Damn you, Bosie

[saffronlie]

Have been watching Wilde and being sad and introspective, although not as sad as I was after watching The Hours last week. I own far too many depressing films about writers.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down

Comments

[pandorasblog]

Yes, there's that tendency in a lot of screenplays and books - that making a character likeable or dislikeable is not just a matter of how they are written, but how those around them are contrasted with them. And when it's real people, then depictions can get subtly warped.

And yes, if Oscar is to be presented purely as a tragic hero, then there would be a tendency to minimise the ruinous, in every sense, experience of Constance - he'd married her, promised to look after her, yet he exposed her to the risk of losing everything. And their sons ultimately lost a father, which is heartbreaking.

I'm particularly aware of how the change in standards affects how people think about Oscar: our modern culture holds that it is of utmost importance to be who you are without compromise, yet it was Constance and the children, as well as Oscar, who bore the cost of his indiscretion and choice of an incredibly unstable and uncaring lover with a similar father.

It's difficult to say this, because it's so easily equated with the argument that says, 'Just stay in the closet! Be a good, repressed little gay person and never mind your suffering! Preserving the straight status quo will always take precedence over your feelings!', but the more I read, the more apparent it becomes that Oscar had a certain amount of influence on his circumstances, and it reads as foolhardiness and uncharacteristic naivety that made him stay with Bosie when the relationship was so obviously compromised and compromising.

Conclusion: love is not logical. :/

[saffronlie]

I agree that Oscar is mainly responsible for his own downfall, which I guess is why it's still so tempting to shift some blame to Bosie. I do think that he regretted his indiscretions and his occasional disregard for his family. He paid the price and had a fitting end, you might say, and so it's almost a neat morality tale in that he was punished for his excesses and met a sad end.

I think you're right that the modern view does want to paint Oscar as someone who expressed his individualism and lived up to his ideals of artistic indulgence. But that view, while convenient, does ignore his more serious sides. I'm always kind of annoyed-slash-amazed at how his wit is overworshipped, but his serious and far more haunting words are overlooked. You can't take just the side of Oscar that you liked. The fashionable view seems to be Oscar the Gay Icon, but there is so much more to him!

And in that one weekend in London when I visited both Keats' house and Wilde's, I was struck by the huge difference in the legacies of the dwellings. Two writers met tragic fates. The house of one was lovingly restored and preserved and kept as a museum to the man and his works. The house of the other was let go into private hands and has never been open to the public. (Although his childhood home in Ireland is now a museum.) I know that this has everything to do with the circumstances of death, and that no one would have dreamed of trying to preserve Oscar's belongings in the aftermath of the scandal, but I find it telling that no one has really tried since, even as moral attitudes have relaxed.