Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 - 1900) was an Irish author.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland to Sir William and Lady Jane Wilde. His mother, Jane Francisca Elgee, was well known in Dublin as a writer who wrote under the pen-name of Speranza.

Wilde studied the classics at Trinity College, Dublin, with distinction, and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874. While there he won the Newdigate Prize in 1878 with his poem Ravenna. At Oxford, though he proved himself to be brilliant intellectually, he was particularly well known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He adopted an effeminate pose, casting scorn on manly sports, wearing his hair long, and decorating his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art. Moreover he declared his desire to "live up to" these things. He also affected a lackadaisical manner, and professed intense emotions on the subject of Theophile Gautier's "art for art's sake", then a new-fangled doctrine, which the artist James McNeill Whistler was bringing into prominence. Wilde made himself the apostle of this new cult. At Oxford his behaviour cost him a ducking in the river Cherwell in addition to having his rooms trashed, but the cult spread among certain segments of society to such an extent that languishing attitudes, too-too costumes and aestheticism generally became a recognized pose. Its affectations were caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan's mocking operetta, Patience (1881).

The aesthetic movement represented by the school of William Morris and Gabriel Dante Rossetti had a permanent influence on English decorative art. As the leading aesthete, Oscar Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities of his day. Apart from the ridicule he encountered, his affected paradoxes and his witty sayings were quoted on all sides. In 1882 he went on a lecture tour in the United States.

In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and he fathered 2 sons Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). He had already published in 1881 a selection of his poems, which, however, only attracted admiration in a limited circle. In 1888 appeared The Happy Prince and Other Tales, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood. This charming volume of fairy tales was followed up later by a second collection, The House of Pomegranates (1892), acknowledged by the author to be "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."

In much of his writings, and in his general attitude, there was to most people of his day an undertone of rather nasty suggestion which created prejudice against him, and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), with all its sparkle and cleverness, impressed them more from this point of view than from its purely literary brilliance. Wilde contributed some feature articles to the art reviews, and in 1891 re-published three of them as a book called Intentions.

His first real success with the larger public was as a dramatist with Lady Windermere's Fan at the St James's Theatre in 1892, followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The dramatic and literary ability shown in these plays, all of which were published later in book form, was as undisputed as their action and ideas were characteristically paradoxical. In 1893 the publisher refused to allow Wilde's Salome to be produced, but it was produced in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1894.

Sexual Orientation

Wilde has variously been considered bisexual or homosexual, depending on how the terms are defined. His inclination towards relations with other men was relatively well known, the first such relationship having probably been with Robert Ross, who proved his most faithful friend. When Wilde became intimate with Lord Alfred Douglas, John Sholto Douglas -- 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who was Lord Alfred's father -- publicly insulted Wilde with a misspelled note left at Wilde's club. The note read "Mr. Wilde posing as a Somdomite."

Wilde charged Queensberry with libel. The confrontation escalated and some believe Lord Alfred egged Wilde on, to fight his father. Wilde was eventually formally accused of 'gross indecency', this being little more than a euphemism for any homosexual act, public or private, and went to trial for that crime.

He was sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895. There he wrote the famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol ("For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die"). Prison was unkind to Wilde's health and when he was released he spent his last years penniless on the Continent, under the name of Sebastian Melmoth in self-inflicted exile from society and artistic circles.

While in prison. he wrote an apology for his life which was placed in the hands of his executor and published in 1905. The manuscripts of A Florentine Tragedy and an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets were stolen from his house in 1895. In 1904 a five-act tragedy, The Duchess of Padua, written by Wilde about 1883 for Mary Anderson, but not acted by her, was published in a German translation (Die Herzogin von Padua, translated by Max Meyerfeld) in Berlin.

He died alone November 30, 1900, in a Paris hotel, under an assumed name, Lord Alfred having forsaken him; he was buried in the Cimetiere de Bagneux, outside Paris but later moved to Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

After Wilde's death, Wilde's friend Frank Harris wrote a biography of Wilde. Wilde is well known for his prose, but also for his quotations, e.g. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

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Two films of his life are The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) starring Peter Finch and Wilde (1997) starring Stephen Fry.

Bibliography

He wrote many famous works, among them:

The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
The Importance of Being Earnest
An Ideal Husband (1894)

External Links

The Oscar Wilde Collection

e-texts of some of Oscar Wilde's works: