THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

‘Judas always writes the biography’: The Many Lives of Oscar Wilde

Ruth Robbins

[This essay was first published in Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, eds Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, pp.97-118, and is here republished by kind permission.  Endnote references are given as underlined numbers - within square brackets - in blue in the text.]

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life,
When even I myself, I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

• WaIt Whitman, ‘Inscriptions’ from Leaves of Grass

Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice.  Not I.  Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim’.

• Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable right of any man of parts and culture.

• Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist - Part One’

Three texts about Oscar Wilde.

First:

Between January and March, 1897, Prisoner C.3.3. in H. M. Prison, Reading, one Oscar Wilde, was occupied in the task of writing a very long letter to one of his ‘accomplices’ in the ‘crime’ of which he had been convicted: the addressee was his former lover and erstwhile friend, Lord Alfred Douglas. In writing the letter, the prisoner C.3.3. was reasserting his identity as a man, not just a number, and as an artist rather than as a criminal. The letter was, of course, the document which we now call De Profundis.

De Profundis is many things. Wilde himself, in a letter to Robert Ross described it as:

the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behaviour… You will see the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the outside seems a combination of absolute idiocy and vulgar bravado. ... I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory that [the Queensberrys] put me into, for all time. ... I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it. (Selected Letters, 240)

Wilde saw his letter as an attempt both to explain himself, for and to himself, and to reinterpret himself for the benefit of posterity.

Other commentators have seen different motivations for its existence. Regenia Gagnier sees it as an exercise in self-therapy whose object is to ‘pose a total imaginative world against the frozen time and alien space of imprisonment’ (Gagnier 1987, 187) in order to resist the threatened loss of self represented by insanity. Jonathan Dollimore has described it as a ‘conscious renunciation’ of Wilde’s pre-prison philosophies, and as a ‘confessional narrative whose aim is a deepened self-awareness’ (Dollimore 1991, 95). Both Norbert Kohl and Christopher Nassaar have commented on the letter’s divided aim. Finally, for Wilde’s most recent biographer, Richard Ellmann, the letter is not a confession but a dramatic monologue, and most importantly of all a love letter to Douglas, in which Wilde ‘complains of neglect and arranges a reunion’ (Ellmann 1988,482, 483). It is an ambiguous text: a large document which, as Whitman might have said, ‘contains multitudes’; it is contradictory in both conception and reception.

The structure of De Profundis, as Gagnier has demonstrated, alternates between the meticulous reconstruction of episodes from Wilde’s shared past with Douglas and the attempt to create a philosophy which gives meaning to his current situation, since, as Wilde says, ‘I could not bear [my sufferings] to be without meaning’ (Selected Letters, 195). Now for Wilde:

Suffering... is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us, as the warrant, the evidence of our continued identity. (Selected Letters, 164)

Dollimore is right to see Wilde as renouncing his previous philosophies. One phrase, repeated several times in the letter — ‘The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right’ — stands in direct opposition to his previous position that ‘only the shallow know themselves’ (Writings, 572).

The letter, however, is not consistent in its recantation of the past. As Gagnier has argued, two pairs of binary oppositions, Romance and Realism, and Romance and Finance, inform the structure of the letter, pulling it in different directions. The Romance of Wilde’s earlier life as a ‘man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of [his] age’ and who was favoured with ‘genius, a distin­guished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring’ (Selected Letters, 194) is narrated in contrast both to Bosie’s despicable behaviour, and to the prison cell in which Wilde now finds himself, as the logical consequence of Bosie’s fatal influence over him. He begins by claiming to blame himself, and forcing himself — and by extension, Douglas — to realise his prison surroundings:

I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. (Selected Letters, 154)

In saying mea culpa, Wilde is also able to point to the difference in consequence between his own actions and Bosie’s equally culpable ones. In other words, whilst Wilde is clearly on a quest to understand and to give meaning to his own sufferings, he seeks also to make Bosie understand the extent of his responsibility for Wilde’s downfall. De Profundis is not about developing self-knowledge alone (indeed, Wilde claims that prison has given him self-knowledge already). His aim is equally to explain Bosie to Bosie: ‘The real fool ... is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long’ (Selected Letters, 154, my emphasis). The letter is didactic. Wilde seeks to kill Bosie’s vanity since self-realisation ‘is the only thing that can save you’ (Selected Letters, 153). Wilde had once written that ‘All art is essentially useless’, and inasmuch as it is didactic, De Profundis is not art, since it seeks to have an effect. Wilde wants to change his friend — to have, as it were, a moral or improving effect on him.

