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Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
Whether one is asked to compile a list of the most famous gays or the greatest writers of English literature, Oscar Wilde is certain to appear on at least one of those lists, if not both. His appearance on the latter would be for such classics as The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A House of Pomegranates. His appearance on the former would be not so much for his celebrated love for Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas as for his martyrdom by the British courts for that love.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Willson Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, was a poet who first gained notoriety for her writings against the British rule of Ireland, penned under the pseudonym "Speranza." Oscar's father, William Wilde, was a respected Dublin surgeon who founded a charity hospital for the poor and was knighted for his work on behalf of the Irish Census when Oscar was ten. In addition to a half-brother and two half-sisters, the illegitimate offspring of his father, Oscar had an older brother, William, and a younger sister, Isola, who tragically died from fever in 1867 at the age of ten. Oscar kept a lock of Isola's hair with him for the rest of his life.
As a boy, Oscar attended the Protora Royal School, where he proved a capable student, taking top prize in Classics his first two years. Despite his academic achievements, he was not very popular with his classmates, not only because of his ungainly and unkempt appearance but also because the wit that would one day make him famous was already manifesting itself through the application of cutting nicknames. (Oscar's classmates retaliated by dubbing him "Gray Crow.") A Royal School Scholarship to Trinity College was awarded to Oscar in 1871. As a student at Trinity, he won a Berkeley Gold Medal in Greek. He was also for a time engaged to a young Dublin woman named Florence Balcombe, but she broke off the engagement, eventually marrying a secretary by the name of Bram Stoker, later the author of Dracula.
In 1874, Oscar won a scholarship to Magdalen College at Oxford. While there, he became a follower of his professor Walter Pater, adopting Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance as his "golden book" and fully embracing the philosophy of the Aesthetic Movement and "the Decadence." Determined that he would become famous and dedicate his life to making "art a philosophy and philosophy an art," Oscar Wilde set off for London immediately upon leaving Oxford.
An early master of publicity and celebrity, Oscar appeared on the London scene in full aesthete persona, wearing flamboyantly styled suits, carrying a lily wherever he went, and voicing his critiques and opinions on art and literature, peppered with the soon to be famous Wilde wit. Having written only a few poems at this point, Oscar's initial fame largely came from the attention his non-conformity drew. Essentially, he was "well-known for being well-known."
In 1880 Oscar moved in with Frank Miles, a portrait artist he had befriended soon after his arrival in London. Through Miles' connections, Oscar ingratiated himself into the artistic, theatrical, and literary circles of the time, coining the phrase "the beautiful people" to describe their members. While some biographies, including the recent movie Wilde, with Stephen Frye, seem to hint that Wilde's first gay experiences did not occur until after his marriage and the birth of his sons, there is considerable reason to believe that Miles was Oscar's first gay lover, not the least of which being that Miles was known even in his time to be gay. Their year-long relationship was stormy, due both to Miles' volatile and often violent temper and to his habit of exposing himself to young girls. Wilde eventually broke off the relationship and moved out, swearing that he would never speak to Miles again. Frank Miles himself later went insane and was committed to an asylum, where he died.
By the time his relationship with Miles had ended, Oscar was famous enough to be admitted to the finest houses and most exclusive social circles without his former friend's assistance. He was a popular party guest, and his foppish appearance and manner had made him worthy of caricature in the public media. When Gilbert and Sullivan presented their play Patience, a spoof of the aesthetes, Oscar gladly accepted their request to serve as publicity front man, particularly as he received one third of the box office receipts in the deal. Now determined to make his fame international, Oscar in late December of 1881 set sail for America.
Arriving in New York early in 1882, and making the now famous statement to the custom agents that all he had to declare was his genius, Oscar Wilde began a tour of the US and Canada, delivering lectures on aesthetics. The original four-month, fifty lecture tour eventually encompassed over eight months and 140 lecture stops. His stops included New York, Ottawa, Montreal, the farmlands of Kansas, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. Stopping in Leadville, Colorado, he won over the silver miners there not only through his lectures but through his ability to drink all challengers under the table. During his tour of North America he also met with Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Longfellow, and saw his play Vera produced on the New York stage. Concluding his tour, Oscar lived for a time in Paris and conducted a new lecture tour of Britain and Ireland before settling again in London in 1883. Oscar had by then abandoned much of his aesthete persona and become more conventional in his appearance, though he would later describe this compromise of his individuality as his one great regret. He also began courting Constance Lloyd, the well-read, multi-lingual, and strong-minded daughter of an Irish barrister. They were married in May of 1884, and over the next two years had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.
