Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish poet, novelist, and writer of plays and short stories.

Biography

His father was a surgeon and founder of a hospital in Dublin, and his mother was a writer who was active in the early movement for women's rights. Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his BA in 1878.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, a young lady with a comfortable inheritance, which enabled him to set up home in Chelsea, London, and live in style while writing. They had two sons, but in 1886, Wilde met and was seduced by the homosexual Robert Ross, at that time a university student. After this he became drawn into Ross's circle of promiscuous homosexuals and pederasts, seeking casual gratification with rent-boys in London. He wrote a veiled account of his descent into vice in the novel "The Picture of Dorian Grey". In June 1891, Wilde was introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas the 21-year-old son of the Marquess of Queensberry. Douglas was already an active homosexual and asked Wilde to help him cope with an attempt at blackmail. He and Douglas very soon became lovers, and indulged in group homosexual activity e.g. in 1893 he, Wilde and Ross all had relations with a 16-year-old schoolboy over the course of one weekend, passing him around between them. The parents were angry but afraid to prosecute. On excursions to Italy and North Africa, both well-established locations for 19th-century pederasty, Wilde and Douglas made use of rent-boys and it is clear that many of these were very young indeed. These holidays could be described as sex-tourism. Drugs such as opium and cannabis were freely used by both to enhance their experiences. Friends such as Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm record Wilde sitting in the Café Royale in London chatting over dinner about having had relations with five boys in one night, and engaging in analingus. One of his witticisms recorded from this period is "Little boys should be obscene and not heard." His pronounced pederastic tastes are confirmed by many letters and poems.

As Wilde became a successful playwright, Douglas made use of him for money and the relationship was far from blissful, as Wilde later recalled in "De Profundis". Douglas detested his father, who was (wrongly as it happens) concerned that Wilde was corrupting his son. In 1895, Douglas persuaded Wilde to bring a libel case against Queensberry, with the aim of obtaining a large amount of damages. This prosecution involved both of them denying that they were homosexuals. Wilde denied it categorically to his own lawyer and to the court under oath.

He lost the case as Queensberry, aided by the London police, easily found a string of 13 rent-boys willing to testify against him. Even the pageboy at the Savoy hotel was on the list. The Crown prosecution service then had no choice but to prosecute Wilde on criminal charges, and he was duly convicted and sentenced to 2 years in prison, a minimal sentence as he could have been liable for five years for perjury and contempt of court. Douglas fled abroad. After the sentence was announced, the police waited 48 hours before arresting Wilde, as it was usual to give men convicted under this law (which was intended as a deterrent) a chance to escape to the Continent. Wilde however did not leave and in effect chose to go to jail, greatly underrating the effect hardship would have on one habituated to ease and luxury.

Wilde's wife divorced him, his plays were taken off the stage and he was declared bankrupt, as he had been, under Douglas's influence, living beyond his means. After his release he went to France and for a short while tried to live with Douglas, who was still living a life of carefree promiscuity with all the boys he could obtain, but the two men soon parted. Before Wilde's death in Paris in 1900 he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis.

The 1995 film about Oscar Wilde, starring Stephen Fry*, omitted any reference to his taste for boys, in order to give the false impression that he was a victim and a martyr. In the past he was thought to have died of syphilis, but more recent studies by Dr Ashley Robins of the University of Cape Town in South Africa report that he died of meningoencephalitis, following a serious ear infection.

Wilde's sexuality

Wilde's sexual orientation has been debated over the years and some considered him as either bisexual, homosexual, and even pederastic. Wilde himself believed that he belonged to a culture of "male love" inspired by the Greek pederastic tradition, through his association with the Uranians. This tradition believed that it was an adult male's duty to bring boys into manhood via sexuality.

In describing his own sexual identity, Wilde used the term Socratic. He may have had significant sexual relationships with Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd (Wilde's wife), Robert Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde also had numerous sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often called rent boys.

Wit

Wilde was a well-known playwright and celebrity, and is still renowned for his wit today. Some of his lines, such as the following from The Picture of Dorian Gray, are still often quoted:

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."

Other memorable lines, from "The Critic as Artist", include:

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

"There is no sin except stupidity."

"...nothing worth knowing can be taught."

Wilde's most frequently produced play is the high comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. It includes such gems as:

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."

"London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!"

Works of Oscar Wilde

Plays

• Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
• Salomé (French version) (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
• A Woman of No Importance (1893)
• An Ideal Husband (1895)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
• The Duchess of Padua (1883)
• Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas with Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
• La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy Fragmentary. First published 1908 in Methuen's Collected Works

(Dates are dates of first performance, which approximate better with the probable date of composition than dates of publication)

Poetry

• Ravenna (1878)
• Poems (1881)
• The Sphinx (1894)
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Prose

• The Canterville Ghost (1887)
• The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy tales)
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)
• Intentions (1891, critical dialogues and essays)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, Wilde's only novel)
• The Soul of Man under Socialism (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1891, first book publication 1904)
• De Profundis (1905)
• The Rise of Historical Criticism (published in incomplete form 1905 and completed form in 1908)
• The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1960) This was rereleased in 2000, with letters uncovered since 1960, and new, detailed, footnotes by Merlin Holland.
• Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal (Paris, 1893) has been attributed to Wilde, but was more likely a combined effort by a several of Wilde's friends, which he may have edited.

See also

• Humanistic aestheticism