OSCAR WILDE IN SPANISH INTRODUCTION
September 2007; updated February 2010
Dr. CRISTINA PASCUAL ARANSÁEZ
INTRODUCTION
1. WORKS BY WILDE
2. BOOKS ENTIRELY ABOUT WILDE
3. WORKS OF WILDE PUBLISHED IN CATALAN, BASQUE, VALENCIAN, GALICIAN AND ASTURIAN
4. BOOKS PARTIALLY ON WILDE
5. ARTICLES ON WILDE
6. DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS ENTIRELY ON WILDE
7. DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS PARTIALLY ON WILDE
8. FILM AND THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS OF WILDE’S WORKS
9. MISCELLANY: ADAPTATIONS OF WILDE’S WORKS AND FICTIONALISED BIOGRAPHIES OF WILDE
INTRODUCTION
The present bibliography contains information about the research material on Oscar Wilde which has been written in Spain since 1900. The fascination exerted by Wilde in Spanish academic and non-academic circles has made him the subject of different kinds of articles and books for more than a century. Unfortunately a considerable number of accounts about Wilde has focused on the myth and has thus expanded the legend around him to the detriment of his intellectual and literary achievements. Nevertheless, the critical material written about Oscar Wilde in Spain over the recent decades has marked a gradual transition from the ‘mythologized’ and very often inaccurate descriptions of Wilde’s life and writings to a revision of the figure of Wilde and his works that has done much to revalue Wilde’s position as a writer and thinker.
As it is the case in other countries, the significant turn in critical research towards the serious appreciation of Oscar Wilde in this country has been the product of the discovery of a variety of unknown documents by Wilde as well as of the emergence of new areas of study and innovative methods of analysis in literary history. In addition, there have been important political and sociocultural changes in Spain – the establishment of democracy in the mid-seventies, the introduction of the degree of English Philology at Spanish universities in the sixties – which have undoubtedly allowed to re-assess Wilde’s career under proper conditions and has contributed to the proliferation of writings about Wilde’s life and works in the last decades.
Since the amount of critical material which has been written about Oscar Wilde throughout all these years in Spain is particularly impressive, there seemed to be a need of compiling the Spanish bibliographical information about Wilde in order to offer a practical tool for researching to those scholars interested in acceding to those critical works. However, this bibliographical study is not simply intended to offer a listing of the titles of the essays and books written about Wilde in this country; the present work constitutes a guide of research whose principal objectives are the following ones: first, to recover a number of essays and books which may have been unduly forgotten among the morass of studies on Wilde in the last years but are nevertheless interesting due to their thoughts and perspectives into Wilde’s life and writings; second, to provide a description of the main developments in the lines of investigation in Wildean criticism which may account for the present ‘demythologized’ portrayal of Wilde; third, to indicate that there are innovative approaches into Wilde’s writings that may be further pursued with fruitful results as well as to suggest new areas of study that have not been explored in Spain yet.
This bibliography starts with a compilation of the Spanish books which are entirely devoted to Oscar Wilde. With the exception of Armiño and Peláez’s work (2001), which contains a large number of papers read at an Oscar Wilde Congress in Madrid and thus shows indirectly the recent efforts to enhance Wilde’s intellectual and literary reputation, the rest of the books are biographies written about Oscar Wilde by Spanish writers from the first decades of the twentieth century up to the present. The fact that these works share significant characteristics – all these works are biographical, none of them has been written by researchers – is particularly revealing: on the one hand, it confirms that these writings emerged from an initial interest in the representation the life of Wilde ‘the myth’ over that in his career as an artist; on the other hand, it suggests that many of them may have in turn endorsed and therefore propagated that popular image of Wilde.
To a certain extent this is true of most of the early biographies of Wilde, which tend to rely on the use of undocumented and/or biased sources and to accumulate an impressive amount of trivial material, all of which renders them fairly inaccurate. With this caution in mind, it is worth remarking Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s biographical works (1944, 1968), which constitute notable attempts to emphasise the importance of Oscar Wilde’s crucial role in the development of fin-de-siècle literary movements. Gómez de la Serna was an aesthetic writer and a prolific journalist who founded a literary magazine called Prometeo in order to innovate the literary panorama in Spain with the introduction of the main ideas and works of the French writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. He contributed immensely to the diffusion of the writings of Oscar Wilde in Spain by publishing extracts of Wilde’s works in Prometeo and he wrote several prologues to the Spanish translations of Wilde’s literary production. All in all, Gómez de la Serna’s biographies of Wilde abound in banal anecdotes, most of which were invented, but he regards Wilde’s eccentric attitude – which he shared – as a brave means to undermine the puritanical code of the Victorian world and, most importantly, he treats Wilde’s artistic achievements with the outmost respect.
