Sort of. A really warm welcome to the area on this not very promising evening,
and it's wonderful to see you and a real honour for us to welcome Michel and celebrate
with her the event of and the publication and the fabulousness of making Oscar Wilde.
So my name is Tess, everyone, and I'm the acting academic director here at the moment and I teach American literature.
I'm based here and at the English faculty and and I'll just give you a brief overview of how the Eden's going to work.
We're going to hear quickly from the author herself,
who's going to tell us the most important things about the book and then give us the tree of hair and little bit of it read.
And we're then going to turn to our panel who I will introduce to you in a minute.
And there they each have some prepared responses. And then if Michelle wants to respond herself, she will.
And if not, it's time for discussion and questions, etc. And the Q&A won't be recorded.
So I don't know what that means in terms of the kind of comments you'll be making. But anyway,
let's go for it and we will finish this sort of punctual 6:30 to go outside and
drink as much wine as we possibly can before seven o'clock when we get thrown out.
And so please do stay. And that because this is very much a celebration for us.
So in introducing Michelle, I should say that. And what is not so long ago that Michelle was deputy director here herself?
And then am I right that that was very much at the same time as this book was all coming to fruition and completion?
And Michelle was an associate professor in English faculty and at Mansfield College next door.
And it's been my privilege to be her colleague for a long time, so I'm extra excited,
not just having had the opportunity to read this book and share this event, but also having know Michelle for a while now.
You know, I can speak to like the winter boot camp phase. And in fact, before that, the were blank from her memory.
But the way that a research presentation at talks racing resistance about the very first and illustrating the very first
cartoon that you found and the winter boot camp say it is kind of ingrained itself in my memory later on the manicure phase,
which I guess was footnotes here, saying I'm giving a squad a manicure fitting that was just the finishing touch.
So it's just really exciting to see these things can be done that come to fruition.
And Michelle's also published on Henry James and Oscar Wilde on Alan Hollingsworth
and on and the fantastic edited collection on late Victorian into modern.
And obviously, it's not my place to talk about this book,
but the screen here speaks for itself a fabulous number of accolades and finally semi-finalist one of the best books of 2018,
etc. can come and sit as near the front if you like, as you like and welcome.
So we thought that to fit this fabulous, but we needed a panel to match, so I'm going to introduce them in order of speakers.
So and our first two are going to be two of our wonderful graduate students.
So Sage Goodwin and William and, well, Nicole.
So Sage is doing a default here in history at University College,
and her research focuses on TV coverage of the civil rights movement and and when she's not doing that very easy task,
she's running on Integrated Resistance Research programme based it talks, which is kind of a full time job in itself, isn't it?
So it's been a real pleasure to get to know her this year.
And the fabulous graduate student is William and, well, Michael, who's visiting just this year from France.
And he's done lots of work in 19th century American history and his current research,
and focuses on the obliteration of African-American cultural sites in New Orleans in the first half of the 20th century.
Next, someone's brave. You come all the way from Brighton, from University of Sussex, which we all know is not a fun journey.
And 25 on a Friday did you take the train ride on the roof?
And a very brave person has come all the way here from the University of Sussex?
Dr Natalia Theory. Have I pronounce that right? I should have checked three.
And she said she is lecturer in English and American at the University of Sussex,
and she works particularly in American literature since 1880 and the theory of mind in Colleges and and she's currently
completing a book that's called Experimental Experimental American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge,
which is contracted to Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanks so much for travelling all the way here to be here.
And and finally, Dr. Elizabeth Kirsch, who became the warden of Rhodes House on next-door neighbour in 2018.
And before that, she served for 12 years as president of Agnes Scott College in Georgia,
which I've had the pleasure of visiting for a conference and can't wait to talk more about that.
From 1997 to 2006, she was the founding director of Duke University's Institute for Ethics.
And she has a fell in philosophy from Oxford and where she herself was a Rhodes scholar
and academic focus and publications in the field of moral and political philosophy,
human rights, ethics, ethical. The ethics of human rights.
Ethnic. Conflict and nationalism.
Feminist theory and transitional justice, and it's a real honour that you've joined us on our panel, so thank you very much for being here.
Without further ado, I'll hand over to Michel. Hugh, thank you very much for coming out, and thank you very much for that warm introduction, Tessa.
It's amazing to me to be amongst colleagues who remember me talking about footnotes as if they were giving Oscar Wilde a manicure pedicure.
But it's even more amazing to see how and the other people who make this place what it is
and keep it running day to day still contributing to to making it going to say great.
