Oscar Wilde

A Literary Life

Kimberly J. Stern

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030246044
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Oscar Wilde: A Literary Life tracks the intellectual biography of one of the most influential minds of the nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on the dramatic events of Wilde's life, this volume documents Wilde's impressive forays into education, religion, science, philosophy, and social reform. In so doing, it provides an accessible and yet detailed account that reflects Wilde's own commitment to the "contemplative life." Suitable for seasoned readers as well as those new to the study of his work, Oscar Wilde: A Literary Life brings Wilde's intellectual investments into sharp focus, while placing him within a cultural landscape that was always evolving and often fraught with contradiction.

© The Author(s) 2019

K. J. SternOscar WildeLiterary Liveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Biographer

Kimberly J. Stern¹

(1)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Kimberly J. Stern

It is always Judas who writes the biography.

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

End Abstract

In “The Critic as Artist” (1891), Oscar Wilde celebrates “the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming.”¹ As a professional scholar, I have always been attracted by the idea that quiet reflection is not an isolating but rather a sociable endeavor, one that brings us into close proximity to the very stuff of life. It is a philosophy that I bring to the classroom, where I unfailingly encounter bright, curious faces just embarking upon their own intellectual journeys, some of them at the most transformative moment of their lives. Learning is an adventure—an unpredictable, messy, sometimes even perilous one, but an adventure nevertheless worth undertaking. “For what is mind,” Wilde reminds us, “but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.”²

Oscar Wilde: A Literary Life was inspired by my passion for learning and teaching. On the one hand, I longed to contemplate how Wilde, one of the most supple and complex minds I have ever encountered, approached the learning process. But I also sought to enhance the learning experience of my students, who had repeatedly approached me in search of an intellectual biography that would help them to navigate the mind of a writer they found energizing and provocative, if not always consistent. In this spirit, the following chapters presume that, as Lord Henry Wotton puts it in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1), at least some of the “great events of the world take place in the brain,” focusing less on what Wilde did than on what—and perhaps more importantly how—he thought.³ This book is intended for all readers of Wilde, from those just embarking on the study of his work to seasoned readers who seek out a greater familiarity with the intellectual contexts that gave it shape. Most of all, however, I present this work as an aid to readers who, cognizant of the contradictions in Wilde’s life and work, wish to understand his mind without abandoning what makes it so alluring in the first place.

Before embarking on this experiment, it is worth taking a moment to reflect upon what it means to write, let alone to read, an intellectual biography. There are few better starting points for such a discussion than Wilde himself. In the spirit of the chapters that follow, I begin by considering Wilde’s own encounters with and responses to nineteenth-century biography. That he at once celebrated and disparaged the genre in his own work provides us with at least some insight into why an intellectual biography of Wilde is so necessary—and so difficult. Next, I consider how contemporary accounts of Wilde, though valuable in their own right, tend to suppress precisely those elements of intellectual biography that Wilde himself prized. Finally, I turn to the structure and methodologies I have deployed in this volume. I admit quite frankly that this is not a complete or definitive record of Wilde’s life, for no record of such a writer can rightly claim to be complete or definitive. I have, however, endeavored to make sense of—and to celebrate—what remains incomplete and indefinite.

Wilde on Biography

In July 1876, at the age of 21, Oscar Wilde informed his friend William Ward that he had abandoned any prospect of competing for an Oxford scholarship. He planned instead “to edit an unfinished work of my father’s, the Life of Gabriel Beranger, Artist.”⁴ His father, Sir William Wilde, had died in April of that year, having already seen the greater portion of the volume printed in the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland between 1871 and 1873. Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, was undertaking the very difficult task of completing the book, and Wilde, in one of his earliest forays into literary work, had volunteered his assistance.

Although the vast majority of William Wilde’s works dealt with medical or archeological subject matter, in this volume he addressed a topic nearer to his son’s heart: the life of an eighteenth-century Dutch artist who settled in Ireland in 1750 and became noted for his depictions of Irish antiquities. Standing at the intersection of art, science, and history, William Wilde was keenly aware of the methodological hurdles before him. He commences with a word on the challenges of biography:

Every biographer who wishes to be impartial should, for the occasion at least, live among the scenes and during the period when and where the personage whose character he is limning resided. He ought to be well acquainted with the subject he has undertaken to describe, and, as far as possible, honestly identify himself with the pursuits, and exercise a fair critical discretion in reviewing the labours of the person who, for the time being, has become the chief actor in his drama. […] Men must be tried by the light of their own times, by the education they have received, and the circumstances by which they were surrounded, to afford them fair play in the history of any country.⁵

