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Oscar Wilde & Gothic Ireland
Literatura Irlandesa / LEM2055
Dr. Bruce Stewart
Reader Emeritus in English Literature
University of Ulster
| Classroom Texts |
| “Man Under Socialism” - Wilde”s statement of support for the Marxist Manifesto and the British Fabian Society |
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| “Reading Gaol” - Wilde”s reaction to the execution of a murdered while himself in prison [gaol] for homosexuality |
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| Remarks |
| Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray must be counted among the classics of fantasy literature on account of its narrative of a beautiful young man and highly-developed aesthete who is led to murder the author of his portrait - a painting which begins to take on the signs of the sins in which he engages in a pleasure-seeking existence while he himself remains eternally young. But that ends suddenly ... |
| No less interesting is his extraordinary “Ballad of Reading Gaol” which captures the last moments of a man who has murdered his wife before his execution by hanging, and the tension in the prison as that event draws near. In the poem Wilde proposes the horrifying idea that ‘we kill the thing we love’ - just as, in fact, he destroyed his own family by taking an ill-advised case against a man who accused him of homosexuality - resulting in his own imprisonment when the fact was prove by his opponent. |
| In a second text made available here, Wilde - best-known for his brilliant social comedies such as The Importance of Being Earnest - responds to a request for support from the Fabian Society of British Socialist in 1880 with his amazingly witty “Man Under Socialism”, a sincere expression of socialist humanism in which he berates the ‘deserving poor’ for accepting the charity of their ‘betters’ (i.e., richer people who actually steal their labour for unjust wages. The essay shows a very different side of the aesthete who preached “Art for Art”s Sake” and demonstrates that fin-de-siècle decadence was ultimately akin to 19th century Anarchism. |
The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996)
ed. Robert Welch; asst. ed. Bruce Stewart
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| Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897) & The Snake’s Pass (1890) |
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| J. S. Le Fanu - House by the Churchyard (1863) - Uncle Silas (1864) .. &c. |
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| Oscar Wilde - Dorian Gray (1891) - “Ballad of Reading Gaol” - Man Under Socialism |
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[ You can greatly extend your knowledge of this writer by browsing in RICORSO - online. ]
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