Introduction

Abstract

As countless critics have observed, and as the preceding quote suggests, the late nineteenth-century author Oscar Wilde regarded his own life as an artistic subject. Indeed, he considered that ‘[t]o become a work of art is the object of living’.¹ Such categorical statements were frequently made by Wilde and explain the writer’s determination to put his genius ‘into his life’ rather than into his work—a resolution he famously confided to André Gide.² Wilde’s fascination with the vagaries of image and identity is reflected in the preoccupation with masks, mirrors, and portraits in his literary works. Just as Wilde strove to foster psychological complexity and ambiguity in his writings, he also consciously endeavored to cultivate diversity in his own character with the intention of becoming a symbolic figure, capable of inspiring endless interpretation. With this goal in mind, Wilde astutely exploited the burgeoning media and consumer culture of his time to become a conspicuous public personality.³ Terry Eagleton recently summarized Wilde as ‘a man who saw himself as clay in his own hands’.⁴ Indeed, Wilde refused to fix or ‘fire’ his personality into any definite form and endeavored to maintain a fluid, malleable identity, consistently rejecting notions of an underlying ‘authentic self. Consequently, Wilde presents a mass of contradictions to those who would try to pin him down; he was at once an Irishman with Republican sympathies who courted the English aristocracy, a Protestant who was deeply fascinated by Catholicism, an effete dandy capable of besting the burliest athletic opponent (in conversational or physical combat), a socialist and an elitist, an optimist and a cynic, a husband, a father and a lover of men.

Art has not forgotten [Thomas Griffiths Wainewright]. He is the hero of Dickens’s Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer’s Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison’. To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.

Oscar Wilde, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’