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Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One
“Pursued by a Pugilist of Unsound Mind”
Chapter Two
In Durance Vile: Pentonville
Chapter Three
Haldane and Morrison vs. The Home Secretary
Chapter Four
The Battle of Reading Gaol
Chapter Five
“Passing From One Prison Into Another”
Chapter Six
The Vexatious Domestic Saga
Chapter 7
The Great Syphilis Debate
Chapter Eight
The Precipitous Road to Homosexual Law Reform
Chapter Nine
Gay Superstar But Not Martyr
Chapter Ten
Oscar As Others Saw Him
Chapter Eleven
Relationships With Family and Friends
Chapter Twelve
Histrionic Personality Disorder
Chapter Thirteen
The Last Words
Appendix
Bibliography
Index |
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“Ashley Robins, from his background
in medicine and psychiatry, has reviewed the life history
of Oscar Wilde, providing new insights into the effects of
his imprisonment, his matrimonial situation and medical problems.
The Great Drama of His Life is a welcome and original
clinical analysis of Wilde’s personality and behaviour,
detailing how these contributed to his downfall.” Michael
Seeney, Deputy Chairman, The Oscar Wilde Society
The following review was published in Issue Number 39
(July 2011) of The Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies
published by The Oscar Wilde Society.
“Ashley
Robins recounts the adversities and misfortunes of Oscar Wilde’s
life, with a closely argued analysis of his personality. Oscar
told André Gide that he had put his genius into his life but
only his talent into his work; Robins remarks that he might
well have added that he put his personality into his downfall.
… He assesses Wilde’s decision to prosecute Queensberry
for criminal libel, the decision which Wilde in De Profundis
described as ‘a combination of absolute idiocy and vulgar
bravado’. The infamous, scrawled defamatory card reads: ‘For
Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite’. The hall porter at the Albemarle
Club read this as ‘For Oscar Wilde, ponce and somdomite’ but
Queensberry interposed to say it was ‘posing as sodomite.’
Queensberry’s own statement to the Magistrate at Marlborough
Street Police Court in answer to the charge was: ‘I wrote
the card simply with the intention of bringing matters to
a head, having been unable to meet Mr Wilde otherwise, and
to save my son, and I abide by what I wrote.’ Robins says
that Wilde fell headlong into Queensberry’s craftily laid
trap, and was astounded when he saw the Plea of Justification
which detailed his encounters with various rent-boys. But
the advice given by his friends that he should abandon the
case was not sound; if he had withdrawn the case the evidence
would have been handed to the Public Prosecutor.
… Next, Robins examines Wilde’s health and mental condition
at Pentonville Prison where he was sent after his conviction.
Confined in a bare and repellent cell with a plank bed and
a small tin chamber pot, Wilde lost a great deal of weight
and according to an article in the Daily Chronicle had
become insane. The Home Secretary, Asquith, demanded a report
and the medical officer, Dr Innes, replied that Wilde ‘was
in good health and perfectly sane’. Then in a sudden change
of policy, the Prison Commissioners ordered Wilde’s transfer
to Wandsworth Prison with a note that Asquith suspected that
‘the Officers of Pentonville were being tampered with by O.
Wilde’s friends’.
… Wilde found Wandsworth Prison harder to bear than
Pentonville. R.B. Haldane, one of the Prison Commissioners
asked the assistant chaplain, the Rev W.D. Morrison, to report.
Morrison’s letter saying that Wilde was ‘quite crushed and
broken’ and that ‘perverse sexual practices [masturbation]
were getting the mastery over him’ sent ‘perturbations throughout
the Prison Commission’. Contradictory assessments were then
made, and eventually two of the foremost ‘mental specialists’
of the day (Dr David Nicolson and Dr Richard Brayn) visited
Wilde. In their interesting report, which Robins reproduces
in full, they concluded that his mental condition was not
indicative of disease or derangement and a display of emotional
depression was ‘accentuated by the sympathetic nature of our
enquiries, and by the knowledge that friends were agitating
on his behalf, a fact he is quite capable of taking advantage
of.’ They recommended that he should be moved to a prison
in the country, in a larger cell, allowed more (supervised)
association with other prisoners, given more interesting work
– bookbinding and gardening – and allowed ‘a freer range of
books and a larger supply.’ Reading Prison was chosen.
… Robins discusses in full detail the machinations among
prison officials and doctors to cover up Wilde's state of
health in his chapter ‘The Battle or Reading Gaol’ and quotes
extensively from Home Office records. The Governor, Lt-Col
Isaacson, a ‘mulberry-faced Dictator’ was hostile to Wilde.
The prison medical officer, Dr Oliver Maurice, neglected to
treat Wilde’s painful ear infection adequately. Wilde was
deeply affected by the news of his mother’s death. He was
in a very low and desperate state, and Robins suggests that
it was on advice from Frank Harris (who visited him at the
request of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise the Chairman of the Prison
Commission) that Wilde petitioned the Home Secretary for his
release ‘before insanity has claimed soul as well as body
as its prey’. Ruggles-Brise commissioned a report from the
prison Visiting Committee which concluded that an expert medical
enquiry was called for; in the event no new evaluation of
Wilde’s clinical state was made but a turning point came when
he appointed Major Nelson as Governor. Under his benign administration
Wilde could write De Profundis and was virtually
restored in body and mind.
