WHY does Oscar Wilde seem so much our contemporary? The outward aspect of his plays the fin de siecle costumes and drawing rooms, the claustrophobic atmosphere of an airtight upper class society is very much that of a specific time and place. Yet his work feels somehow closer to the 1990s than the 1890s, in ways that have little to do with the interplay of Ireland and England, or even with the games of sexual identity that run through it.
What they have a lot to do with, though, is the strange and fascinating episode of his tour of North America in 1882, an experience that is much closer to the post modern world of movies and advertising than it is to the lives of 19th century Hooray Henries in Berkeley Square.
Wilde arrived in the US, not as a man but as an advertisement. He was the "original" of Reginald Bunt borne in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and his lecture tour was conceived as a way of drumming up publicity for the operetta's American production. Wilde was playing a version of a theatrical exaggeration of himself. Oscar Wilde was thus one of the first people to undergo the experience of stars in the 20th century, that of being transformed into a marketable image.
And, like one of Andy Warhol's paintings of Marilyn Monroe, this "Oscar Wilde" was itself capable of almost infinite and mechanical reproduction. Before Wilde arrived in Denver, the humorist Eugene Field carried through a successful hoax in which, dressed as Oscar Wilde", he was received with ceremony and driven through the streets. Wilde himself became a transferable icon.
NOT only was he himself, literally, an advertisement, but he also talked like an advertising man, imbuing consumer goods with an almost sacred aura. One of his lectures was on "The House Beautiful". It was concerned with the aesthetics of household furnishings why wallpaper should not be hung in entrance halls, why heating stoves should be of Dutch porcelain, why secondary colours should be used on walls and ceilings, why blown glass was to be preferred to cut glass. In his spiel household goods could take on, just as they do in modern advertising, the properties of things touched by magic.
So could clothes as he ventured into the Wild West, Wilde blazed a trail that would be followed by Levi Strauss, Calvin Klein, Nike and Wrangler. He had appeared at first in New York as a dandy and aesthete, in a long, green coat trimmed with seal or otter fur, turban like hat, Lord Byron collar and sky blue tie. But as he progressed through the frontier, he adopted more and more the style of the cowboy and the miner corduroys and wide brimmed hat at first, then adding a cowboy neckerchief and tucking his trousers into his boots.
Not only did he tell the silver miners of Colorado that they were the best dressed men in America, but back home in London he preached what they practised. Having himself shocked his American audiences by wearing his own theatrical knee breeches, he ended up, after his Wild West tour, writing to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884 to recommend the adoption of cowboy gear broad brimmed hats, short cloaks, leather boots, and "short loose trousers" which are "in every way to be preferred to the tight knee breeches which often impede the proper circulation of the blood".
WILDE, in effect, tried to do what Levi Strauss managed to do in the latter half of the 20th century to make the working clothes of the American West into a universal consumer fashion for city sophisticates. Contemporary advertisements for Levis and Wranglers, with their fetishisation of cattle wranglers and manual workers, are following where Wilde led. The proletarian dandy, spawn of Oscar Wilde's encounters with the Wild West, remains a central part of contemporary consumer culture.
But if Wilde plugged himself into the emerging consumer world, he also glimpsed its horrors. It was in America, before he wrote any of his major plays, that Wilde learned both the pleasure and danger of image making. The pleasure was that you could achieve fame and fortune simply by manipulating your own image. The danger was that if your image was no longer rooted in personal reality, other people could manipulate it too. This is what happened to Wilde in America, and it happened because his image contained a lie. It left out a central part of Wilde's reality the fact that he was Irish.
Wilde went to America as an Englishman. The letters sent by D'Oyly Carte, who organised the tour, to booking agents, described Wilde as "the new English poet". Wilde's original lecture for the tour was on the English Renaissance. But the attacks on Wilde by the East Coast establishment that began early on in his tour took a form that was only possible on the assumption that he was not an Englishman but an Irishman, not an image of civilisation but a member of a barbarous tribe. For what the most serious of those attacks did was to make Wilde a native, a savage, a black man.
THE most remarkable of the attacks is a cartoon published on the front of the Washington Post on January 22nd, 1882, shortly after Wilde's arrival. Titled "Mr Wild of Borneo", it shows an ape like humanoid creature holding a coconut in its left hand, and below it, Wilde holding a sunflower in his left hand. The text reads "How far is it from this (the ape man) to this (Wilde)?" The caption draws attention to the "citizen of Borneo, who, so far as we have any record of him, is also Wild, and judging from the resemblance in feature, pose and occupation, undoubtedly akin".
The second attack in which Wilde was explicitly depicted as a black man came at one of his lectures in Rochester a fortnight later. Half way through the lecture, on the arrangement of some students, an old black man "in formal dress and one white kid glove to parody Wilde's attire, danced down the centre aisle carrying an immense bunch of flowers and sat in a front seat".
These identifications of Wilde with blacks were in fact repeated in England at the height of Wilde's success. In April 1893, Punch, reviewing the opening of A Woman Of No Importance, referred to its "Christy Minstrel epigrammatic dialogue" and carried a cartoon called "Christy Minstrels of No Importance", at the centre of which sits Wilde with the caption "Massa Johnson O'Wilde".
Being Irish meant that Wilde could never civilise America. However much he wanted to present himself as a civilised Englishman, Wilde was vulnerable to being construed as a simian Irishman. His own persona was always open to being annexed to powerful racial images of barbarism, and therefore could never be a stable image of European cultivation.
BUT the Irish ambivalence which made him ultimately incredible as an icon of English civility also allowed him to appropriate American barbarism in the forms which would prove, in the late 20th century, to be most durable as aspects of mass consumer culture. He learned to make a virtue of ambivalence, to combine fame and infamy, proletarian egalitarianism and aesthetic dandyism. He learned how to be criminal and saint, artist and outlaw. The connections which he made between European style and the American frontier remain central to the mass culture of the late 20th century.
The shape of these events became central to his plays. They juggle with roles, with disguises, with the art of the imposter, and with the slippery and treacherous nature of surface appearances. Wilde's explorations of flatness and superficiality which cannot but have been influenced by his American experiences are perhaps the first coherent expression in art of the emergence of a commodified world, a world in which not objects merely but also the human personality can be mass reproduced.
This above all, is the reason why, in the post modern culture of the 1990s, Wilde still seems strikingly contemporary.
