The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

“To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints…”

London in the 1880s was a city where a woman could create a life of her own, socially, intellectually, and artistically. Art schools and galleries began to fill with young women, no longer satisfied with simply playing the muse, who desired to create. For a middle class of women who were neither required to work nor aristocratically obligated to marry, art offered both intellectual fulfillment and the possibility of a career.

These women were encouraged by the Aesthetics, a fashionable social set that included painters James MacNeil Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry, and poet Charles Swinburne. It was a circle in which young Constance Lloyd found herself enthralled and seduced by its rising star, the critic, poet, and playboy Oscar Wilde, the twentieth century’s first pop culture celebrity.

Constance’s life with Oscar was brief — a little more than ten years as London’s most famous literary couple — when in 1895 the secret life he led with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas exploded publicly, first in a libel suit, then in a criminal suit for sodomy that sent Wilde to prison for two years. But as Franny Moyle reveals in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (public library), Constance Lloyd was a driven, creative, passionate, humorous, and fiercely modern woman, both when she wed Wilde and when she separated from him.

Constance in her early-twenties, before her marriage to Oscar Wilde. She is wearing controversial “aesthetic” dress, with a loose-fitting blouse and sleeves for extra movement.

With a comfortable income provided by her grandfather, Constance Lloyd had the luxury of viewing marriage as a choice. In the fall of 1880, twenty-one-year-old Constance was living apart from her mother and experiencing London life fully for the first time. She wrote to her brother:

I cannot say I prefer the life I am leading at present. If I eventually do not marry, I will not live with Auntie all my life, I shall do something… I want something specific to do to prevent my continually dreaming ‘til I get perfectly morbid.

London in the 1880s was a place where women could increasingly roam freely among certain artistic circles, especially among the Aesthetics. Grosvenor Gallery welcomed women and their friends to converse with artists and sometimes show their own art. London’s first restaurant for women, Dorothy’s, opened on the highly-trafficked Oxford Street with a radical proposition — a place for women to sit and eat alone.

William Powell Firth, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. To the right, Oscar Wilde and his set are portrayed in aesthetic dress while listening to his lecture.

In these new places, Constance found like-minded men and women with whom she could converse and engage with socially and intellectually. In her first letters to her new beau Oscar, she dared to disagree with his opinions on art:

I’m afraid you & I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say they are distinct & separable things.

When she married Oscar, Constance had only experienced the creative half of bohemian life — the sexual side remained the domain of Oscar alone, first with women, and then passionately with men.

In 1882, the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act was an improvement on the previously nonexistent legal rights held by married women. When Constance married Oscar in 1884, a woman could now own, buy, or sell property, was responsible for her own debts, and was her own legal entity, separate from her husband. (In 1858, Isabella Robinson, on trial for adultery, wasn’t even allowed to be present in the divorce court — her only voice was her diary, read aloud by the prosecution.)

Archibald Grosvenor, an idyllic poet, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 'Patience.' The hit musical, was a satire on the Aesthetic movement and its most famous members, including Oscar Wilde.

In a letter after their engagement, Constance was nothing but smitten with her love:

How can I answer your letters, they are far too beautiful for any words of mine, I can only dream of you all day long…If you had your magic crystal you would see nothing, believe me, but your own dear image there forever, and in my eyes you shall see reflected nought but my love for you.

But over the next ten years, Constance and Oscar shared a life of increasing public fame and domestic sadness. The pair had two children immediately after their wedding, but as Constance labored hard through her second pregnancy, Oscar began to reconsider the romantic and sexual nature of their life together. He wrote to a friend:

There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are mere shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or what we long someday to feel…Sometimes I think the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am sorry that it is so.

By dividing his devotion to marriage with his romantic pleasures, Oscar and Constance experienced a partnership that expanded the definition of what it meant to be independent, and what it meant to be alone. Constance became a champion of dress reform, and a figurehead of Oscar’s new women’s magazine, in which he advocated that “we should take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.” Less generous admirers saw Constance as a fanatic, dipping her toe into whatever cause was fashionable, from votes for women to spiritualism.

Oscar Wilde, photographed by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882, two years before his marriage to Constance.

Perhaps her interests were wide-ranging because unlike a conventional married woman of the time, she didn’t simply live one life, with one devotion to house and home. Oscar taught her the ways of a divided love, as freeing or as painful as that might be. In his second book of fairy-tales, Constance was surprised to read Oscar’s dedication to her:

To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints… The candles that burn at the side altars are not so bright or beautiful as the great lamp of the shrine which is of gold, and that has a wonderful heart of restless flame.