Wilde chronicles in detail the lifestyle into which, he argues, Bosie had led him. (The passive voice is often used in the letter; even when Wilde is blaming himself, it is for having allowed himself to be led astray.) He insists on the financial details of their extravagant expenditure together before the scandal broke, and he contrasts past luxury with his present misery. The money and the time which they wasted together represent a double failure in their friendship, which Wilde sees as an artistic failure. The time that they spent together meant that Wilde had neither the leisure nor the liberty to be a great artist; a typical day spent with Bosie left him less than two hours for writing. And the money that they spent on expensive hotels and meals has left Wilde debts which have led him to the Bankruptcy Courts. The fatal friendship has resulted in Wilde failing as an artist, as a man (in the worldly sense that he is now bankrupt), as a husband and father, and as a son.

Yet despite all the very good reasons for Wilde to reject Bosie’s friendship, he seeks also in the letter to find ways of forgiving him. The medium through which forgiveness will come is the example of Christ. Alongside all the other facets of this text, Wilde also uses the letter to write an aesthetic biography of Christ, and he seeks a Christ through whom he too can be redeemed.

This Christ is very much a Christ of Wilde’s own creation. As Ellmann has noted, the one aspect of Christ’s life which has no influence on Wilde is his divinity (Ellmann 1988,483). It is Christ’s example, not his origin, which matters. The sufferings of the son of God are seen in the text as the paradigm for the suffering of the artist (Kohl 1989, 278), and for Wilde, the essential feature of Christ is his personality. He insists that Christ’s value resides in the fact that he exemplified imaginative sympathy with suffering which makes his life into ‘the most wonderful of poems’ (Selected Letters, 205). Christ’s miracles have nothing to do with the miracles narrated by the Gospels. For Wilde, Christ’s story ends with ‘the stone rolled over the door of the sepulchre’ (Selected Letters, 205), not with the Resurrection. The other miracles are miracles dependent entirely on an extraordinary personality.

I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was the charm of his personality that those who touched his garments or his hand forgot their pain; ... and that to his friends who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed delicate, and the water had the taste of good wine, and the whole house became full of the odour and sweetness of nard. (Selected Letters, 207)

That, of course, was the miracle of Wilde’s own personality when he was at the height of his powers. His conversation, the stories he told to his associates, acted like a spell on those who listened to him. (Queensberry himself was charmed for a while. ‘I don’t wonder that you are so fond of him,’ he said to Douglas. ‘He is a wonderful man.’ [Ellmann 1988, 393]) In Wilde’s pantheon, Man is not made in the image of God; Christ is remade in the image of Wilde. ‘Christ is the most supreme of Individualists,’ he wrote in De Profundis (Selected Letters, 207); and again, ‘There is something so unique about Christ’ (215), remarks which could equally be applied to Wilde himself.

The letter, despite several instances of self-castigation, is certainly not an abject confession of past faults. Wilde describes himself as a ‘born antinomian ... one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws’ (Selected Letters, 196). And for Christ too, in Wilde’s recreation of him, ‘there were no laws: there were exceptions merely’ (Selected Letters, 213). Like Wilde himself, this Christ is a disciple of Pater:

All that Christ says to us by way of a little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that we should always be ready for the coming of the Bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the lover. (Selected Letters, 214)

Which is not very far away from Pater’s credo in The Renaissance that one should ‘burn always with this hard, gemlike flame ... maintain [the] ecstasy’ (Pater [1873] 1961, 222).

And finally, Wilde rejects Christ’s traditionally accepted abhorrence of sin. He claims that Christ regarded ‘sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things, and modes of perfection’ (Selected Letters, 215). In a characteristically heretical subversion of Christian doctrine, Wilde argues that sin is necessary; for without it there can be no repentance, and without repentance there can be no self-realisation. ‘The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one’s past’ (215). The alteration takes place because the teleology of sin is changed through the processes of confession and repentance. A sin which is not repented leads to hell; a sin which is forgiven brings rejoicing to heaven. The construction of a narrative of sin through confession, brings events to a comprehensible and moral ending, and thus alters not the facts of the past, but their meanings. This is the move which Wilde makes in the final paragraph of the letter, in which he suggests that the past is not irrevocable:

Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them, and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. ... A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. (Selected Letters, 239)

Wilde always mistrusted too factual an approach to history: it is not the facts which matter, but how they are interpreted.

A second text:

I have become a problem in modem ethics, as Symonds would say, although it seemed to me at the time that I was the solution. Everyone is talking about my particular disposition now, for, as usual, I chose the proper dramatic moment to reveal my sexual infamy to the world. Even the Germans have become interested in the subject, and, of all the extraordinary things that have happened to me, the most extraordinary may be that I shall be remembered not as an artist but as a case history, a psychological study to be placed beside Onan and Herodias. I might even be mentioned by Edward Carpenter in one of his more suggestive passages. ...

The problem, as always in modem thought is one of nomenclature. I am not inverted: I was diverted. (Ackroyd, 112)

These are not the words of Oscar Wilde, but the words of a fictional character who shares his name in Peter Ackroyd’s 1983 novel, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. The novel chronicles the last months of the fictional Oscar Wilde in Paris in 1900.

These words mimic, in a very different tone, another letter which Wilde wrote in prison, this time to the Home Secretary. This second letter is humble, scientific and legalistic. Wilde asked for his sentence to be commuted on the grounds that he was not criminal, but a man suffering from sexual insanity. He borrows the register of contemporary sociology and criminology, and insists (as Ackroyd’s Wilde does with satirical intent) that he is a case study, not an evil man. His crimes are ‘diseases to be cured by a physician rather than crimes to be punished by a judge’ (Selected Letters, 142). Depending on to whom is he is writing, Wilde is many things. He is a criminal, a madman, a martyr, a saint, an artist, a husband, a father, a man about town (a dandy or flâneur). As Ackroyd’s Wilde puts it: ‘I am positively Whitmanesque.  I contain multitudes’ (Ackroyd 1983, 8).

The Wilde in the novel, rather like the real historical personality, is a man who, through resisting stable interpretations and definitions of himself, also seeks to resist closure. It is not through suffering that this Wilde knows himself to be alive in the novel, but through the inscription and re-inscription of himself as a characterological palimpsest. He is unknowable, and finally unknown, even to himself. While he is anxious not to lose the thread of his narrative, to ‘master the past by giving it the only meaning which it now possesses’ (Ackroyd 1983, 75), he is also haunted by a fear that the multiplicity of significance which he has always embraced might simply collapse into meaninglessness:

Could it be that I, who have written so much about the powers of personality, do not — after everything which has happened to me — know what my own personality is? That would be the tragedy of my life, if tragedy is to be found anywhere within it. (Ackroyd 1983, 92)

