The Lost Sheep Herded Home

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), a prominent Irish-born writer and aesthete in the late nineteenth century England, as well as a contradictory man who is at once Satan and angel, still remains the main focus of public attention. The current celebration of Wilde as an icon for the gay rights movement is certainly one legitimate interpretation of his life, but it. oversimplifies his complexity; instead of dying as a gay martyr, Oscar took another road in converting to the Roman Catholic Church, a decision taken after a lifelong fascination and tortuous struggle with Catholicism.However, with his clear disdain for figures of authority and openly homosexual lifestyle, Oscar Wilde is an unlikely pin-up for the Catholic Church. Many doubts were raised on his deathbed conversion. And the importance of his Catholic interest and thinking was also ignored and understated by the critics for a long time in history. By tracking down Wilde's paradoxical life and analyzing his main works, this thesis is dedicated to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, Wilde's spiritual development, his lurking religious contemplation as well as the Christian connotations implicit in his works. By placing Wilde in a wilder cultural background, the paper also attempts to find out the conflicting influences which lead to Wilde's spiritual predicament and keep him from converting until the last moment of his life.