the libra writer: oscar wilde
becoming a gay icon
Welcome to your first Author Birth Chart! We’ll be digging into one writer’s chart every season, and for Libra, we’ve got none other than Oscar Wilde, who Walt Whitman once called “my big strapping boy.”
Of Wilde’s relationship to Libra energy, I once wrote:
Look at Oscar Wilde, who brought his own sharp wit and social observation to his work — The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband. His plays feature that special sort of cutting humor that goes down easier with a gloss of society finery: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Wilde’s humor is rarely concerned with hurting feelings, also a Libra trait — air signs are adept at detaching emotionally, and Libras especially can enjoy banter and flirting for their own sake.
Even so, in his personal life, Wilde had fierce convictions and refused to be anything less than himself; he was a flamboyant gay man living a very out life in a time when to do so was criminal. Wilde defended the “love that has no name” when he was put on trial for homosexuality in 1895. Ultimately, in order to be in harmony with others, Libras must first be in harmony with themselves.
Let’s dig into that chart a little more.
Wilde is a Libra sun with a Leo moon and a Virgo rising. Your sun is the core of who you are - your purpose in this lifetime, if you will. The emphasis on sun signs over other parts of the chart in recent years is new; you can see from even a casual, unstudied glance at a birth chart that it’s made up of many components, of which the sun is just one.
But the big three: the sun is the purpose, the moon is what emotionally feeds you, and your rising is your operating system - how you “do” your chart.
So what do we make of someone like Oscar Wilde?
How to Brand Yourself 101
Wilde was famous (and infamous) in his lifetime for his commitment to aestheticism, which is - perhaps - one of the most quintessential Libra qualities you could find. (Beauty, harmony, high culture, high aesthetics, what you’d see in a museum or on a runway or in Architectural Digest: that’s Libra.) It’s how he made his money: not just through his writing, but through his lecture tours. Asked whether he had actually, in fact, strode down Piccadilly in London carrying a single lily, his hair loose and flowing, he responded: “It’s not whether I did it or not that’s important, but whether people believed I did.”
This ability to become a brand before it was readily in the cultural vernacular is right there in his chart. The second house is where we make our money; the sign that governs it tells us a lot about how we are best poised to do so. For Wilde, his second house is ruled by Libra, and his sun and Venus are right there. His life purpose and aesthetic interests were uniquely poised to bring in the cash flow - though whether he could maintain that is less certain.
Like his once-lover Walt Whitman (himself a Gemini, also with a Leo moon), Wilde had a nose for merging art with publicity. Call it the marriage of Libra aesthete with that Virgo rising pragmatism: an understanding of how, precisely, to organize his thoughts and put everything into practice - how to extend his first American lecture tour from four months into a year-long sensation.
The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Snapshot of its Publication
The Picture of Dorian Gray began appearing in newspapers in July 1890. Notable transits happening for Wilde during that time:
Uranus, the planet of change, was exactly on his sun - as with such things, this can go either way, and the work was initially criticized for its moral failings (e.g. homoeroticism, which was ultimately expunged in the book version). Wilde pushed too hard at social boundaries, was the implication.
Jupiter, the planet of expansion, going through his house of daily habits and work, leading to the potential for blessings/opportunities in changes to daily routine
Particularly interesting to me is that Saturn, the planet of work and responsibility, had just finished a very difficult journey through that very subconscious twelfth house; work published after that transit, like Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest show the psychic benefits of further integration and emotional maturity as an artist
Becoming a Gay Icon
I’m often asked if you can “see” queerness in charts; this is a tricky question. What you can absolutely see is how someone might manage their emotions; you can see difficult family situations, and you can appreciate the cultural setup someone is working with. You can see a predisposition toward acting one way or another.
In Wilde’s case, he’s got a Leo moon that craves emotional validation through self-expression, tucked away in the most private of all houses: the twelfth. This a house where we see a lot of late blooming, the slow revelation of the self to oneself. (Wilde had a number of relationships with women in his youth and did ultimately marry a woman well into his adulthood.)
Sometimes, when looking at the charts of historical figures, it can be hard to assess what was driving them - the pressure of cultural norms, or the internal factors that a birth chart reveals are obviously at play. Or both. Notably: Wilde had Saturn, the planet of restriction, in an exact square to his ascendant, which is how he expressed his entire chart. This would have been formative, leading to someone who is very conscientious of their public presentation; this is made even more so by the fact that his Saturn is right next to the Midheaven, which is our public, career-oriented self: this is the chart of someone who is very aware of how they seem in public, of the self they are putting on for the world.
But here’s the thing: once someone does the work of uncovering their twelfth house personal planets, and once they think about how they are existing in relation to the world around them, it can be very hard to go back.
By the time the trial came around, a number of astrological transits had come around to challenge Wilde’s conception of who he was and what he wanted - and particularly what he wanted out of his career and public image, two things that we’ve seen were vitally important to him. And listen: who knows? I’m not a psychic. But what we can see in the stars is that Wilde had dreamy, idealistic, super spiritual Neptune and transformative Pluto right up there on his Midheaven, challenging his relationship to his work and fame.
There is obviously some kind of extraordinary internal transformation he went through that led a hyper-conscientious, hyper-branded writer to defend “the love that dare not speak its name” in a court of law in 1895 London.
His reputation may have ultimately suffered in his lifetime, but he’s more than come full circle in ours.
Next month, we’ll discuss the chart of a Scorpio writer! This will be an ever-evolving feature, and as always, I welcome your feedback.
Xx
Jeanna