Chapter I. The life of oscar wilde

CHAPTER II. CONTRIBUTIONS OF O. WILDE

2.1 Popular works and characters of O. Wilde

Among Wilde’s most famous poems is “The Sphinx.” As Hyde reported, the work was begun at Oxford, substantially composed in Paris in 1883, and repeatedly polished until its publication in 1894. This most exotic of all Wilde’s poems begins with the raven-like sphinx planted in the corner of the poet’s room and proceeds through a series of imagined scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a lover. Reviewers criticized the work for being sensational and artificial, but later critics have found some notable qualities; in San Juan’s words, “Among all Wilde’s poems, ‘The Sphinx’ alone betrays a masculine energy that enlivens gorgeous landscape, fusing religion, iconology, and historical facts within the current of meditation and monologue.”
Wilde’s fairy tales deserve more notice than they have generally received.⁸ A few of them are minor prose masterpieces, most notably “The Happy Prince,” “The
Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Fisherman and His Soul.” But they should be taken seriously for another reason as well: they embody some of the conflicts and themes that run throughout Wilde’s work. “The Happy Prince” stresses the importance of giving of oneself, even of making the ultimate sacrifice, in order to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. This message foreshadows some of Wilde’s ideas in his later work The Soul of Man under Socialism (privately printed 1895, republished 1904). “The Nightingale and the Rose” deals in a similar way with giving, but here the emphasis is on the need to sacrifice for love. Wilde’s love of beauty and his conception of its fleeting quality find expression in this story of a nightingale who sacrifices its life to produce the perfect rose. In the story’s final satirical twist the beautiful rose is rejected because it does not match the color of a young girl’s dress. In Oscar Wilde, Robert K. Miller declared that this ironic turn reveals Wilde’s “ambivalence toward love” that is “related to his ambivalence about women.” In “The Selfish Giant” the title character overcomes his selfishness toward children and thus serves as an allegory of Christian redemption. The imaginative sympathy of the giant is similar to that which Wilde ascribes to Christ in his later work, De Profundis (1905). “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from the second volume, is the most complex of Wilde’s fairy tales; it was described by John A. Quintus in Virginia Quarterly Review as “another treatment of the doppelgänger theme in which the body and the soul are separated, as they are in The Picture of Dorian
Gray.” In a reversal of the usual situation in which the body corrupts the soul, the Fisherman’s soul—which the Fisherman has dispensed with so that he can love a mermaid—tempts his body to sin and through the resultant suffering body and soul are reunited.
A particularly scathing attack in The Scots Observer made a veiled reference to Wilde’s homosexuality and suggested he take up tailoring or some other “decent” trade. For the novel’s hardcover edition, published the following year, Wilde made some changes, most important of which was the addition of six chapters and the famous epigrammatic preface. Perhaps surprisingly, the reviews this time were more favorable. Walter Pater praised the book highly, and, as Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeatswrote that
“Dorian Gray, with all its faults, is a wonderful book.”
“In spite of its many weaknesses,” asserted Edouard Roditi in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Guidebook, “The Picture of Dorian Gray yet remains, in many respects, a great novel⁹. Though hastily written and clumsily constructed, it manages to haunt many readers with vivid memories of its visionary descriptions.” Epifanio San Juan preferred to assess the book’s importance in terms of its contribution to the development of the novel: “In setting a portrait, a work of art, at the center of the action, Wilde effects the interplay of natural perception and moral judgment in the novel. From the reader’s viewpoint, the picture suggests the treatment of angle and distance—the ways of telling and showing—which make up the perennial issues of the aesthetics and criticism of fiction.”
While The Picture of Dorian Gray has an assured place as a serious work of art and a document of fin de siècle aestheticism, it did not gain for its author a reputation as a great novelist. It is rather because of his dramas that Wilde’s reputation has remained most secure. Louis Kronenberger, in The Thread of Laughter, mentioned Wilde together with the great 18th-century dramatist, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan: “The brilliant stage comedy that glittered briefly in Sheridan and then remained dormant, if not dead, for over a hundred years is in some measure brought back to life with Oscar Wilde.” Wilde’s strengths were certainly suited to the theater; no medium better showcases his irrepressible wit, his penchant for paradox, and his sardonic views on manners and morals.
Salomé is vastly different from Wilde’s society comedies, which were rapidly to follow in the early 1890s. This exotic one-act play has more the atmosphere of the earlier poem The Sphinx in its variations on the themes of obsession, lust, incest, and violence. Salomé moves forward largely on the basis of ritualistic repetition and a unifying pattern of imagery. Richard Ellmann, in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of
Critical Essays, described this unity as “the extreme concentration upon a single episode which is like an image, with a synchronized moon changing color from pale to blood-red in keeping with the action, and an atmosphere of frenzy framed in exotic chill.” Salomé is Wilde’s most completely decadent work. While the play exhibits a few traces of a moral point of view—Jokanaan’s rejection of Salomé and Herod’s fearful conscience at the end—the dominant impression is one of macabre beauty, and the climax is reached when Salomé’s kisses the bitter lips of Jokanaan’s severed head. This impression was undercut for critic Alan Bird, who, in The Plays of Oscar
Wilde, contended that even in this play Wilde’s wit shows through: “Yet the reader (or audience) can never escape the uncomfortable sensation that the author is actually parodying the action, the words, the characters, the whole ensemble of the drama. This suspicion of parody, however faint, produces an intentional distancing, a deliberate alienation, which far from allowing us to dismiss the drama seems to increase the total effect of decadence.”
