The curious influence of Oscar Wilde on Hollywood

The Importance of Being Earnest was NBC’s first coast-to-coast broadcast of a play in 1929. It was ideal for radio, partly because Oscar Wilde’s crisp dialogue obviated any need of facial expressions or gestures. Epigrammatic speech, as Noël Coward found, was a signifier of modernity in the 1920s. Beyond that, as Kate Hext shows, the America of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had a sinewy and hardy sympathy for the Anglo-French fin-de-siècle literary mode of the 1890s known as Decadence.

For too long, Hext argues, historians have focused on the American Dream as a mercenary business, concerned with the optimisation of personal wealth, sociopathic ambition, competitive ruthlessness, grinding long hours of work, mass production, cultural uniformity, winners and losers and he-men and patsies. Yet, she continues, Wilde, shorn of his sexual deviance and disassociated from pretty boys, offered a philosophy of life that was an antidote to corporate America, Wall Street, provincial pettiness and meddlesome neighbours.