Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was the youngest son of Dublin's Sir William Wilde, a wealthy eye and ear surgeon who was as well known for his foul personal habits as he was for his standard textbook on aural surgery, and Lady Jane "Speranza" Wilde, an eccentric and elephantine woman who used her chic literary salon in Dublin (and later London) to further the Irish independence movement. Exposed at an early age to the world of lively and intelligent conversation, Wilde won scholarships to Trinity and later (in 1874) to Oxford for his academic achievements in the study of ancient Greek.

At Oxford, where he studied philosophy, Wilde came under the influence of two scholars: John Ruskin (author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice) and Walter Pater (author of Studies in the History of the Renaissance and Marius the Epicurean), both of whom were concerned with the pursuit of beauty and the rejection of Victorian aesthetics. Ruskin taught that Beauty was essential for uplifting the masses in an era obsessed with progress and prosperity, and that great art was no longer possible in England because the country had grown materialistic and unjust; Pater, on the other hand, building upon the French poet Gautier's idea of "art for art's sake," taught that Victorian art was terrible because it was too utilitarian (aiming at moral improvement rather than Beauty), and that one's highest duty is always to live life as fully as possible by constantly seeking out new sensations. Wilde, by temperament a libertine but by upbringing a conscientious liberal, would spend the rest of his life struggling to reconcile these conflicting claims of what was known then as "the Aesthetic Movement."

As an undergraduate Wilde, determined to become famous ("and if not famous, I'll be notorious"), filled his rooms with exquisite china, grew his hair outrageously long, and dressed in outlandish knee breeches, velvet coats, and a large green tie. Despite his robust 6'3 physique, Wilde shunned athletics ("Except," he later confessed, "for dominoes"), preferring to ape the languid manner of famous dandies like Beau Brummell. After graduating, the 24-year-old scholar arrived in London, where his costumes, lounge lizard mannerisms, and brilliant conversational skills quickly established him as a public figure, the dandified leader of the Aesthetic Movement (which the press had just picked up on, a decade after its popularity in the academy). Wilde soon became an intimate of George Bernard Shaw, the painter James Whistler, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and other social elites who accepted him as a great poet (although he had yet to publish any poetry.) Because he refused to work for a living, when Wilde was offered a salary in 1881 to tour the United States wearing velvet knee breeches and carrying a lily as a sort of living advertisement for Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan's satire of aestheticism, he quickly agreed.

The tour (during which Wilde famously told a U.S. customs official that "I have nothing to declare...except my genius") was a tremendous success. Wilde's speeches on topics such as "The House Beautiful" and "The English Renaissance of Art" made him one of the first true superstars, a gorgeous bohemian figure in a green overcoat of otter fur who was mobbed everywhere from Boston to Wild West mining towns, and feted by everyone from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Walt Whitman. During this tour, which stretched from weeks to months, Wilde began to take aestheticism more seriously: His scathing denunciations of the kitschy excesses of 19th century capitalism prompted one of his biographers to describe the tour as "the most determined and sustained attack on materialistic vulgarity that America has ever seen." Wilde finally returned to Europe, where he wrote two plays, Vera, or The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua. After spending the rest of his money on an unsuccessful production of the latter in New York, Wilde married Constance Lloyd, a wealthy and beautiful heiress, fathered two sons (Cyril and Vyvyan), and finally settled down to the business of launching his own Aesthetic Movement.

In 1885, Wilde wrote "The Truth of Masks" and "The Relation of Dress to Art," critical yet humorous essays which were but the first in a furious salvo of mostly anonymous essays and reviews in which Wilde repudiated everything the sentimental Victorian bourgeois art-lover (or "Philistine," as Wilde puts it) held dear. Against the then-fashionable forms of literature and art which sought faithfully to replicate Nature or Life, Wilde argued that artifice is not only more beautiful but even more real than the natural; and, against the idea that art ought to be morally uplifting, Wilde insisted that art must be created without any sympathy for human emotions or moral concerns. Yet as his epic essays "The Decay of Lying" (1889) and "The Critic as Artist" (1890) demonstrate, Wilde was still concerned with resisting a society which seemed intent on debasing the imagination and inhibiting individual self-development.

