Wilde’s Play: Response

If I had to choose the one Victorian who most challenges and delights me on the topic of play, whether it is the play of language, actors, ideas, children, or lovers, it would surely be Oscar Wilde. In the NAVSA conference Performance and Play, he was the most cited figure in the presentations I attended, with whole panels devoted to him in addition to individual talks and scattered quotations. His emergence as a touchstone for theories of queerness and performativity has generated an impressive surge of academic interest, especially since the mainstreaming of gay studies and the publication of Richard Ellmann’s landmark biography in the late 1980s, and evidently this scholarly and popular inspiration is far from waning. We heard impressive presentations on Wilde and pedagogy, feminism, sexuality, parody, opera, photography, copyright law, children’s literature, spiritualism, the American West, crime fiction, and Symbolist aesthetics, with references to most of the numerous genres in which he made canonical contributions to literature, including poetry, novel, essay, dialogue, comedy, tragedy, prose poem, epigram, epistle, apologia, and fairy tale.

For this occasion, I have focused on three essays about texts that play with Wilde’s playing. Wilde was deeply committed to the theater as a genre and produced some of the best plays of the Victorian period in a remarkably short span of time before his imprisonment brought to an abrupt and premature end his career, though not his appeal, as a playwright. He celebrated the strange power of theater’s heightened artifice to generate the life and social discourse it ostensibly imitated. “I love acting,” Lord Henry archly confesses in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). “It is so much more real than life” (Works 67). A century before it became a key concept of poststructural criticism, Wilde summed up queer performativity in an epigram when he asserted with characteristic elegance and alliteration in “The Critic as Artist” (1891), “Do you wish to love? Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring” (1149). This is Wilde’s play at its most anti-essentialist and optimistic: an invitation to become the poet of one’s own existence, or at least to quote one’s way to a more definitive conception and performance of it. His trials were only the most dramatic instance of the distance that could obtain between Love’s usual Litany and the Litany of a Love that dare not sing its own song, especially with regard to what “the world fancies.” As we know from J. L. Austin’s classic study How to Do Things with Words, an utterance may be performative in structure and intention and still remain “infelicitous,” as when the performer lacks the proper credentials or the audience is unwilling to play along (16). Wilde is known to have even congratulated the audience for its contribution to the success of the first performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892; published 1893):

The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.

(qtd. in Ellmann 346, emphasis original)

His wit is all the richer in pathos on those infelicitous occasions when his audience has betrayed him, as in the period of his trials, imprisonment, and exile, when he feared his performance in the role of the “Infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr,” as he dubbed the pose (Letters 1041), might fail to transfigure—fail to transubstantiate, we might say—those of his pleasures that the law condemned as gross indecency. Shortly before his death in 1900, when the most theatrical audiences he was seeking were with the pope, he penned a few letters to Robert Ross in which he compared himself to the penitent Christian knight Tannhäuser making the pilgrimage to Rome for a miraculous blessing, and we find him worrying that his performance would go absurdly awry: “I fear if I went before the Holy Father with...