Oscar Wilde

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
1882 photograph of Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on 15th October, 1854. He became a renowned wit in London, and wrote many plays, poems and stories.

Contents

[edit] Personality

A hedonistic dandy, Wilde liked to posture as a member of the idle rich but in fact was very hard-working as shown by the fact that he had his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray published and with two plays (Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest) performing in the West End within the same year. Wilde was a chain-smoker and gave a speech after the premier of Lady Windermere's Fan with a cigarette in his hand which shocked the audience only slightly less than his egoistic speech:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you upon the great success of your performance which persuades me that you think almost as highly of this play as I do myself."

[edit] Personal life

Wilde was a bisexual. He is known to have enjoyed sex with men despite being married with two sons and having been in love with a girl at Trinity College. After becoming infatuated with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, he began frequenting rent boys. Wilde's relationship with Bosie drew the ire of Bosie's father, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensbury, a prize-fighter (wrote the rule book) and virulent homophobe with a reputation for violence throughout London. After the death of his eldest son, Douglas, despite being a self-proclaimed atheist, viewed his son's death as a judgement upon his younger son, Bosie, and wrote an abusive letter to Wilde, calling him a "Posing Somdomite" (sodomite: he wasn't very well read). Wilde prosecuted Douglas for libel, leading to a court case in which Wilde's book, The Picture of Dorian Gray was brought forward in evidence due to homosexual subtext between the characters of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wotton and Alan Campbell.

In 1895, Wilde was convicted of 'gross indecency' with other men (a euphemism for homosexuality) and imprisoned for two years, most of which he spent in Reading Jail. It was after this imprisonment that he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the apologetic De Profundis, Latin for "From the Depths." After Wilde's incarceration, Bosie Douglas distanced himself from Wilde and claimed to have been "corrupted" by him, even being so self-righteous as to write a denunciation of Wilde, piously entitled In Excelsis ("In the Highest"). Bosie was also suspected of being an antisemite. Nevertheless, soon after Wilde's release, the two of them reconciled and lived together in Paris with Wilde adopting the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmoth" (a reference to a gothic novel of which Wilde was fond) to protect himself from homophobic attacks. Wilde lived in poverty in Paris and claimed "Like dear Saint Francis of Assissi, I am wedded to poverty however in my case, the marriage is not a success."

Wilde was diagnosed with cerebral meningitis on 25th of November 1900. Before his death, he drank a glass of champagne with his friend and former lover Robbie Ross, claiming "I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means." After waking from a nightmare, he told Robbie "I dreamt I was dining with the dead" prompting Robbie to respond "Oscar, I'm sure you were the life and soul of the party." Wilde died on the 30th of November, 1900. His last words are reputed to have been "This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death - eventually one of us has to go." The wallpaper won. He was originally buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris, but in 1909 he was moved to Père Lachaise Cemetery. The epitaph on the tomb is taken from Wilde’s poem, the Ballad of Reading Gaol: ‘And alien tears will fill for him, Pity’s long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn.’

[edit] Religion and politics

Wilde was raised as a Roman Catholic by his mother, Lady Agnes Wilde and considered himself a Roman Catholic throughout his life, although he was only baptised on his deathbed. Despite being a self-proclaimed individualist, Wilde described himself as an anarcho-socialist[citation needed] and Irish nationalist, saying "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine."[citation needed]

[edit] A few uncited quotations

Wilde probably said or wrote some of the following things at some point.

  • Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
  • I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
  • If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
  • Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
  • Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
  • I am the only person I should like to know thoroughly.
  • I find that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities can bring about all the effects of intoxication.
  • A cigarette is the perfect kind of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves you unsatisfied. What more could you want?
  • Be yourself; everyone else is taken.
  • One should atone for sometimes being a little overdressed by always being absolutely overeducated.
  • To love oneself is the start of a life-long romance.
  • The only excuse for creating a useful thing is that one does not admire it. The only excuse for creating a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
  • The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support