In 1887 Wilde accepted the editorship of a fashionable lady's journal, which he converted into an intellectual woman's magazine before quitting in 1889, unable to deal with a steady job. ("To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn't do—except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community," one of Wilde's characters remarks.) He published a collection of fairy tales in 1888, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (a commercial success, though Walter Pater publicly rejected its ruthless version of aestheticism) as well as three collections of short stories in 1891; and between November 1891 and November 1892 he wrote his first memorable plays: Salomé, Lady Windermere's Fan (whose first production starred the great-grandfather of Drew Barrymore), and A Woman of No Importance. Salomé was banned in England on charges of blasphemy, but his other plays were hits, and Wilde made himself an essential part of their performances by appearing nightly to congratulate the audiences on their good taste. Wilde also spoke out boldly on behalf of the rights of women, working people (most notably in his anti-capitalist essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" from 1891), and the Irish. At the age of 35, with the plays An Ideal Husband (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1894; still considered the finest comedy of manners in the English language) still to come, surrounded by admiring disciples like the poet William Butler Yeats, the essayist and cartoonist Max Beerbohm, and the "decadent" illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, the success of Wilde's new aesthetic movement seemed assured.

However, as he rose in English society, Wilde grew less and less cautious about concealing his homosexual affairs, which he had begun having in 1886 (shortly after his marriage). Despite the fact that the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act had just made sodomy illegal, Wilde casually paraded handsome male "rent boys" and admirers through London's fashionable cafes. His closest companion, young Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, whom Wilde met in 1891, was the son of the brutish Marquess of Queensberry—the inventor of the modern rules of boxing. In 1895 Queensberry publicly accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite," and when Wilde sued for libel, the gay '90s came crashing to a close: His suit was dismissed, and Wilde was arrested for and found guilty of "gross indecency." Not only was he sentenced to two years solitary confinement and hard labor in Reading Gaol—where the luxury-loving dandy suffered greatly from hunger, dysentery, and insomnia—but Wilde's beloved mother died, his plays were shut down, his books were recalled, his family was forced to flee England, and his possessions were all sold in a bankruptcy auction. The name "Oscar" quickly became a synonym for "pervert."

In May of 1897 Wilde was released from prison. Abandoned by his former friends, but refusing to reunite with his family, he left England and never returned. After finishing the maudlin The Ballad of Reading Gaol, he never wrote another word, claiming that "the intense energy of creation has been kicked out of me." Marcel Proust, who met him during this period, describes Wilde in his Memoirs as "the poet who was once feted in all the drawing-rooms, and applauded in all the theaters of London, and then driven out from every lodging-house, unable to find a pillow to lay down on." Wilde drank heavily, grew enormously obese, and finally died in his small Paris hotel room of cerebral meningitis—possibly related to an ear infection he'd contracted in prison—at the age of 46. His last words were, reportedly, either "I'm dying beyond my means," or "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death, and one of us has to go."

HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND?

"One must be serious about something, if one is to have any amusement in life." —Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Oscar Wilde is the only possible choice to be Hermenaut of the Month for an issue on Camp: After all, he is the very embodiment of the ultra-sophisticated, languorous, scathingly ironic homosexual with whom camp has been popularly associated for so long. The encyclopedic Camp: The Lie That Tells The Truth describes Wilde as "one of the first watersheds of camp," while queer theorist Moe Meyer recently went so far as to suggest that Wilde actually invented camp. But camp, although always about attitude, is more than just attitude: Wilde's camp mode of presenting himself to and thinking about the world coheres—when patched together from his plays, his critical essays and reviews, his fiction, his cocktail party aphorisms, and his life itself—into a paradoxical philosophy of living which is serious about refusing to take itself seriously.

Contemporary theorists of "subversive laughter" argue that laughter provoked by slips, stumbles, and somersaults of the body or tongue offers the hope of political liberation by suggesting that the world is not unchangeable, that inflexible rules can suddenly be transformed into something flexible: think Charlie Chaplin or Lenny Bruce. Irony, on the other hand (they claim), is a form of humor which is not revolutionary but subversive, since it only pokes towards reform among an elite audience instead of seeking to overthrow the reigning order outright: think of Socrates' affected ignorance or Kierkegaard's roundabout writing. Wilde's humorous plays, which take sly jabs at bourgeois customs and morals, are certainly ironic, but not in the detached and shallow way that every "sophisticated" playwright after him—from Noel Coward to Neil Simon—has used irony. Because it is always laden with the foreboding sense that the society he was baiting would eventually punish him for it, and because it is also always informed by a deep moral seriousness (although his morality conflicts with that of bourgeois society's), Wilde's flippant yet emotionally and politically engaged form of irony is camp.

