Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Wilde’s short story, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” is divided into six chapters and told from the third-person limited point of view. It follows the exploits of the title character who, after having his palm read at a society party, becomes convinced that he must murder one of his distant relatives before marrying his fiancée, the beautiful Sybil Merton. After first attempting to murder his elderly second cousin, Lady Clementina Beauchamp, with a poison pill (Lady Clementina instead dies of natural causes before she can the pill), Lord Arthur then targets his uncle, the Dean of Chichester, with an explosive clock (that does not produce a big enough explosion to kill his uncle). Faced with having once again to postpone his marriage to Sybil, Lord Arthur happens upon Mr. Podgers, the palm-reader who had initially predicted the murder, and Lord Arthur tosses Mr. Podgers into the Thames River. Mr. Podgers’s death is thus attributed to suicide and Lord Arthur is relieved of the burden of his fate and free to marry Sybil.

The story playfully satirizes the aristocratic high society of late-19th-century London. The tale of a charming young man driven to commit murder through a misplaced sense of “duty” and a too-credulous belief in his own destiny pokes fun at pseudosciences like cheiromancy, or palm reading; at the same time, it also takes an ironic approach to questions of fate and free will, appearance and reality, and even morality itself.

The third-person narrator stands at a critical distance from the characters, especially the eponymous Lord Arthur, allowing his self-delusions and rationalizations to unfold without passing moral judgments or directly ridiculing him. In Chapter 2, for example, a panicked Lord Arthur “was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence,” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 5), as he attempts to come to terms with the fate he believes to be literally written on his own palm. The narrator adds only the comment that, “He was still very young” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 5). The aside is, at best, laconic; moreover, it comments not on the idea of murder itself, but on the binary nature of Lord Arthur’s approach to his own situation. The reference to Lord Arthur’s youth implies that the opposition between “shallow optimism” and “the real facts of existence” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 5) is a function of immaturity, much as his willingness to credit the cheiromantist with prophetic insight in the first place. After all, the other guests at Lady Windermere’s party take the palm readings as a form of light entertainment to be stopped only when they verge on indiscretion.

While Lord Arthur’s own frantic musings introduce the language of free will and fate, the story as a whole thematizes The Ambiguous Relationship Between Fate and Free Will. For, though he believes himself to be following the dictates of some external will that has written its instructions on his palm, Lord Arthur self-consciously—freely—participates in pursuing that fate once he becomes aware of it. More than that, he adds an extra dimension to that fate. Mr. Podgers predicts that Lord Arthur will lose a distant relative, go on a long journey, and commit murder. Lord Arthur acts on the assumption—never articulated by Mr. Podgers or the narrator—that the distant relative must also be the murder victim, which puts him in the absurd position of having to decide how gently to poison his elderly cousin, Lady Clementina, and, later, how to blow up his uncle. The full realization of Podgers’s prophecy is itself a master-class in irony. Lord Arthur does fulfill his destiny, but he does so in three stages rather than two; Mr. Podgers, meanwhile, turns out to have accurately predicted his own death, without knowing that he has done so. Free will and destiny are not two separate forces. Rather, they are entangled and often confused with one another.

The use of irony and narrative distance, moreover, enables Wilde to critique high society and all its foibles without causing as much offense as a direct assault would elicit. The characters are not who they appear to be, but this disconnection is presented as a given of the society in which the story is set, rather than as a problem to be untangled in favor of some deeper “truth.” Thus, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” thematizes Appearance as Social Reality. The play of appearances is depicted as a source of pleasure rather than an object of moral condemnation; good manners and good taste are available even to the saboteur and criminal Herr Winckelkopf.

Lord Arthur’s anxiety about committing murder has less to do with the enormity of the act itself then on its potential revelation that would make him a topic of conversation at another one of Lady Windermere’s parties. Even worse, he fears what such a situation would do to Sybil and thus postpones their wedding:

“[He] was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry her until he had committed the murder. […] This done, he could take her to his arms, knowing that she would never have to blush for him, never have to hang her head in shame” (Chapter 3, Paragraph 4).

These rationalizations have less to do with establishing Lord Arthur as someone so wrapped up in appearances that he would commit murder than they do with demonstrating the absurdity of a social world that would condemn a woman for far less than being married to a killer.

Throughout the story, Lord Arthur’s reliance on the language of duty points to the broader theme of The Irony of Moralism. A young man who felt destined to commit a murder would normally experience some amount of guilt or strong feelings about the crime. He should be in conflict with himself about what the best course of action is and how to weigh his own happiness against the life of another. Yet, these expectations are part of the target of Wilde’s satirical view. Lord Arthur’s primary conflict is the challenges in getting the murders to actually stick. His repeated failed attempts frustrate him because he feels that fate is thwarting his efforts to do what he has become convinced is the right thing. His blindness to the enormity of his contemplated crimes is an implicit critique of those who assert their own morality at the expense of other people; if such people do not, in real life, commit actual murders, Wilde suggests that the difference is still one of degree rather than kind.