Authorial Irony
The unnamed first person narrator of “The Sphinx without a Secret” says to his friend that “women are meant to be loved, not understood.” Within the context of Oscar Wilde’s body of work, situating this observation within the perspective of the character being quoted as “I said” carries the subtle irony of becoming a commentary of the character as the mouthpiece of the author. The ironic element is that while Oscar Wilde’s desire to try to understand women is made manifest by a legacy of creating more memorable female characters that probably any male writer of his era.
Irony as Plot
The very same story—“The Sphinx without a Secret”—features a narrative constructed entirely upon irony. The character to which the narrator offers his advice on loving rather than understanding women turns out to be desperately in love with a woman of mystery. Ultimately, however, it turns out the great mystery of this woman is that there is no mystery; in the end it is she who turns out to be the title character.
Political Irony
Ironically, Wilde pursued the idea of “art for art’s sake” at the very same time he was subtly informing his fiction with political messaging. The most subtly direct indictment of emerging Victorian economic values can be found in “The Model Millionaire.” The Industrial Revolution created a new protective wall against those seeking to protect their aristocratically inherited wealth from the burgeoning call for redistribution of wealth by the worldwide socialist movement. For the first time, the British could honestly adopt the American ethos that new opportunities were creating a path to wealth made available to any who wanted to work hard to achieve, regardless of class. The protagonist of this story is a smart, charming hard-working guy who still can’t dig his way out of his financial hole. Until, irony of irony, an older wealthy man rewards an act of oblivious generosity on the young man’s part by voluntarily choosing to redistribute his wealth. The story’s irony mocks all existing arguments against the power of socialism to improve lives.
Moral Irony
“The Happy Prince” is another exercise in irony. Unlike “The Model Millionaire,” however, this story was specifically geared to children as a moral parable. The story is about how town leaders have constructed a statue of their recently diseased prince who was notoriously happy in life. The statue is gilded in gold and adorned with expensive jewels and they are very proud with their choice. The statue, however, on regains the happiness for the prince he enjoyed in life by giving away all the expensive trappings. Now happy with itself, the town leaders view the statue stripped of its wealth as shabby, ugly and useless and order it melted down. Wilde is using irony here to make another economic point, but this time couches less as a political statement than a simple fairy tale.
“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
This story is a veritable complex web of intricately plotted webs of irony inextricably linked to each other to provide support for the final ironic twist to which it all leads. The story begins with the title character being told by a fortune teller with a track record of proven success that he will become a murderer. Savile is wracked by the belief that he cannot possibly follow through on plans for marriage as long as this weight of mystery lingers over him and so sets upon a plan to get the murder over with before the wedding. The story proceeds from one ironic turn to another as Savile first discovers committing murder is no easy thing then learns that it is possible to believe one has committed murder when that is not necessarily the case. Everything leads inexorably to the final ironic plot twist in which it is fortune-teller was actually foreseeing his own murder at the hands of Savile. Except that the twist is not really the final bit of irony left to tell.