When asked to describe the "philosophy" behind The Importance of Being Earnest (whose subtitle is "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People"), Wilde replied, "We should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." This is perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to defining the camp attitude, which asks, "What is the importance of being earnest, anyway?" "Who are the people the world takes seriously?" asks Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan, "All the dull people one can think of, from the Bishops down to the bores... I think life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it." Wilde, who published his own intellectual notions (which he took seriously) in collections of witty aphorisms with titles like "Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated" and "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," also refuses to accord intellectual seriousness the respect it demands: "Nothing is serious except passion," says Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, "The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all." The earnest mind cannot comprehend the paradoxical truths which Wilde would reveal, and, like Nietzsche's Overman, Wilde's aesthetes operate at a moral level which is so absurdly removed from the ordinary it seems like a put-on.

Wilde and the enlightened aesthetes of his writing are not flippant, nor are they earnest; nor are they not-flippant, nor not-earnest. Like the dancing Shiva image in Hinduism, which is indifferent yet amused, detached yet dancing the world into being, Wilde's camp irony is more revolutionary than the laughter espoused by radical humor theorists, precisely because it is beyond good and evil, beyond funny and un-funny. Wilde's camp philosophy, which mixes serious espousal and mockery, is absurd, and only by being so can it be truly redemptive.

HOW SHALL WE BE?

"The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet found out." —from Wilde's "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young."

"My ambitions do not stop with composing poems. I want to make of my life itself a work of art," announced Wilde. Putting on new identities like he put on new outfits, Wilde wasn't simply heeding Pater's admonition that "Failure is to form habits"; he was putting into practice his existential belief that the self is in fact no deeper than a painter's canvas. Having studied under the American drama coach Steele Mackaye, who taught that self-conscious gestures and poses could transform one's very interiority, Wilde sought to transform his own self into a work of art which—like all art considered beautiful by Wilde's theory of aestheticism—called into question conformist bourgeois values. So although the dandy pose Wilde adopted seems merely frivolous and queer, in the utilitarian bourgeois culture of Victorian England it represented something much more subversive.

Today, Wilde's brand of dandyism signifies a frivolous, non-threatening display of homosexuality. But the "sodomite," according to the Victorian mind, merely engaged in a peculiar sort of sexual behavior: The word "homosexual" didn't even exist at the time. Same-sex desire, that is to say, was considered to be nothing but a degenerate pose, not a mode of being—hence Queensberry's curious accusation of Wilde. So, although his trial may have forever associated effeminate dandyism with same-sex desire, for Wilde the dandy represented the struggle artistically to develop one's unique individuality in a materialistic society which requires of its male citizens the utilitarian virtues of rationality, moderation, self-sacrifice, self-discipline, industry, and thrift.

How so? When the English bourgeoisie came into being, it rejected the pleasure-seeking values of the hated aristocracy in favor of new virtues related to hard work and simple pleasures. According to one recent study, the no-nonsense bourgeoisie even created a new body language, one which was open and direct as opposed to the stylized poses of the aristocrats. So the original dandies of the 17th and 18th centuries, who admired the vanishing aristocrat's disdain for the socially acceptable pursuit of wealth (in favor of the pursuit of self-development), were in turn rejecting bourgeois values with their frivolous poses. This explains why Wilde set his plays and stories among the aristocracy: not because he worshipped power and money, but because he admired the dandy's anti-utilitarian world-view. Wilde wasn't against the "common man," but he despised anything "common" or "vulgar" (by which he meant "received" or "taken for granted"). In Wilde's first play Vera, the hero states, "In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat." Wilde wanted an aristocracy of everyone.

In his essay "The Relation of Dress to Art," Wilde refers to the artist's model as the perfect example of life turned into art, because the model appears "as everything he is not, and as nothing that he is." The bourgeois self, in order to be the bearer of bourgeois virtues, must be an ongoing, coherent thing; not an ever-changing, arbitrary performance like the aristocratic self is. Wilde has his arch-aesthete Dorian Gray wonder at "the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence..." For Wilde, the idea of a solid, real self is naive: "Being natural is simply a pose," points out Dorian Gray's dandy Lord Henry, "and the most irritating pose I know." What the bourgeoisie praise as "character" is simply evidence that one has stopped developing. "Depth" of character is likewise nothing to be proud of, since (as Lord Henry argues) "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." This is what Lord Illingworth may mean (in A Woman of No Importance) when he refers in passing to the "philosophy of the superficial": The fabulously inauthentic and shockingly shallow camp self may be the best defense we have against the oppressive bourgeois values of modern industrial society. And as Wilde showed in his own life (as have the many oppressed men since Wilde's time who have imitated his mannerisms and lifestyle), you don't have to be rich to be an aristocrat. All you have to do is strike a pose.

