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Article · Review

Horse Feathers

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William Cody (Buffalo Bill) and Oscar Wilde
[See cartoon at the foot of the page]

The Fiction of the Wilde West

Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!

Oscar Wilde, The American Invasion.1

The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.

Much the same could be said about accounts Oscar Wilde’s visits to various one-horse stops on his American lecture tour—and not least by Wilde himself who acknowledged the West’s “boundless mendacity” in the quotation above.

Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”

In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.

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Review

Gossip

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The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip (American Edition)
by Neil Titley

(Dan Shepelavy, Vanessa Heron, Editors)
Universal Exports of North America. (Philadelphia), 2023.

ORDER ONLY FROM THE PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE

If you are about to start reading hundreds of biographies, memoirs, and diaries in search of informative or amusing (and preferably salacious) anecdotes about the Victorians in general, and Oscar Wilde in particular, then Stop!—you don’t have to. Neil Titley has done that for you.

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Review

The Happy Prince—(2018)

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Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde.
Photo by Wilhelm Moser, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
 ‘The Happy Prince’ Opens in America

You could be forgiven for thinking that a blog about Oscar Wilde might not be the most objective forum for reviewing a film about Oscar Wilde—perhaps being too close to its subject to see it as one would ordinarily.

However, the opposite turns out to be true about The Happy Prince (2018) because it is not an ordinary film; and it warrants a specialist view being itself the work of an Oscar Wilde specialist.

Rupert Everett has played Wilde’s fictional characters both on stage and in film; he has already appeared as Oscar Wilde himself in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss on both sides of the Atlantic; and, after spending an age poring over Wilde’s works in homage to his patron saint, Everett has spent the last ten years of his life taking on a tide of personal and industry challenges in order to craft this film.

It is an effort that lays bare a more compelling reason why the film should not be regarded as just another movie. And it is a reason Everett shares with the artist Basil Hallward (in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) who accepted that his portrait of Dorian was not just another painting. He confessed: “I have put too much of myself into it.”

Wilde explained this characteristically philosophical view of art when he said:

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

So it is with Everett, whose devotion during a decade of writing, directing, and now acting in a lifetime passion, might also be regarded as his art. Certainly, The Happy Prince is a highly personalized vision: a dark introspection with the protagonist in almost every scene.

So the inference is that we should not approach the film routinely from the outside in, but rather the other way around. Taken on those terms, there is much to admire, not only for the specialist but for the generalist viewer.

Let us look at it, as Everett did, through that lens.

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Article

Anatomy of a Cartoon

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Lady Windermere’s Fan

The Story of Oscar Wilde’s Infamous Curtain Call

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.

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