29 Oscar Wilde and Stoic Humilty
Welcome to the Female Stoic podcast.
My name is Stephanie Poppins and I am an advocate for literary empowerment.
That means I believe the example set by the literary masters can broaden life perspective, create increased self-awareness, and empower us to overcome the obstacles we encounter here in the 21st century.
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By listening and referring what we hear to Stoic philosophy, we can foster a strong sense of self and navigate the world more effectively.
This podcast takes the form of both discussions and meditations, and if you like what you hear, you might consider looking me up on my socials where I post empowering videos every day.
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Or you may like my classic audiobooks and original stories available on my website, newworldbooks.uk.
Happy listening.
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OK, and welcome to today's episode of the Female Stoic Podcast.
Today's episode is entitled Oscar Wilde and Stoic Humility.
This relates to the second-half of his letter De Profundis, which was written between January and March 1897, near the end of his two year sentence for gross indecency.
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How times have changed.
De Profundis means out of the depths, and it refers to a cry of extreme anguish, despair, or profound sorrow which originates from Psalm 130, often recited during funerals or times of repentance.
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So he was in a dark place.
And Speaking of humility, I would like to draw your attention to my new course coming out on insight time and meditation app.
It's entitled How to Write myself Stoic A 5 day Stoic discipline course.
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It was inspired by episode 28 of the female Stoic podcast entitled Stoic Discipline and Emily Dickinson.
So have a listen if you haven't heard that episode already, and have a look out for the course which is coming up in the following week.
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It's designed to be a grounding and empowering boost to your Stoic practice, all within the space of a working week.
Just like any employment, Stoic discipline must be adopted regularly and in a humble focus way in order to achieve maximum results.
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Day one sees us challenging our higher self, Day 2 focusing on the discipline of ascent, day three the discipline of desire, Day 4 the discipline of action and day 5 voluntary hardship.
So take a look at that and if that doesn't appeal, try my other course 10 Days of Stoic Journaling.
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Both of these help us stay humble and connected to our Stoic endeavours.
So back to today's episode, Oscar Wilde and stoic humility.
We are going to start with a little history of Oscar Wilde.
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He was alive between 1854 and 1900 and was a renowned Irish playwright, poet and author of the Victorian era, celebrated for his sharp wit, flamboyance and role as leader of the Aesthetic Movement, which existed between 1816 and 1900, so 1860 and 1900, about 40 years.
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The Aesthetic Movement embodied the idea art should exist solely for its beauty and sensory pleasure, rather for moral, didactic or useful purposes.
And of course, as with every artistic movement, it emerged as a reaction.
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And the reaction was against the Industrial Revolution.
It was reacting to the rigid Victorian morality of the time, which embodied sexual restraint, piety, and rigid class and gender roles.
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It manifested in society this strict Victorian order as a polite, orderly facade, that place propriety is king.
But of course, these conventionally accepted standards of morality, etiquette and social appropriateness often negated the value of authenticity, which is where Oscar Wilde and his pals step in are.
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The prominent figures of the ascetic movement were the artists or painters Rosetti Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris, so you might like to take a look at their work and see how that flamboyancy is injected in their artistic endeavours.
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The ascetic movement aimed to bring beauty into everyday life, and the aesthetes often challenged conservative societal norms, so this led to a reputation of them being decadent and sometimes hedonistic.
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Art for art's sake was their motto.
Which of course, as with all social movements where the pendulum is swinging drastically in defiance of the one preceding it, it is a reaction.
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Which of course something we as Stoics warn against.
So you have the aesthetic movement reacting to the industrial Victorian age.
And as we shall see in this episode of the Female Stoic Podcast, Oscar Wilde is aestheticism personified.
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He is decadence, walking son of a prominent surgeon and a literary Hostess, Jane Wilde.
He was known for social satire, flamboyancy and fashionable clothing, and at Oxford it was that he established his reputation for wit and dandyism.
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Those who met him at his peak described him as radiant, often compared him to Apollo, and his success seemed to precede him, which made his life look like a guaranteed triumph.
But of course this was a huge responsibility.
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He himself acknowledged that high level gifts like artistic capability can bring severe consequences, and he came to reflect that he with similar talents would suffer terribly for what the gods gave them.
