Wildean War: Politics of Fins-de-siècle Spectatorship

Wildean War: Politics of Fins-de-siecle Spectatorshipl MICHAEL R. SCHIAVI I have the most terrible ofall pleasures, the pleasure of the spectator; a pleasure wir/zM out which Art would be dead, and Life would be humane. Oscar Wilde, 1898 (Complere Lerters 1088) I. HISTORIC WILDE SIGHTINGS The centenary of Oscar Wilde's t897 release from prison saw an explosion of drama and film that marched the playwright from professional and romantic glory to inexorable ruin. During the late spring and summer of 1998, New York theatre-goers had their pick of Wildean diaspora. At the West Village's Minetta Lane Theatre, Moises Kaufman had already spent more than a year putting Wilde through his juridical paces in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997). Uptown at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre, film buffs could ogle a thoroughly butch Wilde in the person of Liam Neeson, mouthing the suicidal inventions of David Hare's The Judas Kiss (1998). Wildeophiles on a budget could catch Stephen Fry's star-making tum in Brian Gilbert's film Wilde (1998).' And any Yank who had missed the London premiere of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997), in which a shanered Wilde ca/pe diems A.E. Housman on the River Styx, had only to await the play's transfer to Lincoln Center and Broadway's Lyceum Theatre (2001 ).3 Why would such disparate playwrights and directors - British and Venezuelan , straight and gay - choose precisely this historical moment to mount such different portraits of Wilde on the wane? Why would late-twentiethcentury audiences be so eager to see - with a fetishism approaching mania the man whose disgrace brought down the curtain on the nineteenth century ? Nineteen ninety-eighl's extraordinarily commercial proliferation of Wildes reveals a great deal about the place of Oscar Wilde in literary, social, Modern Dromo, 41'3 (Fall 2004) 399 400 MICHAEL R. SCHIAVI and theatrical history. It also has great resonance for the nature of (homo)sexual spectatorship. During the past thirty years, dozens of literary figureheads have received theatrical scrutiny. New York audiences alone have seen Charles Dickens (Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens, 1952, 1953, 1970, 198 t; The Mystely of Charles Dickens, 2002), Emily Dickinson (The Belle ofAmherst, (976), Mark Twain (Mark Twain Tonight! (977), Christopher Marlowe (Marlowe, a rock musical [!J (981), Zelda Fitzgerald (Zelda, (984), T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Tom & Viv, (985), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein and a Companion, (986), Anais Nin (Anais Nin: The Paris Years, 1986), C.S. Lewis (Shadowlands, (989), Isak Dinesen (Lucifer's Child, 199 I), Zora Neale Hurston (Zora Neale Hurston, (992), Edith Wharton (Irene Worth's Portrait of Edith Wharton, (994), Vita Sackville-West (Vita & Vir- . ginia, '994), Melanie Klein (Mrs. Klein, (995), Ernest Hemingway (Papa, (996), George Bernard Shaw (My Astonishing Self, (997), Noel Coward (If Love Were All, (999), and Mary McCarthy (Imaginary Friends, 2002). Literary celebrities prompting more than one theatrical treatment include Truman Capote (The Truman Capote Talk Show, 1985; Tnt, (990), Virginia Woolf (Virginia, 1985; A Room of One's Own, 1991; Vita & Virginia), and Lillian Hellman (Lillian, 1986; Cakewalk, 1996; Imaginmy Friends). Yet stagings of Wilde more than exceed in number those of Capote, Woolf, and Hellman combined. In addition to Gross, Judas, and Invention, Wilde has also inspired, in the last thirty years alone, Feasting with Panthers (1974), Oscar Remembered (1981), Lord Alfred's Lover ('981), Forbidden Passion (t976), Saint Oscar (1989), Diversions and Delights (1998), Ever Yours, Oscar (2000), and A Man ofNo Importance (2002). Why does Wilde occasion a spectatorial frenzy far eclipsing that surrounding other writers, even those (e.g., Capote, Nin, Coward, Woolf) of notorious - hence theatrical - sexuality ? Airy epigrams can float a fellow across only so many footlights. Wilde's endurance as stage subject reveals audiences' vexed relation to a sight never satisfactorily parsed in over one-hundred years of observation. Although Gore Vidal huffs that Wilde, practitioner of "that most mechanical of verbal tricks: the paradox," needs no "explication or interpretation" (J 48), audiences en masse have not yet made sense of a trickster now a full century dead. As a sexual and social signifier of infinitely...