🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
Here is an idle curiosity.
When Oscar Wilde had this photograph taken by Napoleon Sarony in 1882, not only was he standing against the same wall that Sarah Bernhardt had stood against—but he was standing in EXACTLY the same spot.
Continue reading “Same Difference”
Readers will recall my visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair a couple of years ago where I was offered a very rare Oscar Wilde document.
It was a typescript of the (originally) unpublished portions of Wilde’s passive-aggressive prison masterpiece De Profundis.
It was prepared by Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, for use in the 1913 trial when Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar’s lover Bosie) sued a young Arthur Ransome for having the temerity to imply that a person he didn’t name just might have had a hand in Wilde’s downfall.
Continue reading “Philadelphia Freedom”
My recent article about Stephen Fry as the young Oscar featured a video of Oscar Wilde as a character in a short-lived TV Western series.
Surprisingly, this was not the first time Oscar Wilde had appeared a character in a short-lived TV Western series.
Continue reading “The Wilde West”
Screenwise, Stephen Fry is best known for playing Oscar Wilde in the 1997 movie Wilde.
The opening of that film shows Oscar arriving in town on horseback for his lecture in Leadville, Colorado, but the scene gives a false impression. Not because he actually arrived in Leadville by train. The point is that the 1997 film is not about Wilde’s time in America. Its story arc is the period of Oscar’s relationship with Alfred Douglas in Europe ten years later.
So why do they show Wilde in Leadville?
Continue reading “Young Fry”
Take a closer look at the details of the above cartoon.
It is one of the Fancy Portrait series from the long established satirical journal Punch and it appeared in response to the opening night of Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan at the St. James’s Theatre on February 19, 1892.
It was an event worth memorializing, not least for the occasion of Oscar’s famous curtain call, two aspects of which have become the stuff of legend.
First, that Wilde took to the stage still smoking a cigarette—which some thought disrespectful. Second, that he gave an amusing speech of playful immodesty—which others thought condescending. Or, at least they did in those stuffy Victorian days. One irate newspaper correspondent referred to Wilde’s “vulgar impertinence”.1 These were, of course, the Victorians who could neither grasp irony nor face the change in attitudes that Wilde boldly anticipated.
Conversely, others saw no ill-manners in Wilde’s appearance at all. Indeed, the audience on the night was thoroughly amused, and one report found his demeanor “very touching”.2
Whichever view one took, everyone agreed on one thing: that Wilde was different. And being different is a sure way in any era of achieving the second worst thing the world: i.e. being talked about. So the story of Wilde’s curtain call was seized upon by the press at the time and has been well-documented by authors over the years.
But it all begins with the cartoon. In it Wilde’s curtain call is immediately recognizable: the smoking, the speech, and Lady Windermere’s fan.
So as we have had journalism and biography, let us now revisit the circumstances through the prism of caricature.
It’s debatable whether the name Ernest, used punningly by Wilde in his most famous play The Importance of Being Earnest, was chosen as a late Victorian code word for “gay”.
One the hand, the Wildean academic, John Stokes, suggests here this may be true “since the word ‘Earnest’ bears a euphonious relation to the [gender-variant] term Uranian”—presumably in the sound of its continental equivalents. On the outside1
Conversely, the actor, Sir Donald Sinden, who both knew and consulted Lord Alfred Douglas and Sir John Gielgud on the point, once wrote to The Times to dispute the suggestion.2
However, whether the words Ernest and Earnest are homosexual or merely homophonic, one thing is clear: the the name Ernest itself formed part of a gay literary subtext close to Wilde in the 1890s.
Continue reading “Homophones”
A verse parody appeared just three weeks after Oscar Wilde arrived in America. It was one many such newspaper items in 1882 that poked fun at Wilde and the aesthetic movement.
It was notable for its affected and satirical overuse of alliteration. Although Wilde was known for his occasional penchant for this verbal prose style (something that Whistler later parodied), it was probably not recognized by the author of this verse when it was written in January 1882.
It is more likely that its use was prompted by expressions such as “too-too” and “utterly utter” that were connected to the also alliterative Apostle of the Aesthetes.
As such, the text is instructional in understanding allusions to Wilde and the aesthetic movement. Let us examine the terminology:
Continue reading “Quixote of the Queer”
This Article First Appeared in Intentions,
(New Series No. 105, Feb. 2018)
Published by the Oscar Wilde Society
http://oscarwildesociety.co.uk
The twenty-sixth Oscar Wilde Society annual birthday dinner was held on October 13, 2017 at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall — a now familiar home for the Society and its regulars. However, for one delinquent expatriate member it was a first visit to this ‘new’ venue, a fact which prompted the surprised realisation that my previous birthday dinner was almost twenty years ago.
On that distant occasion the dinner was held at the Cadogan Hotel, an experience now so far removed from The National Liberal Club that it might have happened to an invented younger brother. This Wildean idea seemed apt because, if we condense the intervening two decades into the perspective of successive events, the two places emerge as opposite sides of the same coin of the Oscar realm.
Let me explain.
Continue reading “Oscar Wilde’s Birthday Dinner”In my recent article about Oscar Wilde’s cello coat, and throughout my online archive of Oscar Wilde In America, I often allude to Primary Sources.
For ease of reference, below is the working definition.1
A primary source is the contemporaneous, documented, and reliable viewpoint of an individual participant or observer usually in the form of:
—Newspapers, periodicals and other published materials reporting actual events, interviews, etc., by participants or observers.
—Journals, speeches, letters, memoranda, manuscripts, diaries and other papers in which individuals describe events in which they were participants or observers.
—Records of organizations. The minutes, reports, correspondence, etc. of an organization or agency.
—Primary accounts contained in memoir, biography and autobiography although these may be less reliable if they are written well after the event and distorted by personal agenda, dimming memory or the revised perspective that may come with hindsight.
—Period photographs.
Fortunately, it is increasingly easy to locate primary sources, particularly public domain books, using online searches at places such as the Internet Archive and Google Books.
What is not generally accepted as a primary source, nor should be acceptable in any scholarly account, is the simple referral to a previous work that itself does not rely on a primary source—this practice propagates myth.
As a counterpoint to this dogma read the article here for a rambling yet lighter view of how the notions of primary material factor into some aspects of Wilde.
© John Cooper, 2018.
Footnote:
—Watch Sundance Live—
The 2018 Sundance Film Festival gets underway today, January 18th, and making its world premiere is The Happy Prince written and directed by Rupert Everett.
It is the story of the last days of Oscar Wilde—and the ghosts haunting them brought to vivid life. His body ailing, Wilde lives in exile, surviving on the flamboyant irony and brilliant wit that defined him as the transience of lust is laid bare and the true riches of love are revealed. Or so it says here.
Continue reading “The Happy Prince”