Abstract
The late Victorian era saw Oscar Wilde’s rise to success and fall from grace. For many years the Irish author lived a double life. He was both a celebrated man of letters, and an irreducibly extraneous body. His essay The Decay of Lying, published in 1889, is a Socratic dialogue that, through its inherent duplicity, exhibits this binary condition. On one hand it is a brilliant work of criticism – pleasantly heterodox – that fully embodies Wilde’s rule of “bewildering the masses”, while on the other, even though backhandedly, it gives a recalcitrant account of the implacable social control of his time. In this eulogy of the art of lying – mainly understood as a way of “saying no” to the truths of power – Wilde reveals the theoretical foundations and originality of his political philosophy, which is the same as that displayed in his later essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).
