Making Oscar Wilde by Michèle Mendelssohn, OUP, 360pp, £20
In January 1882, Oscar Wilde toured America with a trunkful of lace-trimmed velvet coats and low-cut Byronic blouses. From New York to Colorado, audiences went wild for Oscar, whose applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by the majority of cowboys.
Throughout his 10-month American adventure, the 27-year-old Dublin-born aesthete presented a celebrity-conscious image of style and self-adornment. His plan as a lecturer was to bring the English Aesthetic movement to America and rid the nation of its vulgar (as he saw it) tendency towards materialism. This was no hazy brainwave, but a determined effort to introduce Yankees and Southerners alike to Walter Pater’s art-for-art’s sake aesthetic.
Wilde, 6ft 4in in knee breeches and silver-buckled pumps, threw out witticisms to the American nation like confetti. In Washington a woman approached him: “So this is Oscar Wilde: but where is your lily?”, to which Wilde replied: “At home, madam, where you left your good manners.”
Making Oscar Wilde chronicles the American lecture tour and the sundry society belles, industrialists, journalists and even penitentiary inmates encountered along the way. From Canada to the Gulf of Mexico Wilde lectured in 30 states, and became “one of the era’s most interviewed people”, says Mendelssohn in her wonderfully well-written book. Not all Americans warmed to Wilde’s dandified personality. The Civil War veteran and journalist Ambrose Bierce sniped: “There was never an imposter so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft.” On the whole, though, Wilde was liked; “la-da-dahism” became the flavour of the moment even in the saloon bars of the Wild West.
In Mendelssohn’s view, Wilde’s reputation stemmed from the publicity generated in America. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his chillingly decadent 1890 novel, was commissioned eight years later by the American editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, JM Stoddart, who had introduced Wilde to the poet and fellow “lover of men” Walt Whitman.
And yet, as Mendelssohn shows, Wilde’s mission to bring swags of lilies and tales of the Italian Renaissance to America was overshadowed by race politics. Irishness was often equated in post-bellum America with the outcast status of African Americans. The connection was made clear in blackface minstrelsy, which was then the premier entertainment on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America especially, minstrel performers sought to ridicule “foreign” or “peculiar” people – people like Wilde, who presented an unfamiliar or just plain weird figure on the American scene. Inevitably the self-adoring dandy with his plucked eyebrows and nails carefully manicured was vulnerable to caricature.
American newspapers and vaudeville playbills portrayed the Irish, and by implication Wilde, as “white niggers” or “negroes turned inside out”; like the stock characters Sambo, Jim Crow and Tambo Bones from blackface, the Irish slaved in low-paid jobs at the bottom of the social pile. For all his modern genius for self-promotion, Wilde found himself lampooned as a “negrified Paddy”, says Mendelssohn, and became the butt of racist jokes.
In some ways this was to be expected. Queen Victoria was frequently greeted at Balmoral Castle in Scotland by a “nigger band”; a century later, her paternal great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II claimed The Black and White Minstrel Show as one her favourite television programmes.
Yet something else was at work. A colour poster, designed in 1882 by the New York lithographers Currier and Ives, shows Oscar Wilde as a brown-skinned, thick-lipped fop with Afro hair. A burlesque Mammy, bent over a tubful of soapy linen, harangues him: “What’s de matter wid de nigga? Why Oscar you’s gone wild.” Mendelssohn has also unearthed a contemporary edition of the Washington Post where Wilde is sent up as “the Wild Man of Borneo” and depicted as little better than a metamorphosed orangutan. All this research is new and a welcome addition to Wildean scholarship.
With immense skill, Mendelssohn shows how Celtophobia was cognate with Negrophobia in late 19th-century America. The Irishman’s mother, a former Dublin salon butterfly, championed women’s rights and, most unusually for the Protestant Anglo-Irish, the cause of Irish independence. Wilde shared her interest in Irish myth and, up to a point, Irish politics. During his American tour, however, he was forced to reconsider his social place in the world as a “black Irishman passing for a white Englishman”.
What memories of America stayed with Wilde towards the end is unknown. On his deathbed in Paris in 1900 he converted to Catholicism. Perhaps it is merely romantic to suggest that he was drawn towards the rituals of the old faith partly out of a lingering sympathy for the Irish people.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.