An Ideal Husband Quotes Flashcards
“A large eighteenth-century French tapestry - representing the Triumph of Love”
Act 1, stage directions
Themes: love, wealth
Lady Basildon: “Ah! I hate being educated!”
Act 1
Themes: women, class
Mabel Chiltern: “Oh, I love London Society!…It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics”
Act 1
Themes: Gender, class
“Venetian red hair, aqualine nose….. she is in heliotrope, with diamons. She looks rather like an orchid and makes great demands on one’s curioristy………A work of art, on the whole, but showing the influence of too many school”
Act 1, stage directions describing Mrs Cheveley
Themes: Gender, class, temptation
Mrs Cheveley: “I don’t know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it”
Act 1
Themes: Gender, beauty, oppression
Mrs Cheveley: “Men can be analysed, women… merely adored”
Act 1
Themes: Gender
Mrs Marchmont: “Men are so painfully unobservant!”
Act 1
Themes: Gender, being observant
R Chiltern: “This Argentine canal scheme is a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.”
Act 1
Themes: Morality
R Chiltern: “You seem to be unable to realise that you are talking to an English gentleman”
Act 1
Themes: Gender, morality, class
Mrs Cheveley: “This is the game of life as we all have to play it”
Act 1 (referring to her blackmail)
Themes: morality
Mrs Cheveley: “Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to man - now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal”
Act 1
Themes: Reputation, morality
Mrs Cheveley: “Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.”
Act 1
Themes: Class, secrets
Lady Chiltern: “She was untruthful, dishonest, an evil influence”
Referring to Mrs Cheveley
Act 1
Themes: Morality
R Chiltern: “No one should be judged entirely by their past”
Act 1
Themes: Morality, reputation
Lady C: “One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.”
Act 1
Themes: Past, morality
R Chiltern: “We all make mistakes”
Act 1
Themes: Morality
R Chiltern: “Truth is a very complex thing”
Talking to Lady C
Act 1
Themes: Honesty, morality
Lady C: “Circumstances should never alter principles!”
Talking to R.C
Act 1
Themes: Morality
Lady C: “It is power to do good that is fine”
Talking to RC
Act 1
Themes: Morality, power
Lady C: “be that ideal still. That great inheritance throw not away - that tower of ivory do not destroy”
Talking to RC
Act 1
Themes: Morality, love, idealisation
R Chiltern: “Put out the lights, Mason, put out the lights!”
After telling Lady C he has no secrets - Othello reference after he kills his wife
Act 1
Themes: Shame, morality
R Chiltern: “I would have lost the love of the one woman in the world I worship”
Talking about if he’d told Gertrude
Act 2
Themes: Love, honesty, morality
R Chiltern: “I was twenty-two at the time, and I had the double misfortune of being well-born and poor”
Act 2
Themes: Class, morality, excuses
R Chiltern: “Is it fair that the folly, the sin of one’s youth, if men choose to call it a sin, should wreck a life like mine?”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, excuses
R Chiltern: “Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth.”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, excuses, class/wealth
R Chiltern: “preached to us the most marvellous of all gospels, the gospel of gold”
About Baron Arnheim
Themes: Morality, temptation, wealth
R Chiltern: “with a strange smile on his pale, curved lips, he led me through his wonderful picture gallery, showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels, his carved ivories”
About Baron Arnheim
Act 2
Themes: Temptation, morality
R Chiltern: “I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to”
Act 2
Themes: temptation, morality
Lord G: “Did you never suffer any regret for what you had done?”
R Chiltern: “No. I felt that I had fought the century with its own weapons, and won”
Act 2
Themes: Temptation, morality
R Chiltern: “I have paid conscience money many times.. The sum Baron Arnheim gave me I have distributed twice over in public charities since then”
Act 2
Themes: Regret, morality
Lord Goring: “Something about ambition that is unscrupulous always”
Act 2
Themes: Ambition, morality
Lord Goring: “Lady Chiltern… I think that… often you don’t make sufficient allowances”
Act 2
Themes: Idealisation
Lady C: “Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is a wrong thing.”
Act 2
Themes: love, idealisation
Lord Goring: “It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world”
Act 2
Themes: Love
Mrs C: “A diamond snake-brooch with a ruby, a rather large ruby”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, wealth
Mrs C: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, relationships
Mrs C: “It is because your husband is himself fraudulent and dishonest that we pair so well together.”