The novel is cast in the form of a journal, always a double form of writing. The journal presumably helps the writer to remember and to make sense of his/her past, so its first intended audience is always the writer. But the journal also survives the writer, and is used as evidence for the interpretation of his/her life and (the ‘death of the author’ notwithstanding), his/her work. (It is significant that the ‘real’ Wilde wrote no such journal — that he sought to resist authoritative interpretation.) Facts are unimportant; far more important is how the facts are read. In De Profundis, the ‘real’ Wilde, described history as having a gothic element, and saw Clio as ‘the least serious of the muses’ (Selected Letters, 159). In the novel, the fictional Wilde shows his journal to a fictional Frank Harris [1] and a fictional Bosie, and tells them that it is intended for publication. Harris responds with outrage: ‘You cannot publish this, Oscar. It is nonsense — and most of it is quite untrue. ... It is invented. ... you have obviously changed the facts to suit your own purpose’ (Ackroyd 1983, 160). Bosie’s response is slightly different: ‘It’s full of lies, but of course you are. It is absurd and mean and foolish. But then you are. Of course you must publish it’ (Ackroyd 1883, 161). In that exchange, Bosie’s response is both crueller and more apt than Harris’s. Earlier in the novel, a fictional version of Robert Sherard drunkenly approaches Wilde with a project to write his biography in which he would ‘explain [his] conduct to the world, and reveal [his] true character’. [2] ‘You will defend me at the cost of my reputation’, the fictional Wilde retorts (Ackroyd, 1983, 69). ‘If anyone were foolish enough to write my biography, then the fatefulness of my life would touch him also. There will, in any event, be no royalties’ (15). A pun is intended here. Such a biography would not make any money; but equally it would be incapable of elevating Wilde’s reputation. He cannot be redeemed through explanation.

Ackroyd’s Wilde, looking back on his life, offers not one interpretation, but several. But while he is happy to resist narrative closure, he cannot resist the closure of death. As the novel progresses, the entries in the journal become shorter, and the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed. Towards the end of October 1900, the real Wilde had an operation for an ulcerated ear, probably the result of a fall he had suffered in Wandsworth in 1896. In real life, he never really recovered from the operation. Ackroyd’s Wilde also has an operation, and its effect at first is that it makes him forget to write his journal, so that a significant chronological gap opens up in the journal — and for that fictional time, Wilde does not exist. A more important effect, however, is that the operation does not cure the ulcer or the pain, and the fictional Wilde is finally unable to write at all, so that the last few entries in the journal are not Wilde’s own, but his words taken to dictation by his young friend and companion, Maurice Gilbert.[3] His sense of impending death produces a fundamental change in the fictional Wilde. It is not that he fears death; what he fears is the loss of control over his own personality — the possibility that another hand might ‘write the end’, and impose a final authoritarian significance on his life:

I feel curiously apart from my writing, as though it were another hand which moves, another imagination I draw upon. Soon I must ask Maurice to take dictation from me: no doubt he will invent my last hours, and the transition will be complete. (Ackroyd 1983, 180)

But while Ackroyd cannot, even in a fiction, prevent Wilde from dying, the final pages of the novel continue to resist the closure that would seem like such a betrayal. The last entries are headed: ‘This is Oscar Wilde talking, taken down by Maurice Gilbert.’[4] It may indeed be that Maurice sets out to fictionalise Wilde’s ending, but his taking of dictation actually deconstructs the possibility that his version of Wilde’s last days and hours is a final or authoritative one. As Wilde’s words become increasingly incoherent, Maurice makes no attempt to tidy them up or to explain them.

30/11/1900

He is becoming delirious now but I will write it down for his words have always been wonderful to me. It has been a hot summer has it not. I tried to get a cab this morning but he said it was too far out. You know when they found the body of Christ I cannot follow what he is saying here and then once more I shall be lord of language and lord of life, do you agree mother? he is laughing I knew I should create a great sensation …

Mr Wilde died at ten minutes to two p.m. on Friday, November 30 (185)

The last words may be significant: Wilde did indeed create a great sensation. But although they are the last words of the fictional Wilde, they do not have ‘the last word’. Wilde is silenced by the only kind of historical fact which cannot be resisted — death.

A third text:

In 1989, Terry Eagleton wrote a play entitled Saint Oscar, which deals with Wilde’s Irishness, his relationship with his mother, and his friendship with the working-class renters whose testimony was an essential part of the evidence against him at his trials. The play received its premiere in the Guildhall, Derry on 25 September 1989, in a production by the Field Day Theatre Company. The published version of the play includes a foreword by Eagleton in which he explains his motivation for having written such a piece. His first reason is that his Oxford students seldom realise that Wilde was Irish: ‘Since Wilde himself realised this only fitfully, this is hardly a grievous crime, though it might be said to be evidence of one’ (Eagleton 1989, vii). The crime he speaks of is that of British cultural imperialism which has long ‘annexed ... gifted offshore islanders to its own literary canon’ (vii). So, one of the origins of the play was the attempt to redress that cultural imbalance, and to rewrite Wilde’s linguistic brilliance as an example of what is dis­tinctively Irish about him.

