Themes
Duty turned upside down
The story's subtitle is 'A Study of Duty', and Lord Arthur treats murder exactly as a conscientious Victorian gentleman treats any painful obligation. He decides that it is 'not a sin, but a sacrifice', refuses to indulge any 'personal pique', and draws up a list of his friends and relatives on notepaper before choosing a victim he is fond of. Wilde's joke is that every virtue the age admired, common sense, self-denial and a horror of scandal, serves a mad purpose. The narrator even praises him for not hesitating like Hamlet, and the comedy lies in that straight face.
Fate and free will
After the reading, Lord Arthur wonders whether we are 'no better than chessmen, moved by an unseen power'. Yet nothing in the story is fated except by his own choice to believe. Podgers gives only a vague prophecy, and Lord Arthur makes it come true by acting on it, so that the prophecy is fulfilled on the prophet. When poison and dynamite both fail he feels that 'Destiny herself had turned traitor', and only a chance meeting on the Embankment completes the crime. Wilde leaves open whether the hand foretold the murder or simply caused it.
Society as a show
Lady Windermere's reception, with its Cabinet Ministers, bishops, prima donna and 'performing lions', sets the tone: society is a spectacle in which everyone is on display. Lady Windermere complains that her pianists look like poets and that her dynamiting conspirator looked like a nice old clergyman, and the story bears her out. Podgers looks like 'something between a family doctor and a country attorney', and the bomb-maker Winckelkopf is a cheerful host with a wine-stained napkin round his neck. The narrator sums it up after the reading: 'The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.'
Murder as farce
Every instrument of crime in the story turns into social comedy. The chemist accepts Lord Arthur's tale of a rabid Norwegian mastiff, the poison sits unused in a pretty silver box, and Herr Winckelkopf treats dynamite as a craft, charging three pounds ten for the clock and insisting that he lives 'entirely for my art'. The bomb ends up in Jane Percy's letter as a 'pretty and ingenious toy' that the family banishes to the stables. Wilde takes the anarchists, Nihilists and dynamiters who worried Scotland Yard and turns them into material for a drawing-room joke.
Love and a secret
Sybil Merton is less a character than 'a symbol of all that is good and noble' to Lord Arthur, and everything he does is done for her sake. He swears that she will never know of his self-sacrifice, and he keeps his word, so the happy ending rests on a secret. The narrator insists that 'For them romance was not killed by reality', and the last scene, with Lord Arthur handing his wife yellow roses while their children dance round him, shows a perfectly happy marriage. The reader alone knows that it was bought with a man's death.