No, that's so tainted, making it the wonderful place that it is.
And also, thank you to these wonderful panellists, almost all of whom I only know through Twitter.
And it's wonderful to see that kind of pseudo reality of Twitter come to life here.
So I'm really looking forward to hearing their thoughts about about the book.
So I thought I would just read you a page or two just to give you a sense of what it is I was trying to do in this book.
So just read for the next time.
I'll just read from the very beginning, the very beginning of the first chapter is called What's the matter with Oscar Wilde?
And this is how it starts. This book tells the story of a local Irish eccentric called Oscar, who became an international celebrity called Wild Today.
He is one of English literature most famous authors known around the world as S. Oscar.
He is the beloved patron saint of all things witty, decadent and over-the-top, and with every passing year, his stature seems to grow.
But his spectacular career and tragic life didn't just happen.
They were made possible by a series of unusual events and unique circumstances that determined his fate and his afterlife.
Wild was not born, a dramatic genius. Yet he eventually became one through a curious process that began when he visited the United States in 1882.
It was the age of Barnum, an era that rewarded the big, the bold and the blustering.
Some might say we're still in that era.
It was here that Wild's remarkable rise was set in motion and like a fairy tale in which a young nobody becomes a somebody.
The transformative events of 1882 would divide his life sharply into before and after.
How this happened has long been hidden from history. But new evidence now makes it possible to reveal how Oscar became wild for over a century.
S. Oscar's life secret life lay buried and unexamined artefacts hidden from sight and scattered in sprawling repositories located all over the world.
Without today's resources, it would have been almost impossible to excavate this forgotten history and bring it to light.
The book you are now holding in your hands or holding in your minds the book you are now holding in your hands could not have been written before.
Now, technology's great leap forward has propelled scholarly research into the digital future.
The golden age of the archive has arrived, so I'll leave that there and pass the microphone to thanks.
Thank you, Michel. Um, I'll just dive in straight away.
So reading Michelle's book gave me cause to think about many different themes that relate both to my own work and also to today's cultural moment.
One that I found quite surprising, for example,
was called popular cultural depictions of race I wasn't expecting when reading a book about Oscar Wilde.
To be able to learn about the history of blackface minstrelsy, for example, another was the tension between a society hurtling towards majority,
while at the same time straining to preserve the status quo, something that I think is resonant for today.
But the element that I found most interesting was the fact that while Oscar Wilde is the star of the show,
a key member of the supporting cast is the press. His journey is a constant dance between his attempts to manage his image in Michelle's book.
He comes alive when he flings off his coat and arranges himself on a bearskin rug bedecked sofa for interview and a volatile press.
He will ridicule him as soon as revere him, as long as it makes for a good story.
So it's fascinating to see that fake news is far from a modern phenomenon.
My own doctoral research considers the relationship between the civil rights movement and the press.
You may be surprised to hear that I see parallels between the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Wilde,
both of Masters at crafting a public persona that relied on what Michel has beautifully phrased sartorial symbolism.
The importance of clothing as a visual signifier essential to my work and threads seised upon through making us go out.
She describes how Oscar quite stepped onto the podium on St. Patrick's Day in St. Paul.
His exquisite clothes announced him as a master, not a slave,
and quite his carefully chosen attire visually distanced him from the raggedy peasants costume that
countless works of theatre and fiction had conditioned audiences to think of as Irish in the same way,
but very intentionally wearing well tailored suits and shiny shoes.
Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights movement deployed to respectability politics that distance them from
the negative stereotypes of uncivilised black Americans that had dominated popular culture through their clothing.
They made claims for therefore inclusion in American society, much as Oscar Wilde did.
But for also, clothing didn't just show what he wasn't. It was key to showing what he was, and cultivating his personal brand was paramount.
The importance of personal branding is something that has clear parallels with today.
The most influential people of our time Barack Obama, Donald Trump,
even Kim Kardashian amasses of controlling their public image, especially in the face of negative press and image.
Instances style trumps substance. Imagine if Oscar Wilde had access to Instagram, we'd probably be seeing a lot more of those knee length breaches.
So Instagram brings me to one of the elements of this book that resonated most deeply with me without being behind the dazzling final product.
There are many failed attempts and imperfect iterations, which we rarely see.
Michelle's book is incredibly valuable in showing us the long road Oscar Wilde took to the genius creations we know him
for and his efforts to keep those various hidden rewriting his own history as it was happening behind every Dorian Grey.
There's a first lecture that was so bad. Audience members walked out. What do you think he was going out?
