Oscar Wilde in Mexico: Keeping the Scandal Alive

Abstract

Oscar Wilde came to be known in Mexico during his lifetime not as a talented writer but rather as an outrageous figure who was disgraced and imprisoned for his “depraved habits”. Soon after the initial scandal of his 1895 trials, a handful of Mexican intellectuals launched modest endeavours to reshape Wilde’s image by turning attention to his literary works, some of which they translated and made available in Spanish to Mexican readers for the first time. Despite this new appreciation of his talents, Mexicans continued invoking the scandalous image of Wilde to stir up attention and startle audiences. Among the first generation of Mexican artists who identified readily with Wilde’s sexual dissidence, there was a marked preference for the writings – literary works that were notably more sexually explicit and themselves more scandalous than those of Wilde – of the more universally respected André Gide, although Wilde’s wit did serve them as a model for shocking their readers. Even Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s greatest cultural critic of the last half century, whose own writings sought to subdue the symbolic importance of the Wilde trials in Mexico’s queer cultural history, could not resist invoking Wilde’s name as a provocation against the homophobia of certain interlocutors.