Wilde, Oscar

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WILDE, OSCAR

education and career
trials
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WILDE, OSCAR (1854–1900), Irish playwright.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was, as he said of himself, a "man who stood in symbolic relation to his times" (De Profundis). He was born on 16 October 1854, at 21 Westland Row in Dublin. His father, Sir William Wilde, a leading ear and eye surgeon, devoted himself to caring for the city's poor. His charitable dispensary later developed into the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital. He also was the author of several noteworthy books on archaeology and Irish folklore.

Wilde's mother, Jane, was also a writer, as well as an activist for Irish nationalism, an early suffragist, and a socialist. Under the pen name Francesca Esperanza Wilde, she drew note in Dublin's political circles by publishing a series of defenses of Irish nationalism. After the family moved to more fashionable quarters on Merrion Square in June of 1855, Lady Wilde convened a regular Saturday afternoon salon with guests such as the writer Sheridan le Fanu, Samuel Lever, the lawyer and nationalist leader Isaac Butt, and the antiquarian and poet Samuel Ferguson.

education and career

This circle was Wilde's milieu until the age of nine, when he was enrolled at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Fermanaugh. He graduated in 1871, gained entrance to Trinity College, Dublin, and studied classics there from 1871 to 1874. He won the Berkeley Medal, the highest honor in classics granted at Trinity, which helped him gain a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. At the age of twenty Wilde moved from Ireland to England and continued to excel in his studies. He graduated from Oxford in 1878 with a double first, and won the 1878 Oxford Newdigate prize for his poems Ravenna.

Wilde returned to Dublin after Oxford and fell in love with Florence Balcome. She, however, spurned Wilde and became engaged to Bram Stoker. Wilde announced his intention to leave Ireland permanently because of the romantic misfortune. He took up quarters in London in 1878, and spent the next six years living off a lucrative lecturing career that took him to France and on a Continental tour of the United States.

Wilde's celebrity as a lecturer derived from his involvement at Oxford in the aesthetics movement, a new cult of decorative arts and aesthetic theory originated by William Morris (1834–1896) and his circle. Wilde captivated the media, who made him spokesperson for the movement. By 1881 the cult of the "Aesthetes" was important enough that Gilbert and Sullivan lampooned it in the popular operetta, Patience, which popularized Wilde as an effete poet who "strolled down Picadilly with a medieval lily in his hand." The show was a hit, and Wilde was a celebrity, though none of his major writings had yet appeared.

The success of the operetta's premiere in New York prompted its producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte (1844–1901), to arrange Wilde's 1882 American lecture tour. Newspapers in the larger cities attacked Wilde, describing at length his pasty white skin, and his odd, lyrical intonation. The mining towns of the West, ironically, applauded Wilde; one of the most favorable press notices about him appeared in the Leadville, Colorado, Gazette in 1881.

Wilde returned to Dublin only twice during this period of lecturing. On one of those visits in 1884 he met Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a wealthy London family, and proposed almost instantaneously. They wed on 29 May 1884. Lloyd's allowance of 250 pounds yearly was a considerable asset, and the couple cultivated a life of luxury at 16 Tite Street in London. In the next two years they had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886).

Wilde commenced a series of journalistic appointments. He reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette from 1887 to 1889, and then became editor of Woman's World, which he fashioned into a laboratory for exploring the decorative arts and a mouthpiece for socialist reformation. The period immediately after taking the editorship was one of extreme creative productivity for Wilde. In 1891 his most important prose writings appeared in the collection Intentions, which included "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist," and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was serialized in Lipincott's Magazine. Mainstream reviewers praised Wilde's prose but condemned his morality. Max Nordau, whose influential book Degeneration (1895) attacked aestheticism, used the novel as an

example of how degenerate artists hasten the "moral laxity and decay" of a nation.