Constance lived at the edge of what was fashionable and what was acceptable. A champion of women’s rights, she used her place as the queen of London’s literary society to accomplish social and political reform. When she died in exile in Italy at the young age of forty, she was separated from Oscar and living under a pseudonym. Her grave had no mention of her famous husband until many years later, when her brother added the no-longer-tarnished title, “Wife of Oscar Wilde.”

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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Oscar Wilde on Art

“The temperament to which Art appeals … is the temperament of receptivity.”

Oscar Wilde may have been the twentieth century’s first and most tragic pop celebrity, and a masterful writer of love letters, but he was also a poignant observer of culture and custodian of the creative spirit. His 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (public library; free download), written mere months after The Picture of Dorian Gray was published, explores the social structures of art with equal parts libertarianism, anarchism, and genuine concern — but more than a political treatise, at the heart of it is a profound meditation on what it means to create, to live, and to be human.

He begins with a beautiful addition to history’s finest definitions of art:

The temperament to which Art appeals … is the temperament of receptivity. That is all.

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.

In a sentiment that Frank Lloyd Wright would come to echo in asserting that “an expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows,'” Wilde admonishes that education in the formal sense subtracts from, rather than adds to, our capacity to enjoy art — a subtle suggestion that true art, like true science, requires a degree of benevolent openness and innocent ignorance:

An educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

He goes on to explore how the appreciation of art differs across creative disciplines:

True as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realized. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists? No. The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realize an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation and the egotism that mars him – the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.

[…]

No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

Like Hugh MacLeod, who famously asserted that “the best way to get approval is not to need it,” Wilde cautions that writing for acclaim — or even being overly aware of one’s ability to “biff” the audience — is a fatal flaw for literature:

With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. … A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.

Wilde then considers the notion of authority not by the public but over the public, turning to the political regimes — or lack thereof — best suited for fostering art:

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannized over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favor of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Wilde — who was imprisoned multiple times for his “crime” of homosexuality, then run into bankruptcy and exile, largely by the church and its tentacles of terror and the era’s mob mentality — goes on to construct a taxonomy of despots:

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. The Prince may be cultivated. Many Princes have been. Yet in the Prince there is danger. One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s madman’s cell. It is better for the artist not to live with Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought. To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes.

[…]

There is danger in Popes. And as for the People, what of them and their authority? Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough. Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalize. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the scepter of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny?

Instead, he proposes that individualism offers the most fertile ground for the seed of art:

Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.

[…]

What is true about Art is true about Life.

This Individualism, Wilde argues, ignites the most generous glow of the human spirit and cultivates the highest potential of the human soul:

What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly.When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

Pair The Soul of Man Under Socialism with Henry Miller on art and the future of humanity.

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Oscar Wilde’s Stirring Love Letters to Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas

“It is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing.”

As we make historic progress on the dignity and equality of human love, it’s hard to forget the enormous indignities to which the lovers of yore have been subjected across the 4,000-year history of persecuting desire. Among modernity’s most tragic victims of our shameful past is Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned multiple times for his “crime” of homosexuality, run into bankruptcy and exile, and fell to an untimely death. But Wilde’s most “sinful” quality — his enormous capacity for passionate, profound love — was also one of the most poetic gifts of his life.

In June of 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate and talented poet, who would come to be the author’s own Dorian Gray — his literary muse, his evil genius, his restless lover. It was during the course of their affair that Wilde wrote Salomé and the four great plays which to this day endure as the cornerstones of his legacy. Their correspondence, collected Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (public library), makes for an infinitely inspired addition to the most beautiful love letters exchanged between history’s greatest creative and intellectual power couples, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Charles and Ray Eames, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

In a letter penned on a cold Oxford day in November of 1892, Wilde writes Douglas:

Dearest Bosie … I should awfully like to go away with you somewhere where it is hot and coloured.

Several weeks later, in January of 1893, Wilde writes:

My Own Boy,

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.

Always, with undying love, yours,

Oscar

Letter from Oscar Wilde to Bosie, November 1892 (The Morgan Library)

In early March of 1893, Wilde channels love’s exasperating sense of urgency:

Dearest of All Boys — Your letter was delightful — red and yellow wine to me — but I am sad and out of sorts — Bosie — you must not make scenes with me — they kill me — they wreck the loveliness of life — I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion; I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me — don’t do it — you break my heart — I’d sooner be rented* all day, than have you bitter, unjust, and horrid — horrid.