Act 2
Themes: Morality
Lady C: “Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me. I feel as if you had soiled me forever.”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, love, idealisation
Lady C: “when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! The ideal of my life!”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, idealisation, love
R Chiltern: “Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men”
Act 2
Themes: Love, gender, idealisation
R Chiltern: “When we men love women, we love them knowing their weakness, their follies, their imperfections”
Act 2
Themes: Love, idealisation, gender
R Chiltern: “All sins, except a sin against itself, love should forgive”
Act 2
Themes: Morality, love
R Chiltern: “You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds”
Act 2
Themes: Idealisation, love - biblical reference
R Chiltern: “Let women make no more ideals of men!”
Act 2
Themes: Love, idealisation, gender
R Chiltern: “You whom I have so wildly loved - have ruined mine!”
Act 2
Themes: Love, gender
“Her sobs are like the sobs of a child”
Stage directions, Act 2
After R.C leaves her in a room alone
Themes: Love, idealisation, gender
Lord G: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”
Themes: Love, confidence
“I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you. Gertrude”
Gertrude’s letter to Goring
Act 3
Themes: Relationships, naivity
Lord G: “It is the growth of the moral sense in women that makes marriage such a hopeless, one-sided institution”
Act 3
Themes: Marriage, morality, gender
“Lamia-like, she is in green and silver. She has a cloak of black satin, lined with dead rose-leaf silk”
Stage directions describing Mrs Cheveley, Act 3
Themes: Morality
Lamia is a mythical half-snake, half-woman
Lord C: “No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir.”
Act 3
Themes: Gender, intelligence
R Chiltern: “I would to God I had died before I had been so horribly tempted, or had fallen so low.”
Act 3
Themes: Regret, morality love (wishes Gertrude didn’t hate him)
R Chiltern: “I am a ship without a rudder in a night without a star”
Act 3
Themes: Marriage, love (Gertrude is the star)
R Chiltern: “She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men”
Act 3
Themes: Gender, temptation, idealisation
Mrs C: “You were the only person I had ever cared for, if I ever have cared for anybody”
Act 3
Themes: Love, morality
Lord G: “self-sacrifice is a thing that should be put down by law. It is so demoralising to the people for whom one sacrifices oneself”
Act 3
Themes: Sacrifice, relationships
Mrs C: “How you men stand up for each other!”
Lord G: “How you women war against each other!”
Act 3
Themes: Gender, relationships
“Tears at the bracelet in a paroxysm of rage, with inarticulate sounds”
Stage directions, Mrs C tries to get the bracelet off, Act 3
Themes: Morality, humanity
“A mask has fallen from her. She is, for the moment, dreadful to look at.”
Stage directions, when Mrs C realises that she has been caught for theft, Act 3
Themes: Appearance vs reality, morality
Mrs C: “I find that somehow Gertrude Chiltern’s dying speech and confession has strayed into my pocket”
Act 3
Themes: Morality, relationships
“Her face is illumined with evil triumph…. her last glance is like a swift arrow”
Stage directions as Mrs C leaves, Act 3
Themes: Morality, victory
Lord G: “If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it”
Act 4
Themes: Marriage, morality
R Chiltern: “This letter of yours, Gertrude, makes me feel that nothing that the world may do can hurt me now”
Act 4
Themes: Love, happiness
Lord G: “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?”
Act 4
Themes: Love
Lord G: “Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission”
Act 4
Themes: Love, gender
Lord G: “A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s”
Act 4
Themes: Gender, power
Lord G: “A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses”
Act 4
Themes: Gender
Lord G: “A woman who can keep a man’s love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women”
Act 4
Themes: Gender, love
Lord G: “We men and women are not made to accept such sacrifices from eachother.”
Act 4
Themes: Gender
Lord G: “Besides, Robert has been punished enough.”
Lady C: “We have both been punished. I set him up too high”
Act 4
Themes: Morality, idealisation, punishment
Lord G: “If he has fallen from his alter, do not thrust him into the mire”
Act 4
Themes: Morality, marriage
Lady C: “A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s”
She’s parroting Lord G’s words
Act 4
Themes: Gender
R Chiltern: “Gertrude, you are to me the white image of all good things, and sin can never touch you”
Act 4
Themes: Love, idealisation
Mabel C: “An ideal husband! Oh, I don’t think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world”
Act 4
Themes: Marriage, love, idealisation
Mabel C: “All I want to be…. to be… oh! A real wife to him”
Act 4
Themes: Marriage, gender
Robert C: “Is it love you feel for me, or is it pity merely?”
Lady C: (kisses him) “It is love, Robert. Love, and only love. For both of us a new life is beginning.”
Act 4
Themes: marriage, love
Final line of the play - some modern productions leave out Gertrude’s final line
