This cartoon is depicting the closing portions of the final Oscar Wilde Trial, resulting in Wilde being convicted of "gross indecency" and being sentence to two years of hard labor in prison (the maximum sentence allowed for gross indecency charges). 

Wilde's health plummeted in prison, and he eventually passed away on November 30th, 1900, in France, at only 46 years old. When Wilde finally was not talking about flowers and started talking to people and searching for homosexual connection (this peaked when he was with Lord Alfred Douglas), he was shot down by governmental oppression. Are "pansies" allowed to talk about things other than flowers? Wilde should not have had to suppress his love for men under the metonymy of flowers. Even if the symbolism speaks the truth, it is a xerox of the truth.

The scariest part about this whole trial is that it was the first time the general public had an idea of what a gay man looked like. In "Victorian Sexualities" by James Eli Adams, Adams states that "The concern with regulation of male lust thus converged with a new conception of sexual identity anticipated in the rise of aestheticism: the homosexual" (134). Continuing, he says that "Only with the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 was a clear image of 'the homosexual' firmly fixed in the public mind, along with a vivid association of literary and sexual 'decadence.'" If Wilde was the first image of a gay man to the general public, and he used flowers as substitutes for real confessions for men, then the seeds are placed for the "pansy" stereotype to rise in the 1920s and 1930s. Flamboyance and flowers were all that many gay closeted men had. At least that's what the stereotypes say.

"Closing Scene at the Old Bailey: Trial of Oscar Wilde." The Illustrated Police News, no. 1628, 4 May 1895, https://peoplesgdarchive.org/item/10866/illustrated-police-news-trial-of-oscar-wilde.

Adams, James Eli. "Victorian Sexualities." Victorian Literature and Culture, 1999.