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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Arnheim's Avarice:
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.
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