A popular perception of Oscar Wilde as an idle aesthete persists. is this a fair representation?
is a carefully cultivated image that wilde developed. For example, when told by actor-director George Alexander to remove a scene from the importance of being serious, he responded, “This scene that you think is superfluous cost me terribly back-breaking work and heart-wrenching tension.” you may not believe me, but I assure you it must have taken me five minutes to write it!’
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however, for much of his career, he was a hard worker. The Importance of Being Serious went through about eight drafts; he started about two and a half times the length of his final compressed version. he wilde perfected every word. but he loved to give the impression that he just did it like he was a lazy brilliance.
I also believe that Wilde was strongly opposed to the kind of Victorian work ethic that was based on the line of duty. There was this idea that as long as you have character, integrity, dedication, and self-control, even the mediocre can flourish. This kind of self-help ethic by Samuel Smiles supports free market and laissez-faire ideology in many ways. justifies a highly competitive market. it complements the pseudo-Darwinian idea that merit will increase and that the system is not fixed. but to the contrary, wilde was well aware of how rigged the system really is.
So, on the one hand, Wilde’s aesthetic of beauty, idleness, and genius suggests that he’s so brilliant that he doesn’t need to put effort into his work. but she also resists utilitarianism and that kind of competitive ethos.
Were there more direct ways in which you engaged politically?
It’s a wonderful mix. he described himself as a socialist and, in fact, somewhat of an anarchist. he signed a petition for the pardon of some anarchists who were sentenced to death in chicago. He rescued John Barlas, a young revolutionary who was arrested for firing a pistol near the House of Commons. and expressed admiration for him by the Russian nihilists and many leading socialists.
however, he was not george bernard shaw. he did not campaign in county councils. he was not part of active political groups.
Intellectually, the brand of socialism he proposed in the soul of man under socialism is a fantastically ideal one in which the state provides you with everything you need and then you are free to do as you please. it is the idea that everyone gets to be a dandy-aesthete if that is what they would like. they would not be obliged, as socialists, to make bribes in local committees, nor to give up their personal taste for luxury.
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde writes that “[a] map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth looking at.” Is this the utopian element of his politics?
yes. More generally, utopianism was a strong element in late nineteenth-century socialist politics. Think of someone like William Morris, who was a utopian visionary. Even George Bernard Shaw, the archetypal Fabian Socialist, was in some respects a Utopian. his works are full of visions of the future. these visions are not necessarily ideal, but they explore the idea that “if we leave here, this is where we will end up.” Wilde joined this current in radical politics and then took it rather perversely in his own direction.
can you tell us more about the political vision of this work?
establishes a vision in which there is no longer any obligation on the individual to work to support himself, to submit to any type of authority.
In part, it exceeds many of the pious expectations about socialism. Wilde’s socialism is not about a lucky few giving up their luxury for the sake of the many who suffer. it is not based on any kind of idea of philanthropy, charity or equal division for all. instead, it is based on the pleasure principle. It is based on the idea that there is enough for everyone. the state will figure it out. the machines will do all the work. no more nasty jobs!
Ignoring how all this was actually to be achieved, Wilde goes on to argue that sympathy for suffering is not ennobling, but painful and demeaning.
what you should have instead, he says, is sympathy with pleasure. you should want everyone else to be as joyful, happy and free as you are. she argues that all authority is demeaning. the legal, judicial and penitentiary systems degrade both the people who impose power and the prisoners and convicts. he also argues against marriage and the family, which he sees as constraints on the individual.
“in the importance of being serious, lies turn out to be true”
It is possible to read the importance of being serious together with a political message of this type, because in that work everyone somehow defies the limits of authority. all young people do exactly what they want, and justify it on the fly. it all ends completely happily ever after, with everyone getting what they want. everyone is wonderfully selfish.
that’s an interesting combination, because the importance of being serious could be interpreted as a rather frivolous charade. wilde described it as written “by a butterfly for butterflies”.
The ‘butterfly for butterflies’ fits Wilde’s self-image as an intellectual esthete. but actually I think it’s an anarchic work.
somehow fits into a conventional farce structure. most farces start with someone lying, committing a crime, or making a mistake. then they lie to cover it up. More and more complications arise from that lie. At the end of most charades, the original lie or sin is revealed and forgiven. authority is reinstated. people return to their rightful place.
