Tortured Artists by Christopher Zara

Author:Christopher Zara [Zara, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440532115
Publisher: Adams Media
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Oscar Wilde

(1854–1900)

Abstract: Daring to speak its name

Birth name: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland

Masterwork: The Importance of Being Earnest

Demons: Secrecy and exposure

“I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and shame.”

—From De Profundis, written from prison, 1897

In Victorian England, a culture built on prudery, sex was a taboo subject, and homosexual sex was a crime. The famously flamboyant playwright Oscar Wilde could not enjoy open relationships with any of his male lovers—and indeed married a woman as a sop to cultural pressures. It was part of the double life he was forced to live, a belittling concession made by a natural nonconformist in a repressive society.

Nowhere is the conscripted duality of Oscar Wilde more evident than in The Importance of Being Earnest, his brilliantly durable sitcom of manners, which continues to be one of the most evergreen comedies in theater. Oscar was at the height of his fame when he sat down to craft a story with “no real social interest.” On a superficial level, he achieved this goal in spades, fleshed out in the feckless über-dandy Algernon Moncrieff, who finds social obligations so tedious that he fabricates the existence of a sick friend named Bunbury, whom he pretends to be visiting whenever he wants an out. Algy’s deceitful habits are matched only by those of his friend Jack Worthing, who has conjured up his own phony alibi, a brother named Ernest, allowing him to make no-questions-asked trips into town.

“in a culture built on prudery, sex was a taboo subject, and homosexual sex was a crime”

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