Rarely do we appreciate the failures that necessarily come for success.
And I think for everyone, especially for those like me who are just starting out on our academic journeys,
that's an important lesson to hold on to you. Thank you.
They'll pass everything to him. Thank you.
That's horrible, I hated the book. You know,
what I found most fascinating about Michelle's book is that it is not just a biography
of wild or having a simple account of his adventures throughout the United States.
It is a brilliantly crafted history of 19th century United States, and most particularly as a scholar of the South myself, I found captivating.
Michelle's description of southern racial tensions, as they relate to, is that this is an memorialisation colour,
skin tone and narrative national narrative, as my previous research focussed on colorism and beauty ideals in the antebellum south.
I couldn't help but avidly read the passage on Wilde, the Irish as that coming to the South with the notion of whiteness was becoming
more rigid and more and more entrenched in the post-war reconstruction era.
You see, White being Irish was not totally considered white by white southerners.
Rather, he was ethnic white and to become white,
White had to embrace the concept of American whiteness or southern whiteness and root for the lost cause due to Confederate veterans.
And this is a point that really struck me in the study, as it is intimately linked to my current project.
There have been tangible and intangible memories and counter memories of slavery in New Orleans.
Obviously, I enjoyed reading on Oscar Walks Confederate family, but I didn't know anything about that.
His uncle was a Civil War veteran,
but I mostly enjoyed a very short passage on white romanticisation and fetishisation of the Old South romanticisation,
fuelled by his mother's bedtime tales that echoed the stories of the George Washington Cable or Charles Chestnut.
Moreover, these romanticisation is also to be studied and actually do Michel in relation with the architecture and the tangible material heritage.
Dreams and dreams and joked of purchasing a magnificent plantation covered with magnolia trees.
And of course, this is a purely aesthetic. And this is what I think.
This is how relevant it is today, because in the age of tear down would tear them down or put in a spoiler,
etc. We only choose to remember as it was going to just twist the narrative orientations to suit a common narrative of an imagined community.
The lost cause and the glorification of the Confederacy is still very much alive because plantations of beautiful and aesthetic.
Excuse me. So thank you for the opportunity to engage with this book.
I have to admit that I probably wouldn't have picked it up otherwise because it says, well on the front, like I'm kind of an American is, you know?
Anyway, I'm happy. Black History Month.
It's Black History Month in the US right now and I'm from East Sussex, but I'm also from Virginia, and it's kind of a rough week to be from Virginia.
We're finding out more and more about how many public officials in Virginia have worn blackface pretty recently.
So this history is frighteningly current. And as Michelle shows, not only in the U.S. but also the U.K.
Christine Grandi has recently pointed out in her work on the variety show the black and White Minstrel Show,
which ran on the BBC from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen seventy eight, that it's very recent history here as well.
So Michelle's new book making Oscar Wilde, offers fresh and surprising insights into that history by layering in queer,
Irish and Irish American histories as as William was pointing out a moment ago.
Above all, it seems to me that she shows definitively how aesthetic refinement in the form of what has become instantly
recognisable as Oscar Wilde's literary wit emerges as an effect above all of a mise on a beam of national,
racial, ethnic and sexual masquerades, both on Wilde's part and on the part of his many imitators.
Moreover, those imitators Michelle shows really wonderfully indissoluble.
She became a part of Wilde's persona, helping to constitute his celebrity even as they parodied or exploited it.
So Michelle Wonders offers a beautifully nuanced account of what it meant for, well, to be Irish in Dublin,
Irish and Oxford English, an Oxford English in America, Irish in America and Irish American.
Through striking archival examples, she shows how each positioning rendered the wilder in persona and person,
subject to new and different dangers and affordances.
For example, she positions Wilde as an Irishman in an America that has no patience for a new, nuanced identity.
When she writes, quote from the Wild was in his support of Irish home rule.
He often saw himself as British first and Irish second.
Moreover, he felt himself part of an international linguistic community for whom English was a lingua franca,
bridging ethnic and national divides in America. However, where ethnic divisions were more, numerous such cosmopolitan ideas had little traction.
Their world was perceived as part of an ethnic community, the Irish, rather than a linguistic one,
the Anglophone and the United States, while its politics met with little sympathy and much misunderstanding.
His nuanced position as Irish by birth and British by choice was taken as equivocation.
So, so what looks like complexity in one sphere looks like dissembling and another a masking or
performance that seems to prefigure the radical instability that critics have read in Wilde's wit.