There are dangers, William Wilde reminds us, to life writing. Chief among these is the risk of mistaking oneself for one’s subject and thereby measuring the figures of the past by the social and cultural standards of the present. Not only does such an approach risk eliding the personal and historical influences that color life events; it also risks drawing that life into the service of specific political or cultural ends. Although life may be (in the strictest sense) linear, it does not necessarily follow a logical or progressive sequence. If it does, one must remain aware that there were always other possible narratives and outcomes. To tell a life faithfully, in other words, the biographer must become a critic and historiographer as well, remembering always that stories are not found but rather made.

I cannot prove that William Wilde’s musings on the challenges of biography inspired those of his son, who seems to have had little relish for fact-driven argument.⁶ But it is certainly true that Wilde shared many of his father’s concerns and took issue especially with the separation of the biographical subject from their cultural and aesthetic context. The risk was so apparent to Wilde that he made it a central dilemma in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a distressed Basil Hallward confesses of his famous portrait: “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.”⁷ Seen this way, the portrait does not merely reflect Dorian’s sins: it also reflects the sins of the biographer. Like his father, Wilde was wary of any biography that attempted to align the life with specific political or cultural objectives; such an approach risked occluding what is truly valuable in life writing—the revelation of a singular personality. Yet Wilde also felt that attaining the kind of disinterested perspective recommended by his father required that the biographer avoid focusing unduly on mere events. Especially in the case of artists and thinkers, the best life writing would also constitute a kind of criticism.

Wilde was, to be sure, an avid consumer of biography. It is in this spirit that he recommended the reading of several intellectual lives in his 1886 piece “To Read or Not to Read.”⁸ Among the books Wilde insists everyone should peruse, he includes the letters of Marcus Cicero (BC 68–43), Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/68), Duc de St. Simon’s Memoirs (1755), the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887), and Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121 AD). During his tenure as editor of the periodical Woman’s World between 1887 and 1889, Wilde reviewed countless biographies, including Mabel Wotton’s Word-Portraits of Famous Writers (1887), Lucy Bethia Walford’s Four Biographies from Blackwood (1888), Bella Duffy’s Life of Madame de Stael (1887), Frances Martin’s Life of Elizabeth Gilbert (1887), the 1888 edition of John Evelyn’s Life of Mrs. Godolphin (1847/1888), Phyllis Browne’s Life of Miss Mary Carpenter (1888), and Janet Ross’s Three Generations of Englishwomen (1888), to name only a few.⁹ He reviewed countless other works for The Pall Mall Gazette during this period as well, including John Addington Symonds’s Ben Jonson (1886) and Elme Marie Caro’s George Sand (1887).¹⁰

The sheer number of essays Wilde wrote on biography at this time is suggestive. In an 1889 review of the Dictionary of National Biography, commenced only four years previously by Leslie Stephen, the Edinburgh Review proclaimed biography to be “at this moment the most popular form of Literature.”¹¹ As Juliette Atkinson has observed, it is difficult to calculate precisely what proportion of works published during this period constitute biographical writing, in part owing to the plasticity of the genre itself, but it was without question comparable to the novel in its rate of publication and consumption at the bookstalls.¹² The preponderance of Victorian biographies in turn fostered a growing cynicism among critics, who frequently questioned the ethical value of exposing private events to public view and lamented the rapidity with which these often hackneyed accounts found their way to market.

Wilde contributed to this critical trend in his most sustained discussions of nineteenth-century biography, both of which appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1887. The first was a review of Joseph Knight’s Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1887), suggestively titled “A Cheap Edition of a Great Man.” One of Wilde’s chief critiques in this essay was the author’s inattention to the subtlety of Rossetti’s literary output and failure to capture his real depth of character—what Wilde deems a “shallow and superficial” treatment of the biography’s subject. Whereas his father had lamented the tendency to wrest biographical subjects from their proper historical context, Wilde maligns the author’s tendency to focus solely on the events of a subject’s life, to the exclusion of more speculative or critical overtures. He writes: “Rossetti’s was a giant personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.”¹³ To some extent, Wilde notes, any biographer must admit the impossibility of confining the mind and character of a person to words on a page—as powerful as words might be, they only (to invoke one of my favo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Biographer
• 2. The Teacher
• 3. The Priest
• 4. The Scientist
• 5. The Philosopher
• 6. The Reformer
• Back Matter