The works written by Gómez de la Serna and all the other early biographical studies of Wilde have been superseded in several respects by those written in the last decades. Contemporary biographies of Wilde are more documented and less partial than the previous ones, and consequently they deal with Wilde’s life and affairs seriously. But regrettably few of these works aim to stop the process of mythologizing Wilde’s life.
Among those writers who intend to provide a demythologized image of Wilde, the most outstanding example is Villena (1978, 1989, 2001). Luis Antonio de Villena is a well-known Spanish poet, writer and literary translator whose deep concern with epicurean decadent traditions as well as his delight in adopting extravagant dandiacal poses may have led him to draw his attention to Oscar Wilde at a very early stage of his literary career. Villena’s account of Wilde surpasses the other Wildean biographies in Spain, because it sets a special emphasis on Wilde as a modern writer who used his literary contacts to promote his writings. Luis Antonio de Villena treats in detail some aspects of Wilde’s career – Wilde’s poetical production, the American tour, his experience as a journalist – which had been neglected by previous Spanish biographers. Above all, Villena insists that Wilde was ‘modern’ in all the aspects of his life and work.
Other biographers of Wilde have dwelled upon the ‘myth’ by writing fictionalised accounts of Wilde’s life. For instance, Dalmau (1994, reprinted in 2000) recreates a fictional monologue in which Wilde addresses the musician Morrissey after the latter has told the writer that he wants to write an opera about him. Another fictional work about Oscar Wilde is a novel written by Villena (1997), which narrates the last meeting of Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas at an old Parisian café.
The next section of this bibliography contains the titles of those books which are partially devoted to Oscar Wilde. The main interest of this section is that it allows us to trace the changes in the perception of Wilde to the emergence of new disciplines and perspectives within the area of literary history in the last years. Spanish critics started to apply to the analysis of Wilde the innovative methodology proposed in areas such as theatre history, comparative studies, or those dealing with the relationships between literature and mass culture, which generated a new image of Wilde as a professional writer.
Soon biographical sketches of Wilde began to appear in the form of chapters in different literary histories written by Spanish writers, which indirectly indicates that, in spite of the usual prejudices against him, his image as a writer of international reputation was never altogether dismissed:
It must be admitted that some of the first commentators presented Wilde’s life and works under the pervasive influence of his legend, which very often resulted in impartial accounts of his artistic achievements; for example, Ayala (1919, reprinted in 2003) describes Wilde as a ‘spoiled child’, and he examines his writings from a moral perspective that leads him to diminish the value of his literary and critical output (but paradoxically he claims elsewhere that Wilde was a ‘genius’ and he places his works among those of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Lord Byron). Some notable exceptions to this early tendency to allow the ‘myth’ overshadow the merits of the artist are Unamuno and Borges (1). Miguel de Unamuno (1968), the eminent Spanish philosopher and writer, compiled a series of articles about British writers under a volume called Letras Inglesas, one of which is devoted to Oscar Wilde (‘La balada de la prisión de Reading’, first published in 1897). Unamuno, who is a firm detractor of Aestheticism, complains that the writers and thinkers who follow this literary movement in Spain lack the artistic qualities which Oscar Wilde possesses; and Borges, whose appreciation of Wilde’s as a writer and thinker is widely known, is one of the first writers to set the myth of Wilde under the proper light in order to emphasise the role of Wilde the artist. In recent years Javier Marías, who is an acclaimed Spanish writer, has included a brief description of Wilde’s life in a selection of biographies of international writers called Vidas Escritas (1992), where he depicts Wilde’s exile to France with a mixture of mild irony and deep admiration.
