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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Night of the Living Shame:
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.
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