The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society

By:

Michael S. Foldy

Format:

Hardback

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Description

Following Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial for committing "acts of gross indecency with men", he lost his freedom, family, reputation, will to create and even his will to live. This book sets out to examine what it was about late Victorian society that allowed this to happen, indeed needed it to happen, and what the trials tell us about the taste and morals of late Victorian England. Michael S. Foldy argues that the prosecution of Wilde was directly linked to many larger social, cultural and political issues that transcended the legal and moral concerns with his homosexuality. Analyzing the trial testimony and the coverage in the press, he considers the various images and metaphors used to describe the threat that Wilde posed to English society and he investigates the social and cultural contexts that dictated how those images were perceived. Foldy shows how the public construction of Wilde's identity as "deviant" was both informed and limited by existing heterosexism structures of repression and mechanisms of restraint and by the emergence of a new and modern variant of homophobia. He suggests that Lord Rosebery, the prime minister of the time, may himself have been a homosexual and that the successful prosecution of Wilde was necessary to prevent a larger and infinitely more damaging revelation. Ultimately, he locates the meaning of the trials within the rhetorical context of the contemporary public debate over the "health" of England - a debate whose terms had been defined largely by moral conservatives - and demonstrates that within a nation that had many reasons to be concerned about the future, Wilde was perceived to represent a potent constellation of threats to the health of British society.

Release date NZ

October 20th, 1997

Author

Michael S. Foldy

Audiences

Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Professional & Vocational
Undergraduate

Pages

224

Dimensions

17x24x2

ISBN-13

9780300071122

Product ID

2211354

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