The importance of being a reader: A revision of Oscar Wilde's works

Pascual Aransáez, Cristina

The importance of being a reader: A revision of Oscar Wilde's works

by Cristina Pascual Aransáez (Author)

American Studies - Literature

53115

Summary

This book explores Wilde's works from the hypothesis that they call upon the active participation of the reader in the production of meaning. It has a twofold objective: first, it shows that Wilde's emphasis on the creative role of the audience in his critical writings makes him conceive the reader as a co-creator in the construction of meaning. Second, it analyses the strategies which Wilde employs to impel the reader to collaborate in the creation of meaning of his literary works and casts light upon the social criticism derived from these.<br>The examination of Wilde’s writings reveals how he gradually combined more sophisticated techniques that encouraged the reader's dynamic role with the progressive exploitation of self-advertising strategies for professional purposes. These allowed the ‘commercial’ Oscar to make his works successful among the Victorian public without betraying the ‘literary’ Wilde’s aesthetic principles.<br>The present study re-evaluates Wilde as a critic and as a writer. It demonstrates that, while Wilde the ‘myth’ was ahead of his time in many ways, Wilde the ‘ARTIST’ anticipated in his aesthetic theory various themes which occupy contemporary literary theoreticians. Thus, it may contribute to give him the status he rightly deserves in the history of literature.

Excerpt

"The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in

the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it".

Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist", 1891.

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the sur-

face do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their per-

il".

Oscar Wilde, "Preface" to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891.

INTRODUCTION

This book explores Oscar Wilde's works from the hypothesis that they call upon the ac-

tive participation of the reader in the production of meaning. The research has a twofold

objective: first, to show that Wilde's emphasis on the creative role of the reader in his critical

writings makes him conceive him as a co-creator in the construction of meaning; second, to

analyse the literary strategies which Wilde employs to impel the reader to collaborate in the

creation of meaning of his narrative and dramatic works as well as to cast light upon the

social criticism which is derived from them.

The first chapter of the study, "The Critical Reception of Oscar Wilde and his Works", is

focused on the analysis of the myth of Wilde. Oscar Wilde has constantly been an object of

critical attention in academic and non-academic circles for more than a century, but paradoxi-

cally little has been said about his literary achievements. The explanation for this is that Oscar

Wilde has been considered to be a controversial personality rather than a literary writer. In the

first section of this chapter I shall examine the origins and popularisation of the legend around

Wilde in order to show that Wilde created and contributed to propagate his own myth as a

superficial dilettante in order to promote himself and to publicise his works. My intention is

to provide an account of the formation of legend around Wilde which will reveal him as an

early instance of the modern type of literary writer who knew how to exploit self-advertising

strategies for his professional purposes.

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to explore the directions which have been estab-

lished in Wildean research, the traditional as well as the innovative ones. During decades

many critics regarded him as little more than a social entertainer whose provocative gestures

and witticisms in his public life and in his literature were not to be taken seriously, and this

served to propagate the existing "myth" of Wilde as a flamboyant poseur which Wilde himself

had originally helped to create; however, modern scholars have gradually discovered that

beneath Wilde's apparent superficiality there can be found a serious philosophy of art and a

sharp criticism of the moral standards of society, which has led to a revaluation of Wilde and

his writings in recent years. The overall view of the different positions adopted in the exami-

nation of Wilde's life and works will provide the interdisciplinary framework within which I

shall integrate my analysis. Moreover, the results obtained after the discussion of the critical

reception of Wilde will justify the need for the present study.

In the second chapter, "Methodological Discussion", I determine the scientific basis of

this investigation as well as the procedures which will be followed to conduct the research. I

shall explain the reasons why I have adopted reader-oriented criticism as the methodological

framework for my study. I shall indicate that there are two general movements in reader-

oriented criticism, namely, "Reader-response Theory" and "Reception Theory", and I shall

revise the various critical tendencies within each of them. Then I shall establish a typology of

the reader under which I shall gather all the critical proposals of reader-response theorists and

reception theorists which I shall analyse in this chapter.

I believe that the methodology to be used in a study should be determined by the corpus

which is the object of analysis. Thus, having discussed the different trends within reader-

oriented criticism, I have related them to Wilde's critical theory on the reader with the aim of

justifying the adequacy of the methodological constructs for my analysis of the role of the

reader in Wilde's creative works in the light of his literary criticism.

The truth is that my decision to explore the role of the reader in Wilde's creative writings

was largely motivated by the fact that Wilde shows a special concern with the figure of the

reader in his critical works. In his critical writings Wilde consistently stresses the importance

of the reader as an individual. His critical position on the role of the reader is condensed in the

first quotation which precedes this introduction, where Wilde emphasises the reader's dynam-

ic collaboration in the creation of meaning of a work of art. In addition to this, it is generally

known that Wilde applied his aesthetic principles into his creative works -- the second

quotation is inserted as an illustration -- which further confirmed me in the idea that it would

be fruitful to study the reader's active role in Wilde's writings.

The following chapters are devoted to the analysis of the role of the reader in Wilde's nar-

rative and dramatic works. I have chosen the narrative and the dramatic works as the corpus

of my research because they reveal the gradual process by which Wilde achieved his maturity

in his relationship with the public. In this study, the evolution of Wilde as a literary figure has

been divided into three stages, which coincide with the turning points in his dealings with the

audience: the origins, during which he wrote short stories and fairy tales that will be analysed

in chapters 3 and 4 respectively; the middle point, where he transgressed the social and moral

values of his audience with potentially dangerous consequences for his career in his novel The

Picture of Dorian Gray, which will be studied in chapter 5; and the climax of his success in

his relation with the audience in his society comedies, which will be examined in chapter 6.

The final chapter synthesises the conclusions which I have reached after a careful exami-

nation of the findings obtained from my research. I have organised them into three parame-

ters: Oscar Wilde's ambiguous relationship with the public, the concept of the reader in

Wilde's critical writings, and the overall results of the analysis of the role of the reader in

Wilde's narrative and dramatic works.

THE WORKS OF OSCAR WILDE

POEMS

· Ravenna, 1878.

· Poems, 1881.

· The Sphinx, 1894.

· Poems in Prose, 1894.

"The Artist"

"The Doer of Good"

"The Disciple"

"The Master"

"The House of Judgment"

"The Teacher of Wisdom"

· The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898.

NARRATIVE

· Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 1891.

"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime"

"The Canterville Ghost"

"The Sphinx Without a Secret"

"The Model Millionaire"

· The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888.

"The Happy Prince"

"The Nightingale and the Rose"

"The Selfish Giant"

"The Devoted Friend"

"The Remarkable Rocket"

· A House of Pomegranates, 1891.

"The Young King"

"The Birthday of the Infanta"

"The Fisherman and his Soul"

"The Star-Child"

· "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", 1889 (original version), 1921 (enlarged version).

· The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 (magazine version), 1891 (book version).

· De Profundis, 1897; 1905 (expurgated version), 1962 (full version).

PLAYS

· Vera, or the Nihilists, 1883.

· The Duchess of Padua, 1891.

· Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892.

· A Woman of No Importance, 1893.

· An Ideal Husband, 1895.

· The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895.

· Salome, 1896.

LECTURES AND CRITICAL ESSAYS

· "The English Renaissance of Art", 1882

· "The House Beautiful", 1882.

· "The Decorative Arts", 1882.

· "Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century", 1882.

· "Lecture to Art Students", 1883.

· "Personal Impressions of America", 1883.

· "The Rise of Historical Criticism", 1879.

· Intentions, 1891.

"The Truth of Masks"

"Pen, Pencil and Poison"

"The Decay of Lying"

"The Critic as Artist"

"The Soul of Man Under Socialism", 1891.

· "A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated", 1894.

· "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young", 1894.

ABBREVIATIONS

"LASC"

"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime"

"CG"

"The Canterville Ghost"

"SWS"

"The Sphinx without a Secret"

"MM" "The

Model

Millionaire"

"HP"

"The Happy Prince"

"N & R"

"The Nightingale and the Rose"

"DF"

"The Devoted Friend"

"YK"

"The Young King"

"BI"

"The Birthday of the Infanta"

"S-C"

"The Star-Child"

"RHC"

"The Rise of Historical Criticism"

"TM"

"The Truth of Masks"

"DL"

"The Decay of Lying"

"CA"

"The Critic as Artist"

"SMUS"

"The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

"WH"

"The Portrait of Mr. W. H."

The Picture of Dorian Gray

LWF

Lady Windermere's Fan

WNI

A Woman of No Importance

An Ideal Husband

IBE

The Importance of Being Earnest

De Profundis

C & R

Criticism and Reviews, vol. XII. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Double

Day, Page and Company: New York, 1923.

I & R

Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail. Macmillan:

London, 1979.

The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London and New York,

1962.

Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis London and New

York, 1979.

More Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. New York, 1985.

Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson. Routledge: NY, 1998

[1974].

Unless otherwise indicated, all the references to Oscar Wilde's critical and creative works

are taken from Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1994 (1948), Glasgow: HarperCollins, which

will be referred to as CW.

1. THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF OSCAR WILDE AND HIS WORKS

1. 1. Oscar Wilde: The Origins of the Myth

For a long time the critics of Oscar Wilde have traditionally perceived Wilde as a social-

ite who successfully amused his Victorian audience with his extravagant poses and with the

witty remarks that characterized both his conversation and his works until he was imprisoned

for his homosexual behaviour and ended up his days tragically. In this section I shall examine

how Wilde himself created his own myth as well as the objectives he pursued with it. The

interest of this study of Wilde as the originator of his own myth is twofold: on the one hand, it

reveals certain aspects of Wilde's personality that are crucial in order to realise the complexity

of intentions underlying his works; on the other hand, it provides clues that explain the initial

directions which were followed in Wilde research. My aim is not to destroy the legend about

Wilde, but to show it under its proper conditions: the myth of Wilde is a fundamental key to

get to know the real Wilde, but in order to reach a fuller understanding of this literary author

is essential not to confuse one with the other.

When Wilde was still an undergraduate at Oxford, he had already succeeded in becoming

an outstanding personality. There were constant rumours of Wilde's extreme devotion to the

new aesthetic cult and his adoration of blue china and flamboyant dresses, and multiple

legends about the eccentricities of the "Professor of Aesthetics" -- as he made himself known

-- circulated among his school-fellows. Apart from being a popular character, Wilde was also

an exceptional student: in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize Poem with Ravenna and he

achieved a double first in Literae Humaniores.

In his last year at University, Wilde had not decided yet what he would do in the future,

but a conversation that he held with his friend Hunter Blair makes it explicit that in any case

Wilde was determined to become a celebrity:

I won't be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or

other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious (I & R, 5).

