Today (Nov. 30) should be a day of celebration for Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was born in 1835 and Winston Churchill in 1874. But, it is still a sad day for Oscar Wilde in 1900, not just because he died, but why and how he died.
Oscar Wilde was a martyr for the modern Gay Rights Movement. His imprisonment and hard labor of two years for “gross indecency” in 1895 hastened his death in 1900; there is no doubt about it. From what I read there was nothing suggests he might have AIDS (may be non-existent then); he obviously died of “broken heart” at age of 46. he wrote before he died, “I can write, but have lost the joy of writing.”
I recall reading about how Harvard students mocked Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality during his visit in 1882. Harvard was not always as open-minded as we know it. I am still trying to find out why Walt Whitman fared much better; Wilde did visit Whitman in 1882.
I once came across a letter to Col. Higginson (there is a book called White Heat about the friendship between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson), Emily Dickinson wrote, “You speak of Whitman, I never read his books, but was told that he was disgraceful”, so Whitman did have his problem.
An American (in France) who was an acquaintance of Wilde drew up a petition to Queen Victoria begging for Wilde’s release from prison, but few French writers agreed to sign it. Even Henry James didn’t sign saying he felt sorry for Oscar, but the petition wouldn’t have the slightest effect on the authority . . . and “the document [petition] would only exist as a manifesto of personal loyalty to Oscar by his friends, of which I was never one.”
Shortly before he died he wrote to his publisher from Paris, “This poverty really breaks one’s heart; it is so sale, so utterly depressing, so hopeless. Pray do what you can.”
I read many of his plays including A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Lady Winderman’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest the past year or two and lamented that how many more plays we could enjoy had he not died at a young age of 46? Bernard Shaw was only six years his junior and died 50 years after Wilde’s passing, and thus we have so many of Shaw's treasures to indulge.
Some question that Wilde never said “I have nothing to declare but my genius”, but if you read him you would agree that the prejudice, narrow-mindedness, intolerance and injustice killed a genius.
Let me conclude this post by quoting Bernard Shaw,
“It is a pity that Wilde still tempts men to write lives on him. If ever there was a writer whose prayer to posterity might well have been ‘Read my works; and let my life alone,’ it was Wilde.”
