At the end of Act 2, Part 2, Sir Robert laments that Lady Chiltern, his wife, has prevented him from acquiescing to Mrs. Cheveley’s request that he present a falsified report on the Argentine Canal before Parliament. As Robert explains how obeying Mrs. Cheveley would have kept his shameful secret safe, he uses an extended metaphor that personifies the secret:
What this woman asked of me was nothing compared to what she offered to me. She offered security, peace, stability. The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose up in front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat. I could have killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed its record, burned the one witness against me. You prevented me. No one but you, you know it.
Robert’s wordplay relies on the double meaning of “bury”—literally, to bury is to inter a dead body in a grave or tomb, but “to bury” can also mean to cover something up like a salacious news story or scandal. Robert’s personification, the original “sin” of his youth, his sale of insider information on the Suez Canal to Baron Arnheim, is a zombie of sorts: a once-buried corpse come horrifyingly back to life through Mrs. Cheveley’s blackmail. To “kill” this secret once again would be to bury it back into its tomb of obscurity.
This scene, including Robert’s larger appeal to Lady Chiltern, is a turning point in the play: Robert can no longer hide his past from his wife, and their future together relies on her ability to forgive him—to break from the social expectations of the London elite and see Robert as a complex, flawed human being worthy of love.
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.