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He felt his gifts led him to value superficial pleasure, stating I let my ego get the best of me and I was no longer the captain of my soul.
But despite the ruin his life brought, he maintained the artist's purposes to find beauty in a sensual world.
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And he believed that for a beautiful soul, pain was an inevitable consequence of that beauty.
So towards the end of his life, he came to embrace both pain and pleasure.
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He was humbled by his experience in prison.
So this De Profundis that was written as a letter in prison depicted suffering as a profound transformative gift.
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And later on he reflected that he came to realise time was the only true currency and said no man is rich enough to bite back his past.
So he has himself.
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His personal pendulum, if you like, has swung from one extreme to another.
His published works included The Happy Prince and Other Tales and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and plays such as Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Ernest, my personal favourite.
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He was married.
He had two children.
But then he began A passionate, scandalous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891, and following a failed libel lawsuit against Lord Alfred's father, he was arrested for gross indecency, found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labour, much of it all read in jail.
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And this is where he wrote De Profundis.
So his life essentially collapsed after his release.
He went on to live in France in exile under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmouth.
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So in De Profundis he showcased profound stoic self reflection.
He adopted a mindset of accepting suffering and transforming adversity, which of course mirrors the Stoic practice of turning obstacles into a source of personal growth.
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But it's the humility we are focusing on today, he said.
Dubrofundis translates to Out of Depths, and initially it was published in a heavily edited form.
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The full unabridged text of course not released until the 1960s, but it acts as a confessional document where he attempts to process his pain and redefine his life's purpose.
He is now at the lowest point of his existence and he is working to redefine what he has to offer.
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He wrote.
The gods had given me almost everything, but I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease, which reflects his downfall from fame to grace.
He is lamenting his wasted genius.
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He's lamenting his vanity and pursuit of pleasure, which he describes as destroying his life.
He's suggesting that self-awareness is the key.
What I did to myself was far more terrible than what the world has done to me.
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He's reflecting on his attitude, on this ego that grew through this, through the adoration of others.
He said I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy.
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So he had no value of time or indeed his gifts.
And this is a poignant reflection on ruin, hedonism, and lost potential.
I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and meaner minds, he said.
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So he's acknowledging here that he's taken the easier path.
I became the spendthrift of my own genius.
What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.
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So what he's denoting here, this paradox to me in the sphere of thought, Many of his witty quotes would juxtapose one extreme with another in order to be humorous.
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So he says desire at the end was a malady or a madness or both.
I grew careless of the lives of others.
He had so much of it that he realised, as he says, I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on.
I found every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has someday to cry aloud on the housetop.
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He's acknowledging here that the small actions, that the unseen actions, the actions behind doors over time accumulate and therefore will be quote cried aloud on the housetop.
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They will be exposed.
It's this karmic point of view and this comes from a place of humility.
You have to be able to have lost everything to understand the value of that thing, which he did.
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He lost out both financially and socially.
I allowed pleasure to dominate me, he said.
I ended in horrible disgrace.
There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility, and that is what we're looking at today.
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Wild.
Aiming to transform his pain into a deeper, more profound artistic and personal understanding, he's expressing a capacity now to reframe these ruminous experiences to show new found appreciation for sorrow and depth rather than just pleasure.
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Which is ironic because he valued authenticity highly.
And yet to be humble as a stoic, as a human being, is the ultimate in humility.
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So to translate that to our lives, we can say I choose to be authentic, but which version of me am I choosing to be?
He had more than one authentic version according to which part of his life he was in at the time.
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But humility is the key here, he said I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul.
And so indeed I went out and I so lived.
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My only mistake was that I can find myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun lit side of the garden.
I shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.
And this is the point here.
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We must embrace both the light and the dark, as I have said to you before, to just seek out the best and not embrace either the worst of ourselves, or indeed to embrace the worst of ourselves and not seek out the best is to deny our stoic self and to deny our inner peace.
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And of course, at the end we can see he was not at peace at all.
As I determined to know nothing of the things of which I was afraid, he said I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed no food at all.
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There was no pleasure I did not experience, he says.
I threw the Pearl of my soul into a cup of wine.
But to have continued the same life would have been wrong, because it would have been limiting all this, he wrote in De Profundis his letter.
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The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.
So by and in the conclusion of the letter he comes to.
And this is what happens when we write.
