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.
