Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  Mrs Oscar Wilde – ‘Yes dear, dinner is ready. Which do you prefer, sunflower dried, or some toasted lily of the valley?’ Oscar – ‘Ah! Ahem! Is that all you have?’ ‘Oh no! There is a big dish of violets in the refrigerator.’ ‘My love haven’t you got anything to eat?’ ‘Eat! Eat! Why what do you mean?’ ‘I should like some beef and potatoes and bread and a bottle of ale, and some’ – But the bride of the aesthete had fainted.

  When Constance married Oscar in May 1884, she became a celebrity. She also became an integral partner for her husband in what Oscar considered the next phase of his career. If as a bachelor he had lived life as the embodiment of Aesthetic principles, in marriage he saw the opportunity ‘of realising a poetical conception … to set an example of the pervading influence of art in matrimony’.1

  Since his return from America, Oscar had abandoned his silk breeches and long hair in favour of elegant suits and a short, curled coiffure. In doing so he had cast off any sense of boyishness that might formerly have been associated with his public persona. Marriage allowed him to develop this more mature character further in the public imagination. Instinctively Oscar understood the key to maintaining the interest of one’s public is to offer them change. Constance could at once provide this, as well as amplifying and extending his profile.

  But this is not to suggest that Oscar’s and Constance’s marriage was some form of publicity stunt, or merely something intended to benefit Oscar solely. It was a happy coincidence that allowed him his new ambition to explore how Aestheticism, and the liberal thinking that attached itself to this artistic movement, might apply in marriage. Far more importantly, his feelings for Constance were rooted in what was, according to the couple’s friends, a very genuine love affair. Ada Leverson, one such friend, noted that ‘when he first married, he was quite madly in love, and showed himself an unusually devoted husband.’2

  On honeymoon in Paris they took reasonably priced rooms, no doubt with John Horatio and Aunt Emily’s words about the need for economy and careful housekeeping still ringing in their ears. Their apartment in the Hotel Wagram, rue de Rivoli, was ‘3 rooms, 20 francs a day, not dear for a Paris Hotel’, Constance explained to Otho. ‘We are au quatrième quite a lovely view over the gardens of the Tuileries.’3

  From here the couple would launch themselves out into Paris society on a daily basis and indulge themselves in art. They visited the annual Paris salon to see the work by Oscar’s friends that was on display: Whistler was showing Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, as well as Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Thomas Carlyle, and the sculptor John Donoghue a bas-relief of a nude boy playing the harp. They went to the opera and to see Sarah Bernhardt in Macbeth, a production in which Constance witnessed ‘the most splendid acting I ever saw. Only Donalbain was bad. The witches were charmingly grotesque. The Macbeth very good, Sarah of course superb, she simply stormed the part.’4 They held dinner parties and attended dinner, luncheon and breakfast parties by return. Constance met an array of new artistic people, among them the American artist John Singer Sargent. Then there was the French novelist Paul Bourget, the sculptor Donoghue (whom Oscar had befriended in America) and the writer Robert Sherard.

  The evening before he married, Oscar had had dinner with some of his closest married female friends, the painter Louise Jopling and the wife of his lawyer, George Lewis. They gave him advice on how a ‘young husband should treat his wife’.5 If they told him he should be romantic, full of grand gesture and spoil his new life-companion, then he followed their advice to the letter. Oscar was enormously extravagant towards Constance. If he ventured out with his Parisian friends while Constance remained behind to write letters, the minute he left her, Oscar would send bouquets of flowers back to their rooms and shower love gifts on her the moment he returned. He played the role of lover extremely well, and not just for Constance’s benefit. Robert Sherard found himself strolling along the Parisian streets with an Oscar full of nuptial joys and attempting to reveal in detail the delights of sleeping with his wife, details that Sherard squeamishly asked Oscar to desist from divulging.

  But in spite of these grand gestures, even on his honeymoon Oscar displayed a characteristic that over the years of marriage to come would prove a thorn in Constance’s side. It is obvious that Oscar enjoyed being apart from his wife as much as he loved being with her. He would disappear, and she would be left alone to her own devices.