The second point of origin is the way in which Wilde apparently prefigures so much of contemporary literary theory:

Language as self-referential, truth as convenient fiction, the human subject as contradictory and ‘deconstructed’, criticism as a form of ‘creative’ writing, the body and its pleasures pitted against a pharisaical ideology: in these and several other ways, Oscar Wilde looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes. (vii)

These two aspects, Wilde’s nationality with its attendant history of colonial oppression, and his sub versions of Victorian commonplaces, are, for Eagleton, connected, both to each other and to his own academic position. To each other since subversion is both the affirmation of one’s own identity as a member of a colonised race, and at the same time, an attack on the very basis of the power which oppresses. To Eagleton himself because he is a man of ‘Irish working-class provenance, now working in the belly of the beast at Oxford’ (viii).  A play about Wilde, he says, allows him to explore the connections between oppression and creativity, but the exploration takes place more ‘for the sake of my own identity and allegiances than as a purely intellectual problem’ (ix).

Eagleton seeks also, he says, to reinscribe Wilde as a political writer, following on from his indirect allegiance to Irish nationalism and his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. The area he does not seek to illuminate is Wilde’s sexual politics: ‘if I have tried to avoid writing a "gay" play about him, this is ... because it seems to me vital to put that particular ambiguity or doubleness back in the context of a much wider span of ambivalences’ (xi). A gay approach would limit Wilde’s potential multiple significance. His reading of Wilde is predicated on the assumption that ‘nobody can write now of Britain and Ireland in Wilde’s day without bringing to mind the tragic events that afflicted Ireland in the past two decades. Reflections on the past are always at some level meditations on the present’ (xi).

In the play itself, therefore, the battle between Eagleton’s Wilde and the English state is actually personified in the recreation of another historical figure, this time an Irishman (since ‘if an Irishman is to be basted, you can always find another one to turn the spit’), Sir Edward Carson. The real Wilde had known Carson at Trinity College, Dublin in the 1870s. His fictionalised alter ego is in the play for two reasons; firstly Carson represented the Marquess of Queensberry when Wilde sued him for criminal libel in April 1895; secondly, Carson was later to become famous as a champion of the Unionist cause. One might assume, therefore, that when Carson and Wilde meet in the courtroom in the play, they are supposed to represent not only prosecution and defence, but also the two sides of the ‘Irish question’. This turns out to be a false assumption.

Just like the ‘real’ Wilde, Eagleton’s version is dismissive of facts and of the general artlessness of history:

I find it impossible to take [history] at all seriously. Have you ever read a history of the human race? Don’t bother, the plot is appallingly thin. I was reading one only the other day, and could hardly contain my incredulity. The author’s imagination was ludicrously narrow; almost all of his French characters were called Louis. No narrative thrust: just a lot of sub-plots carelessly abandoned, themes left hanging in mid-air, a mishmash of sensational occurrences. Wars, famines, massacres, revolutions: I’ve never read anything more improbable in my life. (9)

This Wilde always rejects entrenched positions, and therefore, it is not he who represents Irish Nationalism in the play, but his mother, Lady Wilde. In real life, like her son, Francesca Wilde was prone to fictionalising her own life. She was famous in her own right in the nineteenth century, as the writer of ardent nationalist poetry under her pen-name, Speranza (Ellmann 1987, 5-6). In the play, Wilde introduces her as the personification of the nation: ‘Speaking of Ireland, here she comes’ (9). Mother and son argue about what she sees as lack of political commitment to her cause. It is an argument which is repeated throughout the play, though the causes to which Wilde is asked to submit range from Socialism to Unionism; and Wilde consistently resists all attempts to shackle him to a cause. Lady Wilde wants her son to become a nationalist, as she is, and to devote his pen to the service of his country, to stir up the peasantry to revolt against the English. She asks him to adopt a more political attitude in his art, but he merely responds that ‘Ireland is a third-rate melodrama in an infinite number of acts’ (15). Similarly, Wilde’s conversations with Richard Wallace emphasise his weak grasp on the actual political situation and his indifference to outrages in Trafalgar Square, to strikes and injustices. Just as he is incapable of acting in the political interests of other people, he is also unable to act in his own interests. He refuses to see that his affairs with Bosie, and with the renters, are bound to lead to the courtroom. Wilde is as indifferent to the Realist laws of cause and effect on his own person as he is to their operations on other people.

