In Act 1, Part 1, Wilde introduces the audience to his eclectic cast of characters. As each new character comes on stage, the stage directions for the play—invisible to the audience but available to the reader—fleshes them out in detailed descriptions lush with literary devices. In keeping with Wilde’s aestheticist appreciation of life itself as a work of art, he primarily describes his characters in terms of works of visual art. When it is Mrs. Cheveley’s turn, Wilde relies especially heavily on visual imagery:
Mrs. Cheveley, who accompanies her, is tall and rather slight. Lips very thin and highly-coloured, a line of scarlet on a pallid face. Venetian red hair, aquiline nose, and long throat. Rouge accentuates the natural paleness of her complexion. Grey-green eyes that move restlessly. She is in heliotrope, with diamonds. She looks rather like an orchid, and makes great demands on one’s curiosity. In all her movements she is extremely graceful. A work of art, on the whole, but showing the influence of too many schools.
This introduction is an aesthetic jumble as Wilde combines the language of colors and shape to paint his picture: thin scarlet lips, Venetian red hair, rouged cheeks, grey-green eyes, and an invocation of two different kinds of flowers, the heliotrope and the orchid, compete for attention in the reader’s mind. As Wilde himself concludes, Cheveley shows “the influence of too many schools.” This description provides a visually layered counterpart to Cheveley’s perpetually mysterious nature, which relies on layers of artifice to deflect the other characters’ attempts to determine her intentions.
In Act 2, Part 1, Sir Robert Chiltern recalls his meeting with Baron Arnheim—the aristocrat to whom he sold the secret of the Suez Canal in order to jumpstart his own political career. In his description of Arnheim and his lavish residence, Wilde goes wild with literary devices; the sequence is laden with metaphors and the visual imagery of wealth:
…with a strange smile on his pale, curved lips, he led me through his wonderful picture gallery, showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels, his carved ivories, made me wonder at the strange loveliness of the luxury in which he lived; and then told me that luxury was nothing but a background, a painted scene in a play, and that power, power over other men, power over the world, was the one thing worth having, the one supreme pleasure worth knowing, the one joy one never tired of, and that in our century only the rich possessed it.
The rich visual description of Arnheim’s surroundings underscores the passage's central metaphor that this excess, extraordinary though it may seem, is only a “painted scene in a play.” Wealth is the background set design for the real drama of life: the power to manipulate, to control, and to rule over other people. By this metaphor, Arnheim appears to think of himself as a sort of theatrical director or puppet master—and that this is the “natural” way for the rich and powerful to behave. Robert’s account of Arnheim’s worldview self-consciously toys with its own setting within an actual work of theater: even as Robert describes the artifice of Arnheim’s life, he is himself a character played by an actor within a fictional environment created by Wilde. Throughout An Ideal Husband, Wilde uses the inherently artificial nature of theatrical drama to reveal and critique the more insidious artifice of London society—a world that, Wilde argues, is no more real than a play.
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).
