The British Aristocracy vs. American Vulgarity Theme Analysis

The Canterville Ghost was written in 1887, during England’s Victorian era. This was a period when the English aristocracy began to see its long-held power in society diminish as the new middle class gained wealth and status. While many writers of the period imagined the aristocracy falling to the rising British middle class, The Canterville Ghost depicts irrelevant and powerless aristocrats succumbing to an even worse fate: ceding their place in society to Americans, the group they considered most vulgar. Wilde pokes fun both at the pearl-clutching stuffiness of English aristocrats, and at the tasteless practicality of Americans, satirizing the very premise of class warfare by ridiculing both groups equally and showing them engaged in an absurd tussle over a decaying manor.

Critiquing both sides equally, Wilde reduces Americans and English aristocrats to absurd stereotypes. Using the Otis family as an embodiment of all Americans, Wilde portrays Americans as grotesquely vulgar and mindlessly practical. For example, the Americans are so practical that they hardly react to the presence of a ghost in the house. Instead, they mock Sir Simon, clean up the evidence of his existence, and remain immune to being frightened. This blasé attitude towards the presence of a frightening ghost is meant to suggest the ignorance and arrogance of American indifference to the aristocracy, which the British considered to be almost sacred. On the other hand, Wilde shows the aristocracy, as represented by Sir Simon, to be stuffy, irrelevant, conceited, and even pathetic. Sir Simon, whose tricks have terrified generations of English residents of Canterville Chase, cannot manage to scare the Americans. While Sir Simon is used to being feared and respected simply because he is a ghost, the Otis family treats him as a minor annoyance, which wounds him deeply. He sinks into a depression and then makes furious (though ineffective) plans for revenge, which shows the aristocracy’s inability to cope with its declining power and relevance in the Victorian era.

Although Wilde mocks both British aristocrats and Americans, he clearly believes that Americans have the upper hand, and that the decline of the British aristocracy is inevitable. Sir Simon has been stuck as a ghost for hundreds of years as a punishment for killing his wife, and he longs to be released into the next world. Since Sir Simon represents the aristocracy, Wilde seems to suggest that the aristocracy, too, is in limbo. Aristocrats lack the power and prestige they once had, but their class has not been dismantled entirely. As such, they live in a painful state of trying to stave off the humiliation of decline by denying the obvious: their power is unsuited to contemporary life. On the other hand, Wilde shows that while the Otis family’s practicality and refusal to be frightened or offended is perhaps uncultured, it is also an effective way to live. Sir Simon has ruled Canterville Chase for centuries, and the Americans are the first residents who are able to live normally in the house, which shows their ascendant power. Despite that Sir Simon cannot frighten the family, the Otis twins succeed in terrifying Sir Simon with a prank, which shows that American-style power has currency in the contemporary world.

While Wilde believes that the vulgarity and practicality embodied by Americans is the way of the future, he suggests that the struggle between aristocrats and Americans is foolish. Wilde’s most evocative critique of class struggle is the Otis family’s conflict with Sir Simon about the centuries-old bloodstain from Sir Simon’s wife’s murder. Immediately after moving into Canterville Chase, Mrs. Otis sees the bloodstain on the carpet, but cannot tell what it is. Once the housekeeper, Mrs. Umney, has told her, Mrs. Otis orders for it to be removed, since she doesn’t “care for blood-stains in a sitting room.” The irreverence of her reaction—her lack of concern for how the blood might have gotten there—ridicules the overwhelming practicality of Mrs. Otis’s relationship to the house. Mrs. Umney’s reaction, however, is no less absurd. Protective of British tradition and history (no matter how grisly or irrelevant), she argues that the stain should not be removed because it’s historic and it is “much admired by tourists and others.” To leave a bloodstain in the living room of a private home simply because it’s historic—and to admire a relic of violence simply because it’s tradition—shows that the aristocracy is stuck in the past to a morbid extent.

Wilde’s critique of both British aristocrats and Americans shows his ambivalence about what he saw as the inevitable trend of English society. He deeply loved the decorum and ornate belongings of the aristocracy, but he hated the oppressive nature of living within a rigid class hierarchy, and he understood the foolishness of clinging blindly to the past. Nonetheless, even as Wilde consigns Sir Simon and the British aristocracy to history, he tries to endow Sir Simon with some dignity. Sir Simon is the most charming and well-mannered character in The Canterville Ghost, and by allowing him to finally pass on graciously to the next life, Wilde seems to commemorate a moment in time that was once glorious but no longer has a place in the world.