Eagleton’s text operates on a different basis from Ackroyd’s. Where Ackroyd is careful to get the ‘facts’ right, Eagleton’s is a work about the interpretation of facts; not so much what actually happened, but what we believe to be the case. In the play, the trial is rendered farcical by the laying bare of its assumptions. All the things that one suspects might have been true about Wilde’s treatment at the hands of English justice are openly presented to the court. Even the judge camps it up, making appointments to discuss the trial with the rent-boy witnesses, later, in his chambers, implying that the charge of which Wilde is accused is widespread among his accusers. Wilde’s case is that he is the victim of conspiracy:

I am accused of homosexual relations by an Establishment for whom such practices are as habitual as high tea. Homosexual behaviour is as English as morris dancing, if somewhat less tedious. ... [T]here is a conspiracy against me. When I lost a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the Judge who presided in the case sent a note of congratulation to the prosecuting counsel. Is that what is known as British justice? The young man with whom I am accused of buggery will never be brought to court because he is the son of an aristocrat. I am told that one of the rent boys with whom I am accused of consorting will not be called to bear witness at this trial because he is the nephew of the Solicitor General. Soliciting would seem to run in his family. (40)[5]

Carson’s closing speech in the play trial equally lays bare some of the reasons for Wilde’s prosecution — reasons which have nothing to do with his guilt or innocence under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendments Act. For Carson, an Irishman representing the English establishment, Wilde is a bad husband and father; he is immoral; he mocks the truths which the Establishment holds dear. ‘He is vain, arrogant and self-deluded. ... He is a spoiled brat who has never done a decent day’s work in his life, who at the ripe old age of forty presents the grotesque spectacle of one striving to perpetuate his undergraduate years’ (45). It is time, Carson concludes, that Wilde grew up. Wilde’s response to this, before he is led down to the cells, is that ‘no Irishman can ever receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination’ (46). In that remark, Wilde refers, as it were avant la lettre, to the cases which are now always called the ‘notorious miscarriages of justice’ - the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, and the case of Judith Ward. Eagleton’s position is clearly that Wilde’s trial for one kind of offence against the English state prefigures — predicts .;.. the later injustices, and the basis for all these injustices is the same: the oppression of the Irish by the English.

The play ends with Wilde sitting alone and deserted after his prison sentence, outside a Paris restaurant. He sees his old friend Richard Wallace, who has, in the meantime, lost all his fiery left-wing ideals, and has become a cynical capitalist, demonstrating the defeat which is likely to attend all positions which are too firmly entrenched. When Richard leaves him in darkness, Carson appears, dressed in paramilitary uniform, surrounded by masked gunmen. And, in conversation with Wilde, he effectively repeats the arguments made by Lady Wilde in the first act, except that Carson’s speech is in favour of loyalism, not Lady Wilde’s nationalism. Now occupying an entrenched position himself, Carson can only reject Wilde’s proffered hand of friendship; the lights go down on him and his paramilitary band, to the sound of a drum roll, and the words ‘No surrender’.

Wilde’s last words in the play repeat the theme of ambivalence, the refusal to be pinned down, which is at the heart of Eagleton’s interpretation of him. He muses over the words to be inscribed on his tombstone:

I want them to write on my tombstone: ‘Here lies Oscar Wilde, poet and patriot’. No, that’s a bit terse; not true either. How about: ‘Here lies Oscar Wilde: socialite and sodomite, Thames and Liffey, Jekyll and Hyde, aristocrat and underdog.’ I could have a double grave and double monument; friends could choose which one to mourn at, or alternate between the two. (64)

Like Ackroyd’s Wilde, this Wilde too resists the closure of definitive interpretation. He says that he will have the last true word, and ends the play, slumped at the restaurant-table, speaking a nonsensical epigram: ‘All men are natural Anabaptists; women remain true Presbyterians to the end: The play closes with a song in which all contemporary injustices are reversed, and replaced with their exact opposites, an act of political ‘inversion’.

