That seems explicit enough in the notoriously homophobic letter he wrote to the Home Secretary when asking to be let out of jail. We all sense that there were more Wildes than one in this man: did he want to destroy them all, and, if not, which did he want to destroy? An answerable question at least partially: at times, he wished to destroy Wilde the homosexual. André Gide would tell us it was a self-destructive streak in Wilde, but this proposition only raises a more complex issue. That he was himself aware of the danger involved is shown in, for example, the way he toned down the obvious gay references in The Picture of Dorian Gray when, after magazine publication, it was revised as a book. Long before Ellmann, it was clear that Oscar tended, if not exactly to mention the unmentionable, at least to give unmistakable hints. The simplest element in a complex of forces here is the compulsion to confess. It is a matter of the pressures behind the writing, and the fact that they all have to do with the author’s homosexuality. For this “second point” is not anything Wilde mentions or discusses. But the new biographies make a second point even more interesting and far-reaching. What our recent biographers have been showing is that, in his stories and in his plays, Oscar Wilde was constantly, even amazingly, injecting oblique references to his own person and that of his friends and lovers. At the time, Oscar the polemicist was telling critics and readers not to look for the author in any literary work but only for an objective creation. On this point two subsequent biographers-Gary Schmidgall (1994) and Barbara Belford (2000)-have supplemented Ellmann’s account and, it could be said, corrected it. ![]() Which might not much matter, except that in the work of Oscar’s full maturity (1885–1895), a homosexual dynamic is omnipresent, even when it might at first seem totally absent. Re-reading Ellmann today, I can’t help feeling that in so generously accepting Wilde’s homosexuality, Ellmann had also put it on one side or, in the jargon of today, “marginalized” it. Reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde a dozen years ago, I rejoiced that someone had moved sex from the center of Wilde’s life in order to present him instead as a great Irish writer.
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