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Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900) was an Irish author.
Life and Work
Wilde was born in Dublin in Ireland to
Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde. Sir William Wilde, Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, wrote books on archaeology and folklore.
Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde was a prominent poet, worked as a translator, and wrote for the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s under the pen-name of Speranza.
After Portora
Royal School (1864-1871), Wilde studied the
classics at Trinity College, Dublin, with
distinction (from 1871 to 1874) and Magdalen College, Oxford, (1874-1878). While at Magdalen College, Wilde won the Oxford Newdigate Prize in 1878 with his poem Ravenna.
While at Magdalen College, Wilde became particularly well known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He began wearing his hair long and openly scorning so-called "manly" sports, and
began decorating his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art.
He was deeply impressed by the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater who taught about the central importance of art in life. Oscar Wilde
soon became an advocate of Aestheticism and supported the movement's basic
principle Art for Art's Sake (L'art pour l'art). The doctrine was coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin, promoted by Theophile Gautier and brought into prominence by James McNeill Whistler.
In 1879 Wilde started to teach Aesthetic values in London. Later he lectured in the United States and in
Canada where he was torn apart by the critics. At Oxford University, his behaviour cost him a ducking in the river Cherwell in addition to having his rooms trashed, but the cult spread among certain segments of
society to such an extent that languishing attitudes, too-too costumes and aestheticism generally became a
recognised pose.
The Wasp, a San Francisco
newspaper, published a cartoon ridiculing Wilde and Aestheticism, and Aestheticism was caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan's mocking operetta Patience (1881).
The aesthetic movement represented by the school of William
Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a permanent
influence on English decorative art. As the leading aesthete, Oscar Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities
of his day. Apart from the ridicule he encountered, his affected paradoxes and his witty sayings were quoted on all sides.
In 1882 he went on a lecture tour in the United States, afterwards returning to the
United Kingdom where he worked as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette in the years 1887-1889.
Afterwards he became the editor of Woman's World. During this time he published his most famous fairy tale The
Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Three years later, his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. Critics
often claimed that there existed parallels between Wilde's and the protagonist's life.
In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and he fathered two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886), who both later took the surname Holland. He had already published in 1881
a selection of his poems, which, however, attracted admiration in only a limited circle. The
Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared in 1888, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacob Hood. This volume of fairy tales was followed up later by a second collection, The House of Pomegranates (1892), acknowledged by the author to be "intended neither for the British child nor the British
public."
In much of his writings, and in his general attitude, there was to most people of his day an undertone of rather nasty
suggestiveness which created prejudice against him. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) impressed the public more for this reason than for any supposed literary brilliance. Wilde contributed some
feature articles to the art reviews, and in 1891 re-published three of them as a book called Intentions.
Wilde's favourite genres were the society comedy and the play. From 1892 on, almost
every year a new work of Oscar Wilde was published. His first real success with the larger public was as a dramatist with
Lady Windermere's Fan at the St James's Theatre in
1892, followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895), which became Wilde's masterpiece in which he satirised the upper-class.
The dramatic and literary ability shown in these plays, all of which were published later in book form, was as undisputed as
their action and ideas were characteristically paradoxical. In 1893 the publisher refused
to allow Wilde's Salomé to be produced, but it was produced in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1894. This play formed the basis for one of Richard
Strauss' early operas (Salome, 1905).
Maggi Hambling's statue, "A conversation with Oscar Wilde", installed in Adelaide Street, near Trafalgar Square, London, in
1998.
Wilde has variously been considered bisexual or homosexual, depending on how the terms are defined. His inclination towards relations with other men was
relatively well known, the first such relationship having probably been with Robert Ross, who proved his most faithful friend. Wilde became intimate with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he always called "Bosie". Bosie's father,
John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensbury, publicly
insulted Wilde with a misspelt note left at Wilde's club. The note read "Mr. Wilde posing as a Somdomite."
Wilde charged Queensbury with libel. The confrontation escalated and some believe Lord
Alfred egged Wilde on, to fight his father. After losing the libel suit Wilde was formally accused of "gross indecency", this being little more than a euphemism for any homosexual act, public or private, and
was arrested on April 6, 1895.
He was convicted on May 25, 1895 of "sodomy and gross indecency" and sentenced to serve two years hard labor. He was emprisoned at
Reading, a town some 30 miles west of London. At first he wasn't even allowed paper and pen to write. During his time in prison, Wilde wrote a 30,000 word
letter to Douglas, which he handed to Ross, who sent a copy to Douglas. It was published in 1905 (long after Wilde's death) with the title De Profundis. In 1949
his son Vyvyan Holland
published it again, including formerly left out parts.
The manuscripts of A Florentine Tragedy and an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets were stolen from his house in 1895. In 1904 a five-act tragedy, The Duchess of
Padua, written by Wilde about 1883 for Mary Anderson, but not acted by her, was
published in a German translation (Die Herzogin von Padua, translated by Max Meyerfeld) in Berlin.
Prison was unkind to Wilde's health and when he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last years penniless on the Continent, under the assumed name of
Sebastian Melmoth in self-inflicted exile from society and artistic circles. After his release, he wrote the
famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol ("For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one
must die").
On his deathbed he converted to the Roman Catholic Church, which he
had long admired.
Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900 in a Paris hotel. Different opinions are given on the
cause of the meningitis; Richard Ellman claimed it was syphilitic; Merlin Holland thought this to be a misconception, noting that
Wilde's meningitis followed a surgical intervention, perhaps a mastoidectomy; Wilde's physicians, Dr. Paul Cleiss and A'Court
Tucker reported that the condition stemmed from an old suppuration of the right ear (une ancienne suppuration de l'oreille
droite d'ailleurs en traitement depuis plusieurs années) and do not allude to syphilis.
Wilde was buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside
Paris but was later moved to Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Biographies and biographical films
After Wilde's death, Wilde's friend Frank Harris wrote a biography of
Wilde.
Two films of his life are The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) starring Peter Finch and Wilde (1997) starring Stephen Fry.
In 1987 Richard Ellmann published "Oscar Wilde", a very minute biography.
2003 saw the publication of the first complete account of Wilde's sexual and emotional
life in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (published by Century/Random House).
A multiple-issue 'chapter' of Dave Sim's comic book Cerebus the Aardvark,
entitled Melmoth, (later collected as a single volume under that title) retells the story of Wilde's final months with
the names and places slightly altered to fit the world of the Cerebus storyline, while Cerebus himself spends most of
the chapter as a passive observer.
Bibliography
Wilde wrote many famous works, among them:
External links
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