However, in the importance of being serious, lies turn out to be true. everyone is allowed to keep lying. in fact, it is impossible to separate lies and truth in any meaningful way. the characters become who they pretended to be. While Lady Bracknell is an embodiment of society’s authority and etiquette, she ultimately wields no power.
Is the idea of anarchy also registered at the language level?
yes. some of that is in the puns, but also in the way the language in that work means whatever you want it to mean. one of my favorite parts is when algernon pretends to be ernest. Jack enters in mourning for his brother Ernest, his alter-ego whom he has decided to kill. At that moment, Cecily runs in and says that you will never guess who has come to visit you: your brother Ernest! Jack says, ‘I don’t have a brother,’ to which Cecily replies, ‘Oh don’t say that! no matter how badly he has behaved towards you in the past, he is still your brother.”
jack has inadvertently blurted out the truth, that he doesn’t really have a brother, but that magically turns into something else, and the intrigue continues.
That happens all the time: anything someone says can be manipulated. language becomes a means of creation. For example, Cecily writes in her journal that she is engaged to Ernest, at which point she co-opts Algernon into becoming Ernest and announces that they are engaged. and at the end of the play, that has come true.
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There is a sense in which words are infinitely adaptable to any occasion. there is an elasticity and joy in the language. consider the sermon of dr. chasuble about the meaning of manna in the desert, which can be preached at funerals, harvest celebrations, baptisms, confirmations, or indeed any kind of religious festival.
“There is a linguistic surface of puns, witticisms, epigrams and paradoxes that critics sometimes brand as absurd. but underneath there is a phenomenal analysis of power”
but inversely, the work reveals how society controls the individual. When Lady Bracknell interviews Jack, she uses etiquette to exert total control. the play is full of rules, ranging from rules about how to eat a muffin properly, to rules about old and new money, and having parents to prove family lineage.
Could it also be described as a feminist play?
years ago, my college tutor, christopher butler, talked about the play as a matriarchy, and that was the starting point for my work on wilde. Not only Lady Bracknell is in charge, but also Cecily and Gwendolen. they take the initiative in their relationships and make proposals. so yes, in this play it’s the women who have the real power and authority.
is this a broader theme in wilde’s works?
In Wilde’s works, there is a linguistic surface of puns, ingenuities, epigrams, and paradoxes that critics sometimes dismiss as absurd. but underneath, there is a phenomenal analysis of power, of who has economic power, and how morality is embedded in the systems of power that control how people behave and control admission to society.
women are very clearly subject to these forms of power. they do not have independent economic means: it depends on whom they marry and what kind of power they have within that marriage. morality is both a system used against women and a system certain women know how to use.
In fact, some plays are about women who are smart enough to play around and circumvent that system. Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Mrs. Allonby in A Woman of No Importance are women who very consciously game the system. there’s a wonderful line in a woman of no importance about how it’s essential to play with fire because it’s those who play with fire who never get burned.
again, there is a point where mrs. Allonby talks about how life is so much better for women than it is for men because there are so many more rules imposed on them, so there are so many more rules that they can break. mrs allonby is a character that is able to stand on top of the system and work her way around it.
wilde also depicts the lives of people who have accepted conventional morality and shows how those lives are in danger of being destroyed. mrs arbuthnot in a woman of no importance is a fascinating study of a woman whose instincts are very clearly contrary to the morality in which she believes. guilt tortures her, but that guilt becomes a kind of power. As a victimized single mother, the role of victim or martyr becomes her way of resisting Lord Illingworth and his desire to take care of his child.
one of the aphorisms in dorian gray’s image preface is that “all art is pretty useless”. Is this a beautician novel?
The million dollar question is “what is a beautician novel?”. certainly, it is impossible to interpret the image of dorian gray as a direct statement on aesthetics.
“the whole novel enjoys the surface and the appearance of things”
People have tried to offer such interpretations. For example, they have read the novel about the dangers of treating life purely as art, as Dorian does. it deals with the fundamental experiences of life, like a woman who commits suicide because he has rejected her and broken her heart, as if it were a play or simply an aesthetic spectacle. the novel can then be read as a warning against viewing beauty as the only valuable quality in life.
The problem with such interpretations is that it is impossible to read the novel without aesthetically enjoying it. the whole novel enjoys the surface and the look of things.
there is a point where dorian plans to take some drugs; Just as he is doing this mischief, the narration stops and gives a wonderfully detailed description of the Florentine cabinet containing the drugs. she pauses to appreciate the cabinet before the story continues.
The novel itself demands a similar aesthetic appreciation from the reader. If you want to participate in the novel, you have to appreciate it as Dorian appreciates cabinets, rugs, tapestries, and jewelry.
Is beauty deceptive or can it be a moral guide? Does the novel suggest that if you judge by appearances you will be led astray, like people who think that Dorian cannot be guilty of the crimes he has committed because he is beautiful? Or does the ending of the novel, in which Dorian magically turns ugly while he is “punished” for his sins, affirm the link between morality and beauty? can offer equally compelling readings either way, but only by discarding half the evidence in the novel.
So, it’s a novel that deals with beauty, aesthetics, and the idea of what an aesthetic life would be like, but it doesn’t offer answers.
In the novel, Lord Henry Wotton sends a yellow book to Dorian that is described as “poisonous”. what is the meaning of this book?
The most immediate reference for the yellow book is the novel À rebours (against nature) by j k huysmans. this is a French novel about an aristocrat who indulges in a purely amoral life of the senses. There’s a way Dorian models his life on that.
but you could also interpret the book as the rebirth of walter pater. the conclusion of pater’s book is about living your life with this ‘gem-hard flame’; life is not about the fruit of experience, but about experience itself.
Pater removed this conclusion in the second edition of the book, because he was concerned that it might corrupt some of the young people into whose hands it fell. You can read Dorian Gray as a “what if” book. what would it be like if you were corrupt? And is that a realistic fear or not?
It’s also worth noting that although Dorian blames the book for his corruption, the novel’s preface challenges the idea that a book can corrupt. he maintains that “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” The books are well written, or badly written. that’s all’.
tell us about wilde tales.
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I love all of the stories, but I would pick two for particular attention: “The Fisherman and His Soul” and “The Portrait of Mr. W H.” While many of Wilde’s stories are seemingly simple but have a twist, these two are obviously and inescapably complicated.
‘the fisherman and his soul’ goes wonderfully with dorian grey. the story is somewhat similar to ‘the little mermaid’ by hans christian andersen: the fisherman falls in love with a mermaid and, in order to enter the sea and be with her, he has to cut off her soul.
In a sense, it’s a version of the Faustian deal. In Wilde’s interpretation, the soul becomes another character in the story once it has been eliminated. he goes off and has these extraordinary adventures, and he comes back and tries to tempt the fisherman with the experiences.
The story is interrupted in various ways. Contravening the direct trajectory of many fairy tales, there are enormously detailed descriptions of the exotic cities, merchants, and bands of vagabonds that the soul encounters on its adventures. These descriptions, like those of Dorian Grey, are beautiful to read. they are there for their own good.
The story is framed by the priest, who refuses to bless the fisherman and the mermaid. but it is impossible to read the story in any kind of simple Christian framework. there are witches, and the priest is proven wrong in all sorts of ways.
In general, many of Wilde’s stories invite moral readings and then confuse them. they offer versions of a simple moral that then don’t quite fit the story. not sure what frame it’s supposed to read them in. To further complicate matters, the seemingly simple moral of the various stories contradict each other.
‘the portrait of mr w. h.’ is difficult to read within any genre. Is it a story or is it really a literary criticism of shakespeare’s sonnets?
offers one of the earliest readings of homosexual desire within shakespeare’s sonnets. It contains a detailed analysis of shakespeare’s images and how you might interpret the sonnets, but all of that is contained within a story. is this offered as serious reading or is it offered as misreading? is it a story about how shakespeare’s sonnets are homoerotic? Or is it a story about how that’s a wrong theory? how do you decide if any literary reading is true?
is a kind of endless and recessive hall of mirrors in which what you finally see is your own reflection. it’s wonderfully playful and phenomenally daring, particularly considering that it was published in the late 19th century.
what events led wilde to write the work known as de profundis?
very simply, wilde wrote it as a letter to lord alfred douglas while he was incarcerated in reading jail. he was stretching the rules: he was allowed to write letters in prison, so he wrote a letter of almost a hundred pages once it was published.
it is highly doubtful that lord alfred douglas was really the target audience. Once he had finished writing the manuscript in prison, Wilde asked that several copies be made of it, that excerpts be sent to other people, and that More Adey and Robert Ross keep the copies because they were his literary executors and therefore Therefore, he should have all his works. all these things suggest that it is not simply a letter to an ex-lover.
