Identity is fluid. Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (first performed 1895), affirms this concept. The play asserts the notion that we, as humans, carve our own identity through conscious decision. In doing so, Wilde interrogates the idea of identity...

Throughout ‘An Ideal Husband’, the “battle of life” is portrayed in numerous ways by numerous different characters. For example. Robert Chiltern deceives those around him by selling a cabinet secret, and Mrs Cheveley wears the mask of good...

Both within ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ by Chaucer and ‘An Ideal Husband’ by Oscar Wilde, the theme of power is explored, with various characters attempting to increase their power often by corrupt or deceitful means. Although corruption is explored...

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th Century, featuring several tales loosely linked together that revolve around typical medieval lifestyles with its many modern day parallels. Marriage was a popular theme for debate...

In ‘An Ideal Husband’ Wilde effectively portrays compassion and forgiveness as very important qualities. He emphasizes how these characteristics can save relationships, proving that Robert and Lady Chiltern can recover their marriage. Robert and...

Chaucer and Wilde, although writing 500 years apart, both present power as an intrinsic aspect of marital life in Medieval and Victorian patriarchal societies. January sexually dominates May in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, while in ‘An Ideal Husband’ it...

Alike the division of a novel into chapters, entrances and exits allow playwrights to structure the different sections of the plot in a comprehensive and effective manner for the audience. Whilst Wilde uses “An Ideal Husband” to examine a...

In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, the narrative of drawing room interactions is used as a vessel to portray Wilde’s discussion of private versus public moral integrity and human nature through wit and a comedy of manners regarding upper-class of...

The long, antepenultimate paragraph of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” neatly interrupts the dialogue that has just revealed the true nature of the death of Erskine, a friend of the narrator. The narrator is taking in the shocking news that Erskine had...

“It’s a curious thing, Duchess, about the game of marriage – a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion – the wives hold all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick”.

The play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ by Oscar Wilde presents a window...

Oscar Wilde hails from the Victorian generation, a set of writers known for its dogmas and oppression. In many of his works, he negates these austere ideas with his own particular brand of humour; however, Helas! and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are...

Gothic fiction as it existed in the Victorian literary scene up to the 1900s was a part of and a reaction to the overwhelming speed at which modernity was taking hold of England leading up to the Industrial revolution. The gothic genre was a way...

Social class, in its simplest terms, is a way to divide a populace into strata based on their wealth, or access to power, or some combination of the two. It is also a subjective measurement which often needs only to be implied to exist, so while...

Oscar Wilde hails from the Victorian generation, a set of writers known for its dogmas and oppression. In many of his works, he negates these austere ideas with his own particular brand of humour; however, Helas! and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are...

Not many Literary Figures have retained notoriety quite as splendidly as Oscar Wilde has. His illustrious body of work continues to be heavily debated to this day. Although renown for his plays and sole novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde...

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde tells the story of a personified gold statue that used to be alive, that slowly sacrifices himself in order to lessen the suffering of others. He asks the help of a bird, who also ends up sacrificing his life in...

“The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde is a children’s story within his collection, “The Happy Prince and Other Tales.” In this story, a student pines over a romantic interest who ultimately rejects him, despite the help he receives from...

Fairy tales serve to several purposes; however, they are most commonly meant to be read to children. Sometimes to teach them a moral lesson, others to simply entertain them. Some fairy tales, like Wilde’s, are more complex; they can be interpreted...

Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx without a Secret” is the type of story scholars and critics eschew for its simplicity and self-explanatory title that seems to deflate the climax of the story. However, Oscar Wilde was no hack of a writer and what he...

In “The Decay of Lying”, written in 1891, Oscar Wilde promotes his views of Romanticism over Realism through Socratic-dialogue between the speakers Vivian and Cyril. In part of the essay, Wilde opposes Plato’s views that are found in chapter ten...