ABSTRACT
In June of 1923, twenty-two years after his losing battle with the wallpaper at the Hotel d’Alsace, Oscar Wilde delivered his definitive opinion on the hereafter: it was tedious. “Being dead”, he communicated, “is the most boring experience in life. While Constance Wilde joined the Society for Psychical Research in the 1890s and became a subscriber to Borderlands, a leading Spiritualist magazine at which her husband probably had a glimpse now and again, the joke in Wilde’s story seems directed against the scientific investigation of ghostly phenomena. Certainly, a closer look at the story’s satirical reference to the society for psychical research suggests that it is actually quite well informed. For example, the joke about the irremovable stain and its origin in the relationship between violent death and psychic energy is a layered one. Wilde was one of many who in the late Victorian period possessed what Michael Saler has characterized as an “ironic imagination”.
