The late 19 th Century & Oscar Wilde

1. The late 19thCentury & Oscar Wilde Aestheticism and Decadence

2. Victorian Drama & the Late 19th-Century Stage • The bawdy material of Restoration comedies gradually disappeared from the stage during the middle of the 18th century; the sentimental comedies and tragedies which remained reinforced conventional morality. • Dramatic writing declined towards the turn of the 19th century, but an influx of new genres (e.g. farces, musicals, comic operas) during the Victorian era pushed the popularity of plays to new heights. • Still, however, it was necessary for playwrights to adhere to Victorian mores; even Shakespeare was “bowdlerized.” • By the late 1900s, improved roads, street lighting, and economic prosperity boosted attendance, which resulted in longer play runs, higher profitability—and consequently greater production values.

3. Cultural Terms • Aestheticism: a late 19th-century European arts movement which centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose. Walter Pater emphasized that beauty and the arts could elevate and inspire: "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." • Aestheticism is closely associated with the term “decadence,” which originally carried negative connotations—it expressed the supposed moral and spiritual depravity of the aesthetes.

4. Cultural Terms • Dandy: a man who gave exaggerated attention to fashion and personal appearance; usually spoke in a refined manner, and cultivated idleness and a careless demeanor.

5. Oscar Wilde • Born in Ireland, 1854 • Academically brilliant; graduated from Oxford with a double-first in Classics in 1878 • Married in 1884, had two sons • Supported his family with numerous literary and journalistic endeavors • Famous for his controversial wit and flamboyant dress and mannerisms; openly embraced the lifestyle of an aesthete and dandy • The Importance of Being Earnest: first performed in 1895 and wildly popular for a few weeks—before the two scandalous trials which ruined his career. • After prison, died impoverished in Paris in 1900.

7. The Trials • The Marquess of Queensbury, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, objected to their publicly gay relationship. The Marquess dropped a card at Wilde’s club addressed, “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite” [sic]. • In 1895, only three months after the opening of Earnest, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensbury for libel. • The libel trial quickly devolved into a trial of Wilde himself, during which his relationships not only with Lord Douglas but with many other men, including working class male prostitutes, were produced as evidence. At this time, sodomy was a crime in England. • Immediately after Wilde lost the libel suit, he was tried and convicted of sodomy and “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years hard labor in prison.

8. The Trials, cont. • Wilde’s wit and outspokenness often worked against him during the trials. For example, when asked whether he had ever kissed a certain servant, he responded, “Oh, dear no. He was a particularly plain boy – unfortunately ugly – I pitied him for it.” • He also spoke eloquently about homosexuality: “It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect….It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ‘the love that dare not speak its name,’ and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

9. Study Questions • What kind of social commentary does Wilde make about the upper classes, their lifestyles, and their relationships? • The characters usually seem artificial rather than natural—why? What is the role of artifice and superficiality on a larger level in the play? • How can we differentiate Jack from Algernon, and Gwendolen from Cecily? In what ways are these characters interchangeable? • Based on facts from Wilde’s life, how does your reading of the text change? How important do you think homosexuality is in the play? Do you think a reading of the play must take Wilde’s life into account? • Note the references to writing, particularly to manuscripts, novels, diaries, fiction, and literary criticism. How are texts represented, and how is the idea of “text” important to the play? • What is “the importance of being earnest?” What do you make of the play on the word “earnest,” especially in contrast to the characters’ behavior? Is the play itself in earnest?

10. “Lying, the telling of beautiful, untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”