Oscar Wilde, celebrated playwright and literary
provocateur, was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854.
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College,
Oxford before settling in London. During his days at Dublin and
Oxford, he developed a set of attitudes and postures for which he
would eventually become famous. Chief among these were his flamboyant
style of dress, his contempt for conventional values, and his belief
in aestheticism—a movement that embraced the principle of art for
the sake of beauty and beauty alone. After a stunning performance
in college, Wilde settled in London in 1878,
where he moved in circles that included Lillie Langtry, the novelists
Henry James and George Moore, and the young William Butler Yeats.
Literary and artistic acclaim were slow in coming to Wilde.
In 1884, when he married
Constance Lloyd, Wilde’s writing career was still a work in progress.
He had gone on a lecture tour of North America and been lampooned
in the 1881 Gilbert
and Sullivan operetta Patience as the self-consciously
idiosyncratic philosopher-poet Reginald Bunthorne, but he was celebrated
chiefly as a well-known personality and a wit. He may have been
the first person ever to become famous for being famous.
During the late 1880s,
Wilde wrote reviews, edited a women’s magazine, and published a
volume of poetry and one of children’s stories. In 1891,
his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared
and was attacked as scandalous and immoral. In that same year, he
met Lord Alfred Douglas, who would eventually become his lover,
and Wilde finally hit his literary stride. Over the next few years,
he wrote four plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A
Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The
Importance of Being Earnest.
Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman
of No Importance enjoyed successful runs in the West End
in 1892 and 1893,
respectively. An Ideal Husband opened in January 1895,
but it was The Importance of Being Earnest, which
opened a month later, that is regarded by many as Oscar
Wilde’s masterpiece. Its first performance at the St. James’s Theater
on February 14, 1895 came
at the height of Wilde’s success as a popular dramatist. Wilde was
finally the darling of London society, a position he had striven
for years to attain.
In many ways, The Importance of Being Earnest was
an artistic breakthrough for Wilde, something between self-parody
and a deceptively flippant commentary on the dramatic genre in which Wilde
had already had so much success. Wilde’s genre of choice was the
Victorian melodrama, or “sentimental comedy,” derived from the French
variety of “well-made play” popularized by Scribe and Sardou. In
such plays, fallen women and abandoned children of uncertain parentage
figure prominently, letters cross and recross the stage, and dark
secrets from the past rise to threaten the happiness of seemingly
respectable, well-meaning characters. In Wilde’s hands, the form
of Victorian melodrama became something else entirely. Wilde introduced
a new character to the genre, the figure of the “dandy” (a man who
pays excessive attention to his appearance). This figure added a
moral texture the form had never before possessed. The character
of the dandy was heavily autobiographical and often a stand-in for
Wilde himself, a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who
speaks in epigrams and paradoxes, ridicules the cant and hypocrisy
of society’s moral arbiters, and self-deprecatingly presents himself
as trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. In fact, the dandy in these
plays always proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy
resolution of the plot.
The Importance of Being Earnest was an
early experiment in Victorian melodrama. Part satire, part comedy
of manners, and part intellectual farce, this play seems to have
nothing at stake because the world it presents is so blatantly and
ostentatiously artificial. Below the surface of the light, brittle
comedy, however, is a serious subtext that takes aim at self-righteous
moralism and hypocrisy, the very aspects of Victorian society that
would, in part, bring about Wilde’s downfall.
During 1895,
however, a series of catastrophes stemming from Wilde’s relationship
with Lord Alfred, also a poet, led to personal humiliation and social,
professional, and financial ruin. On February 28, 1895,
two weeks after The Importance of Being Earnest’s opening
night, Lord Alfred’s belligerent, homophobic father, the Marquess
of Queensberry, publicly accused Wilde of “posing as a somdomite.”
The nobleman meant “sodomite,” of course, an insulting and potentially
defamatory term for a homosexual. Queensberry had for some time
been harassing Wilde with insulting letters, notes, and confrontations
and had hoped to disrupt the opening night of The Importance
of Being Earnest with a public demonstration, which never
took place. Against the advice of his friends, Wilde sued for libel
and lost. Wilde probably should have fled the country, as the Criminal
Law Amendment Act of 1885 had made
homosexual acts punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment. However,
Wilde chose to stay and was arrested. Despite information about
Wilde’s private life and writings that emerged at the trial, the prosecution
initially proved unsuccessful. However, Wilde was tried a second
time, convicted, and sentenced to prison for two years.
Wilde may have remained in England for a number of reasons, including
self-destructiveness, denial, desperation, and a desire for martyrdom.
However, some historians have suggested that Wilde’s relentless
persecution by the government was a diversionary tactic. Lord Alfred’s
older brother was reportedly also having a homosexual affair with
Archibald Philip Primrose, Lord Rosebery, the man who would become
prime minister. Queensberry was apparently so outraged that he threatened
to disclose the relationship, and the government reacted by punishing
Wilde and his lover in an effort to assuage the marquess. In any
case, Wilde served his full sentence under conditions of utmost
hardship and cruelty. Following his release from prison, his health
and spirit broken, he sought exile in France, where he lived out
the last two years of his life in poverty and obscurity under an
assumed name. He died in Paris in 1900.
For sixty or seventy years after Wilde’s death, critics
and audiences regarded The Importance of Being Earnest as
a delightful but utterly frivolous and superficial comedy, a view
that partly reflects the mindset of a period in which homosexuality
remained a guarded topic. The decriminalization of homosexuality
in England in 1967 and
the emergence in American of an interest in gay culture, and particularly
in the covert homosexual literature of the past, has made it possible
to view the play in a different light. The play’s danger and subversion
are easier to see from a twenty-first-century perspective. In the
ambiguity over exactly what people refer to when they speak of “wicked”
or immoral behavior, we can detect a system of coded references
to homosexuality, just as we can infer a more general comment on
the hypocrisy of late Victorian society.
