Oscar Wilde's speech from the dock

Abstract

Current orthodoxy holds that Oscar Wilde's deportment during and after his trial fits the paradigm embodied in the lives of Irish nationalist martyrs. Without examining closely what precisely Wilde said in the dock and what Irish martyrs say in the dock, those who write on the subject assume that Wilde defended homosexuality as patriots defended Irish independence, and that he was eager to speak openly and proudly on behalf of his 'cause'. Such was not the case: in the spring of 1895 Wilde had not yet theorized his sexuality as a political issue. Nor did he wish to be a martyr. Like Byron and Wilfrid Blunt, and indeed like his own mother Speranza, Wilde was an oppositional celebrity, for whom politics was a continuing public performance that, with luck, led in the long run to some kind of interesting immortality.Fully accepting Wilde'sIrish nationalist politics and the Irish literary traditions that inform his work, appreciating all the recent scholarship that rehibernicizes Wilde, I have no wish to dehibernicize him. Simply to set the record straight on Wilde' s speech about 'the love that dare not speak its name', this article analyses the genealogy of that speech and comments on other aspects of Wilde's defence. Finally, it looks at the slow, gradual way Wilde came to frame his sexuality in 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' and in letters written after he had served his sentence.