Dr. Eileen Warburton

The Jury Will Come to Order by Dr. Eileen Warburton
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde

The public pillory reduces a person to a narrow definition, a single pose.

One day there was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the most successful comic dramatist of his age, an Irishman of radical politics, a thoughtful socialist, a highly educated, brilliant scholar, a scathingly funny satirist and social observer, the most celebrated and quoted wit of his time (or any other), the most daring, exuberant, liberating boulevardier, a militant, revolutionary aesthete, the true friend of the edgiest artists and writers of his day, a tender, attentive father, a kind (if not passionate) husband, and, by all accounts, a courteous gentleman.

The next day there was Oscar Wilde, exposed as a fool for “the love that dare not speak its name” (since the name for it had not yet been coined), falsely condemned as a criminal corrupter of youth, persecuted for sexual perversion, broken by imprisonment and hard labor, dying in exile.

And now? We hear one note. Oh. Oscar Wilde. The gay writer.

This is what a public “shaming” does. It reduces the nuanced and complex to the least common denominator so that it’s easy to ignore the wholeness of a man or woman. People don’t have to listen to him anymore, can just dismiss his uncomfortable, challenging ideas. And, what is a court trial—especially for a morals charge like this—but a public shaming?

It is fascinating that the entire Wilde-Douglas scandal was ignited by the leaving of a calling card at a gentlemen’s club (such potent symbols of the dominant society of the time!) with the accusation that Wilde was POSING as a “somdomite [sic].” Posing. The charge is about appearances. Wilde, of course, was the prophet of pose, the great artist of appearances. He celebrates surfaces in his writing, just as he invented and carried off his own public personas complete with hats, capes, brilliant colors, sensuous fabrics, green carnations or white lilies, and exquisite bon mots. He made choosing the beautiful appearance an act of conscience and the definition of free will individuality. The ugly, the vulgar, the common, the bourgeois, the small-minded and conformist—these were the real enemies that stood in the way of any whole humanity. For Wilde, the aesthetic was what defined the moral. He was keenly conscious of the tensions between the beautiful surface and the dark interiors.

Essentially, he was tried on his posing, on his appearance in art. That is, he was examined in the witness box on the meanings of his writings—his novel, his poems, his letters—the (more or less) public output of his life, his visible exterior. In his answers, he tried and failed, with his clever wit and elegant grace, to control the discourse with people determined to judge and redefine these appearances as socially dangerous. Ultimately, his very celebrity made him a political scapegoat who was condemned as an example.

Posing—projecting the credible and integrated appearance of some made-up self—is also the central act of the theatre, of course. Wilde was theatrical to his bones, a superb comic dramatist and satirist. Of his contemporaries, only the plays of his friend Bernard Shaw have the staying power today of Wilde’s comedies. Perhaps only a play can capture the complicated drama of the trial of a man whose public and private life was the creation of his art. Playwright Moisés Kaufman likes to say that “Oscar Wilde was the first performance artist. He was a man who chose to live his life with passion. And in trying to define his own world in his own terms, he came up against a society that found him truly subversive.”

Moisés Kaufman (1963 - ), like Oscar Wilde, is an outsider-observer, living increasingly as an insider. Whereas Wilde was an Irishman drawn to Catholicism living in Victorian Protestant England and a lover of men living with wife and children, Kaufman is a Venezuelan of Romanian and Ukranian Jewish descent whose first language is Spanish, gay and educated in an Orthodox yeshiva, now living and writing in New York. For both men, the emphasis in their art is on the made structure, Wilde reveling in the Aesthetic movement, and Kaufman in 1991 founding and directing the Tectonic Theater Project.

The name “Tectonic,” writes Kaufman with fellow founder Jeffrey LaHost, was chosen from the art and science of structure, to emphasize the group’s interest in construction—”how things are made, and how they might be made differently.” The central question is, “What can theater do that is uniquely theatrical, that cannot be realized in any other medium?” Hence, the construction of Gross Indecency, Kaufman’s first play, out of trial transcripts, newspapers, letters, and other documents. It uses the innate theatricality of the courtroom trial to present the argument and evidence to us, the audience cast as a kind of jury, judging characters, society, and Wilde himself. It honors the conflicting and multifaceted nature of those months in 1895 without weaving a fictional version determined by the playwright’s vision or agenda. The conflicts allow us to see Wilde variously as victim and as author of his own ruin, as hero, and as liar: Bosie as both arrogantly selfish and unworthy of Oscar, and as the idealized, worthy beloved: all the characters three-dimensionally and contradictorily. Therefore, this radical construct eschews the reducing of Wilde to that single, flat pose and recaptures the complexity of his flawed, appealing humanity. It is the very opposite of the public pillory.

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde opened Off-Off Broadway with little fanfare in 1997 in a production that cost $15,000. Critically hailed, it moved to Broadway, ran for two years, won many awards, and by 1998 was the third most produced American play in the country.

© 2007 by Eileen Warburton

Quotations from Oscar Wilde

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

It is through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.

Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Public Opinion ... an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.


For further reading, later and now:
Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellman (New York, Knopf, 1988). The definitive biography of Wilde.
Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, Merlin Holland (London: Carroll & Graff, 2006). Merlin Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson.


