Abstract
Wilde’s writings are a lifelong meditation on Aristotle. A strange statement, no doubt: after all, when we think of Wilde and classical antiquity, Plato comes to mind most readily. Wilde’s advocacy of, and martyrdom for, “the love that dare not speak its name”; the homosocial dialogic structure of his critical essays in Intentions; the quasipedagogical homoerotics of The Picture of Dorian Gray; and the career-spanning preoccupation with form all suggest an affinity with Plato and Platonism. Nonetheless, as Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand have demonstrated in the seminal edition of Wilde’s university notebooks, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, and as Iain Ross has recently convincingly argued in Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, Wilde spent much time pondering both Aristotle’s On Poetics and Nichomachean Ethics. 1 He flatteringly references Aristotle in “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” and weaves it into his discussion of the manifesto of art for art’s sake, though in the university commonplace book he complains that Aristotle—like Plato—does not value imagination. Aristotle frequently crops up in the Oxford notebooks and, more obliquely, in later reflections on ethics and life’s purpose, such as “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Wilde also mentions Aristotle in his prize-winning Oxford essay “Historical Criticism.” Aristotle’s ethics may have received more attention from the young Wilde than his writings on comedy and tragedy, but the influence of the latter work is undeniable.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of the Mind in the Making, edited with a commentary by Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
and Ian Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127–93.
For more recent, concise, but essential explorations of Wilde’s relationship with classical antiquity, see also Philip E. Smith II, “Oxford, Hellenism, Male Friendship,” in Oscar Wilde in Context, edited by Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28–38
Morris Freedman, “The Modern Tragicomedy of Wilde and O’Casey,” College English 25:7 (1965), 518.
Joseph Lowenstein, “Oscar Wilde and the Evasion of Principle,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 84:4 (Autumn 1985), 392–400.
Henry Alley, “The Gay Artist as Tragic Hero in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11:2 (2009): http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481–4374.1469. 1 August 2014.
Aristotle, On Poetics, translated by Seth Benardete and Michael Davis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 30.
Michael Davis, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle’s Poetics (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1992).
John Gassner, “Catharsis and Modern Theater,” in Aristotle’s Poetics and English Literature, edited by Elder Olson (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1965). According to Glassner,
Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle and the Pleasures of Tragedy,” in Making Sense of Aristotle: Essays in Poetics, edited by Øivind Andersen and Jon Haarberg (London: Duckworth, 2001).
Helena Gurfinkel, “‘And Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves:’ Murder and Sexual Transgression in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,’ The Importance of Being Earnest, and Salomé,” in Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World, edited by Robert N. Keane (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 163–74.
I am referring here to the books that have now become the staples of queer Wilde studies: Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York, London: Routledge, 1992)
and Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley, Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1992).
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Raby (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 305.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Earnest,” in Tendencies (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1993), 52–72.
Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salomé, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Raby (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 245.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Raby (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 58–59.
Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 72.
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Raby (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131–32.
Eltis also references Patricia Flanagan Behrendt’s Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991, which makes a similar point.
For a non-incestuous father-son marriage plot that counters the heteronormative narrative, see Helena Gurfinkel, Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014).
Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 908.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Michael Y. Bennett
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gurfinkel, H. (2015). “Would You Kindly Inform Me Who I Am?”: Wilde’s Comedies of Manners as Tragedies. In: Bennett, M.Y. (eds) Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410931_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410931_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56827-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41093-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)