There’s a self-conscious literariness to this reading. On trial, where others might have been cowed by the solicitor general’s attack, Wilde dodged it through what Ellmann calls a “triumph” of imaginative displacement. What made him singular was his multiplicity. His star rose, Ellmann argues, because he was capable of playing many parts it fell because he defied a doctrinaire age and refused to relinquish the power to choose among those parts. Biographers who do aim to “compass” the whole story, as Hesketh Pearson (1946), H. Montgomery Hyde (1975), Richard Ellmann (1988), and now Matthew Sturgis have sought to do, are obliged not only to recognize the many Wildes but to do something about them.Įllmann’s method in his “ Oscar Wilde,” a sympathetic humanist treatment long seen as the canonical one, is to frame Wilde’s life as a Greek tragedy and his self-contradictions as integral to the scale and the complexity of his heroism. “Oscar Wilde lived more lives than one, and no single biography can ever compass his rich and extraordinary life,” Neil McKenna tells us at the beginning of “ The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde” (2005), before choosing just one of those lives to tell-Wilde’s sexual and emotional history. Among Wilde’s modern biographers, faced with a subject whose life has been flattened out for exemplary purposes by various communities (gay, Irish, Catholic, socialist), it’s axiomatic to acknowledge his multidimensionality, his slipperiness. Martyrs don’t usually admit to feeling “sickened” by accounts of their own behavior, and any ambiguities or contradictions in their personalities tend to be glossed over by their hagiographers. The point is, who says it.” At the critical moment, he was able to transform the drama in his imagination by taking both roles, substituting the real Lockwood with an alternative Wilde, one who could control the courtroom and its narrative. I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. But the sensation was short-lived: “Suddenly it occurred to me, How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself. He was “sickened with horror” at what he heard. His catalogue of accusations, shot through with moral disgust, struck Wilde as an “appalling denunciation”-“like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante,” as he wrote two years later. It was a Saturday in May, 1895, the final day of his trial for “gross indecency,” and the solicitor general, Frank Lockwood, was in the midst of a closing address for the prosecution. Oscar Wilde was in the dock when he observed himself becoming two people.
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