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RICH LogoRHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rendueles Villalba, MD

Coffee, Tea, Sodomy? by Rendueles Villalba, MD

Gross Indecency, Moisés Kaufman’s 1997 play about the trials of Oscar Wilde, presents a triptych montage of a man who dared to pose. Though known for a flamboyance of body language (as if forever jokingly posing for some campy vanity shot), the daring I mean is the non-frivolous type — the posing of dangerous questions. This is how I read the unconscious grammar of Queensberry’s charge: “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]”. The peculiar logic, curious misspelling and suspension of a closing predicate suggest a troubled world in Queensberry’s charge. What is Queensberry saying? That Oscar Wilde is an imposture homosexual, or a sodomite that likes to pose for photos, or perhaps a Kama-Sutrian acrobat of sexual positions? Presumably he means something far less playful - but Freud would have a lot to say about how he bungles his words on this one. If I may venture an irreverent Freudian translation of Queensberry’s line, it would read: “Oscar Wilde dares ask: ‘Sodomy anyone?’” Or to put it more seriously, Can I decide my own sexuality? May I have and enjoy a private sexual life protected from un-welcomed conformity demands?

Perhaps I credit Queensberry’s unconscious with unwarranted profundity, but these at least, are the questions that Kaufman seems to ask in his rendering of Oscar Wilde’s tragic demise. Gross Indecency, in this light, is about the rape of privacy. Or, as Otto Kernberg would put it, the play questions the “analization” of sexuality (the making of sex into nothing more than an offensive dirty joke). Kaufman challenges us post-Victorians, to ask: what is sex? A thing we do? A thing we are? Like human language, does human sexual expression achieve a unique (even exalted) standing in nature? Is it one of the many ways we humans dare define ourselves on our own terms, for our own purposes? Or is it the quintessential embarrassment, a ridiculing reminder that “human” is an arrogant fiction in a world of grunting animals.

For us Westerners enamored with rugged individualism, the courtroom is a particularly seductive arena for myth making and hero worship. The individual on the witness stand evokes images of the noble “defendant” of truth. We hear echoes of the martyr trials of Socrates, Christ, and Galileo. We identify with the accused and their bold claim: “here I stand, I can do no other”. “I will not submit to what I know is false.” By accepting condemnation from fraudulent accusers, the defiant defendant becomes iconic — a heroic champion of humanity’s strivings to claim immortal elevation by telling “the Truth”. But is Oscar Wilde a modern-day martyr-hero? Kaufman seems to want to make him one, but Wilde simply will not comply with the assignment. While he, no doubt, was an artist of great talent, Wilde’s indulgent and irresponsible morality, not to mention his frank lying, reveal him to be too humble a figure for the pantheon of historic martyrs. We must still wait on the coming of the sexual messiah (no pun intended).

Perhaps a greater embarrassment for Wildean idolatry comes from an important fact Kaufman left out of his play. Just prior to Queensberry’s attack on Wilde, he had lost his first-born son to suicide. It is widely believed that Francis Douglas committed suicide after engaging in a scandalous homosexual affair with none other than the Prime Minister of England, Lord Rosebury. Could it be that Queensberry’s grief motivated a displaced, paranoid attack on Wilde? Might he have been afraid of loosing yet another son, not to Oscar Wilde the person, but to what he saw as a shameful (and potentially lethal) use of his son as a sex object? If these questions had been posed in the play, it would have humanized Queensberry to a degree that might have earned him a more sympathetic hearing. He would no longer play the simple one-dimensional villain. Kaufman’s Queensberry is a perversely mean-spirited homophobe. As he rails at Oscar Wilde, he names him an alien “other”, a non-me, a never-me. But a less dichotomous view is quite possible. After all, research on homophobia finds it to be an externalized expression of an internal homoerotic conflict. I am tempted to observe Queensberry’s fascination with boxing and encourage the interested reader to examine Joyce Carol Oates homoerotic thesis, On Boxing. Could it be that Queensberry’s excessive protestations belied an internal struggle with latent homoerotism? If so, we may find Oscar Wilde a duped victim of an updated Oedipal conflict. In this reworking of Oedipus, the mother is the murdered member. The classic Oedipal love triangle collapses into an intolerable dyad. Father and Son share a pederastic desire, but their shameful conspiracy against conventional heterosexuality (the dead wife/mother) necessitates a scapegoat. Into the tragic Greek trap steps Oscar, a fated victim of his own narcissistic dalliance. Wilde’s penchant for masochism only heightens the trap’s seductive allure. Wilde’s love for Lord Alfred Douglas progressively assumes larger-than-life proportions, culminating in grand scale societal disapproval and the looming specter of catastrophe. The effect is to create a self-annihilating “you-and-me-against-the-world” intensity to the lovers’ union. Wilde falls under the spell of an infatuation lock-hold that uncannily conjures the haunt of Dorian Gray.

© 2007 by Rendueles Villalba, MD



References:
Adams HE, Wright LW, Lohr BA (1996) Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105: 440-445.
Kaufman, Moises (1998) Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Kernberg, Otto F. (1995) Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.
Oates, Joyce Carol (1994) On Boxing, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press.
Paglia, Camille (1991) Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York, NY: Vintage Books.

SHRINKRAP
Take the characters to therapy

Final Friday of each production

Post-show discussion

Local psychiatrist Rendueles Villalba, MD and guest lead a post-show discussion to examine the play and playwright from the psychological perspective. Included in the price of admission.