After having taken his degree in 1878, Wilde left Oxford and went to London, where he

tried to find a publisher for a volume of verse he had prepared. Wilde had occasionally

published some of his poems in various magazines such as The World, The Irish Monthly and

Dublin University, and now he put together most of them along with several new ones in a

book entitled Poems. His brother Willie, who worked as a journalist in London, introduced

him to some editors and they published some of Wilde's poems. Nevertheless, Wilde soon

realised that it was not easy for him to find a publisher for his book, and when he finally

signed a contract with a small house called David Bogue, he had to pay for all the costs

regarding its publication. In order to settle his professional situation, Wilde attempted to find

his way in the academic world: he wrote a paper ("The Rise of Historical Criticism") for the

Chancellor's Essay Prize at Oxford in 1879, whose subject was historical criticism among the

ancients, but he was not awarded it. After this failure Wilde applied for a post as inspector of

schools in 1880; however, he was not elected.

It was precisely these initial difficulties that led Wilde to concentrate upon his artistic ca-

reer, and he decided to start to attract the interest of the public through controversy in order to

be able to promote himself as an artist. As Wilde would later tell Yeats, he soon found out

that "a man should invent his own myth" (quoted in Ellmann, 1987: 284). The principal

reason which may have induced Wilde to devote himself to this task is revealed in one of his

letters to a friend:

... London is full of young men working for literary success, and [...] you must carve your

way to fame. Laurels don't come for the asking (L, 179).

Therefore it can be inferred that the creation and commodification of his own myth was

actually a commercial technique consisting in becoming the object of attention in order to

publicise himself and his artistic production, which shows that Wilde can be regarded as a

precursor of the modern advertising strategies used for creating celebrities nowadays.

Wilde began to excel the principles of his aesthetic creed wearing extraordinary hair

dresses and unconventional clothing, and people began to consider him to be the leading

exponent of aestheticism. Wilde seriously adhered to the beliefs of the aesthetic movement,

but his eccentric attitudes in speech and manner were part of an overall design to publicize

himself among society. As Holland (1977: 29) claims, "in his daily life he was always

fashionably dressed and never appeared in public except in the 'correct' clothing". Soon

Wilde's self-advertising strategies produced the intended effects. Wilde become a fashionable

personality in society, and the increasing interest that his effeminate poses aroused in social

circles, together with his reputation as a brilliant conversationalist converted him into the

'lion' of the receptions held at the most distinguished houses of London.

This explains how, in spite of the unfavourable reviews of Poems (1881), its sales were

encouraging: many readers were extremely curious about the poetical work of this extrava-

gant wit. Beckson (1998a: 5) stresses this point when he remarks that:

... The book went through five editions (totalling 1250 copies), which, if not overwhelming,

was an impressive beginning for a new poet at a time when a first volume of poems was ex-

pected to sell between 300 and 500 copies, though, no doubt, some of the public interest had

as much to do with Wilde's personality as with his poetic accomplishment.

Another important consequence of Wilde's reputation as the most conspicuous aesthete

was that he became the object of the satire

of the media, which organised a long series of

attacks against the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes: Wilde was the target of several parodies

and satires that appeared in several poems and cartoons of Punch, and many plays included

characters that represented implicit caricatures of him (e. g. the aesthete Lambert Stryke in F.

C. Burnand's The Colonel). Far from being upset about this abuse upon him, Wilde learnt how

to take advantage of it for his own professional objectives. Thus, the media unconsciously

served Wilde's purposes because it enhanced his relevance as a public personality in front of

society, although the Victorians were not provided with the image of the real Wilde but with

the myth that Wilde himself had striven to create.

The most significant work in this campaign against the aesthetic movement was the pro-

duction of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience; or Bunthorne's Bride (1881), which

was a sketch on aestheticism. The protagonists of this operetta were Reginald Bunthorne and

Archibald Grosvenor, who stood as composites of several artists related with the pre-

raphaelite or aesthetic movement (Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Whistler), but it soon became

obvious for everybody that many of their aspects have been derived from Oscar Wilde

1 Oscar Wilde was continuously satirised during his literary career and after his downfall. Wilde started to be

mocked as early as 1880 in George du Maurier's cartoons for the Punch, and from that moment onwards the

lampoons upon him were constant. The satirical attacks did not diminish when his reputation as a playwright had

been firmly established thanks to the enormous success of his society comedies. An evident proof of it is that

Lady Windermere's Fan was parodied shortly after its production in a play with the title The Poet and the

Puppets: A Travestie Suggested by "Lady Windermere's Fan", written by Charles Brookfield with the collabora-

tion of the actor Charles Hawtrey. During his final years and after his death even Wilde's friends such as Max

Beerbohm and Ada Leverson satirised the person of Wilde and his works.

For a fuller account of the parodies and satires on Wilde, see Beckson (1998b: 257-259) and for an extensive

analysis of the fictional representations of Wilde in Victorian literature, see Kingston (2007).

2 Patience contributed to spread the well-known story that Wilde "walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a

lily in his medieval hand". When Wilde was later asked about it by an American journalist, he answered that:

"To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph" (New York World, 8

January, 1882). Wilde's reply is particularly illustrative of Wilde's delight in taking part in the creation of his

own legend.

Patience was immensely successful in London and the producer Richard D'Oyly Carte

decided to run it in New York, where it achieved a similar success. That induced Carte to

think that the Americans would be particularly interested in knowing the leading exponent the

aesthetic movement, with which they had no direct contact in their country, and he proposed

Wilde to lecture on the aesthetic doctrine around the United States.

This gave Wilde an excellent opportunity to turn the negative publicity about him into an

effective means of self-promotion. He was acquainted with the fact that Patience took him

off

, but he had a too quick mind for business to dismiss the possibility of going on a lecture

tour. In fact, Wilde had many reasons to accept this offer: first, he regarded himself as the

great apostle of aestheticism and the lecture tour allowed him to propound the tenets of the

aesthetic creed; second, it would give him the chance to arrange the production of his first

play, Vera, or the Nihilists, which he had not been able to produce in London

, and to initiate

negotiations for a second play in preparation that was entitled The Duchess of Padua; third,

Wilde expected that this project would be financially rewarding.

On January 1882 Wilde started a ten-month lecture tour that brought him to half of the

cities of North America and Canada

. By the time he arrived at the United States, the Ameri-

cans had already constructed an image of Wilde according to the fictional representation that

3 Wilde never protested against the satiric imitation that Patience made of him. On the contrary, as soon as he

was told about it, he wrote a letter to George Grossmith, who was the character that played Bunthorne, in order

to ask him to reserve a box for him. Wilde seemed to be delighted at the prospect of this operetta, and he said to

Grossmith that: "With Gilbert and Sullivan I am sure we will have something better than the dull farce of The

Colonel. I am looking forward to being greatly amused" (ML, 35). Nonetheless, Wilde's apparent complacency

must be considered part of his overall design to achieve fame by all costs. As Ellmann (1987: 131) points out,

"notoriety is fame's wicked twin: Wilde was prepared to court one in the hope that the other would favour him

too". Once he reached the peak of his success, he revenged himself of the ridiculed poked at him in Patience by

inserting a satirical remark against it in a stage direction of The Importance of Being Earnest: "Jack and

Algernon whistle some dreadful popular air from a British Opera" (CW, 405).

4 Vera, or the Nihilists is a play about the political and social difficulties existing in Russia as a result of the

Nihilists' conspirations to murder the Tsar. The play was to be premiered in London on 17

December 1881, but

in November the rehearsals were suddenly cancelled before they had started. Eight months ago the Tsar

Alexander II had been assassinated in March and the new Tsarina was the sister of the Princess of Wales, and

The World (30

November, 1881) reported that Wilde had decided to postpone the opening of his drama

"considering the present state of political feeling in England".

In general, the most relevant Wildean critics (Pearson, 1956: 54; Ericksen, 1977: 119; Bird, 1977: 11; Ellmann,

1987: 146; Raby, 1988: 12; Kohl, 1989: 35; Eltis, 1996: 28) have unanimously accepted this reason for Wilde's

withdrawal of his play. The exception to these critics is George Rowell, who argues that after eight months the

assassination of the Tsar Alexander II was not such a recent event and that the play had never received a license

from the Lord Chamberlain to be performed. According to him, "the pretext for the postponement may have

been the play's political content, but the real reason was surely the lack of funds to put it on" (in Beckson 1998b:

397).

5 For a schedule of Wilde's lectures in America and Canada, see Beckson (1998b: 191) and Ellmann (1987: 178-

181), who includes the cities where Wilde stopped but did not lecture. For a specific account of the Canadian

tour, see O'Brien (1982).

A comprehensive and accurate record of Wilde's interviews in the United States and Canada can be found in

Hofer and Scharnhorst (2013).

Patience and the newspapers had propagated. As it had happened with Wilde's contemporar-

ies in England, the Americans' first encounter with Wilde was via his myth, and again he

contributed actively to encourage it to achieve his purposes: Wilde strategically used his

fictional image in order to attract a large audience to his lectures but once there he indoctri-

nated them on the serious principles of the aesthetic movement, thereby showing them that

their popular idea of aestheticism

was erroneous.

Murray (1980: 7) defines Wilde's American lecture tour appropriately when she refers to

it as a "mixed experience":

On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that Wilde was enthusiastically received by

the journalists and society in general. There was great press coverage of his arrival, and the

newspapers of the cities in which he lectured (e. g. New York Daily Tribune, Philadelphia

Press, The Daily Examiner, The Toronto Evening News) reported his witty commentaries and

were eager to interview him. As regards the reception on the part of society, he had numerous

admirers among the public, and the most important social personalities gave parties in Wilde's

honour. This offered Wilde the opportunity of making important social contacts, and he did

not miss the chance to use them for his professional interests, both the purely literary ones --

to meet important literary authors whose works he admired (Whitman, Longfellow), and

businesslike ones -- he managed to settle the production of his two plays.

Wilde wrote to his family and acquaintances about his American experience in an exalted

way, as the following extract from a letter to his friend Mrs. George Lewis illustrates:

I have several [...] secretaries. One writes my autographs all day for my admirers, the other

receives the flowers that are left really every ten minutes. A third whose hair resembles

6 Carte had organized Wilde's lecture tour with the intention of capitalizing on the success of Patience.

However, Wilde took the opportunity of his American tour to denounce openly the image of aestheticism that

this operetta offered. This is why Wilde said in his lecture "The English Renaissance of Art":

You have listened to Patience for a hundred nights and you have heard me only for one. It

will make, no doubt, the satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it,

but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr Gilbert (Jackson, 1991: 17).

And later he added:

You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic move-

ment in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic

young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite

of what Mr Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these

two lovely flowers are in England the most naturally adopted for decorative art... (Jackson,

1991: 27).

mine is obliged to send off locks hair to the myriad maidens of the city, and so is rapidly

becoming bald (L, 86).

