Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture

The Making of a Legend

Joseph Bristow, Joseph Bristow

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780821443033
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.

In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera Salome and Robert Ross's edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.

This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde's value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, and Late-Victorian Table-Talk LUCY McDIARMID

Since the wealth elite was also the power elite, high society was an essential adjunct to political life, where dinner parties might be as important as cabinet meetings.

—David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990)

[D]oors were open to the successful Victorian intellectual as much on account of the social standing of the roles he and his peers characteristically occupied as for his individual achievement in some department of “serious work.” Some of these doors opened on to dinners and receptions at the houses of the wealthy and the powerful.

—Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (1991)

“A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world”: Lord Illingworth’s epigram from Oscar Wilde’s third society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (1893), is a bit ambiguous (CW, 4:109). Does it mean that the London dinner table is a stepping-stone to “the world,” a rung on a career ladder? Or does it simply mean that skills in dominating the one and the other are comparable? In any case, the word dominate suggests that one should perhaps be uneasy about the idea. Or is the statement merely glib, selfreferential praise of table-talk? All of these suggestions are present. Underlying them are the notions that dominating a London dinner table is an art or power that everyone would recognize immediately and that the dinner table is an important site, worldly and political in its nature, as the quotations from David Cannadine and Stefan Collini indicate.¹ Without analyzing closely the precise nature and kind of comments uttered over dinner, both Cannadine and Collini acknowledge that such comments may constitute high politics in another form. Lord Illingworth’s epigram is witty, sinister—and true.

Table-talk was both practiced and described by Oscar Wilde and by Lady Gregory. Anglo-Irish Protestants living in London during the 1880s, these writers were coevals who were also acquaintances. Wilde and Gregory dined with many of the same people: the overlap in their circles, according to letters, journals, and other records, includes such politicians and diplomats as W. E. Gladstone, Willie Grenfell, and James Russell Lowell, U.S. ambassador to England; aristocrats such as Lord Curzon and Wilfrid Blunt; writers such as W. B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, and Henry James; and artsy Society types such as Marc-André Raffalovich, John Gray, and Aubrey Beardsley.² John Gray, frequently said to be the original of Wilde’s protagonist Dorian Gray, was a close friend of Lady Gregory’s and gave her copies of his privately circulated devotional poems (Diaries, 46).³ Gregory and Wilde were admirers of one another’s work. They most likely met sometime in 1888 or 1889, probably at a dinner or salon at the Gregorys’ London home, though Sir William Gregory may have met Wilde at one of the gentleman’s clubs somewhat earlier.⁴ In a letter dated September 1887, Wilde asked Gregory to contribute to the journal Woman’s World, which he began editing for the publishing house of Cassell that year. In a journal entry from 1928, Gregory remarks that she believes Wilde’s last major poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), “will outlive all Wilde’s other work and a great deal of the work of his contemporaries.”⁵ In an entry for July 1930, Gregory at the age of seventy-eight describes herself “resting on the sofa” and reading “again the Ballad of Reading Gaol” (Journals, 2:535). (Although not relevant to the topic of table-talk, it is worth mentioning—if merely to indicate their generational alignment—that both Wilde and Gregory had sons who were killed in World War I.)

As a field of scholarly inquiry, table-talk exists in the overlap of cultural anthropology, cultural history, and sociolinguistics. The meal as a cultural phenomenon has been theorized by Mary Douglas in “Deciphering a Meal,” which looks at “the message encoded by food,” considering such issues as “the line between intimacy and distance,” the “hot meal” as a “threshold of intimacy,” and the hierarchical scale of importance and grandeur of meals throughout the week and the year.⁶ Placing the meal in historical context, Robert Jameson in “Purity and Power at the Victorian Dinner Party” examines “the active social uses of eating rituals by individuals and the use of dining to legitimate whole social groups,” especially the way in which the dinner is “structured by an increasingly complex code [that] separates the diner from foods of different character.”⁷ Historians such as Roy Strong have commented on the “bourgeois display” of the dinner party and have noted the importance of the centerpiece, the table setting, and all the material indications of opulence.⁸ In the most comprehensive recent approach to dinner parties, Natalie Kapetanios Meir analyzes what she calls “Victorian dining taxonomies.”⁹ Meir touches only obliquely on table-talk as an item in the taxonomy in one of the citations from Everybody’s Book of Correct Conduct, Being the Etiquette of Every-day Life (1893):