I must see you soon — you are the divine thing I want — the thing of grace and genius — but but I don’t know how to do it — Shall I come to Salisbury — ? There are many difficulties — my bill here is £49 for a week! I have also got a new sitting-room over the Thames — but you, why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy — ? I fear I must leave; no money, no credit, and a heart of lead —

Ever your own,

Oscar

* “renter” was slang for male prostitute in London

Their affair was intense, bustling with dramatic tempestuousness, but underpinning it was a profound and genuine love. In a letter from late December of 1893, after a recent rift, Wilde writes to Douglas:

My dearest Boy,

Thanks for your letter. I am overwhelmed by the wings of vulture creditors, and out of sorts, but I am happy in the knowledge that we are friends again, and that our love has passed through the shadow and the light of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us always be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we have been always.

[…]

I think of you daily, and am always devotedly yours.

Oscar

In July of the following year, Wilde writes:

My own dear Boy,

I hope the cigarettes arrived all right. I lunched with Gladys de Grey, Reggie and Aleck York there. They want me to go to Paris with them on Thursday: they say one wears flannels and straw hats and dines in the Bois, but, of course, I have no money, as usual, and can’t go. Besides, I want to see you. It is really absurd. I can’t live without you. You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north and south, towards sun and moon — and, above all, yourself. The only thing that consoles me is what Sybil of Mortimer Street (whom mortals call Mrs. Robinson) said to me*. If I could disbelieve her I would, but I can’t, and I know that early in January you and I will go away together for a long voyage, and that your lovely life goes always hand in hand with mine. My dear wonderful boy, I hope you are brilliant and happy.

I went to Bertie, today I wrote at home, then went and sat with my mother. Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life: they are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.

London is a desert without your dainty feet… Write me a line and take all my love — now and for ever.

Always, and with devotion — but I have no words for how I love you.

Oscar

* The fortuneteller’s prophesy apparently came true — Wilde and Douglas travelled to Algiers together the following January.

Signed poster by Edward Gorey (from my personal collection)

In 1895, at the height of his literary success, with his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest drawing continuous acclaim across the stages of London, Wilde had Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, prosecuted for libel. But the evidence unearthed during the trial led to Wilde’s own arrest on charges of “gross indecency” with members of the same sex. Two more trials followed, after which he was sentenced for two years of “hard labor” in prison. On April 29 of that year, having hit emotional and psychological rock-bottom, his reputation ruined and his health deteriorating, Wilde wrote to Douglas on the eve of the final trial:

My dearest boy,

This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.

Another letter, written on August 31, 1897, shortly after Wilde’s release from prison, reads:

Café Suisse, Dieppe
Tuesday, 7:30

My own Darling Boy,

I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.

I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other. Goodnight, dear. Ever yours,

Oscar

Oscar and Bosie in 1893

But perhaps the most eloquent articulation of their relationship comes from a letter Wilde wrote to Leonard Smithers — a Sheffield solicitor with a side business of printing erotica, who became the only publisher interested in Wilde’s books in his post-prison years — on October 1, 1897:

How can you keep on asking is Lord Alfred Douglas in Naples? You know quite well he is — we are together. He understands me and my art, and loves both. I hope never to be separated from him. He is a most delicate and exquisite poet, besides — far the finest of all the young poets in England. You have got to publish his next volume; it is full of lovely lyrics, flute-music and moon-music, and sonnets in ivory and gold. He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with. He has also ruined my life, so I can’t help loving him — it is the only thing to do.

More of their exquisite correspondence appears in Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, but that one sentence alone — “He understands me and my art, and loves both.” — is an immeasurably beautiful addition to history’s most profound definitions of love, a sublime manifestation of the highest hope one creative soul can have for a union with another.

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Oscar Wilde: The Rise & Fall of the 20th Century’s First Pop Celebrity

‘He had a musician’s sense of a sentence.’

111 years ago today, the world lost the great Oscar Wilde — poet, playwright, action figure. This fascinating 1997 documentary from Omnibus traces Wilde’s life, loves, and legacy, from his intellectual upbringing to his infamous imprisonment at the height of his fame and success for “for gross indecency with other men” — basically, for being gay and out in Victorian England — to his exile and untimely death. The film features cameos from Stephen Fry, who played Wilde in the film of the same title, Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, and prolific British playwright Tom Stoppard, who explore what made Wilde the 20th century’s first true pop celebrity.

He had perfect pitch, perfect touch. He had a musician’s sense of a sentence.”

[Prison] was where Oscar discovered that life does not imitate art, and that the reality of a prison sentence was miles away from the ivory towers of martyrdom he had previously assumed it to be.”

For a proper Oscar Wilde remembrance, you won’t go wrong with The Happy Prince and Other Tales and, of course, The Importance of Being Earnest. (Which, for some almost sacrilegious reason, is going for just $1.50, it seems.)

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