Chaucer and Wilde, although writing 500 years apart, both present power as an intrinsic aspect of marital life in Medieval and Victorian patriarchal societies. January sexually dominates May in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, while in ‘An Ideal Husband’ it...

Alike the division of a novel into chapters, entrances and exits allow playwrights to structure the different sections of the plot in a comprehensive and effective manner for the audience. Whilst Wilde uses “An Ideal Husband” to examine a...

In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, the narrative of drawing room interactions is used as a vessel to portray Wilde’s discussion of private versus public moral integrity and human nature through wit and a comedy of manners regarding upper-class of...

In every system of cultural meaning-making, there occur certain words and names which are connotatively "loaded," which have an "emotional valence" in excess of their denotations. Such was the word "Salome" in late nineteenth-century western...

The monologue of King Herod just preceding the Dance of the Seven Veils (Wilde, 50-53) demonstrates the depth of the King's desperate neuroses. While his intention is to implore Salome to dance for him, Herod ends up delivering a capricious,...

“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems The World's Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally...

Author Shannon Alder once said, “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” Essentially what Alder is saying is that the things we find fault with in other people are really the things that we do not have and therefore...

In Salome, Oscar Wilde’s short drama, the protagonist Salome is objectified into an idealized sex symbol by her male admirers. To see how, a reader must consider descriptions of Salome as an ethereal body, expressions of lustful desire directed at...

The long, antepenultimate paragraph of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” neatly interrupts the dialogue that has just revealed the true nature of the death of Erskine, a friend of the narrator. The narrator is taking in the shocking news that Erskine had...

“It’s a curious thing, Duchess, about the game of marriage – a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion – the wives hold all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick”.

The play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ by Oscar Wilde presents a window...

Oscar Wilde hails from the Victorian generation, a set of writers known for its dogmas and oppression. In many of his works, he negates these austere ideas with his own particular brand of humour; however, Helas! and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are...

Gothic fiction as it existed in the Victorian literary scene up to the 1900s was a part of and a reaction to the overwhelming speed at which modernity was taking hold of England leading up to the Industrial revolution. The gothic genre was a way...

Not many Literary Figures have retained notoriety quite as splendidly as Oscar Wilde has. His illustrious body of work continues to be heavily debated to this day. Although renown for his plays and sole novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde...

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde tells the story of a personified gold statue that used to be alive, that slowly sacrifices himself in order to lessen the suffering of others. He asks the help of a bird, who also ends up sacrificing his life in...

“The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde is a children’s story within his collection, “The Happy Prince and Other Tales.” In this story, a student pines over a romantic interest who ultimately rejects him, despite the help he receives from...

Fairy tales serve to several purposes; however, they are most commonly meant to be read to children. Sometimes to teach them a moral lesson, others to simply entertain them. Some fairy tales, like Wilde’s, are more complex; they can be interpreted...

Social class, in its simplest terms, is a way to divide a populace into strata based on their wealth, or access to power, or some combination of the two. It is also a subjective measurement which often needs only to be implied to exist, so while...

Oscar Wilde hails from the Victorian generation, a set of writers known for its dogmas and oppression. In many of his works, he negates these austere ideas with his own particular brand of humour; however, Helas! and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are...

Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx without a Secret” is the type of story scholars and critics eschew for its simplicity and self-explanatory title that seems to deflate the climax of the story. However, Oscar Wilde was no hack of a writer and what he...

In “The Decay of Lying”, written in 1891, Oscar Wilde promotes his views of Romanticism over Realism through Socratic-dialogue between the speakers Vivian and Cyril. In part of the essay, Wilde opposes Plato’s views that are found in chapter ten...