The Embarrassing Orthodoxy of Oscar Wilde
Michael Buma, Class
The Victorian Newsletter
No. 107 Spring 2005
Used by permission

Oscar Wilde is one of those rare authors perhaps equally famous for his life as for his works. When Wilde was a student at Oxford he enthralled his colleagues by decorating his room with blue vases full of lilies (the known symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and is reported to have caused a stir by showing up to gallery openings in a coat made to resemble a cello. The son of a woman who had reinvented herself by claiming her maiden name, Elgee, which was a corruption of the surname of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, Wilde inherited his mother's sense of flair and daring. With his ubiquitous green carnation, flamboyantly feminized dress and clever epigrammatic sayings, Wilde cultivated the dandyish persona of "the aesthete in the marketplace" (Sloan 9) when he was through at Oxford, soon winning fame on both sides of the Atlantic for his easy wit and effulgent flamboyance. Wilde was highly adept at networking and self-promotion, essentially managing to turn himself into a walking advertisement for his plays, prose, poetry, and aesthetic philosophies. When the artistic freedom and experimentation of the "New Hedonism" surfaced in the 1880s and 90s, Wilde became the "presiding spirit of this emerging new culture" (Sloan 19).

READ THE FULL TEXT » (PDF, 1.48Mb)