“A Nation of Lunatics“
OSCAR WILDE ABOUT AMERICA featuring Derrick Jenkins
People are often surprised to learn that early in his career Oscar Wilde, the poet, playwright, and wit famous for his flamboyant, dramatic, and ultimately tragic life in London and Paris, made an extensive visit to America.
Aged 27 in 1882, Wilde undertook a nearly 12 month lecture tour of the USA, traveling 15,000 miles, in which he visited over 150 cities and gave a total of 141 lectures. The wit, brilliance and deliberate outrageousness of the self-proclaimed “Apostle of Aestheticism” caused controversy among audiences across the continent.
While at Customs on Ellis Island, Oscar Wilde is reputed to have made one of his most oft-repeated quotations: “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”
The America visited by Wilde was a nation still badly shaken by the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this atmosphere Wilde’s message of regeneration through art and beauty seemed to many Americans to open new horizons of social possibility.
In 1882 New York was a gas-lit city of a million people living through a time of growth, gentrification and residential displacement as the city’s wealthy moved uptown.
The Statue of Liberty was not yet in the harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge was still being constructed; the tallest building was Trinity Church.
When Oscar Wilde arrived in New York, the young nation’s biggest celebrity was the legendary Cowboy Showman Buffalo Bill. Wilde had a knack for self-promotion and excelled at self-adoration thus often erasing the line between fame and notoriety. By the time the aesthete returned to Britain, he had by far drawn more news coverage than anyone else and launched the superficial celebrity culture that permeates American popular culture to this day.
Wilde was the first celebrity who became famous merely for being famous.
Oscar Wilde is the most quotable of author of all time. In books of quotations Wilde entries are exceeded only by those of Shakespeare and the Bible.
His views on America have become legendary – “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
PERFORMANCE – Monday, August 4 at 20:00 hrs in MERLIN
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THE DARK MONDAY @ MERLIN series is presented in cooperation with: DAZ – Deutsch-Amerikanisches Zentrum, Staatministerin für Kultur und Medien, Kulturverein Merlin e.V.
New English American Theater Stuttgart 