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25 pages • 50 minutes read
Oscar WildeLord Arthur Savile's Crime
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1887A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Superstition
Superstition plays an important role in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” Without Lord Arthur’s irrational belief in the validity of the palm reading prediction, the events of the story would not have occurred. Lord Arthur has several opportunities to reconsider his faith in the prophecy: after hearing it for the first time, after the accidental death of Lady Clementina, and after the failed attempt on the life of the Dean of Chichester. However, he never once doubts that his fate is already planned out for him, and that Mr. Podgers has correctly deciphered the message on Lord Arthur’s palm. The absurdity of Lord Arthur’s superstition draws attentions to other social rituals and performances that are also attempts to assert control over uncertainty, from the highly curated soirees at Lady Windermere’s to the complex system of aristocratic privilege that establishes an individual’s worth with no regard to their character.
The Deferred Marriage
Marriage occupies an ambiguous space in the story. The narrator briefly hints at Lady Windermere’s romantic history in Chapter 1, noting that she has had three husbands but only one lover and, as a result, is able to hold herself beyond reproach. In other words, her social status does not depend in any simple way on her marital status; she is wise enough to know better. Lord Arthur’s seemingly straightforward hopes for his marriage to Sybil would mark him as credulous even without the palmistry plot. Within the palmistry plot, the marriage comes to represent everything that will remain inaccessible to him until he takes care of his newly discovered destiny. He is literally willing to kill to make it happen. However, the fact that he allows his self-styled duty to put off his entry into the socially legible situation of matrimony in the first place suggests that he might, like many young men, harbor reservations about his marriage that happen to be taking an extreme form. The marriage, when it does happen, is so happy it almost cannot be believed; indeed, “romance was not killed by reality” (Chapter 6, Paragraph 1). Even though Lord Arthur has seemingly achieved a happy ending, complete with a beautiful wife and two well-behaved children, something about that marriage remains unresolved, never quite coalescing into reality.
Verbal and Situational Irony
Irony pervades “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” both in the narrative tone and the events themselves. Wilde repeatedly draws upon the resources of verbal irony (wordplay and sarcasm) and situational irony (when the opposite of what you expect to occur happens) to deconstruct binary oppositions, such as that of appearance and reality. Epigrammatic statements, such as “nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion” (Chapter 1, Paragraph 2), characterize the narrative tone and reveal the world of the story as one where appearances function independently of whatever reality they conceal; Lord Arthur’s failure to understand this quality of his world nearly proves his undoing.
The murder attempts themselves are exemplars of situational irony. Lord Arthur carefully plans Lady Clementina’s demise, ensuring that foul play will not be suspected. He celebrates the success of his plan only to realize, upon sorting through her belongings, that her death was, in fact, unconnected to his efforts. The ironic overtones of the second murder attempt—the exploding clock sent to the Dean of Chichester—are even stronger. Far from blowing up his uncle, Lord Arthur succeeds only in amusing his cousins with a harmless toy. In both instances, the seriousness of his endeavor is undermined by events themselves.
When Lord Arthur does succeed at murder, he nonetheless does not succeed at banishing irony from his life. After all his deliberate planning, the successful murder of Mr. Podgers is the result of a momentary impulse. More than that, the fact that the cheiromantist unknowingly predicted his own death back in Chapter 1, reinforces the ironic character of the whole. The story is so steeped in irony that its lack in Chapter 6 appears conspicuous—and even suspicious. The happiness of Lord Arthur and Sybil’s marriage goes unchallenged even by Lady Windermere, but the possibility remains that her judgment that it is all “nonsense” applies not just to palmistry but to conjugal bliss.
Related Titles
By Oscar Wilde
