The Model Millionaire Study Guide

Oscar Wilde was born into a distinguished Anglo-Irish family in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. His mother’s love of poetry instilled in him a lifelong devotion to literature, and he excelled early at Classics. His studies took him to Oxford in 1874, where he joined ranks with the burgeoning Aesthetic and Decadent movements, which promoted “art for art’s sake.” In the years after university, he broke into London high society, where his good looks, outspoken behavior, and biting wit made him a celebrity. He proved that his fame was well-earned by producing a steady stream of quality poems, stories, and plays—including the enduringly popular 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest—that skewered the Victorian morality of his day while maintaining a light touch and a mastery of humor and irony. His 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray scandalized English readers with its homoerotic undercurrents and frank promotion of artistic hedonism. The scandal proved fateful: in 1895, Wilde’s personal enemies brought him to trial for “gross indecency,” invoking Dorian Gray as evidence. They were able to prove that Wilde, married with children, had indeed been carrying on homosexual affairs with younger men—a crime at the time. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor. Debilitated by his prison ordeal, Wilde made off to France upon his release, spending his final few years there in grim poverty and dying of meningitis in 1900.

Wilde’s writing generally belongs to the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, which were overlapping currents in late-19th-century literary and visual arts that pushed back against the Victorian era’s stifling morality and emphasis on scientific progress and rationality. Against this cold utilitarianism, Aestheticism valued “art for art’s sake,” while the (originally French) Decadent movement extended this philosophy into an all-purpose hedonism that found liberatory pleasure in transgression. Wilde played a major role in defining these philosophies. Some of Wilde’s writings explicitly explore these ideas, while lighter pieces like “The Model Millionaire” seek simply to provide the self-contained aesthetic delight that Wilde cherished. Contrary to criticisms that Wilde’s attitudes were amoral and divorced from reality, Wilde in fact maintained a lifelong interest in economic reform, and he composed substantial socialist manifestos. He felt that economic inequality impeded universal access to artistic and aesthetic pleasure, and this concern informs “The Model Millionaire,” where poverty threatens to thwart Hughie’s romance.

Wilde’s artistic outlook was greatly influenced by the Victorian art critic Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance exalts individual artistic refinement above all else. He was also influenced by the critic John Ruskin, whose numerous writings insist on art’s power to elevate society. This tension emerges thematically in “The Model Millionaire.” In the story, Wilde also gently satirizes Victorian pretensions—a theme he greatly amplifies in his dramatic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. This play comedically exposes social hypocrisies around marriage and class only hinted at in “The Model Millionaire.” While Earnest proves that Wilde transcends easy categorization, he nevertheless remains most associated with the Decadent movement. His Decadent peers include Algernon Charles Swinburne, a poet likewise fascinated by artistic extremes and transgressive sexuality. Given that these writers valued aesthetic perfection so highly, it should come as no surprise that “The Model Millionaire” features a surprise reversal of fortune: the ancient philosopher Aristotle proclaimed that such a reversal is essential to any well-constructed plot in his Poetics, the first and arguably greatest work of literary criticism. Furthermore, Wilde’s interest in surprise endings was not unique among his contemporaries: the American short story writer O. Henry, perhaps influenced by Wilde, likewise composed brief tales of social commentary with witty twist endings, such as “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Duplicity of Hargraves.”