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Hypocrisy and Hyperbole with Oscar Wilde

The Modern Messiah Keller 1882 1 — Cartoon depicting Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit to San Francisco
Image George Frederick Keller

How Oscar Wilde's satirical writings subverted the Victorian high society to which he belonged.

Written by
Caitlyn Lehmann
Published on
12 Sep 2024

In the weeks leading up to Oscar Wilde’s ill-fated third trial at London’s Old Bailey, his works were pulled from booksellers’ shelves and his name expunged from theatrical advertisements for his hit plays. His two young sons were hastily packed off to Switzerland to shield them from the unfolding scandal. Some of Wilde’s intimate acquaintances fled into voluntary exile. Friends and detractors alike were forced into reckonings with conscience as Wilde’s disgrace threatened to engulf all those connected to him.

Prosecutions for “gross indecency,” the term used by the British legal system to criminalise sexual contact between men, were comparatively rare in late nineteenth-century England. Often the charge was often downgraded to a lesser one to avoid the glare of public attention. But the determination to suppress scandal – particularly within the British establishment – also added to the unusual zeal with which Wilde’s own prosecution was pursued.

As historian Harry Cocks notes, shortly before Wilde’s arrest, the British government had suffered a series of political embarrassments when prominent civil servants facing similar accusations had not faced trial. The Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde’s nemesis who had provoked the author’s failed suit for libel, may also have been pressuring for Wilde’s conviction by threatening to expose the Prime Minister, Lord Rosenbery. Rosenbery was himself the subject of rumours concerning his relationships with younger men

BB331_Dorian Gray1931 — *The Picture of Dorian Gray* (Wilde) 1931 edition

Scandal twinned with suppression. Public honour hiding private foibles. As a sharp observer of the moral posturing of his contemporaries, Wilde delighted and subverted with his works’ witty portrayals of duplicity and insincerity among the upper classes. His society plays unleashed well-mannered mayhem by pitching together upstanding characters of compromised integrity with honest sinners and kindly cynics. His creations also tapped the public’s growing fascination with hidden lives and potentially hideous secrets, most famously in his novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

Dorian Gray was Wilde’s alluring and shocking addition to a wave of uncanny crime narratives that gripped readers and marked the emergence of detective fiction. It followed Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries (published serially between 1887 and 1893), and, sensationally, the real-life Jack the Ripper murders in 1888.

BB331_LWF — May McAvoy and Irene Rich in Lady Windermere's Fan (1925)
Photo IMDB

But while dramatic crimes spoke to basic archetypes of good and evil, Wilde’s characters resisted such easy categories. His plays borrowed conventional plots from melodrama and gave their moral endings a twist. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, for example, the fallen woman who has abandoned her child – usually expected to repent or die – re-emerged as the worldly Mrs Erlynne, who wins a happy marriage and teaches tolerance to her prudish daughter. In Dorian Gray, the titular anti-hero is both villain and innocent corrupted.

Wilde’s trial in 1895, however, left little room for liberal mindedness. The prospect that his own respectability disguised a life of ‘perversion’ turned the trial into a press sensation. Even among the artists, suffragists and political agitators of his circle, Wilde’s homosexual liaisons were regarded as an indulgent self-undoing. Only when he emerged from prison, traumatised and his health ruined, were there courageous calls to reflect: to reflect on the price that the righteous had demanded from the man who spot-lit the failings that the righteous liked to hide.