On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that although Wilde's pride on this social

triumph was entirely justifiable, he was obviously exaggerating when he later claimed that he

had a "triumphal" progress (L, 94, 109). There were several editor writers who saw Wilde's

aesthetic behaviour as an effrontery to their forthright principles and they satirically described

him as a "limp and clinging aesthete" (The New York Herald, 4 January 1882) or as "one of

the greatest mountebanks of the age" (The Daily Graphic, 9 January, 1882).

Moreover, Wilde felt a compulsory need to comply with even the slightest expectation of

the audience related to clothing in order to guarantee the success of his lectures. The follow-

ing letter Wilde sent to his American representative is particularly clear on this point:

Dear Colonel Morse, Will you kindly go to a good costumier (theatrical) for me and get

them to make (you will not mention my name) two coats, to wear at matinees and perhaps

in the evening. They should be beautiful; tight velvet doublet, with large flowered sleeves

and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under collar. [...] Any good costumier would

know what I want -- sort of Francis I dress: only knee-breeches instead of long hose [...].

They will excite a great sensation. They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my

not wearing knee-breeches (L, 97).

Both the positive and the negative sides of the American lecture tour were the conse-

quences of the process of mythologizing the figure of Wilde: the myth of Wilde had soon

converted him into a celebrity who was constantly the centre of attention of the public and the

press; however, it had also conditioned the image of Wilde as a personality worthy of morbid

curiosity rather than intellectual interest.

It is important to note that Wilde apparently adopted a position of indifference towards

the hostility of the press during his lecture tour, but at certain occasions his tone reveals an

unmistakable feeling of bitter indignation. And thus, he writes to his friend Joaquin Miller in

contemptuous terms about the attacks of the press upon him:

... as touching the few provincial newspapers which have so vainly assailed me, [...] be sure

I have no time to waste on them. Youth being so glorious, art so godlike, and the very world

about us so full of beautiful things, and things worthy of reverence, and things honourable,

how should one stop to listen [...] to the irresponsible and irrepressible chatter of the profes-

sional unproductive? (L, 98)

Wilde was also offended at what he considered to be the audience's trivial reaction to-

wards his lectures, as it can be observed in the following extract from an interview that

appeared in the Morning Herald on 10

October 1882:

I came out here [the American continent], never having spoken in public in earnest about

my message, strongly feeling what I was saying, and I talked seriously to those people.

They heard me and went away and talked about my necktie and the way I wore my hair. I

could not understand how people could do such a thing. I thought it inexpressibly stupid (I

& R, 105).

Before the American lecture tour, Wilde had never shown any signs of resentment at be-

ing treated in a light way by the English newspapers and society. However, the passages

above indicate that Wilde's position towards these matters had become significantly different.

In order to understand this change of attitude, one must not lose sight of the fact that Wilde

had created and contributed to popularise his own legend because he had soon realised that,

unless he achieved fame through self-publicity, he would not be able to achieve his profes-

sional ambitions, which were to succeed as an artist and get recognition for his artistic

production

Wilde had not initially complained to be ridiculed in the papers or to become the enter-

tainer of the upper-classes at society receptions because he was well aware that he had to go

through these situations in order to become the centre of attention of the press and the public.

As Wilde had imagined, the results of this vogue for him were highly beneficial for his

professional purposes: first, he was able to create an audience for his works, as the impressive

social reception of Poems showed; second, he was offered to be the spokesman of the

aesthetic movement in America.

The lecture tour was actually the first professional opportunity for Wilde to proclaim his

aesthetic manifesto. This explains why he protested against the lack of seriousness about it on

the part of wide sectors of the press and the public. Wilde was dedicated to fulfil what he

considered to be his mission on behalf of aestheticism, and this is reflected in the last quota-

tion cited above, where Wilde uses words like "in earnest" or "seriously" to refer to the way

he was speaking about his "message". The fact that people went to his lectures out of curiosity

did not worry him as much as the hostile reactions of the papers; as regards the former, he

Shannon (2011), Morris (2012) and Castle (2013) also draw attention to Wilde's efforts to construct his public

image and advertise it by means of modern self-promotion strategies during his American lecture tour.

remarked that: "Well, I get a hearing, and still hope to do some good in my day" (I & R, 71).

Nevertheless, his objection towards the attacks of the press was stronger:

I have something to say to the American people, something that I know will be the begin-

ning of a great movement here, and all foolish ridicule does a great deal of harm to the

cause of art and refinement and civilisation here (L, 88).

Wilde was strongly determined to convince the Americans of the seriousness of the aes-

thetic programme by means of his lectures in spite of the general abuse in the Press, and

eventually a growing number of papers admitted the popular image of Wilde was misleading,

as the following instances illustrate: on 27th March 1882 The Daily Record-Union comment-

ed that "he has been considerably misrepresented and unduly ridiculed. He is apparently

sincere and earnest" (I & R, 75); on 21

April 1882 The Topeka Daily Capital acknowledged

that "there was much less of that affected soul foulness about the talented young Englishman

than one would suppose" (I & R, 80); and on 15

May 1882 The Daily Witness reported that

"... Messrs. Du Maurier, Burnand and Gilbert had done him a grave injustice" (I & R, 83).

The lectures that Wilde delivered during his American tour show his deep concern with

the serious principles of aestheticism. Wilde's repertoire consisted of three lectures: "The

English Renaissance of Art", "The Decorative Arts", and "The House Beautiful". In "The

English Renaissance of Art", Wilde presents the tenets of the aesthetic doctrine in general

terms. He gives an account of the contributions of the Pre-Raphaelites to the aesthetic

movement and borrows remarks from Pater about the adoration of beauty and the principles

regarding the love of art for art's sake. In "The Decorative Arts" Wilde emphasises the need of

creating beautiful surroundings and of using machines for doing degrading tasks, and he

suggests how the artist and the handicraftsman should work together. These beliefs were new

in America, but they had already been anticipated by Morris and Ruskin in England, from

whom Wilde borrowed them. In "The House Beautiful" Wilde puts the principles of decora-

tion of the previous lecture into practice because he recommends his audience how to deco-

rate a house according to them. Among his suggestions, he stresses the need to avoid what is

not useful or beautiful -- which shows the influence by Ruskin and Morris -- and he remarks

the importance of endowing the house with a harmonic scheme in colour, using Whistler's

pictures to exemplify his views.

However, these lectures also indicate that Wilde borrows ideas -- and passages -- from

many authors without acknowledging them. It gives one the impression that he omits his

sources in order to be regarded as the founder of the aesthetic movement, which is confirmed

because he even goes so far as to claim that:

Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in Eng-

land, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what

beautiful things they might create8 (Jackson, 1991: 116-117).

Wilde's unacknowledged "borrowings" gain him the notorious image of plagiarist, which

would not abandon him during his lifetime or till a long time after his death. Moreover they

also serve to endow these lectures with incoherence, because he mixed irreconcilable ideas

(e.g. Pater's ideal of art for art's sake and Ruskin's belief in the social and moral function of

art). This added to the legendary view of him as an inconsistent writer.

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that Wilde was initiating himself in his

artistic career and that he was still in the process of absorbing the influences of his predeces-

sors before attempting to elaborate an aesthetic programme of his own. As we shall see in a

later section of this study (2. 3), Wilde later developed his aesthetic theory in Intentions,

whose origins can in a certain sense be traced to these lectures, and this shows the lack of

foundation for the myth of Wilde as an epigone or contradictory writer.

The American tour confirmed Wilde's extraordinary ability to exploit his myth in his

dealings with the public in order to fulfil his professional aims. It was an important experi-

ence for Wilde due to two main reasons: first, he could explore the possibilities offered by

maintaining an ambiguous relationship with the audience, which would characterise the rest

of his artistic career; second, he started to give his initial steps in attempting to develop his

own personality as a serious theoretician of aestheticism.

After having spent in Paris the large sums earned with his American lecture tour, Wilde

came back to London in 1883. By that time he abandoned his aesthetic costume, which had

become outmoded, and he took up the decadent manners of a dandy, in which he found a

most promising way of continuing his self-promotion among the leisured classes of society.

8 This passage is taken from a lecture entitled "Art and the Handicraftsman", which is composed by fragments

that seem to belong to the original manuscripts of "The English Renaissance of Art" and "The Decorative Arts".

For a summary of the difficulties found with the edited texts of Wilde's American lectures, see Kohl (1989: 71-

72).

Since he was in a desperate need of money at his return, he asked Morse to organize for him a

lecture tour in Britain for the autumn and winter. Wilde devoted most of the British tour to

offer witty descriptions in an epigrammatic style of his personal experiences during his

American tour. In two lectures entitled "Impressions of America" and "The American

Invasion" Wilde commented satirically

on American people, art, culture and thought, and

they became very popular among the British public. However, this lecture tour was simply a

temporal source of income. In addition, the American première of Vera; or the Nihilists

(1883) was a failure, and the American actress Mary Anderson, who had agreed to produce

The Duchess of Padua, suddenly decided to reject it, and these events sharpened Wilde's

financial difficulties.

Wilde married Constance Lloyd on 29

May 1884. His wife's dowry was insufficient to

solve their alarming economic situation, which was aggravated with the births of Cyril (5

June 1885) and Vyvyan (3

November 1886). Wilde was still the principal butt of the papers'

lampoons and his extravagant personality made his presence demanded in society, but he saw

himself forced to look for a fixed occupation that granted him a permanent income.

Wilde could not live on his legend alone, but it is important to remark that his popular

image played again a fundamental role in propelling his career: some years ago Wilde's fame

as the most outstanding aesthete had been the incentive to choose him as the spokesman of

aestheticism in America; now his notoriety, which had been increased after his lecture tours,

led certain newspaper editors and publishers to decide to associate his name to their publica-

tions for their own advertising purposes, and this resulted economically and professionally

rewarding for Wilde.

In 1885 W. H. Stead, who was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette since 1883, offered

Wilde the post of literary reviewer for his paper. His choice of Wilde might have been based

on two main motives: Stead was moving away from the initially conservative direction of the

paper, and he must have seen in Wilde a figure that represented the break with conventional

standards and therefore suitable to work for his paper. Moreover, Stead was one of first

9 Wilde wrote an article entitled "The American Man", which was published in the Court and Society Review on

April 1887. This article resembles these lectures in that it consists of satirical remarks upon the Americans

which are full of wit.

But the Americans continued to be the targets of Wilde's satire in his creative works. "The Canterville Ghost"

relied on the satire of the American way of life and thinking for one of the sources of its humour. Moreover,

satirical comments on American mentality reappear briefly in The Picture of Dorian Gray (chapter 3: 36-37; 41-

42), and they develop into a particularly significant element in Wilde's play entitled A Woman of No Importance,

where one of the principal characters -- an American young woman called Hester Worsley -- is the embodi-

ment of the prejudices of American puritan society.

practitioners of the emerging "New Journalism", according to which the periodical was a

"business concern" whose end was "to sell as many copies as possible, irrespective of the

means" (Leavis, 1990: 178), and he must have thought that the incorporation of the notorious

Wilde to his paper would contribute to its publicity. Wilde was reluctant to work on journal-

ism, but his financial crisis led him to accept Stead's offer and between 1885 and 1890 he

wrote more than eighty articles for the Pall Mall Gazette as well as literary criticisms for

different newspapers such as the Dramatic Review, the Speaker, Queen, and Vanity Fair.

