Lord Goring, whose apparently idle manner conceals a capacity for practical loyalty and judgment. Wilde turns letters, visits, and mistaken assumptions into a tightly managed social comedy, while the stakes remain personal as well as political. Lady Chiltern's idealization raises the question of whether love can survive knowledge that contradicts its preferred image. The play tests the relation between accountability and forgiveness without allowing respectable appearance to settle the issue, making the supposedly frivolous characters useful critics of those most confident in their seriousness.
- Integrity and reputation
- Forgiveness
- Idealization
Why read it
For a polished comedy that makes political vulnerability and the demand for perfection in marriage part of the same problem.
Four-act comedy · English text