A Performance: Oscar Wilde

Some days, I really, really wish Oscar Wilde had been around to see Twitter. I think he would have loved it. All those slick bon mots, those 140 character slices of wit, the pithy commentary on news and popular culture. Sounds like just his kind of medium.
I think he would have enjoyed it for reasons beyond his sharp observational humour too. Wilde was among the first in the 1890s to fully popularize the idea of commodifying the self – of turning one’s own identity or appearance into a brand that could be sold or used to promote something. His personality (or rather, I should say, various personas) proved integral to audience reception of his plays. He was, in a sense, a performance himself.
One of the things I’ve occasionally struggled with whilst studying English Literature is my desire to interject with comments like: “Oh, but that’s so relevant to social media today!” or, “wow, so basically this writer kick-started the idea of people as brands – he’d have adored taking selfies!” My desire to yank people and themes from the past into contemporary culture is fine for general conversation, but it’s not quite what’s expected in a tutorial.
Yet the concept of offering yourself – your lifestyle, your aesthetic, your opinions, your image – up for public consumption is what the internet’s all about. Ok, no, that’s a gross generalisation. Let’s rephrase. It’s a phenomenon found in various corners online, with public platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and blogs allowing the individual to present a polished, publishable version of themselves. And it doesn’t just ‘allow’ it – but encourage. We’re expected to repackage certain aspects of our life online. Our meals. Our faces. Our response to TV shows or breaking news. For some this repackaging can be commercially successful. To many it’s just a bit of fun – albeit a fun that requires you to be continually updating another identity online.
To a certain degree, for all of us who engage with social media, it does remain a bit of a performance. Like Wilde’s multifaceted presentation of himself and his works, what we put up online isn’t untruthful or non-genuine – but it is just a version, a single perception, a small window into an individual’s existence where we don’t know just what’s being concealed or revealed or fabricated or elaborated. And that’s fine. It would be weird to have an online representation that completely matched the messy, sprawling, complex personality of each person. More than that – it would be impossible.
What fascinates me though, is how little we acknowledge this continual process of selection and construction. We may nod every now and then to the fact that we’re assembling ourselves online in every self-portrait snap in the mirror or snappy tweet. But we rarely extend that awareness to others. Although we can recognise which bits of our life we’re amplifying or highlighting, and which bits we’re leaving in the shadows, we tend to take what others put online as some kind of whole.
I wonder what Wilde would have made of it all. Alongside embracing it, would he have passed comment on it? Might he have become something of a performance artist on Instagram? Amassed thousands of followers to promote new works? Let the world know about his new clothing purchases? Played with the medium, showed up its artifice, indulged in instability and ambiguity, written essays and dialogues about social media? Who knows. It’s fun to imagine it though…
So here I'm kind of performing a part, as I always do on this blog, my outfit, landscape and props suggesting a particular character, aesthetic or scene. Obviously this is something of a homage to the man himself, my emulation of Wilde achieved with plenty of second hand velvet, a shirt and some loafers from a charity shop, vintage accessories, a stack of books and heaps of kirby grips to tuck and pin my hair up in place.
(PS Thus what might look like a hair cut is not. Just another assembled element of visual image).