Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde Essay

Oscar Wilde and his trials, both literal and figurative, has been the subject of instead a few films and fetchs ap maneuver from the considerable mass of writing that exist on this subject. This is because Oscar Wilde, as a metaphorical figure has never failed to capture the public imagination as the veritable revolutionary against partnerships delimiting and deterministic conventions and a crippling value system.And yet, Moises Kauffmans latest play Gross indecorum The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde manages to turn the relatively familiar material the trials and indict handst of the legendary Wilde on charges of sodomy and paederasty into a riveting and powerful document against social determinism. The theme of Kauffmans play is the ever-continuing conflict surrounded by art and morality and of course with such a theme, Wilde, the martyr to nineteenth century morality, with his assertion that in that location are no immoral books, only badly written ones is the perfect hero.Dra wing from a big variety of sources that includes trial transcripts, journalistic articles, contemporary autobiographies (including the one by Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) and later biographies, Kauffman in the play winnerfully brings alive the past in a way that Wilde himself would have approved of. The play breaks only generic boundaries and has the elements of a historical drama, a docudrama, a courtroom drama, a social commentary, catastrophe and comedy all rolled into one.The oft-repeated tale of Wildes fall from fame and fortune is by no means old wine in juvenile bottle, primarily because the playwrights in-depth research brings in new life into the tale by documenting new perspectives and exploring newer avenues and thereby problematizing the positions of victim and victimizer, secondarily because Kauffman c erstntrates in masking direct in its birth context and does not overtly attempt to make it contemporary, and finally because by showing Wildes plight in h is confrontation with a world that found him fundamentally subversive to the interests of the corporation the playwright strikes an universal chord.Wildes passionate attempt to live a life on his give birth terms is superbly dramatized in the play. Most riveting are the dramatizations of those moments that change the life of the indite for once and all. Such a fateful moment comes when Wilde denies kissing a young man with a humourous putdown of his realizes instead of a straightforward no. In the first of the three trials and in a climactic moment Wilde is asked by the prosecuting attorney Edward Carson, if he had ever kissed one of the young working class men with whom he was known to keep company.Wilde, with his suave and polished wit replies Oh, dear, no, He was a peculiarly clear boy. Carson leaps victoriously at the implication of such a comment, that Wilde would have kissed the boy if he was a diminished more attractive and the authors fate is sealed. From this moment onwards the play takes on a destructive momentum as Wildes entire life spirals out of control betrayed by his own wit.Never again is he able to gain control of his life. Through the presentation of Wilde, with support from his immense research, Kauffman manages to subtly problematize the positions of victimizer and victim in the play. For as we find in the play, even before he stabs himself with his own clever tongue Wilde frittered away his prodigious talents by surrounding himself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. As he quotes from De Profundis towards the end of the play I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a homophile(a) joy. Still, the intrinsic irony of the fact that it is his suavity, wit and incomparable craft with words that would bring his downfall is excessively highly symbolic as far as the theme of the play is concerned, for the play, among other things, engages with the typical mincing debate over morality and art.Wilde refused to side with the dominant discourse of compartmentalizing his personal erotic longings and keeping it discover from the aesthetic side of his life. And the fact that he raised his personal sense of morality to the level of an art turned out to be the ultimate source of his tragedy in an age which preferred to look at art as a mode moral dispensation for social welfare.Apart from tracing the tragical downfall of this hero with a sincerity and passion that raises Wildes conviction and his untimely death to the level of a crucifixion so that the protagonist becomes a patron saint for all those whose life has been crippled by the narrow moralities of a compulsively prohibitionist society, the play also successfully and subtly presents a multilevel study in public perceptions of class, art and sexuality and this is what makes Kauffmans themes universal.The playwright uses a chorus line of actors, who appear both on stage and in front of it posing as the investig ators in a hearing, almost classical in its simplicity. This modern chorus continuously reads, quotes or acts out from a huge variety of sources fruits of the playwrights research on his subject establishing an ever-shifting mosaic of perspectives. This chorus takes up several(prenominal) convincing and often hilarious figurative perspectives.The multiple roles bring to the table the likes of Queen Victoria (the author of the Gross Indecency Law), and G. B. Shaw to name a few. The chorus quotes from the memoirs of Wilde and his lover, the accounts of Sir Edward Clarke and the editor Frank Harris. A particularly invigorate scene is the one when a later day academic is brought into the play to deconstruct Wildes cognitive process in court with insights that are nonetheless valid for being presented satirically.However the most hilarious of all these is probably the scene where the chorus dons long white underwear to display how Wilde procured his gross indecencies. The greatest su ccess of Kauffmans use of the chorus lies in the fact that by means of it, very subtly exclusively surely, he manages to communicate a rather unsettling idea to the readers of the play that even in our age of singular freedom, we are not very far from the social Puritanism that crippled Wilde during his lifetime.