This is a collection of four short comedy mystery stories that Oscar Wilde wrote and published in magazines from 1887, before bringing them together in this volume in 1891. They showcase:
- Wilde’s favoured milieu and subject i.e. the upperest of the English upper classes
- whose conversation is littered with smart, politely cynical banter and witty bons mots
- his aptness, given half a chance, to slip into the purplest of purple prose, likely to reference precious jewels and the pink fingers of dawn and the glories of Greece etc
- his just-as-frequent tendency to slip into the over-egged tones of Victorian melodrama
1. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
This brilliant comic story exemplifies all four aspects of Wilde’s fiction.
1. It is set among the highest of high London Society, opening at a wonderful party being given by Lady Windermere at her London mansion, Bentinck House, which gives Wilde the opportunity to introduce a series of caricatures of the upper classes, but also the ‘straight’ hero of the story, dashing young Lord Savile.
2. The tone of frivolous banter, elegant badinage based on paradox and wit is established right at the start:
‘But surely that is tempting Providence, Gladys.’
‘My dear Duchess, surely Providence can resist temptation by this time.’
‘No one cares about distant relatives nowadays,’ said Lady Windermere. ‘They went out of fashion years ago.’
3. After having his palm read, Lord Arthur wanders the streets of London till dawn, when he encounters carters coming in from the countryside piled high with fruit and veg for Covent Garden:
and the great piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. 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…
After several attempts to carry out the pre-destined murder fail, a gloomy Lord Arthur:
wandered down to the Thames Embankment, and sat for hours by the river. The moon peered through a mane of tawny clouds, as if it were a lion’s eye, and innumerable stars spangled the hollow vault, like gold dust powdered on a purple dome. Now and then a barge swung out into the turbid stream, and floated away with the tide, and the railway signals changed from green to scarlet as the trains ran shrieking across the bridge. After some time, twelve o’clock boomed from the tall tower at Westminster, and at each stroke of the sonorous bell the night seemed to tremble. Then the railway lights went out, one solitary lamp left gleaming like a large ruby on a giant mast, and the roar of the city became fainter.
At two o’clock he got up, and strolled towards Blackfriars. How unreal everything looked! How like a strange dream! The houses on the other side of the river seemed built out of darkness. One would have said that silver and shadow had fashioned the world anew. The huge dome of St. Paul’s loomed like a bubble through the dusky air.
Like a painting by Whistler, isn’t it? If only London was actually like that.
And then there’s Wilde’s tendency to reference all things Greek as a marker of beauty. Here’s a description of Sybil Merton:
The small, exquisitely-shaped head drooped slightly to one side, as though the thin, reed-like throat could hardly bear the burden of so much beauty; the lips were slightly parted, and seemed made for sweet music; and all the tender purity of girlhood looked out in wonder from the dreaming eyes. With her soft, clinging dress of crêpe-de-chine, and her large leaf-shaped fan, she looked like one of those delicate little figures men find in the olive-woods near Tanagra*; and there was a touch of Greek grace in her pose and attitude.
4. And closely related to the passages about rose-coloured dawn are the equal and opposite passages of over-ripe melodrama which thrill themselves with big words like Murder and Horror and Fate and Destiny and Doom!
Looking at him, one would have said that Nemesis had stolen the shield of Pallas, and shown him the Gorgon’s head. He seemed turned to stone, and his face was like marble in its melancholy. He had lived the delicate and luxurious life of a young man of birth and fortune, a life exquisite in its freedom from sordid care, its beautiful boyish insouciance; and now for the first time he became conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.
The plot
As to the plot: Lord Arthur Savile is a young, rich man about town (‘he was very wealthy himself, having come into all Lord Rugby’s property when he came of age’). He is engaged to the fragrant Sybil Merton. At Lady Windermere’s party he has his palm read by her latest discovery, a cheiromantist, a short, fat, sickly man named Septimus Podgers. (Wilde’s astonishing snobbery is on such open display that many readers fail to even notice it.)
It was Mr. Podgers, the cheiromantist! No one could mistake the fat, flabby face, the gold-rimmed spectacles, the sickly feeble smile, the sensual mouth.
