An Ideal Husband Critics Flashcards
SOS: “ Wilde invited audiences to treat it as a problem play, society drama engaging with contemporary issues”
SOS:: “The play reviews, English, high society and government has enthralled to wealth and birth, hypocritically veiling its feelings with the supposed adherence to high moral ideas”
NEAL: “Insincere society that refuses to acknowledge its reliance on secrecy and public masks”
SOS: “Sir Robert’s marriage and the country’s financial integrity are rendered vulnerable through an insistence Lon unrealisable standards of morality”
SHAW: “the mechanical idealism of [Sir Robert’s] stupidly good wife”
Liverpool Mercury Reviewer: Sir Robert was “rescued by his wife”, the play concluded with “the success of the wife in preserving her ideal husband’s honour”
SOS: “One sense that does emerge coherently from the play is it critique of the dangers of idealism both on a personal and national level”
ELTIS: “Sir Robert varies his moral standpoint according to circumstances”… “unshakeable English integrity” to “resentful self pity”
Wilde: “All art is at once surface and symbol”
SOS: “Outward appearance is all that counts”
SOS: Women are the “natural guardians of society’s higher ethical standards”
SOS: “The play does not establish a consistent viewpoint on the issues it raises… mutually contradictory statements…”, NO “coherent conclusion.
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SOS: A society “founded in corruption or complacent privilege”
SOS: “Each character talks with a crystallised non naturalistic wit, which complicates notions of sincerity, self expression, and truth.”
WILDE: “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art”