In 1886, shortly after Vyvyan's birth, the Wildes welcomed a 17-year-old student by the name of Robbie Ross into their home, allowing him to live there for a brief period. In time he seduced Oscar. While Frank Miles may have been Oscar's first relationship with another man, his relationship with Ross seems have been the first to be consummated sexually. The following year Wilde took a position with The Woman's World, a magazine for which he wrote literary essays and critical articles. He also became increasingly unfaithful to both Constance and Robbie, pursuing friendships and trysts with other young men, including streetwalkers. By 1890 Oscar had ceased his sexual relationship with Robbie in favor of one with a 23-year-old clerk named John Gray. Though initially hurt and jealous, Robbie remained a loyal friend of Oscar's for the rest of his life, just as Oscar continued to love Constance.
Oscar's sexual awakening coincided with an explosion of literary output. The same year that he began working at Woman's World, he wrote "The Canterville Ghost," a piece of supernatural humor which in the next century would know many cinematic incarnations. The year 1888 saw the appearance of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children's stories which included "The Selfish Giant." In 1891 Oscar wrote his famous essay, "The Decay of Living," and also "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," a story which later appeared along with "The Canterville Ghost" and others in a short story collection, aptly titled Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories. A second collection of children's stories, A House of Pomegranates, appeared in 1892. A plethora of plays also appeared, including Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1894). But the one work which most displayed this connection between Wilde's sexual realizations and his literary flowering was the highly homoerotic The Picture of Dorian Gray, which first appeared in 1891.
Dorian Gray was the result of a dinner attended by Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, and American publisher J.M Stoddard, at which Stoddard requested works from the authors to be printed in serial format in his Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. (Doyle's contribution was The Sign of Four.) The Picture of Dorian Gray was later produced as a play before being published as a novel. An uproar was raised about the perceived immorality of the work, in which the title character sells his soul to remain young and beautiful forever, but with the loss of his fear of death also loses his conscience, becoming an unabashed hedonist and eventually a murderer. The fact that the homosexuality of Dorian and his many male admirers was not very well hidden in either the play or the novel probably did not help its reception by the critics and audiences of Victorian London, either. In time, the scandal attributed to Dorian Gray would help it to become a classic. Scholars have generally agreed that Dorian was based on many of Oscar's previous loves, especially Frank Miles and John Gray. Popular notion incorrectly names as an inspiration the young man who, two years after Dorian Gray, became both Oscar's great love and the source of his downfall, - Lord Alfred Douglas, affectionately known as "Bosie" by his close friends and especially by Oscar.
A 21-year-old student at Oxford when he first met Oscar, Alfred Douglas was the son of John Sholto Douglas, Eighth Marquess of Queensbury, a title inherited after the Seventh Marquess "accidentally" shot himself while rabbit hunting and John's elder brother died while climbing the Matterhorn. ( He had the bad luck of being tied to his two fellow climbers when they fell. ) First gaining fame for formulating the Queensbury Rules of Boxing in 1867, the Marquess was a walking caricature of a homophobe, - illiterate, stupid, hot-tempered, bullying, violent, verbally and physically abusive to his wife and children, paranoid about any real or perceived questioning of his manhood, and always ready to pick a fight. Today the Marquess would probably be diagnosed as bipolar if not psychotic, and his madness was certainly well-known in his own time. Indeed, accounts speak of madness existing among members of the family for centuries. While not evidencing the violent tendencies of his father or the psychosis of his ancestors, Bosie was hardly faultless himself. Oscar may have seen no wrong in him, thus proving that love is indeed blind, but contemporary and later accounts describe the young man as being a snob, an anti-Semite, a liar, two-faced, and a fair weather friend. He was also no innocent when he first met Oscar, having already engaged in numerous sexual trysts and showing a partiality for working class lads and streetwalkers.
Having become aware of his son's relationship with Wilde, the Marquess began stalking and harassing the writer. He also began employing the services of a bodyguard. Like all bullies, the Marquess lived in secret fear of being knocked on his back by someone bigger, and at well over six feet, Oscar might just have been the person to do it. The final straw for Oscar came when the Marquess left a card for him at his hotel, upon which was written "For Oscar Wilde, the Somdomite," thus engaging in the time-honored custom of homophobes showing both their hate and illiteracy by leaving childishly scrawled and misspelled epithets for their targets to find and laugh at. Despite the pleas of both Bosie and Robert Ross to ignore the incident, Oscar determined to teach the Marquess a lesson by suing for him for liable, using the calling card as evidence. His decision could not have come at a worst time. The Importance of Being Earnest, later to become his best-known play, had only just opened, and a scandal was already raging over the provocative Salome, which Oscar had written for his dear friend Sarah Bernhardt.
