Oscar Wilde - Man of Fashion and Letters

       


 While we are not reading Oscar Wilde in this travelling class, my lord we should be.  If only time permitted.  There are some sites in Dublin associated with Wilde, and so he is doubly worth thinking about.

We remember Wilde as a critic, a poet, an essayist, a dramatist, a letter writer, and a novelist who lived his life his way, as an eccentric genius, full of enthusiasm, decadence and flair, which ultimately ended too soon, and indeed most tragically.

If we begin at the beginning, it is easy to see that Oscar Wilde came by his eccentric genius honestly.  Wilde’s mother, whose name was Jane Frances, demanded that everyone refer to her as Francesca Speranza. She felt her poetry (she was a poet) was so infectious that if the public was exposed to it, they would catch her poetic fever, and it would spread through the country like a contagion.   She repeated this so regularly that she became known as Francesca Speranza Influenza Wilde.

The reputation of Wilde’s father, a famous eye and ear doctor in Dublin, in the Merrion Square neighborhood of Dublin (where there is a lovely statue of Oscar Wilde reclining on a rock) was even more widespread that his son. His fame, involving chlorophorm, an ex-lover, and a lengthy trial is too complex to get into here. It does serve to show that the Wilde men do not fare well with litigious lovers.

Take warning, Dear Oscar.

We know very little about Oscar as a child, other than from his mother. She, who seems to be attached to impressive names, dubbed her second son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.  A flair for extravagance is rooted early in Oscar as well. An early piece of his writing comes to us as a letter to his mother while at summer camp, age 13. 

Oscar Wilde Statue - Merrion Square Dublin

It starts thus:

“Darling Mama,

The [clothes] hamper came today and I never got such a jolly surprise.  It was more than kind of you to send it, though the flannel shirts you sent are . . . not mine.  Mine, as you may remember, are the one quite scarlet and the other that divine lilac shade . . .”

Not the typical note one might get from a young lad at summer camp, but Oscar Wilde, my friends, was in no way typical. He was certainly a man of fashion.

At Trinity College in Dublin, Wilde became attracted to the Aestheticism movement, and thus he decided to always surround himself with beautiful things, and here is when he decided to make his symbol the lily.  When asked why he chose the lily, he respond by saying “Because it is the most beautiful, and useless thing in the world.”

When Wilde finished his time at Trinity, he also, in essence, finished his time in Ireland, moving to Oxford England to escape the confining and claustrophobic atmosphere of Dublin. James Joyce, his fellow Irishman, who we will hear about in our next reading, would heartily agree with these sentiments.  In Oxford, Wilde did well in his classes, but they did not take up too much of his time, as he spent much of his time furnishing and refurnishing his rooms.  Again, surrounding himself with beauty as well as variety.   After one of his great refurbishings (and there were many), he noted “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

In his 20s Wilde was known mostly for his entertaining wit at parties, his extravagance in dress, and his connection to the aesthetic movement. He had a successful speaking tour in America, where he notoriously presented a lecture to miners (in a mine mind you) in Leadville Colorado, where he spoke about the beauty of ornate silver.  He followed his presentation by drinking whiskey with the men.  He was a huge success.  Even so, he returned to England as a 28-year-old man who was still unsure of what he would do for a career.   

In part because of his well-documented travels in America, Wilde was a favorite topic in the newspapers, and as such, gossip and rumors began to spread about him, particularly that he was spending too much time with young men, and not enough time with young women.  In the Victorian age to be a homosexual, and a public figure even more so, was not tolerated by the ass…… by the puritanical moralists.  Family members and friends encouraged Oscar to find a wife.  Particularly a wealthy one.  He was successful, . . .  successfully marrying the wealthy Constance Lloyd, successfully designing her gown for the wedding, and successfully giving her two sons.  The marriage, though, was not ultimately successful.  Oscar preferred the company of young, intelligent, beautiful men, who shared an interest in the arts.  He was living a double life.

