The document provides an overview of Oscar Wilde's life and work, with a focus on his play The Importance of Being Earnest. It discusses Wilde's views on art expressed in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he argues that art has no purpose beyond creating aesthetic pleasure. The document analyzes how Wilde's play uses ambiguous and queer language and style to comment on Victorian domesticity and sexuality in an indirect way. It argues the play is interested more in the beauty of literary language than conveying any direct messages about the world. Students are assigned readings from Yeats and Joyce for the next class.

1. ELIT 46C
Day 13
WILDE STYLE

2. Looking for a cool
summer course?

3. Business / Participation
Midterm back Thursday. How’d it go?
◦ I’m happy with how the mean looks at this point—it’s high.
◦ I think we should celebrate this!
Evals today:
◦ What does it mean to “convene”?
Participation for today:
◦ 1 point for saying something to your neighbor during our
“purpose of art” breakout.
◦ 1 point for saying something in full group discussion.

4. Why do people write literature?
What do they hope/expect it to do?
(Or, if you write literature,
what do you hope/expect it to do?
Why do you write it?)

5. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Born in Dublin
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and then Oxford.
Married Constance in 1884, two sons.
1890: The Picture of Dorian Gray. Super gay. Lots of criticism for it.
1891: introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”), who was an undergrad at Oxford.
February 1895: The Importance of Being Earnest.
February 1895: Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, calls Wilde a “somdomite
[sic]”, and Wilde (at Bosie’s encouragement) sues for libel.
The Trials:
◦ April 1895: Queensberry acquitted. Wilde is liable for Queensberry’s legal fees, which leaves him
bankrupt.
◦ April 1895: Wilde prosecuted for “gross indecency” under Labouchere Amendment. Acquitted.
◦ May 1895: second trial. Wilde is convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
1897: his health broken, Wilde is released and sails immediately for France.
Reunites with Bosie for a while in Naples, until they are separated by their families.
1900: dies of meningitis in Paris.
Bosie marries a lesbian in 1902, converts to Roman Catholicism in 1911, condemns Wilde,
publishes anti-Semitic newspaper.
2017: Wilde pardoned posthumously.

6. Aestheticism
Preface to Dorian Gray:
“There is no such thing as a moral or an
immoral book.
[…]
No artist desires to prove anything. […] No
artist has ethical sympathies.
[…]
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art
really mirrors.
[…]
All art is quite useless.” (1732-33)
What to make of this?
◦ Where does this leave meaning?
◦ Where does this leave critique?
◦ And what about mimesis?
From a letter to Bernulf Clegg (1891):
“Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not
meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. […] If the
contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind,
the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has
failed to realise the complete artistic impression.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for
its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all
that is to be said about our relations to flowers.”

7. The Importance of Being Earnest:
What can you say about
the style here?
LET’S WATCH A CLIP.

8. Surfaces
Lady Bracknell:
“Few girls of the present day have any really solid
qualities, any of the qualities that last, and improve
with time. We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.”
(1771)
But does the play regret this?
Gwendolen: “my ideal has always been to love
someone of the name of Ernest.” (1742)
Cecily: “And of course a man who is much talked about
is always very attractive. One feels there must be
something in him after all. I daresay it was foolish of
me, but I fell in love with you, Ernest.” (1758)

9. Queer Style
Gay subtext/puns (Christopher Craft):
◦ Bunbury: code for double life, but also gay act. Maybe also slang for gay brothel.
◦ Earnest: vaguely homophonic with Urning (German word for homosexual in the period).
◦ Cigarette cases: gifts that Wilde regularly gave to gay lovers (esp. prostitutes).
The style itself becomes queer (Alan Sinfield): a queer style
becomes identified with Wilde’s life and works.
◦ “the trials helped to produce a major shift in perceptions of the scope of
same-sex passion. At that point, the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus
of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence,
and aestheticism were transformed into a brilliantly precise image […].
The principal twentieth-century stereotype entered our cultures:
not just the homosexual, as the lawyers and medics would have it,
but the queer” (Sinfield 3).

10. Queering Heterosexuality?
BUT, all of this queerness exists (and is parasitical on) the
heteronormativity of the marriage plots in the play.
◦ Everyone is apparently heterosexual in the play.
◦ But also not, right?
Gwendolen on queer domesticity:
“The home seems to be the proper sphere for the man. And
certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he
becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like
that. It makes men so very attractive.” (1761)
Huh???

11. So how are we supposed to read all of this?
Is this play a critique of Victorian domesticity, femininity, and/or morals?
Is the play about late Victorian homosexuality, using code to wink at people in the know?
Well, yes.
But it’s also not (only) doing those things, because those things would require mimesis.
And, “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (1732).
Wilde wants to hold open the ambiguity and indeterminacy of literary language
here. The lines in this play are literature because they are beautiful or
pleasing (in some way), not because they say anything about sexuality
or the world.
It’s not an accident that most critics return again and again
to the question of Wilde’s style.
They are more interested in trying to capture how his
language works than what it is saying.

12. For Thursday
Read:
1. W.B. Yeats: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (2087-
88); “Easter, 1916” (2093-95).
2. James Joyce: “The Dead” (2282-2311).
Participation for today:
1 point for saying something to your neighbor
during our “purpose of art” breakout.
1 point for saying something in full group
discussion.