Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel (review)

Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years focuses on Wilde’s prison years (1895–97) and his exile (1897–1900), tracing “Wilde’s euphoric enjoyment of his new freedom in the days immediately after his release, as well as the disappointment and dejection that followed as Wilde came to realize that exile as Britain’s most notorious sex offender meant public insults, long bouts of isolation, loss of livelihood, and eventually a withering of his health and creative faculties” (9).

Frankel describes Wilde’s solitary confinement (which devastated Wilde, since no one needed an audience more than the witty entertainer) and aggravated hard labor. Wilde would have had to ascend about 8,640 feet on the treadmill every day—like climbing Chicago’s Sears Tower six times or stepping up the Eiffel Tower ten times. As a result, he quickly broke down. Not until he was granted an allowance of books (by Saint Augustine, Dante, Blaise Pascal, Cardinal Newman, or the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen) and paper did his situation improve.

After his release, most people commented on how Wilde looked better, healthier, younger (he had lost weight). Wilde initially developed a routine of bathing in the sea, attending mass, and agitating for prison reform, which helped pass the 1898 Prisons Act, an occasion during which “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was quoted twice in the Houses of Parliament. More incredibly, Wilde enthusiastically celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (in whose name he had been condemned), treating local youths (all male) to strawberries and cream and “God Save the Queen.” Immediately afterwards, people started to gossip why the female sex had not been invited, and the parties ended.

Concerning Wilde’s relationship with Bosie, Frankel attempts to redeem the maligned aristocrat. First of all, in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde knew what he was doing, and he also knew the stakes of reconnecting with his lover after Reading Gaol. In this context, Frankel explodes the myth that the authorities had been dragging their feet after Wilde lost his first trial, giving him valuable hours to escape to the Continent. Next, although De Profundis damaged Bosie’s reputation to posterity, Wilde never mailed that vituperative letter, which might have been useful as therapy but was dismissed after Wilde’s sentence. Frankel quotes a very different letter from Holloway Prison: “If one day, at Corfu, or in some enchanted isle, there were a little house where we could live together, oh! life would be sweeter it has ever been” (131). This idyll materialized in Villa Giudice at Posillipo, Greek for “a place where unhappiness comes to an end,” in the Bay of Naples, where Wilde reunited with the love of his life. Frankel adds that the two lived there in style, employing a cook, a maid, and two boy servants, and it was there, in Douglas’ company, that Wilde completed “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Bosie, flush with the inheritance from his loathed father, also continued to support Wilde until the very end, spending today’s equivalent of about $50,000 in 1900 alone.

Instead, Frankel, following other biographers, faults Wilde’s estranged wife Constance for listening to her lawyers rather than her heart in refusing to let Wilde see his sons. Both Cyril and Vyvyan became orphans when their mother and father passed away within a couple of years, and both were kept in the dark about the whereabouts and death of their father. And since in married life three is company and two is none, Frankel turns to Robbie Ross, Wilde’s faithful friend and Bosie’s implacable rival. Ross controlled Wilde’s purse strings, hoped to normalize—that is, heterosexualize—Wilde’s social standing, and successfully promoted the “nakedly self-obsessed” Bosie perpetuated in so many books, plays, and films about Wilde (15).

Frankel then moves on to the Paris of Wilde’s last years, which boasted over 100 commercial venues for people of Wilde’s sexual orientation, including cafes, bars, hotels...