Man of Many Guises: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

By Gavin Witt, Production Dramaturg

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde: with a handle like that, a tousled mix of Irish myth and Anglo-Protestant lineage, is it any surprise the man liked to write about identity confusion and naming issues?
 

The second son of prominent Dubliners, Sir William and Lady Wilde, Wilde began life with many advantages and high expectations. His mother was a popular, if notoriously eccentric, public figure—and ardent Irish Nationalist poet—who published under a series of pen-names, including the nom-de-guerre Speranza (or “Hope”). His father was a successful eye surgeon, appointed royal oculist to Queen Victoria. Even in his infancy, Wilde’s mother was foretelling greatness in his future. Nor would he disappoint, though it would be neither in the pursuit of politics (his mother’s passion) nor in the practice of a genteel profession like his father’s.

Rather, after distinguishing himself academically at every level through his award-winning scholarship at Oxford, Wilde turned his back on the “family business” of Irish politics (though he later confessed that, had he remained in Ireland, it would likely have claimed him in due course). Instead, he stayed in England and parlayed his not-insignificant notoriety from Oxford into his first venture in London. After all, the rather narrow set who had formed his peers at school were largely either offspring, or themselves members, of the confined social circle he set out to woo and win. And true to his multifaceted nature, Wilde the student attained not merely academic note; he emerged equally celebrated for his wallpaper, his quips, and his clothes. In short, in his dress, demeanor, and décor, Wilde was an early practitioner of what came to be called the Aesthetic movement—advocating Art for Art’s sake and Beauty as its own end.

He set up in London as a Professor of Aesthetics, a manner of life coach-cum-decorator. Today, he’d get his own show on Bravo or MTV (“Real Aesthetic Housewives of Mayfair”); then, he got coveted invitations to the best homes, where he rapidly made himself invaluable with his ready wit and charming ways. Overcoming whatever liabilities his Irish origins might have offered, he created a public persona, or series of them, out of imagination, ambition, and just enough family money.

For the next decade or so, Wilde’s would be a steadily shifting identity—or more accurately, a kaleidoscopic series of sometimes overlapping identities. He wrote some unsuccessful art plays and published very successful poems, fables, and short story collections to establish his literary cred. As the Aesthetic expert and prophet of Decadence, he composed criticism and essays on home décor, children’s education, and dress and deportment. He gave lectures, even traveling to America—including a legendary jaunt out West, where cowboys and miners jostled to see the apostle of Too Utterly Utter. He married a socially connected minor heiress, and with her money set up the House Beautiful and started a family. To support them, as the responsible husband and father, he became editor of Woman’s World—both surely as far as one could imagine from his calculated character as the ultimate Dandy about town.

Amidst his growing domesticity, however, Dandyism got its due as well, when to enormous popular acclaim—and critical umbrage—Wilde published The Portrait of Dorian Gray in 1890-91. First in serial form then as a short novel, it sold wildly well, despite (or it could be thanks to) accusations that it was debased immoral filth. For many, its pithy witticisms and decadent ideology embodied the image of Wilde they had constructed and wanted to consume: an ideal of living purely for pleasure without remorse or concern for consequences.

Perhaps this pose proved ultimately too convincing to the man behind it: Wilde now regularly alternated parties, salons, and late night suppers among the glitterati with what he called “feasting with panthers,” but might charitably be called “chasing rough trade.” He also initiated an increasingly public flirtation, then affair, with young Lord Alfred Douglas, a relationship that ultimately landed Wilde in prison.

Meantime, though, he added theatrical impresario to his ever-expanding roster of identities as he retrieved his playwright’s quill and teamed up with several successful actor-managers. Together they produced, in stunningly short succession, the plays that cemented his reputation and his legacy, and seemed to have made his fortune. With the exception of Salomé (which British censorship forced him to publish, then produce, in France), Wilde turned away from the high-art aims of his early efforts, finding success with a trio of society comedies that were essentially witty romantic melodramas set among the titled elites and modeled after the most popular form of the day. [See Wilde and Victorian Theater] Even here, identity was slippery and various; and from Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance he began to craft a more complex mixed form that culminated in the most celebrated (and innovative) of his plays, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Flamboyant as ever, confident, the toast of the town, Wilde was at the peak of his powers when the house of cards he’d laboriously and precariously erected came tumbling down. Maybe it was too many conflicting identities to manage or master, but a host of far less pleasant new ones landed on his head—sodomite, outcast, convict—and he traded his original flourish of names for a prison number: C.3.3. Never again would he stand at the pinnacle of the society he loved and lampooned, conquered and immortalize—succumbing to his final role, that of exile, when he died in Paris in 1900.