Shaun de Waal
November this year was the centenary of the death of Oscar Wilde in a cheap Paris hotel; it has been said that the 20th century, on the doorstep of which he died, was the Wilde century. In many ways, Wilde was a (sometimes?unwitting) prophet of the hundred years after his death. In his paradoxical?wit as well as his tragic fall from grace, he prefigured currents that ran ever stronger through the century.
Wilde was a “master of mass media”, as Camille Paglia calls him, the link between Lord Byron and Elvis Presley. Yet he became the OJ Simpson of his?time, its most famous accused. He was the first pop star, but the scandals?of his private life were played out in public as would be those of so many, from Princess Diana to Bill Clinton.??
Wilde’s greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, may on the surface have been the quintessentially Victorian amusement, all froth and banter,?but its concern with the tangles of identity and heredity gestured?toward issues that were to surface again and again in the century after his?death. Such narrative ideas may have been as old as the fairytales of princes disguised as peasants, or the Oedipal drama, or the comedies of?Shakespeare that play so fruitfully with doubled or hidden identities, but?Wilde brought these themes to a particularly pointed pitch. Perhaps it was?because of his own doubled or split identity: Irishman and Englishman,?socialist and aristocrat, sodomite and married man.
The 20th century saw issues of identity convulse the social fabric. The?opposition of self and other was defined and exploited more thoroughly than?ever before. Nazism brought a vast industrial apparatus to bear on the annihilation of the other within Jews who had all but assimilated?themselves to European culture. Apartheid made skin-colour the most powerful?signifier of identity, moulding and enforcing class structures out of racial?signifiers.??
But, on the personal level, identity politics enabled new struggles for human rights. In the 1890s, round the time Wilde was most famous and?engaged in the most scandalous trial of his day the early sexologists?were categorising human sexuality. Heterosexuality was defined by its?opposing categories, and the homosexual was born. In 1889, Dr Magnus?Hirschfeld helpfully created a questionnaire that would answer for the reader the question, “Am I at All an Uranian?” (Uranian was his word for?homosexual.) Questions included: “Were you petted more than most children? Is?your wrist flat or round? Do you whistle well and naturally like to do so? Do you feel at ease in the dress of the opposite sex?”
The category of homosexual as a particular type of person instead of?sodomy as a particular kind of act shifted the emphasis from a sin of?which anyone was theoretically capable onto a ingrained kind of being, set?apart from normality. But the imposition of such an identity (queer, fag,?moffie) also enabled such people to band together under the sign of that?difference and fight, as a group, for their rights.
This happened in?mid-century in the West; it is happening now in Africa in the burgeoning gay rights movement. Africans are now able to examine their sexual desires and,?on that basis, identify with a community indeed, call that community into?being, and mobilise on that basis. You can’t mobilise on the basis of habits?or actions, but you can mobilise on the basis of identity, even one imposed?from without.
Yet Wilde also saw that identity itself is a slippery thing, provisional,?socially constructed. When the most famous artistic celebrity of his day was?brought low by a libel trial, he sought to slither out of his predicament by?equivocation and reinterpretation of what he had written, whether as?artistic production or as private correspondence. We are more aware than?ever, today, that identity is shifting, porous; in a globalised world, with?cultures in flux, we see ourselves as hybridised, of mixed parentage and?heritage, traditional/modern, African/European/American. We speak in many?voices, yet constantly ask ourselves: Who are we??
Wilde’s art and life bled into one another; as a public figure, he made great use of his appearance and such innovations as the green carnation ?that mutant bloom celebrating artificiality. His capacity for self-invention and his flamboyant dandyism persisted and reinvented itself in pop music, in?Mick Jagger and David Bowie, in the multiple exterior identities that a?self-generating icon such as Madonna can marshal and manipulate to propel a?pop career. Wilde knew that the masks we assume can often be the most?powerful signifiers of our inner selves.
And he knew that meaning itself is mutable, can easily be inverted to create?a new meaning he was, as one commentator put it, a post-modernist before?his time. Language, for him, was not the stable repository of a fixed?meaning, but an endless play of signifiers. He said it best himself: “If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.”?