Literary Criticism, European

The stranger Wilde

Name: The stranger Wilde
Author: Gary Schmidgall
ISBN: 9780452271579

by Gary Schmidgall

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Overview

Though Oscar Wilde's legendary life and his extraordinary art are both intimately and unmistakably linked to his homosexuality, no Wilde biographer has ever really explored the full implications of his gay identity - until now. Gary Schmidgall's is a true post-Stonewall performance, the first book to assert frankly that Wilde's sexual orientation is the key to his literary accomplishments and his enduring appeal. The Stranger Wilde sidesteps standard chronological biography to provide a brilliant portait drawn from Wilde's own writings and the observations of his contemporaries and later critics, set against the backdrop of Victorian convention, which was to undo him in the end. Here is Wilde in all his many guises: as flamboyant Oxford undergraduate, as aesthete in America, as son and brother, as husband and father, as lover and seducer of young men. Here is the celebrated author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray and the outrageous figure who went deliberately, defiantly to ruin and imprisonment. Even confirmed Wilde connoisseurs will find this book full of surprises. And for those who know him only as a writer of scathing wit and scandalous appeal, this dazzling biography will introduce a complex, paradoxical artist of genius, whose legend pales beside the provocative and fascinating truth.

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Editorials

Boston Globe

An astute study...genuinely original.

San Francisco Chronicle

Breathes new life into the memory of Wilde.

Publishers Weekly

A lively, original, often moving portrait of Oscar Wilde, this biographical essay claims him as ``one of the . . . great liberators Ireland has produced,'' a moral philosopher akin to Nietzsche as an unmasker of hypocrisy and prudery. Peering behind Wilde's public personas as scourge of Victorian verities, aesthete, arbiter of style and colorful talker, Schmidgall ( Literature As Opera ) probes his ``essentially childish spirit,'' his strain of misanthropy, his ``ruinous infatuation'' with young men and the Falstaffian exuberance that lent him charisma. Delightfully illustrated with period drawings and photographs, this unconventional life is organized thematically, with chapters on Wilde's unhappy marriage; his spiritual kinship with Lady Jane (``Speranza'') Wilde, his ``flamboyant, eagle-beaked'' mother; his homosexuality; his notorious conviction for sodomy; and so forth. Schmidgall builds a tantalizing if strained case that Wilde's autobiographical literary works embody ``a concerted and devastating attack on the Closet.'' (Apr.)

Library Journal

In a work that is part biography, part literary criticism, and mostly performance art, Schmidgall ( Shakespeare and Opera , Oxford Univ. Pr., 1990) introduces a Wilde who is indeed a stranger to the Wilde of the standard biographies. In some rather dazzling readings of The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde's other writings, the author demonstrates that Wilde's homosexuality is foundational to his aestheticism and his literary identity. Yet, while there are interesting moments here--e.g., the comparisons of Wilde with Nietzsche and Shaw--the whole is little more than a poorly organized pastiche of Wilde's writings. In the end, the tedious and tiresome exercise of looking for Oscar draws all the life from the stranger Wilde. Libraries owning Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde ( LJ 12/87) may wish to purchase Schmidgall as a competing view; but, for most libraries, this work will be a marginal purchase. Not recommended.-- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio