Wilde,+Oscar

An Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and consumate wit, born Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900). His only novel is //The Picture of Dorian Gray// (1890) which argues for “art for art's sake." He is also well known for his comedies //Lady Windermere's Fan// (1892) and //The Importance of Being Earnest// (1895).

Wilde is mentioned just one in //Absalom Abasalom!// when Mr. Compson mentions him while imagining a scene in the Sutpen graveyard. But the critic Ellen Cromwell argues that his influence in broader in the novel, that the book is in conversation with Wilde. She notes that Wilde visited the South in the 1880s and that //fin-de-siecle// or decadent atmosphere of the South during Reconstruction powerfully influenced //The Picture of Dorian Gray.// Moreover, she argues that in Bon and Henry, Faulkner "reworks" the temptation scene of Wilde's novel, in which the dandy Lord Henry Wotton manipulates/captures the imagination of Dorian Gray (Cromwell 628) and that Charles Bon is "is a literary figure anticipated by the androgynous pseudoaristocrat Oscar Wilde, who, like Bon, came down from Oxford to find himself first in Mississippi (visiting with Jefferson Davis on a gracious verandah) and then in New Orleans (where he was escorted on a tour of the city by Civil War hero General P. T. Beauregard)" (598). In doing so, says Cromwell, "Faulkner reinterprets dandyism for the South­­, casting the dandy as a culturally-perceived monster who registers the threat that miscegenation and deviant sexuality pose to the postbellum South" (598).

Source:

Crowell, Ellen. "The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde's Trip through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha." //MFS Modern Fiction Studies// 50.3 (2004): 595-631. Print.

-Nick Neely

//But there she [Bon's octoroon mistress] was, with the eleven-year-old boy who looked more like eight. It must have resembled a garden scene by **the Irish poet, Wilde**: the late afternoon, the ark cedars with the level sun in them, even the light exactly right and the grave, the three peices of marble (your grandfather had advanced Judith the money to buy the third stone with against the price of the store) looking as through they had been cleaned and polished and arranged by scene shiftes who with the passing of twilight would return and strike them and carry them, hollow fragile and without weight, back to the warehouse until they should be needed again.// (AA 157)