After knowing how the families worked in the 19th century, I realize Wilde grew up in a special family. Wilde was born into a doctor’s family. He had an elder brother and a younger sister. His mother Jane Wilde used Speranza (the Italian for hope) as her pen name and had become the national heroine for her articles in the nationalist journals of the revolutionary Young Ireland movement, the Nation. Wilde’s father William Wilde was actually a famous surgeon and medical commissioner for the Irish Census in 1851 as he wrote a report about the devastating effect of starvation and mass emigration. Borne into this extraordinary family, Wilde accessed the chances to contact to the society and the world. Although Wilde was not the favorite of his parents, he did reveal his ability for keen observation in his childhood while having dinners with his parents on the table. Furthermore, Wilde’s parents welcomed all the literary and professional friends to their house. Their visit was like a salon holding in Wilde’s house. Wilde’s father was a tiny, thin and untidy man; while Wilde’s mother was a tall, Junoesque figure, with fashionable styles like wearing flamboyant, low-cut gowns with trailing bows which were the flittering fashion in the 1840s and 1850s.
Though Wilde’s mother was the daughter of an obscure unsuccessful solicitor, she created a powerful and ambitious image for herself. Sloan then concludes that Oscar Wilde “inherited his mother’s compulsion to romantic self-invention, and her defiant imperviousness to the adversities of the moment” (2). Jane Wilde’s brother once observed that “‘Jane [had] some heart, she [had] good impulses, but the love of self [was] the prominent feature of her character’” (qtd. in Belford 8). Therefore, when Oscar inherited this love of self from his mother, “he transformed it into the first celebrity art form” (Belford 8). Wilde’s mother was famous because of her patriotic
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articles in the journals and of her radical statement. She was a woman with great ability and even helped publish more of Wilde’s father’s medical articles after his death.
Therefore, when Wilde traveled to America, he was known as “Speranza’s son.”
Consequently, Wilde was challenged by the Irish-Americans to justify his claims as an
“English Renaissance,” as it was viewed as a threatening statement towards his native land. Wilde replied by proclaiming that he was a “thorough republican” predicting that the Irish art and literary work would one day welcome the independence.
Therefore, Wilde’s mother was never the typical kind of Victorian woman who was tender, innocent and weak, spoke softly and depended on the husband in the Victorian age. She was sharp with her statement in her articles. In the marriage, she condemned that her bright, vivid nature was damaged by her husband’s nervous and hypochondriacal moods when they were home, away from the public attention. In other words, Wilde felt his mother’s desperation and frustration since marrying his father seemed to restrict his mother’s energetic spirit. Later in his life, Wilde projected himself as that kind of role of suffering and self-sacrificing victim to Douglas’s moods when he wrote the De Profundis in the prison after his affair with Douglas was widely spread in the London society. Wilde was influenced by his mother a lot consciously or unconsciously as he also included many discussion details with his mother in the De Profundis to remind Douglas that not only Douglas had a thoughtful mother who was concerned about his son’s life, but he Wilde also had this caring mother who cherished and cared about him. Wilde’s close and intimate relationship with his mother thus had been revealed, though the exposure of Wilde’s scandal did harm Wilde’s mother with sorrow and shame.
However, just like Wilde’s mother, other women who lived life more independently than other counterparts still suffered in the Victorian age. Wilde’s
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mother once wrote that women only had the pin money as provision for a wife’s personal expenses. The husband then could reserve the rest of all the property. When Wilde’s father died, he left no income after his death but he had in fact used Wilde’s mother’s own settlement to buy property when he was alive. “The right of married women to ownership and control of their own property and earnings was not finally secured until the landmark Married Women’s Property Act of 1882” (Sloan 41). Even women like Constance, Wilde’s wife who was from the upper-class, could only approve under the settlement agreement that she kept control of her own property through trustees. Generally speaking, the women had no control over the financial sources of the family when it came to the property issues in the Victorian age.
Therefore; even Wilde’s mother, who was courageous and independent, still had to confront this bitter and humiliating situation in the 19th century. Wilde actually liked strong women, as her mother often referred herself as an eagle and Joan of Arc, Wilde was deeply attracted by heroic women (Stetz 232). Marriage was not the best choice for Jane Wilde as she desperately liked an independent life, but living alone was inappropriate in the Victorian age and she did not want to live with her relatives.
However, when Wilde was about to marry, his mother wrote a letter to him to express her care that she would like Wilde to have a house in London and live a better life with Constance helping him in proofreading, and hopefully could become a member of Congress. Obviously, when it came to the son’s family life, this fashionable and independent mother threw away her feminist opinion and hoped her daughter-in-law could be a good and helpful mate (Belford 110). Consequently, when reading Wilde’s two plays, the image of Wilde’s mother could also be a hint because Mrs. Erlynne never gives up her individual freedom and Mrs. Arbuthnot insists on remaining single.
Both characters make the decisions which are not accepted by the public in reality and are against the Victorian’s family principal. Their thoughts are also very avant-garde
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to that century. Yet, they all encourage their children to return to the family life (patriarchal norm) in the end of the plays.