cover image The Stranger Wilde: 2interpreting Oscar

The Stranger Wilde: 2interpreting Oscar

Gary Schmidgall. Dutton Books, $25.95 (512pp) ISBN 978-0-525-93763-0

A lively, original, often moving portrait of Oscar Wilde, this biographical essay claims him as ``one of the . . . great liberators Ireland has produced,'' a moral philosopher akin to Nietzsche as an unmasker of hypocrisy and prudery. Peering behind Wilde's public personas as scourge of Victorian verities, aesthete, arbiter of style and colorful talker, Schmidgall ( Literature As Opera ) probes his ``essentially childish spirit,'' his strain of misanthropy, his ``ruinous infatuation'' with young men and the Falstaffian exuberance that lent him charisma. Delightfully illustrated with period drawings and photographs, this unconventional life is organized thematically, with chapters on Wilde's unhappy marriage; his spiritual kinship with Lady Jane (``Speranza'') Wilde, his ``flamboyant, eagle-beaked'' mother; his homosexuality; his notorious conviction for sodomy; and so forth. Schmidgall builds a tantalizing if strained case that Wilde's autobiographical literary works embody ``a concerted and devastating attack on the Closet.'' (Apr.)