The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde
by Joseph Pearce
Ignatius, 412 pp., $35
NO ONE WORE SO MANY MASKS in his writing and his life as Oscar Wilde--or "Wild Oscar," to borrow the moniker the Colorado lead-miners and the California gold-miners gave him during his rapturously received tour of America in 1882. But "Do masks conceal the truth or do they reveal it?" asks Joseph Pearce at the beginning of his revisionist history of the life and fate of Oscar Wilde, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde.
It surely must say something about this book, originally published in London four years ago by HarperCollins, that it was not picked up by a major house in the United States, not even by the American branch of HarperCollins, but has only now come out from the conservative Catholic firm of Ignatius Press in San Francisco. Might that not be because Pearce has not only unmasked the real Wilde (for example, he explodes the myth that Wilde died of syphilis) but has also stripped away the legends that have gathered about him during the past hundred years in the homosexual subculture, where he is known as "Saint Oscar"? ("Saint," of course, in the upside-down, Wildean sense: "We cannot go back to the saint," he said. "There is far more to be learned from the sinner.")
In Pearce's view, "Contradictions are uttered [by Wilde] for effect, intended to entertain. Contradictoriness was not Wilde's orthodoxy. It was his pose." But of course, when a person projects as many poses as did Wilde, the person too becomes something of a mask, even to himself. Not surprisingly, we learn that Wilde's attraction to Catholicism was due, at least in part, to his fascination with masks. In an early poem, "Rome Unvisited," Wilde depicts how the pope, in elevating the consecrated Host at Mass, shows his God to human eyes / Beneath the veil of bread and wine. In other words, as Pearce rightly sees, for Wilde, "the Blessed Sacrament is a mask that shows God to the people. It is a veil that reveals." No wonder Wilde ends the poem by calling upon the name Of Him who now doth hide His face, for even God wears a mask.
Wilde is also famous for his disdain for socialism, partly no doubt for selfish reasons, just as he knew he avoided becoming a Catholic for selfish reasons. ("What is to become of an indolent hedonist like myself if Socialism and the Church join forces against me?" he asked. "I want to stand apart and look on, being neither for God nor for his enemies.") But the selfishness had a different motive in the two cases. The Catholic Church genuinely fascinated Wilde from adolescence on, but socialism entirely repelled him, precisely because it was so direct and unmasked.
NIHILISM HAD THE SAME EFFECT. His first play was called Vera, or The Nihilists, and on that topic he could be withering: He defined the nihilist as "that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in." The nihilist believes in nothing except nothingness, precisely because he wears no mask. He stands for nothing because he represents nothing: No one can re-present something to the world without having a mask to do the presenting.
The pervasive flatness of the modern world, with its pointless and meaningless ideologies, may also have been the reason Wilde could never take the Church of England seriously. As he pointed out, with his usual whimsy, the Anglican Church is a peculiar via media between flat accommodation and easily transparent masks: "In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where [doubting] St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle."
While clearly a Catholic by conviction from adolescence on (this Pearce makes abundantly clear), Wilde could never really join the Church, even after two years spent in hard labor in prison, because the masks he wore had taken on a life of their own, with the pose finally replacing the man, at least until the last few hours before his death: He "had enshrined the double entendre at the very core of his psyche. His higher self, emerging triumphant in his art, still clung, almost unwillingly, to the religious sensibility that had accompanied him throughout his life. His lower self, pouring forth epigrams at the dinner table or in his criticism, sought licentious liberation from the moral constraints that his higher self, the voice of conscience, sought to impose."
PART OF THE BRILLIANCE of Pearce's biography comes from the way he demonstrates Wilde's essentially religious and moral self by an acute analysis of the man's art (his literary criticism is another matter, where poses ruled), for "it is one of the paradoxes of Wilde's life and art that the true Wilde is to be gleaned from what he says in his art far more than from what he says, or is alleged to have said, in his life."
And of no other work is that more true than of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Pearce makes bold to claim is Wilde's most moral work, despite the near universal suspicions of its "immorality" from reviewers of that time. When Dorian's mentor, Lord Henry Wotton, proclaims that art has a soul but man does not, Dorian disagrees. "The soul is a terrible reality," he counters. "It can be bought, and sold, and bargained away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it."
Pearce makes clear that Wilde came close to plumbing the mysteries of his own soul while he was in prison, and he was fond of quoting Dante: "Sorrow remarries us to God." But after reverting to his old vices after leaving prison (much to the disgust of his long-suffering and much-abused wife), he was baptized a Catholic and received absolution and extreme unction a few hours before his death.
As his wife so shrewdly wrote to a friend at the time, Wilde's reversion to his old ways showed that "punishment had not done him much good, since it has not taught him the lesson he most needed, namely that he is not the only person in the world." But prison at least taught him something. As he said in De Profundis, "Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow: Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask."
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is Chester and Margaret Professor of Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar.