Long Description:He was the son of a surgeon, Sir William Wilde and the writer Jane
Francesca Elgee (known as "Speranza"). From his school days and
certainly at Oxford University, it seems, the beginnings of his
fanatical aestheticism could be found in his extravagant dress
sense and consummate style. Wilde despised sport and violence. In
his play A Woman of No Importance (1893), he sums up his feelings
towards both activities while demonstrating his astonishing and
famous command of wit: "The English country gentleman galloping
after a fox - the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable".
Until his first expression of homosexual feelings in 1886, Oscar
Wilde's works (mostly poetry) were fairly second-rate, shallow or
derivative. However, his sexual revelation seemed to be a turning
point: his productivity increased, and the quality improved. The
guilt he felt about his homosexuality and his treatment of his
wife, Constance (who he had married in 1884), and their two
children, could be seen to have honed his ability to write on the
themes of evil, crime and suffering. Up to the writing of The
Importance of Being Earnest (his last play) in 1886, his career can
be divided into three basic units.
The first was that in which he wrote predominantly fairy tales,
in which the good and the pure always triumph (the best known
examples being "The Selfish Giant" and "Lord Arthur Saville's
Crime"). However, Wilde's tales differ from the norm in that they
deal with the evil within human beings rather than as an external
force. Written for "children from eight to eighty" they can be seen
as an urge within himself to fight his own 'evil' and remain in a
world of childlike 'innocence'. At this time, he also wrote
critical essays like "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as
Artist" in a playful, witty style that masked their
seriousness.
By 1890, Wilde seemed to have come to the conclusion that the
'evil' in himself could not be controlled, and so explored the
theme not within the safe confines of a fairytale, but in a dark,
sinister novel with a tragic ending. The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), as its title implies, has a central character whose nature
is grey: his childlike innocence is gradually corrupted. He becomes
increasingly evil as the novel progresses, finding beauty in evil,
though he sometimes yearns for his lost innocence. Finally, he
becomes so evil that he cannot bear it. On discovering that he
cannot recover that which is lost, he grows desperate and
accidentally kills himself. Despite Dorian's immoral behaviour, the
novel has a moral end, as it shows what happens to someone who
cannot control evil impulses. However, the press still attacked the
novel for its perceived immorality. So, Wilde set forward what was
essentially the same message in a social comedy, the play Lady
Windermere's Fan (1892), which highlighted the ambiguity of class,
nature and evil. This was much more successful with the public.
Late in 1891, Wilde wrote his chilling one-act symbolist play
Salome, in which human nature is presented as entirely black. But
Wilde was not unhappy about this; declaring that human nature is
totally and irrecoverably evil, and that we should express this
rather than hiding it. Banned from the English stage by the Lord
Chamberlain, Wilde again responded by repeating the basic message
in a light comedy, A Woman of No Importance (1892). Underneath this
play's conventional melodramatic surface and sparkling wit is the
idea that human nature is totally evil. In both these plays, Wilde
is a Satanist, preaching the acceptance and expression of inner
depravity and denying that there is any goodness in human
nature.
However, Wilde felt that he had gone too far, and so The
Importance of Being Earnest can be seen the product of a reaction
against lost innocence. The tone perfectly recaptures this, and the
characters who inhabit the play are really babies who are playing
at life. When Jack is consulting Dr Chasuble about being
christened, the Canon offers to christen him at five o'clock along
with some newly-born twins. In his response - "Oh! I don't see much
fun in being christened along with other babies. It would be
childish" - Jack refers to himself as a child. He and the other
characters, though physically adult, mentally and psychologically
remain in childhood, innocently imitating the behaviour of real
adults - thus their attempts to marry are attempts to ape the
behaviour of grown-ups. Their actions are quite babyish until the
game is interrupted by real life. Thus, without actually returning
to the fairy-tale genre, Wilde can recapture the safe, closeted
world of childlike innocence.
Wilde was imprisoned for homosexual acts in 1895 and went
bankrupt before he left the prison. Other than De Profundis (1905,
posthumous), written partly in jail, his only other contribution to
literary history would be The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a grim
and sombre reflection on the execution of an inmate and (again) the
deep-seated evil in man. Wilde died in 1900 but his name is still
synonymous with the bohemian lifestyle, wit and comic theatre.
Description kindly taken from Dublin Tourism.