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Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) |
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Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde's other best-known works include his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which deals very similar theme as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Wilde's fairy tales are very popular – the motifs have been compared to those of Hans Christian Andersen. When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till diey had examined the rings that they recognised who it was. (from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by Lui Trugo, Three Sirens Press, 1931, p. 246) Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin to unconventional parents. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1820-96), was a poet and journalist. Her pen name was Sperenza. According to a story she warded off creditors by reciting Aeschylus. Wilde's father was Sir William Wilde, an Irish antiquarian, gifted writer, and specialist in diseases of the eye and ear, who founded a hospital in Dublin a year before Oscar was born. His work gained for him the honorary appointment of Surgeon Oculist in Ordinary to the Queen. Lady Wilde, who was active in the women's rights movement, was reputed to ignore her husbands amorous adventures. Wilde studied at Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (1864-71), Trinity College, Dublin (1871-74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-78), where he was taught by Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Even at the age of 13, Wilde had a dandy's taste in clothing. "The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie's, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac but it is too hot to wear them yet," he wrote in September 8, 1868, in a letter to his mother. (Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, selected and edited by Merlin Holland, Carroll & Graf, 2007, p. 4) Willie, whom he mentioned, was his elder brother. Lady Wilde's third and last child was a daughter, named Isola Francesca, who died young. It has been said that Lady Wilde insisted on dressing Oscar in girl's clothes because she had longed for a girl. In Oxford Wilde shocked the pious dons with his irreverent attitude towards religion and was jeered at for his eccentric clothes. He collected blue china and peacock's feathers, and later his velvet knee-breeches drew much attention. Wilde was taller than most of his contemporaries, and athletically built, but the subject of sport bored him. In 1878 Wilde received his B.A. and on the same year he moved to London. Soon his lifestyle and humorous wit made him the most talked-about advocate of Aestheticism, the late 19th century movement in England that argued for the idea of art for art's sake. To earn his living, Wilde worked as art reviewer (1881), lectured in the United States and Canada (1882), and in Britain (1883-1884). Since his childhood, Wilde had studied the art of conversation. His talk was articulate, imaginative, and poetic. From the mid-1880s he was regular contributor for Pall Mall Gazette and Dramatic View. Between 1887 and 1889 he edited Woman's World magazine Wilde married in 1884 Constance Mary Lloyd, the daughter of John Horatio Lloyd, a wealthy barrister, and Ada Atkinson. Constance had enjoyed athorough education, she played the piano well, was interested in arts, embroidery, and could read Dante in Italian. For a short period she was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. After she turned away from occultism she became involved in Christian socialism. Wilde himself had joined the Freemasons in the late 1870s. On honeymoon in Paris Wilde and Constance visited the annual Paris salon, saw there Whistler's Harmony in Grey and Green and went to opera to see Sarah Bernhardt in Macbeth. It is possible that before the marriage Wilde told Constance something of his sexual past. "I am content to let the past be buried, it does not belong to me," she said in a letter, "for the future trust and faith will come, and when I have you for my husband, I will hold you fast with chains of love and devotion so that you shall never leave me." (Oscar Wilde: A Life by Matthew Sturgis, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021, p. 286) At Portora Royal School he had had some "sentimental friendships" with boys, and he had an encounter with a female prostitute in Paris while going steady with Constance. Their marriage ended in 1893, but the couple never divorced officially. Wilde's love letters to Constance have not survived. The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), a collection of fairy-stories, Wilde wrote for his two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Possibly one of the pieces, 'The Selfish Giant,' was a joint effort between Wilde and Constance, who published her own collection, There Was Once in the same year. The Picture of Dorian Gray followed in 1890 and next year he brought out more fairy tales. Wilde had met a few years earlier Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), an athlete and a poet, who became both the love of the author's life and his downfall. Bosie's uncle, Lord Jim, caused a scandal when he filled in the 1891 census describing his wife as a "lunatic" and his stepson as a "shoeblack born in darkest Africa." During a stay in Paris, Wilde wrote Salomé in French. An anonymous English translation, dedicated to Alfred Douglas, was published in 1894. Richard Strauss's operatic version of the play was first performed in Dresden, five years after Wilde's death. The Picture of Dorian Gray was published first by Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. Some of the homosexual content was censored by Lippincott editor J. M. Stoddart. Wilde revised the novel still further before it came out in expanded book form in 1891, added with six chapters. The book has some parallels with Wilde's own life. At Oxford he became a close friend of Frank Miles, a painter, and the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower, and it seems that they both are represented in Dorian Gray. Wilde made his reputation in theatre world between the years
1892 and 1895 with a series of highly popular plays. Lady
Windermere's Fan (1892) dealt with a blackmailing divorcée driven
to self-sacrifice by maternal love. In A Woman of No Importance
(1893) an illegitimate son is torn between his father and mother. An
Ideal Husband (1895) was about blackmail, political
corruption and public and private honour. In The Importance of
Being Earnest
(1895), a comedy of manners, John Worthing (who prefers to call himself
Jack) and Algernon Moncrieff (Algy) are two fashionable young
gentlemen; other characters include Rev. Canon Chasuble, Merriman (butler), Lane (manservant), Lady
Blackwell, Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax, Cwcily Cardew, Miss Prism
(governess). "ALGERNON: Lane's views on marriage seem somewhat lax.
Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example,
what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have
absolutely no sense of moral responsibility." (Ibid., Walter H. Baker Company, 1920, p. 3) John tells that he has a
brother called Ernest, but in town John himself is known as Ernest and
Algernon also pretends to be the profligate brother Ernest. Gwendolen
Fairfax and Cecily Cardew are two ladies whom the two snobbish
characters court. Gwendolen declares that she never travels without her
diary because "one should always have something sensational to read in
the train." (Ibid., p. 82) Before the theatrical success Wilde produced several essays,
many of
these anonymously. His two major literary-theoretical works
were the dialogues The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1889) and The Critic as Artist (1891). In the latter Wilde lets his character state, that
criticism is the superior part of creation, and that the critic must
not be fair, rational, and sincere, but possessed of a temperament
exquisitely susceptible to beauty. "Gilbert:
Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely
requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The
difficulty that I should fance the feels is the difficulty of
sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a standard mus be
impossible." ('The Critic as Artist,' in Intentions, Bretano's, 1905, p. 126) The Soul of a Man Under
Socialism (1891), a more traditional essay,
takes an optimistic view of the road to socialist
future. Wilde rejects the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice in
favor of joy. Although married and the father of two children, Wilde's personal life was open to rumours. Constance had tolerated his infidelities and long absences from home, but his affair with Alfred Douglas (or 'Bosie') had a catastrophic effect on the marriage. In the midst of the crisis Constance found comfort from reading Dante's Inferno. During a separation from her husband in 1893 she took a portable Kodak camera with her to Italy, where she photographed buildings and some of the art pieces in Florence. Wilde's years of triumph ended, when his intimate association with Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). It all began when John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, left an insulting visiting card at the Albemarle Club, where Wilde was a member. What he really wanted, was to separate his son Lord Alfred Douglas, and Wilde. Unexpectedly, Wilde proceeded to sue, but the result was his arrest and two criminal trials. Constance went with her children to Switzerland and then to Germany to escape the public eye. In 1895 she changed her and son's names to Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan Holland, taking the same family name her brother Otho used. During
his first trial, which failed on a technicality,
Wilde defended himself, stating: ""The 'Love that dare not speak its
name" in this century is such a
great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between
David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his
philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and
Shakespeare. It has that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as
it is perfect. . . . There is nothing unnatural about it." (Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel, Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 299-300) Mr.
Justice Wills,
when pronouncing the sentence in the retrial, stated: "It is no
use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead
to all sense of shame, and one eannot hope to produce any effect upon
them. It is the worst case I have ever tried." (The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, edited, with an introdution by H. Montgomery Hyde, William Hodge and Company, 1948, p. 339) While Wilde served his sentence, Bosie stood by
him, planned to
dedicate a volume of poems to him, but the author felt himself
betrayed and turned against his friend. Later they met in Naples, where
they
shared a villa. Constance visited Wilde
in prison, too. Afterwards she wrote: "It was indeed
awful, more so than I had any conception it could be. I could not see
him and I could not touch him, and I scarcely spoke . . ." (The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, Basic Books, 2006, p. 61) Wilde was sent to Wandsworth prison, London, and then Reading
Gaol. After more than 19
months of deprivation, he was at last allowed pen and paper. At that point he had became inclined to take opposite views
on the potential of humankind toward perfection. De Profundis (1905), which he wrote, was a dramatic monologue and
autobiography, addressed to Alfred Douglas. "Everything about
my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our
very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We
are clowns whose hearts are broken." (Ibid., G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905, p. 105) After his release in 1897 Wilde lived under the name Sebastian
Melmoth in Berneval, near Dieppe, then in Paris, where he spent
his first weeks in exile at hotel Lavenue on rue du Depart. He wrote The
Ballad of Reading Gaol,
revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. On his death bed
Wilde turned to Roman Catholicism. Wilde's friend Robbie
Ross, who became his literary executor, brought a priest to
his bedside. Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, penniless, at Hôtel Alsace on rue des Beaux-Arts at the age of 46. One of his visitors had called it a "shabby, cheap, and unsanitary place with no drainage." Wilde can claim several last words, of which the most famous include "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do" and "I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means." Mostly he talked nonsense, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. Wilde was first buried in the cemetery in Bagneux, and in 1909 his remains were removed to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. "Do you want to know the great drama of my life?" This is what Wilde asked of André Gide in Algiers. "It is that I have put my all genius into my life; I've put only my talent into my works." (Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality by André Gide, edited with an introduction by Justin O'Brien, Routledge, 2011, p. 145) Constance died in 1898 in Genoa, after a spinal surgery. Her brother Otho blamed the surgeon, Signor Bossi, for his sister's death. Bossi was shot dead in 1919. Cyril was killed by a German sniper in 1915. Vyvyan, who also served in the army during WW I, gained fame as a translator and author. His son Merlin became an acknowledged Wilde scholar. For further reading: Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality by Stuart Mason (1907); The Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde by Frank Harris (1914); Oscar Wilde and Myself by Lord Alfred Douglas (1932); The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, edited, with an introdution by H. Montgomery Hyde (1948); Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (1970); The Trials of Oscar Wilde by H. Montgomery Hyde (1975); Oscar Wilde: A Biography by H. Montgomery Hyde (1975); Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism by Rodney Shewan (1977); Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman (1987); Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel by Norbert Kohl (1989); Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (1993); Oscar and Bossie by Trevor Fisher (2002); A Portrait of Oscar Wilde by Merlin Holland (2008); Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle (2011); The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family by Emer O'Sullivan (2016); Wilde between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail ondage, and de Profundis by David Walton (2020); Oscar Wilde: A Life by Matthew Sturgis (2021); Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, edited by Rob Marland (2022); Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment by Joseph Bristow (2022); Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive by Sean O'Toole (2023) - See also: André Gide, John Keats - Films: Oscar Wilde (1960), dir. Gregory Ratoff, starring Robert Morley, Phyllis Calvert, John Neville, Ralp Richardson. The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), dir. Ken Hughes, starring Peter Finch, Yvonne Mitchell, Lionel Jeffries, Nigel Patrick, James Mason. Wilde (1998), dir. Brian Gilbert, starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle. Selected bibliography:
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