Wilde about America
“The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal class.” – Oscar Wilde
In 1882 Oscar Wilde toured America as the “Apostle of Aestheticism”, his wit and brilliance and deliberate outrageousness creating controversy among audiences across the continent. The Aesthetic Movement, allowed new forms of identity for men, that were profoundly at odds with Victorian notions of manliness and were an oppositional movement in the American Gilded Age. In the atmosphere of a nation badly traumatized by the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilde’s message of regeneration through art and beauty seemed to many Americans to open new horizons of social possibility.