Self-Plagiarism, Creativity and Craftsmanship in Oscar Wilde

Self-Plagiarism, Creativity and Craftsmanship in Oscar Wilde Josephine M. Guy University of Nottingham IN HIS 1993 SURVEY of Wilde scholarship Ian Small suggested that there are several aspects of Wilde's career which remain relatively unexplored, one of the most important of which is his role as a professional writer.1 Indeed Small hints that an account of the "writerlyWilde " is particularly necessary if Wilde's growing reputation among modern critics for intellectual seriousness is to be finally secured. Significantly in the past few years precisely that sort of knowledge has begun to emerge. The accumulated work of textual scholars over the past decade and a half has begun to reveal a Wilde who revised more thoroughly and much more often than earlier critics had realized. Similarly, evidence from recently published correspondence has revealed that Wilde was more ready to take advice and was more alert to his own limitations than his public persona of competence and confidence might have suggested. We now know that the writerly Wilde worked long and hard, that he was as much burdened as inspired by the daily grind of earning his living by the pen and, like any aspiring professional writer, was continually prey to the anxieties of failure, both creative and commercial.2 Despite its novelty, this new "journeyman" Wilde has been relatively easy for modern critics to accept, perhaps because it is possible to reconcile that Wilde with the more traditional view of Wilde as a Victorian iconoclast. Thus Sos Eltis, in the most recent and detailed account of Wilde's writing practices, has detected a pattern of subversion in the "painstaking process of correction and revision" to the society comedies: Wilde is claimed to have progressively drawn his texts "away from their conventional origins, transforming them from GUY : WILDE derivative imitations of the plays on which they were modelled into far more subtle and subversive works."3 By contrast, there is a second aspect of Wilde's writing practices which may initially seem more difficult to explain. As early as the 1880s, critics drew attention to his apparent willingness to "borrow" silently the work of others. The savagely critical reception of his first volume, Poems (1881), is the best documented example of this borrowing; but his unpublished lecture on Chatterton (which Rupert Hart-Davis dates as 1886) is perhaps the most blatant. The MS ofthat lecture is the smoking gun, for it reveals that large sections of the piece were taken from works by other critics in a simple act of theft.4 Modern explanations of such unashamed plagiarism have tended to point to the pressures which Wilde experienced in the early stages of his writing career: that he was keen to establish himself as a serious writer, but that he was nonetheless constrained by the commercial regime of professional authorship. In these arguments, it is significant that this rather careless appropriation of the language of others ceases (to all intents and purposes) by the late 1880s—that is, when Wilde's reputation was becoming more secure. So when in "The Critic as Artist" (1890) Wilde uses Arnold's language, or Pater's in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the strategy is knowing and careful—their ideas are never passed off as Wilde's own. Rather, in these instances, borrowing has become a strategy of allusion, an act of display rather than disguise.5 For my purposes, however, it is important that these explanations of Wilde's early plagiarism of the work of others are wholly compatible with more recent accounts of his development into a literary craftsman: thus, as Wilde gradually finds a voice and develops a distinctive style, he simply has no need to rely on appropriated material. Moreover, when he continues to borrow, he merely takes the données of stories, the situations of plays or various popular dramatic devices. In other words, his debts are commonplace and generic, and are transformed or subverted. They are not direct copying. In fact borrowing from the work of others is not the only kind of plagiarism which Wilde practised. His oeuvre also contains many instances of self-plagiarism—of Wilde "borrowing" from his own works. Once again, this second...