I bring this up in reference to the Australian Ballet’s 2024 evening-length work, “Oscar©” (whose press materials mystifyingly include the copyright icon, even though titles cannot be copyrighted in the US and don’t need to be in Australia)—just given its American premiere at City Center—because a number of outspoken aficionados of ballet in Manhattan have insisted that it was folly for the choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, even to attempt a ballet about that master of the epigram and all-around literary wit. And yet, I have still to hear a word of scolding from anyone anywhere about ballets that adapt plays of Shakespeare—whose wit, as well as his invention of a fair patch of English vocabulary, is certainly up to snuff—or the novels of the richly witted Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë, Michael Cervantes, Herman Melville; or, mon Dieu!!, the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Critics, both professional and self-appointed, are gatekeepers by definition, and I’ve been prompted to administer lashes with a wet noodle to my own blind dismissals; nevertheless, in this case I think that Wilde is better than his fans on this occasion represent him as. His wit is unquestionably dazzling; however, as Lubitsch’s delightful film adaptation demonstrates, Wilde’s wit does not end-stop his artistry or his symbolic achievements concerning desire and obsession or the spontaneous triumphs of the psyche over legalistic morality that is the condition humaine. (“All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”—O.W.) There is much more to the thought and sensibility of Oscar Wilde than his flair for epigrammatic reversals and skill at skewering hypocrisy with a playful phrase. He could look beyond a stereotype into a character’s potential, he put evil in exactly the place where—according to its scale—it belonged, and he accorded second chances with grace to individuals in middle age who went the distance to try to help those whom they had wounded in youth. Late in life, after his sufferings in Reading Gaol, he expanded his emotional diapason. As Richard Ellmann, the outstanding biographer of Wilde and his compatriot James Joyce, described in his Oscar Wilde a post-prison meeting of Wilde and André Gide:

Gide spoke of Dostoevsky, who had served a four-year penal sentence and had then written The House of the Dead. Wilde said that he had come to admire the Russian writers for a quality totally lacking in Flaubert, their pity. This was a great change for him. It was pity, he said, that had kept him from killing himself, for he could not help pitying prisoners in the same misery. (541, quoted sentence above 321.)

Furthermore, aesthete that Wilde was, from his youth he distinguished between the beautiful (which overwhelms perception and imagination) and the erotic (which prompts sexual action). When he brought them into whispering intimacy in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and, eventually, into full identification in his play Salome, he became the subject of societal shock—although not to everyone. His publication of Dorian Gray was traumatic for his wife and children, who considered themselves socially exiled by it; however, it enchanted his mother, Lady Jane Wilde—poet, feminist, and social activist—who wrote in a letter to Oscar, her youngest child, “It is the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fictions of the day.” (320) (Lady Jane remained her son’s champion even when he was in prison.) We don’t often hear about Wilde’s mother; nevertheless, Ellmann also makes the point that although André Gide was glad to withdraw from his relationship with his own mother, Wilde would not give up his. As the source of certain passages voiced from the stage by a narrator to set up the ballet’s proceedings for the audience, a program note for “Oscar©” points to Neil McKenna’s 2005 The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography, whose research apparently supported the view that not only was Wilde far more promiscuous than generally thought but that he also spoke up in public for sexual freedom. On the other hand, the “secret life” may not have been so secret. Nearly twenty years before McKenna’s biography was published, Ellmann had written of Wilde’s ability to keep five different circles of friends, relatives, and acquaintances from learning about one another’s existence. When Wilde spoke of pouring his “talent” into his work but his “genius” into his life, that ability to compartmentalize must have been one element he meant by “genius.” Could another element have been discretion?