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The Oscar Wilde they never quote

REVIEW BY STUART MUNCKTON

The Importance of Being Earnest
Directed Oliver Parker
Starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Dame Judi Dench
Screening at major cinemas

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" — Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The release of the new film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, will generate renewed interest in Wilde's life and work.

Wilde is remembered chiefly for two things. The first was his legendary wit. Many books have been published that are dedicated entirely to quotations attributed to Wilde. Some came from his writing, but many originated from the dinner conversations that made him such a popular figure in London society.

The second thing Wilde is remembered for is his dramatic life. He once commented that he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work. The story of his meteoric rise to be arguably the first modern celebrity, followed by his complete fall from grace after being jailed for homosexual acts, is even more of a legend than his wit.

What tends to get overlooked, and not accidentally, is Wilde's radical streak. Wilde was a self-proclaimed socialist, even if, as he himself once admitted, his socialism was much closer to anarchism.

He came from a radical pedigree. His mother was an active Irish Republican and revolutionary. His wife, too, played a role in the early feminist movement. When, in 1886, George Bernard Shaw asked leading artistic figures to sign a petition in support of the Haymarket Martyrs (Chicago anarchists who were framed for murder and executed), Wilde was the only one he could get to sign. For a short while, Wilde attended meetings of the Fabian Society, moderate socialists who believed in piecemeal reform. However, he soon found them too conservative.

Long before his sexual preferences were exposed, Wilde shocked and outraged the English ruling class. Being Irish, he was always an outsider, no matter how well connected to the English establishment he was. This enabled him to objectively observe the elite and use his writing and wit to satirise and expose their hypocrisy.

Even Wilde's plays, mostly light comedies, aroused moral indignation. A Woman of No Importance, which openly attacked sexual hypocrisy, was the sharpest and most obvious example. But even his most trivial work, The Importance of Being Earnest, sent up the absurdity and hypocrisy of the prevailing ruling class morality. The English ruling class did not appreciate being mocked by an Irishman and the exposure of Wilde's homosexuality served as an excuse to remove a thorn in their side.

Wilde lived during the Victorian age, with its repressive morality and harsh censorship, and Wilde openly challenged and defied this. He declared that art should not be a tool to reinforce ruling class morality, but should serve only itself. Wilde caused outrage when he wrote in the preface to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that there is "no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. A book is well written or badly written. That is all."

However, Wilde's "art for arts sake" views did not prevent him from using his writing to expose the gross injustices in society. His short stories, written for children, such as The Happy Prince and The Young King, detail poverty, inequality and the horrific exploitation behind the creation of wealth in class society.

The most complete expression of his radical views came in his brilliant and largely forgotten essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which was written at the height of his success.

In this essay, Wilde turned his wit on private property and the injustices that stem from it. He mocked the hypocrisy of charity and insisted instead that "the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty is impossible". He declared: "Why should [the poor] be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the table and are beginning to know it."

He celebrated rebellion, declaring it "finer to take than to beg". In one of his greatest quotes, which for obvious reasons fails to appear in the books or on the t-shirts, he declares "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress is made."

Wilde hailed socialism as the means by which humanity would liberate itself from the necessity to live and work for others and argued that through socialism all individuals would be able to achieve their full potential, something impossible in a world marred by poverty and suffering. In his vision of a socialist society, technology would be used to liberate all from tedious labour, leaving each individual the chance to spend their time as they wish.

He is insistent that the "great men" in history are only great due to their circumstance and that, given the chance socialism would provide, all individuals could be greater still. Under socialism, Wilde insists: "One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

The Soul of Man Under Socialism is explicitly revolutionary. He openly rejects all plans for piecemeal reform, arguing that nothing less than a complete transformation of social relations is necessary.

Anticipating the predictable response his beautiful vision of a society without exploitation or inequality would bring, Wilde asked: "Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

Go and see The Importance of Being Earnest. The film has its strengths and weaknesses (which I planned to comment on before being sidetracked by Wilde's socialist visions) but it is enough to say it is infinitely better than Oliver Parker's lifeless adaptation of another Wilde play, An Ideal Husband.

At the end of the day, the sheer quality of Wilde's story and dialogue wins through. If you want to escape for a while and watch a perfect example of a trivial comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is the way to go. Just remember that there is more to Oscar Wilde than they let on.

From Green Left Weekly, July 24, 2002.
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