Episode 253: “An Ideal Husband” by Oscar Wilde, Acts 2 & 3
We are back on The Literary Life podcast this week with a continuation of our series on An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. Today Angelina and Thomas cover Acts 2 and 3 of the play, including some more background on this literary period, starting off with some background of the comedy of manners and satire. They discuss a wide range of topics touching on the ideas in this play, as well as covering the key plot points in these two acts.
Join us next week for a preview of the 2025 season of The Literary Life. Then we will be back with the wrap-up of An Ideal Husband after that.
This is the time to purchase any of the pre-recorded classes you’ve had your eye on at HouseofHumaneLetters.com because the Christmas sale is on now through December 31, 2024. For those who want a way to keep track of their HHL webinars, conferences, and mini-classes, here is a handy spreadsheet to help you out! Just copy the document into your own files, and you can edit it as you please!
Episodes Mentioned:
Episode 98: “How Much Land Does a Man Need” by Leo Tolstoy
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Commonplace Quotes:
We have been conditioned to think of any technological advance as an unambiguous improvement for our lives, and so we eagerly wait for the next model of phone or the next generation of car and dutifully upgrade our systems and download the latest app. The fact that Lewis imagines the possible downsides of labor-saving devices comes as a surprise, but this is not the only time that Lewis worried about our relationship to machines. The same theme comes up in That Hideous Strength and Abolition of Man, as well as in the lecture he gave when he assumed his academic chair at Cambridge: De Descriptione Temporum. In that lecture, Lewis provocatively claimed that we have less in common with our grandparents’ grandparents, than they had in common with Caesar, Beowulf, Achilles, or the Pharaohs. He arrives at this stupefying assertion by reflecting on a fascinating question: what would happen if we spent more time around our machines than we spent with the natural world? What would happen if machine metaphors got into our imaginations so deeply that we forgot they were there, and, thus, without us even knowing it, we began to think and feel about ourselves and our lives and our goals as if we were machines or work functions, too?
Dr. Jason Baxter, from Why Literature Still Matters
When Spinoza states that God loves no one, only Himself with infinite intellectual love, it may perhaps be inferred that Spinoza was on no bad terms with Spinoza.
F. L. Lucas, from The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth Century Minds
At my front they are, once every year, the voices of the local choir of those boys or children who have not even tried to learn to sing, or to memorize the words of the piece they are murdering. The instruments they play with real conviction are the door-bell and the knocker; and the money is what they are after.
C. S. Lewis, from “Delinquents in the Snow”
Piano
by D. H. Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Book List:
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Odd Women by George Gissick
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