Wilde, Oscar

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), essayist, poet, novelist, and dramatist, was born on 16 October 1854 at 15 Westland Row, Dublin. He was the second son of Sir William Wilde, a noted eye surgeon and folklorist, and Jane Francesca Wilde, who as "Speranza" had penned inflammatory nationalist verse in her youth. Educated at Portora Royal School, Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde first made his name as a self-appointed "Professor of Aesthetics," touring the United States in the early 1880s and lecturing on such subjects as the "House Beautiful" and, in San Francisco, on his Irish nationalist sympathies. His first literary success was with the Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which was swiftly followed by a series of society comedies that simultaneously flattered and satirized Wilde's fashionable West End audiences: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). A noted wit and dandy, Wilde gave an outsider's informed, fascinated, yet skeptical view of the workings of the Victorian aristocracy—with its casual cruelties and sexual double standard—and of the pragmatism undermining the high-sounding sentiments of imperialist politics. Wilde, as an Irishman and a married homosexual, was doubly estranged from the conventional English society that he both commented upon and courted. As his celebrity grew, his double life became ever more precarious, and he began to conduct a semipublic affair with Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), the dangerously unstable son of the Marquess of Queensberry. At the apex of his fame—with An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest both playing to packed audiences in the West End—Wilde took out a libel action against Queensberry (who had accused him of "posing as a Somdomite [sic]"), provoking his own subsequent trial and conviction for gross indecency. His friend Frank Harris believed that Wilde was put on trial not just for his sexuality but for his nationality as well, claiming that in front of an English judge and jury Wilde had as much chance of being found innocent as one of the Invincibles, the group responsible for the Phoenix Park murders in 1882. Wilde died virtually penniless in Paris after serving two years of hard labor, and was written out of literary and cultural history until his recuperation in the 1980s as a contemporary gay icon and his reevaluation as one of the most important figures of the Irish literary renaissance.

This recuperation has involved a rediscovery of Wilde's importance as an art theorist as well as a writer. The aesthetic theories that he outlined in his essays, collected as Intentions (1891), anticipate to a surprising degree some of the central tenets and assumptions of both modernism and contemporary cultural theory, such as the ideas of the dispersed and decentered nature of human identity and of language being "the parent and not the child of thought" (Complete Works, p. 1,023). At the same time, Wilde's studied nonchalance is now seen as a mask for the seriousness of his artistic ambitions: Much critical work has concentrated on him as a professional writer in a recognizably modern context, collaborating with other theatrical practitioners, polishing and revising his work through composition and rehearsal into performance.

Wilde, Oscar

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