The plot of The Importance of Being Earnest hinges on a life which has literally been mistaken for a text. Jack Worthing is swapped as a baby for a three-volume novel ‘of more than usually revolting sentimentality’. His very existence is a fiction; and luckily for him, he belongs to Miss Prism’s optimistic genre, in which the good end happily and the bad unhappily since that is what fiction means.

Like Jack Worthing, Wilde’s life has also been mistaken for a text, not least by Wilde himself. He famously told André Gide that he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work; and his own interpretation of himself, De Profundis, the nearest thing in Wilde’s oeuvre to autobiography, is dramatic in the extreme with few concessions to Realism. Wilde has not gone away. Despite the fact that he insisted himself that art should conceal the artist, the critic continues to seek him out. In one sense the reasons for this are easy to understand. It was indeed a spectacular life — a biography which demands the attention of the audience. From relatively humble beginnings with his early pretensions to poetry, he elevated himself to the top of the literary tree in six short years, from 1889 to 1895. At the time of his arrest, after the failure of the Queensberry prosecution, three of his plays were in production in the West End — he was at the height of his powers. When the crash came, it was absolute. In De Profundis, Wilde compares Christ’s life to a poem: ‘For "pity and terror" there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek Tragedy to touch it’ (Selected Letters, 20). The only difference between Christ and a Greek hero is that Christ had no tragic flaw, no hubris which brought him low.

Wilde’s own life also has the shape of Greek tragedy. It shares the trajectory of a meteoric rise followed by the most absolute fall. The fall is ‘explained’ in so many different ways that no explanation is adequate. Wilde himself saw that from the outside his conduct looked like ‘a combination of absolute idiocy and vulgar bravado’ (Selected Letters, 240), and he did not want to go down in history as a man renowned for a lack of intelligence, or for a lack of taste. Perhaps he found danger erotic, and took pleasure in going too close to the edge. Wilde’s own assessment of himself partially supports such a reading: ‘Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went into the depths in the search for new sensations’ (Selected Letters, 194). But no explanation can ever satisfy us; we want to know why, but we treasure Wilde’s ambiguity. We try to trace out his motivations just as we trace the motives of characters in novels. We take the artistic shape of the life as an indication that the life had other artistic features, particularly the explicability and significance of action. Because we retell Wilde’s life so often, we feel that it should mirror the features of textuality: we undertake a Wildean strategy, and make life follow art. ‘As soon as we start to tell a story, we make connections where before there were none’ (Josipovici 1994, 277).

In terms of Barthes’s definition of the author, Wilde was not an author. What Barthes objected to was the tyrannical authority which the composite construction of the author imposed on textual criticism. And he distrusted the ways in which biographical information is used to explain the text (Barthes 1977, 143). But that ‘authority’ can only be derived when there is a general agreement about the meaning of the author. In a sense, Wilde took care to cover his tracks. We may all ‘know’ that he was convicted for homosexual offences, but we cannot know whether this represents a personal failure of his own moral code, or a failure of his mental health, whether it is the failure of the society which imprisoned him - or whether, indeed, it was not a failure at all, but a martyrdom which now signifies a form of triumph. The facts may not change, but their interpretation does with the passage of time and changing attitudes. Even at the moment of disgrace, in May 1895, we must beware of the re-creating a homogeneous audience all baying for Wilde’s blood.[6] Interpretations in this case can only ever be partial and temporary - which is what helps to keep this author alive.

Wilde’s own artistic philosophy, as well as seeking to conceal the artist, also (in typically contradictory fashion) virtually sanctions a biographical approach. For him, art is the expression of personality. And it is in that word ‘personality’ that we must seek to understand Wilde. For despite the textuality of his life, the implied homology between his life and his art, Wilde was not a character in a three-volume novel or in a well-made play. Indeed, ‘character’ is a word he almost never uses, and the distinction between character and personality is essential.