And so in 1890 Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Like much that was produced by Wilde, it created a sensation.  On one level, It is about a dashing young man and his pursuit of sensual pleasures.  Dorian Gray continues to look young and beautiful throughout the novel, even though his actions become more and more unacceptable to society and to himself.   It might be an ingenious commentary on the problem of seeing oneself in art. Indeed, a portrait that Gray keeps hidden in a remote upper room, takes on the physical costs of his actions and becomes hideous to look at.  And while the opening preface suggests that art and morality should remain separate, that art is for art’s sake, there seems to a theme in this novel about the problem of living the double life, or a warning about selfish hedonism.  At the end, mm Gray can no longer bear to look at the rotten image of his inner self that the portrait represents, and so in an eerie and delightful gothic moment, in his attempt to slash the picture, he instead just slashes himself.

Lord Alfred Douglas, a young beautiful man who also was the youngest son of the Marquis of Queensbury, impressed Wilde by saying he had memorized large passages from the work.  Lord Alfred Douglas was charming, and reckless, and he loved vexing his father, the Marquis of Queensbury.  Wilde and Lord Douglass became inseparable.

Now the Marquis of Queensbury, is a towering figure in the sport of Boxing.  If you know anything about boxing…..well you have me there….but I do know this…. there is something called the Queensbury rules.  They are named for him.

Not surprisingly Queensbury wanted his son to graduate from Oxford with a fine reputation, and thus he began tyrannizing his son.  The son used his relationship with Wilde to pester and enrage his father.  And indeed, it was clear to many that Lord Alfred Douglas was doing just that: Using Oscar Wilde.  In a way, we could say that:  Lord Douglas was good looking on the outside, but rotten inside. 

During this time Wilde pumped out may of his greatest works :Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) A Woman of no Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest a story that is in part about living the double life in (1895).  Like Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest was a sensation.

Indeed, The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the funniest, wittiest, pun-filled (I did say Pun –filled) play you will ever see.  It questions whether marriage is a plague, or just a dull responsibility.  It skewers Victorian prudery and pretensions, and it presents a life of triviality, decadence, and the double-life as a life of liberty.  Both central male characters in the play have secret identities and activities.  Jack is Jack in the country and Earnest in the City.  Algenon is Algey in the City and Earnest in the country.  Neither is exactly Earnest.

In an attempt to cut Wilde down as he came to the height of his fame, Queensbury heightened his attacks on Wilde by leaving a calling card addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing as a Sodomite” at his club for all the members to see. At least that is what is what was recorded as evidence by the judge.  The national Archives shows the original copy saying  - (either because Queensbury was in a rage, or in a rush, or just … ignorant) “Oscar Wilde Posing Somdomite – or Oscar Wilde posing a Somdomite”  - I’m not sure what either of those means….but it sounds compelling.  Anyway… Even though it created some embarrassment, we are told Wilde would have never done anything about it, but Lord Douglass egged him on demanding that Wilde take out a slander suit on his father, which Wilde finally agreed to do.  The trial did not last long and a second trial did not end in Wilde’s favor, Victorian England and all that rot. 

Ultimately, for his “Gross Indecency” The Judge sentenced Wilde to “Two years Hard Labor.”   This tragic sentence was a disaster for Wilde.  His name was removed from the playbills and he was pressed to sell most all of his beautiful furniture and possessions, including his blue china, to pay lawyer’s fees.  Worst of all, his time in prison weakened his heath immensely.  While he did not die there, he did not live long after his release. 

In a squalid Paris Hotel, Wilde died in poverty, without his beloved beautiful surroundings.  One of the last witticisms Wilde gives us is from this deathbed:

“My Wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One or the other of us has to go!”

But that isn’t the witticism I wish to leave you with.  Instead, let us turn back to the trial, whereas the Marquis of Queensbury leapt up and accused Wilde stating “You are in the gutter and you are dragging my son there too” – Wilde, in his erudite elegance retorted “We are all of us in the gutter, sir, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

 

 

Dog and Bear: Who Wins? (Who Cares?)

 

Near the end of Waverly, after Edward and Rose are married, they agree to “spend a few days at an estate which Colonel Talbot had been tempted to purchase in Scotland as a very great bargain” (367). It seems after the old Scottish estates were ransacked by the English, they could acquire them at a great discount.  Clever Brits.  It reminds me of the white flight – slum lord – urban decay - gentrification schemes we have seen (and are seeing) in the States. Anyway, after Colonel Talbot partially restores Tully-Veolan, and the Baron of Bradwardine is being shown his former ancestral home, there is an interesting exchange between Colonel Talbot and the Baron of Bradwardine.  As the Baron surveys the grounds, and sees the two great bears that previously adorned the gates returned to their rightful place, he exclaims, “While I acknowledge my obligation to you for the restoration of these images of bears as being the ancient badge of our family, I cannot but marvel that you have no where established your own crest, Colone Talbot, whilk is, I believe, a mastiff, anciently called a talbot” (369).  After a bit of poetry, Talbot assents that his crest would include a dog, and follows with “if crests were to dispute precedence, I should be apt to let them, as the proverb says, ‘fight dog, fight bear’”(369).  I found that a bit odd, or hard to make sense of, and even stranger that our editors didn’t include a footnote to help explain. While bears are not found in Scotland (at least not in modern times) there are some family crests that include the rampart bear or the bear’s head.  The dog image for Talbot makes me think of an English bulldog.  The bear could be symbolic for Scotland in a similar manner, but it isn’t as obvious to me.  That leaves us with the quote” fight dog, fight bear.” It seems there is an old Scottish proverb “Fight dog, fight bear; wha wins, deil care.”  I think that means who cares which wins.  Deil, I’m guessing, means the devil.  The devil may care, or nobody cares.  In a few pages we find out that Talbot has been restoring the estate for Waverly, who has purchased it to restore to the Baron, and who [Waverly] will inherit it as he has married the Baron’s daughter, Rose.  Who cares?  It’s all good.  No harm done. All the loose ends are tied up, and the Baron even has his old drinking vessel in the shape of a bear restored to him.  A toast is made to “The prosperity of the united houses of Waverly-Honour and Bradwardine” (374), and likewise the jacobite lays downs with the English.  The fight is over, and it seems who won doesn’t matter. The Devil may care.

The Bonnie Prince of Waverly

Charles Edward Stuart
(Bonnie Prince Charlie)
Painted by Allan Ramsay

In Waverly, our hero Edward is taken captive by English forces. His family name, family history, association with known Jacobites, some papers he has on his person, and his outraged demeanor all work against him. He is put on trial for treason and is hustled away towards Stirling Castle. This is where things get interesting. Edward will need to pick sides between the English loyalists and the Jacobites. His newly found Scottish friends, like Mac Ivor and even Donald Bean Lean are certainly behind the ambush of the English troops that secures Edward’s freedom. They bring Edward to Holyrood in Edinburgh (where we will be) which was acting as the center of Jacobite military and political power and the court (illegitimate court the English would say) of Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie). Bonnie Prince Charlie has recently joined the cause, coming from France undercover to help lead the forces to restore the Stuart royal line. When Mc Ivor, who meets Edward at Holyrood, introduces Edward to the “bonnie” prince, Edward is taken with him.
    Bonnie Prince Charlie, born in Rome, and educated in French courts, is a model of aristocratic manners and refinement. Scott describes him in Waverly as “A young man, wearing his own fair hair, distinguished by the dignity of his mien and noble expression of his well-formed and regular features” (213). The prince is likewise taken with Edward, noting that there would be “no master of ceremonies necessary to present a Waverly to a Stuart” (213). It seems the prince is familiar with Waverly’s family history, and so when the prince asks Edward to join the Jacobite cause, he quickly agrees. In his “Review Essay: Sir Walter Scott,” (Romanticism 16.1, 2010 page 94-99) Christopher MacLachlan states: “Scott’s story, of how the sensitive but naive young Englishman Edward Waverley finds himself caught up in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and carried by a mixture of personal affections and political manipulation to Edinburgh, a meeting with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and participation in Jacobite victory at the battle of Prestonpans, . . . is told with a sureness and vitality that lifted the novel as a form to a new height. . . . . His perception that history can be told through characters and personal relationships transformed the idea of the past and opened it up to Romantic understanding. Edward Waverley himself is like a time-traveller, a proto-Wordsworthian avid for nature and the sublime, mediating between the reader and the period of the novel at the same time as he assures us that a new sensibility will triumph over the divisiveness of the past” (99). Like Waverly, we are seduced by Bonnie Prince Charlie, but Scott may also be telling the reader that his aristocratic ideas, like the divine right of kings, are archaic. Scott suggests it is time to look at these old divisions between the Stuart and Hanover line with reason, after all (as we are continually reminded) it has been “sixty years since.” 