  Oscar was attracted by danger. He loved experiencing low life and would seek out notorious street haunts, where he would immerse himself in another world. Even on his honeymoon Oscar and Robert Sherard ventured out to some of the low-life bars in Paris, such as the Château Rouge, a notorious criminal haunt, above which was Paris’s ‘Salle des Morts’. This was a room in which the city’s beggars and orphans, dropouts and cut-throats spent the night – a room full of ragged men who looked, in slumber, more like corpses than human beings, and upon whom Oscar gazed in horror and wonder.

  Within a few months of their marriage Constance and Oscar would begin to talk about matrimony in unusual terms, consciously ‘modern’ in their approach to their new status. Adrian Hope recalled one dinner party with them in which Constance ‘said she thought it should be free to either party to go off at the expiration of the first year’.6 Oscar subsequently offered the proposal that marriage should be a contract for seven years, renewable as either party sees fit at the end of that duration.

  It’s intriguing to speculate whether these expressions on both sides promoting some form of trial period in wedlock, or some notion that marriage need not be eternally binding, indicates that the marriage suffered some teething troubles. What is sure is that Oscar and Constance, like so many other Victorians, barely knew each other when they married. They had met many times, but nearly always in public situations. And Oscar had spent much of their six-month engagement away on his lecture tour.

  It seems likely, given the many accounts of a genuine love affair between the two of them early on, that they simply suffered a kind of shock reaction to the adjustments each had to make to accommodate life with the other. Oscar must have been surprised to find, beneath the delicate exterior of his violet-eyed Artemis, a rather steely resolve and something of a short temper. Later in life, after Arthur Pinero had written his stage hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Oscar’s nickname for Constance would be Mrs Cantankeray.7 Constance, on the other hand, had to accommodate Oscar’s ego, his tendency to leave her alone and his utter uselessness with money.

  In spite of this, the public profile that they presented was immediately, and for the next few years, fixed as one of utter union and single-minded purpose. If Oscar had an idea that there could be such a thing as an artistic marriage, then Constance was ready and prepared to explore it with him.

  The first, instant evidence of this was Constance’s wardrobe. Although she had in recent years adopted the loose dress that Otho so loathed, on her honeymoon Constance revealed a new wardrobe that took Aesthetic fashion to new heights and spoke not only of her allegiance but also of her preparedness to partner the high priest of Aestheticism in awakening a wider public to just how far art might be extended in life.

  A sense of Mrs Nettleship’s fabrications is given by The Lady’s Pictorial, which reported:

  If the French ladies are more slaves to fashion edicts than are their English sisters, and are less indulgent to eccentricity in dress or manner, they yet recognize the superior right of grace inspired by taste to adorn itself with picturesque becomingness. Mrs Oscar Wilde, in her large white plumed hats, in her long dust cloaks of creamy alpaca richly trimmed with ruches of coffee coloured lace, in her fresh and somewhat quaintly-made gowns of white muslin, usually relieved by touches of golden ribbon, or with yellow floss silk embroideries, is declared ‘charmante’ and to be dressed with absolute good taste.8

  ‘My dress creates a sensation in Paris,’ Constance proudly announced to Otho on the fifth day of her honeymoon. ‘Miss R,9 who is as I said, frig
htful … wants me to get Mrs Nettleship to make a dress for her exactly like the one of mine. Of course I promised. Imagine Oscar’s horrors.’10

  Constance had a passion for old lace and embroidery, and so pieces that she had collected over the years were now worked into her outfits by Mrs Nettleship. One description of Constance in the year of her marriage makes note of her ‘in a very artistic looking gown of crimson and gold brocade. There was a Watteau plait at the back and the sleeves were long, full and puffed at the top of the elbows. A wide and falling collar of old lace complemented the chief features of this very elegant toilet.’11

  Within a year the golden couple, effervescing with mutual devotion, dressed in their Aesthetic uniform, were the subject of a craze. Mrs Oscar Wilde, or ‘Mrs Oscar’, as she was often referred to, had certainly become the brand extension that her husband had hoped. By May 1885, when galleries held their important summer show previews, Mr and Mrs Wilde were offering Lillie Langtry some serious competition as the main interest for celebrity spotters. ‘Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde were the only rivals in public interest’ to the ‘rush and crush whenever “the Lily” was recognised’.12

