Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction
Angela Kingston
Language: English
Pages: 319
ISBN: B00FGVT54A
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries. Focusing on Wilde’s relationships with many of these writers, Kingston examines and critiques ‘Wildean’ portraits by such celebrated authors as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, as well as some lesser-known writers. Many fascinating, little-known biographical and literary connections are revealed. While this work will be of significant interest to scholars of Wilde, it is also written in a clear, accessible style which will appeal to the non-academic reader with a general interest in Wilde or the late Victorian period. (Amazon)
"This book fills an important gap in the field. Kingston brings together a broad range of works that reflect Wilde's influence during his lifetime and well beyond. Its genre of annotated-bibliography-as-narrative stands as engaged criticism, contributing greatly to our knowledge of both the artist as critic and critic as artist. This is not straightforward biography, but rigorous textual analysis that broadens our understanding of Wilde as author and cultural subject."-- Frederick Roden, University of Connecticut
"All of the works that Kingston discusses show that Wilde had the capacity to inspire a very mixed bunch of fictions that frequently share an impulse to distort or exaggerate whatever their authors had come to know about him. Kingston's useful book will hopefully prompt further, more critical inquiries into the conflicted reasons why Wilde, throughout his career, became the subject of such lavish storytelling."--Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles, Victorian Studies (Volume 52, Number 1)
adapted—like a restored Church’.13 Despite all his aesthetic excesses, however, Fletcher’s Davenant has many Wildean charms; the comments made by the American Ferris most likely represent Fletcher’s own assessment of her Oxford friend: ‘Claude is a good sort of fellow . . . in spite of all his nonsense. He strikes me as a sort of epitomized Europe . . . I am curious to see if he will accomplish any thing. He has talent’.14 Fletcher appears to have been diverted by the wit that underlined Wilde’s
Wilde, which is examined below. It is Hawkshaw’s conduct in relation to another woman, the notorious flirt and socialite Isabella Woodward, daughter of the Irish MP, which casts the harshest light upon his character. Heavily in debt because of his extravagance during the London season, Hawkshaw engineers a romance with Woodward, already a friend, with a view to marrying her for her money; a scenario that had already been devised for a Wildean character by Besant and Rice in The Monks of Thelema.
of [his] most mutually satisfying connections were with women [like Ada Leverson] who shared his passion for novelty and whose temperaments put them at odds with the majority of their female acquaintances.63 Dixon does not appear to have been a woman of Leverson’s type. Like Corelli, she seems to have channeled her dislike of Wilde’s inconsistency into her fiction. Dixon’s ambivalent reaction to Wilde also appears to stem from her observation of his ambiguous sexuality and the unusual ambience
Richard Le Gallienne ‘Brown Roses’ (1896) In contrast to ‘The Fifth Edition’, there is little anti-Wilde feeling discernible in the fourth short story published in 1896, written by Wilde’s former intimate Richard Le Gallienne. As related in Part 2, the poet Hyacinth Rondel, who first appeared in Le Gallienne’s ‘The Woman’s Half-Profits’ in Prose Fancies (1894), reappeared in the second series of Prose Fancies in 1896, in the story ‘Brown Roses’. In this tale Rondel instructs his barber to cut his
noted, the masking symbolism of vampirism also allowed Stoker and his Victorian readers to enjoy the sexuality of the novel surreptitiously, perhaps unconsciously.98 This aspect of Dracula certainly escaped comment by contemporary reviewers of the novel, who, while acknowledging the book to be sensational, found nothing morally objectionable in it. In addition to this camouflaging effect, there is another aspect of vampirism that is particularly relevant here, namely the abnormality of the