Does An Ideal Husband Celebrate Human Imperfections or Encourage Corruption?

 

   Does An Ideal Husband Celebrate Human Imperfections or Encourage Corruption?

2018 was the year I went from high school to college where I had my BA in English literature. The first semester I took an introductory course in English Drama. It was there that I read Oscar Wilde for the first time. The professor picked Lady Windermere’s Fan to be our only reading. A couple of months later after the first semester was finished, I went to Cairo’s International Book Fair, a habit that I easily broke over the years. There I bought a collection of his works just because I knew I was going to need it sometime very soon.

But that “very soon” came four years later after I finished my degree, I decided to pick up this book and get back to Wilde from where I left off. Customary, I started with Days of Being Earnest, then Salome, A Woman of No Importance, and all the way to An Ideal Husband. Reading all the plays collected in this book in order. After an entire week of living in the Wildean world of elitist society, beauty, luxurious houses, and Victorian fashion, one couldn’t help but get attached to it, live it, dream about it, and even mimic it, forgetting his own real circumstances.

But why am I talking about An Ideal Husband in Particular?

Because it is still fresh and vivid in my mind on one hand, and also because it deals with a subject matter that I find important and interesting, and surprisingly relatable. Therefore, I decided to exercise this interest and turn it into an article. An Ideal Husband, published in 1895 frankly questions both the private and the public spheres in London. It’s about the blackmail of a very important political figure who works at the House of Commons (parliament) and is later offered a cabinet seat. Mr. Robert Chiltern’s past mistake of fraud and corruption haunts him to his present and threatens both his position in public life as well as his very successful marriage to Gertrude or Lady Chiltern. The play also tackles other issues of love, marriage, and conservatism which Wilde succeeds in juxtaposing with each other.

 

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: “…No one should be entirely judged by their past.”

LADY CHILTERN (sadly): One’s past is what one is. It’s the only way by which people should be judged.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: That’s a hard saying, Gertrude!

 

This quote in my opinion poses an immensely important question that has been raised more frequently, especially with the rise and rise of social media which made it easy for everyone to track down people, look for their past slips and errors, big or small and judge them for it years and years after. This brings up “cancel culture” into even more suspicion and skepticism than what it is already being put into. Is there a moral law to say who should or shouldn’t be convicted for their past slips?

Robert Chiltern turns up to be a cheater because years and years back when he was full of ambition, he used a cabinet secret to arrive at his great fortune, he shortcutted his way to wealth and climbed the ladder with one or two leaps, that all when he was still very young and had a lifetime ahead of him, but at that time he saw a chance. A woman named Mrs. Cheveley had found out about this secret and came all the way from Vienna to London in order to blackmail him turning his life upside down. In that manner, Mrs. Cheveley is the evil antagonist, and Chiltern’s flaw is easily forgiven. Of course, this isn’t the first time to find ourselves empathizing with a character just because he looks or sounds innocent, regardless of what she or he has done.

I believe Wilde was against Chiltern’s conviction. Portraying Mrs. Cheveley as the epitome of jealousy and pure evil of elitist women with power, and Chiltern as the respectable “ideal husband” who’s married to a loyal typical conservative woman, leading a steady happy life. Again, moral relativity is present at the table when we ask ourselves, is what Chiltern did to be forgiven? I think yes is the answer the play wants to give. Primarily because Chiltern’s mistake was harmless and that no one should have known about it, it’s not groundbreaking in any way, or that’s what Chiltern thought. On the other hand, one can say this is merely another way of justifying corruption. What else is corruption if it’s not what Chiltern did?

Even if one’s mistakes never harm anyone physically or psychologically, it is still in question and that’s what “cancel culture” debates. One of the main reasons why so many people detest cancel culture is because it gives great freedom to the public to put other people, usually, powerful figures, accountable for both their present and past errors. We often underestimate the public and accuse them of narrow-mindedness, which can be argued for natural reasons, but it can’t be true all the way.

I am not saying that the play is wrong in its message, not because literature can’t play a decisive moral role, but because we all know that things are more complicated than that. Nevertheless, the wider, long-term impact of cheating one’s way up the social ladder is that it creates unfairness and inequality. This idea is at the roots of many ideologies and disciplines. Marxism for instance rejects this unequal distribution of chances. There are so many Robert Chilterns out there selling their morality for money or power, many of them get away with what they do, and very few do not, and there lies another form of inequality. If one gets away with it then so should everyone, and if one doesn’t, then everyone’s past should be dug into, no more secrets. No one should pay the price of his mistakes while others live freely without conviction claiming that it’s better than no conviction at all. For years we have seen judicial systems act executions in public as a clear threat to others, but we’ve also seen political organizations or merely singular figures eradicating all traces of anything that was in their best interest to get rid of. If breaking the rules is an option we give to Robert Chiltern, if rules can change their nature from rigid to soft then everyone should have access for an initial mistake to be made, or a line to be crossed, one wish to be granted, they, in this case, are free to use it as they wish. Including one that we grant ourselves as readers who are capable of forgiveness and compassion.