Oscar Wilde

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) studied at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem 'Ravenna'. His flamboyant aestheticism attracted attention, much of it hostile; he proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater and the cult of 'Art for Art's sake' mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881). Wilde undertook a lecture tour of the United States in 1882, after the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems (1881). In 1884 he married, and in 1888 pubished a volume of fairy-stories, The Happy Prince and other tales, written for his sons. In 1891 followed Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and other stories and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Gothic melodrama. Wilde claimed in his preface, 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all'. He published A House of Pomegranates (1891), fairy-stories; and The Duchess of Padua (1891), a dull verse tragedy. He achieved theatrical success with his 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). Salomé (now known chiefly for Richard Strauss's opera), written in French, was refused a licence, but performed in Paris in 1896 and published in 1894 in an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas with illustrations by Beardsley. Lord Alfred's father, the marquess of Queensberry, disapproved of his son's friendship with Wilde and publicly insulted the playwright. This started a chain of events which led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexual offences in 1895. He was declared bankrupt while in prison and wrote a letter of bitter reproach to Lord Alfred, published in part in 1905 as De Profundis. He was released in 1897 and went to France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by his prison experience. In exile he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, after the romance by Maturin. He died in Paris. His other writings include critical dialogues ('The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist', 1891) and The Soul of Man under Socialism, a plea for individualism and artistic freedom, first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891.

A volume of letters, ed. R. Hart-Davis, appeared in 1962.


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 From Andrew Sanders's The Short Oxford History of English Literature:

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a Dubliner distinguished by both his class and his education. He was also the son of a romantically inclined mother who dabbled in nationalist verse. Wilde himself only ever flirted fancifully with what was, in the 1880s, the particularly vexed and pressing question of Irish Home Rule. Having left Dublin to study at Oxford, he seems thereafter to have aspired to shine in England and, as far as was possible, to be the central figure in a fashionable metropolitan coterie of artists, writers, and wits. He also acted out the parts of a London socialite and of an amusingly provocative social critic. Underlying all Wilde's life and work (he readily acknowledged there was an intimate relationship between the two) there were, however, both a seriousness and an acute, but amused, awareness that he was acting. Wilde's homosexuality, both covertly and overtly expressed in what he wrote during the 1890s, might at first have seemed little more than a gesture to an imported French décadence; after the terrible fall marked by his trial and imprisonment (a fall which in some ways he seems to have deliberately courted), the alienating bias of his art became manifest. The contrived style of much of his prose, the excessive elaboration of his poetry, and the aphoristic and paradoxical wit of his plays, are all subversive. They do more than reject mid-victorian values in life and art in the name of aestheticism; they defiantly provoke a response to difference.

Amid a welter of affectation, Wilde's essays suggest that he could, when it suited him, be a perceptive, rather than simply a naughty critic. He always questions institutions, moral imperatives, and social clichés; he rarely suffers fools gladly. From the refinedly outrageous lectures he gave to Colorado miners in the early 1880s (kitted out in velvet knee-breeches) to the calculatedly annoying challenges to conventional literary morality publicly expressed during his first trial, Wilde enjoyed his chosen roles as an aesthete and an iconoclast. His Platonic dialogue, The Decay of Lying (1889) and the two parts of The Critic as Artist (1890) suggest something of the aphoristic dialogue of his later comedies (though his plays would rarely allow an authoritative voice to be so pointedly interrupted, or occasionally qualified, by a convenient stooge). The inspirer of these dialogues may have been Plato, but the sentiments are Pater's and the lexical virtuosity is characteristically Wilde's. He offers the kind of criticism which delights in snaring butterflies rather than breaking them on wheels. He can be memorably cruel ([Mrs Humphry Ward's] Robert Elsmere is squashed by the observation that it is Arnold's Literature and Dogma 'with the literature left out') and an initially flattering suggestion can be cleverly turned on its head ('Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning'). Wilde's central arguments are, however, derived from an awareness that art is far more than a mere imitation of nature. 'A Truth in Art', he remarks in The Truth of Masks (1891), 'is that whose contradictory is also true'. In The Decay of Lying there is also a recurrent plesaure in insisting that 'the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art'. Wilde's longest and most provocatively serious essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), does not argue primarily for a new social order or for a redistribution of property, but for a larger and expanding idea of freedom, a liberation from drudgery and the rule of machines. The future achievement of a socialist order offers the prospect of what Wilde candidly sums up elsewhere as 'enjoyment'.

Wilde's delight in provocation, and his exploration of alternative moral perspectives, mark his most important work of fiction, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel's Preface presents a series of attitudinizing aphorisms about art and literature which end with the bald statement: 'All art is quite useless'. The narrative that follows is a melodramatic, Faustian demonstration of the notion that art and morality are quite divorced. It is, nevertheless, a text riven by internal contradictions and qualifications. Aestheticism is both damned and dangerously upheld; hedonism both indulged and disdained. Dorian Gray is a tragedy of sorts with the subtext of a morality play; its self-destructive, darkly sinning central character is at once a desperate suicide and a martyr. Wilde's stage tragedies have less interest and far less flair. His first play, Vera: or, The Nihilists (1880) suggests a pretty minimal mastery of theatre technique and an even thinner grasp of the Russian political realities which it attempts to dramatize. His blank-verse drama, The Duchess of Padua (written in Paris in 1883), never even reached the stage, while A Florentine Tragedy, begun in 1894 when Wilde as at the height of his powers, remained unfinished until 1897. Quite the most powerful and influential of his tragedies, Salome, was written in French and translated into English in 1894 by Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The play, which draws on the Bible account of the death of John the Baptist and on Flaubert's story Herodias, was not produced in England until 1931 (a victim both of its outrageous treatment of Bible history and of its author's reputation). The striking, overwrought imagery of Salome, and its shocking juxtapositions of repulsion and sexual desire, of death and orgasm, were particularly powerfully transformed in the German version which became the libretto of Richard Strauss's revolutionary opera of 1915.

Wilde's comedies of the 1890s have a far surer place in the theatre. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) has indeed been accorded an unchallenged canonical status which is witnessed by its probably being the most quoted play in the English language after Hamlet. Lady Windermere's Fan: A Play about a Good Woman (1892) was Wilde's first supreme success on the London stage. It has distinct parallels with its comic successor, A Woman of No Importance (1893), in that it centres on the discovery of a dire secret and is at its most animated and conspicuously Wildean in the witty speeches of a dandified male aristocrat. Both plays have a noticeable feminist bias in that they stress the innate strength of their central female characters, a strength which draws on, and finally masters, a certain puritanism. In April 1895, at the time of Wilde's arrest, charged with illegal homosexual practices, both the carefully plotted An Ideal Husband (1895) and its successor The Importance of Being Earnest were playing to large London audiences. As the scandal developed, first Wilde's name was removed from the hoardings outside the theatres, then the runs of both plays were abruptly terminated. The real achivement of these plays lies neither in their temporary notoriety, nor really in their polished and anti-sentimental artifices, but in their undercurrents of boredom, disillusion, alienation and, occasionally, real feeling. In both, despite their delightful evocations of flippancy and snobbery, and despite their abrupt shifts in attitudes and judgements, Wilde triumphed in capturing a fluid, intensely funny, mood of 'irresponsibility' which challenges all pretension except that of the artifice of the plays themselves.

Hegel on Wilde

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