Stunned by what he hears he stumbles out of the party and spends the night’s wandering the streets of London in horror, for Mr Podgers has predicted that Lord Savile will commit a murder!!
The joke, the comic conceit of the whole story, is that Lord Savile is made to (ironically) decide it is his Duty to commit this murder and so get it out of the way before he can marry his fiancée. It is a suave and satirical inversion of what most people would regard as their ‘duty’, characteristic of Wilde’s love of inverting conventional values or sentiments:
Many men in his position would have preferred the primrose path of dalliance to the steep heights of duty; but Lord Arthur was too conscientious to set pleasure above principle…he recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder…For a moment he had a natural repugnance against what he was asked to do, but it soon passed away. His heart told him that it was not a sin, but a sacrifice; his reason reminded him that there was no other course open…and he felt no hesitation about doing his duty.
Since Duty compels him to murder someone he sets to the task with energy and makes a list of possible victims:
He accordingly made out a list of his friends and relatives on a sheet of notepaper, and after careful consideration, decided in favour of Lady Clementina Beauchamp, a dear old lady who lived in Curzon Street, and was his own second cousin by his mother’s side.
From this point onwards the text revels in the multiple paradoxes thrown up by a charming gentleman having decided that Duty obliges him to murder a relative. For example, he disdains to do it by hand, being both a gentleman but also wishing to avoid the publicity attendant on such an act, and definitely not wanting to be lionised at one of Lady Windermere’s parties.
So he consults some textbooks on poison at his club then strolls down St James’s to a famous chemists who he easily persuades to make a pill of aconitine, a strong poison, claiming it is to put down a dog with rabies. Then he visits Lady Clem and gives her the pill as a gift, contained in a charming silver bonbonierre, claiming it will cure her heartburn. She is touched and promises to take it next time she has an attack.
Proud of having done his duty, Lord Savile goes abroad till Lady Clem dies, holidaying with his brother Lord Surbiton in Venice (of which Wilde takes the time to show off his knowledge, specifically of the top hotels and restaurants).
When he gets news that Lady Clem has died he feels the warmth and pride of a man who has Done His Duty and returns to London to resume his engagement to Sybil. Lady Clem has left Lord Savile her house in Curzon Street and, when he is clearing it out along with Sybil, she comes across the bonbonniere! Disaster! Lady Clem died a natural death, he did not murder her at all! He is back to square one in his plan to fulfil Mr Podgers’ prediction.
Recovering from his bitter disappointment, Lord Arthur determines to act like a man and so decides to blow up his uncle, the Dean of Chichester. He goes to see a Russian he’s met, a Count who’s over here researching Peter the Great’s spell in England, who writes him a letter of introduction to a famous bomb maker who specialises in making explosive clocks. The comedy derives from the extreme politeness and formality of the conversation between the lord and the bomb-maker.
‘The clock is intended for the Dean of Chichester.’
‘Dear me! I had no idea that you felt so strongly about religion, Lord Arthur. Few young men do nowadays.’
‘I am afraid you overrate me, Herr Winckelkopf,’ said Lord Arthur, blushing. ‘The fact is, I really know nothing about theology.’
Arthur duly sends an ornate clock containing a timed bomb to his uncle (anonymously, of course) but then hears nothing on the day it’s due to go off and a few days later his mother receives a letter from the Dean’s daughter describing the funny little present they’d been sent which gave a funny fizzing then a little pop, prompting the statue of freedom on its top to fall off and break its nose in the fireplace. So much for explosives!
A note on Ian Small’s annotations
I read the stories in the Penguin Complete Short Fiction volume, which is edited by Ian Small. Unlike the feminist academic who edited the OUP’s edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Small doesn’t take every opportunity to tick off his author for being a member of the patriarchy who erases female presence, or scold his male readers for their toxic masculinity, which is a refreshing change.
Instead, Small writes a sensible introduction which places Wilde’s shorter fiction in the overall context of his career, and his notes are lovely: he chooses just the right words and phrases to annotate and the notes themselves are useful and informative. He is particularly illuminating about recurring themes of Wilde’s; for example, the minor detail that Wilde repeatedly has his characters mock American novels. In other notes he points out that:
Names
Wilde had to be careful about names so as to avoid libel; this meant he often recycled fictional names, most obviously in Lord Savile’s Crime which a) features a Lady Windermere, later to be used as the central character of the play, and b) names the protagonist’s fiancée Sybil, just like the fiancée in Dorian Gray.
