Content area
Full Text
BECAUSE THE IMAGE of the green carnation has often been associated with Oscar Wilde, writers on the subject have provided extravagant accounts that have acquired the status of venerated fact rather than ingenious fancy. The most blatant example occurs in W. Graham Robertson's 1931 memoir, Life Was Worth Living, in which Robertson, a designer of theatrical costumes, relates the dubious story that, on the day before the première of Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde instructed him to buy a green carnation. However, in his memoir, Robertson shifts oddly from a single green carnation to many, Wilde allegedly having said to him:
"I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow-it will annoy the public.... A young man on stage [that is, the actor portraying the dandy Cecil Graham] will wear a green carnation; people will stare at it and wonder. Then they will look round the house and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green. 'This must be some secret symbol,' they will say. *What on earth can it mean?'"
When Robertson also asked Wilde what it meant, Oscar allegedly replied: "'Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.'"1 No other memoir or any published letter, for that matter, has confirmed Robertson's account.
If Wilde wished to create a sensation at the première of Lady Windermere's Fan on 20 February 1892, there was no mention from the drama critics that any young gentlemen in the audience wore green carnations or, for that matter, that the actor portraying Cecil Graham wore one on stage. The drama critic Clement Scott was distressed because Wilde took his curtain call while holding a cigarette, but he did not mention that Wilde wore a green carnation.2 Frank Harris, who also attended the première, does not mention in his 1916 biography that Wilde wore the green flower; however, Henry James, who, like Harris, was at the opening, wrote to a friend that "the unspeakable one" did, in fact, wear what he called a "metallic blue carnation" (that is, blue green) while speaking to the audience during his curtain call.3
With his customary facetiousness, Wilde may have suggested to Robertson that members of his entourage and the actor portraying Cecil Graham all wear green...