Psychoanalyzing Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide by Melissa Knox (Yale University Press, 185 pp., illustrated)

Melissa Knox's psychobiography, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide, is refreshingly unlike many other scholarly books--it's not full of academic jargon, it's not overblown, and it's highly readable.

Knox, a professor of English at St.Peter's College in New Jersey, began her quest to explore the unconscious mind of the famed 19th-century Irish-born playwright/poet/wit (1854-1900) as a way to understand "his life, style, and literary work." It is the unconscious mind, writes Knox, that is "the source of creativity."

Psychobiography, unlike its more conventional counterpart, does not solely rely on the use of "the well-known life experiences of a person and on the conscious mind as revealed in letters, literary works, or public and family life." Those sources don't tell the whole story. By digging deeper through the psychoanalytic approach, the biographer "can identify the unconscious conflicts that determine the forms (the subject's) creative genius took, as well as choices of subject and approach--genre, theme, style, plot." She further states that "ideally, one sees not just the outside actions but whence they originate."

In Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide, Knox takes the pages of Wilde's plays, poems, and other works, and delves into his inner life thus confronting the reader with Wilde's "conflicts, ...weaknesses,...childishness, ...fears, and ...deep shames and secrets." The reader is also made aware of Wilde's contradictions and self-destructiveness. Among the most important aspects of his life are his fear of the debilitations of syphilis (which he ironically contracted from a female prostitute during his undergraduate days at Oxford) that makes itself evident in his 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, "a parable of an artist foreseeing his own physical and mental decay," his ambivalence about his homosexuality (embracing it one minute and calling  it "sexual madness" the next), and his desire to be accepted by the British upper class while at the same time writing unflatteringly about its members. Oscar Wilde was indeed a complex and troubled soul, whose mother  (a writer and Irish revolutionary) expected great things from him. And he tried to fulfill her wish. "I believe in you and your genius," she wrote him prior to the opening of one of his plays, A Woman of No Importance. (Mrs. Wilde wrote essays under the pseudonym, Speranza.)

After serving a two-year sentence in prison for committing "indecent acts," Wilde became a social pariah, "shunned in the streets even by old friends" and eventually died "in mental, physical, and economic decline" at the age of 46.

In Wilde's short, turmoil-filled life, he accomplished much. Besides writing plays and other literary works, he was an early feminist who edited a women's magazine, Lady's World (later renamed Woman's World). And because of his prison experience, he advocated prison reform in letters-to-the-editor that were published in the Daily Chronicle.

It is quite plain that Oscar Wilde was born 100 years too soon. Today he would be a TV talk show staple because of his skills as a conversationalist and wit.

All in all, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide earns its place beside the collected works of Wilde. This is the book to consult to get a better understanding of the writer who was called "the foremost homosexual in the English mind."

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (March 1997).