In the context of late 19th century US attitudes toward Irish Americans, while the Oxon Ian appeared to be engaged in ethnic,
if not racial passing of the kind that could warrant brutal reprisals, he would have had better success if he'd gone the other way.
As Michael Rogan showed in his 1996 book on immigrant Jews in Hollywood, blackface, white noise, blackface and other forms of racial masquerade,
Rogan showed were a crucial medium of assimilation for white ethnic immigrants,
essentially performing an alliance with whiteness by parodying blackness.
Michelle offers us a fascinating look at the many blackface imitations of Oscar Wilde that circulated on the stage and in visual culture,
rendering his Irishness as blackness.
I was also fascinated by Michele's description of how, in turn and identification with his Irish-American maternal uncle John Kingsbury.
LG, a powerful southern slave owner, gave Wilde a different access to whiteness,
positioning Irish home rule as a parallel to beleaguered southern states rights,
wild war, Irish nationalism, as opposed to Irish Americanness as a kind of Confederate face.
We begin to see and by the way, he probably was racist, right? But you know, you would have to be to put on a Confederate Phasiwe, he began.
We begin to see anticipations of the reversals that brought us Hollywood's iconic
Hollywood cinema's most famous Confederate Irish-American Scarlett O'Hara,
who dresses in green curtains to defend a plantation home named after the hill of Tara,
a symbol of ancient Irish sovereignty played in the MGM film, of course, by the English actress Vivien Leigh.
These multiple layers of racial and ethnic masquerade were both performed intentionally by wild.
And unintentionally absorbed into his persona from the many imitations and parodies that helped make it.
But what perhaps most interests me amongst the astonishing range of performer performances
that Michelle shows us is the blackface the female impersonators such as The Only Leon,
the stage name of the Irish American performer Frances Patrick Glassie, who starred in the show Patience Wild or the Sisters of Oscar.
So female impersonation blackface. Oscar Wilde.
This racialized ethnicities female performance not only points of the gender reversals that have so long been associated with Wilde's writing,
but also helps us to see how closely into our articulated gender and race are,
particularly in the late 19th century, the only Leon dance is the lead in patients wild.
Tantalisingly soon after Franco's troublingly specific date for the great paradigm shift,
when we stopped thinking of sodomy as a set of acts and began thinking of the homosexual as a species of person,
the only Leon, this impersonator helps us to see a paradigm of sexuality in transition.
As Eve Cedric so powerfully described in the epistemology of the closet as such,
Cedric points out in her essay Tales of the Avuncular It and as Michelle's account confirms,
both the 19th century concept of sexual inversion and the Homo hetero binary that comes to dominate accounts
of sexuality in the 20th century address Wilde's range of desires and embodied in habitations very poorly.
Blackface sexual masquerade instead seems to open up the study of Wilde to
another set of questions that American Studies has recently explored in new and
exciting ways in which I believe will no doubt be taken up further still at the
colloquium on queer black performance later this month at St. John's College,
and which I'm very sad to miss. New scholarship tells us that while race and sex are irreducible to one another, they are in many ways co constituted.
We're reminded by the only Leon's parody of Wilde that the blackface performances of Al Jolson in the jazz singer and the singing Fool.
He's blackface to assign femininity to the ethnic character, as well as ultimately confer whiteness on the star, as as Rogan argues.
We might read these scenes of racial and sexual crossing with Kyla Schiller, for example, whose recent brilliant book The Vile Politics of Feeling,
argues in part that when we understand the neo lamarche and underpinnings of 19th century race science,
we're forced to conclude that sex differentiation itself is always racialized.
Binary sex, she argues, was seen as a feature of only the most civilised,
but in quotation marks there with the category women serving as the site of
sentimental overflow that allowed the category men to achieve ideal rationality.
Sex in Schiller's reading, there's not just intersex intersect with race, but is produced by it.
It's an account that tracks well with Hortense Spillers influential argument that
the Middle Passage and chattel slavery produce processes of violent engendering.
See Rileys Norton in his recent book Black on Both Sides A Racial History of Trans Identity,
built on Spillers description of engendering to argue that quote,
it would stand to reason that gender indefinite ness would become a critical
modality of political and cultural manoeuvring within figuration of blackness.
Illustrated, for example, by the frequency with which narratives the fugitive ity included crossed gendered modes of escape.
Norton is referring, of course, to tropes of racial and gender passing narratives such as that of William and Ellen Kraft's escape from slavery,
in which Ellen Craft masqueraded as Williams. What invalid white master or in Harriet Jacobs masquerade as a male sailor in her own escape.
