Poison, Passion, and Personality: Oscar Wilde’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning

Abstract

In 1877, as a 23-year-old Oxford undergraduate, Oscar Wilde was invited to fill out two pages of a ‘Confession Album’, an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions, and fears. Certain of his answers point to an already keen wit (when asked the title of his favorite ‘book to take up for an hour’, he responds that he never takes up books for an hour), others to surprisingly conventional tastes (riding is a favorite amusement). The form also testifies to Wilde’s deep appreciation for all things Greek: his favorite authors include Plato, Sappho, and Theocritus; he would hate to part with his Euripides; he admires Alexander the Great. But when faced with a question regarding the place he would most like to live, Wilde chooses not Athens or Argos² but ‘Florence and Rome’; and when asked about the historical period in which he would most liked to have lived, Wilde opts for ‘the Italian Renaissance’.³ As there is no room on the form for Wilde to expand on this statement, we can only speculate as to why he sees Renaissance Italy as a time and a place in which he would have felt at home. But what the response tells us for certain is that while he was at Oxford, Wilde found the culture of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy particularly appealing, was comfortable imagining himself as part of that period, and was prepared to acknowledge his enthusiasm for the period to his friends.

There were times when it seemed to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange and terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of wonder. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890¹