‘A Medium More Important than Bodily Sense’: Wilde, the Antipodes, and the Techno-Imagination

Abstract

A decade ago, in his chapter for The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Ken Stewart voiced what has long been the conventional understanding of Wilde and his relationship with Britain’s Australian colonies. ‘The image of aristocratic dandyism [Wilde] affected’, Stewart asserted,

was the reverse of typically Australian. In witty conversation and in his plays and other writings, he employed with pitiless brio the convention of Australia as a joke place, a vast and distant outpost overrun by convicts, sheep and wealthy philistines who were to be spurned, unless one was in debt.[i]

Indeed, some thirty years before Stewart, in his now still-standard biography of Wilde, the most significant statement Richard Ellmann makes about Australia is that Wilde turned the country into ‘the butt of his regional jokes’.[ii] Even twenty years before Ellmann, in 1970, Coral Lansbury declared that Wilde ‘could never regard Australia as a subject for anyone’s serious attention’.[iii] In this article, I seek to go beyond this somewhat unproductive understanding of Wilde’s relationship with Australia. Instead, I argue, over the course of the 1880s and ’90s, Wilde and Australia came (albeit, at times, begrudgingly) to identify with one another. In making this argument, I work to view the relationship through the prisms of both fin-de-siècle technology and celebrity culture, on the one hand, and ‘Antipodean’ discourses on the other.

[i] Ken Stewart, ‘Britain’s Australia’, in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. by Peter Pierce (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 7-33 (p. 31).

[ii] Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 207.

[iii] Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-century English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), p. 30.