A warrant was sworn out against the Marquess on 1 March, and the trial began on 3 April. Oscar's confidence, manifested in sarcastic and witty rebuttals to the prosecution's questions and statements, soon vanished when he was presented with the names of known male streetwalkers he had associated with, as well as letters written by him to Bosie. The Marquess was found not guilty of libel. Worse, Oscar found himself charged with "indecent acts" and a new trial was set. Oscar thus found himself in an extreme case of the great distinguishing characteristic of litigation in British courts - whether defendant or plaintiff, the loser pays. Arrested and jailed on 5 April, Oscar found himself again before the courts a few days later. New evidence, including the testimony of hotel clerks who spoke of Wilde sharing his rooms with Bosie and other young men, and even of fecal matter and semen found on his sheets, was introduced. After a hung jury resulted, Oscar was released on bail pending a new trial in May. Again ignoring the advice of his friends, he refused to leave the country and instead insisted on staying to face the charges against him. During his next trial, Wilde was faced with a letter written to him by Bosie, speaking of "the Love that dare not speak Its name." Asked to name this love, Oscar invoked the tradition of paiderastia practiced by the Greeks, carefully omitting the sexual side of the tradition to make his own relationships appear more noble to the court. Despite his eloquence and passion, Wilde was found guilty of indecency and sentenced to two years at hard labor. First incarcerated at Wandsworth Prison, he was later transferred to Reading Goal. Constance, Robert Ross, and others of Oscar's associates left the country, some never to return. At no time during his trial or imprisonment did Bosie say a word in his lover's defense.
Upon his release from Reading in 1897, Oscar left England to wander Europe, subsisting on an allowance sent to him by Constance until her death the following year. Oscar was refused custody of his sons following Constance's death, and they were raised by her relatives. For a time Oscar was reunited with Bosie and they lived together for a time in Naples before a final falling out. Though the two men never spoke again, Bosie convinced his mother to send an allowance to Oscar, who eventually reunited with Robert Ross and settled in Paris, living under the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmouth," the name of a character (and martyr) in the novel Melmouth the Wanderer, written by an ancestor. He wrote numerous articles for Parisian newspapers and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poetic account of his imprisonment as well as a plea for prison reform. Oscar also entrusted to Ross the manuscript for De Profundis, a 30,000 word letter to Bosie which Wilde had written during his incarceration which blasted Bosie and blamed him for Oscar's ruin. Controversy still persists as to how much blame Bosie deserves in the matter. In all honesty, Oscar showed extremely unwise impropriety in their relationship, making a point of being seen in public with Bosie, dining with him in London's finest restaurants, and sharing rooms and perhaps even sex partners with Bosie in some of London's finest hotels. His trial and imprisonment merely confirmed what many already suspected.
The years spent in Reading Gaol had had a detrimental effect on both Wilde's physical and psychological health. Overweight to the point of appearing bloated, he had developed a nervous tremor in his hands and lacked much of his old confidence. Red blotches, which he attributed to "mussel poisoning," first appeared in 1899. Bouts of depression were also common. The habit of drinking absinthe, acquired soon after his arrival in Paris, contributed further to the deterioration of his health. Since his days in Reading Gaol, Oscar had been plagued by a recurrent ear infection, - ironic, since his father had specialized in maladies of the eyes and ears. Surgery was performed in September of 1900, and for a time his spirits appeared improved, though his health remained poor. By October his weight had dropped dramatically. By November the ear infection had returned, and soon developed into cerebral meningitis, which in turn led to alternating periods of coherency and delirium. On 30 November, at 1:50 in the afternoon, Oscar Wilde died.
Wilde was interred in Bagneaux Cemetery before being transferred to Pere Lachaise in 1909. A monument by American sculptor Jacob Epstein was placed on the grave in 1914. By then, the old scandal had been forgotten, and Oscar's plays and novels were once more popular and acceptable. Much of the Victorian repression and hypocrisy that had condemned Oscar Wilde was dead. Unfortunately, so was their most famous victim.
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