But the serious examination of Wilde’s writings which would eventually led to the revaluation of this author started with those comparative studies (Cansinos-Assens, 1919; Goy de Silva, 1950) which discussed Wilde’s treatment of the Salomé myth and the relation of Wilde’s text to those of the French writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, these books about Salomé tended to portray Wilde as a minor figure who limited himself to appropriate French sources. Later some writers have tried to rectify this alleged lack of originality in Wilde’s use of French motives, for example Alonso Gómez (1999), who reinterprets Wilde’s original use of symbolism in his one-act tragedy.
The parallels between Wilde’s De Profundis and other writings in Western literature are the object of analysis of some studies such as González de Cardedal’s pioneering work (1939) and the recent account of Puente (2002), both of which provide accounts of the possible analogues of Wilde’s work in European literature and thinking where Wilde is treated as a central figure in the modernist tradition.
A similar line of argument is pursued by Julio Chiappini (1991) and Juan Herrero Senés (2002), who broaden their scope to deal with Wilde’s critical writings. Hence Julio Chiappini investigates the connections between Wilde’s and Borges’ critical stance on different literary matters. And Herrero Senés reassesses Wilde’s significance as a thinker and art theoretician by exploring the liberating experience which arises from Nietzsche’s and Wilde’s conceptions of life and art.
Equally remarkable in their attempts to relocate Wilde’s position in literary and intellectual culture are those works which have lately arisen from the most innovative methods associated with literary history. In the area of theatre history Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (2002) provides a short but insightful description of the stage design in the contemporary productions of Wilde’s plays in Spain which draws attention to Wilde’s resourcefulness as a modern playwright. As far as the new studies of literature in relation to mass society, the stimulating Formas artísticas y sociedad de masas: elementos para una genealogía del gusto, el entresiglos XIX-XX (Facundo, 2001) tries to elaborate a paradigm to understand contemporary culture by searching the roots of today’s cultural concerns in the artistic and literary products at the turn of nineteenth century.
The third section of the present bibliography is the most extensive of all of them, because it includes the large number of papers and articles written about Oscar Wilde in this country over the last century. It is especially noteworthy that most of these scholarly essays have been written over the last thirty years, which testifies to the fact that the current tendency to revaluate Wilde’s artistic merits in the light of the new areas of study of literary history has in turn produced an increase in the intellectual interest in his figure and writings. A look at the academic writings about Wilde shows that there exists a wide range of innovative approaches to his life and works, and it also allows us to determine the degree and the kind of critical attention which individual works receive. This point is essential in order to determine the similarities and differences between the trends in Wildean criticism in Spain in contrast to those in other countries, which can be very helpful to suggest new fields of research for the future.
The majority of the recent studies about Wilde have focused on the most controversial aspects of his life, such as his dealings with Victorian society, the trials, and his imprisonment. However, there is a notable shift from the traditional moralizing vision of Wilde’s life which was typical of the previous works to the main emphasis upon the social and philosophical concerns that Wilde concealed beneath his public mask which characterises these new articles and papers (e. g. Roffe, 1979; Ballesteros González, 19917; Álvarez Baños, 1998; González Moreno, 2000; Rodríguez Monge, 2000; Pascual Aransáez, 2003, 2004). Apart from this, the growing interest of critics to take up the subject of Wilde as an influential literary figure has resulted in the production of works which analyse how his critical and literary principles pervades the works of later Spanish writers (Bellveser, 1976; Coletes, 1985; Constán Valverde, 2002/2003).
As regards Wilde’s literary and critical output, The Picture of Dorian Gray has received much more scholarly attention than the rest of Wilde’s writings. Spanish scholars have devoted most of their studies to Wilde’s novel, and they have discussed the same kind of topics:
Galán (1997) and Costas Pardo (1998) examine the sources and parallels of Wilde’s novel with different works: Galán indicates the connections between Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Costas Pardo analyses the relationship of Wilde’s novel to the theme of Faust. The issue of homosexual identity in The Picture of Dorian Gray is investigated by Sánchez Pardo (1993) and Domínguez Leiva (2000) from the perspective of the emergence of homosexuality within literary discourse, and Suárez (2001) treats the question of homosexuality in Wilde’s novel in contrast to contemporary representations of homosexuality in art. But The Picture of Dorian Gray has been especially explored by means of the different methodologies provided by the late trends in literary theory. Therefore, Fraile (1994) comments Wilde’s novel from a postmodernist standpoint which draws on different critical perspectives in order to provide a picture of it as a metaphor of the act of reading; Monforte (1998) reads The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage; Pascual Aransáez (2001) carries out a study of Wilde’s novel by putting into practice the theoretical principles of the reception theorist Wolfgang Iser, and she shows that Wilde employs certain literary strategies all throughout the novel in order to propel the reader to cooperate actively in the production of the meaning novel and thus to discover by himself its moral implications.
