Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

“Well, he is not a bit like a cheiromantist. I mean he is not mysterious, or esoteric, or romantic-looking. He is a little, stout man, with a funny, bald head, and great, gold-rimmed spectacles; something between a family doctor and a country attorney. I’m really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying.”

Lady Windermere, describing Mr. Podgers, uses parallel structure, which is a device in which similar grammar or sentence structures are repeated, as with “little, stout man”; “funny, bald head”; and “great, gold-rimmed spectacles.” She is also being ironic by suggesting that people are being deliberately difficult by not matching their appearance to their profession; inattention to one’s appearance is a faux pas.

“Lord Arthur smiled, and shook his head. ‘I am not afraid,’ he answered. ‘Sybil knows me as well as I know her.’

‘Ah! I am a little sorry to hear you say that. The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding. No, I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.’”

Lady Windermere speaks ironically when she quips that marriages work best when people do not know one another well. Lord Arthur’s avowal of knowledge is revealed as a sign of his ignorance—yet, at the same time, this ignorance secures his happiness more than any intimacy ever could.

“Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

Lord Arthur, in his inner monologue, turns to Shakespeare to contemplate life’s absurdity—and the ways that appearance and reality can be at odds with each other. Surprisingly, the theater emerges as the truer space, for directors can cast actors with the proper “qualifications” to play Hamlet or King Henry V (i.e., “Prince Hal”). By contrast, whatever force or destiny has arranged real life seems to have alienated people from their true natures, putting them into roles that they are ill-suited to play.

“A policeman looked curiously at him as he passed, and a beggar, who slouched from an archway to ask for alms, grew frightened, seeing misery greater than his own.”

Wilde uses irony to emphasize the extremity of Lord Arthur’s emotional disturbance. The beggar sees Lord Arthur, a wealthy, upper class gentleman in fine clothes, yet somehow intuits that this aristocratic young man is the real victim. The reader knows that well-to-do Lord Arthur has experienced nothing more traumatic than having a fortune told to him. While it was unpleasant to be told that he’d commit a murder, nothing bad has actually happened to him. Yet, Lord Arthur projects his own feelings onto the beggar to seem like the greater sufferer by comparison.

“From a dark courtyard came a sound of oaths and blows, followed by shrill screams, and, huddled upon a damp door-step, he saw the crook-backed forms of poverty and eld. A strange pity came over him. Were these children of sin and misery predestined to their end, as he to his? Were they, like him, merely the puppets of a monstrous show?”

This passage signals Lord Arthur’s dangerous attachment to the idea of fate. As he wanders the London streets after receiving his palm reading, Lord Arthur sees images of people suffering from poverty and sickness and, ostensibly for the first time, senses a solidarity with them. Ironically, he believes that he also has no choice which is a false equivalence. Being born into poverty and being unhoused is a very different situation in the highly stratified English society than Lord Arthur’s situation of having his fortune told and not liking what he heard.

“There was something in the dawn’s delicate loveliness that seemed to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in beauty, and that set in storm.”

The alliteration of this passage—“dawn’s delicate,” “break in beauty,” and “set in storm”—signals the transition between night and day and Lord Arthur’s own mental transformation from a helpless “puppet” of fate to a man who will deliberately carry out a duty. The repetition of sounds, more frequently found in poetry, mimics the reflectiveness and deep thinking that Lord Arthur is doing at this point in the story as he ponders his fate.

“The light stole softly from above, through thin slabs of transparent onyx, and the water in the marble tank glimmered like a moonstone.”

Wilde’s vivid visual imagery, applied to Lord Arthur’s bathroom, provides a strong, somewhat hyperbolic, contrast to the squalid conditions of London’s poor that was presented in the previous chapter. Lord Arthur’s life is beautiful and charmed, and the palm reading cannot change that.

“He felt that to marry her, with the doom of murder hanging over his head, would be a betrayal like that of Judas, a sin worse than any the Borgia had ever dreamed of.”

Wilde alludes to the Gospel story of Judas, who betrayed Christ’s identity to those looking to arrest him, as well as to the Borgias, a prominent family during the Renaissance, whose members exercised their influence through a range of crimes. The allusions mark Lord Arthur as a man with an upper-class education, if a conventional imagination, even as they also clearly—even humorously—overstate his situation.

“The wild, turbid feelings of the previous night had by this time completely passed away, and it was almost with a sense of shame that he looked back upon his mad wanderings from street to street, his fierce emotional agony. The very sincerity of his sufferings made them seem unreal to him now. He wondered how he could have been so foolish as to rant and rave about the inevitable.”

Firmly believing in his fate, Lord Arthur freely decides to meet it head on. He sets aside his initial emotional reaction and enters deliberately into his pursuit of the destiny over which he believes he has no control.

“Every day he studied the obituary column in the Times, expecting to see a notice of Lady Clementina’s death, but every day he was disappointed. He began to be afraid that some accident had happened to her, and often regretted that he had prevented her taking the aconitine when she had been so anxious to try its effect.”

This passage speaks to Lord Arthur’s avoidant character. He decides to murder Lady Clementina, but recoils in horror when she suggests taking the poison pill immediately when he is with her. He wants her to wait until he is gone, because he does not want to witness or deal with the consequences of his actions. He decides to travel to Venice to wait for news of her death. He also already fears that he might not be responsible for her death at all.

“Lord Arthur started, and a faint blush came into his cheek. He had almost entirely forgotten what he had done, and it seemed to him a curious coincidence that Sybil, for whose sake he had gone through all that terrible anxiety, should have been the first to remind him of it.”

When Sybil discovers the case with the poison pill in it, the reader sees that Lord Arthur does not have remorse for Lady Clementina’s death, even though she had never wronged him and he had no conflict of any kind with her. Somehow, while going through the things Lady Clementina had left him, he managed to forget that he was (at least to his knowledge) the reason for her death. His lack of remorse or guilt is telling.

“He had done his best to commit this murder, but on both occasions he had failed, and through no fault of his own. He had tried to do his duty, but it seemed as if Destiny herself had turned traitor.”

Lord Arthur ironically believes that his duty, the best way for him to act, was to commit a murder quickly and efficiently. When his attempts are unsuccessful, he does not understand why “Fate” will not cooperate with him when it was Fate’s idea in the first place. Lord Arthur at no time interprets the difficulty in murdering his distant relatives to the possibility that this is not, in fact, what was predestined, or that the palm reading could be inaccurate.

“Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky, misshapen figure striking out for the staircase by the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realised the decree of destiny.”

Lord Arthur throws Mr. Podgers over the bridge, finally committing the murder that Mr. Podgers himself warned that Lord Arthur would perform. Lord Arthur feels horrible not because he threw an innocent man into the river for no good reason, but because Mr. Podgers might have survived the murder attempt, like his previous would-be victims did.