THE third Oscar Wilde Autumn School opened last night with a lecture by the playwright, Frank McGuinness. The school, which takes place in Lacy's on the Strand Road in Bray, Co Wicklow continues until next Monday.
John M. Farrell will speak today on "Oscar Wilde and, the Gay Identity" and. Sighle Breathnach-Lynch will give a lecture entitled "Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the Aesthetic Nexus". This evening the poet Derek Mahon will read from his work.
De Profundis, Wilde's long dramatic love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), "tells a great, terrible story", McGuinness said in his lecture last night. De Profundis, Wilde's last work, published posthumously in 1905, was written a few months before his release from Reading Gaol, near the end of his two-year sentence for "acts of gross indecency with other male persons".
"It could be regarded as an argument outlining Wilde's spiritual and sexual evolution, conveying the sincere feelings of the sinner who has converted into a penitent, Mr McGuinness explained. But it was also "terrifying in its accusations and admissions".
Bosie did not write to Wilde during his traumatic time in prison. Wilde ends De Profundis plaintively: "I waited month after month to hear from you. .. There is no prison in the world into which Love cannot force an entrance. If you did not understand that, you did not understand anything about Love at all."
The voices in De Profundis "range from the most self-pitying to the most self-loathing tones. It is a histrionic defiance against the histrionic judgment passed against Wilde at his trial, a theatrical explosion to break the silence of censorship, that his prison sentence demanded" McGuinness concluded.
Tomorrow, the school honours Speranza, Wilde's mother and also a well-known poet, with a day devoted to the theme, "The Recovery of Feminist Biography". Margaret Ward will lecture on Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Sinead McCoole will speak about Hazel Lavery.
On Saturday, Bruce Arnold will talk about "Sir William Wilde and the Mask of Swift". Dr Muriel McCarthy, Keeper of Marsh's Library, will give a lecture on the Wilde/Travers libel case.
On Sunday Dr Barbara Wright, Professor of French at TCD, will look at Wilde and French literature, and on Monday Dr Declan Kiberd of UCD will examine Wilde and Synge. For more details, phone 01-286-5245.