Another important offer which was motivated by Wilde's notoriety took place in 1887,

when he was appointed as editor of the monthly The Lady's World: a Magazine of Fashion

and Society, which was later renamed The Woman's World at Wilde's suggestion

. This

magazine had started to be published by Cassell and Company in November 1886, and it had

been designed to inform women of upper class society about the latest tendencies in dress and

home decoration. Its sales were bad, which induced its publishers to suggest Wilde to take its

editorship and reconstruct it. They saw that Wilde was strategically adequate for this post of

editor not simply because he would undoubtedly attract the attention of a wider audience to

the magazine but also because he had already lectured on the topics that the magazine dealt

with. Besides, as Beckson adds (1998b: 242), they knew that "by moving in fashionable

society circles, he [Wilde] could attract the support of influential society women".

Wilde was highly pleased at his appointment as editor of The Woman's World and he

worked seriously on giving a new direction to the magazine, which he considered to be "too

feminine, not sufficiently womanly" (L, 194). Most of the modifications Wilde introduced

were aimed at providing the magazine with intellectual contents, which had been absent in its

previous issues. In contrast to what could be expected from the popular image of Wilde, he

stressed the importance of dealing with serious topics, which went in detriment of trivial

matters. Although he did not dismiss the value of subjects like dress, he asserted that "we

should take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women

10 Wilde suggested to the Cassell directors to change the name of the magazine from The Lady's World to The

Woman's World. In a letter to Wemyss Reid, who was the general manager of Cassell's publishing firm, Wilde

argued that:

The present name of the magazine has a certain taint of vulgarity about it that will always

militate against the success of the new issue, and is also extremely misleading. It is quite

applicable to the magazine in its present state; it will not be applicable to a magazine that

aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture, and position (L, 203).

Although initially Wilde's suggestion met the publishers' resistance, they finally acceded to Wilde's desires.

Consequently, the first issue under Wilde's editorship, which appeared in November 1887, was named The

Woman's World.

wear, but with what they think, and what they feel" (L, 194). This shows that Wilde's recon-

struction of The Woman's World already gave hints not only of his intellectual curiosity but

also of his supportive attitude towards women's equality. In this regard, critics within the

tradition of Women Studies (Maltz, 2003; Stetz 2004, 2013) have recently examined Wilde's

editorship from a feminist perspective, highlighting his role as a contributor to the advance of

women's movement.

Apart from his labour as editor of this magazine, Wilde also contributed several reviews

on contemporary literature and art to it, which were published in a section entitled "Literary

and Other Notes" until October 1889, when he decided to resign his post.

Therefore, it can be observed that Wilde worked hard as a journalist, but he could not

make a name for himself in literary circles with his journalistic career because the majority of

his articles were anonymous, following the common practice in newspapers in England 1880s

and the 1890s

. Wilde objected strongly to this rule of anonymity in English journalism, and

while he was the editor of The Woman's World it was not observed in the articles published in

his magazine. Wilde explained to an interviewer that the basic reason for his opposition to

anonymity in the papers was that:

... A man who has a name that is valuable will not be an English journalist. English news-

paper articles are written anonymously. A good writer can get no credit for good work, and

so will not write for an English paper (I & R, 107).

It is true that this requirement of the English newspapers frustrated Wilde's desires to

achieve a literary and critical recognition. However, Wilde's stage as a journalist was crucial

in his formation as a writer and thinker, and it must be acknowledged that this was in part

propitiated by the freedom of expression that Wilde enjoyed from the anonymous condition of

most of his writings:

Wilde's new job gave him the opportunity to get into closer contact with the literary

works of relevant authors, and this increased his interest in the serious study of novelists like

Dostoevsky, Turguenev and Balzac. Moreover, it seems that as Stokes (1997: 69) suggests,

Wilde managed to profit from the convention of anonymity in journalism in order to "map out

his literary territory": apart from dealing with glamorous topics (embroidery, dress reform or

social manners), Wilde wrote about a number of intellectual issues like the English rule in

11 For an introduction to the issue of anonymity in Victorian journalism, see chapter 6 in Stokes (1989: 145-

166).

Ireland, women's rights, and cultural aspects of far-off countries that would have never been

expected of him by the Victorian public, who saw him merely as a shallow dilettante. This

contributed to improve his versatility as a writer, and it also reveals that Wilde already

showed a serious concern as well as a liberal mind with respect to many social questions,

which would later pervade his literary works.

It seems that the fact that the post of literary reviewer demanded Wilde's insertion of his

personal opinions about several writings incidentally helped him to find a voice of his own in

the manifestation of his aesthetic ideals. In these early literary criticisms Wilde started to

insist on his belief that "as far as the serious presentation of life is concerned, what we require

is more imaginative treatment" (C & R, 227), and he reiterated his assumption that "the

subject of a work of art has, of course, nothing to do with its beauty" (C & R, 312). Moreover,

Wilde took advantage of anonymous writing in order to denounce openly what he considered

to be the lack of artistic taste of Victorian society: he manifested that "it [was] a bad thing for

an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection" (C & R, 443) and he also criticised

that his contemporaries had "made Truth and not Beauty the aim of art, and seem to value

imitation more than imagination" (C & R, 268). More surprisingly, Wilde made use of the

anonymity required in English newspapers to be able to express openly his belief in the moral

function of the artist, which contradicted his previous defence of the principle of art for art's

sake:

When the poor are suffering from inherent faults of their own, and the greediness of capital-

ists, and both are in danger of suffering still more from causes over which they have but

partial control, surely the hour has come when the poets should exercise their influence for

good, and set fairer ideals before all than the mere love of wealth and ostentatious display

on one side and the desire to appropriate wealth on the other (quoted in Beckson, 1998b:

278).

When this passage is read against the other fragments of literary criticisms which I have

referred to above, it can be observed that Wilde was shaping a personal aesthetic theory that

showed a movement away from aestheticism:

Wilde separated himself from the doctrine of the art for art's sake that proclaimed the total

uselessness of art, but he maintained the aesthetic ideals of the autonomy of Art and his

conviction that Beauty was a value in itself. He believed that the work of art should aim at the

perfect expression of Beauty over everything else but this did not imply that it could not fulfil

moral purposes; it could do it as long as these remained subordinated to this main objective

and were never used to determine the value of the work of art, which was to be judged merely

on aesthetic grounds. The origins of Wilde's complex relationship with aestheticism can be

traced to his early American lectures, and this accounts for the contradictions that resulted in

his combination of Pater's and Ruskin's proposals. Later, Wilde had clarified his views and

had developed his own aesthetics according to them, which resulted in the theory presented in

the critical essays that he later collected in a volume entitled Intentions in 1891.

It is remarkable that Wilde's manifestation of his belief in the possibility of expressing

moral concerns in art is never so explicit as it is in his anonymous articles, and this has led

Beckson (1998b: 241) to argue -- rightly, in my opinion -- that Wilde relied on this anonym-

ity to "express his belief in the morality of art without fear of being accused of apostasy",

which fits perfectly with Wilde's double attitude of revelation and disguise which he main-

tained with the public.

Between 1885 and 1890 Wilde was deeply involved in journalism, but he was also work-

ing seriously on his creative writings, because in spite of his previously unsuccessful attempts

at poetry and drama he had not abandoned his literary aspirations. Even though he claimed

boastfully that he was "hard at work being idle" (L, 147), the truth was that Wilde's supposed

indolence was simply a pretence and, contrary to the popular image he created of him, he was

an extremely productive writer whose main concern was to obtain a brilliant reputation as a

literary author.

Wilde soon realised that his experience as a journalist could prove highly useful for the

fulfilment of his literary aspirations. Working for the papers made Wilde familiar with the

short-fiction forms that begun to proliferate in the English periodical press at the end of the

nineteenth century, and he soon became well acquainted with the tastes of the readers that

consumed them. The commercial instincts of Wilde must have indicated him that this offered

him an excellent opportunity to enter the literary marketplace, and as early as 1887 he started

to write a series of short stories and fairy tales which he initially published in several maga-

zines and journals until 1891, when he decided to collect them into three volumes:

One of the volumes was entitled Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, and it was

a collection of four short stories in which Wilde had relied on his knowledge of the literary

market (the trends for detective story, ghost story, feuilleton and topics of fashion such as

chiromancy and supernatural phenomena) in order to offer his particular vision of the world.

As he expected, these stories delighted the reading public and they constituted his first literary

successes. The other collections that Wilde published were respectively named The Happy

Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, where he compiled his fairy tales. At

that time the tradition of fairy-tales established by Hans Christian Andersen had become

popular in England and Wilde moulded his tales in this manner, but avoiding its excessive

sentimentality and implicitly parodying some of its conventions. The Happy Prince and Other

Tales was more successful than A House of Pomegranates, which was generally considered to

be excessively artificial in style and too sombre due to the negative connotations of its

thematic content. In any case, Wilde's collections of short-fiction amply demonstrated his

literary powers, and he started to be regarded as a writer of consequence. Their publication

also confirmed Wilde's commercial ability for self-promotion: he dedicated some of his fairy

tales to aristocratic women of powerful position, attempting thus to take advantage of his

social connections in order to enhance his reputation in high society.

By this time Wilde had finally triumphed in social and literary circles. The society who

had initially lionised him now treated him with respect, and the newspaper critics who had

regarded him to be a mere figure of fun had been forced to acknowledge his literary achieve-

ments. Wilde saw with justifiable pride that his plans had worked out as he had expected: the

creation and popularisation of his own myth had provided him with social recognition, which

in turn had served him to advertise his literary career. This success made Wilde feel extremely

self-confident about the opportunities that his new social and literary position offered him,

and he decided to rely on the further exploitation of this commercial formula in order to be

able to create a larger audience for the reception of his more ambitious literary projects.

However, Wilde erroneously dismissed the possible consequences that his transformation

into a figure of social and literary relevance might have had in the general public's attitude

towards him. So far Wilde had been able to exert certain control over his audience because

they had never taken him seriously and consequently they had dismissed his effronteries as

the harmless tricks of a social entertainer. However, people now began to realise that Wilde

was not a clown at the service of society, and they began to feel somewhat uncomfortable at

his triumph. The general public did not see Wilde as a serious writer who had primarily

striven for social recognition in order to commercialise his works in the modern consumerist

market, but as an insolent Irish opportunist that advertised himself simply as a means to climb

up the social scale, and consequently they started to regard his writings with suspicion.