It is not correct

To ignore your partner at dinner, however little he or she may be to your taste. Join in the general conversation if you prefer, but address yourself from time to time to your neighbour. This is a duty you owe to your hostess. (144)

In Feast, Strong suggests a more Wildean take on dinner conversation, noting that the “cult of the dinner party … opened a whole new arena of social competition, in which success depended on recruiting the best talkers” (307).

Table-talk, though not named as such, is considered as part of the taxonomy of “conversation” in The Principles of the Art of Conversation by J. P. Mahaffy, Wilde’s Trinity College tutor and close friend. The book’s date of publication, 1888, places it at the same time as Wilde and Gregory were talking at the highest London dinner parties. Although Mahaffy never considers table-talk under its own heading, a dinner party is the implicit setting of many of his examples:

In a country house where I was staying, the host had invited the colonel commanding a neighbouring depot and his wife to dinner, and the conversation was flagging seriously. Some mention of New Zealand in that day’s papers suggested it as a topic, upon which a couple of us brought out all we knew about New Zealand, discussed the natives, then savages generally, and so restored the fortunes of the evening. The colonel and his wife still sat silent.

When they were gone, we said to the host that we thought it very hard work to entertain people who would not say anything to anybody. He replied that they had said something as they got into their carriage. What was it? The colonel observed that it was very impertinent of people to talk about countries they had never seen, especially in presence of a man like himself, who had not only lived for years in New Zealand, but had written a book about it! This was the thanks we got.¹⁰

The politics of this example deserve their own analysis in some other context. But here, as in the rest of the book, Mahaffy’s focus is on the social and theatrical skill of the talkers. Not only does he never consider the kind of London dinner party that Cannadine and Collini refer to; he privileges Irish talkers, of whom Wilde and Gregory are prime examples, on almost every page (for example, “in Irish society, where wit is less uncommon than elsewhere, and where it is no less highly prized” [84]).

Most students of the Victorian dinner party refer to its context as a domestic site. Strong says that in post-Napoleonic Europe, “the arts of the table became finally separated from politics and the state,” and the “archetypal meal of the nineteenth century was to be the private family dinner party,” an expression “not only of domestic bliss but also social status” (Feast, 288–89). A chapter titled “Bourgeois Rituals” in Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby’s multivolume History of Private Life discusses dinner parties as a relationship of households to one another, a means of “proclaiming” and maintaining social position in a community.¹¹ In addition, the chapter “Private Spaces” in the same book talks about the dining room as the place where “the family put itself on display for its guests.”¹² The concept of “display” raises the issue of the extradomestic circle: Who are the guests? And when they are assembled together with the host family in the dining room, what kind of “circle” do they form? Like the “display” of silver, servants, and food, the category of table-talk implies performance and audience; it suggests that the dinner party—particularly the kind of dinner party that Wilde and Gregory attended—is a crossover zone, with characteristics of both an intimate domestic sphere and a public, often official, one.