  While Constance seemed to prefer ‘tea gowns’ in lightweight and pale-coloured muslins for her day wear, for her evening wear Mrs Nettleship and Constance would often turn to green. At a preview of the Grosvenor Gallery’s 1885 summer show

  aestheticism culminated in Mrs Oscar Wilde’s costume of a woollen stuff in dull reseda13 trimmed with pink, a kind of Kate Greenaway dress, tied at the waist by a drooping pink sash. Round the neck she wore a wide Toby frill of two rows of ficelle lace with vari-coloured beads, and a large pink bow fastening a bunch of yellow marguerites; on her head a small Tam o’Shanter cap of the same greenish grey material was the accompaniment to this eccentric costume.14

  A year later, at the same event, Constance was once again the focus of attention. This time she was dressed ‘in every shade of green from the palest lichen to the fullest summer foliage – a lizard trimmed with beetles’.15 Mrs Nettleship had sewn the iridescent green wings of the ‘jewel’ beetle on to Constance’s gown, so that they glistened like sequins.16 She would repeat this practice a year later, fashioning a hat for her client in which ‘beetles’ wings shone from unsuspected corners whenever the head was turned’.17

  Anna, Comtesse de Brémont, remembered how startlingly original Constance always looked. On one occasion she would be

  purely Greek, on another early Venetian, in rich tints of old rose, with gold lace, high collar, trimmings and girdles. Again I would see her arrayed in draperies after the medieval style, or cerise and black satin with necklaces of quaint gems, all of which she wore with a shy air of depreciation, a bearing that was not quite in keeping with the stately, sumptuous style of dress.18

  While the bohemian set considered her outfits charming, Constance’s dress was generally considered eccentric and far too avant-garde by the wider public. Her new-found celebrity brought just as much ridicule as praise. One critic wrote that ‘The least said’ about her dress ‘the better’.19 The press aside, even some friends and neighbours found themselves utterly bemused by Constance’s transformed appearance. The poets Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper noted in their memoirs how they were ‘received by Mrs Wilde in turquoise blue, white frills and amber stockings’.20 Adrian Hope’s fiancée, Laura Troubridge, met Constance shortly after she and Oscar returned from honeymoon. Horrified, Laura described her ‘as looking too hopeless’, dressed in ‘white muslin with absolutely no bustle; saffron coloured silk swathed about her shoulders, a huge cartwheel Gainsborough hat, white, & bright yellow stockings & shoes’.21

  Adrian Hope kept Laura up to date with news of Constance’s wardrobe. That November he wrote to her, noting that, while visiting his Napier connections at Constance’s old home of ioo Lancaster Gate, she and Oscar turned up for tea. ‘He dressed quite like anyone else, she in mouse-coloured velvet with a toque to match looking horrid.’22 Adrian recounts another instance when his friend Jo was introduced to the Wildes. ‘Jo sat amazed at Mrs Oscar,’ Adrian reported to Laura, ‘and at Oscar who seemed to confound Jo’s wits altogether.’23

  There were occasions when Oscar and Constance wore planned, matching or complementary outfits that made something of a spectacle. Louise Jopling recalled an instance when they walked along the King’s Road in Chelsea, with Oscar in a suit of brown cloth with innumerable little buttons on it that looked ‘rather like a glorified page’s costume’. Mrs Oscar meanwhile ‘had on a large picture hat, with beautiful white feathers adorning it’. The couple were immediately taunted by a gang of street urchins, who, surprisingly well versed in the Bard, commented that they were like ‘’Amlet and Ophelia out for a walk’. On another occasion, at a private view at the Grosvenor Gallery, they were ‘a harmony in green. The coat of the apostle of culture was of Lincoln green cloth heavily trimmed with fur, while Mrs Oscar had a very pretty and graceful velvet gown of exactly the same shade of colour.’24

  But what seems clear is that, apart from such moments of collaboration, it was generally Constance who now took on the mantle of eccentric dress, while Oscar gradually began to adopt what would become his signature style: conventional attire with unconventional details. Although his dress may have had dandyish touches (Bradley and Cooper remembered him in a lilac shirt with heliotrope tie at around this time), it was more often than not now described as ‘sensible’.25 It was as if his marriage to Constance had bestowed a degree of respectability and maturity on the one-time rebel, who now seemed ‘lulled into confidence … by the security ensured through his happy marriage … There was no longer any need for eccentric and startling self-advertisement.’26 Oscar conversely gave his new wife permission to express the most extreme tendencies of her character.

