Typically for Wilde, his description of the setting for An Ideal Husband, in Act 1, Part 1, paints a scene of extravagance and beauty anchored by an allusion to an actual work of visual art that foreshadows the central theme of the play:
At the top of the staircase stands Lady Chiltern, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age. She receives the guests as they come up. Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a large eighteenth-century French tapestry—representing the Triumph of Love, from a design of Boucher—that is stretched on the staircase well.
Thus the reader discovers the wonder of the “octagon room,” one of the play’s central set-pieces. The “Greek beauty” of Lady Chiltern nods to the influence of Greek aesthetics and philosophy on Wilde’s writing—and the art and literature of the aestheticist movement of which he was a part—and the classical allusion continues with Wilde’s description of the French tapestry: an apparent reproduction of an 18th century Neoclassical painting by François Boucher, likely one of a number of paintings he titled the Triumph of Venus. As the titles suggest, these works depict Venus, the Roman goddess of love, lounging around and surrounded by cupids. The explicit inclusion of such a scene in the Chilterns’ octagon room underscores the centrality of love as a theme in An Ideal Husband—and subtly foreshadows love’s ultimate victory over avarice and artifice at the end of the play.
In Act 1, Part 3, Mrs. Cheveley blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into supporting the Argentine canal scheme. When Chiltern protests, Cheveley laments what she feels to be a useless preoccupation with morality in London society using simile and an ironic allusion to the seven deadly sins:
Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man—now they crush him.
In decrying the “seven deadly virtues,” including purity and incorruptibility, Cheveley ironically criticizes morality in the language of Christian sin—revealing, in the process, her own extreme amorality. Following up with a simile comparing this new moral craze with bowling pins being hit by a ball, Cheveley dismisses how London's political leaders knock themselves about in their rush to moral judgement. Her speech highlights two of the major themes of the play: the question of whether “goodness” is boring and undesirable—and morality therefore only useful as an act—and the crisis that occurs when real moral conflict, like the one that Chiltern now faces, arises in a world that only values delight and amusement.
In Act 2, Part 2, Lady Chiltern, Lady Markby, and Mrs. Cheveley make some rambling small talk about society life in London. Their conversation uses color imagery and a set of literary allusions to cast judgement on their spouses:
Lady Chiltern: But I am very much interested in politics, Lady Markby. I love to hear Robert talk about them.
Lady Markby: Well, I hope he is not as devoted to Blue Books as Sir John is. I don’t think they can be quite improving reading for anyone.
Mrs. Cheveley: I have never read a Blue Book. I prefer books ... in yellow covers.
Lady Markby: Yellow is a gayer colour, is it not? I used to wear yellow a good deal in my early days, and would do so now if Sir John was not so painfully personal in his observations, and a man on the question of dress is always ridiculous, is he not?
The “Blue Books” to which Markby and Cheveley allude were the blue-covered almanacs of the 19th century that would have held general information and statistics about the state of the United Kingdom and its economic prospects. Mrs. Cheveley’s so-called “books in yellow covers,” by contrast, would have been the literary journals that were exploding in popularity in the 1890s—the very moment that Wilde wrote An Ideal Husband. Such journals were especially popular in the creative and artistic circles of which Wilde was a part.
In her closing line, Lady Markby implies that the choice of book—blue or yellow—is primarily an aesthetic one despite the obvious and meaningful distinction in the books’ subject matters: Wilde uses color imagery in this sequence to conflate aesthetics (and the preference for certain colors) with the questions of “seriousness” that are so central to the play (whether to dally in politics and the economy or in leisure and aesthetic pleasure).
At the beginning of Act 3, Part 1, Wilde again uses his stage directions as an opportunity to describe his characters and their behavior. In this expository sequence, Wilde uses a combination of allusion, hyperbole, metaphor, and personification to describe Phipps, Lord Goring’s butler:
Phipps, the Butler, is arranging some newspapers on the writing-table. The distinction of Phipps is his impassivity. He has been termed by enthusiasts the Ideal Butler. The Sphinx is not so incommunicable. He is a mask with a manner. Of his intellectual or emotional life, history knows nothing. He represents the dominance of form.
By alluding to the sphinx—the monster of Egyptian myth who poses deadly riddles to its beholder—Wilde establishes Phipps’s practiced indifference in hyperbolic terms of the sphinx’s legendary inscrutability. Wilde also adds in a dose of personification with the metaphorical comparison between Phipps and a living mask or disguise—is a “mask with a manner.” This makes him a perfect butler for Goring, who can rely on Phipps to help out in the background without any distraction. In some ways, Phipps is also the ultimate embodiment of the satirically conceited Wildean archetype: everything about Phipps is a façade, a constantly maintained act that never lets slip his “intellectual or emotional life” within—even Mrs. Cheveley could hardly aspire to more.
