Oscar+Wilde's+The+Sphinx



Oscar Wilde is best remembered for three things: his style, his social commentary, and his scandal. Born in 1854 in Dublin Ireland to William Wilde and Jane Elgee, Wilde was the second of the couple’s three children. Born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, Oscar and his older brother were both given four Christian names, though Wilde slowly whittled away at his own, reportedly claiming that “a name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in the advertisements” (Pearson 10). His younger sister, Isola Wilde, died from a sudden fever as a child, leaving Wilde bereft. He honoured her memory by carrying a lock of her hair “and haunt[ing] his literary work with images of girls unknowing of their incipient womanhood” (ODNB).

Wilde was described as a dandy even in his youth: "He was unlike the other boys in all his tastes and habits ... he disliked exercise, detested games, loathed fighting ... and was wholly deficient in the spirit of adventure. On the positive side, he read a great deal, was careful about his clothes, wore his top hat on weekdays, loved flowers, admired sunsets, enjoyed solitude, and often mooned about in a state of abstraction.” (Pearson 18)

Though an intelligent boy with an excellent memory, he was not an engaged student until he began to study the classics, which he studied at Trinity College, Dublin and for four years at Oxford (Pearson 19).

Though Wilde was well-known before his imprisonment, his fame only increased with his infamy. Peter Dickinson writes that “Oscar Wilde has, of course, repeatedly been subjected to posthumous conscription by scholars, critics, writers, and artists as the exemplary literary, sexual, and national outlaw” (416). While Pearson argues that Wilde’s pederasty was simply the result of boredom and “the main oddity in his composition [which could] be described in a sentence: half of him, the emotional half, never developed beyond adolescence; the other half, the intellectual half, was well-developed at an age when those about him had hardly begun to think for themselves” (42), it is likely that his unwillingness to admit Wilde might not have been heterosexual was informed greatly by the age in which he was writing (the mid-1940s).

The Sphinx is a single poem that was published in 1894 by John Lane, though the edition in the library does not contain a publication date. This edition is bound in dark green/black cloth without embellishments. The call number is PR5820 S6 1910. Judging by the volume’s small size, it is possible that this book was printed to be read as a pamphlet during travel, such as on a train, and was designed to be portable. Despite its age, the book is in excellent condition, with few markings and little evidence of wear aside from the oxidation of the pages and a few stains. The pages are thick and sturdy. It was printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.

Inside the book there is a cover page that features black and white illustrated images in contrasting styles: what appears to be an Egyptian-style Sphinx creature next to a Grecian-looking woman. The book is dedicated to Marcel Schwob, a Jewish French writer of short stories and many styles of non-fiction, whom Wilde likely met during his extensive time in Paris. Hesketh Pearson’s biography of Wilde suggests that “The Sphinx is the first of [Wilde’s] works to hint at hidden vices” (85), pointing to the way that language is used throughout the poem to both subvert and support the surface meaning of the poem. Pearson writes that Wilde “hesitated to publish it ‘as it would destroy domesticity in England’. But a careful study of it would be more likely to establish domesticity in England and place monogamy on an enduring basis” (85). Little information about its publication or reception is available, though it was published just one year before Wilde was arrested and found guilty of gross indecency with two male prostitutes (ODNB). The Sphinx was published in the midst of Wilde’s success as a playwright, and his poetry has been largely overlooked historically in favour of his more popular plays (with the exception of //De Profundis//). The Sphinx was, according to a note from Robert Ross in the text, composed in Paris at the Hotel Voltaire in 1874, but was not deemed complete until 1889. The final draft of the manuscript has been housed in the British Museum since 1910. Works Cited Dickinson, Peter. "Oscar Wilde: Reading the Life After the Life."//Biography// 28.3 (2005): 414-32. Web. Edwards, Owen Dudley. “Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900).” Owen Dudley Edwards //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Sept. 2012. Pearson, Hesketh. //The Life of Oscar Wilde//. London: Methuen, 1946. Print. Wilde, Oscar, and Alastair. //The Sphinx//. London: J. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1920. Print.