Abstracts

Kerry Powell (Miami University; Oxford, Ohio): "Wilde Man: Feminism, Oscar Wilde, and the Theatre of Masculinity"

In the dock, and before that in his plays, I believe that Oscar Wilde was trying to imagine a new performance of gender which we can begin to understand by foregrounding the impact upon him of newly destablilized categories of gender, especially the new scripts for masculinity that some radical late-Victorian feminists were bringing forward. I suspect that Wilde’s own representation of masculinity is partly a reaction against, and partly a negotiation with, that militant phase of Victorian feminism, and I hope to explore that shifting ratio by examining, in my talk, the intersections between feminists such as Josephine Butler and Millicent Fawcett on one hand and Wilde’s plays and courtroom trials on the other. A consideration of the manuscript history of Wilde’s plays will help to clarify his relationship to fin-de-siecle feminism and to establish the terms of Wildeian performativity — its negation of any concept of a core or "true" gendered identity, replacing that with a theatrical virtuousity which enables us, like Dorian Gray, to "multiply our personalities" without regard to fixed ideas of "real" maleness and femaleness. To focus my talk, I’ll give special attention to A Woman of No Importance. In writing and revising this play, I believe, Wilde begins to recognize that in destablilizing the established categories of gender and gender-based ideas of morality, he and many feminists were of one mind. On the other hand he has not fully resolved, if he ever would, the differences that divided them.

Paul Kinsella (UBC): "Word  of Mouth: Wilde, Mahaffy and the Art of Conversation"

Scholars and biographers, while accepting the relationship between Oscar Wilde and his Trinity College tutor J.P. Mahaffy as "mutually important," have offered little elaboration on this theme. Recently, however, studies of Wilde's childhood and background have revealed the existence of a "social religion of wit" in the Dublin of the mid-nineteenth century, in which both  Wilde and Mahaffy participated at different points in their lives.   Mahaffy, who was fifteen years Wilde's senior, made a deliberate study of the practice of wit in the Dublin salons, and later became an illustrious talker in his own right, even going so far as to write a manual of advice on the subject of "the art of conversation." In my paper I will suggest that Mahaffy re-presented the politics of orality and the techniques of talk to his promising student at Trinity College, and that evidence of the resulting influence can clearly be discerned in the accounts of Wilde's speech performances which have come down to us, as well as in his defence of oral values in "The Decay of Lying."

Wilhelm Emilsson (UBC): "Wilde Today"

What explains the strong presence of Wilde in contemporary culture? First, he can be seen as a proto-postmodernist artist. Second, he offers a stylish way of existing in the constant flux of modernity. Third, he understood that the modern age was being increasingly driven by images and catchphrases, so he took charge of his own myth by circulating carefully crafted images of himself accompanied by energetic epigrams/soundbites. I will look at traces of Wilde's "surface aesthetics" in some of his "disciples," especially Quentin Tarantino, who has been described as "applying style to sheer slaughter," Tom Stoppard, who has Wilde appear in his latest play The Invention of Love, and Morrissey, whose "defiant ambiguity" owes a great deal to the influence of his "Victorian mentor," Wilde.