Foss Delivers Spooky Paper on Ghosts, Vampires, and Oscar Wilde
Professor of English Chris Foss delivered a spooky conference paper entitled “A Matter of Life in Death: Ghosts, Vampires, and Oscar Wilde” at the annual meeting of the Victorian Institute, held this year on Saturday, Sept. 12 in Knoxville, TN. Rumor has it Foss spoke in darkness with a flashlight shining up at the bottom of his face.
The paper offered an intriguingly unusual angle on Victorian relationships to life and death by examining Hester Travers Smith’s purported communication with the ghost of Oscar Wilde in the early 1920s.
Travers Smith claimed that Wilde also provided her with a posthumous play boldly titled “Is It a Forgery?” – a text that explicitly engages with themes of immortality and the supernatural through its representations of the undead. Not only is one of the main characters revealed to be a vampire, but its final act exclusively features robed souls and travelers journeying away from earth towards their new futures.
How Travers Smith presents what she insists is Wilde’s vision of life after death suggests that popular views of Wilde, as well as her own Victorian heritage, continue to play a crucial role in his reception. Rumor also has it that the session ended with its own Ouija board conversation with Oscar’s ghost.
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