“He says that sending someone to prison for loving boys or men, and the idea that prison will prevent you from doing so, is patently ridiculous”
wilde always plays with gender. genre is how works are marketed and sold, and it also forms the rules and expectations about how we read works. As with many of Wilde’s works, it’s hard to know how to categorize de profundis.
It’s called a prison letter, but it’s also a kind of apology, a self-justification rather than an apology. it is also a form of biography, a manifesto about art, a defiant rejection of society’s standards and judgments, and a statement of purpose for his future plans for artistic self-definition.
wilde was highly successful in shaping his future reputation with de profundis. for example, he wrote that “I was a man who was in a symbolic relationship with the art and culture of my time”, and this has helped shape the way he has been thought of ever since.
Did you always think you had been wrongfully imprisoned?
basically, yes. after his conviction, he did not deny doing the things he was jailed for. but he says that sending someone to prison for loving boys or men, and the idea that prison will prevent you from doing so, is patently ridiculous. he says very explicitly in de profundis that the laws that condemned him were wrong and unjust laws.
remained defiant after his release from prison, with ‘the ballad of reading jail’, and his letters to the Home Secretary and to the newspapers. he campaigned for prison reform, criticizing the treatment of children and the mentally ill in prison.
The only time he submitted to the law was when he appealed to the Home Secretary to release him early on the grounds that he was losing his sanity. at that time he characterized his homosexuality as a disease, a disease. he in fact cited as authorities people like cesare lombroso and max nordau, who pathologized the criminal and condemned homosexuality. that was his lowest point.
Did your political views change when you were imprisoned, or is there continuity with your earlier political view of the soul of man under socialism?
There is a lot of continuity. in ‘the ballad of reading jail’ and in profundis, he criticizes the prison system and the hypocrisy of society. in both works he inverts the idea of the prison hierarchy, as it was in the soul of man under socialism. it is the prisoners who are compassionate and imaginative, and it is those who exercise authority over them who are degraded and made cruel by that authority.
the only point where wilde changed, which is more philosophical than political, was in the value of suffering. in the soul of man under socialism, he says that sympathy for suffering is simply degrading. In part, he had been countering the Victorian sentimentality of suffering and the idea that the poor and the weak are somehow purified or ennobled by their suffering.
in de profundis, he retracts that opinion. he says that suffering really has value. suffering is where emotion and form come together. Some of the most intense experiences, like being imprisoned where time stands still and all you have are your thoughts, means that you can see the totality of your life: you live every moment in time simultaneously. it gives a different kind of emotional depth; compassion and imagination grow from that.
We haven’t talked about the fact that Oscar Wilde was Irish. Is that something important to keep in mind when reading his works?
wilde changed his national allegiances throughout his life, in part to suit himself. at times, he downplayed his Irish character. For example, he lost his Irish accent when he went to Oxford. he could speak of ‘our english land’, and rank with shakespeare, milton, wordsworth, shelley and keats as one of the greats of english literature. However, when Salomé was denied a license to perform, he made it very clear that he was not English but Irish. at one point he spoke of applying for French citizenship, because the French appreciated the true value of artistic freedom.
That said, he was extremely critical of British rule in Ireland and was a lifelong advocate of Irish nationalism. I think his Irishness meant that he was very aware of power, the power that was exercised over his country and the self-justifying narratives of power.
but the Irish character of his works? there is a lot of discussion about this among the savage critics. he appropriates material from Irish fairy tales, legends and folk stories. there’s also a sense in which, although he posed as part of English high society, he did so in a way that had to do with acting. Many of his works distort and deconstruct the image that English society has of itself. his humor was wonderfully subversive and corrosive.
As with his sexuality, his Irishness placed him outside of the mainstream. he was an insider-outsider with the genre, and he was an insider-outsider with the literary system. he learned the rules and could play them, but absolutely for his own benefit.
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