Wilde's next venture into literature was more complex than his last attempts at short fic-

tion. He wrote "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." (1889 original version, 1921 enlarged version),

which is a hybrid of fiction and philological study in the narrative mode of a short story that

dwells creatively on an old theory (popularised by Thomas Tyrwhitt and Edmond Malone in

the 18th century) according to which Shakespeare's Sonnets had been dedicated to a young

boy actor called Willie Hughes. The critical reception was generally favourable because it

was seen as an amusing parody of the traditional problem of the identity of Mr. W. H. among

Shakespearean scholars. However, a few critics accused "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." of being

morally offensive, referring implicitly to the homosexual allusions that appeared throughout

the story. W. E. Henley wrote in the Scots Observer on 6

July 1889 that "The Portrait of Mr.

W. H." was "out of place in Maga [a.k.a. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine] -- or, indeed, in

any popular magazine" (quoted in Schröder, 1984: 14). Yates was more explicit when he

remarked in the World on 10

July 1889: "The subject is a very unpleasant one, and it is

dilated upon in the article in a peculiarly offensive manner" (quoted in Schröder, 1984: 14).

It must be admitted that these criticisms were exceptional, and that contrary to Harris's

claims that "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." "set everything talking and arguing" and "did Oscar

incalculable injury" (1959: 69), most reviewers found no fault with the moral tone of this

story

. Nevertheless, these criticisms reveal that there was a new sharpness in the journalistic

attacks on Wilde, which was an inevitable consequence of the general desire that existed to

stop the advances of this socially mobile self-advertiser.

Wilde did not seem to care about what people said against him. His eminent success had

increased his self-assurance, and he knew that the controversy around his figure was commer-

cially valuable for his professional purposes because it attracted attention over his works. As a

consequence, Wilde started to display a growing defiance in his life and in his writings. The

publication of Intentions in 1891 alarmed the Victorian public, because the critical principles

advocated by Wilde in the essays comprised in this book constituted a frontal attack to their

assumptions on art:

"Pen, Pencil, and Poison" was a satirical biography of the forger Thomas Griffith Wain-

ewright and it showed the amoral aspects of aesthetic individualism. "The Decay of Lying"

was an essay written in dialogue form in which Wilde developed the basis of his aesthetics by

dealing with the relationship between Art and Reality. Here he propounded the supremacy of

Art over Life and Nature, and he asserted that the Spirit of Lying was essentially creative and

absolutely necessary in Art. "The Critic as Artist" (formerly named "The True Function and

Value of Criticism"), which was also written in dialogue form, was Wilde's most important

critical essay. In this work he examined the interrelationship between critical and creative

talent, arguing that the creative faculty necessarily presupposed a critical faculty which

conferred the latter the category of art. "The Truth of Masks" (formerly named "Shakespeare

12 However, some years later "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." would be part of the evidence used by the prosecutor

Edward Carson to prove Wilde's homosexuality in the first of his trials (Hyde, 1962: 113).

and Stage Costume") was a critical essay in which he tried to prove that Shakespeare was well

aware of the decorative and dramatic possibilities offered by historically accurate costumes

Apart from this volume of critical writings Wilde also produced that same year a critical

essay called "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". In it he concerned himself with individual-

ism -- arguing in favour of a Libertarian socialism that had nothing to do with the Webbsha-

vian deification of the state, as well as with art -- condemning the Victorian popular press

and public for their attempts to restrict the creative freedom of the artist.

Wilde's challenging attitude towards the Victorian readers culminated with the creation of

his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 magazine version, 1891 book version).

Wilde wrote his novel according to his artistic principles, which defied the moral and literary

principles of the Victorians. Since Victorians "did not mind being shocked so much as having

their basic assumptions attacked and their stability threatened" (Chapman, 1968: 234), the

critical reception of The Picture of Dorian Gray was strongly negative. Wilde's novel was

heavily accused of immorality, and at the basis of most of the charges against the atmosphere

of sin and corruption of the book was the strong suspicion of Wilde's homosexuality, which

had been initially aroused by "The Portrait of Mr. W. H".

The situation led Wilde to defend his novel from the numerous attacks of the Press, and

this resulted in an intense debate between Wilde and the newspaper critics that shall be

analysed in a later section of this study (see 5. 1). By now, it is sufficient to point out that this

severe abuse upon The Picture of Dorian Gray was the price Wilde had to pay for the offence

provoked by his ostentatious signs of familiarity with the upper-class world and by his use of

self-promotion as a means of social mobility. To this respect, it is significant to note that a

review of The Picture of Dorian Gray that appeared in the St. James's Gazette on 26

June

1890 read: "MR. OSCAR WILDE'S LATEST ADVERTISEMENT: A BAD CASE" (Mason,

1908: 25). In the debate with the Press, Wilde played with his characteristic double image of

13 "The Truth of Masks" differs so much from the other critical essays included in Intentions both in tone and

subject-matter that it does not seem to stem from the same author as "Pen, Pencil, and Poison", "The Decay of

Lying", and "The Critic as Artist", and therefore it may strike one as surprising that Wilde collected them all in

the same volume. In fact, Wilde later ordered to replace it with 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' in the French

translation of Intentions (see L, 294-295). The reason why Wilde included "The Truth of Masks" in the English

version of Intentions was to be able to achieve the minimum length required for the publication of the book. He

knew that its inclusion was problematic, but his shrewd ingenuity helped him find an intelligent solution. He

added a few stylistic corrections, invented this paradoxical title and the subtitle "A Note on Illusion" and, most

importantly, appended the following conclusion:

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I

entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criti-

cism attitude is everything (CW, 1173).

flamboyant dandy and serious writer and he proved more than a match for the critics, to

whom he defeated with his brilliant replies to the editors of the papers in which he was

attacked.

Thus, Wilde's commercial use of his myth was working successfully, but the scandal

raised after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray showed that its excessive exploita-

tion had started to be dangerous. However, Wilde was swelled with his triumph

, and he did

not stop to consider the risks that his new situation entailed.

This happened in the year 1891, which was also crucial in the development of Wilde's

literary career for other reasons. Two years previous to it, an important American actor called

Lawrence Barrett had written Wilde because he was interested in producing The Duchess of

Padua. After having agreed on some modifications -- such as the change of the title for

Guido Ferranti -- the play was staged in New York in January 1891. The performances had

to be stopped in three weeks due to Barrett's ill health, but Wilde was enthusiastic about how

it was running and he decided to produce it in London. He offered The Duchess of Padua to

Henry Irving and George Alexander, and both of them rejected it; in fact, the play was not

good and some years later Wilde himself considered it unfit for publication

. However,

Wilde's negotiations with Alexander about it unexpectedly resulted in Alexander's suggestion

to him to write a modern comedy and Wilde, for whom it was imperative to get money

quickly because of the expensive life style which he had adopted after becoming the intimate

friend of the aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891, readily accepted it.

During the next years Wilde devoted himself completely to drama. His works for the

stage consisted in four society comedies with the exception of his one-act tragedy written in

French entitled Salome (1891), which the Lord Chamberlain refused to licence due to a

centuries-old ban on the representation of biblical characters on the English stage

. Wilde's

14 Wilde commented on these years of his life in De Profundis, where he said: "I thought life was going to be a

brilliant comedy" (CW, 998).

15 In 1898 Wilde wrote to his friend Robert Ross, who had become Wilde's literary executor after his imprison-

ment, the following: "The Duchess is unfit for publication -- the only one of my works that comes under that

category" (L, 757).

16 Salome was presumably banned on account of a traditional rule against the representation of biblical

characters that was in operation since the time of Reformation, but it seems that the sexual perversion represent-

ed in Salome may have been another important reason for banning the play, because Lord Chamberlain Pigott

asserted that Salome was "half Biblical, half pornographic" (quoted in Powell, 1990: 33).

Except William Archer, the rest of English newspaper critics were unanimous in their support of Lord Chamber-

lain's decision, which gave them a new excuse for their indefatigable attacks on Wilde's works. Wilde's

expression of his indignation to the ban of Salome was excessively disproportionate -- he even threatened to

become a French citizen -- but he was right in his complaint that the English papers were "trying in every way

to harm Salome, though they have not read it" (L, 319). It was obvious that Press's reaction to Wilde's play was

part of their crusade against him. As Bird (1977: 63-64) remarks, the result was that "the public tended to assume

society comedies were his most critically acclaimed works, and they were produced in the

following order: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An

Ideal Husband (1895) and finally his most important play, which is The Importance of Being

Earnest (1895). With his society comedies Wilde's techniques to manipulate the audience

came to full fruition.

For many years Wilde had commercialised his myth among society, and this had provided

him with a wide knowledge on how to please his audience, which he applied into his plays:

the characters and the physical elements of the setting mirrored the elegance and luxury of the

upper classes but they also revealed implicitly their shallowness and the falsity of their moral

principles; and the dialogues abounded with sparkling witticisms which at first sight seemed

inoffensive but they contained a veiled denunciation of the defects of Victorian society

beneath the surface.

Consequently, Wilde's society comedies were very successful among the public, who en-

joyed them immensely because they could not easily discern Wilde's twofold intentions. As

regards the critical reception of Wilde's plays, newspaper reviewers were for the first time

unanimous in their praise of his society comedies, which they found to be highly amusing for

the audience. However, the majority of the reviewers were clearly influenced by the ideas

raised by the myth of Wilde about his artificiality and lack of seriousness; only a few critics

detected Wilde's shrewd tactics to manipulate the public, and most of them simply misunder-

stood those devices as mere commercial strategies without realising that there were also

serious intentions beneath Wilde's plays.

Wilde was well aware that, as his previous critical and creative works, his dramas perpet-

uated among the Press and the public the fictional image that he had initially contributed to

encourage with the creation of his own myth. However, this was exactly what he intended. In

a letter written on late February 1894 Wilde confessed it to a friend, as well as his reasons for

his decision:

that Salome had been proscribed on grounds of indecency, and a black shadow was cast over his reputation". In

1896 Salome was premiered in Paris by Aurélien Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre.

To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely -- it is not wise

to show one's heart to the world -- and as seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool,

folly in its exquisite modes of triviality and indifference and lack of care is the robe of the

wise man. In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks (L, 353).

By 1895 Wilde had reached the highest peak of his success, but this year marked the fatal

events that would cause his ruin. The Marquess of Queensberry, who was Lord Alfred

Douglas's father, was determined to separate his son from Wilde, and he had lately troubled

Wilde in several occasions. In February 1895 he left a card for Wilde at the Albermale Club

that read "To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]. Wilde thought about bringing an action

for criminal libel against Queensberry and Douglas, who hated his father deeply, urged him to

do so. As a result, Queensberry was tried but he was found not guilty. Then it was Queensber-

ry who applied for a warrant to arrest Wilde on a charge of offences to minors. Wilde was

arrested on 5

April 1895, and after three trials

(26 April 1895 - 25 May 1895) he was

convicted of engaging in "acts of gross indecency" and sentenced to two years' hard labour,

which was the maximum penalty for homosexual acts according to the Criminal Law

Amendment Act of 1885. From the moment of his imprisonment onwards Wilde would not

write anything but letters (among them the long letter De Profundis addressed to Douglas,

which was written in prison in 1897), with the exception of his poem "The Ballad of Reading

Gaol" (1898), which he wrote during his pseudonymous exile to France.