The plays have also been persistently studied in Spain, both taken collectively and individually. The early works about Wilde’s modern comedies are those which regarded them as a whole. Critics such as Toro Santos (1979) and Martínez Victorio (1987) comment on the nature and the function of the dandy in Wilde’s society dramas, arguing that the Wildean dandy’s use of irony is an effective weapon both to disguise his real self as well as to attack the social and moral foibles of Victorian society.
A more innovative approach to Wilde’s plays is provided by recent critics, who prefer to study them on an individual basis. The Importance of Being Earnest has received the greatest amount of critical attention, and many of the studies devoted to it have subjected it to a close textual analysis. Hence Candel Borman (2000) centres upon the propositional and pragmatic behaviour in the play, and Mira (2003) analysis the different possibilities of translation of the play into Spanish. An Ideal Husband has also been discussed from an innovative perspective in Mansilla Blanco’s ‘’Art Never Expresses Anything but Itself’: las acotaciones artísticas en An Ideal Husband de Oscar Wilde’ (1994), which is an insightful analysis of the stage directions in Wilde’s play. Apart from the social comedies, Salome has been widely studied by Wildean critics. López-Abadía Arroita (1988) and Ramos Gay (2003) have pursued the question of the origins and development in the use of the myth of Salomé from the French writers to Oscar Wilde, where the emphasis is set upon the parallels (not the influences) between the French writings and Wilde’s drama. More interesting are the accounts provided by Gutiérrez Gutiérrez (1995) and Bonilla Cerezo (2003), who discuss the influences of Wilde’s Salomé upon the literary works of modernist writers from Spanish-speaking countries (Enrique Gómez Carillo in the former, Valle-Inclán and Castelao in the latter).
Interestingly enough, Oscar Wilde’s critical works have been highly appreciated by Spanish critics in recent years. In general these scholars who have taken up the study of Wilde’s critical writings attempt to bring light to the connections between Wilde’s criticism and those of acclaimed literary critics or writers, which enables them to emphasise the value of Wilde’s proposals in the context of the most important literary and critical movements as well to highlight Wilde’s role as a precursor of certain concerns in modern and contemporary literary theory. Among these articles, the most suggestive ones are Díaz Bild’s ‘Wilde and Barkhtin on the Opendedness of Art and Life’ (1996), Pascual Aransáez’s ‘Extreme Versions of Subjectivist Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Intentions and Anatole France’s La Vie Littéraire’ (2001) and ‘A New Approach to Oscar Wilde’s Literary Criticism: Revaluation of Wilde’s Aesthetics in the Perspective of Reception Theory’ (2002); Rodríguez Mosteiro’s ‘Oscar Wilde a la luz de las teorías orteguianas’ (2002), and Bárcenas Orbe’s ‘El canto de Marsis: filosofía, educación y el arte de vivir’ [on education as an aesthetic experience in the critical production of Foucault and Wilde] (2006).
In contrast, Wilde’s short fiction has been barely discussed by critics in Spain. The works which have treated Wilde’s fairy tales collectively treat them from a rather traditional standpoint (Martínez Arancón, 1980; Roca i Costa, 2000). The critics who have analysed Wilde’s fictional writings separately provide more innovative accounts of them, but they are scarce: Sanz Casares (1990) comments on the social and ethical proposal of ‘The Young King’, and in another article (1992) she explores the figure of the grotesque in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’; Pascual Aransáez (1999) carries out a cognitive analysis of the crosss-linguistic differences between the ‘The Happy Prince’ and its Spanish translation.