Jokes
Wilde recycles not just names but jokes, one liners from these stories reappearing in the plays.
Cosmopolitan
Late-Victorian High Society was characterised by easy movement between the worlds of high politics, high society, the arts and so on, something any reader of the fiction of the period notices.
The geography of London
was highly meaningful in Wilde’s fiction: the kind of High Society Wilde depicts lived in Mayfair or St James’s (Lord Savile lives in Belgrave Square, Sybil lives at her father’s house in Park Lane): all other parts of London were less high class and carried meanings, thus Bayswater was a newly built neighbourhood aimed at the new middle classes, Soho was associated with prostitution, the East End was universally associated not just with poverty but with violent crime and even, down at the waterfront docks, drugs i.e. opium dens set up by Chinese sailors.
Meals
In the same spirit, meals are an important indicator of class in Wilde: for Lord Arthur ‘tea’ denotes high tea, taken at 4pm and consisting of tea and, maybe, cucumber sandwiches; he humorously turns down an invitation from some Russian anarchists to a meat tea, which, as the name suggests, involved cold or hot meat and was a much more lower class habit.
The Morning Post
The Times may have been the British Empire’s newspaper of record, but the Morning Post contained all the Society gossip and so was the newspaper most of Wilde’s characters read, in order to read about themselves, their parties and their affairs; it features in Lord Arthur Savile and the Sphinx.
Cigarettes
Smoking cigarettes was a marker of modern ‘decadence’: smart young men and ‘fast’ women smoked cigarettes, by contrast with their parents who didn’t smoke at all, or reassuring uncles who smoked trusty old pipes:
After breakfast [Lord Arthur] flung himself down on a divan, and lit a cigarette.
The telephone
Incidentally, speaking of ‘modern’ I was struck that Lord Savile telephones to his stables to have his hansom prepared; impressively hi-tech for 1887.
Russian revolutionary politics
A hot topic in the 1880s; Wilde dealt with the subject at length twice, once in his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism which takes as its starting point the writings of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin; and once in his early and unsuccessful play, Vera or the Nihilists (premiered New York 1883) which is entirely about Russian revolutionaries.
The French revolution
was in the news because of its centenary in 1889, to commemorate which France had just sent the United States the Statue of Liberty.
Tanagra
Small explains the reference to Tanagra in the passage about Sybil Merton by explaining that in the last decades of the 19th century small and beautifully proportioned statuettes from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC were found at Tanagra, a village in Greece.
2. The Canterville Ghost
A brilliant comedy ghost story, it is also about the contrast and/or culture war between Americans and English, specifically American millionaires buying up Britain. In this case it’s the American Minister, Hiram B. Otis, who buys Canterville Chase, ancestral home of the Canterville family. Lord Canterville warns him about the family ghost to which Otis replies with American can-do confidence aka money:
‘My Lord…I come from a modern country, where we have everything that money can buy; and with all our spry young fellows painting the Old World red, and carrying off your best actresses and prima-donnas, I reckon that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, we’d have it at home in a very short time in one of our public museums, or on the road as a show.’
Ian Small has a useful note pointing out that Americans are in several places in Wilde’s writing described as ‘natural’ or ‘painfully natural’, by contrast with the fastidious European super-sophistication which he thinks of himself as representing.
Mrs. Otis, who, as Miss Lucretia R. Tappan, of West 53rd Street, had been a celebrated New York belle, was now a very handsome, middle-aged woman, with fine eyes, and a superb profile. Many American ladies on leaving their native land adopt an appearance of chronic ill-health, under the impression that it is a form of European refinement, but Mrs. Otis had never fallen into this error. She had a magnificent constitution, and a really wonderful amount of animal spirits.
So it’s a story of other-worldly spirits versus animal spirits. So Mrs and Mrs Otis, their eldest son Washington, 15-year-old Miss Virginia E. Otis and the twin boys catch a train to Ascot, are transported the seven miles to Canterville on a waggonette and are received by the family housekeeper, the lugubrious Mrs Umney, who they have agreed to keep on.
