The fate of Oscar Wilde:

From brilliance to infamy

by Gwen Herat

In a week, Oscar Wilde was reduced to ignominy and shame which resulted in finding himself facing a future imprisonment at the Old Bailey. What preceded was the scandal that shook it to the foundation of the century of Victorian England.

The literary circle was gripped by the horror that fell upon the country's most brilliant playwright Oscar Wilde when he was at the height of his popularity that was reduced to a psychological issue to suffer ultimate humiliation.

It was at Oxford that Robert Ross was introduced to Oscar Wilde in 1886 when Ross was about 17 years his senior and was to play an important role in Wilde's life in the years when Wilde turned to the unnatural from the natural ways of men.

This was history veiled in obscurity and was to be proved beyond any doubt in the years that followed as attested by ample documents. The emergence of Ross was always there in the background paving the way to his downfall but its presence carefully covered up and scarcely discernible while all the time Wilde was innocently unaware of the danger lurking in the form or Ross.

Emotional man

Lord Alfred Douglas who knew Ross at the same time as Wilde recognised him as a nervous, affectionate, sentimental and an emotional man. Three of them had one thing in common which may have later contributed to the scandal they were involved in; they adored their mothers and despised the fathers and were devoted sons.

Ross lost his father when he was a child while Douglas hated his father and Wilde's devotion to his mother was a sheer veneration. Ross who hailed from a very influential and wealthy background with a Canadian Prime Minister among others, studied at King's College, Cambridge.

He emerged as a brilliant personality who achieved distinction in many fields but lay within a low profile and contributed much to the achievement of others with Oscar Wilde deriving positive encouragement but this was not going to be what he imagined where his writing was concerned.

A new tone was detected in Wilde's writing with his close association with Ross. There was a sinister streak in some of his writings like an intellectual toying with strange sins and hints of perverse tendencies. These manifestations coincided with the change of nature in Wilde and occurred during the Ross period of corrupting influence that brought about the fall.

Wilde rejected these efforts with disdain saying that one cannot take the responsibility for the failure of another. His thinking was at such high level that it was too late to intercept the cancer that was spreading his body and mind. His course of conduct that led to his downfall in 1886 was when he began to experiment and the practice became dangerously stable in 1889. Ross boasted that he was the first boy he had and not Alfred Douglas.

Scandal

What produced the change in Wilde's nature? No one cared to analyse his situation, not until it became the scandal of the time.

Many psychologists of the time refused to believe that it was a psychological reversal that his physical had transformed this father of two children into a gentle woman especially at a time when there was no uncertainty about the moral lapses in men.

The change was complete and irreversible; but was he held responsible for it? Today, no one thinks so with bi-sexual and gay marriages being the order of the day and lawfully accepted by powerful countries constitutionally.

But his answers come in uncertain voices. At his time, the study of mystery of the abnormal had not penetrated deep enough into humanity for revealing the ultimate secrets. If it was so, he would have been the super hero of his time like Rudlof Nureyev to name one personality. His case has not been proved to date even after many battles in court and the verdict lay open.

Many are the reasons to suppose that there may not be a mix-up in the lesser defined differences between sexes and their mental and emotional feelings that are psychological.

Reason

It was believed that the reason Wilde distanced himself from his wife was that he was suffering from the recurrence of a disease contracted during an affair while at university. Later, it was claimed the cause of his death was this particular disease though on and off disputed.

It was extracted from one of his biographies that Oscar Wilde when at Oxford contacted syphilis for the cure of which mercury injections were administered. It was probably due to the treatment that his teeth subsequently turned black.

Wilde went to see a doctor in London before proposing to his future wife who assured him that he was completely cured with no pathological obstacle to his marriage but later he was to discover that the disease had been dormant and was forced to give up physical relations with his wife.

It was at this juncture when Wilde was feeling depressed that his friends tempted him to homosexuality. Wilde was feeling guilty about the mess he had got into to cool off his relations with a sweet, gentle and exceptionally beautiful wife with whom he had been deeply in love with. But Alfred Douglas found it hard to comprehend and did not believe it.

Biographers

This statement was made by one of the most painstaking biographers, Boris Brasol but another equally reliable biographer, Sherard in one of his last books devoted to Wilde said without a hint that he had been party to spreading the original report; during the years he knew Wilde that he never saw him sick or ill with pain. There were many attributes to him of a certain disease and that it was the final cause of his death.

Never in his 17 years of association had he noticed the existence of a disease and said the playwright had a wonderful constitution just as wonderful as his brain.

The two men, Robert Sherard and Boris Brasol changed their views about its truth. Brasol's attempt to discover the cause of death from medical reports was fruitless just like the pathology for the verdict of the criminal courts which has yet to be registered.

To be continued