The scandal of Wilde's trials and imprisonment destroyed his social prestige and brought

an abrupt end to his brilliant literary career. At the beginning Wilde had sought social

recognition in order to facilitate the success of his literary works, and now his social degrada-

tion worsted his significant literary achievements: his books were withdrawn from the stalls

and bookshops, and his name removed from posters and theatre programmes

. Given the

notoriety of Wilde and the sexual nature of the affair, his trials became a sensational event

and their proceedings were reported minutely in London newspapers. The Press gloated over

his downfall, and with a few exceptions (the Reynold's Newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, the

Illustrated Police Budget) most papers were unanimously hostile towards Wilde. The Press

17 For the most accurate and complete account of the trials to date, see Holland (2003).

18 The only objection against the removal of Wilde's name from theatre handbills was raised by the playwright

Sydney Grundy, who rightly argued: "If a man is not to be credited with what he has done well, by what right is

he punished for what he has done ill?" (Goodman, 1995: 87). Grundy's protest was reported in an anonymous

article which appeared in The Illustrated Police News on 27

April 1895, whose author concluded that "to retain

the benefit of the dramatist's work and to suppress his name is mere moral humbug" (Goodman, 1995: 87).

did not refer explicitly to Wilde's homosexuality because that would have transgressed the

rules of Victorian decorum, but they emphasised the immorality of what they regarded to be

Wilde's abnormal conduct. This is clearly illustrated in the News of the World of 26

May

1895, where Wilde was insultingly depicted as "disreputable", "ghoul", and a "loathsome

importer of exotic vice" (Goodman, 1995: 132).

However, I think that it is particularly interesting to observe that most of the attacks were

still directed to Wilde the self-publicist, echoing the continuous abuse to which Wilde have

been subjected in the Press on account of his self-advertising behaviour. Thus, on 6

April

1895 The Star described Wide as "a parasite, an excrescence, an aberration which diligent

advertisement had made more or less familiar to the public against its will" (Goodman, 1995:

78), and on 27

May 1895 The Daily Telegraph expressed its satisfaction at the prospect that

Wilde "may well be allowed to pass from that platform of publicity which he loved into that

limbo of disrepute and forgetfulness which is his due" (Goodman, 1995: 133).

All these hostile reactions towards Wilde after his downfall reveal that the Victorians

were eager to get rid of Wilde, and that his homosexuality proved to be a most effective

pretext to achieve their purpose

. Gagnier (1986) sums up the main critical views about

Wilde's conviction when she classifies the reasons for it into social and political: as regards

the social reasons, she comments on the middle-classes' resentment to an Irishman who dared

to consider himself among the upper classes and treated them derisively as if he were socially

superior to them (145-146), and she also remarks on the fear of the Victorians at possible

social disruption of the increasingly visible homosexual circles (95); as far as the political

reasons are concerned, she supports Douglas's and Adey's hypotheses that Queensberry had

threatened the Treasury to produce evidence of the homosexuality of high figures of the

government if Wilde was not convicted (205-207).

19 Gay (1992), who has devoted a two-volume study to the subject of sexuality in Victorian England, argues that

it was not simply Wilde's homosexuality but above all his boastful defiance of Victorian moral values which was

crucial for his conviction (II: 191-194). According to Gay, in the last decades of the nineteenth century most of

the bourgeois preferred to ignore the existence of homosexuality, as if silence over it were the best means to

protect their social stability. As a result, homosexuals were safe as long as they kept up appearances and

pretended that rumours about them -- if any -- were false. Gay contends that due to Wilde's public reaction to

the Marquess of Queensberry's hint at his homosexuality and to the display of his characteristic contemptuous

attitude towards the established norms during his trials society felt forced to take notice of Wilde's conduct, and

they decided to abuse him and send him to prison in order to revenge upon him.

The exact motive for converting Wilde into a scapegoat cannot be ascertained, but I be-

lieve that it is possible that it were a compendium of these different reasons

. In any case,

what is evident is that the sensational circumstances that surrounded Wilde's final years

gained him notoriety as homosexual, which added to the fictional image of Wilde as a mere

flamboyant dilettante and contributed to shape the legend of Wilde. It was with justifiable

pride that Wilde had claimed in De Profundis: "I awoke the imagination of my century so that

it created myth and legend around me" (CW, 1016).

In the next section I shall study how the myth of Wilde was propagated after his death in

the works of his early critics, which will serve to explain the lack of serious attention to the

literary figure of Wilde and his works that have characterised the research on Wilde for many

decades.

1. 2. The Popularisation of the Myth in the Critical Studies of Wilde

Until recent decades many studies of Wilde have been instrumental in the perpetuation of

his myth as a shallow dilettante and a notorious homosexual, and this has had negative

consequences for the assessment of his literary production, whose value has been either

ignored or underestimated. This section is an attempt to explore the critical reception of Oscar

Wilde and his works, and it has a double objective: first, it aims to examine the different ways

in which the studies of Wilde contributed to popularise the myth around him; second, it

intends to show how the gradual shift of critical attention from Wilde's personality to his

works was determinant in order to initiate the process of revaluation of Wilde and his writings

that would occur in the 1980s.

The sensationalism that had characterised Wilde's life determined the biographical ap-

proach that predominated among his early critics. The first critical accounts of Wilde were

memoirs written by his friends or acquaintances and their opinions of Wilde were inevitably

biased due to the speculation and defamation that had already arisen about him during his

lifetime. These early critics wrote their works as either desperate attempts at self-justification

20 In Wilde's opinion, the real reason for his imprisonment had been his attempt to jail the Marquess of

Queensberry. In De Profundis, Wilde told Lord Alfred Douglas:

Remember how and why I am here, at this very moment. Do you think I am here on account

of my relations with the witnesses on my trial? My relations, real or supposed, with people

of that kind were matters of no interest to either the Government or Society. They knew

nothing of them, and cared less. I am here for having tried to put your father into prison

(DP, 1008).

or passionate defences of Wilde, which confirmed that Wilde's claim that "every great man

nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography" ("CA",

1109) proved to be right at least in his case. This evident lack of objectivity led these critics to

incur in excesses in their accounts, which were decisive in encouraging the existing mythical

image of Wilde in different ways. The most important examples are the following ones:

Lord Alfred Douglas published several books in which he strived to justify his relation-

ship with Wilde in order to dispel any possible suspicions about his own alleged homosexu-

ality. Douglas gave a partial description of their relation that confirmed the popular beliefs

about Wilde, while it revealed his personal desires of self-glorification. Douglas's final

published book on his life with Wilde is Oscar Wilde: a Summing-Up (1961). Here Douglas

refers to Wilde's life as a "frightful tragedy" (5), and he draws a portrait of Wilde that sup-

ports the typical vision of Wilde as a superficial dilettante: Douglas limits himself to place

emphasis on Wilde's "superb sense of humour" (35), and on his fame as "the most brilliant

talker in London" (36). He also contributes to propagate an idea popularised among Wilde's

partisans shortly after his death, namely, that Wilde had been "a martyr to progress" (15).

Although Douglas claims early in his work that he hopes to write about Wilde "objective-

ly", and with "little reference to myself and any grievances I may have had" (8), it soon

becomes obvious that this book about Wilde is a pretext to clear up Douglas's own name from

any kind of criticism to his person. This passage illustrates the general tone of self-apology

that characterises the whole work:

The plain truth is that if I had been the Archangel Gabriel I could not possibly have acted

better towards him than I did. I gave everything and received nothing, except abuse from his

soi-disant friends [...] I am not defending myself, I require no defence; I am defending Os-

car [...] I was the only person in the world who wanted him, out of pure friendship and

compassion. (99).

Another friend of Wilde's who wrote about him was Robert Sherard. Sherard published

many books in order to defend Wilde from his attackers, and the most influential one was a

biography entitled Oscar Wilde: the Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1909). Sherard's

biography reproduces the widespread ideas about Wilde's gift for conversation ("the most

wonderful talker that the world had ever seen", 17) and his alleged plagiarism ("his imitative-

ness, one of the marked traits in his character", 46). However, this work is useful for the

serious study of Wilde because it includes interesting comments about Wilde's personality:

Sherard remarks on the businesslike nature of Wilde to publicise his works during his stays at

Paris (70), and he points out Wilde's serious concern with political (35) and social affairs (94-

97).

One of the difficulties encountered in Sherard's book is its lack of biographical accuracy,

as the author himself acknowledges (15). However, the main fault with this biography is

Sherard's evident bias for Wilde, which diminishes the value of his perceptive insights about

him. In the first chapter Sherard expresses openly that he intends to be the principal apologist

of Wilde among his contemporaries (10), and later in the work he manipulates some facts in

order to show Wilde under a better light. Thus, Sherard's blind adoration for Wilde leads him

to assert that "it was not in his nature to yield to excess" (47), which is obviously false, and he

refuses to accept Wilde's homosexuality, arguing that Wilde "was the purest man in word and

deed" (14), and that his unconventional behaviour was simply the consequence of temporal

"madness" (11).

Anna Comtesse de Brémont, who was an intimate friend of the Wilde family, relied on

her knowledge of the close relationship between Wilde and his mother in order to write a

memoir about Wilde from a new perspective. In Oscar Wilde and his Mother (1911) Brémont

states that Wilde's genius was the result of the combination of his masculine brain and his

"feminine soul", which he had inherited from Lady Francisca Wilde. According to Brémont:

When the soul and the brain are united in a natural combination we behold the normal con-

dition of the ordinary man and woman. When the union of soul and brain is abnormal, the

result is genius. This phenomenon is due to the hybrid state wherein the soul and brain are

bound in sexual antithesis (15).

Brémont develops a pseudo-scientific theory which was based on stereotypes about men

and women that were in vigour at her time but that nobody takes seriously nowadays. Never-

theless, the interest of her approach lies in the fact that she is the first author to consider that

Wilde's paradoxical behaviour towards the public is worthy of study, and in this respect she

reaches relevant conclusions. At the beginning of her work Brémont criticises those critics

who have described Wilde's visible attitudes "without probing deeper for the invisible

mainspring of these qualities, acts, and conditions" (14). Then she moves on to discuss

Wilde's posing as an intelligent strategy to catch the attention of the public (29), and she

praises it for its "boldness and originality" (54). Nonetheless, the problem with Brémont's

position is that she shares the common belief that Wide did not take his posing in earnest (48),

which leads her to contribute to the perpetuation of certain steoretypical ideas about Wilde:

Brémont asserts that after his American tour Wilde's increasing success among society made

him abandon this habit because there "no longer the necessity of a pose" (69), and she goes on

to explain the subsequent development of Wilde's literary career reductively in terms of the

popular assumptions about his plagiarism (111) and about his indolence (114).

