Colin Wilson Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Review, No. 186, May 1995, pp. 28–29.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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The writer Oscar Wilde was imprisoned 100 years ago following a series of trials where he was pilloried for his sexuality and lifestyle. Colin Wilson looks at some of his plays and poems to show what makes them relevant today |
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in May 1895 for being gay. Wilde’s books were crucial in his conviction and they were quoted in court as evidence of his ‘immorality’. Many of those works are still worth reading. Stories such as The Birthday of the Infanta and The Remarkable Rocket combine fantasy, wit and sadness. Wilde’s theories of art – such as his rejection of realism and his delight in urban life – look forward to the modernist ideas of the 20th century.
The novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray and the comic play The Importance of Being Earnest reflect Wilde’s political ideas. He stresses the falseness of middle class values, especially through the character of Lord Henry Wotton who attacks commercialism, ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’ English common sense he dismisses as ‘the inherited stupidity of the race.’ In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde uses his devastating wit to make fun of marriage, the family and the church.
Such attacks stem from Wilde’s loathing of Victorian capitalism – he hated the way that ‘respectable’ behaviour robbed spontaneity and joy from people’s lives. He delighted in paradoxes which poked fun at accepted morality, such as, ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’ He wanted a society in which everyone would he free to express themselves.
However, Wilde nowhere considers how we can win such a society. Often he wants to escape into the past. He declared, for example, that ‘industry is the root of all ugliness’, and admired Ancient Greek society as supremely natural and beautiful. Collective struggle plays no part in Wilde’s ideas – instead, it is the ideas of great thinkers like Michaelangelo and Shakespeare which are the key to changing society.
Wilde’s attitude to conventional morality was, of course, connected with his homosexuality. Dorian Gray is about a young man’s beauty, and there are constant hints about the main character’s sexuality. In both Dorian Gray and The Importance of being Earnest, secret lives are central to the plot. Dorian’s portrait reflects his hidden world of cruelty, degradation and murder. Algernon and Jack invent a friend and a brother to avoid their social obligations and have a good time. This duplicity reflects Wilde’s own life. On the one hand, he was a respectable man, married with two children – on the other, he was paying off blackmailers and having sex with rent boys. Wilde’s double life is reflected in his portrayal of homosexuality as sensuous and attractive, but also sinful, something to hide.
In 1890 Wilde published The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which he advocates the abolition of private property so as to ‘reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible’. Wilde praises those who reject charity: ‘Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and they are beginning to know it.’ Socialism will mean the end of marriage and family life, since relationships will become more free and open. It will also mean the end of crime since criminals ‘are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.’ Under socialism machines will do all the drudgery, leaving people free to live fulfilled lives.
Wilde emerged from prison bankrupt and an outcast, and died three years later. Prison only confirmed his disgust at society’s values and his sympathy for its victims: ‘Prisoners are, as a class, extremely kind and sympathetic to one another... it is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons.’ In 1898 he published The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem about the hanging of a convicted murderer. Wilde’s anger at the cruelty and hypocrisy of the prison officials is plain:
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‘The warders stripped him of his clothes, |
Wilde’s desire for change is here as great as ever – though, instead of finding individual salvation through art or ideas, he now looks to religion.
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‘This too I know – and wise it were |
Wilde speaks from his own experience of prison. The food was so bad it gave everyone diarrhoea, and all the cells stank. Children were imprisoned in the same conditions as adults. People who could not read were beaten because they did not understand the rules.
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‘For they starve the little frightened child |
Some of Wilde’s partners were below 18, the current gay age of consent. A hundred years later, he could still have faced prison, So we need to do more than mourn the beauty, intelligence and joy our rulers destroyed in Oscar Wilde. We need to fight for Wilde’s dream – for a socialist society where prisons, poverty and oppression are no more, and where we will all be free.
Colin Wilson Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 3 June 2020