In 1891 Wilde also wrote Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of four stage hits that elevated Wilde into a West End legend. It opened as an immediate hit at St. James' Theatre in London in February 1882, and earned Wilde an astonishing seven thousand pounds. He followed it with A Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 19 April 1893, which was hailed as the best "comedy of manners" since Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). In his third West End hit, An Ideal Husband, Wilde crafted his epigrams and wit around a political melodrama, prompting the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) to call him "our only serious playwright." Wilde's next—and last—play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the Haymarket only a month after An Ideal Husband, putting Wilde in the enviable position of having two simultaneous West End hits.

trials

The notes for works left by Wilde suggest he intended to have a long career as a playwright. However, 1891 also saw the beginning of Wilde's intimacies with Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (1870–1945), the son of John Sholto Douglas, 8th Marquess of Queensberry. Douglas, a devotee of the cult of aestheticism, became Wilde's constant companion in the London social world.

Douglas had not yet come of age and had no allowance, and Wilde's flagrant displays of spending and support, as well as the attention paid by the public to the men's extravagance, snubbed the father's position as financial authority. To retaliate, the marquess made a plan to interrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with an insulting delivery of vegetables made to the playwright while his play was in progress. Warned of the plot, Wilde had the marquess barred from the theater. The next day, 18 February 1895, the marquess left a calling card for Wilde at the Albemarle club. On the back he had written, "For Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite [sic]."

Goaded by Douglas, Wilde pressed charges of criminal libel against the marquess. The ensuing events ended any hopes Wilde had of sustaining his career and left him financially and emotionally destitute. In April the crown took over prosecution, and the solicitor Edward Clarke based his case against the marquess almost entirely on Wilde's own assertions that the accusation of being a sodomite had no basis. To challenge that claim, Edward Henry Carson, barrister for the defense, located several lower-class boys who claimed to have had intimacies with Wilde. The revelation laid waste to the prosecution, humiliated Wilde, and prompted the dismissal of the case.

Carson's witnesses, however, provided the ground for the crown to arrest Wilde on 6 April 1895, on charges of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons: under section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act." Wilde, along with Alfred Taylor, who had allegedly solicited the services of young men for Wilde, faced twenty-five counts. The jury deadlocked on all charges except one, of which they acquitted Wilde.

Despite entreaties from luminaries such as Bernard Shaw and even from the marquess's own attorney, Edward Carson, the crown stood adamant in its desire to secure a conviction, and pursued a second trial under the prosecution of the solicitor-general himself, Frank Lockwood. The crown's motives are a matter for speculation. Ambiguous letters between Queensberry and Prime Minister Rosebery (Archibald Philip Primrose), who was widely suspected of having had a homosexual affair earlier in his career with another of Queensberry's sons, suggest that Rosebery might have been blackmailed into pursuing prosecution. More generally, the British government had become uncomfortably associated with prurience by several well-publicized scandals that called into question the moral ethics of certain government officials. The prosecution of Wilde might have seemed a way to redeem the government against its own transgressions.

Wilde himself, however, was the leading contributing factor. In 1892 the lord chamberlain refused to license the performance of Wilde's newest play, Salome, because it contained biblical characters. Wilde reacted publicly and his anger resounded across London society. In 1893 he published the play in a French edition, as if to snub the parochial taboos of the English system, and in 1894 he published an English fine art edition with pornographic illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). Such actions showed little respect for authority. Also, Wilde's Irish origins and his flaunting of new, commercially derived money caused further contempt. In many ways, this was a prosecution about nationality and class as much as it was about sexual behavior.

The third trial resulted in the verdict of guilty on all charges save one, and Wilde served two years at hard labor in prison, the last eighteen months of it at Reading Gaol. He was released on 19 May 1897. Penniless and abandoned by his wife and sons (as well as by Douglas), he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, after the title character of Melmoth the Wanderer, and lived in self-imposed exile from society and the aesthetic movement. Only two pieces of any significance issued from Wilde after release. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a poem seeking to elicit compassion for prisoners, and De Profundis (1905), a long letter written to Douglas from prison that provides Wilde's most personal statement of his philosophies of art, life, and himself.

Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on 30 November 1900, only three years after his release. He was buried in the Cimitière de Bagneux on the outskirts of Paris, but was later relocated by generous friends to the more prestigious Père Lachaise Cemetery, where his grave is marked by a commissioned monument from sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein (1880–1959).