Oscar Wilde

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

Wilde was bom 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 talcs 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), «А 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

appcaranccs 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. Thcmalically, he unites his own concern with style with society's concern with appearances. He ridicules social hy­pocrisy and the Puritan idea of earnestness and sincerity. The result is a satirical fantasy on surfaces in which apparently trivial matters such as a name arc treated with extravagant seriousness. Wilde also wrote «Salom6> in French (1893), a one-act Biblical tragedy.

In 1895, Wilde was al the peak of his carecr 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 Qucensberry. As a result, Wilde be­came involved in a hopeless legal dispute and he was sentenced to two years in prison al 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.