Who Killed Oscar Wilde?

What did Oscar Wilde die of? 

Arthur Ransome, one of Wilde’s first creditable biographers, reported that Wilde died of syphilis. Richard Ellmann, Wilde’s foremost biographer, reports “Wilde’s final illness was almost certainly syphilitic in origin” (579). Vyvyan and Merlin Holland, Wilde’s son and grandson, respectively, both believed that the syphilis theory was poppycock. 

The syphilis story is that, at 20, Wilde slept with a prostitute (a female, the critics all hastily add) and contracted syphilis; twenty years later, it would kill him. Voila? Voila. 

Why is the syphilis story so popular? I would argue that it is popular because it puts the blame squarely on Wilde. He lived as he died, a whore until the end. Stay celibate and then monogamous, children, or you’ll end up like Wilde did. 

As a sexual disease, syphilis—perhaps wrongly so, I shan’t get into that here—implies dirtiness, uncouth living, perversion. And Wilde was, for Victorian standards, perverse. It was why he had gone to prison, after all; he had been found guilty of gross indecency. While not sentenced for being an active homosexual, he was convicted for acting like it. 

The syphilis theory has continued until recently, and although I can’t give a conclusive answer to what Wilde did die of, I am absolutely certain that it was not syphilis. I am fond of the cholesteatoma theory, or, that Wilde died because of complications in his ear, possibly a tumor. In other words, a giant ear infection brought down the Irish playwright.

Ear infections are not as sexy—literally—as the idea that Wilde died because of his sexual exploits. And that is why I believe the syphilis theory has had credibility for so long. It is easier to say that Oscar Wilde died because he slept with prostitutes, male and female. The blame for Wilde’s death lands squarely on Wilde if we believe he died of syphilis. 

If Wilde died of an ear infection, the blame rests on us. 

Now, Rebekah, I can hear you say, we’re 21^st century Americans. Oscar died a hundred and sixteen years ago of an ear infection, which is clearly no one’s fault. What on earth are you talking about? 

When Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895 he was sent to three different prisons. Prisons in Victorian England were very different than present-day American prisons, or, I would hope, modern-day British prisons. In Pentonville and Wandsworth, the first two of three prisons Wilde would live in for three years, Wilde suffered to the point that he lost a great deal of weight. He suffered constantly from diarrhea. He could keep none of the food down, and could not work. 

In prisons in those days, you see, you were forced to work. Wilde would run on a treadmill for hours, he would ruin his hands making tarry rope. He was unable to speak to his fellow prisoners. 

Crumlin Gaol, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2012. Behind me is the prison itself, which designer Sir Charles Landyon partially based on Pentonville, where Wilde resided for a few months. Not pictured are the unmarked graves behind my photographer, where at least five bodies still rest.

It was at Reading that Wilde slowly began to recover. His cell no longer stank like a fetid latrine; he regained some of his usual bodily functions. He still had to work, but he was allowed paper and pencils. He was given books to read. In De Profundis he professes his joy at being given stale white bread over the hard black bread given to prisoners; he knew that it is nothing to be thankful for, stale white bread, but he was grateful all the same.

Even though his treatment at Reading was marginally better, Wilde still suffered. His hearing in his right ear, which had never been good, grew progressively worse. At one point, he fainted during chapel and fell heavily on his right ear. This led to a perforated eardrum, which was a constant source of pain for Wilde. The writer implored the Home Secretary and the prison medical officer for assistance, but they did nothing to assist Wilde’s suffering. 

Wilde was released from prison in 1897. In 1900 he would die.

Of course, Wilde had suffered from hearing problems all throughout his adult life. However, I have no doubt that the lack of medical access Wilde had in prison exacerbated his hearing problems, leading directly to his death. Perhaps if Wilde had not been imprisoned, or had prisons better medical care, the author might have lived into the 20^th century. 

This is all speculation, obviously. I can’t prove any of this. But I do have to sit and think about how ludicrous it was to send a man to prison for being gay and acting on it. I don’t care that it was considered normal, or that it was different back then: It was ludicrous. It’s even more ridiculous that, had Wilde been tried earlier in the century, he could have been put to death. 

But in all honesty? He was sentenced to death. It was not a death on “a day of dark disgrace with a noose about his neck nor a cloth upon his face,” as Wilde puts it in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, but it was a death sentence still. 

When Wilde was released from prison he petitioned a group of Jesuits to allow him on a six-month retreat. He was apparently in great spirits after being released, speaking of Reading, Ellmann reports, “as if it had been a resort” (527). Wilde kept up the banter until the Jesuits sent back a messenger to Wilde, informing him that it was impossible; should Wilde wish to come on a retreat, they would need a year to decide. 

Ada Leverson, who was one of the few who came to see Wilde when he was released and was present for this rejection, wrote that Wilde “broke down and sobbed bitterly” (as qtd. in Ellmann 528). 

I both love and hate this story for several reasons. I love it, because I am so proud of Wilde and how hard he tried, at first, to assimilate back into who he used to be, to assimilate to the world around him. I hate this story, because I am Catholic, and because the Jesuits had forgotten a work of corporeal mercy: to visit the prisoners. Wilde may no longer have been a prisoner, but he was newly released from prison, and the least the Jesuits could have done was accept Wilde and help him as he regained his shaky footing. Would the Jesuits have not hidden Saul when he escaped from prison? 

In the end, Wilde died with a man who loved him by his side, and a few doctors who cared nothing for him. Wilde was broke, impoverished, and an exile twice over: he died not in Ireland, where he had been born, or in England, where he had made a name for himself. 

I have been thinking a lot about Oscar Wilde in the wake of the Orlando Massacre. I see reports of the murderer’s homophobia, and how the homophobia of the American culture led to this attack. And I am reminded that even though one man picked up a gun and killed 49 people, we as a culture are to blame for creating a system where homophobia is encouraged, thus tacitly allowing this man to walk into a nightclub with a gun and open fire.  

I am frustrated that even though there is now no law that states men who act on same-sex desire must go to prison, men and women and all of the other genders are still at risk of being killed for being who they are. I am angered that my church has not learned the greatest maxim Jesus taught us, which is to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. So often from the pulpit I hear a message of hate when my God preached love for the poor, for the sick, for women, for prostitutes, for murderers, for tax collectors, for Roman centurions, for children, for the helpless. 

It was a heteronormative, Christian society that sent Oscar Wilde to prison and, ultimately, to his death. And it is a heteronormative, Christian society that has allowed this massacre to happen. 

It is easier to believe that Oscar Wilde’s dalliances led him to his own ruin. But it is more accurate to remember that society condemned Oscar Wilde who, following the message of the gospel, forgave them in his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. 

Forgiveness is nice, but it has been a hundred and sixteen years since Wilde died, and only a few weeks since the Orlando Massacre. And it is painfully obvious to me that we allies and Christians, who profess the most but do the least when it comes to helping the marginalized, need to stop praying and start changing what we say at the pulpits, and what is read in our law books, and how society views people who don’t fit into that nice, neat box somebody fashioned for us a long, long time ago. 

I know not whether Laws be right,

Or whether Laws be wrong;

All that we know who lie in gaol

Is that the wall is strong;

And that each day is like a year,

A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law

That men have made for Man,

Since first Man took his brother’s life,

And the sad world began,

But straws the wheat and saves the chaff

With a most evil fan.

This too I know—and wise it were

If each could know the same—

That every prison that men build

Is built with bricks of shame,

And bound with bars lest Christ should see

How men their brothers maim.

 --The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

All quotes are from Richard Ellmann’s work Oscar Wilde (1988), and Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), as first published by Leonard Smithers.