‘There was your error,” Sir Robert Chiltern tells Lady Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. “The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?”
You don’t have to be a woman to be affronted at Sir Robert’s misogyny, but it probably helps. Writing as a man who has, so far as I’m aware, never been put on a pedestal by any woman, this line of rhetorical questioning was quite the revelation.
In The Importance of Being Oscar (BBC Two), a sprightly turn through the life and works of the great Irishman destroyed by the British establishment and his own folly, two actors performed this scene; talking heads then glossed its relevance to his tragic life. Wilde’s marriage to the long-suffering, and emblematically named, Constance was scuppered by the playwright’s illicit passion for Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.
Arguably, Wilde’s looming ruin found expression in Chiltern’s importunate wail, which we heard continue in self-pitying vein. “You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now. And so, last night you ruined my life for me – yes, ruined it!”
It is as if, in this speech, Wilde made women bear responsibility for what the heteronormative Victorian establishment would do to him. It’s also as if Sir Robert was Wilde as cowardly Christ, unwilling to come down from the cross to disclose his wounds. Which seems unfair all round.
But that is no way to interpret Wilde. Art doesn’t imitate life, but the other way round, as we learned from his lovely essay The Decay of Lying, dramatised here. “Where, if not from the impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?” said one croquet-playing fop to another. “At present, people see fogs, not because they are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.”
Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland sensibly told us that, bewitched by his plays and stories, we have neglected Wilde’s essays. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde wrote: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” If so then, while art does not imitate life, it may give – through its very artificiality – expression to what is otherwise unbearable about life.
And his life did become unbearable. Bosie’s dad, the Marquis of Queensberry, turned up to the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895 with a bouquet of rotting vegetables then left a card at Wilde’s club describing him as a “sondomite” (sic). This prompted Wilde to sue the marquis for libel, his biographer Matthew Sturgis argued. That spurred police investigators to track down the rent boys whom Wilde paid for sex. Their testimonies resulted in two years’ hard labour at Reading Gaol. Wilde died, in Parisian exile, in 1900, bankrupt and disgraced.
In what was otherwise telly hagiography, Gyles Brandreth, president of the Oscar Wilde Society, stated that several of these prostitutes were 16 when they gave testimony; younger when Wilde had sex with them. And yet there’s no sign Wilde regretted the abuse. In De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Bosie from Reading, Wilde declared: “People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they … were delightful and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement.” That “feasting with panthers” makes it sound as though he was willing prey when he was the predator.
There’s a risk with this sort of documentary that, just as each man (and woman) kills the thing he (or she) loves, so admirers damn their hero with praise. Stephen Fry claimed there was no Shakespeare play as perfect as The Importance of Being Earnest. Equally, Wilde scholar Jerusha McCormack argued, no doubt rightly, that the Irishman mounted “an extravagant campaign against Anglo-Saxon stupidity”. But when anyone puts Wilde on a monstrous pedestal as literary genius, Irish rebel sticking it to English toffs, queer icon or anything else, they neglect the one jot of truth Sir Robert says in An Ideal Husband, namely: “We have all feet of clay, women as well as men.”
