Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (review)

Joseph Bristow's Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend brings together a dozen essays, most of which are devoted to illustrating Richard Ellmann's assertion that "Wilde is one of us" (Oscar Wilde [Hamish Hamilton, 1987], xvii), and all of which, taken together, richly complicate Ellman's remark by making clear that we—the inheritors of Wilde's life and work—have been an enormously varied group, interpreting and appropriating that legacy with a promiscuously Wildean freedom. The subtitle thus both asserts and acknowledges that the business of the volume is not to see Wilde and his works as in themselves they really are, but rather to describe the ways that Wilde has been constructed, resisted, honored, and ironized from the earliest moments of his posthumous career until the present. After an introductory essay in which the editor summarizes and adjudicates several decades worth of early disputes over Wilde's reputation and manuscripts, the essays move in roughly chronological order, following Wilde's influence across two continents and four national cultures. This emphasis on the making of Wilde's legend is responsible for both the considerable interest and some of the limitations of the volume, which attends relatively little to Wilde's own writings and which relaxes at times into a kind of presentism, seeming to assume that Wilde is praiseworthy to the extent that he is modern, or that the task of judgment is to measure Wilde and his interpreters against a standard of contemporary enlightenment.

The keynote of interpretive freedom is struck again and again—the freedom of the artist from mere reality and the freedom of the critic or adapter to use an original text as the mere occasion for further performance—with Wilde cast as both the inspiring and original practitioner of such freedoms and then, in his turn, as their object. In an essay on Wilde and photography, Daniel Novak describes how Napoleon Sarony's pictures of Wilde helped to establish that photographs are not mere reproductions of reality, but copyrightable works of a photographer/artist for whom the real was merely the occasion of further creation—just as, for the posing Wilde, the facts of his given identity were merely the occasions for the free self-creation in which he was constantly engaged. The same complex of issues recurs in Leslie Moran's "Transcripts and truth: Writing the Trials of Oscar Wilde," which analyzes from the standpoint of a legal scholar the unsustainable claims of documentary accounts of Wilde's trials to be mere (and thus reliable) transcriptions. His well-earned if unsurprising conclusion is that "telling the truth of the real trials of Oscar Wilde is, and is likely to remain, a project closely associated with the imagination" (255). It would have been useful if Moran had suggested by what means we should distinguish between the relative reliabilities of competing accounts, or taken up the hard question of whether the Wilde trials were typical or unique in the challenge they posed to documentary transcription. The essay nevertheless combines fascinating information with helpfully clarifying conceptualization.

Several essays document the variety of ways in which Wilde's lived freedom from convention has been put to use by diverse traditions of cultural and political activism and by later writers. Yvonne Ivory establishes that Wilde was a central figure in early German gay-rights movements, but also that he was often invoked as a champion of individualism, rather than of explicitly sexual dissidence, because individualism was the banner under which more cautious or phobic partisans dared to rally. Erin Williams Hyman connects Wilde's aesthetic individualism with the fraternally countercultural movement of French anarchism, showing how French performances of Salomé (1893) after Wilde's trials served as declarations of avant-garde solidarity in the midst of a reactionary movement in France (in response to declining birth rates) to exercise increasing control over private...