Wilde as Editor of Woman's World: Fighting a Dull Slumber in Stale Certitudes

Wilde as Editor of Woman's World: Fighting a Dull Slumber in Stale Certitudes Catharine Ksinan University College Dublin WHILE CRITICS AND BIOGRAPHERS continue to comb through the minutiae of Oscar Wilde's life, few attach significance to his job at Cassell and Co. editing Woman's World between 1887-1889. Prevailing opinion discounts this period as a rather colourless, uneventful stage in his career, remarkable only for the acute boredom Wilde supposedly experienced . A fellow employee Horace Wyndham recalled many years later that Wilde "declared answering letters to be 'an absurd practice' [whereas] his attendance at the office dropped to one day a week___nl In another memoir Wyndham supplies a vignette of Wilde's work habits: "'What are you working at just now?' enquired a visitor one day, when he saw him lolling in an arm chair and reading a French novel. 'At intervals ,' was the reply."2 It is hard to believe that Oscar Wilde was engaged imaginatively or intellectually at Cassell's, a view cultivated by the now well-circulated details of his only salaried job. Wilde's boredom, solicitation of Queen Victoria for poetry, grief over Cassell's no-smoking policy and publication of Constance and Speranza in Woman's World are fascinating details in a life and career arrested by tragedy. But the very fact that fate's wheel so bitterly reversed Wilde's experiment in Utopian individualism makes all that he executed in life and work a hieroglyph to be studied closely. Two years spent working in the mass media seems a sizable interlude in what was a relatively short life. As it turns out, the trivia often rapidly glossed by biographers and entirely detoured by critics adorns an edifice of work, writing, and philosophy which Wilde styled at Cassell 's—if languidly so. 408 KSINAN : WILDE At the nucleus of this work are Wilde's largely unacknowledged efforts to create a serious and intelligent woman's journal at a time when few if any existed. If biographers have expended more than cursory energy on Woman's World, they have done so with baffling (and worrisome) disregard for the magazine's focus so openly hinted at in the title. Women were on Wilde's mind at Cassell's, and women's minds, so poorly served or expressed in contemporary journalism, were the source of his interest and labours for the magazine—indeed, a principle inducement to taking the job in the first place. Wilde intended to use Woman's World to display and disseminate woman's writing, to exhibit the breadth of their interests, to underwrite their talents as thinkers, artists, scholars. The editorship gave Wilde the opportunity to challenge society with a renovated model of women's mental life and labours—which society almost unanimously agreed were not serious and peripheral at best. To most Victorians women were picturesque, for better or for worse, and hardly the source of intellectual invention, abstraction, or judgment. Such assumptions were fertile ground for Wilde to do what he did best; challenge, dispute, provoke—and thus fracture the old dinosaur bones of Victorian social, moral and gender dictates, which for women were harmful and degrading. Wilde's work at Cassell's was carried out in marked juxtaposition to the received thinking about women, and this would ultimately formulate failure for his magazine. But his trials in the sphere of women's issues were hardly this. Of the scholarly and illuminating biographies of Wilde to date, including and perhaps concluding with the work of Richard Ellmann, Montgomery Hyde, and Hesketh Pearson, each tends to brevity in the case of the Woman's World period of Wilde's life; Hyde turns to gossip and tangents, Pearson to both, and Ellmann to a few comments on the magazine's content in what is an already brief discussion. Of the somewhat scurrilous biographers, Boris Brasol notes in a few lines Wilde's preoccupation with women's issues at the magazine. His assessment, while hardly flattering to Wilde, represents the furthest commentaryhas gone in examining the nature of Wilde's concerns at Cassell's: "Woman's World experience is of some biographical import: the long list of notes, articles, essays and sketches...