WHAT SHALL WE BELIEVE?

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either..." —Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Impatient with the "factification" of the "suburban intellect," Wilde devotes many of his essays and the majority of his best quips to debunking the limited bourgeois idea of truth. "The English are always degrading truth into facts," he complains in "Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated," adding, "When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value." In "The Critic as Artist," the critic Gilbert dismisses all those qualities we associate with truth: sincerity (the "worst vice" of the "fanatic"), verisimilitude ("unrealistic," sniffs Gilbert), and probability ("that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life"). In "The Decay of Lying" the critic Vivian disses consistency, too: "Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action."

Because he is, after all, attempting to convince people of his own opinions, Wilde is constantly on guard against becoming tedious himself. In "The Critic as Artist," when the earnest Ernest is finally about to agree with Gilbert, the dandy cries, "Ah! ...When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong." And at the end of "The Truth of Masks," in which Wilde painstakingly proves a point about theatrical costuming, he apologizes, "Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay... The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything." A decade later, in The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde still has a character saying, "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."

Art, for Wilde, is the source of truth—precisely because it never tells the truth. In a famous passage in "The Decay of Lying," Vivian tells Cyril that "Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us... Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style, while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting human life...will [always] follow meekly after..." However, although the artist performs a service by showing reality as it is not, his or her perspective is still made too narrow by the focus of their particular medium. The critic, however, who is free to explore all schools of art, and is therefore free of prejudice, is another matter.

Wilde argues that in "criticism of the highest kind" (or "right interpretive criticism"), rather than seeking to discover the "true" intention of the artist, the critic actually lends a text or canvas its myriad meanings. (Any work of art which has but one message to reveal, and is therefore incapable of inspiring reverie and imagination, is not beautiful by Wilde's definition.) "It is Criticism that, recognizing no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it," says Gilbert. "Truth," he concludes, "is merely one's last mood." More importantly, according to Lord Illingworth, "Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore."

But Wilde is not simply a relativist. For as one character says in Dorian Gray, "The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them." And in "The Truth of Masks," Wilde writes that "A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true." ("The wise contradict themselves," agrees "Phrases and Philosophies.") That which is ultimately true can only be that which beautifully contradicts itself, thereby provoking us to wonder. This is why Wilde so often praises the liar, whose aim "is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure." By not seeking to force his opinions on others, the liar may actually help to usher in a new, utopian world in which, as Vivian puts it, "Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land." The willful creation of self-contradictory, multiplicitous, "insincere"—and therefore wonder-inspiring—meaning, is camp truth.

WHAT SHALL WE DO?

"It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world..." —Lord Goring, in An Ideal Husband.

The aesthetes of Wilde's essays and plays articulate a consistent rejection of morality and ethics which led Wilde's contemporaries—and generations of arty hedonists ever since—mistakenly to regard his philosophy of aesthetics as nothing but an excuse for uninhibited licentiousness. Lord Henry remarks that "We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do." Lord Darlington agrees, "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." And, in a rather more high-minded fashion, the critic Gilbert rejects morality like so: "Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing... Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong." The extremes to which Wilde sometimes took this position is evidenced in his 1889 essay "Pen, Pencil and Poison," which idealizes the dandy artist and murderer Thomas Wainewright (who was said to have killed one woman because of her thick ankles) whose crimes demonstrated his ability to divorce his art from morality! But in Wilde's own life he was extremely generous with his friends and lovers (which explains why he was constantly in debt), a caring father to his children, and daring in his support of politically unpopular—even dangerous—causes. What gives?

What Wilde rejected was not the idea that one's life should be guided by a sense of morality, nor that one should seek to make a positive difference in the world. What he really objected to was the self-satisfied moral posturing of (what he refers to as) the "Puritan" bourgeois do-gooder. "Of all poses, the moral pose is the most offensive..." says Gilbert, "They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious." Wilde was not an amoralist, then, but was conducting, as the great literary biographer Richard Ellman notes, "in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics." The ethics to which Wilde objects are those which are preachy and utilitarian, instead of instinctive and beautiful. Wilde's aestheticism is a morally and politically engaged one.

