I’ve received an e-mail from a homeschooling mother who is concerned by opposition to her staging of a homeschool production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. She was seeking reassurance that she was not doing anything wrong in staging the play and was seeking the rationale for the play’s Christian morality. Here’s my response:

Regarding An Ideal Husband, I can only reiterate what I wrote in my book on Wilde with regard to its overarching moral: Lady Chiltern’s puritanical placing of her husband on an unrealistic pedestal of perfection is at the root and heart of the play’s moral dynamic. When Lady Chiltern insists that her husband is “as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing”, Lord Goring replies with uncharacteristic earnestness that “Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.” In this exchange is to found the moral dynamic of the play. Against Lady Chiltern’s naïve insistence upon human perfection, Goring counterposes the reality of imperfect, or fallen, humanity and establishes love as the ground for the forgiveness of failings. This is encapsulated in the play’s climax in which the unreal “ideal husband” is exorcised by “a real wife” who loves her real husband, with all his failings. And, of course, the play’s final lines are an insistence that the greatest of all virtues is love, without which forgiveness is not possible.

That being said, Lord Goring utters iconoclastic lines for the purpose of effect (and for the garnering of laughter from the audience). Such humour might grate with certain puritanical sensibilities but it does not alter the healthy Christian morality of the play.

As for your Protestant critic, I am reminded of Chesterton’s distinction between Protestants and Catholics which dovetails very well with the moral of An Ideal Husband: “A Protestant believes that he is a good Protestant, a Catholic believes that he is a bad Catholic.” Protestants believe that they are better than their neighbors because they go to church; Catholics go to church because they know they are miserable sinners. The only “ideal husband” is the Bridegroom and the only ideal wife is His Bride, the Church. As for the rest of us, we need to understand that we are all sinners, working towards the ideal because we are not the ideal.