Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle

By
Miranda Seymour



The jacket of this entrancing biography conflates two photographs to present one perfect whole: the ideal husband and his perfect family. Pretty, large-eyed Constance, dressed in the soft aesthetic style she helped to make fashionable, is embraced by the older of the couple's two small sons. Oscar, sporting a new short haircut and sober buttoned-up jacket, looks gravely at the camera. He holds aloft an unlit cigarette. Visiting the Wildes' smart Chelsea home on Christmas day, 1888 (the year before these photographs were taken), WB Yeats noted a life of perfect harmony that suggested, nevertheless, "some deliberate artistic composition". Yeats's observation was both shrewd and misleading.

In 1888, Constance Lloyd had known Oscar Wilde for nine years; she had been married to him for four. Her love for her brilliant husband ("As long as I live you shall be my lover," she wrote in answer to his proposal in 1883) was fully returned. "I feel incomplete without you," Oscar told her shortly after their marriage. A proud new father, he couldn't stop urging male friends to get married.

On one level, Franny Moyle shows Wilde as a fond husband, Whistler's bourgeois malgré lui. Oscar shared his wife's decorative tastes: their creation at 16 Tite Street of a modishly sparse "House Beautiful" was a work of joint endeavour. Oscar supported Constance's enthusiasm for women's rights, for "rational" dress, and for a literary career of her own. Devoted parents, the Wildes began publishing stories for children at around the same time. Among Moyle's discoveries is a slight variant, in Constance's hand, of her husband's tale, "The Selfish Giant": evidently, the Wildes' collaboration was close. Harsh new rulings on homosexuality were introduced to England in 1885. At about this time, with their sexual connection on the wane after the difficult birth of their second son, Vyvyan, the Wildes welcomed young Robbie Ross into their home. Robbie, a loyal friend to both throughout the rest of their lives, became Oscar's lover. The situation was not uncommon in the "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" world inhabited by the Wildes. Oscar dropped hints to various young men that his sexual preferences had changed; Constance, with seeming innocence, welcomed them all as family friends. No boat was rocked.

Warning had been given. By the summer of 1892, Bosie Douglas had usurped Constance's place. But following Wilde's break with his expensive, tempestuous and untalented young lover (Bosie's translation from the French of Wilde's Salome was so poor that it had to be rewritten by the embarrassed author), it was Constance who succumbed to Lord Alfred's pleas.

In February 1894, she invited him to return.Constance's own restlessness and wish for independence contributed to the making of the disaster named Alfred Douglas. Spoilt, selfish and vastly in love with what he believed was his own genius, Bosie (the name derived from Lady Queensberry's pet-name of "Boysie" for her third son) entered the Wildes' life in 1891. Constance, immersed in spiritualism (she did herself no favours in that murky world by reporting to Oscar on the secret rituals involved in joining the ludicrous Order of the Golden Dawn), was often absent from home. Oscar, while addressing his wife as "the great lamp" of a cathedral shrine, made ominous reference – in that same moving dedication of his second collection of children's stories – to "individual side chapels" dedicated to "other saints".

All too well known is the inglorious part played by Bosie in Wilde's vertiginous downfall, in 1895, at the height of his fame. It was Bosie who urged Wilde to prosecute Lord Queensberry for the infamous "posing Somdomite" card left, without an envelope, at Wilde's club. It was Bosie's careless gifts of suits, their pockets still filled with incriminating letters, that linked Wilde to the world of rent-boys into which his young lover had led him. It was Bosie who hurt Constance's reputation most, by declaring her responsible for the failure of Wilde's marriage. Moyle is at her best in describing the tragic final years. Constance, often presented as a hard and unforgiving woman, is more convincingly portrayed here as a valiant wife. She visited Wilde in prison. She paid his expenses when he left it. She planned, as he did, for a reunion. When Bosie ("that dreadful person") resurfaced with more appetising invitations, Constance accused Wilde only of being "weak as water". She was among the first to praise "The Ballad of Reading Gaol".

Constance died in exile, aged 39. Wilde (he died two years later, in 1900) laid flowers on her grave in Genoa. Douglas, briefly imprisoned himself for libelling Winston Churchill, continued to diminish her. (Outliving them all, he died of heart failure in Lancing, in 1945.) Moyle's account, the first to draw on more than 300 of Constance's unpublished letters, is delightful, sad, and entirely convincing; her last chapters reduced this hardened reader to tears.

Source:  This article originally appeared in 2011 The Guardian.

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