Oscar Wilde’s later writings have not received much critical attention by Spanish critics, either. Sánchez- Pardo González in ‘Confesión y Sublimación en De Profundis: raza, disciplina e identidad en Oscar Wilde’ (1999) maintains that Wilde’s lifewriting results from the collapse of the ‘fundamental fantasy’ that organised his reality by protecting him from the loss of Lord Alfred Douglas. As she sees it, Wilde decides to turn to the concept of ‘race’ as a category of imagination which induces him to reconstruct his identity through this epistolary representation of his melancholia and his acceptance of social abjection. As regards The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the few critics who examine it adopt a linguistic perspective: Sala (1997) discusses Miguel Arimany’s poetic translation of Wilde’s poem; Pascual Aransáez (2000) analyses the interrelationship between syntax and metre in The Ballad of Reading Gaol in order to show that Wilde’s personal experience in prison had an important influence on the form of the poem, which differs from a traditional ballad in that it reflects the individual’s subjective point of view.
The next section of the bibliography deals with the Spanish doctoral dissertations which are totally or partially devoted to Oscar Wilde. A look at the former indirectly indicates the shift towards the revaluation of Wilde’s works that has taken place in the last decades:
The early doctoral dissertations focused on traditional aspects such as the socialism in Wilde’s writings (Toro Santos, 1977), the irony in Wilde’s literary production (Martínez Victorio, 1989), and the aestheticism in Wilde’s fairly tales (Sanz Casares, 1991). In contrast, Pascual Aransáez (2002) considers Wilde as a modern professional writer who used his businesslike abilities and the marketing techniques at his disposal to promote his works, and she studies how Wilde's emphasis on the creative role of the receiver of the work of art leads him to employ a series of strategies in his literary writings that encourage the reader to participate in the construction of the meaning and to derive their social implications. And Ramos Gay (2003) analyses the influence, reception and subversion of the French drama (especially Feydeau’s vaudevilles) in Wilde’s comedies in order to reassess Wilde’s plays in the context of nineteenth century English drama and to show Wilde as a precursor of certain comical formulas used by contemporary playwrights (Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard).
In a similar way, the fact that there is a growing number of scholars who decide to make reference to Wilde’s works in their doctoral dissertations about other authors indicates the current appreciation of Wilde’s achievements as a thinker (Serrano de Haro Soriano, 1993; Cruzalegui Sotelo, 1994; Clúa Ginés, 2004), a writer (Sánchez Espinosa, 1994; Valls Oyarzun, 2005; Gónzalez de la Llama Fernández, 2005), and a playwright (Marín Lajusticia, 1991; Jiménez Fortea, 2003).
Finally, I have included two sections which are intended to testify to the enormous popularity of Oscar Wilde in academic and non-academic circles alike at present. The first one of them comprises those Spanish film and theatrical representations of Wilde’s works that have been recorded (although there have been many of them live everywhere in Spain over the last twenty years), and the second one contains the main information about the free adaptations of Wilde’s life and Wilde’s writings which have been written or performed (and later recorded) in this country.
All in all, the amount of critical material here compiled demonstrates that the ‘traditional’ portrayal of Wilde which was characteristic in the critical accounts about this author and his works at the beginning of the twentieth century has eventually given way to an innovative image of Wilde as a professional and skilled writer and a serious thinker who was concerned with social and cultural matters. Nevertheless, it also implies that there is still much to be done in order to broaden the scope of research of Wildean studies in Spain, because there are some aspects which have been unduly neglected: we have observed that the short fiction and the later writings have not received much critical interest and the same can be said with respect to two society dramas, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband; moreover, Wilde’s active participation in the commercial aspects involved in the production of his narrative and dramatic works has not been explored yet; and some aspects of Wilde’s life, such as his career as a journalist or his political concerns have been totally ignored so far. These final remarks do not intend to add a pessimistic tone to the bibliography. On the contrary, my objective is to encourage scholars to continue their investigations into Wilde’s life and writings by searching new fields of study in order to attain a deeper understanding of the richness of Oscar Wilde’s literary and intellectual achievements.
NOTE
The present bibliographies compile secondary sources about Oscar Wilde which have appeared in Spain, even if they have been originally written in different countries. Therefore, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Chiappini are included here, because the works of these Argentinean writers have also been published by Spanish publishing houses; the same can be said with respect to Rodrigo Quesada Monge from Costa Rica, whose articles on Oscar Wilde are published in an electronic journal and thus available in Spain.
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