The French writer André Gide maintained a short relationship with Wilde, with whom he

regularly met during the latter's stays at Paris both before and after his imprisonment, and

after Wilde's death he wrote an essay entitled "Oscar Wilde: In Memoriam" (1903) as a

tribute to him. Gide's brief work about Wilde consists of a series of personal reminiscences,

which are coloured by his own opinions about Wilde's personality. Gide does much to spread

the popular belief that Wilde should be taken lightly as a literary writer, because he insists

that "Wilde n'est pas un grand écrivain [...] ses oeuvres, loin de le soutenir, semblèrent foncer

avec lui [...] grand écrivain non pas, mais grand viveur" (266). Moreover, he popularises a

well-known sentence which Wilde said to him and that has been largely determinant for the

lack of critical attention to Wilde's literary works, namely: "Voulez-vous savoir le grand

drame de ma vie? -- C'est que j'ai mis mon génie dans ma vie; je n'ai mis que mon talent dans

mes oeuvres" (284 - 285).

However, it must be added that despite his harsh judgments of Wilde's writings, Gide

never endorses the popular belief that Wilde was simply a shallow entertainer of society; on

the contrary, he is one of the first critics to defend Wilde from this typical charge to him,

arguing that Wilde use a mask in order to hide his serious self from the rest of people:

... Et comme il s'occupait d'abord d'amuser, beaucoup de ceux qui crurent le connaître n'au-

ront connu de lui que l'amuseur [...] Devant les autres, je l'ai dit, Wilde montrait un masque

de parade, fait pour étonner, amuser ou pour exaspérer parfois (270-271).

The most important of the early Wilde biographies is Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde: His

Life and Confessions (1916; rpt. 1959). Harris was an intimate friend of Wilde's, and even

though their relationship was unstable -- particularly during Wilde's final years -- Harris

remained a firm defender of Wilde before and after his death. Harris's biography is significant

for two main reasons: first, it is the earliest work that gives a detailed account of Wilde's life,

covering from his first years in Dublin till his last days in Paris; second, it offers an image of

Wilde that is less biased than the previous ones and therefore seems more credible.

Harris expresses the commonly-held views about Wilde's exceptional abilities as a talker

and a charming wit, but, more importantly, he attracts attention over other traits about Wilde's

personality that have passed unnoticed till then, such as Wilde's extraordinary intelligence and

his enormous interest in intellectual questions (54). Moreover, he praises the artistic quality of

Wilde's literary works, especially "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (230) and The Importance of

Being Earnest (320). Nevertheless, Harris's book is somewhat spoilt by his love for sensation-

alism. For example, he depicts the trials in exaggerated terms as a crusade of "an uneducated

middle class and a barbarian aristocracy" (152) against Wilde, in which he portrays himself as

Wilde's pathetic saviour ("If he could be saved, I was determined to save him", 267). This,

together with the fact that most of book is written in dialogue form with quotation marks,

makes it to a large extent an unreliable work.

Harris's biography contains George Bernard Shaw's appendix "My Memories of Oscar

Wilde". Shaw coincides with the rest of Wilde's critics in stressing his "wonderful gift as a

raconteur" (331), and he points out that Wilde was a great writer of society comedies because

"the criticism of moral and manners viva voce was his real forte"(336). Nonetheless, Shaw

contributes to encourage the mythical belief that Wilde should not be taken seriously as a

writer, summing up his final estimate of Wilde thus: "Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest,

not industrious" (341).

By the second decade of the twentieth century Wilde's literary reputation started to be

gradually restored: Wilde's plays became again performed, and a body of serious scholarship

about Wilde was in the process of being formed. The first scholarly studies of Wilde were

Arthur Ransome's Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912)

, an essay on Wilde in Holbrook

Jackson's famous book The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rpt. 1950), and Arthur Symons's A Study

of Oscar Wilde (1930). These critics intended to offer a critical examination of Wilde's works,

using his personality as the key to understand them:

The studies of Ransome (1912) and Jackson (1913) were considerably successful in their

respective attempts to enhance Wilde's reputation as a literary writer. Ransome (1912)

emphasises "the critical attitude" that Wilde adopted in his works against his so-called

"dilettantism" (229-230), and Jackson (1913) contributes to destroy the myth of Wilde's

insincerity, arguing that "his intellectual playfulness destroyed popular faith in his sincerity,

and the British people have still to learn that one can be serious in one's play with ideas" (76).

21 Ransome's book has become particularly well-known because Lord Alfred Douglas brought an unsuccessful

libel action against Ransome on account of it in 1913, which demonstrates that Wilde's scandal was still too

close in time to obtain impartial data about him.

However, these authors tend to dwell unnecessarily on the spectacular aspects of Wilde's

life, which shows that the common disposition to increase the importance Wilde's personality

over the literary value of his writings was still dominant at this time: Ransome inserts

multiple details of Wilde's eccentric personality in his critical account of Wilde's works and

he dedicates a whole chapter to the sensational events that took place during Wilde's trials,

because in his view "much of the life of Wilde is so bound up with his work as to be incapa-

ble of separate treatment" (25). Likewise, Jackson thought that "it may never be quite possible

to separate such man from such work" (80). Consequently he devotes the initial part of his

essay to discuss "the singularity of Oscar Wilde" (71), and towards the end of it he comments

that "he [Wilde] had no purpose in life save play" (86), concluding that Wilde "was the

playboy of the Nineties" (86).

Arthur Symons's A Study of Oscar Wilde (1930) was the scholarly work that most clearly

contributed to encourage the biographical interest in Wilde rather than the critical attention to

his writings. Symons's work consists in a series of revised fragments of his previous reviews

and articles on Wilde, and it is heavily permeated with personal comments that endorse the

popular beliefs about Wilde's posing ("without being an artist, he maintained the attitude of an

artist", 47) and about the superiority of his personality over his literary production ("a

personality certainly more interesting than any of his works", 88). Symons's book contributed

significantly to perpetuate the myth of Wilde, mainly because it discouraged many critics

from attempting a serious study of Wilde's works.

The lifting of the taboo on the subject of homosexuality in the 1930s and 1940s resulted

in a shift in the biographically-oriented studies of Wilde. At that time there was a growing

tendency in academic circles to apply Freudian psychoanalysis into literary studies, and there

were critics of Wilde that adopted a Freudian approach in order to analyse how his homosex-

uality manifested itself in his works. This marked a significant step towards the slow process

of relocation of critical attention from the personality of Wilde to his writings. The most

notable studies in this field were those of Léon Lemmonier (1938) and Robert Merle (1948):

Lemmonier (1938) sets out to prove that Wilde's feeling of guilt about his homosexuality

was a leitmotif that manifested itself progressively throughout all his literary writings.

Lemmonier initially sees that Wilde's "sense of sin" appeared for the first time in some his

early poems and in Salome (31). Afterwards he comments how Wilde's increasing remorse

about his homosexual desires was further developed in his prose -- particularly in The

Picture of Dorian Gray (100). Finally, Lemmonier observes that the expression of Wilde's

guilty feelings reaches its culmination in the comedies, where, according to him, Wilde

recurs to the theme of the discovery of secret as a conscious attempt to release himself from

the pressure of keeping his homosexuality hidden (201).

More interestingly, Merle (1948) suggests that Wilde maintained a double position with

respect to his homosexuality in his works. On the one hand, Wilde expressed his satisfaction

at his "perversion" (478) in his writings by employing an ornamented style and imaginative

contents that allowed him to escape from the social and artistic norms of the Victorians, from

whom he sexually differed (245). On the other hand, Wilde also felt tormented by his homo-

sexuality. According to Merle, Wilde's use of certain recurrent topics in his writings such as

sin, revelation of secrets, pardon, narcissism (a Freudian pattern associated it with homosexu-

ality) are to be regarded as different means by which Wilde intended to expiate his guilt over

it (487-490).

The main problem with the studies that dealt with the presence of Wilde's homosexuality

in his literary production is that they offered a reductive view of Wilde: Wilde the aberrant

figure had given way to Wilde the pathological case. Nevertheless, Lemmonier's and Merle's

scholarly works must be above all considered for their positive effect in encouraging the

revaluation of Wilde's literary achievements, because they helped to demonstrate that in spite

of the popular assumption about the lack of intrinsic value of Wilde's writings, these were in

themselves worthy of critical attention.

The gradual discovery of Wilde's literary achievements did not only propel the increasing

reorientation of the critical studies of Wilde towards his works; it also affected the general

tone of the subsequent biographies about Wilde, which started to be intended to document

Wilde's life as well as to provide a critical account of his writings. The most relevant biog-

raphies were those by Brasol (1938), Pearson (1956 [1948]), and Woodcock (1989 [1949]),

which played a significant role at their time in the revaluation of Wilde's life and writings:

The biography of Brasol (1938) was the first scholarly study devoted to Wilde's life. Bra-

sol excludes from his biography the typical anecdotes that abounded in the previous biog-

raphies about Wilde, and he includes some unpublished letters written by Wilde in order to

sustain his work on sound evidence. Moreover, he insists that Wilde's popular image of

"London dandy" was a mask to hide his strong sense of social engagement (176). However,

Brasol's obvious bias against Wilde's homosexuality makes his work full of expressions such

as "his brilliant intellect [...] polluted with sexual obsessions of the saddest kind" (143) or

references to "his perverted intellect" (189), which mar Brasol's aspirations to neutrality. In

addition to this, there are some passages in this study that reveal that Brasol is heavily

influenced by the existing mystification of Wilde. For example, he explains Wilde's apparent-

ly contradictory nature as a "a strange antithesis" that resulted from "a schizophrenic split" in

Wilde's soul (101), and more significantly, he finishes his biography according to the tradi-

tional view that interprets Wilde's life in terms of a melodramatic tragedy: "Such was the end

of the earthly drama of Oscar Wilde, whose genius, surviving his dust, continues to live and

shine among the immortals of all lands and ages" (322).

The biographical work of Pearson (1948) was the best study of Wilde's life at the time it

was written and for many decades it was regarded as the definitive biography about Wilde till

the appearance of Ellmann's (1987). Pearson uses primary sources for all the events that he

narrates, and he avoids the melodramatic tinges that coloured the other biographies about

Wilde. In fact, Pearson protests against this tendency, remarking that "far too much attention

had been paid to his tragic story" (2). With respect to Wilde's homosexuality, Pearson does

not dwell on it from a sensational or moral perspective; on the contrary, he offers a balanced

account of it because he rightly considers that "it is not as interesting as some people have

tried to make out" (3). Therefore, Pearson's biography became an effective instrument to

attempt destroy the myth of Wilde, or rather, to see it in its proper light. Furthermore, Pearson

went great lengths in order to stress the serious image of Wilde as a literary writer, placing a

particular emphasis on the individuality of Wilde's art against the typical accusations of

plagiarism (145) and expanding Brasol's recognition of the social conscience that underlies

Wilde's works (159).

