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"Douglas, Alfred Bruce, 1870-1945"
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De Profundis
Oscar Wilde's autobiographical work on suffering, self-realization, and the artistic process
De Profundis (Latin for \"from the depths\") is Oscar Wilde's reconciliation from a life full of pleasure. In 1891 the author began an intimate relationship with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas, known to his friends as Bosie. This affair led to speculations about Wilde's sexuality just as his career was reaching its apex. Ultimately, Bosie's father, the powerful Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of homosexuality. As this conduct was considered a \"gross indecency\" punishable by hard labor, this was a serious charge, and one that ultimately landed Wilde in prison.
It wasn't until January of 1897 that Wilde began to write from his cell. De Profundis, a scathing indictment of his former lover, is the letter that Wilde wrote to Bosie from prison. In addition to detailing the wrongs visited on Wilde by Bosie and his family, De Profundis traces the spiritual growth that Wilde experiences in prison. Having lost everything he holds dear, Wilde transforms his hardship into art.
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eBook
Walking Sideways into Paradise: Desire and Degeneration in Lord Alfred Douglas's Animal Nonsense
Tails with a Twist was included among the season's children's books in a number of periodicals, including The Athenaeum, The Literary World, The Morning Post, and the Daily News, the last of which complained that the book's rhymes \"are calculated to make children less friendly towards the animal creation. \"3 The problem persisted when Douglas released his second volume of nonsense, The Placid Pug and Other Rhymes (1906), despite the fact that his publisher enclosed an explanatory note to reviewers in the book.4 \"I had ventured, with the advice of the publishers, to issue it as an illustrated book, and to allow it to appear at or about Christmas,\" Douglas explained. Illustrated books which appear in the Christmas season are, I gather, considered the property of children, and my book was not a book for children. Douglas is famous for his poem \"Two Loves\" (1894) and its concluding reference to \"the love that dare not speak its name,\" cited as evidence in Wilde's trial for \"acts of gross indecency,\" and was therefore familiar with speaking in disguise.7 That notorious final line operates through the veiled references that often characterized fin-de-siecle writing on same-sex desire and anticipates the comic anxiety about the antelope's unspeakable acts.
Journal Article
Oscar on the Boards: Playwrights Represent the Playwright on Stage
In this article Roger Porter analyzes five plays about Oscar Wilde, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, David Hare, Eric Bentley, Moises Kaufman, and Terry Eagleton. He focuses on various aspects of the three Wilde trials of 1895, and shows how, while the plays employ verbatim transcripts of the court records, they use the latter in quite different ways and with different emphases, suggesting how the several playwrights regard Douglas in his relation with Wilde, as well as Douglas's implication in the verdict. Several of the plays focus almost exclusively on Wilde's personality, while others engage with larger issues, including Victorian moral regulation of sexuality, the relation of art to society, and English attitudes towards the Irish. He also stresses how the plays’ dramaturgy relates to their perspectives on Wilde, especially on his cultural role. Roger Porter is Professor Emeritus of English, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA. He is the author of Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (University of Nebraska Press), Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Cornell University Press), and co-editor (with Sandra Gilbert) of Eating Words: a Norton Anthology of Food Writing.
Journal Article
Butterflies, Orchids and Wasps. Polyglossia and Aesthetic Lives: Foreign Languages in The Spirit Lamp (1892-1893)
This paper focuses on The Spirit Lamp, a short-lived undergraduate periodical whose fifteen issues were published in Oxford by the bookseller James Thornton between May 1892 and June 1893 and edited first by J. S. Phillimore and Sandys Wason, then by Lord Alfred Douglas (for the last six issues). One of the characteristics of this journal is that, beside several translations, it features quite a lot of material written in foreign languages. The presence of ancient languages, Greek in particular, is noteworthy. It corresponds to the already well-documented link between Hellenism and homosexuality. Yet the presence of modern languages, and of French in particular—albeit in my opinion one of the salient features of The Spirit Lamp—is usually overlooked. The aim of this paper is to show that the polyglossia of The Spirit Lamp is an essential part of an aestheticization of life and the expression of otherwise unspeakable desires. It equally involves performance: a homosexual identity is created through this performance, blurring the limit between art and life. I also argue that what we witness in The Spirit Lamp is the creation of a hybrid language based on the setting up of a framework of reference other than British and on the defamiliarization of the English language.
Journal Article
Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of 'Greats'
Shuter examines the literary works of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred Douglas. In a sense, all three were Oxford men pursuing the same course of study, that remarkably ambitious school of Literae Humaniores or \"Greats\" designed not only to introduce young men to certain designated works of philosophy and history by the principal Greek and Roman authors but to train them to think critically about philosophic and ethical questions and to relate historically earlier to historically later stages of thought. As the instances of Pater, Wilde, and Douglas demonstrate, however, Shuter notes that some young men were more receptive and retentive than others of its mental impress.
Journal Article
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and the Rhetoric of Agency
Foster examines the tonal inconsistencies of Oscar Wilde's \"De Profundis.\" In \"De Profundis,\" Wilde was trying to demonstrate not so much that he was above the world, but that he had been--and still could be--an agent in a world that required duplicity and disguise for survival.
Journal Article
Lord Alfred’s Editor: The Balancing Act of Editing Lord Alfred Douglas’ Without Apology
Lord Alfred Douglas is the Yoko Ono of Victorian literature, known less for his own artistic accomplishments than for the scandal which surrounded his relationship with Oscar Wilde. His autobiographical work Without Apology was published in 1938 then went almost immediately out of print. The manuscript remained in a private collection for over sixty years until its purchase by the Clark library in 2004. I made the first comparison of the manuscript with the first and only print edition of the book in 2005, but this paper will be the first in which the challenges of being the editor of this work will be used to illuminate the role of editors of celebrity memoirs generally, both in the early half of the twentieth century and today. As the example of Lord Alfred’s editor demonstrates, the role involves delicate negotiations between the world of the celebrity and the world of the audience which include audience expectations of the celebrity, celebrity authors’ relationships with broader social mores, and differences in perceptions of past public activities within the scope of a private life between audience and celebrity. Additionally, the example of Lord Alfred and his editor permits the consideration of how specific issues ranging from homosexuality to monarchy must be navigated when publishing for a mainstream audience.
Journal Article