Oscar Wilde: A "Writerly" Life

Oscar Wilde: A "Writerly" Life RUSSELL JACKSON and IAN SMALL For many of Wilde's works there are numerous manuscript and typescript texts and drafts; many works, too, exist in more than one published version. This fortunate circumstance allows us to study his methods as a writer, and it affords modern scholars a degree of intimacy with him not available to earlier critics. The constant revision of his work exhibited in the manuscripts and typescripts will be documented in the forthcoming Oxford English Texts edition of Wilde's works. But does this material have implications beyond textual scholarship? Does a knowledge of Wilde's writing practices bear in any way on his biography? Intellectually the relationship between biography and textual scholarship has always been a peculiarly close one in that both practices have been underwritten by a teleological narrative; this is as true of Wilde as of other writers. Just as textual scholars have attempted to piece together the various manuscript and typescript drafts of Wilde's works into a narrative of development, so in the same way biographers have sought to write the life in terms of a tragedy in which the significant events are those which foreshadow or contribute to the ultimate downfall. However, recent theorizing in textual criticism, particularly in the area of research into dramatic works, has tended to suggest that this narrative paradigm is perhaps not wholly appropriate. Scholars working with Shakespeare - and particularly on King Lear - have argued that there is not an "ideal" work for which all extant texts are imperfect witnesses;I in the same way it is possible to argue that Wilde's revisions to the drafts of his plays do not appear to represent successive attempts to refine a work to its perfect , or near perfect, form. Rather, it seems to be the case. that the revisions evidenced in the typescript and manuscript drafts of plays such as A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest represent changes made for specific and local circumstances; they do not, in other words, follow any teleological pattern. Moreover, as this essay will argue, this concept of local Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 3 4 RUSSELL JACKSON and IAN SMALL or circumstantial change is one which is equally applicable to Wilde's life. If we take Wilde's proposal that "life imitates art" as being literally true, and apply it to his own life, we find a striking congruence between Wilde's practice of local textual revision and his attempt to "revise" or refashion his personality through the use of masks. All of this implies that, at a very deep level, Wilde construed his life in "writerly" terms: as he tells us, at least in his case, creation and self-creation are strictly analogous processes. A perfect example of the complex interrelationship between the fashioning of the life and the making of the work is to be found early in Wilde's career. In 1882, just before and just after his journey back to Britain from North America , Wilde underwent a change at the hands of his hairdresser and tailor, observing that "the Oscar of the first period is dead": the flowing locks were replaced by the (unflattering) "Nero" cut, and the extravagant garb of the Aesthete was discarded.2 The Oscar of the first period had written principally poetry. It is striking that after the publication of his Poems in 1881, the Oscar of the second and successive periods - with the exception of "The Sphinx" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" - wrote little or no poetry: the change in the career of the writer and the contrived change in his image coincide perfectly . Indeed, it is incidents such as this which have led so many biographers to see Wilde's entire life as a series of metamorphoses, and the notion of Wilde refashioning his personality is a very familiar one - it is perhaps most frequently encountered in the topic of his "masks."3 The usual explanation for such an activity is couched in moral terms, in the sense that biographers and critics have described Wilde's need to use masks in terms of a desire to evade moral censure (and perhaps...