Oscar Wilde Related Questions

Factual Questions
1

I just finished reading a fascinating book on Oscar Wilde and understand how and why he was prosecuted, convicted and thrown into prison. And while some of his close friends counseled him to flee to France to avoid prosecution, he chose to stand up for his principles and subsequently paid a heavy price… namely two years behind bars.

The prosecution took place in late 1800’s London, and the law in England was clear regarding homosexual behavior, although not everyone involved in the case was prosecuted. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t convicted of sodomy, which would have carried a much heavier penalty.

I assume that even though his behavior had occurred in other countries, such as in France, Italy and Morocco, by fleeing to one these countries he could have avoided prosecution, or at least postponed it for quite some time. In many countries this behavior was happening and most people were simply turning a blind eye to it.

Here are my 3 questions:

  1. Had he stayed in Ireland and never gone to England, and had he behaved exactly the same, is it likely he would have been prosecuted there?

  2. Had he lived in the US or France, and had behaved exactly as he had in England, is it likely he would have been prosecuted there?

  3. Had he been a woman instead of a man, would it have been just as likely that he/she would have been prosecuted?

I have a feeling that Victorian England was a particularly bad place to be caught up in these kinds of activities. It’s also clear to me that there was a political component to his prosecution and he was sacrificed to protect higher ups in Parliament.

2

The real problem for Wilde was that he got caught up in the fight between Alfred Douglas and his father. They basically used Wilde as a weapon against each other and Wilde got the worst from both sides.

3

A lot depends on

  1. Ireland was part of the UK until 1922, as far as I know the same law was in effect de jure.

  2. Sodomy was not a capital offense in France after 1791, had he been convicted of that. Laws still would have affected him, but may have been more lax in enforcement.

  3. WAG but I think I’ve read that women could “get away” with more than men.

That Victorian England was a land of sexual repression was only somewhat true, but not to the extent that people think today (“come see wenches flash their ankles at you!” is an exaggeration).

4

Being a lesbian or sex between women has never been a criminal offence in Great Britain.

5

Had he stayed in Ireland he might not have been prosecuted because he would never have impinged on the notice of the Marquess of Queensberry, or anyone else of similar political influence. But, yeah, the laws dealing with homosexual activity were pretty much the same in Ireland and in England, and if there was a difference in the enthusiasm with which they were enforced I’m not aware of it.

6

Most of the OP has already been answered, so much of my answer is pretty redundant. But I took too long composing it to just delete it, so:

It’s possible, if not probable, that Wilde would never have been prosecuted for gross indecency had he not sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. Had he not responded to Queensberry’s calling card (with its note addressing Wilde as “posing as a somdomite [sic]”), Wilde’s personal life wouldn’t have been subjected to such scrutiny. On public record, Wilde was a married man with two children; suspicions that he was gay–based on his mannerisms and what-not–couldn’t be substantiated without extensive investigation into his private life. And it was a lot of trouble (and expense) to dig up solid evidence of Wilde’s homosexuality, mainly in the form of statements from male prostitutes (admittedly, Wilde was naive to believe that these “rent boys” would never talk). Queensberry himself didn’t go to all that trouble until he found himself accused of libel, at which time his lawyers hired a number of private detectives to uncover evidence of Wilde’s sexual behavior.

In other words, Wilde could have behaved the way that he did (i.e., had sex with other men) and remained in England without being prosecuted, had he not been so reckless as to respond to Queensberry’s allegations and thereby put his own character on trial.

So I would slightly reword the central issue in your questions as follows: “if Wilde’s acts of homosexual conduct were made public knowledge (with evidence to substantiate the charges), is it likely he would have been prosecuted [elsewhere]?”

  1. In Ireland, the likelihood of prosecution would have been the same as in England. As a part of the United Kingdom, Ireland was subject to the same law under which Wilde was convicted, i.e., Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, as can be seen in the Irish Statute Book.

2a. In the US, it would most likely depend on the state in which Wilde committed homosexual acts, and how that state defined “sodomy.” In the UK, “sodomy” was considered to refer specifically to anal sex, which was difficult to prove (without catching someone in the immediate act)–it was easier to get a conviction for “gross indecencies” which included ANY sexual behavior between two men (although as a misdemeanor, and not subject to as harsh penalties as sodomy). In many American states, “sodomy” had a broader definition, including oral as well as anal sex. It’s very likely (depending on the state) that based on the prosecution’s witnesses (the aforementioned rent boys, who testified to committing sodomy with Wilde) that Wilde would have been convicted of a more serious crime than the UK’s “gross indecencies.”

2b. In France, on the other hand, Wilde would have been in the clear, legally speaking. Sodomy laws had been struck down at the time of the French Revolution. If Wilde had fled to France, he would have been beyond the reach of the UK law, and would have been free to perform homosexual acts in France without fear of legal prosecution.

  1. As a woman, Wilde would not have been subject to the same charges or penalties, even in the UK. The “gross indecencies” law specifically applied to same-sex acts between men.

A famous story–possibly apocryphal–relates how Queen Victoria, when signing the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (the “gross indecencies” law), was informed that the act didn’t cover “similar acts” by women. To which she responded, “Women don’t do such things!”

But, anyway–Oscar Wilde would have been better off had he been a woman or a Frenchman. Or had he not taken Queensberry to trial in the first place.

7

Thanks everyone. Clearly the interaction with Queensberry regarding his son’s relationship with Oscar triggered everything else, and had Oscar had not sued Queensberry for libel, or had fled to France before his prosecution happened, things would have turned out quite differently for him. Hindsight is 20/20.

