A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of April
Just Out of the Pool
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde loses the libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury who accuse him of homosexual practices.
Oscar Wilde’s experience with the English legal system was calamitous given the judicial nature of his oppression. In Wilde’s case, there were three trials. The Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s young lover Bosie, had accused Wilde of ‘posing as a sodomite’. The Marquess of Queensbury had chased around London confronting Wilde at his home and elsewhere until the writer was driven to fight back. The form that Wilde’s retaliation took was disastrous for Wilde. He initiated Queensberry’s prosecution for criminal libel but abandoned the case when evidence incriminating him made defeat certain. It was a humiliating reversal and led to his own prosecution.
Wilde’s own performance as a witness was sparkling at first, but then not truthful. He should never have started legal proceedings, but was essentially forced into it. He couldn’t live in peace in England without rebutting Queensberry; but he was unable to rebut him. He was indeed a ‘sodomite’, and pretending to be otherwise to defeat his enemy was bound to end in failure. Trapped whichever way he turned, he chose the path of attack and was floored.
In the second and third trials, Wilde resisted charges of gross indecency. He lied about his relations with rent boys, and pleaded not guilty though he knew that he had broken the law. This led to dishonesty of presentation. The second trial ended inconclusively, the jury unable to decide on Wilde’s guilt; at the third trial the jury showed no such uncertainty and convicted him. Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour, ‘hardly sufficient’, according to the judge, ‘given the seriousness of his crime’.
On his release, he went into exile and wrote nothing else of any real value. During the course of the trials, Wilde was cross-examined about his work. Asked to defend it against a charge of immorality, he insisted that art was without any ethical content. Lying about his intimacy with male prostitutes, he also misrepresented literature’s intimacy with moral discourse. His responses first entertained and then provoked, but did not educate the court; his evidence was not a lesson. It backfired, injuring him rather than the prosecution.
Wilde’s trials point to a certain connection between literary censorship and sexual oppression. Sexuality is a form of self-expression and is thus analogous to literary creativity. One might even say that our sexuality makes artists of us all. As defendant, Wilde was thus doubly, and most inclusively, representative of writers, certainly, but more widely, of everyone whose private life the State attempts to regulate.