31 pages • 1 hour read
Oscar WildeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
This theme is immediately touched upon when Hiram Otis and Lord Canterville discuss the ghost in the opening chapter, and it comes up frequently throughout the text. Hiram and his family represent New World beliefs, while Lord Canterville, Sir Simon, and to an extent the Duke of Cheshire represent Old World beliefs.
Materialism is a sub-theme here, brought up in a number of ways. One example occurs after Lucretia offers Sir Simon’s ghost the tincture for indigestion. He finds her materialistic beliefs to be annoying. Another example is that when Hiram tries to convince Lord Canterville to accept the jewels, he says they would be worth a lot of money.
After Sir Simon killed his wife in the 1600s, her brothers starved him to death in an effort to seek justice. However, their desire for justice turned into vengeance, which then poisoned his passing so that Sir Simon’s ghost sought vengeance by scaring people to death—quite literally, as each time he appeared, a member of the Canterville family would soon pass away. However, he gives up that quest for vengeance when he asks for Virginia’s help to find the beauty of death and the rest it promises. She provides forgiveness and helps him to seek God’s forgiveness so that he can finally be at peace.
Sir Simon’s ghost tells Virginia that his purpose for existence is to haunt others, and if he can’t do that, why bother existing at all? He comes to discover with her that love is the real reason for existence, and then he is able to find meaning and rest. Virginia uses that lesson to steer her new life as the Duchess of Cheshire.
For Lord Canterville, his meaning in life is to maintain his values and lineage. Hiram sets out seeking to undermine and correct Old World beliefs, only to end up accepting some of them, such as the existence of Sir Simon’s ghost and his daughter’s marriage into the English aristocratic class. These motifs, which represent English/European and American values respectively, can be connected to finding and preserving the meaning of existence, because for each of these characters, love for their ancestors or descendants drives their actions.
By Oscar Wilde