The word character has its origin in the Greek word kharakter, meaning impress or stamp. The first dictionary definition is a printing term; the second defines character as a biological term, meaning the collective peculiarities of a species or race. The third definition originates from the idea of a written testimonial to a person’s essential qualities, particularly his/her morality. Only with the fourth definition do we move overtly into the realm of literature. What comes out of this etymological investigation is that the word character implies stability, knowability. Character is stamped through the individual like the lettering in a stick of rock. It is a word better suited to fictions than to real people whose knowability must, after all, always be open to question.

Personality, on the other hand, comes from a Latin root - persona - meaning, in the first instance, ‘actor’s mask’, or the face that one presents to the world. So personality refers not to the essential being but to a role which can be assumed and cast off at will. Consequently it is potentially inconsistent, knowable only in a conditional way, for the moments during which that particular mask is being worn. Wilde comments in De Profundis: ‘Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask’ (Selected Letters, 201). One can only wear a mask which signifies pleasure, implying that pleasure is only to be found on the surface: pain cannot be acted. Wilde wore the mask of pleasure for so long that it was assumed that he could only be inconsistent, trivial and insincere. But beneath the mask there is always another possibility. Moreover, even the naked face may always reassume its disguise.

The admission of sincerity in sorrow was an extreme statement for Wilde. He is asking his addressee to see him unadorned, unprotected by his mask. In addressing Douglas like this - with a plea for acceptance despite his unadorned state - Wilde is taking a very large risk: Douglas had once commented that when Wilde was not on his pedestal, he was not interesting. Indeed, in De Profundis, Wilde refuses to occupy this lowly position for very long; he reassembles a personality which he then associates with Christ, thus replacing himself on the artistic pedestal from which the scandal had removed him. The maskless face of Sorrow is not a permanent condition; it does not reveal character — essence — but is in fact only an alternative personality which is soon rejected. If the letter is in­consistent in the sense that it is not just a humble confessional, or the letter of an injured lover, or a therapy, or an autobiographical explanation, it is at least consistent in its dramatisation of each of these roles in turn. It is a series of experimental artistic attitudes. It is not a resumé in which a life can be seen ‘steadily’ and ‘whole’ (Arnold 1980,67):[7] it must be read sequentially.

Both Ackroyd and Eagleton have registered this multiplicity of readings. Their texts belong with the wealth of biographical materials about Wilde as well as with genre writings. As all biography is necessarily interpretation and in that sense is the fictive reconstruction of a life, so their works break down the distinction between fiction and historical fact. Wilde, by his own admission, lived more than one life, and the textuality of those lives resides in their multiple layers of signification. The biographer who seeks a single or simple explanation for Wilde is treacherous. Lives, even narrated lives, resist the closure of the authoritative interpretation. This is true of any life, but it is particularly true of Wilde’s, who is fascinating precisely because he teeters always on the edge of contradiction.

In ‘The Critic as Artist’, Gilbert admits to a fascination with autobiography, which he says is irresistible. Every man must be his own Boswell, he says, since lives written by others are always betrayals. ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography’ (Writings, 242). Biographers are ‘the mere body-snatchers of literature’ (Writings, 243). They are only outsiders who have no access to the really interesting secrets and indiscretions which make autobiography worthwhile. It is, for example, probably the desperation of De Profundis which makes it readable at all — the sense we get of a man not just writing his life, but writing for his life. But although the impulse of Ackroyd and Eagleton is partially biographical, and therefore — in Gilbert’s eyes —a betrayal, the existence of these fictions among so many would perhaps have appealed to Wilde, especially as the interpretations of him in the present age mirror his own distrust of absolute answers. Their open-ended versions of his multiple personalities demon­strate an intimate connection between Wilde’s Victorian literary life and our contemporary theories.

• Dr Ruth Robbins is principal lecturer in English in the School of Cultural studies at Leeds Metropolitan University.