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OSCAR WILDE | |
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Born: Dublin IntroductionWilde, like fellow Irishman and friend Yeats, was a brilliant oral storyteller, a temporally displaced bard. When he fell from grace during scandal in later life, he earned many a meal-- and arranged many a loan--after ensuring an after dinner audience's affection with a good tale. It is largely from this practice that he initially achieved notoriety, and from jotting down the essence of his speech that he made his living for Wilde, who often found the act of writing disagreeable (yet never the act of talking) believed that writing was a necessary way of venting immense intellectual energy, but for him not an end in itself. Given that he identified himself always as a speaker-first as a bard and then, as he grew older, as Platonic guru to young Oxonians --it is unsurprising that he made a drama of his life. Often, as Philippe Jullian reports, he knew that his greatest role was that of "the artist triumphing over the brute" (Oscar Wilde, p.318), and in this sense certainly his literature, rather than being his definitive artistic statement, became a backdrop for his real art-life. |
As the painter is drawn to warm and cool tints, Wilde was fascinated by the dichotomy between the good and evil components of life. Like an actor, he is more taken with beauty than content-asserting that if there was an afterlife that he should like to return as a flower, utterly without soul but entirely beautiful. In statements throughout his life-often paradoxical and of which Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894) is quite representative-he apparently elevates beauty over soul. In a letter to his mother he cries: "I'm unable to write a line or a sentence so long as I'm not in complete possession of myself. I should like very submissively to follow nature-which is within myself and must be true." (Delay, André Gide, p.396) Yet he also believed, as reported by Jonathan Dollimore in his analysis of Dorian Gray, that "anyone attempting to be natural is posing" (Sexual Dissidence, p.10). The distinction between the two uses of "natural" explains a good deal about why more conservative peers misunderstood Wilde. He favored nature when it was construed as an internal individualistic impulse (think Whitman), but not when it was considered as it was by most people: as society's norm. Similarly, when he suggests that beauty is the greatest good and in so doing diminishes the role of the soul, he does so not out of shallowness, but out of a half-facetious, half-earnest pursuit of that which is more genuine, less socially constructed (and therefore less hypocritical). |
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This search for uncorrupted nature led Wilde to a ferocious individualism, ironically attained by means that in the nineteenth century were considered criminal: sexual deviancy. Dollimore relates Wilde's homosexuality to the search for self-identity, suggesting that he creates a natural self only by casting down "a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigor and repression that generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned" (p.3). Wilde brought about this internal upheaval, or recreation as Dollimore puts it, in many young disciples (significantly Gide, who is most vocal about reporting the chaos it threw into his life). This practice, somewhat of a game to Wilde, calls to mind The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which young Dorian is seduced and corrupted by the older Lord Henry, who attempts to both free the beautiful boy from convention and entertain himself.
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