This panel will consider Oscar Wilde’s lectures and afterlife on the Pacific West Coast, exploring his reactions to American culture and America’s reaction him. Wilde travelled all over North America on his 1882 lecture tour in support of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera Patience which parodied Aestheticism. His American experiences left a powerful impression, reflected in his fiction – the short story The Canterville Ghost sees an American family purchase a haunted English country house and the play A Woman of No Importance features the puritanical heiress Hester Worsley – as well as in his non-fiction, for instance his journalism for The Court and Society Review which wittily satirised American customs.

Wilde reportedly found the Eastern States “too much of a reflex of English manners and customs”; “what I like best”, he informed the San Francisco Chronicle, “is the civilization which the people of the West have formed for themselves”. He repeated his praise in Personal Impressions of America: “Perhaps the most beautiful part of America is the West, to reach which, however, involves a journey by rail of six days, racing along tied to an ugly tin-kettle of a steam engine.” This panel will examine Wilde’s preference for and continuing connections to the West Coast, such as Los Angeles’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the largest collection of Wilde-related material in the world.

Wilde’s time in the United States has been the subject of sustained scholarly attention. Michèle Mendelssohn’s Making Oscar Wilde (OUP, 2018) analyzes the journalism of the period and its impact on Wilde’s self-fashioning; David M. Friedman, in Wilde in America (W.W. Norton, 2014), charts the development of Wilde’s persona and the modern idea of celebrity; while John Cooper’s website Oscar Wilde in America is an ever-expanding online resource of historical information on Wilde’s transatlantic peregrinations. As Kate Hext has shown in Wilde in the Dream Factory (OUP, 2024), Wilde also left a lasting impression on Hollywood in adaptations of his work, for example the landmark Salomé (1922) starring Alla Nazimova, as well as in the form of the trademark Wildean wit of classic comedy movies.

After a brief welcome from our presider, Sandra M. Leonard, Assistant Professor of English at Kutztown University and Oscar Wilde Society member, the panel will begin with Dan Williford, a Research and Instruction Librarian at Ringling College of Art and Design, who will present the paper, “Oscar Wilde in California: Aesthetic Lectures and Their Afterlife on the Pacific Coast”. This paper will provide an overview of the Californian venues for Wilde’s lecture tour, making use of Wilde’s texts and contemporary press coverage to examine their reception and impact. Williford will demonstrate that West Coast newspapers alternately treated Wilde as a serious lecturer, a fashionable curiosity, and a target of satire, revealing tensions between aesthetic ideals and the pragmatic culture of the rapidly developing Pacific frontier.

The next speaker, Sandra M. Leonard, will present “Oscar Wilde and ‘American Barbarism’: Ignorance as Vitality in Wilde’s American Women”, exploring Wilde’s response to American culture and civilization. This presentation argues that Wilde’s attitude is emblematic of the Victorian reorientation of the cultural East-West divide of late antiquity, with America representing an untrammelled virility contrasting with the education, culture, and effeminate decadence of Europe and the East.

Our final panellist is James McDougall, Associate Professor of English Studies at Wenzhou-Kean University, who will deliver “The Sting of The Wasp: Gilded Age Grotesqueries of Oscar Wilde’s West Coast Trip and Anxieties over American Civilization”. Building on the overview of newspaper coverage provided by Williford and with reference to the cultural debates foregrounded by Leonard, McDougall will discuss how Wilde and his ideas were ridiculed by the San Francisco illustrated weekly, The Wasp. This paper argues that The Wasp’s brutal assaults on Wilde reflect its political vision of the West Coast as a contested frontier space that could be managed only by violent masculine authority.

All panellists will limit their paper to 10-12 minutes to allow time for a respondent. Our respondent, John Cooper, researcher, author and documentary historian, will offer his expertise on Wilde’s time in the United States to comment upon and synthesize the three papers, bringing out their cross-currents to encourage inter-panel discussion and audience Q&A.

Our speakers and respondent work in different fields (librarianship, independent research, traditional academia) and operate both within and outside the US. This is the third panel organized by the London-based Oscar Wilde Society (representing approx. 400 diverse members worldwide).