Lady Windermere’s Fan is a story about a woman with a past. Mrs. Erlynne, the fallen woman who years ago left her husband and her daughter—now Lady Windermere—reappears and tries to regain a social position. Ironically it is the fallen woman who turns out to be the “good woman” of the subtitle (“A Play about a Good Woman”), and the good woman of the first act, Lady Windermere, is forced to undergo a painful realization that things are not always what they appear to be.
Arthur Ganz observed in British Victorian Literature that Lady Windermere “learns that a single act is not a final indicator of character and that a sinner may be a very noble person indeed.” This recognition, growing even as it does from a rather conventional return of a relative, adds a note of seriousness to a play that probably could have succeeded on its wit alone. Lines such as “Why, I have met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women¹⁰. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education” probably flattered the upper class audience and confirmed the suspicions of the middle class that this is the way dandies spoke in their drawing rooms and clubs. Robert Keith Miller complained that the play suffers from the juxtaposition of this verbal wit with the serious nature of the plot and maintained, “The union of Mrs. Erlynne with Lord Augustus, in the last fifty lines of the play, strikes one as a rather desperate attempt to relieve the tension of the last several acts in order to end on a light note.”
While publicly Wilde was enjoying the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in his private life the author was beginning a homosexual relationship with Lord
Alfred Douglas. Wilde had been introduced to “Bosie” Douglas, the son of the eighth
Marquess of Queensberry, by the poet Lionel Johnson. As Hyde reported in Oscar
Wilde: A Biography,Douglas immediately fell under the spell of Wilde’s charming conversation. In July of 1893 Wilde moved in with Douglas at The Cottage, Goringon-Thames, ostensibly so that they could work together.
A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband followed quickly on the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan and received similar acclaim from the audiences and similar disdain from the critics. Again in these plays Wilde presents characters with “pasts”—Lady Arbuthnot, the “Woman,” and Sir Robert Chiltern, the “Husband.” Both have their counterparts in puritanical characters that clearly resemble Lady Windermere. In both of these plays, Miller noted, “we find Wilde condemning absolutes and pleading for tolerance in a world that is apt to be harsh.” Neither of these plays is as carefully structured as Lady Windermere’s Fan. Agreeing with Speranza, Wilde’s mother, that the plays needed “more plot,” Alan Bird declared that in A Woman of No Importance “the plot is weak, and is, in fact, practically nonexistent. The incident, such as it is, of a woman meeting a former lover and being involved in a tug-of-war over their child does not offer sufficient action or opportunity for development to fill four acts.”
The plot centers on two pairs of lovers—Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, and Algernon Moncrieff and Cecily Cardew. Each of the men leads a double life: Jack, who lives in the country with his ward Cecily, has invented an alter ego named Ernest for his life in town; Algernon has done similarly with his imaginary invalid friend Bunbury, who lives in the country. When the audience shortly learns that each of the young women absurdly wishes to marry a man named Ernest, the stage is set for farcical twists and turns. Over almost all the action presides Lady Bracknell, a woman with wit to spare and a discerning judgment regarding the credentials requisite for the proper marriage. When Jack and Algernon turn out to be brothers in the same respectable family as Lady Bracknell, the play can end happily and absurdly with the two marriages.
Perhaps Freedman was correct when in The Moral Impulse he described the play as “an account of the search of several young persons for meaning in a society extraordinarily reluctant, even impotent, to assign importance to anything except the superficial.” However, the second part of this statement is much easier to accept than the first part, because the young people participate in this farcical society, and they live by its rules—or break them in acceptable ways. If an element of seriousness can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker called “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems.”
Wilde’s dramatic career, and indeed his entire writing career, with the exception of De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, came to an end following the enormously successful Importance of Being Earnest. This play and An
Ideal Husband played concurrently in London in 1895 until Wilde’s arrest and trial. The Importance of Being Earnest subsequently ran for a month with the author’s name removed from the playbills and the program; An Ideal Husband was canceled almost immediately.
“Imaginative freedom is the key element in Wilde’s criticism.¹¹ In “The
Decay of Lying” he argues that lying is a requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The problem with the novel in England, Wilde claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works:
“they find life crude, and leave it raw.” In this essay Wilde makes his seemingly outrageous statement that “life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.” Though perhaps overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridgeand the other earlier English romantics.