The animal spirits are almost immediately on display as Mrs Umney points out in a solemn whisper the patch of red on the library carpet which is:
the blood of Lady Eleanore de Canterville, who was murdered on that very spot by her own husband, Sir Simon de Canterville, in 1575.
Taking no nonsense Mr Otis whips out a stick of Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent and after a few moments of hard rubbing, has completely removed the centuries-old stain. Mrs Umney faints with shock, There is a loud burst of thunder overhead. Mr Otis lights up a long cheroot. The Yanks are here.
But the blood stains keep returning, day after day, despite being cleaned away, despite Mr Otis locking the library door and taking the key to bed with him. A few nights later he is woken by the clanking of chains and opens the door to find a ghost clanking along the hallway. Mr Otis’s phlegmatic response is to ask him to keep the noise down and, indeed, has brought from his beside a bottle of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator. Outraged, the ghost storms off down the hallway, only to be ambushed at the top of the great oak staircase by the twins who throw a pillow at his head.
The Canterville ghost is outraged. He reviews the great achievements of his career i.e. scaring various housemaids and visiting clergy out of their wits before deciding:
It was quite unbearable…no ghosts in history had ever been treated in this manner. Accordingly, he determined to have vengeance, and remained till daylight in an attitude of deep thought.
But all his attempts to scare the natural Americans fail, even when he decides to emit his ‘celebrated peal of demoniac laughter.’ All that happens is Mrs Otis rushes out into the hall offering him a spoonful of Mr. Dobell’s tincture, which is a great cure for indigestion.
Mortified he makes up his mind to put on a truly terrifying display and Wilde describes his preparations with ironic humour. However, the ghost, dressed to horrify, has barely turned the corner into the Otis family’s sleeping quarters before he spies a truly terrifying sight, turns tail and flees. It is, in fact, a fake ghost knocked up by the incorrigible twins.
Sir Simon is a very conscientious ghost and he is obliged to make certain appearances at certain times and places, so he continues to do so but he finds himself so frightened of the Americans that he willingly uses the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to silence his squeaking chains and takes to wearing slippers so as not to wake anyone. In a final attempt to scare the twins, the ghost dresses up in yet another costume and in the middle of the night slowly pushes open their bedroom door – only for a jug full of water balanced on top of the door to fall on his head, giving him a nasty chill.
One afternoon the quiet and soulful daughter, Miss Virginia E. Otis, comes across the ghost alone and sad in the Tapestry Chamber. He doesn’t even try to frighten her but pours out his troubles and woes and she is touched and moved to tears. Isn’t there some escape from this job, she asks. Only if you help me fulfil the prophecy carved in the library window, which is 6 lines of verse effectively saying the ghost can only be saved by a golden girl who gives away her tears.
And the ghost takes Virginia through a secret passage in the wood panelling. With the result that she is late for dinner and then doesn’t appear all evening. Increasingly worried, Mr Otis remembers he gave some gypsies permission to camp on his land. When they go to check the gypsy camp they find it hurriedly vacated and this triggers them sending telegrams to all the local police offices and riding to Ascot station to ask the stationmaster to send messages all along the line asking if a 15-year-old American girl has been seen.
All a wild goose-chase, because later that night with a crash and bang Virginia emerges from the secret panelling to the huge relief of her family (and her young boyfriend, the little Duke of Cheshire). She explains that the ghost is well and truly dead, that he repented his sins, and that she wept for him and that saved his soul. Now all that remains is a skeleton in a secret dungeon.
The final section of the story describes the grand formal burial of Sir Simon’s skeleton in the Canterville plot, and the discussion between Otis and the Lord about who should have ownership of the casket of jewels the ghost gave to Virginia. Lord Canterville insists it is here. And so she wears them at her wedding to the young Duke of Cheshire and when the happy couple are presented to Queen Victoria in 1890.
Commentary
The central gag is drawn out, namely the notion that the ghost does its best to scare the Yanks who remain perfectly indifferent and only promote wonderful American products. This scene or motif is repeated about six times, the essential repetition of the ghost’s attempts and the Americans’ debunking of it concealed by the brio with which Wilde comes up with identities and disguises which the ghost adopts.