Such real events are echoed in fictional narratives of escape from slavery,
such as William Hill's Black Brown Patel and Mark Twain's put on her Wilson.
It's fitting that in her analysis of the Amelia of Twenty five essay Sorry Memoir of the Female Washington-Williams,
Sorry, I'm just getting all tangled up here.
Essie May Washington-Williams, who was the black daughter of segregationist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond?
Christina Sharp reads Washington-Williams as deliberately reframing the monstrous intimacy
between a patrician white man and a black servant not only as plantation romance,
but as quoting Oscar Wilde, the love that dare not speak its name.
I want to conclude by turning to Michelle's incredibly compelling reading of Wilde's plays as drawing on minstrel tropes,
especially for their wit refined, decadent aristocratic wit, as revealed as rooted in the low form of racial masquerade.
The English dandy imitating the the black dandy minstrel figure rather than the reverse.
This reading sheds new light on existing work that has focussed on the gender reversals that characterise this way.
For instance. A line of dialogue from Gwendolyn in the importance of being earnest quote,
the home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man and certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties.
He becomes painfully effeminate. Does he not? And I don't like that.
It makes men so very attractive. Such moments of reversal have long been a centrepiece of readings of Wilde as a queer author.
By drawing attention to the minstrel affinities of these performances of wit,
Michelle shows us how and offers us a new archive through which to trace what Daphne Brooks has identified as the black origins of camp.
For example, in the cakewalk that would itself be identify imitated in minstrel shows.
And because of this, we begin to see some of the artistic payoff of these genealogies of racial and sexual crossing in American studies,
which are intimated in Schiller's analysis of sentimental fiction. And in Rogan's reading of the white ethnic sentimental performances of what the
music critic Carl Wilson has called schmaltz in his well-known book on Celine Dion.
It's all related, cheesy or sentimental style and its ostensible opposite.
While wilder and dry wit turn out to be counterparts in an aesthetics of embodied crossings,
it would be hard to overestimate the importance of vicarious ness in defining the sentimental.
If Sedgwick tells us in a chapter that also sketches the interdependency of sentimentalism and wit,
what making Oscar Wilde shows us with astonishing concreteness is how deeply embedded in concrete histories of ethnic,
racial and sexual masquerade that vicarious ness is.
Well, I feel like a bit of an imposter here and not being a historian, not being an American studies.
But I have to say that I was so delighted to basically have the excuse to read this book because it really is absolutely enthralling.
I mean, you know, you see all those wonderful quotes up there. I came to it, you know, thinking that I knew a little bit about, I mean, I'm American.
I know something about 19th century America. But it was it was really quite an extraordinary story to to read.
And I and so I just want to, you know, as a non historian,
as somebody who has wrestled with questions of race and ethics and memory, both in my in my scholarly work, but also, you know,
in in being born in a rose house, in being president of a southern college,
I just wanted to to to touch on a few of the things that the kind of thoughts that that it prompted to read this extraordinary story.
First, though, I want to say that it's a it's a beautiful example of history as detective story.
I really, I loved Michel, your opening of coming across.
I guess it was the courier in Ives plate, which which everybody, if you haven't read the book, I know there's copies up there.
You know this. This amazing, you know, I think of Courier Ives, as you know, Christmas scenes, you know,
very much the kind of stereotypical all-American art production, visual culture production.
And so there is this this engraving or drawing of Oscar Wilde in blackface?
And and you came across that in an hour and an archive and and then also, I guess,
came across the the kind of playing cards these trading cards of Oscar Wilde clearly depicted through his dress, which I you know,
I loved your point, sage, about how how people's identity is connected with their with their dress as Chinese,
as African-American, etc. and that initially you were like, OK, this is just too weird.
And this is not the project I'm currently working on, but that it kept drawing you to try to explain this and to and to understand it.
And so I found that incredibly compelling. As several of the folks here have have have mentioned, it is a really extraordinary.
This depiction of Oscar Wilde American journey in 1882 and the ways in which he both sought to
catapult to fame and to exploit all of the mechanisms of becoming famous in in 1980 in that period,
but also all of the ways in which he was exploited and parodied that it uncovers this fascinating brew Irishness as blackness,
the the the intersections of stigmatised I.
Entities, gender, race and the ways in which popular culture in ways that you know, as we look at it now seem extraordinarily blatant and to me,
surprising, you know, not as a scholar of 19th century visual culture, you know,
so I had never really looked at these kinds of visual representations.
And so it it it it is a, I think, a very salutary.
