Oscar Wilde: the man and the artist 117 years after his death
On November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died. Literary genius and emblematic figure of late nineteenth-century decadence, known for his eccentricity, Wilde was severely condemned for his homosexuality and ended his life in complete poverty and solitude. “Do you want to know what the great drama of my life has been? It's just that I put my genius in my life "
Oscar Wilde's is a literary experience halfway between genius and dissolution, which has always made it difficult to establish a clear boundary between the sublime art of some of his works and the misery of the circumstances in which they are composed. His only novel, "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" (1891) immediately became one of the highest examples of English literary aesthetics: a story of moral decay in which the author spared no detail, a strong position against degradation of the individual who, however, will not avoid Wilde criticisms, trials and accusations of immorality. Wilde was also an excellent theater writer despite not having a dramaturgical background: famous remain "The fan of Lady Windermere", "The importance of being Earnest" and "Salome", the last masterpiece that was censored in England and represented in Paris in 1896, while the author was in prison. The sharp spirit and irreverence of some of his literary intuitions have made Oscar Wilde the undisputed symbol of that exasperated and decadent end-of-the-century aestheticism, which never ceases to fascinate even after a century.
Wilde had inherited from his mother the habit of hiding his true age, and on birthdays he used to wear black, claiming to be grieving the death of another of his years. It is said that in a particularly creative period of his life he loved to dress with long and elaborate wigs, and decorate clothes with fake flowers and feathers. This, and many other eccentricities, have helped to create an image that still lives today: that of a witty, profound, ferociously ironic intellectual about that same society who first admires him and then condemns him, who chooses to live and tell the story. his time as one of the characters in his books.
“He became an arbiter of elegance in the metropolis and his annual income, income from his writings, reached almost half a million francs.He scattered his gold among a succession of unworthy friends. Every morning he bought two expensive flowers, one for himself, the other for his coachman; and even on the day of his sensational trial he had himself taken to the court in his two-horse carriage with the coachman dressed in gala and with the powdered groom ": this is how another famous Irish literary genius, James Joyce, will remember him. in Italian in the Trieste newspaper “Il Piccolo della Sera”, ten years after his death.
The driving force of Wilde's art is sin. He put all his characteristic qualities, wit, generous impulse, asexual intellect at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the golden age and joy of the world's youth. But deep down, if some truth detaches itself from his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, from his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms and not by syllogisms, from his assimilations of other natures, alien to his, such as those of the delinquent and the humble, it is this truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss which is called sin.
The De Profundis, from the darkness of the prisons
From a very young age on the person of Oscar Wilde there are rumors and gossip about his homosexuality,made more insistent also by the habit of greeting his closest friends with a kiss on the lips and by the extravagances in the way of dressing and hairdressing. At the height of his career and notoriety, Wilde was the protagonist of one of the most talked about trials of the century: accused of sodomy, an unparalleled scandal in England at the time, and sentenced to prison and two years of forced labor, he will leave psychologically and socially ruined, so much so that he will choose to spend his last years in Paris, where he will then die on November 30, 1900.
But precisely in prison he will write one of his most beautiful works, intimate and without masks: a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man Wilde loved and because of whom he ended up in chains, published under the title of "De Profundis". Pages in which the writer is recognized in his simplicity as a man, grappling with the ghosts of his past:
We who live in this prison, in whose life there are no facts but pain, must measure time with the heartbeat of suffering, and the memory of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think about. Suffering is our way of existing, as it is the only way available to us to become aware of life; the memory of what we have suffered in the past is necessary for us as a guarantee, as a testimony of our identity.
