Oscar Wilde

1. Oscar Wilde

2. Oscar Wilde • Born in Ireland, 1854. • “Fop”: One who is foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress, or manners. (OED) • Published The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890. • The Importance of Being Earnest first performed in 1895. • Died in 1900 at the age of 45, three years after his release from prison.

3. 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. • He was convicted of sodomy and “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years hard labor in prison.

4. 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.”

5. What does this have to do with the play?

6. What does this have to do with the play? • Gwendolyn: “The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive” (35).

7. What does this have to do with the play? • Lady Bracknell: “[A] cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in society. […] You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?” (14-15).

8. What does this have to do with the play? • Gwendolyn: “I often wish that in public, at any rate, you had been more demonstrative. […] I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present” (10-11).

9. What does this have to do with the play? • Algernon: “Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read” (4). • Gwendolyn: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train” (36).

10. What does this have to do with the play? • Gwendolyn: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing” (44). • Lady Bracknell: “We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces” (47).