A Therapist’s Reflection: Oscar Wilde

In celebration of Pride Month, I wanted to share some brief thoughts on one of my favourite writers who, despite having great talent, was ostracised because of his sexuality, Oscar Wilde.

Not only was Wilde an insider as he had attended Oxford University and was accepted in aristocratic and literary circles, but he was also an outsider as he was Irish. Despite being a hugely popular playwright, he lost everything when he was publicly trialled in court for the charge of homosexuality. Being gay was considered a crime in Victorian times, and Wilde was punished severely and imprisoned for two years in 1895. Harshly treated, he was required to walk a tread mill for 6 hours a day, slept on a plank of wood, and kept in solitary confinement.  Never would be recover the loss of his health, reputation, status, and family. To escape the scandal, his wife and two children fled the country, and Wilde never saw his children again.

Although Wilde’s life story is famous, he is best remembered for his writing. Wilde’s sharp wit and irony are brilliantly conveyed in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ as he exposes the ridiculous nature of Victorian etiquette around courtship, and the snobbery of the upper classes. This is satirised when Lady Bracknell is interviewing Worthing to see if he is a suitable match for her daughter, Gwendolen. Lady Bracknell is horrified to discover that, as a baby, Worthing was found in a handbag on Paddington Station and therefore does not know his birth family. Lady Bracknell loudly disapproves claiming: ‘To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag…seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution’. Clearly, Bracknell struggles with Worthing because he is without family, and without class and therefore finds him a threat to her own power and position. As a member of the aristocracy, she fears the loss of her privilege, also revealed in her disgust of the French Revolution. Using caricature and wit, Wilde exposes the folly and stupidity of the upper classes with humour and elegance.

For me, Wilde’s life and art recall important themes in therapy. Clearly, Wilde felt different and rejected by society for his homosexuality. He was judged and criticised, ostracised from those he loved most. Traumatised by his imprisonment, the focus of his work shifted from aesthetics to stoicism, suffering and death. For example, he claims to: ‘absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear or reluctance… To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development’, in De Profundis. This stoical attitude reveals Wilde’s maturity in seeing suffering as a part of his life journey, and as furthering his personal growth. Furthermore, Wilde also wrote: ‘I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison’. This displays an aspiration for calm composure and detachment which a person might find in meditation.

Wilde died in Paris in poverty, three years after his time in prison, at the age of 46.

Today, he is considered one of our finest writers and is globally recognised for his elegant use of language, as well as for his ability to challenge societal norms. We need to move away from the Victorian time of judgement, punishment and persecution. Social progress means embracing and celebrating difference and diversity. Wilde’s plays, novels, short stories, and poetry are treasured and part of our shared cultural heritage.