Episode 255: “An Ideal Husband” by Oscar Wilde, Act 4 & Film Adaptations

This week on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina and Thomas wrap up our series on An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. In sharing thoughts on Act 4, Angelina and Thomas consider whether Wilde’s satire works well here at the end, as well as expanding more on the ideas of “the angel in the house” and women’s suffrage during this time period. Today they are also joined by Atlee Northmore to discuss film adaptations of this work.

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:

In Search of the Jane Austen Adaptation: Pride and Prejudice

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Commonplace Quotes:

If I’m right, then, we’re losing the ability to be moved by still things, because we’re moving too fast to be quiet in front of them. We might have come to stand before these places of awe, moved by the noble desire to heal our own inner emptiness, but , standing in front of them, we don’t know what to do, and so we start to fidget, spiritually. And in a desire to do something, we take pictures which we will decontextualize in a “fast-moving” platform, where they will make up part of our selfie narratives, the split-second content for other peoples’ violent, late-night, sad hearted, envious episode of bottomless scrolling…If I translate what I see into a series of posts that you can accelerate through in an act of bottomless scrolling, then you can feel their importance, but only at the price of depth and complexity. And I need a lot of them, because as I flatten out the images, I have to string them together, in a desperate effort to relocate qualitative experience with quantitative amplification.

…the attention moves from the phenomenon of wonder, onto how I look in front of them, and, thus, the life-giving, nourishing encounter with beauty I described above is perpetually deferred. And, starved for beauty, I participate all the more feverishly in the attempt to consume it, but, unbeknownst to me, I am using what I stand in front of merely to amplify the power of my image, rather than allowing what I see to empower my interior life. Thus, I starve my inner heart, while consuming outer experiences. The whole world becomes nothing but a series of changing backgrounds for my face, experiences I purchase in order to enhance my social value in the currency of likes.

Dr. Jason Baxter, from Why Literature Still Matters

On top of these particular misjudgments there was his pervasive indulgence in the language of calumny. Special venom was reserved for fellow critics who had arrived at his conclusions before he did. When he finally decided that Dickens was a great writer, he took particular care to vilify any other critics who had ever said so: they hadn’t been right in the right way. He treated D. H. Lawrence the way the scholiasts had once treated Virgil, as a voodoo talisman. I already thought that there were totalitarian tendencies in all this but had not yet found the nerve to say so: hence the strained tone, of respect trying to conceal repulsion.

Clive James, from “F.R. Leavis in America”

A Selection from “The Angel in the House”

by Coventry Patmore

Lo, love’s obey’d by all.  ’Tis right
   That all should know what they obey,
Lest erring conscience damp delight,
   And folly laugh our joys away.
Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings
   And voices to the woodland birds,
Grant me the power of saying things
   Too simple and too sweet for words!

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