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

Abstract

Throughout Oscar Wilde’s fiction and drama, objects carry symbolic weight, foil the plots of antagonists, and signal the sexual desires of Wilde’s characters. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) figures the transformative power of life’s experiences in a portrait of the protagonist; The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) confirms familial standing and identity through a handbag; and An Ideal Husband (1895) defuses a blackmail attempt when one of its protagonists recognizes a bracelet at an opportune moment. In addition to serving as valuable conceits, objects function as key signifiers, with Wilde regularly allowing objects to serve as extensions of characters themselves. Often, this act of extension is as much about definition as it is about substitution, as with Madame de Ferrol, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whom Lord Henry describes as “an édition de luxe of a bad French novel” when “she is in a very smart gown” (2007, 175), a quip recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), when Dumby refers to Mrs. Erlynne as “an édition de luxe of a wicked French novel, meant specially for the English market” (1995b, 26). The qualifier at the end of Dumby’s statement is important to note. With it, Wilde suggests that he is indeed crafting characters with scandalous sexualities, ones that are as potentially shocking to the British public as the decadent French “yellow book” of the era – like J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours – but codified in a way that allows them to be presented on stage for British theatergoers. My analysis begins with the assumption that objects – in the form of both props and conversational referents – do indeed signal the individual drives, including the sexual and political ambitions, of Wilde’s characters. An Ideal Husband lends itself to a close reading of its objects because Wilde revised it specifically for print following his incarceration. As Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (1994) explain, the play “is unique in the extent to which it attempts to create for a reading public a sense of visual immediacy” due to Wilde’s addition of “lengthy stage directions ensuring that thematic points would be made by stylistic and sartorial means” (27). An Ideal Husband perhaps offers more to the reader than the theatergoer. In addition to being analytically rich thanks to Wilde’s persistent visual cues, the play invites further analysis because its dialogue and stage directions are rife with a surprising number of references to objects with sexually and politically charged meanings, from Rococo paintings to yellow books. These objects not only offer insight into the sexual identities of characters, but they also carry striking political implications.