8

There’s what I call the “Wilde Principle” - it’s a really bad idea to sue someone for libel when you know what they said is true. Corollary - Especially when the libel is about something illegal.

The apocryphal story I heard was that the law only covered men because none of the men in government knew how to explain to Queen Victoria what it was that women did.

The other interesting point was that Oscar used to go on about the ethereal love between an older artist and his protégé in glowing terms; then you read about the testimony from the trial, and Oscar was no different than the predatory dirty old men through the ages who hire teen street hookers for their drunken orgies, except in this case it was male hookers.

9

I wasn’t trying to justify Oscar’s actions, or the actions of his numerous compatriots, although I don’t see it exactly as predatory since it was consensual and didn’t involve boys under 14 years old from what I read (which may be wrong).

Sexual mores were different in those days than they are today. Most of his trysts were either with young men in college or younger ‘rent boys’ as already mentioned. This illegal activity was already happening in London with or without his involvement.

He was an exceptional author, poet and playwright, and I appreciate the work he produced, if not his personal proclivities.

10

And Douglas appeared to have been using the relationship to upset his father. He was the one who made sure there was evidence around so his father would find out what was going on. And when Queensberry did find out and wrote his note, it was Douglas who encouraged Wilde to sue Queensberry for libel.

11

Wilde wouldn’t be the first or last person to resort to prostitutes to enact an idealized fantasy.

12

If he’d been a woman, he wouldn’t have gone to jail, since there was no comparable crime on the books. However, the female Wilde would likely have been divorced by her husband, never seen the children again (Victorian divorce law was almost always in favour of the father), and may have been sent to a lunatic asylum for an indefinite time, which isn’t actually much better than going to jail for a specified time.

13

I thought most US states had similar laws to the UK until a few years after our law started changing, so he would have been just as liable. Whether anyone would have set out investigate him, in the absence of the private detectives Douglas’s father put on to him once he sued for libel, is another matter. But I imagine Alfed Douglas, who could start a fight in an empty room, would have landed him in trouble almost anywhere.

Technically, French law didn’t criminalise homosexuality and already had a low age of consent as well, which is why he settled in France after his release and so many others had fled there after other scandals; but there were other catch-all morality/decency offences that he might well have fallen foul of.

14

Indeed, Sir Richard Burton founded the Kama Shastra Society at the height of Victorian Britain, and published uncensored translations of the Kama Sutra[, The Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nezaoui, and the monumental 18-volume Arabian Nights (which contains surprisingly racy stuff).

15

“Never” is too broad. At common law, sodomy was frequently poorly defined and under some of the working definitions (e.g., “the deviant act against nature”) almost anyone could have been charged for almost any sex act. Or even non-sex acts, like putting ketchup on porridge.

16

Possibly, but I doubt if there were many, if any, cases brought against women on that basis.

17

I know this is not the Victorian period, but I did read that the sodomy laws pre Jacobean period were only used for what we would now call child rape. All sodomy cases brought before then were men on boys, or occasionally girls. It’s hard to figure out just what was going on legally with consensual males. I assume consensual adult sodomy wasn’t condoned, but it doesn’t seem to have been prosecuted either.

Edit: I think it may have been the early Tudor period sodomy laws were brought in. It was between then and the Jacobean period that the law was used to prosecute adult on child sex. What, if anything, was on the statute books before then im not sure.

18

One of the apocryphal stories of medieval Britain concerns Edward II, who neglected his wife in favour of his buddy Piers Gaveston. Eventually the local nobility got fed up with the king’s ineffectiveness and rebelled, his wife ran the country and he was imprisoned. He conveniently died a few years later - some stories say he had a red hot poker pushed up his anus, other stories say he was hung upside down and molten lead poured into his anal cavity. The story goes that a metal funnel was used to hide any external evidence of the method.

Of course, this was just working his tendencies into the punishment, he was actually killed for being a useless king, and because as with any captive claimant, he provided a rallying point for rebellion as long as he was alive.

I mentioned Wilde’s hypocrisy because that’s what it was… he espoused this airy-fairy line about love that transcends, when basically he was a dirty old man getting his rocks off. It’s the contradictory messages. it would be like a straight guy writing about the marvelous transcendence of love while hiring drug-added prostitutes. Eliot Spitszer, for example, never waxed poetic about the virtues of straight love and mentoring younger women at $2000 a night; whereas a senator, say, who espoused straight family values and stood against gay rights yet adopted a wide stance in airport washrooms, would earn all the ridicule he gets.

19

I don’t see that Wilde was displaying the hypocrisy you’re saying. He wasn’t publicly denouncing homosexuality or prostitution.

I think Wilde’s biggest problem was self-delusion. He fantasized about experienced older men having relationships with attractive young men. But he couldn’t attain these types of relationships in the real world. So he went after substitutes like hiring young male prostitutes and having them play the part for him. He put the fact that they were only there because he was paying them out of his mind.

To put it in a more contemporary setting, he was like some guy going to a strip club. He’s having a good time with all the women hanging out with him. In the back of his mind, he knows that they’re only paying attention to him to get his money but he puts that thought away and pretends that what’s happening is real.

That self-delusion was probably what led Wilde to go to court. He was living in his fantasies and didn’t consider how a trial would separate the fact from the fiction.

20

I thought it was Wilde who instituted the prosecution (against advice).

And he was a total smart arse when giving evidence.