Biographies: oscar wilde — the man, the life, the legend

Abstract

By any account, Oscar Wilde experienced — one might say endured — a legendary life. Countless biographies, memoirs, and critical books have for more than a century sustained a good deal of mythmaking about his literary success and his scandalous sexuality. The legend continues to capture the imaginations of thousands of general readers, theatergoers, movie-buffs, university students, and college professors. Nowadays it would not be unfair to imagine that any reasonably educated person with an interest in the arts had heard some of the more absorbing stories about how and why Wilde commanded the attention of an adoring audience only to transmogrify into its most contemptible pariah. The considerable reputation that Wilde earned through his four witty Society Comedies, abruptly followed by the ignominy he suffered through three badly orchestrated trials in 1895, has left a lasting impression on cultural memory. But these two closely connected events have been recorded in an unstable manner that continues to distort our understanding of a writer whose career proved uneven in its achievements, whose behavior suffered from marked inconsistencies, and whose legacy for many years remained subject to tireless wrangling among a colorful cast of disreputable enthusiasts and censorious onlookers.

I was so typical a child of my age that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (732–733)²

My thanks go to the staffs of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, where much of the research for this chapter was carried out.