Oscar Wilde
Born
on October 16, 1854 in Dublin, author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde
was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England, known for his
brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for
homosexuality. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a
poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of
aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his
only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now
considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of
Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895),
his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s
affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross
indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty
three years after his release at the age of 46.
Early Life
Oscar
Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854 in Dublin,
Ireland. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was
knighted for his work as medical advisor for the Irish censuses. William
Wilde later founded St. Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, entirely at his own
personal expense, to treat the city's poor. Oscar Wilde's mother, Jane
Francesca Elgee, was a poet who was closely associated with the Young
Irelander Rebellion of 1848, a skilled linguist whose acclaimed English
translation of Pomeranian novelist Wilhelm Meinhold's Sidonia the Sorceress had a deep influence on her son's later writing.
Wilde
was a bright and bookish child. He attended the Portora Royal School at
Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek and Roman studies. He won
the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his last two
years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. Upon
graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to
attend Trinity College in Dublin. At the end of his first year at
Trinity, in 1872, he placed first in the school's classics examination
and received the college's Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor
awarded to undergraduates.
Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde
received the Berkeley Gold Medal as Trinity's best student in Greek, as
well as the Demyship scholarship for further study at Magdalen College
in Oxford. At Oxford, Wilde continued to excel academically, receiving
first class marks from his examiners in both classics and classical
moderations. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained
attempts at creative writing. In 1878, the year of his graduation, his
poem "Ravenna" won the Newdigate Prize for the best English verse
composition by an Oxford undergraduate.
Upon graduating from
Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his friend, Frank Miles, a
popular portraitist among London's high society. There, he continued to
focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems,
in 1881. While the book received only modest critical praise, it
nevertheless established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer. The next
year, in 1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on
an American lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140
lectures in just nine months.
While not lecturing, he managed to
meet with some of the leading American scholars and literary figures of
the day, including Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt
Whitman. Wilde especially admired Whitman. "There is no one in this wide
great world of America whom I love and honor so much,'' he later wrote
to his idol.
Upon the conclusion of his American tour, Wilde
returned home and immediately commenced another lecture circuit of
England and Ireland that lasted until the middle of 1884. Through his
lectures, as well as his early poetry, Wilde established himself as a
leading proponent of the aesthetic movement, a theory of art and
literature that emphasized the pursuit of beauty for its own sake,
rather than to promote any political or social viewpoint.
On May
29, 1884, Wilde married a wealthy Englishwoman named Constance Lloyd.
They had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in 1886. A year
after his wedding, Wilde was hired to run Lady's World, a once-popular English magazine that had recently fallen out of fashion. During his two years editing Lady's World,
Wilde revitalized the magazine by expanding its coverage to "deal not
merely with what women wear, but with what they think and what they
feel. The Lady's World," wrote Wilde, "should be made the
recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects
of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that
men could read with pleasure."
Acclaimed Works
Beginning in 1888, while he was still serving as editor of Lady's World,
Wilde entered a seven-year period of furious creativity, during which
he produced nearly all of his great literary works. In 1888, seven
years after he wrote Poems, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children's stories. In 1891, he published Intentions, an essay collection arguing the tenets of aestheticism, and that same year, he published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The novel is a cautionary tale about a beautiful young man, Dorian
Gray, who wishes (and receives his wish) that his portrait ages while he
remains youthful and lives a life of sin and pleasure.
Though
the novel is now revered as a great and classic work, at the time
critics were outraged by the book's apparent lack of morality. Wilde
vehemently defended himself in a preface to the novel, considered one
of the great testaments to aestheticism, in which he wrote, "an ethical
sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" and "vice
and virtue are to the artist materials for an art."
Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan,
opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim,
encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form.
Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays—witty,
highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark
and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.
Personal Life and Prison Sentence
Around
the same time that he was enjoying his greatest literary success,
Wilde commenced an affair with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas.
On February 18, 1895, Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, who
had gotten wind of the affair, left a calling card at Wilde's home
addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite," a misspelling of
sodomite. Although Wilde's homosexuality was something of an open
secret, he was so outraged by Queensberry's note that he sued him for
libel. The decision ruined his life.
When the trial began in
March, Queensberry and his lawyers presented evidence of Wilde's
homosexuality—homoerotic passages from his literary works, as well as
his love letters to Douglas—that quickly resulted in the dismissal of
Wilde's libel case and his arrest on charges of "gross indecency."
Wilde was convicted on May 25, 1895 and sentenced to two years in
prison.
Wilde emerged from prison in 1897, physically depleted,
emotionally exhausted and flat broke. He went into exile in France,
where, living in cheap hotels and friends' apartments, he briefly
reunited with Douglas. Wilde wrote very little during these last years;
his only notable work was a poem he completed in 1898 about his
experiences in prison, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Death and Legacy
Wilde died of meningitis on November 30, 1900 at the age of 46.
More
than a century after his death, Wilde is still better remembered for
his personal life—his exuberant personality, consummate wit and infamous
imprisonment for homosexuality—than for his literary accomplishments.
Nevertheless, his witty, imaginative and undeniably beautiful works, in
particular his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest, are considered among the great literary masterpieces of the late Victorian period.
Throughout
his entire life, Wilde remained deeply committed to the principles of
aestheticism, principles that he expounded through his lectures and
demonstrated through his works as well as anyone of his era. "All art is
at once surface and symbol," Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
"Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read
the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that
art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that
the work is new, complex and vital."
