Oscar Wilde

English playwright

• Born: October 16, 1854
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: November 30, 1900
• Place of death: Paris, France

Wilde’s comedies, including such masterpieces as The Importance of Being Earnest, were the finest seen on the British stage for many years and have endured as witty testaments to his artistic credo that art is superior to life.

Early Life

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was the second son of Sir William Wilde, a prominent Irish surgeon, and Jane Wilde (née Elgee), a poet and Irish nationalist. He was raised in an affluent, successful, and intellectually stimulating home. From an early age, Oscar and his brother Willie were allowed to sit at the foot of the adults’ dinner table and listen to the conversations of the Wildes and their guests, many of whom were prominent in Irish social and literary circles.

At ten, Oscar was sent to the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen. Physically, he was a tall and awkward boy, but he had already revealed signs of the sharp wit that would later fascinate the literary world. He was also noted for his fast reading, once claiming to have read a three-volume novel in thirty minutes. He excelled in Latin and Greek and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, which he entered in October, 1871.

At Trinity, Wilde won several academic prizes, including the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. Strongly influenced by his tutor, the Reverend John Mahaffy, a professor of ancient history, Wilde continued to excel at classics and won a scholarship worth ninety-five pounds per year at Magdalen College, Oxford, which he entered in October, 1874.

At Oxford Wilde encountered two men who were to influence his thought. The first was art critic and writer John Ruskin, who was at the time a professor of fine arts. Ruskin believed that art should have a moral component, and as Wilde worked with him on a road-building project, Wilde found the idea that art might promote the improvement of society to be an attractive one. Wilde was also exposed to a contrary, and more important, influence in the form of Walter Pater, fellow of Brasenose College. According to Pater, what mattered in life and art were not moral or social concerns, but the intense appreciation of sensual beauty, especially that produced by works of art. While under Pater’s spell, Wilde took to referring to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as “my golden book.”

Wilde flourished during his time at Oxford, living a flamboyant lifestyle and dressing as a dandy. He also excelled in academics, winning the Oxford Newdigate Prize for Poetry with “Ravenna,” a poem that describes his response to his first sight of the Italian city. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in November, 1878, Wilde went to London to pursue his career, unsure of what that career might be.

Life’s Work

It did not take Wilde long to set himself up in London. He shared rooms off the Strand with his Oxford friend Frank Miles. Wilde cultivated a wide circle of acquaintances, and after his mother arrived in London, he was the chief attraction at the literary salon that she presided over at her Chelsea home. With his witty conversation, outrageous opinions, and outlandish, colorful taste in clothes, Wilde was soon the talk of London. He became the clear leader of the art-for-art’s-sake school of aesthetics, a school of thought that had been introduced to England by Pater and emphasized that art need serve no utilitarian end; its mere existence as a thing of perfection and beauty was sufficient.

In 1881 Wilde published his first work, Poems , a collection of lyrical poems that are mainly derivative in style from poets such as John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The book quickly went through five editions but was badly reviewed by critics. However, such critical dismissal hardly made a dent in Wilde’s growing celebrity, and the following year he visited the United States for a highly successful lecture tour. Upon arriving in New York on January 3, 1882, Wilde told a custom’s officer, in one of his most famous bons mots, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” In the course of twelve months, Wilde delivered more than eighty lectures, and he arrived back in England more sought after than ever before. He promptly spent the next three months in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of many leading literary and artistic figures, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Edgar Degas.

In the fall of 1883, Wilde became engaged to Constance Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish barrister, whom he had met two years earlier. They married in May of the following year and, within just over two years, gave birth to two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. The growth of his family put Wilde under financial strain; although he was well known and celebrated, he was without a reliable income. After another lecture tour and taking on some literary journalism, he became editor of The Woman’s World in 1887, a position he retained until 1889.

In 1888, Wilde entered the seven-year period of his greatest success, during which he published almost all the work—as novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, and social and literary critic—on which his reputation rests. The first such work was The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), a collection of fairy tales that one reviewer compared to those of Hans Christian Andersen.

In 1890, the abbreviated serial version of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; it was published in book form the following year and made an immediate impact on the reading public. The story tells of a young man of great beauty who pursues a selfish, hedonistic life, apparently without any consequences. However, a mysterious portrait of him slowly changes in a way that reveals how his soul has been corrupted. When he finally decides to reform his life, he stabs the portrait in a rage; when others arrive on the scene, they find the portrait restored to one of youth and beauty, while Dorian Gray himself lies dead—old, wrinkled, and disgusting.

In 1891, Wilde also published Intentions , a collection of essays that expressed his ideas about the relationship between life and art; two more collections of short stories; and an essay called “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” a somewhat misleading title to a piece that is mainly about individualism and art. In addition, Wilde’s play The Duchess of Padua was produced in New York under the title Guido Ferranti.

From 1892 to 1895, Wilde’s career reached its zenith with London and New York productions of his witty comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which ran for eighty-six performances to popular and critical acclaim. With its brilliant wordplay (including extensive use of paradoxes and epigrams) and its farcical plot (which includes such stock devices as intercepted letters and mistaken identities), the play embodies a perfect fantasy world that has little relation to life as it is really lived. Describing his overall aim in the play, Wilde explained that he wished to treat all the trivial things of life seriously and the serious things with a studied triviality.

However, the year of Wilde’s greatest success, during which three of his plays were playing simultaneously in London, was also the year of his downfall. In May, 1895, Wilde was tried and found guilty of “gross indecency,” a euphemism for homosexual activity, which at the time was a criminal offense. He was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor. The seeds of Wilde’s tragic fall had been sown in 1891 when he had met Lord Alfred Douglas, a young poet with whom he formed an intimate friendship. Douglas’s father, the marquis of Queensberry, accused Wilde of homosexuality. In March, 1895, Wilde recklessly sued Queensberry for criminal libel, but he lost the case and was immediately arrested and put on trial. The trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict, but Wilde was retried almost immediately, and this time there was to be no reprieve.

Wilde was imprisoned under harsh conditions. Confined to his cell for twenty-three hours per day, he was at first denied all books except a Bible, a prayer book, and a hymn book. His hard labor consisted of picking oakum in his cell. Conditions improved later, and he was able to obtain more books. While in prison, Wilde wrote a confessional letter to Douglas called De Profundis (1905) and a collection of poetry titled The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). On his release from prison in May, 1897, Wilde emigrated to France, never to return to England. Divorced and financially ruined, he had to rely on friends for support. His health deteriorated, and he died in 1900 in the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris.

Significance

Oscar Wilde’s greatest achievement was the way he used language to create what has been called a form of comedy as pure as the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Demolishing the complacency of Victorian social, moral, and artistic assumptions with the weapons of wit, Wilde delighted in turning stuffy platitudes upside down and then turning to the audience for applause. It was a brilliant performance that ensured that during his life, Wilde would be both greatly admired and maliciously mocked.

Although Wilde’s enemies eventually found satisfaction in his disgrace, it is Wilde, if literary history is the judge, who has had the last laugh. This is not only because he was an important influence on a variety of twentieth century writers and literary forms—from the Symbolist dramas of William Butler Yeats to the stylish comedies of W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward, and perhaps even the absurdist plays of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett—but also because of the fact that of those artists during the 1890’s who worked in the literary forms known as aestheticism and Decadence, it is Wilde who has remained enduringly popular.

During the late 1990’s, as the centenary of Wilde’s death approached, interest in Wilde underwent a kind of renaissance. There was an outpouring of scholarly studies, and plays such as the Off-Broadway Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), by Moisés Kaufman, and David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1997), which played in London and New York, further imprinted Wilde’s name on the popular imagination.

Bibliography

Belford, Barbara. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House, 2000. Focuses on Wilde’s life and work within the context of 1890’s London society, portraying Wilde as a clever self-promoter and provocateur.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988. This is the definitive biography, a prodigious work of scholarship that is elegantly written and sympathetic to Wilde. Ellmann argues from circumstantial evidence that Wilde died of complications from syphilis that he picked up while at Oxford and also disputes the commonly held notion that Wilde converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.

Ericksen, Donald H. Oscar Wilde. Boston: Twayne, 1977. This useful, concise introduction to Wilde’s life and career emphasizes the analysis of individual works and includes an annotated bibliography.

Foldy, Michael S. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. By analyzing the trial testimony and press coverage, Foldy argues cogently that the prosecution of Wilde was not solely based on matters of morality but was directly linked to wider social, cultural, and political issues.

Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde: Including My Memories of Oscar Wilde by George Bernard Shaw. 2d ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997. Harris was one of the few friends who remained loyal to Wilde after his downfall. His biography, although highly readable and full of interesting anecdotes, is not always reliable. Shaw’s afterward is a shrewd assessment of Wilde.

Holland, Merlin. The Wilde Album. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. This is a useful complement to the weightier biography by Ellmann. Holland, Wilde’s grandson, supplements his biographical narrative with various artifacts—including photographs, press clippings, and political cartoons—that document Wilde’s emergence as a media celebrity and show how Wilde consciously created his own fame. The book includes rare family photos and all twenty-eight publicity portraits made for Wilde’s 1882 U.S. tour.

Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. New York: Harper Bros., 1946. Although superseded by the massive research and detail contained in Ellmann, this remains a full and engaging account of Wilde’s life.

Sloan, John. Oscar Wilde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Places Wilde’s work within the context of late nineteenth century London society. Examines how his work has been adapted to film, stage, and other media since his death.