Wilde mocked the moral seriousness of the age. He glorified pleasure, even shallowness, arguing that aesthetics were more important than ethics, and promoting art for art's sake. "Books are not good or bad, only well or badly written," was one of his favorite aphorisms. Oscar Wilde was witty, arrogant, and always striking a pose. When he arrived in New York City for a 1882 lecture tour, he told the customs officials, "I have nothing to declare except my genius."
By the mid 1890s, Wilde was at the very height of his fame. His comic plays Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance had been widely praised by critics and audiences alike. The Importance of Being Earnest, his most famous work, was soon to come. Young men slavishly imitated everything he did, arriving at the theater for the opening night of Lady Windermere's Fan, for example, wearing Wilde's trademark green carnation in their buttonholes.
His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, was a disquieting book written in an era that prized reticence and respectability. The book was laden with decadence and sensation. Although married with two children, Oscar Wilde was a homosexual. And reticence was completely antithetical to his very nature.
Homosexuality was certainly not unknown at that time in Great Britain. The preparatory schools and universities were rife with it. John Addington Symonds wrote that at Harrow, among the most famous of the public schools, in the 1850s, "the talk in dormitories and studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, and the sport of naked boys in bed together." Years later, the poet Robert Graves was to observe that for every born homosexual, there were at least ten permanent homosexuals "made" by the public-school system.
At Oxford and Cambridge, dons were not allowed to marry until 1882, and for many years after, few availed themselves of the opportunity. The cult of romantic friendship flourished, virtually canonized in Tennyson's great poem, "In Memoriam". In examining the papers of the Apostles, the most elite and intellectual society at Cambridge University, the biographer Lytton Stachey became convinced that many of the past Apostles had been secret although chaste homosexuals. But sex between men was not just restricted to the working class. The Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889-90 involved aristocrats and working class male prostitutes, and showed that sex between two man knew no boundaries.
Wilde apparently had his first homosexual encounter with Robbie Ross (later to be his literary executor), at Oxford in 1886. In 1891, he met Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), with whom he began a complicated relationship that was to dominate his entire life and lead to his eventual downfall. The two became lovers when Wilde was 36 years old, and Douglas, known as "Bosie", was just 21. By the time Bosie first met Wilde, he had read The Picture of Dorian Gray nine times.
Wilde's biographer, Richard Ellmann, described Bosie in this way:
The youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry had a pale alabaster face and blonde hair...His friends-and he never lacked friends-thought him charming. In temperamnet, he was totally spoiled, reckless, insolent, and, when thwarted, fiercely vindictive. Wilde could only see his beauty...
Although their sexual relationship soon ended, Wilde and Bosie became inseperable; there was a romantic and passionate undercurrent to their friendship that continued for the next few years. Bosie wrote sonnets and edited an Oxford literary magazine, in whose pages he urged acceptance of homosexual relationships. He introduced Wilde to the aristocracy, as well as the world of young working class men - stable boys, clerks, and domestic servants - who were sexually available for a few pounds or a good dinner. Wilde called this act "feasting with panthers".
Under the influence of the vain and extravagant Bosie, Wilde began frequenting hostels, apparently to write more, but also because they were convenient places to bring young men for sexual liasons. He delighted in telling stories about the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, where male youths participated in the games without any clothing on whatsoever.
For his part, the careless Bosie permitted some love letters from Wilde to fall into the hands of one working class man. This was an unwise decision on both their parts. An 1885 law called the Labouchere Amendment had widened legal prohibitions against male homosexual acts. Up until that point in time, only sodomy had a punishable offense - by death, until 1861; no other sexual acts between males had been penalized. Oral sex was common and allowed under the law up until that point in time. Now the law extended to "indecency between males" (oral sex) as well, an offense punishable with two years in prison. The new law was widely called the "Blackmailer's Charter". Nevertheless, the vain Wilde never thought that the new law would touch him. "The Treasure will always give me twenty-four hours to leave the country," he assured one intimate.
The rest of this article to be completed soon...
