Making Oscar Wilde

by Michèle Mendelssohn

Overview

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, this book tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.'

Combining new evidence and gripping cultural history, Michèle Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde's rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic pageant. With superb style and an instinct for story-telling, she brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate the United States and Britain with his words and ended up conquering the world. Following the twists and turns of Wilde's journey, Mendelssohn vividly depicts sensation-hungry Victorian journalism and popular entertainment alongside racial controversies, sex scandals, and the growth of Irish nationalism. This ground-breaking revisionist history shows how Wilde's tumultuous early life embodies the story of the Victorian era as it tottered towards modernity. Riveting and original, Making Oscar Wilde is a masterful account of a life like no other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198802365
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2018
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Michèle Mendelssohn, Associate Professor of English, Mansfield College, Oxford

Michèle Mendelssohn is a literary critic and cultural historian. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, earned her doctorate from Cambridge University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. Mendelssohn's previous books include Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture and two co-edited collections of literary criticism, Alan Hollinghurst and Late Victorian Into Modern (shortlisted for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize). She has published in The New York Times, The Guardian, African American Review, Journal of American Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Victorian Literature and Culture.

Table of Contents

Prologue: What's the matter with Oscar Wilde?Part One, 1854-1881Turning PointsDo You Find the World Very Hollow? Astonishing the DonsNot Having Set the World Quite on FirePart Two, 1882-1883Col. Morse's CampaignOscar DearMr. Wild of Borneo, or The PaddyLife Imitates ArtIs it Manhood? The War of ArtAin't Nothing Like the Real ThingSon of SperanzaUnderground MenGoing SouthThe ConfederateSuccess is a ScienceYou Have Made Your NameBy the ThroatEpilogue: The Private View

Editorial Reviews

01/22/2018
Mendelssohn (Henry James), a professor of English at Oxford, peripatetically, and not quite satisfyingly, reexamines Oscar Wilde’s self-mythologization, reinvention, and rise to celebrity, mostly in terms of Wilde’s 1882 speaking tour of the United States. Straining to broaden the focus from Wilde’s own career to a larger cultural context, Mendelssohn emphasizes how the author was caught up in the racial, ethnic, and class anxieties roiling a post–Civil War America full of newly arrived immigrants, many from Wilde’s native Ireland. After describing Wilde’s early life and university career, the book shifts focus to the then-little-known 27-year-old Wilde’s time crisscrossing the U.S. talking about the Aesthetic art movement that he so flamboyantly represented. Though Wilde would paint the tour as a success, in fact he often found himself the subject of mockery and hostile scrutiny. Mendelssohn argues that Wilde nevertheless learned twin lessons in perseverance and showmanship that served him in good stead in writing the plays that would subsequently secure his fame. Mendelssohn’s study never quite settles, as it tries to meld biography with an expansive cultural history filtered through the lens of Wilde’s visit and interactions. Nonetheless, there is much to ponder in Mendelssohn’s analysis, whether one agrees with it or not, and it will hopefully inform future discussions of Wilde. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Mendelssohn's book is well researched and written, clear, readable, and engaging. She describes some less known events in Wilde's life in spellbinding detail... In it, we learn of the impact of early key life experiences upon later life and that those who are exploited sometimes exploit others." — Beth Bidlack, Mount Holyoke College, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work

From the Publisher

03/01/2018
Mendelssohn (English literature, Oxford Univ.; Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture) here surveys Oscar Wilde's entire life (and afterlife), but most of her book is devoted to his 1882 American lecture tour. The author focuses less on the content of the lectures than on the often-hostile responses Wilde inspired. Some of these negative reactions resulted from his flamboyant dress and mannerisms, but much also reflected late 19th-century Celtophobia, leading to attacks on him in the Washington Post, Harper's Weekly, and other periodicals. Mendelssohn shows that this anti-Irish sentiment was combined with Negrophobia, with Wilde sometimes presented in minstrel shows and posters in blackface. Indeed, this book was inspired by Mendelssohn seeing the racist 1882 Currier & Ives poster "The Aesthetic Craze," which portrays Wilde as a African American dandy and features an offensive caption. Mendelssohn claims Wilde drew on this when he wrote his comedies of the 1890s, and the Celtophobia he encountered in America fostered his Irish patriotism. His tour was modestly successful, earning him $5,605, which English newspaper accounts increased five-fold. VERDICT Without actually justifying her book's title, Mendelssohn offers a solid introduction to Wilde (though the definitive biography remains Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde). Her well-told account paints an unsettling picture of post-Civil War America's racism and xenophobia.—Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

Library Journal

2018-04-11
A fresh look at Oscar Wilde's English, Irish, and American contexts.As "gay history's Christ figure," Wilde (1854-1900) has been amply investigated by biographers and literary historians, but Mendelssohn (English/Oxford Univ.; Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, 2007, etc.) was surprised by a discovery she made in a library archive: six small cards, each depicting Wilde with a different ethnicity: Irish, Chinese, French, German, black, and white American. In addition, she found a Currier and Ives poster of Wilde with brown skin, thick lips, and "spiky Afro hair." The provocative images, she writes, inspired her quest "to solve the mystery of Wilde's identity." Although she claims that her research reveals a "secret life" unknown to previous writers, in fact much of Mendelssohn's entertaining study conveys a familiar portrait of the ambitious aesthete: his "larger-than-life parents," Sir William, a renowned oculist, and his eccentric wife, Jane; Wilde's experiences at Oxford, where he hosted "exotic" soirees in his college rooms and won honors for his intellectual prowess; his literary reputation as a poet and playwright; his exhausting American tour; marriage and fatherhood; and his precipitous downfall, which led to incarceration in Reading Gaol. Mendelssohn's contribution to Wilde's legacy is her fresh look at the American tour, providing social and cultural context that helps to explain the mystery of the disconcerting images. In 1882, Wilde disembarked in New York into a swirling eddy of assumptions about race, class, and gender. The foppish 27-year-old generated curiosity—sometimes cruel—about his manliness. His lectures, which at first were "painful," the New York Times reported, invited parodies. His unscrupulous manager promoted him as if he were one of P.T. Barnum's freaks, and the press mounted "degrading attacks," such as caricaturing him as "Mr Wild of Borneo," an image of Wilde as "a negrified Paddy." Blackface minstrelsy, a hugely popular form of entertainment, lampooned him. The Currier and Ives poster, Mendelssohn concludes, reflected the inseparable connection of "Negrophobia and Celtophobia" in 19th-century America.A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.

Kirkus Reviews