Oscar Wilde’s Ghost: The Play of Imitation

This paper considers Oscar Wilde’s 1923 appearances at séances in the home of Hester Dowden, an episode in Wilde’s afterlife that informs ongoing debates about the transmission of thought in Wilde’s aestheticism. I draw on Gabriel Tarde’s sociology, which became known in the interlude between Wilde’s death and his 1923 ghosting, in order to claim that, in Wilde’s work, imitation structures even seemingly autonomous actions. For Wilde, imitation and its inescapability constitute the creative act, and in The Picture of Dorian Gray and the plays, especially The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde offers what we might call a playful sociology of imitation. This view of artistic production rejects what Wilde calls literary mimesis in favor of an account of exuberant creativity that nonetheless affirms the inescapable influence—or the social mimesis—of other minds.