Literature and drama: forms, analysis, and interpretation

¶ … records court transcripts from "The Trials of Oscar Wilde," when the opposing council at the trial asks the defendant, Oscar Wilde, if he kissed one of the boys whom Wilde was supposed to have engaged in homosexual practices, Wilde appears unfazed. When asked if he kissed the boy, Wilde, with customary wit, responded that he did not, because "he was a very ugly boy." This kind of exchange forces the reader to ask the question not so much why Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency, but why Wilde ever believed he could be found innocent of the love that "dare not speak its name." (Longman Anthology 2125)

Throughout both of his trials, Wilde adopts a kind of insouciant, provocative pose that seems, to the modern eyes, to be a 'typical' portrait of a flamboyant male homosexual. Because Oscar Wilde's artistic medium has become synonymous with such a posture it is difficult to re-read history with open eyes. However, the answer as to why Wilde thought he could 'get away with it,' would seem to be found, not so much in the actual, textual evidence of either the trials or Wilde's later works during and after his imprisonment. Rather it is the attitude by which sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, was viewed by Wilde's Victorian reading public. As Peter Barry notes in his selection on "Postmodernism," rather than assuming categories such as 'homosexual' are transcendent across time and culture, one must read how particular sexual behaviors were 'read' during the actual 'text' of that cultural period of time. (Barry, Chapter 4, 81) What homosexual behavior or a homosexual persona meant to a Victorian before Wilde's trials was not the same as it might be in a contemporary reader's eyes.

Because homosexuality was not 'obvious' to Victorians as it was to us, Wilde often engaged with a kind of cat and mouse game with his reading public as a closeted homosexual author. Famously, the word 'earnest' was slang in many circles for homosexuality and queerness. (Barry, Chapter 7, 139) Thus Wilde's most famous drama "The Importance of Being Earnest" can be read as a kind of oblique testimony to his desire to reveal his orientation to the public. But he presented 'earnestness' in a way that the public would consume it without really being aware of what it was digesting from a literal perspective. In other words, he presented it as a heterosexual comedy of manners.

Yet Wilde did not only see himself as a homosexual. He also perceived himself as a universal voice for his age, as is evidenced in this selection from his letter to his lover Boise from prison, in "De Profundis." was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realized this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realize it afterward. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged.

What is so interesting about this passage is that Wilde asserts his own centrality as an intellectual figure of his age. This is evidenced not only in how he stresses that he contributed to the literary climate of the era, but also in how Wilde admits that his public persona of the 'aesthete' became synonymous with the aesthetic movement. What later became simply 'homosexual,' that is verbal and visual flamboyance, was to Wilde something more personal and more complex. It was the way he communicated his own celebrity and sexuality, but was also part of his larger artistic philosophy. He continues in "De Profundis," several paragraphs later.

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring... I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art...I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric of the sonnet...I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

In the eyes of modern observers, the aesthetic and the homosexual are often elided into one. In Wilde's age, before the publicity of his trials, he was seen as a celebrity who made a vital contribution to the literature of the age as well as the popular culture of the age. Wilde saw himself as possessing high social position (a very crucial component to self-esteem in the class-conscious England of his time) as well as standing outside of society and critiquing it through the aesthetic movement he helped found. Obliquely in this passage he refers to the personal nature of his dramatic art, but he also stresses its universal relevance to the larger social climate. The artificiality Wilde himself practiced in life, concealing his homosexuality, became in Wilde's eyes, a metaphor for the other forms of artificiality of society's practices in their totality.

In some ways, Wilde can be seen as taking the posture, not of a "sodomite," as Boise's father called him (in misspelled fashion) in the infamous calling-card that precipitated Wilde's first libel trial, but of a social and literary critic. This was true of both the way Wilde viewed his art of concealment as well as he lived his life. In his chapter on "Liberal Humanism," the critic Peter Barry writes that across most contemporary literary theories these similarities in approaches of modern criticism hold fast. Modern critics assume that:

politics is pervasive, 2) language is constitutive, 3) truth is provisional, 4) meaning is contingent, and human nature is a myth. (Barry, Chapter 1, 11)