  Although fashion may appear superficial, Constance’s collaboration with Mrs Nettleship represented a practical demonstration of serious thinking about dress that was circulating within certain circles. That Oscar would begin to explore the subject of dress in a new set of lectures devised within a few months of his marriage may well reflect the influence that Constance had on him and his subject matter.

  On 1 October 1884 Oscar delivered his new lecture on dress to an audience in Ealing. He would repeat it on tour over the next six months. Oscar suggested that there had been a golden age of English dress. Harking back to a pre-1066 England, when ladies wore the loose medieval robes that the Pre-Raphaelite painters had re-imagined, he suggested that this era of beauty and simplicity was lost when William the Conqueror and his French court brought in new, exaggerated styles. Despite another brief period of beautiful clothing in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the restoration of Charles II revived the French influence once again, and since then it had persisted. In the 1880s the French-inspired Watteau toilette, with its hourglass profile created by tight corsetry, its tight-fitting sleeves and heavy bustle, and its high-heeled shoes dominated English fashion.

  Fundamentally his views on dress recognized the need to liberate women from the distorting and deforming clothing that moulded their bodies into idealized shapes. Oscar suggested that dress should be ‘rational’. He advocated the wearing of high waistbands that did away with corsetry. He praised the Greeks, Assyrians and Egyptians for clothing that was supported from the shoulder rather than the waist, and he condemned high-heeled shoes that tipped the body of the wearer forwards. He even suggested that wool was the ideal fabric, able to provide warmth in winter but also feel cool in summer.

  It’s hard not to hear something of Constance’s voice in these lectures. That she favoured dresses with high waistbands is clear. That she shunned high heels is also known, not least because of a comical note she wrote to her brother in 1882 in which she announced: ‘I have ordered a pair of shoes to be made for me with broad soles and low heels. We have discovered that my left foot is a three quarters of a size larger than my right.’27

  To the twenty-first-century eye, the considerat
ions of where to place a waistband and whether or not to wear heels seem flippant. But in the nineteenth century these were considerations that had genuinely important social issues at their heart. The issue of restriction to one side, there were the health issues at stake: tight corsetry crushed internal organs and deformed ribs. The stiff ivory stays often included in corsets deformed muscles and created chronic spinal damage. There were safety issues too. The large crinolines that women had worn in the earlier part of the century were terrible fire hazards. Oscar’s own family had had their share of tragedy in this respect. His father’s two illegitimate daughters had died in hideous circumstances. The girls had attended a dance one evening. The crinoline skirt of one caught in a fire. When the other tried to save her sister she too caught ablaze. They became two human torches. Despite the frantic attempts of other party-goers to roll the girls on the floor and beat out the flames, both of them succumbed to their burns.

  Working-class women, even in their simpler outfits, also found themselves at risk from their clothes. The long, cumbersome skirts that women wore were trip and catch hazards – something that working women in factory environments were all too aware of. A skirt getting caught in heavy machinery was a genuine danger.

  The idea that Aesthetic fashion was also something altogether safer and more wholesome for women was soon being widely acknowledged. By 1885 the press were conflating the terms ‘artistic’ and ‘hygienic’ when it came to dress. When Constance attended a lecture that Whistler gave in March that year, the lady correspondent for the Bristol Mercury and Daily Post observed plenty of pretty dresses

  of both styles of fashion which now prevail in society, according to the taste of the wearer. Tight-fitting, well draped gowns, after the Parisian models, and some which might be called hygienic, or perhaps artistic, loose and flowing and very simple. Mrs Oscar Wilde of course wore one of the latter style, with a very high waist and a plain skirt. It was made of soft, creamy silk, embroidered with golden yellow flowers and she had daffodils in her hair and on her bodice.28