Oscar Wilde: a life marked by brilliance and persecution

Oscar Wilde's early life

Among the authors, since the second half of the nineteenth century, who have suffered consequences and discrimination for their sexual orientation, considered a diversity, there is Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and then was sent to Oxford where he gained a first class degree in classics and distinguished himself for his eccentricity. He accepted the theory “Art for Art's Sake”, in fact he became a disciple of Walter Pater, the theorist of the aesthetics movement.

Wilde's literary achievements

In the late 1880s Wilde wrote short stories like “The Canterville Ghost” and then he wrote his only novel: “The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1884 he married Costance Lloyd, who bore him two children, but was a marriage of pure facade. For his homosexuality, Wilde lives in the discomfort of a Victorian morality that was imposed in England of the time and in his works he touched on important issues such as the social and sexual exploitation of women or political corruption. Victorian society prosecuted Wilde and sent him to prison for his sexual orientation. He was the protagonist of two judicial proceedings, which troubled him throughout his life. In the first, it was Wilde himself who accused the man with whom he had been in a relationship since 1891 (John Douglas), but the prosecution retaliated against him for evidence of his homosexuality gathered by investigators hired by the defense; in the second proceeding, Wilde was accused for sodomy. The prison where he spent two years was Reading Gaol, in Berkshire. Furthermore he had a relationship with Robert Ross, a Canadian literary critic, and many other men. Wilde died in Paris in 1900.