The end passages become sentimental. Young Virginia really is close to becoming an angel. And when she attributes the ghost’s ultimate atonement and salvation, nobody questions her.
And then it ends, as almost story ever told, with the happy marriage of Virginia and her Duke. Those damn Yanks, coming over here, stealing our most eligible bachelors. This also is a recurring motif and joke in Wilde’s plays.
3. The Sphinx Without a Secret: an etching
Very short, barely 6 pages in the Penguin edition. Ian Small’s notes tell us that The Sphinx was 1) a nickname Wilde gave to his friend Ada Leverson; 2) was the title of one of his best poems; 3) the sub-title was an example of Wilde’s habit of sub-titling texts or poems in terms of other art forms, generally art or music, very much in the manner of Whistler who called his paintings after genres of music, for example, nocturnes etc.
The plot
The narrator is sitting in a cafe in Paris watching the world go by when he is hailed by Lord Murchison, a good friend from years ago at Oxford. But the man seems anxious and harried. They hail a horse-drawn cab and go to a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. After they have eaten, Lord Murchison tells his story.
He shows the narrator a photo of an attractive woman with large vague eyes and wrapped in rich furs. One evening he was walking down Bond Street when he glimpsed a beautiful face in a carriage window. Her beauty haunted him. Next day he walked up and down Rotten Row seeking her, to no avail.
A week later he is dining at Lady Rastail’s when to his utter amazement the woman arrives as a guest and is introduced as Lady Alroy. Murchison takes her into dinner and tries to make conversation, but she is timid, almost anxious. When he mentions having seen her in Bond Street she tells him to hush. He asks if he may pay a call on her next day, she agrees, but when he does so the butler informs him she has gone out. Puzzled, he writes her a letter from his club and she replies agreeing to another meeting, at which she begs him not to write to her at her home.
What the devil is going on? It has the claustrophobic, gnomic secrecy of a Sherlock Holmes story (this story was published in the same year as the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, 1887).
He is taking a short cut between Regent’s Park and Piccadilly when he spots her in a rough quarter of low streets, veiled, hurrying along to the last house in a shabby row and letting herself in with a key. When he calls on her that evening, he explains that he saw her but she refuses to explain her strange behaviour. He had nerved himself to propose marriage, he had become so infatuated by her, but instead finds himself becoming angry and eventually raging at her, before storming out and then going abroad with a friend.
A month later he returns and reads in the Morning Post that she caught a chill at the opera and died. So he goes along to the house he saw her enter; he quizzes the landlady, who simply replies that Lady Alroy had indeed rented the drawing room, liked to arrive wearing a veil and… ‘met someone?’ cries Murchison, anxiously. ‘Not at all,’ the landlady replies. She simply sat and read books and occasionally had tea…
So, back in the present, this is the story he tells the narrator and asks what the devil it all means? The narrator calmly tells him: nothing. She had a fondness for melodrama. She read novels. She liked to fancy herself the heroine of one of them, dress up, slip around the shabbier streets of central London. She was acting in a play of her own devising. There was no secret. She was a sphinx without a secret.
4. The Model Millionaire
A charming little short story about philanthropy and love. It opens with a little flurry of Wildean epigrams. Having read Ian Small’s introduction I now know that Wilde’s texts sometimes actually began as sets of epigrams on a particular topic which he then set out to link together with argumentation or fictional narrative. Thus the painter character pronounces:
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow.
Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed.
The poor should be practical and prosaic.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
After this brief flurry of apothegms, the text settles down to be a sort of fairy story. Young Hughie Erskine is ‘wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his grey eyes’ but absolutely hopeless at finding a job or a career with the result that he is practically penniless (apart from the two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him.)
He is in love with Laura Merton, ‘the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India’.
They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them.
The colonel refuses to consider Hughie as a son-in-law unless he can rustle up £10,000 to support Laura, which he hasn’t the slightest chance of doing. One day Hughie drops in to the home of his friend, Alan Trevor the painter. Alan is painting a beggar, a strikingly picturesque old man.
