Welcome
to my weekly blog, SATURDAY SESSIONS!
In
this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I
include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its
Culture.
If
you wish to ask me any question about the text, by the way, just send me an
e-mail at greg@bluefeather.ie
IRISH
LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
OSCAR WILDE (1854 - 1900)
Born near Merrion Square in Dublin, Oscar Wilde was
raised in the house which is currently the American College in Merrion Square,
directly opposite his famous statue in the park itself.
At the
height of his success as a playwright, Oscar was a household name in Victorian
England where he lived most of his life. However, up to the 1960s, the Catholic
Irish never dared speak his name - because he was gay!
All
of his satirical plays are still very funny, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest.
His
plays were about 'illegitimate' births, mistaken identities, late revelations
and the hypocrisy of Victorian society - but his Victorian audiences loved
them!
He irritated
Victorian society by wearing long hair and having an aesthetic outlook on life:
'I find it harder and harder every day to
live up to my blue china.'
He
often wore a green carnation to remind everybody that he was Irish.
He
then shocked society when he published the famous, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1890. This was a Gothic Horror
story about a young man who made a Faustian pact that allowed him to keep his
youth and live a decadent life; only the
painting would grow old and show the effects of his corruption.
Wilde
was a great essayist and social commentator. In this, he was also ahead of his
time, revealing the deep influence of Taoist philosophy in his work.
Then,
one day, Oscar made the tragic mistake of defending himself in court against an
accusation relating to his homosexuality.
He
discovered that he was bisexual later on in life; he had married Constance and
they'd had two children.
He
lost the court case and ended up again in court, this time not as plaintiff, but
as defendant.
Oscar
lost the case and was sent to jail to do hard labour for two years. The
experience broke his spirit and made him ill. He contracted an untreated infection to his ear-drum in prison which eventually led to meningitis.
The
British public promptly forgot him. When
he was being transferred from a very harsh prison (Pentonville) to Reading Gaol
(jail) in London, the people on the railway station platform jeered and spat at
him. That unexpected incident was
heart-breaking for him.
Wilde wrote of his experience of
hearing child prisoners crying. 22
children were imprisoned in Reading, including a seven-year-old, sentenced to
one month’s imprisonment for setting fire to a hay stack, an 11-year-old who
stole a paintbrush, and a 10-year-old who killed a duck. Wilde wanted to commit
suicide but the prisoners helped him to stay alive. Indeed, he wrote a famous
poem for one of them who was hanged for murder, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
After
prison, he changed his name, left England and went to France.
(PART TWO NEXT WEEK)
