Oscar Wilde: Rebellion, Morality, and Victorian Society

Introduction

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an author, playwright, and widely regarded as one of the most brilliant literary figures of his age. Born halfway through the Victorian era, during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), Wilde came of age in an England undergoing radical change—change that profoundly affected how individuals lived and thought. The Victorian period is well known for its narrow social conventions, double standards, repression of sexual desire, hypocrisy, and rigid class consciousness.

Wilde's father was a distinguished surgeon, and his mother was a writer. At the age of twenty, Wilde traveled from his home in Dublin, Ireland to university in England and was considered a brilliant achiever. He was homosexual, and Lord Alfred Douglas became his lover. His writing contained undertones of homosexuality and innuendo, which inflamed Victorian society. In his work, Wilde depicted evil as arising from within the individual rather than as an external force.

This paper examines Wilde as a figure of inherent contradiction and paradox—simultaneously a conformist and a rebel. His works pointed out the follies of contemporary society and expressed values contrary to accepted social norms, yet those same works were published, performed, and appreciated within that society. The following sections discuss Wilde's major works, his aesthetic philosophy, the legal consequences of his homosexuality, and his legacy in the emergence of pro-homosexual discourse.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was not well received upon publication, creating controversy with its implication of homosexuality—a relationship that in Victorian society was punishable by imprisonment. Dorian Gray is a young man of striking looks who devotes himself to self-gratifying sensuality. While having his portrait painted by Basil Hallward, Gray declares that he desires eternal youth and vows he would give everything—even his very soul—to remain eternally young.

Dorian gets his wish, but grows increasingly evil over time. The more corrupt he becomes, the older and more grotesque his portrait appears, while Dorian himself remains young. Years pass, and Dorian is confronted by his own guilty conscience. In desperation, he stabs the hideous portrait—and is found dead, knife in hand, while the portrait is miraculously restored to its original image of the young and handsome Dorian.

Nils Clausson (2003), writing in "Culture and Corruption: Paterian Self-Development vs. Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray," notes that the novel has "always provoked contradictory interpretations, but underlying the disagreements about the work's meaning there has persisted a more fundamental debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. This debate is discernible in the early reviews, though somewhat obscured by the hysteria over the novel's alleged immorality." Modern critics remain just as divided about the meaning of the novel as its original reviewers, who were preoccupied with its moral implications. What has not changed is the role that perceived genre plays in interpretation: while some critics read the novel as belonging to a single genre whose conventions unlock the text's meaning, others view it as a heteroglossia combining two or more genres (Clausson, 2003).

Wilde's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism examines individualism—what he calls "self-development"—with Wilde lamenting that "society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living" (Wilde, Soul of Man). Clausson additionally cites the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing, who argued that most homosexuals "had a mental disease caused by hereditary degeneration," noting that "inverted sexuality appears spontaneously, without external cause, with the development of sexual life as an individual manifestation of an abnormal form of sexual life, and has the force of a congenital phenomenon" (Krafft-Ebing, in Clausson, 2003).

Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest

Wilde wrote Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, a play that was much better received by the Victorian public. His play The Importance of Being Earnest, staged in 1895, has been called a masterpiece. It constitutes an attack upon Victorian society and specifically targets moral and social hypocrisy, the class system, the use of marriage as a social tool, and the triviality of aristocratic life (McCauley, 2003). Because the ridiculousness of the characters was so extreme, Victorian audiences did not realize that Wilde was satirizing them. His use of epigrams also contributed to the play's success, including the following:

Divorces are made in heaven; The truth is rarely pure and never simple; In marriage, three is company, two is none. (McCauley, 2003)

Gary Pearce (2003), in "Oscar Wilde and the Politics of Irish Aestheticism," argues that readings of Oscar Wilde have long been burdened by cliché—the very thing Wilde struggled against throughout his artistic and intellectual life. Wilde himself provided some of the "strongest and earliest clichés or stereotypes...in the form of the English aristocratic dandies that populate his society comedies" (Pearce, 2003). Yet there is a subversive edge in Wilde's drama that has been increasingly recognized as a "modernist challenge that underlies the veneer of Victorian culture" (Pearce, 2003). Wilde is now recognized more than ever as one of those who undertook "new experiments in language, identity and form" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Pearce argues that he is best used to understand "how conscious modernism continues to engage with problems associated with the development of self and society" (Pearce, 2003).

