Oscar Wilde, Narcissism, and the Quest for “Likes”

Kardashians and Lil Waynes and Trumps, Oh My! Our lives are fairly densely inhabited by pop celebrities. Thanks to social media it seems that never before in the history of human endeavour has so much of such little value been known of so many. And very often it seems that a vicious-circlesnowball-water-cooler effect is at play, whereby people get talked about simply because they are being talked about.

Curiously enough, David Friedman’s Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity goes a fair way to explaining how our current situation evolved. In this work he documents Oscar Wilde’s visit to America (1882) at the very start of his meteoric rise to fame and infamy. (To those who are not familiar with Oscar Wilde, well, Google him! This is an inexcusable lacuna in your formation!) Wilde started out as a brash, young, self-proclaimed prophet of the aesthetic movement in the England of the 1870s. In the space of 30-odd years he produced classics in fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray), drama (The Importance of Being Earnest), and poetry (The Ballad of Reading Gaol). At the same time he proceeded from his upstart years to being lionized by London and Paris society, then to being convicted and jailed— at the height of his fame in 1895—for “gross indecency” (i.e., homosexuality) and subsequently shunned or ignored by most of his friends and acquaintances.

How the rise? Why the fall?? Friedman sheds light on Wilde’s precocious ability to use his particular talents and the media to deliberately craft a popular image. In fact, the process began well before the American tour. Wilde’s parents were both famous Dublin personalities who moved in the best society, so Wilde was reared in an environment dominated by strong personalities and brilliant conversationalists. His university studies at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford exposed him to aesthetic theory and provided an environment in which he could not only demonstrate his prodigious intellectual capacity but hone his performative skills through increasingly outré behaviour. Wilde at this time, when asked about his future plans, stated in a typically jaded fashion: “I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.” Words to live by...and perhaps die. Wilde soon became the most recognized representative of the socalled aesthetic movement, a movement which most Victorians viewed with a horrified fascination. He was satirized in the media—particularly Punch magazine—and was effectively made the main character in a Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, Patience.

In the early 1880s, impresario Richard D’oyly Carte, who had founded the D’oyly Carte Opera company with Gilbert and Sullivan, decided to send Patience on tour in the United States and Canada. Concerned that the American public might have no idea about the main satirical point of the operetta, he and his associates decided to send Wilde on tour as an unwitting shill for the show.

Friedman shows that it was in America that Wilde’s desire for fame, recognition, and self-promotion aligned with the adventive spirit of entertainment capitalism. Newspaper publishers around that time were discovering the awesome appeal of sensationalist journalism. Wilde was greeted by throngs when he landed in New York, and throughout his year-long tour people flocked along railroad stops to catch a glimpse of the famous aesthete. In short, he became a one-man media event.

This was no random occurrence. D’oyly Carte and his minions paved the way with glowing and sensational news releases. The first thing that Wilde did in New York was to attend a photo shoot with Napoleon Sarony, a celebrity photographer, who produced dozens of pictures of Wilde in various fey poses These photos became the early equivalent of baseball cards, and Wilde’s image was used to sell everything from stoves to cigars to bust enhancers (Holy Click Bait, Batman!). By the end of his stay, Wilde’s image was perhaps best-known in the Americas; and Wilde himself was the most talked about Briton.

Wilde also became master of a new media feature, the celebrity interview. Newspapers would send representatives, and Wilde would extravagantly accommodate. He had the equivalent of a movie set that he brought along with him so most of his interviews were elaborately staged—with exotic clothes, drapes, materials featuring prominently. With his unusual appearance and his outrageous, paradoxical statements, he made headlines wherever he went and whatever he did.

He also, by the by, elevated schmoozing to a fine art. With all the media hype and public fascination, notables, even the most intimidating ones, figured they’d better meet with this entity. So, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with slews of governors, mayors, and university presidents, all jumped on the bandwagon.

Your Google search will reveal the rest: how Wilde’s spectacular fame was succeeded by soul-destroying notoriety. One of Wilde’s latter-day statements— “I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age”—was perhaps more prescient than he knew. There is a direct line leading from Wilde’s mediated egoism and our current fascination with the narcissistic seductiveness of social media.

Wilde in America is available through Lennoxville Library via interlibrary loan.

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