Bourgeois morality is not merely hypocritical (as a character remarks in An Ideal Husband, "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike"), but destructive. "Morality," writes Wilde in "A Chinese Sage" (an 1890 review of one of the first English translations of the Taoist Chuang Tzu), "went out of fashion when people began to moralize. Men ceased then to be spontaneous and to act on intuition." According to Wilde our simple, inborn virtue is destroyed by the moralizing of those whom he calls "prigs" and "offensive busybodies." So it is a complicated mixture of Taoism and Wilde's engaged aestheticism which Gilbert expresses when he says that "It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above the fine intellectual virtues those shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical benefit to itself." Gilbert rejects a laundry list of utilitarian bourgeois virtues: chastity (because it is "unnatural"), charity (the beginning of "a multitude of evils"), self-sacrifice ("a survival of the mutilation of the savage"), self-denial ("a stumbling-block to progress"), and even—in a phrase worthy of Chuang Tzu himself—conscience ("The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays... is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine").

So what is the ethical dandy's moral code? For one thing, despite the nonchalance with which he (or she, in the case of the many female aesthetes in Wilde's plays) expresses himself, the dandy is un-commonly courageous. "To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy," says Gilbert, "It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability." "Conscience," agrees Lord Henry, "and cowardice are really the same things." Wilde often satirizes the bourgeois ideal of marriage, for example, as an exercise in the mean-spirited preservation of property: Everybody marries for money and gives up liberty in the bargain. So Wilde's courageous morality looks—to respectable society—like immorality. But to Wilde, a sin against society may be the path to one's own self-perfection: "What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress..." insists Gilbert, "In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics."

What, then, does Wilde suggest we do with our lives? Absolutely nothing. For it is the seemingly disaffected idler who is uniquely capable of being truly virtuous, precisely because he or she isn't busy trying to save the world: Detached from the daily grind, the contemplative, non-'useful' person is able to see beyond the moment. This helps explain why Wilde, who took great risks to speak on behalf of the oppressed, rejects the do-gooder's "emotional sympathy" for those who are suffering. Not only is sympathy a prejudice, as Gilbert argues, which therefore limits our ability to be helpful, but sympathy with suffering is a sort of sickness; it is "the special vice of the age," as Lord Illingworth puts it, because "one should sympathize with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life." Lord Goring (An Ideal Husband) even goes so far as to argue that "If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world." But this is an unpopular position in a world which favors action. In "The Critic as Artist" (which was subtitled "With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Absolutely Nothing") Gilbert notes that "Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it...never forgives the dreamer... To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world."

Despite the charge that Wilde's literature is immoral (or just shallow), we can see that this is a misreading of his project. In fact, Wilde's dandies almost inevitably come to a bad end: Dorian Gray dies horribly, Lords Darlington and Illingworth don't get the women they love, while Earnest's carefree bachelors Algernon and Jack unfortunately do. While Wilde approved of these character's attempts to develop their personalities, free from the constraints of the usual, he clearly condemned them for only expressing the most selfish parts of themselves. But it's interesting to note that one of Wilde's dandies, Lord Goring (Wilde supposedly remarked that An Ideal Husband "contains a great deal of the real Oscar"), does wind up happy. Although Goring, "the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought," presents himself as shallow, selfish, and easily bored, it's clear that this is merely a stylish way of being almost religiously unsentimental and detached. As a result, Goring is able to articulate what Wilde calls "the philosophy that underlies the dandy": Pleading for tolerance on behalf of sinners, Goring urges his friends (who are tormented by the need to maintain their moral respectability) to recognize that life cannot be lived according to absolute ideals, that we must be flexible and willing to change. His idle detachment allows him to be the model of the ethical aesthete, loving and generous without being sympathetic or "kind." Goring's qualities are those of the true critic, who, according to Gilbert, is "cosmopolitan" (free of prejudices), "detached" (free from vulgar emotions), "intellectual" (contemplative and serene), and "insincere" (recognizing no position as final).

Wilde recognizes that this brand of aestheticism is not without its political applications, as he discusses in his least ironic essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism." Noting that, since "cultivated leisure is the aim of man," liberal romantic ideas about the dignity of manual labor are empty, Wilde suggests that only an unsentimental attempt to beautify the lives of the oppressed—by relieving them of the necessity to work for a living—is justifiable. After all, if people learn to love beauty, they will naturally prefer things which are graceful, charming, and harmonious, and reject that which is vulgar and discordant, reasons Wilde; and since nothing vulgar can be good, and since nothing beautiful can be bad, a truly aesthetic world will be a harmonious world. In other words, Wilde's aesthetic politics aren't based on bleeding heart ideas about sympathy and charity for the downtrodden, but simply on an aesthetic revulsion against (and solidarity with) the ugliness of a life lived—whether one is rich or poor—in slavery to others. "Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly," thunders Wilde, "When he can do so without exercising restraint over others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be a saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself." Wilde's goal, as always, is the freedom and leisure to cultivate one's own personality.

