Oscar Wilde

Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900), was an author, playwright, and wit. He preached the importance of style in both life and art, and he attacked Victorian narrow-mindedness and complacency.

Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. His full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. At 20, Wilde left Ireland to study at Oxford University where he distinguished himself as a scholar and wit. He soon became a well-known public figure, but the period of his true achievement did not begin until he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. In these fairy tales and fables, Wilde found a literary form well-suited to his talents. Wilde's only novel, the ingenious Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), is an enlarged moral fable. It describes a man whose portrait ages and grows ugly as a reflection of his moral corruption while his actual appearance remains the same. The book seems to show the destructive side of a devotion to pleasure and beauty similar to Wilde's own.

Wilde's plays taken together are his most important works. Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895) combine then current fashionable drama of social intrigue with witty high comedy. In each play, Wilde brings together an intolerant young idealist and a person who has committed a social sin in the past. They meet in a society where appearances are everything. The effect is always to educate the idealists to their own weaknesses and to show the need for tolerance and forgiveness.

In The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his masterpiece, Wilde departed from his standard formula by combining high comedy with farce. The characters take insignificant things seriously while casually dismissing important concerns. The result is a satire on the shallowness of British society and its focus on good breeding and proper formalities. Almost every line in the play is an epigram (clever saying). Wilde also wrote Salome (1893), a one-act Biblical tragedy, in French.

In 1895, Wilde was at the peak of his career and had three hit plays running at the same time. But in that year he was accused of having homosexual relations with Lord Alfred Douglas by Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry. As a result, Wilde became involved in a hopeless legal dispute and he was sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor. From his prison experiences came his best poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and a remarkable autobiographical document sometimes called De Profundis.

Wilde left England after his release. Ruined in health, finances, and creative energy, but with his wit intact, he died in France three years later.

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