Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
Prophet
By Jason Epstein
WORKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ARTICLE
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
a play written and directed by Moisés Kaufman. at the Minetta Lane Theater, New York City
Vintage, 143 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society
by Michael S. Foldy
Yale University Press, 206 pp., $30.00
Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century
by Philip Hoare
Arcade, 256 pp., $25.95
Wilde thought he was the symbol of his age. In fact he was a prophet of the century to come. He died in pain and penniless in a cheap Paris hotel room in 1900 at the age of forty-six, perhaps of a prison injury to his ear. Had he lived he might now be remembered as England's most articulate—and most extreme—theorist of modernism, of the evolution, that is, of the Romantic idea that the objective world is, as he called it, 'fictional,' while reality is created by the 'critical' imagination in its various artistic forms. There is no telling what plays he might have written had he lived another thirty years. Wilde thought of Christ as a kindred spirit. He called him the 'precursor of the romantic movement in life,' an artist who spoke permanent truths to the beliefs and customs of the day. 'The highest criticism,' he wrote, perhaps with Christ in mind, 'is the record of one's own soul.' Wilde was an absolutist of subjectivity, an apostle of what in degraded form is now called self-realization, and thus a hero of the present age, admired by the antinomian young and the subject of many academic articles and books. Gross Indecency, a highly praised play based on Wilde's three trials, has been playing to full houses in New York for a year. Another play about Wilde, written by David Hare and starring Liam Neeson, will soon arrive here from London.
Review, 5226 words
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