Discussing seventeenth-century architectural developments that extended, under the same roof, both private space for individual family members and salon space for guests, Jürgen Habermas observes, “The line between private and public sphere extended right through the house. The privatized individuals stepped out of the intimacy of their living rooms into the public sphere of the salon.”¹³ But the late-Victorian London dinner party, as I see it, was different. This kind of dinner party typically moved across several rooms, from front hall to library to dining room to drawing room (where the men joined the women after coffee was served to them separately). In this respect, it is the talk, not the room, that created a zone with a certain elasticity, making the occasion a flexible one. Such socializing was public enough to have an aura of power—to be, potentially, a significant event, to command attention. The dinner parties that Wilde and Gregory went to included guests who were powerful, well-known figures in art and politics, the kind of people mentioned regularly in the press. Such individuals comprised London’s elite: the “leading minds” that Stefan Collini analyzes in Public Moralists. They were the political and cultural celebrities, the diplomats, journalists, historians, and “public intellectuals” of the time (13–59). In this context, table-talk was secular, worldly, and contemporary in its orientation. Within an atmosphere created by the licensed informality of famous or powerful people who were slightly off duty and by the heightened formality of a meal where such people were present in a private dining room, table-talk constructed a zone in which the activities of the empire’s ruling classes, artists, and intellectuals could be circulated, critiqued, and reimagined. The Victorian dinner party therefore was private enough to allow for risk-taking, permitting guests to broach subjects or opinions not possible in a more open space. Because these dinner parties took place within a domestic setting, there was an assumed safety about anything that was said there. Comments were made without necessarily being considered official to guests who understood the implicit confidentiality of the talk.

Two brief examples help to illuminate the social elasticity that I identify with late-Victorian table-talk. Both instances help to frame the points that Wilde and Gregory raise about table-talk in their writings. My first example comes from the diaries of a contemporary of Lady Gregory and Wilde, the Fabian activist Beatrice Webb (1858–1943). The dinner party was the ur-unit of Fabian “permeation,” the technical term for the means by which—precisely because of its flexibly private and public nature—the Fabians sought to influence government policy by getting to know important policy makers socially. Webb’s diaries record hundreds of such dinners, given and attended by herself and her husband. These events were always planned with much care to bring together people who could be useful to one another. On one such occasion, on 22 November 1905, Webb was dining at the house of Lord Lucas, a Liberal peer who, she said, “cultivated our friendship.”¹⁴ Sitting after dinner with the wives, Webb (writing about Mrs. Willie Grenfell), begins to doubt the value of dinner parties and their talk altogether: “But when I sat with her and the other smart little woman in that palatial room I felt a wee bit ashamed of myself. Why was I dissipating my energy in this smart but futile world in late hours and small talk? Exactly at the moment this feeling was disconcerting me, the door opened and Mr. Balfour was announced. I confess that the appearance of the P.M. dissipated my regrets. It is always worth while, I thought, to meet those who really have power to alter things” (Diary, 3:12). The nature of this social zone thus changes as the prime minister walks in—or, more precisely, as Webb sees him enter and rejoices in her proximity to power. The after-dinner “small talk” of women changes to a more significant conversation, not strictly table-talk but nevertheless the kind of semiprivate conversation among public figures that makes dinner parties politically valuable.

In the second example, another prime minister, Herbert Asquith, took advantage of the unofficial space of the dinner party to enlist support for his government’s policy. This episode occurred much later, on 1 August 1916, and one book refers to it as a dinner party, but in his memoirs Walter Page, the U.S. ambassador to whom Asquith was speaking, calls it a luncheon.¹⁵ Whatever the meal, its date was the eve of the execution of Roger Casement, the Irish rebel convicted of High Treason for his attempt to run guns in aid of the Easter Rising. After a trial in June, Casement had been found guilty and was sentenced to hang, but the government had also circulated sub rosa pages from homosexual diaries said to be Casement’s. Typed transcripts of these inculpating documents had been shown to people who would talk about them, as a means of destroying popular support—especially Irish and American support—for Casement. On this occasion, Page mentioned that he had seen the transcript, and Asquith said to him, “Excellent. And you need not be particular about keeping it to yourself.”¹⁶ Although one cannot know for certain whether Asquith would have said something like that in his office, clearly the context of a meal created a zone that felt less-than-official and granted license for the encouragement to gossip. Page’s memoirs do not mention that comment, and its origin is difficult to find. All Page’s account say...