“Immortal Children of Undying Fame”: Preserving a Personal Legacy in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”

ABSTRACT

Oscar Wilde's short story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is the story of a small group in search of the identity of the person to whom William Shakespeare famously (and enigmatically) dedicated his collection of sonnets, a man known only as Mr. W. H. Scholars have debated for centuries the man's true name, and Oscar Wilde jumped into that conversation in 1889 with the publication of his story. In this paper, I argue that Wilde’s story is not as much about identifying Mr. W. H. as it is about preserving his own authorial legacy for future generations. In pursuing this argument, I offer a close reading of the text filtered through the lens of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” and conclude that Wilde sought to perpetuate his name through the facilitation of academic debate about his collected works.

ORCID

Andrew Spencer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2890-3485

Notes

1 Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 58.

2 Gomel, 75.

3 Ibid., 80.

4 Barthes, 143, italics in original.

5 Ibid., 146.

6 Gomel, 76.

7 Ong, 10–11.

8 Ibid., 11.

9 Loesberg, 14.

10 Ellmann, 31.

11 Qtd. in Beckson, xxxii.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., xxxvi.

15 Gomel, 85.

16 Ellmann, 11.

17 Toomey, 406.

18 Saint-Amour, 62.

19 Ibid.

20 Barthes, 147.

21 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 304.

22 Barthes, 146.

23 Ibid., 142.

24 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 304.

25 Ibid., 308.

26 Ibid., 308–9.

27 Ibid., 312.

28 Ibid., 301.

29 Ibid., 310.

30 Bashford, 418.

31 Barthes, 146.

32 Saint-Amour, 86.

33 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 312.

34 Ibid., 318.

35 Ibid., 324–5.

36 Ibid., 345.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 348.

39 Ibid., 349.

40 This idea echoes that of the myth of the Sphinx, a subject of a famous Wilde poem. According to mythology, once a mortal was able to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, the Sphinx died by one of several different means.

41 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 350.

42 Ablow, 180.

43 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 350.

44 See, for example, George Herbert Palmer’s Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakespeare (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912).

45 Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 316.

46 Qtd. in Ellman, 297.

47 Loesberg, 30.

48 Saint-Amour, 89.

49 Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 58.