Although Wilde secured fame for his eminently epigrammatic wit, his pithy French pronouncements remain uncollected and little known. These ostensibly Parisian writings are the focus of Rebecca N. Mitchell’s paper, “Wilde’s French Epigrams.” Amid the loose manuscript folios that contain Wilde’s draft epigrams is a series of sheets in (imperfect) French: “la poesie c’est la grammaire idealisee” reads one line; “pour ecrire il me faut de satin jaune,” reads another, both blithely ignoring pretense to accents or capitalization. His French might be imprecise, but the sentiments –“poetry is grammar idealized,” “to write I need yellow satin” – are recognizably Wildean. These manuscript pages have been documented previously. Martin Birnbaum’s Oscar Wilde: Fragments and Memories (1914) first transcribed them and provided context for their composition. Robert Sherard’s Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1905) also provided an account of the interactions that gave rise to the phrases. Despite such notices, however, these Parisian fragments of Wilde’s writing have escaped scholarly scrutiny. Their generic status is contested. Are these epigrams? Plagiarisms? Proto-dialogues? Snatches of recorded conversation? Their slippery status makes them difficult to define, but tantalizingly interesting indications of Wilde’s authorial development. In the years following this moment, Wilde would go on to develop his dialogic style, refine his epigrammatic wit, and polish his command of written French. This paper, which draws from Mitchell’s work on the epigrams in the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, explores Wilde’s early writing in French to suggest that it represents nascent aspects of his composition practice and literary style.
Wilde’s association with the greatest French celebrity of his day informs Gregory Mackie’s paper, “Fandom and Forgery in Oscar Wilde’s Letters to Sarah Bernhardt.” As an ardent follower of celebrated actresses, Wilde’s enthusiasm did not stop at the English Channel. His devotion to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, for example, extended to displaying her portrait in his London home. Although the two celebrities are linked in history by the abortive production of Wilde’s French drama Salome, which, with Bernhardt in the title role, was banned from performance in Britain in 1892, Sharon Marcus has argued that Wilde’s own fame was informed by Bernhardt’s example, for he “attained celebrity as an author by emulating an actress.” Wilde cultivated connections with French artists during extended visits to Paris. Although many abandoned him after his trials in 1895, Bernhardt remained supportive. After release from prison, Wilde even managed a reunion with his “dear Sarah” in 1898. It would stand to reason that the two could have corresponded, and by the 1920s, with the emergence into print of memoirs about his life and collections of his letters, Wilde’s legend was reinforced by a growing bibliography of titles that memorialized him and exploited his notoriety. By investigating the overlooked 1924 booklet that purported to record their friendship, Oscar Wilde’s Letters to Sarah Bernhardt, this paper explores the French coordinates of celebrity, fantasy, and myth-making that informed Wilde’s afterlife. For far from embodying the gossipy insider scoop they claimed, the letters are all forgeries contrived by a fan. Edited by “Sylvestre Dorian,” the Letters promise sensational revelations into the lives of both artists, including Wilde’s “secret which he confided only to Sarah Bernhardt, his […] desire to be a woman.” That the entire production was a hoax contrived by “Sylvestre Dorian,” an American writer and impostor whose real name was Brett Holland and who, under the name “Dorian Hope,” had also circulated forgeries of Wilde manuscripts from Paris, suggests that Wilde’s and Bernhadt’s legacies could continue to inspire transnational desires and performances of their own.
Archival revelations about Wilde also inform Colette Colligan’s paper, “The Wilde Trials and Transnational French Journalism.” Wilde’s 1895 sex trials have been one of the most studied international media events of the nineteenth century, but newspaper digitization and digital search now allow the world’s vast coverage of the trials to be unearthed and compared. This paper undertakes this project by reexamining the French coverage of Wilde’s trials. Nancy Erber’s 1996 essay, “The French Trials of Oscar Wilde,” has been the definitive scholarly work on the French coverage, wherein she examines the French reception of the trials in a half-dozen different newspapers and finds rich nationalist commentary on the sensationalism of the British press and the hypocrisy of British morality. Thanks to the mass digitization of newspapers over the last decade and the creation of a custom-designed Wilde Trials News Archive, this paper revisits Erber’s analysis of the French press coverage by widening the corpus of French newspapers to include both Paris-based and provincial papers published in English and foreign languages. What emerges are not only French opinion pieces and interviews on the trials that have yet to be discussed in scholarship, but also the enmeshment of French journalism within systems of transnational and international news reporting at the time. French reporting on the trials could be highly local, while also operating on transnational and international scales. This paper will bring a new digital perspective to the French coverage of the stories about gender and sexuality circulating around Wilde’s trials, while also putting late nineteenth-century media history in a multinational and multilingual context.