Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Life
Wilde was born in Dublin into a spectacularly clever family: his father a knighted eye surgeon and folklorist, his mother a poet and Irish nationalist who wrote under the name “Speranza.” He went to Trinity College Dublin, then Magdalen College Oxford, where he picked up a double first, a reputation for outrageous clothes, and the aesthetic ideology of Walter Pater — the belief that life, like art, had to be lived at the pitch of its most intense perceptions. He moved to London, became famous for being famous before he had actually written anything, toured America giving lectures on aesthetics (at customs in New York: “I have nothing to declare except my genius”), married, had two sons, and spent most of the 1880s as an editor and journalist before his real productive period kicked in.
Between 1891 and 1895 he produced almost everything anyone remembers him for: The Picture of Dorian Gray, the society comedies (Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest), and a volume of essays. He was the most successful playwright in London and by his own description the most talked-about man in England.
Then he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, and the libel suit went spectacularly wrong, and Wilde was prosecuted under the Labouchere Amendment for “gross indecency” with other men — principally Queensberry’s son Lord Alfred Douglas. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol. He wrote De Profundis in prison, the Ballad of Reading Gaol after he got out, and essentially nothing else. His wife changed her sons’ surnames and moved abroad. He died bankrupt in a cheap Paris hotel in 1900, reportedly saying either “this wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death — one or other of us has to go” or nothing at all, depending on which memoir you trust.
What They Were Doing
Wilde wrote in the key of paradox. Nearly every sentence is a sentence that looks like a platitude and then isn’t: “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” “Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.” The trick is not decoration; it’s a method. What Wilde is doing — in the plays, in Dorian Gray, in the essays — is inverting the Victorian moral commonplace to see if its opposite is truer. Often it is. The paradox is an X-ray.
Underneath the wit is the seriousness of Aestheticism: the claim that art is not a mirror of life but the thing life should imitate, and that the highest form of existence is the cultivation of experience and beauty for their own sake. [[the-picture-of-dorian-gray|The Picture of Dorian Gray]] is where Wilde took his own doctrine out for a test drive. A beautiful young man prays to remain young while his portrait ages in his place, and it works — the face is unchanged by the soul’s corruption, but the portrait records every cruelty in detail. The novel is Aestheticism’s proof text and its autopsy. Lord Henry’s famous epigrams — the most-quoted lines in the book — are the philosophy; Dorian’s career is the consequence. Wilde is running the experiment honestly enough to let it fail.
He’s also, quietly, one of the great Irish prose stylists of the nineteenth century. The plays look like sparkling drawing-room comedies and are actually brutal critiques of English hypocrisy written by a colonial subject passing in the center of empire. An Ideal Husband is a political thriller. A Woman of No Importance is a feminist manifesto disguised as a country-house farce. Earnest is a long, gleaming knife aimed at the Victorian sentimental novel.
De Profundis and the Ballad of Reading Gaol are a different register — the paradox gone, the aestheticism deepened by suffering into something closer to Christianity. “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” is written by a man whose whole theory required the opposite to be true, discovering it was true anyway.
Influence
Wilde is everywhere the twentieth century wanted to be: in drag queens, in pop lyrics, in camp as a sensibility (Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” is unthinkable without him), in the aphoristic novel (Oscar Hijuelos, Alan Hollinghurst), in nearly every witty stage comedy in English since. The trial and imprisonment made him the twentieth century’s first gay martyr, decades before the word would have been used that way; the De Profundis letter is one of the founding documents of modern gay writing. As a stylist, he is the grandfather of every writer who writes for the sentence rather than the page — Angela Carter, Truman Capote, Salman Rushdie, Ocean Vuong. The plays are still revived every season somewhere in the English-speaking world.
Connections
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — the novel Aestheticism tested itself against. The portrait as the externalized conscience.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Wilde’s Lord Henry is the Nietzschean aesthete with an English accent and an inheritance. The Genealogy’s diagnosis of slave morality and Wilde’s paradox-inversions are cousins, working the same problem from stage-left and stage-right.
- Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche published in 1886; Wilde’s Dorian Gray in 1890. Neither read the other (Nietzsche was already collapsing into madness), but they are the same aphoristic instinct in two languages.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra — the über-aestheticism of living beyond received morality. Dorian is what happens when you try to live Zarathustra’s program without Zarathustra’s discipline.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — the great Christian counter-argument. Every Wilde epigram about self-invention has a Dostoevsky scene underneath pointing out what the self-invention will cost. Dorian Gray and [[crime-and-punishment|Crime and Punishment]] are the same novel at different altitudes.
- The Eternal Husband — Dostoevsky’s doubling study pairs directly with Dorian Gray’s portrait: both are novels about a split self that can’t stop confronting itself.
Key Works
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
- An Ideal Husband (1895)
- De Profundis (1897, published 1905)
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
- The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)