Abstract
According to the author, the making of Oscar Wilde (i.e., what made or formed him) was his 1882 yearlong American lecture tour, which was, in part, intended by its organizers to promote the American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience, a satire of the Aesthetic Movement. Some scholars believe that Wilde was a model for the opera’s character Bunthorne. The bulk of the book (Part 2) focuses on Wilde’s American tour. Part 1 of the book (covering the years 1854–1881) highlights events and experiences in Wilde’s life that influenced his time in the United States—his father’s death and his mother’s adoration, his studies at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, and his embrace of the Aesthetic Movement, which valued the ideal of beauty over social or political themes in art, literature, and music. The motto of the movement was “art for art’s sake.” The third and final part of the book (covering the rest of Wilde’s life, 1883–1900) briefly describes how Wilde’s American tour influenced him, including his lectures on interior design, his editorship of the Woman’s World magazine, and his plays.
In addition to writing a biographical sketch, Mendelssohn provides an examination of late-19th-century American social conditions and influences including the media. Her novel use of media of the time (e.g., posters, newspapers, and magazines), some recently made more accessible via mass digitization projects, is a major contribution to scholarship on Wilde, as is her focus on race and ethnicity. Some of the media featured racist, xenophobic, or homophobic caricatures of Irish-born Wilde, which are included among the book’s 48 illustrated plates. The narrative explains the significance of these plates, especially the depictions of Wilde as a Christy minstrel by Currier and Ives and in Punch magazine, as a sunflower-worshipping monkey in Harper’s Weekly (sunflowers were a symbol of the Aesthetic Movement), and as a “Wild Man of Borneo” (featured in the freak shows of P. T. Barnum) in the Washington Post, which featured the caption “how far from this to this?”
In addition to the harmful caricatures of Wilde in the media, Harvard and Yale students mocked him during his lectures. After this mockery and his exploitation by the tour’s organizers, Wilde took control of his own public image. Upon his return to England, he in turn mocked Americans in his lectures and writings and drew upon imagery used in the caricatures of him. In particular, he used elements of minstrelsy to his own reputational and financial advantage in his plays, A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Wilde mythologized himself and was, and continues to be, mythologized. It is said that upon his arrival in America, he asserted, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” Wilde’s quest for fame and celebrity intensified during his American tour, but the depictions of him in the American media were not the type of notoriety he desired. That came upon his return to England in 1883 when Walter Hamilton published the first history of the Aesthetic Movement, a book entitled The Aesthetic Movement in England, which included an entire chapter on Wilde.
Mendelssohn’s book is well researched and written, clear, readable, and engaging. She describes some less known events in Wilde’s life in spellbinding detail, including a chapter that describes Wilde’s encounters with classmate Christian Cole from Sierra Leone who was the first black graduate of Oxford University and the first black barrister to practice law in England. While at Oxford, Cole received much more notoriety than Wilde. Another chapter discusses Wilde’s maternal uncle, who had once owned a Louisiana plantation worked by enslaved people.
The book raises several challenges and questions that are of interest to readers of Affilia. What do we make of the power of media to shape individuals and groups for good or ill? Who protects the vulnerable from the often ruthless media of dominant cultures? How do we continue to learn about and respond to systemic, structural racism and xenophobia? Mendelssohn’s study of Wilde is also a very personal one. In it, we learn of the impact of early key life experiences upon later life and that those who are exploited sometimes exploit others.
