BOOKS 33: OSCAR WILDE'S THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

WITH PROFESSOR NICHOLAS FRANKEL

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the novel that scandalized, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth. Dorian wants to experience life fully, and the book became evidence in the trial where Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for "gross indecency" - his love for other men. Wilde had been the consummate celebrity, famous for his plays, especially the sublime The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan, but also as a public speaker who had entertained and charmed audiences during an American tour. After his prison term Wilde left England for exile in France. It was not only Wilde on trial, but also literature itself. British society decided was that a book can corrupt, that gay love must be outlawed, and that censorship, repression and propriety must supplant freedom of the imagination, of literature, of love. Martyr, scapegoat, crusader for LGBTQ rights - that was my understanding of Wilde when I recently edited a small book of Wilde on Love. To correct my image of Wilde as utterly crushed and destroyed by his trial, I spoke with one of the world's foremost Wilde experts: Professor Nicholas Frankel of Virginia Commonwealth University, a graduate of Oxford, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia. Professor Frankel has edited new and uncensored editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray, of The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest, and of his prison writings. His expansive and gripping biography, Oscar Wilde; The Unrepentant Years, provides a much fuller picture of Wilde than previous biographies and lets us see how one of the first true celebrities who knew how to deploy his image like the best of today's internet influencers, changed the way we live in the world. Listen to this episode not only during Pride Month (when I recorded this episode, via zoom during the lockdown) but to re-discover one of the most transformative novels in the English canon.

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