It's a great moment to read this. Natalia's also mentioned this at a time when in the United States and in other places, but in the United States,
we have seen over the last several years a kind of eruption of of both racist tropes, xenophobic tropes,
intersections between different stigmatised identities being brought to the public sphere and in ways that I think have been quite for some people,
maybe not surprising, I think for many Americans, very surprising in their ruthlessness and their cruelty.
And to see how much that strand, you know, is still present in American culture,
the the and, you know, most most tellingly in the last couple of weeks,
you know, to to think of blackface still having been employed in a in a sort of amusing way in the 1980s, you know, by people in their late 20s.
You know, I was a college student in the in the early 80s,
and so I was just really thinking about like what would make somebody, you know, put put on blackface.
So so the the I think it's a it's a remarkably rich and nuanced portrayal at a time when we really need to understand and to and to
dig deep into understandings of of racial stigma and how visual culture and popular culture reinforces various forms of racial,
ethnic and gendered stigma.
And also the combinations of these how Oscar Wilde was by his by this interesting identity as being kind of English kind of Irish,
a paragon of manliness, somebody who was, you know, in some in some of his depictions,
somebody who was questioning notions of manliness that he he invited by this, you know,
within American culture being elided, his identity being elided with all of these other stigmatised identities.
So as an American non historian, I think it was it was just an extraordinary story to read,
and I think a very telling story to read within the contemporary context.
So the other pieces that I found quite fascinating.
One was, I mean, I did not know, for instance,
that the interview was a new art form and the the it is an amazing story about how Oscar Wilde became a great writer and what it was,
what were the practises and the experiences that led him to become this extraordinary that a great writer of dialogue, a great writer of of wit.
And that part of it was, as Natalia mentioned, that, you know, he he drew on Crystal Crystal in story.
Part of it was also the fact that he was interviewed so often.
And you talk about how I think it was nice he had he did 98 interviews in his lifetime and think I'm remembering that no right,
95 of which were in 1882 in America,
and that he starts out as this dull, hyper scholastic lecturer who you know who,
other than the the exotic presentation on stage, would not draw an audience.
But through these interviews, learns how to be succinct and witty.
And you know how all of that kind of fed into his artistry later on.
So I thought it was a really fascinating look at ad. You know, we now live in the in the social media age.
People are being urged to be witty in 140 characters or less.
But how the precursor to the ways in which our media forms shape writerly practises and help people
cultivate writerly skills I thought was a very interesting part of the of the the Oscar Wilde story.
Finally, and this is. Where it kind of comes to my, you know, drawing, I guess most closely to things that I have thought about and wrestled with.
I think Michelle does an extraordinary job of of painting a very nuanced picture of of Oscar Wilde as both, of course, very progressive.
There's wonderful passages about his feminism and how that was cultivated and
honed in his in his time in in America and the people that he encountered,
but also the ways in which he played into as part of this seeking acceptance within American society.
You know, he he had a a an African-American manservant who he would callously and casually refer to as his slave.
And so, you know, all the as we think about.
So you know what, I have often been thinking about in the last few years and and also since coming to Rhodes
House is how we make sense of and and and develop moral judgements of historical characters.
You know, he is now saying to Oscar, you know, you present him as a very complex individual, both in terms of his attitudes towards race and sex,
his his his his attitudes towards the truth, his desperate desire to be accepted and to be famous.
You know, a very complex character and and and personality who has since that time really become kind of a saint of of gay rights, you know?
And conversely, we look at people like Cecil Rhodes, you know,
who is has now become sort of the the fulcrum of everything that's bad about British imperialism,
you know, kind of Rhodes is the personification of it. And so I've been thinking a lot about that,
about kind of how historically people come to stand for and to be known for either
their best or their worst qualities and what work that is doing in the present day.
You know what work it's doing in the present day for Oscar Wilde to be a saint,
what work it's doing in the present day for Rhodes to be a, you know, the worst of the imperialists, if you will.
So as I have often found myself talking to the Rhodes community,
talking to other communities about needing to develop a more nuanced understanding of that
that contextualises people in their time to understand their attitudes within their time,
and then to understand why we need them to play angelic or demonic roles in our own time.
And then ultimately, I guess how, you know, contemporary movements,
contemporary institutions all owe their origins to flawed and complicated human beings.
And I think you've done a beautiful job in this book of sketching this very flawed and
complicated human being and making us appreciate all of the heroic aspects of of his life,
the tragic aspects of his life, but also drawing us to become more nuanced in our own judgements of historic figures.