The actual structure of an aesthetic society, which Wilde begins to sketch out in "The Soul of Man," is incomplete, although despite its title the essay seems to be arguing for anarchism, not socialism. Wilde liked to call himself a socialist—because he was under the impression that socialism champions beauty, liberty, and pleasure, and opposes received cultural structures such as property (which gets in the way of idleness) and marriage—but he tended to confound nihilism, decadence, socialism, aestheticism, and democracy, all of which seemed to him to represent methods of escaping tyranny over the individual. "I think I am rather more than a Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe, but, of course, the dynamite policy is very absurd indeed," Wilde told an interviewer shortly before the end of his career; and in "The Soul of Man," he writes that "The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all."

"When we reach the true culture that is our aim," concludes Gilbert, in what is perhaps Wilde's most perfect articulation of the goal of ethical aestheticism, "we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile." This is Wilde's utopia: the universal attainment of a saint-like detachment from cowardly, utilitarian, and materialistic "moral" concerns, and a radical restructuring of society to allow widespread idle (yet critical) contemplation, resulting in a democratic state of grace in which everything is beautiful and every moment thrilling.

FURTHER READING

Aristotle: Ethics and Politics. In "The Critic As Artist" Wilde (who went to Oxford on a classics scholarship) writes that "Whatever in fact is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks." Indeed, Wilde's scandalous ultra-modern views on (for example) the importance of doing nothing, the superiority of an aesthetic morality to a religious one, and one's duty to one's own self-development, are straight out of Aristotle. His radical essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" merely continues Aristotle's dictum that the good state must exist to help its citizens achieve true leisure—which is not merely "free time," but a state of being in which activity is performed for its own sake only, and during which one is free to be contemplative and detached.

Linda Dowling: The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (University Press of Virginia, 1996). Wilde's particular genius as a progressive activist, according to Dowling, was to confront the public, in his life and work, with the seemingly undemocratic aristocratic spirit which previous generations of progressives had renounced. Wilde's fictional aristocrats represent not wealth and position, but a potentially universalizable superior way of being in the world, an anti-bourgeois aristocracy of mind or spirit. It was for being an aristocrat of aesthetic consciousness, for believing in the power of art to create a harmonious and free human community, Dowling claims, that Wilde was symbolically sacrificed.

Richard Ellman: Oscar Wilde (Knopf, 1984). By far the best of the 100 or so biographies of Wilde which have been published since his death, the two decades of study, research, and writing which went into this amazing literary biography actually killed its author. Ellman masterfully demonstrates that Wilde's aestheticism was anything but shallow, and that his wit was anything but trivial. Even better, he manages to lionize Wilde without ever sanitizing the man's eccentricity or eventual degeneracy.

Moe Meyer, ed.: The Politics and Poetics of Camp (Routledge, 1994). Routledge's ever-expanding list of Cultural Studies titles has been repeatedly criticized by traditional types as being simply faddish, yet this book's radical reapraissal of Camp as a witty yet powerful cultural critique is great history, comparative literature, sociaology, and queer theory rolled into one. Of particular relevance to the subject at hand is Thomas King's "Performing 'Akimbo': Queer pride and epistemological prejudice," which discusses the challenge to the bourgeois value system and sense of self posed by the gestural excesses of 17th and 18th century fribbles, fops, and mollies; and Moe Meyer's brilliant essay "Under the Sign of Wilde: An archaeology of posing," which shows that Wilde was dangerous not because he was gay, but because his ur-Camp posing suggested that the order of things is far from inevitable, that the "natural" is unnatural, and that therefore the dominant order could be subverted.

Ellen Moers: The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (University of Nebraska Press, 1960). Moers's unusually perceptive history, which demonstrates that the great dandies' poses were expressions of their idisgust with the uniformity, vulgarity, and mediocrity of the increasingly materialistic societies in which they lived, misreads Wilde's dandyism as nothing but an expression of his desire for notoriety, when in fact he was single-handedly dragging the Victorian era into modernity. (But it's still essential reading.)