{"id":322,"date":"2022-03-20T11:59:15","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T15:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/?p=322"},"modified":"2022-03-20T11:59:17","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T15:59:17","slug":"reading-into-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/2022\/03\/20\/reading-into-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Into Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After our class conversation on Wednesday, I do think I look at The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em> a little differently. Not that my earlier readings of the play, as a critique of Victorian society and a commentary on Englishness, have any less valence, but that there is an expanded sense of what the play speaks to, sitting more directly within the full nexus of Wilde\u2019s identities. My first instinct, when reading Wilde, isn\u2019t to focus on the queer aspects of his narratives, favoring instead his aestheticism and the Irish\/English aspects of his works. But Colm Tobin\u2019s piece helped me to see, even more, how each of those aspects of Wilde inform each other as a part of his whole person \u2014 particularly in The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em>. The hidden identities that both men take on, the secret lives they lead, become particularly poignant in light of Wilde\u2019s struggles with his identity and the way he shrugged them on and off \u2014 adding that tinge of darkness amongst the humor and social jibes.\u00a0 As Tobin aptly puts: \u201cThe problem about all of Wilde\u2019s work, but his plays especially, is that they are forced to compete with the drama of his own last years\u201d (Tobin, 71). The heightened, though comic, drama of mistaken identity and misreading in the play then becomes a way of reading Wilde as well, for good or ill, and the play\u2019s final lesson about the certain inevitableness of being earnest, suggests the then inevitable outcome of Wilde\u2019s life, that there is an inescapable truth of self that comes to the fore no matter what you do, or perhaps despite it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tobin sums Wilde up well at the close of his piece: \u201cThe personal became political because an Irishman in London pushed his luck. He remains a vivid presence in the world one hundred years after his death. He played out the role of the tragic queer. He was witty, the greatest talker of his generation, skilled in the art-of the one-liner, the quick aside. But he was also untrustworthy and he was doomed\u201d (Tobin, 84). Such a long string of adages seem necessary to fully encompass the life and tragedy of such a dynamic figure and there is no better space to locate that attempt than in Wilde\u2019s work itself, throwing away all pretense that the art doesn\u2019t reflect the artist.  (When I initially wrote this last line, I wrote Wilde\u2019s work himself, as opposed to itself\u2026 a mistake, but a rather apt one for showing how easy it is to conflate the art and the artist \u2014 in a large sense, Wilde today is in fact his work.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After our class conversation on Wednesday, I do think I look at The Importance of Being Earnest a little differently. Not that my earlier readings of the play, as a critique of Victorian society and a commentary on Englishness, have any less valence, but that there is an expanded sense of what the play speaks … Continue reading Reading Into Identity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3672,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8878,541768,541764,541784],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-identity","tag-irishness","tag-the-importance-of-being-earnest","tag-tobin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3672"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}