… Robins discusses why after his release from prison
Oscar produced no significant literary work apart from The
Ballad of Reading Gaol and his two influential letters
to the Daily Chronicle about prison conditions. He
dismisses the idea that the stresses of imprisonment impaired
his creativity, and concludes that in exile he was removed
from an admiring public and this alienation damaged his confidence
and destroyed his inspiration to create new work. He had an
idle disposition, was inherently unable to curb his wilful
expenditure, and towards the end of his life drank heavily.
… Robins rejects the idea that Wilde was essentially
heterosexual until he was seduced by Robbie Ross. His true
orientation was homosexual and although he admired Constance
and felt himself to be in love with her, his marriage was
motivated by the need for financial security and to project
himself to the public as a happy married family man. (A separate
chapter is devoted to the protracted wrangling over the Wildes’
marriage settlement.) Robins discusses the ‘precipitous road’
to general acceptance by society of a homosexual lifestyle
as positive and constructive, and remarks that in exile Wilde
made no attempt to take up the cause of homosexual law reform.
… In considering Wilde’s personality, Robins first discusses
‘Oscar as others saw him’. He was charming and generous. His
astounding talent as talker, raconteur and conversationalist
meant he was always in need of an audience, and posing and
posturing were essential ingredients of his behaviour. As
Ross noted, Oscar in prison ‘would hastily assume one of his
hundred artificial manners, which he has for every person
and every occasion’. The list goes on: recklessly extravagant,
arrogant, affected, pretentious, haughty, conceited, vain,
flamboyant, ostentatious, bombastic, self-aggrandising, insensitive,
hurtful, self-centred, idle, impatient, intolerant, unforgiving,
uncompassionate, untruthful, predisposed to boredom and failing
to pay his bills.
… As for his relationships with family, friends and
lovers, Robins believes that Shaw was right to say that ‘Wilde,
though he could inspire friendships of the most devoted kind,
was incapable of such friendships himself though not on occasion
of noble and generous gestures.’ Oscar became bored with married
life, neglectful of Constance and uncaring, letting her be
short of funds whilst he pursued his homosexual affairs. When
she died his grief was superficial and what sadness there
was quickly passed. Oscar was very fond of his two sons, but
after his imprisonment his craving to see them was primarily
to appease his own emotional needs for approval and acceptance.
Wilde’s love for Bosie was deep-seated and their affair was
sustained and intense; but in other affairs, begun with passion,
boredom set in as the excitement waned. Robins concludes that
fresh and new acquaintances were precious and irresistible
but old tried and tested friendships were dispensable, exploitable
and reproachable.
… Robins sets out his description of Oscar’s personality
with forensic clarity. What can usefully be added? Robins
as a senior clinical psychiatrist seeks to assess, indeed
to diagnose Wilde’s personality using modern classifications
of mental and behavioural disorders, He finds that Wilde meets
the American Psychiatric Association’s [APA] criteria for
an histrionic personality (pervasive attention-seeking behaviour,
sexually seductive behaviour, shallow and exaggerated emotions,
self-dramatisation, etc.) and would classify him as having
an histrionic personality disorder because flaws
in his behaviour e.g. his total indiscretion in his liaisons
with rent-boys and in his love affair with Bosie, caused harm
to himself and others. In an appendix he gives the results
of having a 180 item questionnaire about personality traits
completed ‘as they thought Wilde would have done’ by twenty
Wilde specialists. He finds the results compatible with this
diagnosis.
… One may add that other disorders on the APA list include
narcissistic personality disorder (pervasive pattern of grandiosity,
need for admiration and lack of empathy) which some feel fits
Wilde quite well (or, even better, Bosie), and paranoid personality
disorder (irrational suspicions and mistrust) for which sounds
just right for Queensberry. There are of course other, or
overlapping interpretations of Wilde’s self-destructiveness:
Clifton Snider (in The Wildean No. 23) argues that
Wilde had an addictive personality being both a romance addict
and the alcoholic son of alcoholic parents.
… It is pleasing, and helps to put his findings in perspective,
that Robins concludes his analysis by quoting a study of creativity
and psychopathology by Felix Post which found that ninety
per cent of some fifty writers studied (Balzac, Dostoevsky,
Flaubert, Ibsen, Joyce and Kafka to name but a few) all suffered
from personality disorders, rather than just having various
personality characteristics. It is also well-known that the
list of alcoholic writers is a long one. Whether or not one
accepts that to use the term ‘disorder’ in a clinical sense
is entirely appropriate, Oscar was in good company.
… With its narrow focus on Oscar’s personality, behaviour
and adversities, this is a sombre book which inevitably has
few glimpses of his wit and his greatness as a writer. That
said, it is notably lucid and well-reasoned, carefully and
thoroughly researched with valuable extended quotations from
unfamiliar original sources, and adds significantly to our
understanding of Wilde the man and of important events in
his life.” Donald Mead, Editor of The Wildean,
and Chairman of The Oscar Wilde Society
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