The study of Woodcock (1949) is not exactly a biographical work about Wilde, but it was

written as a critical companion to Pearson's biography with the aim of providing a careful

exploration of the most controversial aspects of Wilde's life and writings. Woodcock uses a

"dialectical method" (3) in order to explain the apparent contradictions in his life and works,

and he establishes a series of contrasts ("aesthetic clown" vs. "creative critic", "social snob"

vs. "social critic", "playboy" vs. "self-conscious prophet", 7) that he later examines in his

book. Woodcock attempts to reconcile the seemingly contradictory aspects of Wilde, which

he considers to be "quite compatible" (200): he understands Wilde's aesthetic eccentricities in

clothing and behaviour as the logical consequences of his open defiance of social conventions

(108-109), and he believes that this trait of Wilde's personality matches with the social

criticism exposed in his individual works, which he considers to be the practical application

of his own social and political credo (146-176). All this leads him to conclude that the key to

solve Wilde's apparent contradictions can be found in "the doctrines of philosophical anar-

chism and responsible individualism of which Wilde was an advocate" (88). Woodcock was

the first critic who approached Wilde's life and works from the perspective of Wilde's social

and political concerns, and his study contributed to enhance the image of Wilde as a serious

writer.

These biographical books were later overshadowed by Ellmann (1987)

who gave a new

emphasis to many important aspects of Wilde's life -- particularly his facet as self-publicist

(78, 130, 195, 202) -- and offered an impressive amount of additional information about it

due to the findings in Wildean scholarship and the availability of hitherto unpublished

material (i.e. Hart-Davis's editions of Wilde's correspondence). It must be acknowledged that

Ellmann's biography contained a series of errors and shortcomings, many of which were

subsequently corrected by Schroeder, who included more than a thousand annotations in his

book, Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (second edition, revised

and enlarged, 2002 [1989]). However, in spite of its inaccuracies and omissions, Ellmann's

biographical study is still the most significant and influential account of Wilde's life that we

have to date

. According to Beckson (2003: 435), "Ellmann remains, as most scholars

concede, the starting-point for new biographies on Wilde".

During the forties and the fifties the gradual shift of focus from Wilde to his works con-

tinued with the emergence of comparative studies. The initial works in this field had followed

a source-hunting approach: Fehr (1918) carried out a point-for-point analysis of the French

and the English influences that he could find in Wilde's poetry, and Hartley (1935) attempted

to discover the French influences that were present in all of Wilde's works. These studies

served to indicate that Wilde was learned in contemporary literature, but they had a negative

effect on Wilde's literary reputation, because they tended to revive the old cliché that Wilde

was a plagiarist, which resulted in the dismissal of his works as imitations. Thus, Fehr (1918)

concluded that:

Bei keinem anderen Dichter wird man weniger als bei ihm der Versuchung widerstehen

können, das Wort Plagiat in den Mund zu nehmen. [...] Wilde ist ein geschickter Nachemp-

finder der verschiedensten Stilarten (1918: VIII-IX).

Nevertheless, some years later, critics widened the scope of comparative studies and they

set out to elucidate the origins of the aesthetic and philosophical views present in Wilde's

writings among different literary traditions. Among these works, the most significant ones are

those of Roditi (1986 [1947]) and Ojala (1954).

For a collection of essays evaluating Ellmann's biography on Wilde at the twentieth anniversary of its

publication, see Mendelssohn (2007).

Roditi (1986) offers remarkable insights into Wilde's work, and he strives to revaluate

Wilde as writer and thinker, because he considers him to rate as equal to Coleridge and

Arnold (5). In Roditi's own words, his purpose is "to indicate the central position that Wilde's

works and ideas occupy in the thought and art of his age and in the shift [...] to what we now

call modernism" (5). Roditi establishes connections between the contents and the style of

Wilde's poetry and short prose with the main literary movements of the nineteenth century --

the Parnasians, the Symbolists, the late English Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. He also

sees Wilde as "heir to dandyism" (25), and praises The Picture of Dorian Gray for illustrating

the ethics of this philosophical doctrine (83-84). Finally, Roditi regards Wilde as a precursor

because he points out that the witty and paradoxical dialogues of Wilde's comedies have

influenced modern novelists like Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh (198).

Ojala (1954) devotes his study of Wilde to show "how far aestheticism underlies his per-

sonality, penetrates his philosophy, determines his art, and gives his style its colour and

cadence" (12). Ojala classifies the main influences upon Wilde as "formative" and "sympa-

thetic" (106). By "formative influences" he means the aesthetic socialism of Morris and

Ruskin and later the aesthetic individualism of Pater, which marked the progressive develop-

ment of Wilde's aesthetic philosophy in his early writings (74ff). Ojala explains how this

process culminated in Intentions, where, according to him, "Wilde's thought reaches its

prime" (105). By "sympathetic influences" Ojala means Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and

Renan, from whom Wilde took certain definite ideas to complement his aestheticism as

expounded in his later writings (107ff). Ojala's detailed work is a noticeable instance of the

seriousness which started to predominate in the critical examination of Wilde's writings and

that would be characteristic in future studies. His findings are not especially significant, but at

least he contributes a serious approach to the previously ill-treated subject of Wilde's relation

with aestheticism.

The change of critical focus from Wilde's personality to his writings that had been pro-

gressively adopted by the critics was completed during the 1960s and the 1970s with the

emergence of a series of work-oriented studies in Wilde. Critics were determined to offer an

objective account of Wilde's literary achievements in order to establish his reputation as a

writer on neutral grounds, and they focused exclusively on Wilde's writings to prevent that

subjective judgments about his personality interfered with their critical interpretation of his

works. During these two decades the critics of Wilde applied textual analysis in their exami-

nation of his writings, and the results of their studies marked the origins of the serious

reconsideration of Wilde and his works. Many monographs and essays were devoted to carry

out individual analysis of Wilde's critical and literary writings. The following studies are

among the most insightful of these scholarly accounts of Wilde's works:

San Juan (1967) was the first critic who used text analysis in order to interpret the totality

of Wilde's work. At the opening of his study, San Juan expresses his dissatisfaction with the

present situation of Wildean research. The interest of his complaint lies in the fact that it

epitomises the general feeling of uneasiness that was growing among contemporary scholars

of Wilde:

Almost all the critical evaluations of his achievement, except for highly specialized papers

on sources and influences, vitiate themselves in accepting biased popular judgments of the

writer's personality [...] to the extent that we scarcely know why Wilde still occupies a posi-

tion of some importance in literary and intellectual history (3).

San Juan's thesis is that the reason for Wilde's long-lasting relevance in academic circles

is that he is a more serious writer than it has been popularly believed, and he dedicates his

study to scrutinise Wilde's individual writings in order to prove it (17). The analysis of the

poems is particularly insightful, because he traces the stylistic and thematic development of

Wilde's poetry from his early imitative poems to The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and thus he

sees the lack originality of Wilde's initial poetry not as a sign of plagiarism but as a conse-

quence of Wilde's hesitating beginnings as a poet (46). Moreover, he interestingly points out

that the topics that appear in Wilde's poems are "remarkable broad in scope and betray a

seriously inquiring mind" (23). San Juan's analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray is also

illuminating, because in contrast to previous critics, he studies Wilde's handling of time and

space in the novel (51-60). As regards Wilde's literary criticism, San Juan doubts Wilde's

originality (74), but at least he acknowledges that Wilde was always seriously committed to

his aesthetic principles (100). Finally, San Juan examines in detail the structure and the

content of the comedies and he stresses the social criticism in them, arguing that they served

Wilde to "articulate, in ironic modes, his condemnation of the follies of `decadent' society in

the late nineteenth century" (138).

Ericksen (1977) was a critic who set out to analyse Wilde's work in its entirety in order to

convey "a powerful sense of the importance of Oscar Wilde's place in English literary history"

(8). In the introductory chapter, Ericksen echoes San Juan's protest against the tendency in the

critical accounts of Wilde to focus on the personality of Wilde and overlook his writings (7),

and he also adds an insightful comment directed to destroy the mythical image of Wilde the

outsider:

A parallel weakness [...] has been the tendency to see both Oscar Wilde and his works as

historical and literary anomalies rather than products of the shaping influences of the nine-

teenth century. Too often Wilde is considered narrowly as an artist set apart. [...] The truth,

of course, is that Wilde is very much a part of his age (7).

Ericksen believes that Wilde's works are written with a seriousness of purpose which has

not been fully recognised yet, and his study intends to solve this situation by means of a

"critical/analytical assessment of individual works" (8). The value of Ericksen's critical

account of Wilde's writings lies in that it offers penetrating insights into certain important

aspects of them. Hence, Ericksen insists that those who dismiss Wilde's criticism as "superfi-

cial, inconsistent, contradictory, and even insincere" (73) commit the error of remaining in the

surface of these writings without realising that "beneath that surface lay Wilde's central

critical beliefs" (75). Moreover, Ericksen is one of the first critics to note that, the contradic-

tion between the Preface and the body of The Picture of Dorian Gray is simply apparent and

that the novel possesses "philosophical consistency" (96). With respect to Wilde's comedies,

he supports the growing belief in the strong sense of social criticism inherent in them,

comparing Wilde to Ibsen and Shaw in his rebellion against the Philistines of the Victorian

Age (135).

There were some of these critics who devoted their studies to analyse Wilde's works from

fresh perspectives that were intended to provide correctives to specific aspects of the tradi-

tional image of Wilde:

Cohen (1978) sets out to analyse Wilde's writings in order to portray Wilde as a moralist.

Cohen aims to undermine the traditional idea of Wilde the immoral writer because he thinks

that, contrary to what is generally believed, morality is "Wilde's constant preoccupation,

orders and give meaning to his internal world" (11). In his analysis of Wilde's works, Cohen

focuses on the development of Wilde's "conflict between Old and New Testament moral

perspectives -- between vengeful judgment that damns the transgressor eternally, and the

Christian law of love, with its offer of forgiveness" (11). Cohen establishes three stages in this

process: the first phase is represented by Wilde's stories, which "broaden the scope of his

moral awareness" (13); the second phase is constituted by the critical essays and The Picture

of Dorian Gray, where Wilde "does not clearly and consistently maintain a single moral

Details

Pages
Type of Edition: Erstausgabe
Year: 2014
ISBN (eBook): 9783954898138
ISBN (Softcover): 9783954893133
File size: 3.6 MB
Language: English
Publication date: 2014 (September)
Keywords: oscar wilde

Author

Cristina Pascual Aransáez (Author)

The importance of being a reader: A revision of Oscar Wilde's works

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Author

Cristina Pascual Aransáez (Author)