 Scott, Sir Walter. Waverly; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2015.

Remembering the Olde Cheese

 

I’m thinking back on the last time I travelled with students in London.  We were in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, an old pub (a bit touristy, but an old pub) with an interesting literary history.  Dickens supposedly wrote there, and the story goes that Oliver Goldsmith and James Boswell frequented the place. (But then, what place didn’t they frequent, one wonders.)  Anyway, in the pub was a group of seven or eight male orderlies from the nearby hospital.  They were talking a break after work. Big, burly, middle-aged men in their scrubs.  They could tell we were Americans, of course, and so they struck up a conversation.  When they found out we were studying literature they began to question us.  “What are you reading?” and more to the point “what do you know?” What they wanted to know, really, was what could we recite.  One of them stood up with his pint in hand and began reciting Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  The students were stunned.  Another man began on Milton’s “Lycidas” and another did some Wordsworth, of course.  Then they turned to us.  “What have you got.”  I was able to recite some T. S. Eliot, but it was rough going. These working-class men knew their poetry, and we did not.  It was an interesting lesson and part of the reason for travel.   In my African-American Literature class this term we are reading James Baldwin.  In his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, 

he writes: “A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition – of intellectual activity, of letters – and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends.  But this tradition does not exist in America” (6-7).  Baldwin suggests that we feel differently about writers and writing in America.  We think differently about the arts and about vocations.  He leaves the U.S.A. for Paris at one point in his career to learn about himself.  He learns as much about his own country as he does about himself.  He says “The writer is meeting in Europe people who are not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different from his own. They may love or hate or admire or fear or envy this country [the U.S.A.] – they see it, in any case, from another point of view, and this forces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken for granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable” (9). I think that is one of the great values of study abroad.  We can learn much about other cultures, but we can learn just as much about our own culture, and indeed, about ourselves. I can’t wait to learn more about myself this time across the pond. Studying abroad is a transformational and enlightening experience.

Old Blog - New Name - (A Resurrection of Sorts)

 

Ah.  Here it is. Wakey wakey old blog. I’m going to resurrect you.  Rise up and come forth old friend - it has been a few years. Sorry dear reader, but this old fellow traveler (a blog once called Irish Hurst), that at one point seemed vibrant and significant, was buried and hidden away.  Indeed, I thought it was lost forever.  And yet here it is. What once was lost is now found.  And by golly, I am here as well.  Now, is it possible that we can be made ready to continue our travels together?  Well, as you, dear reader, can see on your screen, the evidence is unrefutably clear.  It...is...alive!  Amazing....... And, as this blog is reborn, I will christen it anew with a new name: Reed Roams.  And now that the blog is named and set, and now that I've got this silly intro done, let me re-introduce myself:

I’m Dr. Brian Reed. I’m the chair of the Department of English at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. I’ve been at Mercyhurst for 22 years.  I’m currently teaching a class on African-American literature, a section of British Classics, a film class called Literary Hitchcock, and this class called Fiction of Capital Cities: Edinburgh, London, and Dublin. It is this class that has inspired me to blog again.  I do wish we had just called this class Capital Fictions because I think there is some wordplay in that title, as in “by golly, these novels are capital!”  I hope this blog is "capital." 

This blog will reflect on a study abroad experience with students to the capital cities of Dublin, Edinburgh, and London.  I’m delighted to be going on this trip.  There is much to look forward to. Here, I'll reflect on some of the reading we are doing for class and ponder what we might experience across the pond.