Wilde and France

Abstract A glance at the Index of Authors in Thomas Wright’s Oscar’s Books: A Journey around the Library of Oscar Wilde (2008) shows the extent to which Wilde read and appreciated French literature. His interest in and debt to writers such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Gautier, Maeterlinck, Rachilde, and Stendhal is well known. The nineteenth-century theory of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) also exerted a specific influence on Wilde’s own aestheticism, fusing with other influences. The first section of this chapter analyses some of these specific French influences and shows how Wilde adapted not only theories but also plot, character, and language in his own writings, culminating in his decision to write Salomé (1893) in French as a way of expanding his own artistic practice. The second section of the chapter offers a reading of the affinities between Wilde and several French critics from the fin de siècle, with a specific focus on the essays collected in Intentions (1891). It proposes that Wilde’s conception of criticism as a form of interpersonal dialogue both responds to and anticipates similar developments in France, as expounded by critics including Anatole France and Jules Lemaître. In this respect Wilde was not simply influenced by the movements of decadence and Symbolism; he can also be aligned with the fin-de-siècle French interest in dilettantism, in its definition by Paul Bourget as a form of critical scepticism. The chapter concludes that Wilde’s relationship with France was not simply one of mutual enrichment; it also contributed to Wilde’s status as a cosmopolitan writer on the world stage.