We are expressing our thoughts and we come to a natural conclusion through writing, which is why I always promote journaling.
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He comes to a conclusion.
He's saying some of in the Happy Prince and some of the words in the Young King is a foreshadow of what was to come.
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Notably in the passage where the Bishop says to the kneeling boy, is it not he who made misery wiser than thou art?
He said.
It's a phrase I wrote when it seemed to me little more than a phrase, but a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that, like a purple thread, runs through the texture of Dorian grey.
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So he's acknowledging here there is a deep sorrowful side to himself and he acknowledges it to a degree, but he hasn't tasted it.
And it's only when he loses everything that he is humble enough to accept that part of himself.
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The message here?
Don't wait until you've lost everything to.
Respect and acknowledge the gifts you actually have, and those gifts come in light and dark shades.
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So let's have a look at the concept of Stoic humility.
This is a virtue rooted in self knowledge.
When we are humble, we acknowledge our limitations whilst maintaining our self respect and staying true to our virtues.
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We accept life's highs and lows without pride or complaint, and we focus on controllable actions rather than outcomes.
So in order to maintain humility, we'd need to practice the virtue of knowledge.
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The Stoic virtue of knowledge We need to make sure we are managing our ego, and it is a good idea to in some capacity be serving others.
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Marcus Aurelius advised.
Receive without pride, let go without attachment.
And this means we should accept success without arrogance, and we should accept failure without despair.
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It's exciting to be successful, it's devastating to fail.
But just how deep does the emotion we attach to that go?
That is for us to manage that reaction in order that we keep the walls of our inner citadel high and maintain our inner peace.
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Recognising oneself as a small part of a larger whole reduces the need to boast or feel superior.
We all have gifts to give, and whether some gifts are more acknowledged than others doesn't matter.
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It's in no consequence.
So in order for us to be stoically humble, we need to stay open to new ideas.
We need to constantly be developing ourselves, focusing on virtuous actions rather than seeking validation or recognition from others and refusing to get drawn into the dramatic unnecessarily, especially if it has nothing to do with us.
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So we're going to talk about the journal task now.
And as you know, each week on the Female Stoic Podcast, we have a journal task, as Oscar Wilde wrote Diprofundis.
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So we complete our journal task each week.
And of course, this is a reflection of what the Stoic Masters did.
So today's Stoic task is about gratitude and humility.
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I would like you to write down in your journal today the address of your childhood home, as much of it as you can remember.
And I would, I would imagine you can remember quite a lot, possibly all of it with a code and everything.
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So write down the address of your childhood home and remember how you felt when you lived there.
You probably had little understanding of the social status of your family when you were young, or indeed cared very little about it.
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This time and this place was when you were at your most authentic and your most humble.
So you're writing down your address of your childhood home and then underneath your address, write down a list of words that you associate with that person who lived there.
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You, you as a child.
A list of words you associate with you as a child.
This is a great exercise to stay grounded and on my home screen, on my laptop, I have a picture of my humble childhood home which helps me stay grounded when I'm working on my endeavours and on my challenges so that I don't become too absorbed in them to remember the authentic me where it all started.
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So in conclusion, today, Oscar Wilde viewed the gifts he was afforded, genius, wit, beauty, fame as both a divine blessing and a dangerous isolating burden that ultimately led to his downfall.
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He viewed this after he had lost everything.
He then understood the power of humility.
He saw himself as an artist who ceased to be the Lord over himself.
He had traded his potential for pleasures and parties.
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Ultimately he believed while he was granted natural gifts, he was also equally as responsible for wasting them, which is a cautionary tale.
He was quoted as saying nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand, and he was proof of this.
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Now, of course, he was persecuted under the Unjust Laws Act of the time, but he had committed his own crime against himself long before that.
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If you have any questions, you can always put them in the group chat and obviously go onto my page and you can sign up to the newsletter there and I shall see you next time.
Bye.
Hey Stephanie here, Thank you for listening to the Female Stoic podcast.
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It is an honour and I just want to say I really appreciate you being here.
It's amazing the power of women in literature and the stoic messages they have to share.
Please, if you can, return the favour by spreading their words and sharing this podcast far and wide so more of us can benefit from their wisdom.
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And don't forget to leave a review if you like what you've heard, see you next time.