Modris Eksteins (1994), in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, observes that during this period "gratification of the senses was suspect, indeed sinful," yet in the art of Gustav Klimt, the early operas of Richard Strauss, the plays of Frank Wedekind, and "in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde...a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change" (Eksteins, 1994). Eksteins further notes that the sexual rebel, "particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment" (Eksteins, 1994). Britain had, in the previous century, "damned her great poets and writers: Byron had been chased out of the country, Shelley forbidden to raise his children, and Oscar Wilde sent to prison" (Eksteins, 1994).

Pearce (2003) notes that Wilde "was a major symbol of the sexual anarchy that threatened the purposive and reproductive modes of the bourgeois family." In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon mocks the utilitarian nature of modern marriage: "The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public" (Showalter, 1992, in Pearce, 2003).

The dominant narratives of this period were realist in nature; stories centered around marriage and inheritance were giving way to fantastic fin-de-siècle tales about split personalities (Showalter, 1992, in Pearce, 2003). Many of Wilde's plays constituted a "critique of the naturalization of bourgeois relations," particularly evident in "the uncertain or hidden heritage, parentage or filiations that form the crux of many of his plays" (Pearce, 2003). In rejecting the bourgeoisie, Wilde aligned himself with "the modernist attempt to force new affiliations within the aesthetic realm" (Pearce, 2003).

Wilde did not look to art as an imitation of life but as an expression of beauty, and he "sought to utilize inversions, ironies and shifts in points of view to produce new meanings and possibilities, similarly to twentieth-century modernism" (Pearce, 2003). He extended Baudelaire's emphasis on the modern heroism of the artist to include the critic: "it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings and makes it marvelous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age" (Pearce, 2003).

Simon Conen (2000), in "Social Criticism in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan," states that Wilde held rebellion to be a necessity—a conviction that led him to support the women's liberation movement and commit himself to women's struggle for equal rights. The Victorian era was characterized by "purity, self-discipline, family, sexual morality, work and capitalism," as well as a "predominant inequality in the treatment of the genders" (Conen, 2000).

Women in the Victorian era, particularly those of the upper and middle classes, did not earn income. They were greatly restricted, barred from many professions, and expected to marry and rear children. Female occupations in the Victorian era included: domestic servant, dressmaker and milliner, factory worker, governess or teacher, member of a religious order, nurse, writer, or prostitute (Conen, 2000).

Marriage during the Victorian era was not undertaken for love but for the conveniences and securities it offered families. Parents selected partners for their children and intervened in undesirable matches. As Conen explains, parents "thought mainly in commercial terms; the social status or the institution of marriage itself seemed far more important than the husband-to-be as a person." Marriage functioned as an economic transaction: "the woman acquires security, and the wealth to maintain a conspicuous social position; in return, the man's sexual infidelities are condoned, or at least overlooked" (Conen, 2000).

The Victorian age's double standard was fully institutionalized. The family was "patriarchal, based on a double standard of sexual morality according to which fidelity was demanded of the wife while the husband pursued his extramarital career of sexual escapades among prostitutes or expensive mistresses, depending on his social class. Even the law supported these different moral principles" (Conen, 2000). The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 permitted a man to dissolve his marriage on grounds of his wife's adultery alone, while a wife could only seek divorce by additionally proving cruelty. In either case, "the children became the man's property and the mother could be prevented from seeing her children" (Conen, 2000). All property and money belonging to a woman was legally her husband's.