Wilde's Play: Response

Abstract

if i had to choose the one victorian who most challenges and delights me on the topic of play, whether it is the play of language, actors, ideas, children, or lovers, it would surely be oscar Wilde. in the navsa conference Performance and Play, he was the most cited figure in the presentations i attended, with whole panels devoted to him in addition to individual talks and scattered quotations. His emergence as a touchstone for theories of queerness and performativity has generated an impressive surge of academic interest, especially since the mainstreaming of gay studies and the publication of richard ellmann’s landmark biography in the late 1980s, and evidently this scholarly and popular inspiration is far from waning. We heard impressive presentations on Wilde and pedagogy, feminism, sexuality, parody, opera, photography, copyright law, children’s literature, spiritualism, the american West, crime fiction, and symbolist aesthetics, with references to most of the numerous genres in which he made canonical contributions to literature, including poetry, novel, essay, dialogue, comedy, tragedy, prose poem, epigram, epistle, apologia, and fairy tale. For this occasion, i have focused on three essays about texts that play with Wilde’s playing. Wilde was deeply committed to the theater as a genre and produced some of the best plays of the victorian period in a remarkably short span of time before his imprisonment brought to an abrupt and premature end his career, though not his appeal, as a playwright. He celebrated the strange power of theater’s heightened artifice to generate the life and social discourse it ostensibly imitated. “i love acting,” lord Henry archly confesses in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). “it is so much more real than life” (Works 67). a century before it became a key concept of poststructural criticism, Wilde summed up queer performativity in an epigram when he asserted with characteristic elegance and alliteration in “the critic as artist” (1891), “do you wish to love? use love’s litany, and the words