🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
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.
The Canterville Ghost is a short story by Oscar Wilde which made its first appearance in America in The New-York Tribune on Sunday, March 27, 1887.1
Unfortunately, I was too young to read the original.
Continue reading “The Canterville Ghost”
There have been Oscar Wilde bars before now: in Berlin, San Diego, Chicago, and, I seem to recall, one previously in New York City. There is a Wilde Café in Minneapolis, and a bar called Oscar Wilde 9 located, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, at #9 Oscar Wilde St. in Mexico City.
Most of these pretenders, however, merely give a nod to the old boy by borrowing his name. One or two, such as Wilde’s Restaurant in The Lodge at Ashford Castle, in Cong, Ireland, and the Oscar Wilde room at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, London, try a little harder to embody Oscar’s maxim that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess.
But believe me, none of them, past or present, comes remotely close to the lavishness to be found at the new Oscar Wilde Bar in New York City.
Continue reading “The Oscar Wilde Bar”
I recently gave a talk on the subject of Oscar Wilde and his relationship with sunflowers to the good people of the Maryland Agriculture Resource Council at their Sunflower Soirée, a yearly festival devoted to the Helianthus annuus. Literally, an annual event.
Between you and me, it was a wonderful occasion; but as there was a gloomy weather forecast I choose to take poetic license and focus on the portent to a poignant moment.
Continue reading “The State of the Sunflowers”
When one thinks about New Jersey today—and as I live there one is forced to occasionally—it becomes quickly apparent that it clings to its endearment as the “Garden” State rather than necessarily exemplifying it. Industrial towns abound, especially in the heartland, and one such place is Freehold, the birthplace of Bruce Springsteen, and where Oscar Wilde once lectured.
I set off on the trail of the Oscar of my American dreams.
Continue reading “The New Jersey Turnpike”
—Arcane Allusions in The Importance of Being Earnest—
If Oscar Wilde really did live in terror of not being misunderstood—as he wrote in The Critic as Artist in 1891, he need not have worried. At least not so far as his plays are concerned, because there are parts of the texts now so arcane that they are almost bound to be misunderstood—if they are understood at all.
Take Wilde’s most famous play The Importance of Being Earnest.
Continue reading “Time: The Present”
It styles itself as Simple, Cheery, and Charming—which it is, and that will have to suffice as a review as I was only there long enough for one drink. And therein lies a tale.
Continue reading “The Pictures of Dorian Gray”
If I am to find Wildean relevance in topical US culture, there is a latter-day Nellie the Elephant in the room. And before proceeding, I should explain that twisted metaphor for the uninitiated.
I refer to the UK children’s novelty song entitled Nellie the Elephant and in particular to the eponymous pachyderm who was celebrated in the oft-repeated chorus for going off with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, TRUMP! “Trump” apparently being the sound an elephant makes.
And trump, like any other annoying refrain stuck in one’s head, it’s a word currently hard to ignore. So reluctantly I must face it—the capitalized version that is—before we send in the clowns and say goodbye to the circus that is becoming politics in America.
Continue reading “Moral Equivalence”