‘Fathers should be neither seen nor heard,’ runs one line in An Ideal Husband: ‘Mothers are different’. The influence of Lady Wilde – and other women – helps solve the puzzle of her playwright son Over a century on, Oscar Wilde continues to hypnotise us. The work, though distinctly uneven, is filled with intellectual provocation and delicious fantasy, and studded with scintillation, but it is the life – those action-packed 46 years with their almost Greek trajectory of catastrophe, rapid fall and pitiful resolution – that has marked him out as one of the great symbolic figures of western civilisation. We keep coming back to him, trying to make sense of his actions. Was he simply a victim of society? Were there inherent flaws in him that governed, or failed to govern, his actions? What sort of man, indeed, was he? In person, he beguiled many of his contemporaries, but his behaviour was by no means always admirable; often it was barely intelligible. He remains a mystery, his motives as puzzling as Hamlet’s; this, of course, only increases our fascination in him. Every aspect of his life has been pored over in an unending procession of books – his childhood, his family, his celebrity, his sex life, his radicalism, his formidable intellectual underpinnings, his Irishness, his illnesses, his death, all comprehensively covered. And still the puzzle remains. Eleanor Fitzsimons is to be congratulated on finding a new and eminently profitable angle from which to approach him: the women who were so uncommonly significant in his life. His mother, first, of course; his sister Isola, whose death when still a child devastated him; Lillie Langtry, whose troubadour he affected to be; his poor, utterly bewildered wife Constance; a clutch of influential lady novelists; a handful of leading ladies, who appeared or, quite often, didn’t appear, in his plays; a couple of stalwart middle-aged friends – Adela Schuster and the woman he dubbed “the Sphinx,” Ada Leverson – and sundry caring supporters, mostly French women, at the end. There is no question that Wilde had a deep empathy with women. It is tempting to attribute this to his essential gayness, though he had experienced genuine heterosexual desire (as opposed to the extravagant poses of his relationship to the so-called “professional beauties” such as Langtry), not least for Constance, with whom, initially at least, he attained great happiness. Alfred Douglas, that poisonous, mendacious nightmare, said at least one true thing in his life when he noted that women loved Wilde because “although he was expected to talk brilliantly, he really did a great deal of listening”. Continue reading...
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