The Soul of Man under Socialism, though not collected in Intentions, was published in the same year, 1891. Wilde’s society friends must have been amused at his advocacy of socialism, but the conclusions of this essay are consistent with those of the other essays—if we accept his premises about socialism. Wilde advocates a nonauthoritarian socialism under which the individual would be freed from either the burden of poverty or the burdens of greed and guilt. As Michael Helfand and
Philip Smith stated in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, “Wilde formulated a nonauthoritarian socialist theory which encouraged aesthetic activity, analogous to sexual selection, and reduced competition (and thus natural selection), as the way of achieving continuous cultural and social improvement.” To Wilde’s previous emphasis on imagination he now brings an emphasis on individualism, both of which, he speculates, would flourish under socialism.
At the end of the work he expressed its weaknesses as well as anyone later appraising
De Profundis has: “How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures to realize those aspirations shows you quite clearly.” The scorn and bitterness come early in the letter, where he excoriates Douglas for his lack of imagination and soul. Then Wilde reverses his position and accepts any blame for the outcome of events. But the vehemence of the early denunciation renders hollow a finely cried statement like the following: “To regret one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” Though on the whole it is beautifully written, the letter suffers from this uncertain tone and, as George Woodcock noted, presents Wilde’s sentimentality at “its most irritating depth in De Profundis.”
Nevertheless, the work contains passages of real power, such as those in which Wilde describes life in prison and the ridicule he was subjected to during his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading. And Wilde reasserts the most important critical principles of the earlier essays: the importance of individualism, imagination, selfexpression, and self-development. In De Profundis, Christ becomes the archetype of the artist, “the most supreme of individualists.”
Wilde’s last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was written shortly after his release from prison in 1897¹². Hyde recorded in The Annotated Oscar Wilde that Yeats called it “a great or almost great poem,” but the fact that he chose only 38 of the poem’s 109 stanzas for publication in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse suggests his awareness of the work’s diffuseness. The poem appeared in 1898 without Wilde’s name but with the identification “C.3.3.,” his cell number at
Reading Gaol. The ballad tells a very moving story of a man condemned to death for the murder of his young wife and records the horror of his fellow prisoners as they watch him go through his last days. Though the poem has much of the realism that Wilde always abhorred, it transcends 19th-century prison life in its handling of the themes of suffering, isolation, and collective guilt (“Yet each man kills the thing he loves”). The poem is the most successful of Wilde’s non-dramatic works primarily because, as Robert Keith Miller said, Wilde himself is “no longer the center of attention.” The speaker is a prisoner, but the focus is first on the condemned man and then on all of the prisoners as a group.
Similarly, Wilde eluded attention after his prison release. He wandered Europe for three and a half years under an assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, and died bankrupt in a Paris hotel on November 30, 1900.
“From Wilde’s death until the late 1940s, critics generally focused on his biography, choosing to discuss the man rather than his writings,” reported Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Debra Boyd. Even then, Wilde was “relegated to being a minor fixture in the Victorian pantheon of writers, one admired mainly for The Importance of Being Earnest or considered a representative of Aestheticism or the Decadent movement.” But in more recent decades, Boyd continued, the writer’s reputation has risen. “Additional biographical and textual materials have been made available,” affording critics and scholars an enhanced view of Wilde’s sense of his own works. “In addition,” said Boyd, “poststructuralist criticism and gay studies have provided scholars with varied theoretical frameworks from which to examine
Wilde’s works.”
Boyd pointed to a handful of scholars, including Jonathan Dollimore and
Richard Dellamora, who have subsequently placed Wilde “in the forefront of writers who examine the sexual and political dimensions of art.” Boyd argues that even in such a favorable light, scholars tend to gravitate toward the author’s plays and longer fiction like Dorian Gray, to the neglect of Wilde’s shorter pieces. “More attention must be paid to his short fiction,” she maintained. “In this age of literary theory, few writers can articulate as clearly as Wilde did for the theoretical bases for their works and then actually practice what they preach. Wilde’s stories show that he was able to merge theory and practice, creating works of art that stand up well to critical scrutiny.” The author has been the subject of many biographies, both in book and film version, notably Richard Ellmann’s 1988 work, Oscar Wilde, and the dramatic film Wilde, released in the late 1990s.
Just as Wilde the playwright and poet established his place in the literary canon, so Wilde the correspondent has been the object of critical examination as well. Several volumes of the author’s letters have been published, including The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, coedited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and published in 2000. In his introduction, Holland describes coming across the full texts of letters previously published only in fragments. In his grandson’s view, the missives show another side to Wilde, beyond the creator of social comedies and poems. With these letters, maintained Holland, readers must reinterpret the author as “a hard-working professional writer, deeply interested by the issues of his day and carrying in his intellectual baggage something that we all to frequently overlook, a quite extraordinary classical, literary and philosophical education.”