I had no clue Oscar Wilde was anti semetic! I read up on it a bit and I assume you have evidence from the Picture Of Dorian Gray, which I hadn’t read. I saw someone saying that the character in it is a parody and at most Wilde was insensitive since some of his closest friends and supporters were a jewish couple, but I’d really like to hear your input on that matter
Some quotes:
From
The Picture of Dorian Gray:
- A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt…
- For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jeweled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Grey loathed him more than ever.
- This is a recurring character who is shown to bow and scrape before anyone who he thinks might be able to give him some advantage, and who tries to emulate English nobility but gets it wrong because he is ‘the wrong sort.’
- Harry, the Jewish theatre owner, is also shown to be taking financial advantage of a young actress’s debts to keep her ‘bound to him.’ Harry’s insistence that he wants to ‘introduce’ her to Dorian is a clear implication that this theatre owner is also a pimp.
- It is a ‘Jewish doctor’ who is responsible for infusing the blood of others into a man to make him totally evil.
Some people have argued that he was parodying George Eliot here, and that since ‘he had a Jewish friend,’ specifically a novelist who he called ‘The Sphinx,’ gosh, he couldn’t be antisemitic (I know, I groaned out loud too), but read on, friends! It only gets worse from here!
It should be noted that Wilde was hardly unique in his anti-Semitism. It’s actually fairly difficult to find literature from this era that DOESN’T make use of rabidly anti-Jewish tropes (in all honesty, this brand of anti-Semitism remained common within Anglo-Irish literature until the outbreak of WWII, take a flying guess why).
I don’t mean this as a defence of Wilde in any way, I just want to point out that this hatred of Jews was positively endemic.
Oh, I know, I absolutely know. I’m just personally really fucking sick of seeing all of these queer/LGBTQ-positive posts holding up Wilde specifically as some sort of like, cinnamon roll of sweet-yet-sour-acerbic-gayness, some sort of Harmless Sassy Granddaddy Gay, and just never acknowledging that – among other things – he was a really terrible antisemite. The same sort of ignore-dem-flaws idolizing of him happens in the communist/socialist communities, which is doubly ironic considering, you know, how many of the same people praising Wilde will breathlessly talk about the book Revolutionary Yiddishland and how important it is, etc. etc.
As an English Education major, especially, this sort of blind celebration of Wilde annoys the absolute piss out of me. Wilde was a horrible, horrible antisemite who went out of his way to include these sorts of themes in literally everything he fucking wrote. Not talking about this, like, ever, unless someone Jewish brings it up, is not only frustrating and hurtful to people who hear ‘oh it’s okay if you’re an antisemite if you’re queer, we’ll give you a pass,’ but it’s really bad scholarship. If we’re gonna talk about what Wilde wrote and why, his antisemitism is a big part of that. Heck, he even blamed his gayness and his suffering for his gayness on ‘THE JEWS,’ you can’t separate anything he wrote from his hate of us.
(None of the above is really aimed at what you said, @tikkunolamorgtfo, so please don’t take this as me ranting at you or yelling at you, just sort of – near you – because I just … have a Big Feeling about the way Wilde is talked about. He was a pretty horrible human being who gets a pass in the gay community and it makes me wanna yell a lot.)
No worries, I totally get it!
