Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend

Preface

Preface The chapters in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture share one aim: they seek to reveal how and why a gifted Irish author who experienced varying kinds of fame, notoriety, and shame across the course of his twenty-five-year career would claim greater and greater attention from successive generations of writers, critics, composers, dancers, filmmakers, and performers throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.As I point out in the introduction, the depressing circumstances surrounding Oscar Wilde’s early death at the age of forty-six hardly suggested that within a matter of decades he would become one of the most valued literary influences on the modern world.After his reputation collapsed on 25 May 1895, when he was sent to jail for two years in solitary con- finement with hard labor for committing acts of “gross indecency” with other men, he seemed fated to be consigned to perpetual obscurity. On Wilde’s release from his brutalizing sentence in 1897, his character was so besmirched and his spirit so demoralized that he deserted Britain,moving around France and Italy under a carefully chosen incognito, “Sebastian Melmoth,” the two parts of which allude to the early Christian martyr murdered by Diocletian, on the one hand,and the nomadic protagonist of his great-uncle’s gothic romance, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), on the other hand. The silence that muffled the remaining three and a half years of his existence was so deafening that he decided to publish his final work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), initially not under his name but using the number of his prison cell,“C.3.3.”Only when thousands of readers had bought copies of this poem, whose protests against an unjust prison system proved an instant runaway success, could Wilde recover some dignity by disclosing his authorial identity in the seventh edition, which came out a year before his death. Despite his disappearance into exile, and thus into anonymity, there nonetheless remained a substantial audience that still wanted to read him, albeit more for the punishment he had suffered than for the pleasure they derived from the sparkling comedies that had wowed the London stage during the years before his downfall. The Ballad kept the widely reviled author ix You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. very much in the public’s consciousness in the months leading up to his demise from meningitis on 30 November 1900. The complicated rehabilitation of Wilde—a figure whose experiences of fame were seldom distant from perilous infamy—arguably began with the stir created by the Ballad. But other developments, including Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera based on Wilde’s play Salomé, also ensured that neither his legacy nor his memory would be lost. Even though Wilde was laid to rest after a modest funeral at the suburban Bagneux Cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, some eight years later the talented American sculptor Jacob Epstein took up the challenging commission of designing a tomb in honor of a man to whom the world was belatedly paying its respects. Epstein’s monument (erected at Père Lachaise, Paris, in September 1912) is a fine example of early modernist sculpture, but like many other phenomena linked withWilde’s reputation,it would remain a source of controversy.The sculptor ’s striking male sphinx,inspired by Wilde’s 1894 poem dedicated to that mythical being, featured noticeably protruding genitals.At an early stage, the offending organs of this exuberant creature—which looks as if it is about to rush headlong through the air—were covered by a bronze cache-sexe thatWilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, arranged at the request of the cemetery managers after the police had insisted that the tomb should be covered in tarpaulin. (The monument was not unveiled for another two years.) The metallic decoration was soon vandalized. Much later, in 1961, the genitals suffered the same fate, as Michael Pennington points out in his history of the tomb (An Angel for a Martyr: Jacob Epstein’s Tomb for OscarWilde [Reading:Whiteknights Press,1987]).The sculpture remained castrated until 2000, when artist Leon Johnson commissioned silversmith Rebecca Scheer to create the prosthesis that he duly affixed that year in a ceremony titled, appropriately enough,“Re-Membering Wilde.”Epstein’s visually...