He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous expression. Over his shoulders was flung a coarse brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered hat for alms.
They discuss painting and Alan says he’ll get 2,000 guineas for his painting. When Alan is called out of the room Hughie is so overcome with pity for the knackered old man that he goes over and gives him the last sovereign in his pocket. The man smiles strangely and says thank you. When Alan returns to the room, Hughie, by now embarrassed at his own generosity, takes his leave.
That evening Hughie bumps into Alan at his club, the Palette Club and they get talking about the old tramp. Alan says he asked lots of questions about Hughie so Alan told him all about his beloved Laura Merton, about the obdurate colonel, the £10,000 requirement and all the rest of it.
It’s only now that Hughie reveals that he slipped the old man a sovereign which prompts Alan to burst out laughing. For ‘the old beggar’ is really Baron Hausberg, the richest man in Europe.
‘He could buy all London to-morrow without overdrawing his account. He has a house in every capital, dines off gold plate, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses.’
He asked to be painted in the guise of the poorest of the poor and so Alan, to indulge the whim of a multi-millionaire, lent him a ragged old suit he picked up in Spain. Hughie is mortified to realise what a fool he’s made of himself.
Next morning his servant announces a visitor. Monsieur Gustave Naudin, de la part de M. le Baron Hausberg. Clearly a notary or lawyer, this visitor hands Hughie an envelope containing a cheque for £10,000. His generosity of heart has been rewarded. The story cuts to a swift two-line conclusion. Hughie and Laura are married. Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a speech at the wedding breakfast. And concludes with a Wildean mot.
‘Millionaire models,’ remarked Alan, ‘are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!’
More Ian Small insights
In his introduction, Ian Small points out that the 1880s saw a great widening of the reading public as a result of 1) new developments in print technology which made printing books and magazines cheaper 2) an explosion in the size of the reading public due to increased education, crystallised by the 1870 Education Act. One of the consequences was a dramatic growth in genre fiction, most notably ghost stories, detective stories and fairy tales. He then shows how Wilde, still desperate to make a living, lost no time in trying at his hand at each of them, fairy tales in the volume titled The Happy Prince, a ghost story in The Canterville Ghost, a murder story in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.
Parody
But what is immediately obvious is that Wilde tried his hand at all these genres in the form of parodies. He elegantly inverts the fictional values associated with each genre. Thus the fairy tales are not very reassuring and tend to highlight people’s greed. The ghost in Canterville completely fails to scare the Americans. The murder in Savile is not committed at the start of the story, but forms the ironically logical conclusion of the story.
Small thinks the stories ‘subvert’ Victorian morality but that’s not quite right. At the end of Savile and Millionaire the young lovers get happily married. In Canterville the only sensitive, imaginative member of the Otis family saves the soul of a sinner and reconciles him with God. In Millionaire a spontaneous act of kindness is handsomely rewarded. Surely nothing could be more conventional or piously Victorian than these outcomes?
Inversion of values
It’s more accurate to say that the journeys to these conclusions are unorthodox. They turn the conventions of their genres, especially Canterville and Savile, on their heads. Not only that but the inversion tends to be at the expense of social values. In Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime the joke is that Arthur feels duty bound to commit the murder the cheiromancer has predicted for the sake of his fiancée. The moral inversion at the centre of the story mocks society’s values. And it foregrounds the conflict between Morality and Social Convention which is a, arguably the, central theme of Wilde’s works.
Disguise
Parody of genres and inversion of social values are joined by a third recurring theme, which is disguise and concealment. This is the theme of the two short and slight stories in the volume. In Sphinx Lady Alroy maintains a secret, wears a veil, whips up an air of melodrama around herself, which turns out to be utterly baseless and empty. It is not the ‘secret’ that matters: there is no secret; it is the performance, it is the play-acting which matters, which gives her her identity.
Millionaire is a lesser example, although it still centres on the figure of a fabulously rich multi-millionaire masquerading as a homeless beggar. Putting the actual plots to one side for a moment, both stories share the same fundamental structure whereby the majority of the narrative is driven by a subterfuge, a disguise and a bit of play-acting, which is then revealed.
Books & Boots 