Abstract
A mainstay of Wilde criticism is an attempt to reconcile Wilde’s personality, which led to his public reputation as a decadent dandy and poseur ruined in a spectacular sex scandal, with his achievements in literature. In 1985, in the introduction to a volume of critical essays covering Wilde’s major works, Harold Bloom returns, as most Wilde critics explicitly do, to the ultimate question: why was the artist who was so immersed in life and letters, the author of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and The Importance of Being Earnest, “so doom-eager?”1 Why did Wilde, at the height of his reputation as a successful playwright, allow himself to be broken on the public wheel of scandal which he could have avoided? The puzzle is exaggerated by our general tendency to exalt artistic and intellectual achievements, elevating them above other aspects of human behavior, especially above those associated with sexual activity which society labels scandalous.
The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like those of a turbot …
Walter Savage Landor
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Notes
Harold Bloom, Oscar Wilde (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p.6.
André Gide, Oscar Wilde (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 1.
Quoted in Philip Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978): preface, p.4.
See John Stokes, Oscar Wilde (London: Longman Group, 1978);
Epifanio San Juan, The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967);
Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (New York: New Directions, 1986; orig. pub. 1947);
Donald Ericksen, Oscar Wilde (Boston: Twayne, 1977).
Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), p.31.
Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Annotated Oscar Wilde (Clarkson N. Potter, 1982), p.18.
Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850–1900 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p.27.
Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), p.46.
Boris Brasol, Oscar Wilde (New York: Charles Seribher’s Sons, 1938), p.70.
William Butler Yeats, quoted in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p.399.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Unmanly Manhood,” Woman’s Journal [Boston], 4 February 1882, xiii, 33.
Ambrose Bierce’s Satanic Reader, ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins (New York, 1968), pp.5–6.
Review by Oscar Browning, in Academy, 30 July 1881, xx, 85.
Robert H. Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London, 1906), p. 134.
Quoted in Ernst Bendz, The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose Writings of Oscar Wilde (Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press, 1914), p.34.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Methuen Library Edition, 1910), p.138–39.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p.95.
J. Peter Euben, “Preface,” Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p.x.
Edward Tripp, The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1970), pp.68–69.
Rictor Norton, The Homosexual Literary Tradition (New York: Revisionist Press, 1974), p.364.
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp.95–96.
See Peter Webb, “Victorian Erotica,” in The Sexual Dimension in Literature (London: Vision, Barnes and Noble, 1982), p.55.
See Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, “Dangerous Wounds: Vampirism as Social Metaphor in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin,” The European Studies Journal, II, 2 (1985),
Bram Dykstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Philip Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), pp.46–47.
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© 1991 Patricia Flanagan Behrendt
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Behrendt, P.F. (1991). Sexual Drama in the Early Poetry. In: Oscar Wilde Eros and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21657-4_2
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