An Ideal Husband Textual Quotes

Question 1

Sir Robert Chiltern

Answer 1

• “power is his passion”
• “Strength and courage” to yield to “terrible temptations”

Question 2

Lord Goring

Answer 2

• “…goes to the opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day… you don’t call that leading an idle life, do you”
• [Enter LORD GORING in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. Whitegloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first welldressed philosopher in the history of thought.]
• I had no idea that you, of all men in the world, could have been so weak, Robert, as to yield to such a temptation as Baron Arnheim held out to you.
• 110,000 pounds. LORD GORING. You were worth more, Robert.

Question 3

Mrs Cheveley uses social conventions

Answer 3

• Please get me a glass of water. = MAKING USE OF SOCIAL CONVENTIONS TO GRAB [LADY CHILTERN’S letter, the cover of which is just showing from under the blottingbook]

Question 4

Love to miss Cheveley

Answer 4

• Arthur, you loved me once….I loved you, Arthur… I am tired of living abroad. I want to come back to London.

Question 5

Setting in initial stage instructions

Answer 5

• ‘Mrs Marchmont and Lady Basildon, two very pretty women, are seated together on a Louis Seize sofa…affectation of manner…Watteau would have loved to paint them’

Question 6

Lady Chiltern

Answer 6

• Goring: a little hard in some of your views on life. I think that . . . often you don’t make sufficient allowances.
• “lie to me! lie to me!”
• You will write, won’t you, to Mrs. Cheveley, and tell her that you cannot support this scandalous scheme of hers? If you have given her any promise you must take it back, that is all!.. You must never see her again, Robert. …She is not worthy to talk to a man like you.

Question 7

Moral Lessons

Answer 7

• ‘Sir Robert Chiltern . . . most rising of our young statesmen . . . Brilliant orator . . . Unblemished career . . . Wellknown integrity of character . . . Represents what is best in English public life . . . Noble contrast to the lax morality so common among foreign politicians

Question 8

Women

Question 9

Women and Men

Question 10

Mabel Chiltern

Answer 10

• Mbel Chiltern as ‘a perfect example of the English type of prettiness

Question 11

Ideals

Answer 11

• “And if you don’t make this young lady an ideal husband, I’ll cut you off with a shilling.” MABEL CHILTERN. An ideal husband! Oh, I don’t think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world.
• I admire him for it. I admire him immensely for it. I have never admired him so much before. He is finer than even I thought him.
• We have both been punished. I set him up too high.
• You were to me something apart from common life, a thing pure, noble, honest, without stain. The world seemed to me finer because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived. And now oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!
• “I delight in your bad qualities. I wouldn’t have you part with one of them”
• I would have lost the love of the one woman in the world I worship…my wife is as perfect as all that.
• implacable “false idol”, “monstrous pedestals”
• “the white image of all good things, and sin can never touch” her.

Question 12

Masks

Answer 12

• what a mask you have been wearing all these years! A horrible painted mask!

Question 13

Commentary

Answer 13

• “Probate information is practically the source of every large modern fortune
• Goring:” In England, a man who can’t talk orality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician”