Wilde×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen, on On their public reputation versus what they actually thought.
2. 00:09
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Miss Austen, I must tell you that I have always considered you the most dangerous woman in English letters. Which is, of course, the highest compliment I can pay.
3. 00:16
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Dangerous, Mr. Wilde? I wrote about entails and curates. You wrote about poisoning one's portrait. I think we must adjust our terms.
4. 00:24
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but poison is obvious. Everyone sees the arsenic coming. You, however, convinced the entire British reading public that you approved of them. That takes genius of a particularly sinister variety.
5. 00:36
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I convinced them of no such thing. They convinced themselves, which is rather different. A person determined to find endorsement in a text will find it, no matter how plainly one has arranged the satire.
6. 00:48
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Yes! Exactly my predicament. I spent my entire career explaining that I was not endorsing half the things I said, merely saying them beautifully. The public insisted on taking me literally when I was being figurative and figuratively when I was being literal. It was exhausting.
7. 01:02
   Jane Austenshare moment

   You also insisted on being outrageous, which does complicate the hermeneutics. I merely described what I saw.
8. 01:09
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   But they think you loved what you saw. That's the really delicious irony. You eviscerated the country gentry with a butter knife, so cleanly they didn't notice they were bleeding, and they've spent two centuries calling you cozy.
9. 01:20
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Cozy. Yes. That is the word they use, isn't it? As if I spent my time knitting tea cosies rather than observing that most people marry for money and then pretend they've done something else entirely.
10. 01:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They've made you into the patron saint of matrimony. I've seen the film adaptations. All that heaving bosom and true love conquering all. It's perverse.
11. 01:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote about women who had to marry because they had no other means of survival. That is not a romance. That is an economic treatise with dialogue.
12. 01:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet they've turned you into an argument for traditional values. You must find that particularly galling.
13. 01:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I find it illuminating. People read what they need to read. My books are quite clear, I think, about what marriage was—a marketplace where women were sold to the highest bidder who would have them. But admitting that would require admitting that one's great-grandmother was purchased, so instead we have true love.
14. 02:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The past is always prettified. Makes the present seem less ghastly by comparison. Though in my case, they've somehow decided I was a prophet of... what do they call it now... radical self-expression?
15. 02:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Were you not?
16. 02:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I was a prophet of beautiful things said beautifully. Half the time I didn't even believe them. I believed in their aesthetic value. There's a difference.
17. 02:32
    Jane Austenshare moment

    So when you said you could resist everything except temptation, you were not actually recommending surrender to temptation.
18. 02:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I was making an observation about human nature and doing it in a memorable fashion. The memorability was the point, not the moral instruction.
19. 02:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Mr. Wilde, you cannot spend your career being memorable about wickedness and then complain when people think you endorse wickedness. That is not how language works.
20. 02:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But I was being ironic!
21. 02:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Irony that half your audience doesn't recognize is simply failed communication. You know this.
22. 03:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's rather harsh coming from a woman whose most famous heroine is widely believed to be a model of perfect propriety when she's actually rude to nearly everyone she meets.
23. 03:13
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Elizabeth Bennet is not rude. She is honest. If people cannot distinguish between the two, that is their deficiency, not mine.
24. 03:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    She tells Darcy he's the last man in the world she could be prevailed upon to marry. That's not honesty, that's artillery.
25. 03:27
    Jane Austenshare moment

    He had just insulted her family, her connections, and her prospects while proposing marriage. What did you expect her to say? 'Thank you for your reluctant condescension, sir, I am overwhelmed'?
26. 03:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well, that's what any sensible woman of her era would have said. She had no money, no prospects, and she rejected ten thousand a year. The woman was completely mad.
27. 03:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Or completely sane. Rich men are not actually rare, Mr. Wilde. Rich men who are tolerable are.
28. 03:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Spoken like someone who never had to worry where the next meal was coming from.
29. 03:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I beg your pardon?
30. 03:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, come now. You lived your entire life in genteel poverty, dependent on your brothers, publishing anonymously because a woman author was scandalous. And yet your heroines blithely refuse fortunes right and left. It's wish fulfillment.
31. 04:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is not wish fulfillment to imagine that a woman might have standards. Even a poor woman. Especially a poor woman, in fact, because she's the one who must live most intimately with her choice.
32. 04:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you never married.
33. 04:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I accepted a proposal once. The next morning I withdrew my acceptance. I think that demonstrates precisely my point—that marriage to the wrong person is worse than no marriage at all.
34. 04:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But you let your heroines have both. Principle and prosperity. You give them Darcy and his ten thousand.
35. 04:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    After she refuses him, yes. The money only comes after she's proven she doesn't need it to be happy. That is not nothing, Mr. Wilde.
36. 04:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's fiction.
37. 04:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    All literature is fiction. Including your epigrams about temptation and wickedness. You cannot claim exemption from your own critique.
38. 04:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Touché. Though I maintain there's a difference between writing plays about fictional people doing wicked things and writing novels about fictional people doing virtuous things. The public knows my characters are scoundrels. They think yours are saints.
39. 05:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My characters are neither scoundrels nor saints. They are people attempting to navigate a world that gives them very little room for error. Emma Woodhouse is spoiled and meddlesome. Fanny Price is priggish. Anne Elliot is overly persuadable. I am quite clear about their faults.
40. 05:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet the readers love them anyway. See them as aspirational. That's the problem with virtue, even flawed virtue—people want to emulate it. Whereas no one actually wants to be Lord Henry Wotton. They simply enjoy listening to him.
41. 05:44
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Are you certain of that? I think a great many people would very much like to be Lord Henry. They simply lack the wit to carry it off, so they pretend they're shocked instead.
42. 05:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You may be right. Which brings us back to the original problem: the public's determination to misunderstand us both, merely in opposite directions.
43. 06:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    They think I'm wholesome and you're wicked. Whereas in truth we were both doing the same thing—observing our societies with a clear eye and reporting what we saw.
44. 06:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The difference being that you trusted your readers to see through the characters' delusions while I didn't trust mine to see through my own performances. Perhaps you had the better opinion of humanity.
45. 06:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Or the less accurate one. They have, after all, spent two hundred years proving you right. Half of them think I'm endorsing the very institutions I'm satirizing.
46. 06:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then we're both failures at communication.
47. 06:34
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Or successes at it, and the failure lies elsewhere. A reader who opens a book determined to find his own reflection will find it, regardless of what the author has written. We cannot control that.
48. 06:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very philosophical of you. And how perfectly useless. We're still misread, misquoted, and turned into advertisements for values we didn't hold.
49. 06:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. But we're also still read, which is more than can be said for most of our contemporaries who took care never to be misunderstood. Clarity is not always the highest literary virtue.
50. 07:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Are you suggesting that being misinterpreted is a mark of success?
51. 07:10
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I'm suggesting that a text which can only be read one way is not a text that will survive into ages with different preoccupations. Ambiguity has its uses.
52. 07:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Even when that ambiguity gets you labeled cozy?
53. 07:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Even then. The label is temporary. The books remain. Eventually someone reads them properly and writes a corrective essay, and the cycle begins again. It's quite sustainable, really.
54. 07:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You're far more patient about posterity than I am. I wanted to be understood immediately and completely. I wanted the audience to laugh at precisely the right moments for precisely the right reasons.
55. 07:45
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is because you wrote for the stage, where the audience is captive and the meaning must be immediate. I wrote for readers alone in their rooms, who could take their time. Different forms, different expectations.
56. 07:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet we've both ended up in the same position: beloved for the wrong reasons.
57. 08:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Better than being ignored for the right ones, I think. Though I admit that is a low bar.
58. 08:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The lowest. And yet here we are, two centuries and one century on respectively, still explaining ourselves. It's rather undignified.
59. 08:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Only if you expected dignity was owed to you. I expected nothing of the kind, which is why I published anonymously. Let the books stand and the author vanish—that was always the sensible approach.
60. 08:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I could never have done that. I wanted the applause. I wanted the recognition. I wanted everyone to know that Oscar Wilde had said that thing they were quoting.
61. 08:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And now everyone does know. They simply don't know what you meant by it. One must choose, I suppose, between fame and understanding. It seems you cannot have both.
62. 08:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How depressing.
63. 08:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How realistic.
64. 08:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You know, Miss Austen, you really are the most dangerous woman in English letters. Dangerous because you're right, and you're right in a way that makes it impossible to argue with you, and there's nothing more infuriating than that.
65. 08:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I shall take that as a compliment, Mr. Wilde.
66. 09:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It was meant as one. Though I'm not sure I've forgiven you for the bit about failed communication.
67. 09:04
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I said irony that goes unrecognized is failed communication. Your irony was recognized. It was simply embraced by people who enjoyed the wickedness too much to care about the critique. That's not failure, that's human nature.
68. 09:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then we're back where we started: misread, but at least memorable.
69. 09:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Exactly so. And truly, Mr. Wilde, in literature as in life, being memorable is rather the whole point.