Tag: prison

Article

Some Common Prisoner

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Oscar Wilde Visits Two U.S. Prisons

—Updated from its original posting in 2015—

State penitentiaries are not generally considered tourist destinations.

Yet in a curious twist in Oscar Wilde’s conventional social activity during his lecture tour of North America in 1882, he took the opportunity to visit TWO American state prisons within the space of three days: one during a train stop on his way to lecture in Atchison, KS; and a second (along with its insane asylum) before his next evening lecture in Lincoln, NE.

Did Wilde have a special interest in places of incarceration? Or, aware of his appeal to notoriety, was fate prefiguring for him a life on the inside?

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Review

Useful Editions

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Literary Metaphor at the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway

Focused though I am on Oscar Wilde In America, I like to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

However, I know that to see the brushstrokes up close it is sometimes necessary to depart from topical and geographical constraints and visit the works themselves.

So last weekend I attended the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway, Ireland, where I discovered part of the Wilde canvas rendered in two books with contrasting techniques.

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Article

“Oscar” the Opera: The Art Of Darkness

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Oscar, the opera in Philadelphia

The last time Oscar Wilde visited Philadelphia it was to promote an opera. That was during his lecture tour of America in 1882 when a required part of his raison d’être was to be the poster-boy for Gilbert & Sullivan’s latest offering Patience—a comic opera whose purpose was to ridicule the adherents of the Aesthetic Movement. Not that it mattered to Oscar Wilde that he was the movement’s leading representative and the person most closely identified with the ridicule. He always knew he would outlive the mob mentality, and it is an ironic measure of the wisdom of Wilde’s indifference that he has now triumphantly returned to Philadelphia as the subject of an opera himself. The question is: if Oscar the man was indifferent to Patience, would he have had any patience for Oscar the opera?

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