An Ideal Husband Critics Flashcards
“Goring… acts as Wilde’s personal voice”
George Woodcock
“Wilde recultivated an eroding sexual stereotype of the victorian era that women are intellectually the inferiors of men”
Kerry Powell
“Women were creatures of vast feeling but scant intellect”
Kerry Powell
“The Ideal husband is caricatured as a sort of plaything at the mercy of his wife’s every whim”
Norbert Kohl
“Women… were technically powerless… at the same time, the plays were really about them, and everything the men did was designed to win their love, admiration or forgiveness”
Roger Ebert
“As long as everyone plays by the rules in public, they can be broken in private”
Roger Ebert
“Lady Chiltern loves her husband but loves his upright character even more”
Roger Ebert
“characters regard each other as ‘pure’ representations”
Harold Bloom
“R.C’s machiavellian justification for his own reckless ambition for power and wealth”
Harold Bloom
“Reveals the gap between moral posturing and the reality of public power”
Peter Raby
“Insincere society that refuses to acknowledge its reliance on secrecy and public masks”
K. Neal
“An Ideal Husband hints at social and political corruption but withdraws into conventional ideology about the respective worth of men and women”
Philip Cohen
“[the upper class] did not give a damn about conventional morality”
Pearsall
“[Lady C is] priggish and naive”
Katherine Worth
“In AIH… Wilde proved he could glitter and say something at the same time”
Alvin Klein
“He wanted… to render a true portrait of English society’s follies”
Alvin Klein
“[Chiltern is] a spokeperson for every man who is presumed, and pressured, to be more than he is”
Alvin Klein
“Wilde’s.. astringent observations of women’s tendency to create impossible standards for men and live vicariously through their reflected glory”
Helen Meany
