An Ideal Husband Critics Flashcards
T. Eagleton
“Wilde is political in all kinds of ways, some of them fairly obvious and some of them not”
“despite his carefully nurtured flippancy displayed throughout his life tenderness and compassion toward the dispossessed”
“a remorseless debunker of the high-toned gravitas of Victorian England”
B. Belford
“Deliciously absurd, morally serious, profoundly sentimental, and wickedly melodramatic”
“it is primarily a comedy of manners about political corruption, and love”
P. Hall
“Through the character of Lord Goring, Wilde expresses his tolerance: ‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing’”
“The plays lives not because of its wit but because of its compassion”
S. Bose
“Wilde mocks society’s confinement of women, fallen or not, into prescribed roles and undercuts customary morality but fears self-determining women’s disruptive power”
S. Cohen
“It is an eloquent plea for individual expression in the face of Victorian conformity”
“Wilde advocated individual freedom, the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, style and wit”
“Imperfection seems appropriate in a play that advocates acceptance of a man’s imperfection”
S. Eltis
“Wilde’s writings constantly challenge any simple division between truth and lies, between self and mask, between reality and fiction.”
“it’s structured around a criminal, and sympathy with a criminal”
“So many of Wilde’s play are about a secret”
Wilde
“All art is quite useless”
“All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”
“criticism is the highest form of creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist had not put there”
