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

by Franny Moyle

  Amid the excitement of appointing godparents and generally showing off their new baby, Oscar wrote to the author, polymath and eccentric Edward Heron Allen and asked him to cast the baby’s horoscope. Heron Allen was one of those men who, like Douglas Ainslie, found himself mesmerized by Constance and fell rather inappropriately in love with her.6 Perhaps this was why it took him six months to get around to the task. Or perhaps some instinctive sense of foreboding had prevented him doing so sooner. Just before Christmas he delivered the news that Cyril’s life was not to be a rosy one. It was a strange warning, presented to Constance and Oscar at the height of their happiness, and not the first that they would receive. According to Heron Allen, the devoted parents were deeply grieved by the results.

  Cyril was an utterly loved baby. Both Constance and Oscar had a passion for their first-born that comes through in references to this child again and again. The neighbouring Hopes were suitably scathing about the new arrival, wondering whether the Wildes’ experiments in dress would be extended to the new addition to the family. Laura Hope wondered, ‘Will it be swathed in artistic baby clothes? Sage green bibs and tuckers, I suppose, and a peacock blue robe.’7

  The new arrival had another effect. If marriage had somehow been responsible for Oscar settling into a more mature persona, the arrival of a child prompted something further. Oscar decided he must get a job. Freelance journalism and lecturing were no longer enough when there was a child to feed. Just weeks after Cyril was born, he wrote to his friend the Hon. George Curzon asking if he might help him become ‘one of her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools!’ Curzon and Wilde were friends from Oxford days. When Oscar had sent his poetry to the Oxford Union, Curzon was one of the few voices to sound out in his defence. Now Oscar wanted Curzon to be his referee, not least because the Rt Hon. Edward Stanhope, the politician in whose gift the inspectorates were held, was not within Wilde’s circle and Oscar was concerned that ‘he may take the popular idea of me as a real idler’.8 Oscar’s bids for secure employment in this instance were unsuccessful.

  Motherhood, however, did not suggest a more traditional, domestic wifely role to Constance. Far from it. The trajectory on which she had been placed in marrying Oscar was one she was determined to continue even after the birth of her first child. Artistic marriage amounted to more than conventional domesticity for women, even when children were introduced.

  On her return from honeymoon Constance had written to Otho and expressed her firm intention to have a career. ‘I am thinking of becoming a correspondent to some paper, or else going on the stage: que pensez vous? I want to make some money: perhaps a novel would be better.’9 Babies were not going to get in Constance’s way.

  Her very first foray into published writing occurred a month before the arrival of Cyril. In the ‘Correspondence’ section of the Pall Mall Gazette on 6 May 1885 Constance took issue with another lady correspondent on a subject she was clearly genuinely passionate about.

  On the topic of ‘Ladies’ Dress – Esthetic and Artistic’ Constance explained that she was a ‘one of the much abused aesthetes’ who a former correspondent had complained were untidy in their appearance. The correspondent in question had suggested women should be in tailor-made dresses. Constance was quick to retaliate with the point that these outfits are ‘ill fitted for home occupation or home comfort’. With her current situation clearly at the forefront of her mind, Constance also took issue with the suggestion that ‘a young matron should wear what is close fitting and appropriate to her duties’ by pointing out that ‘the duties most ordinarily assumed by our young matrons are those of childbearing, for which close-fitting dress is eminently unsuitable’. In a series of further comments Constance went on to demolish her opponent on a point-by-point basis. If some people look untidy in Aesthetic dress, it is because they are essentially untidy people, but even this must be better than the hideous distortion to female bodies effected by ‘the high Paris hat and the ungainly crinolette’. Aesthetes were simply attempting to preserve the ‘proper proportions of the human body while allowing as much freedom and ease of motion as possible’. And finally Constance declared her allegiance to the ‘promoters of the rational dress movement’ and added, ‘the inconvenience of their dress is owing not to their eccentricity, but to the necessity they are under of trying to make the divided skirt look as though it were not divided, on account of the intolerance of the British public’.

  In 1881 the enterprising Viscountess Harberton had founded a campaigning organization, the Rational Dress Society, ‘to promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based on considerations of health, comfort, and beauty and to deprecate constant changes of fashion which cannot be recommended on any of these grounds’.10 The Viscountess embraced the principles of the society herself, for it is she who is largely credited with the invention of the ‘divided’ skirt, which she herself wore with utter disregard for the ridicule that this costume widely attracted.

  Constance joined the Rational Dress Society. Her activities for the organization would lead her into public speaking in 1886 and into editing in 1888, when she would take on the editorship of the society’s Gazette. She may well have been a member from the inception of the society, although it is more likely that she would have joined when, as a married woman, she had greater financial and social freedom to do so.

  The overlap between the Aesthetic and rational dress movements became clear in 1883, when the Rational Dress Society held an exhibition in the Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, in which Mrs Nettleship featured among the exhibitors. Who knows whether Constance, with her keen interest in dress, paid her 2s 6d entry fee to see, in that same venue to which she and Otho would go to hear Oscar lecture, stalls displaying a vast array of costume options for the modern woman and her children?

  The first stall in the hall was taken by Messrs Liberty & Co. of Regent Street, where a range of their art fabrics was accompanied by an explanation of their inclusion in the exhibition. Art fabrics ‘play an essentially prominent part in connexion with Rational and Healthy dress’, a placard read, going on to explain how Liberty’s had revived the materials so much in favour with ancient Greece, a time of healthy and liberal costume. Liberty’s did not combine their fabrics with new materials; their fabrics were pure, their silk pure silk. As for colour, Liberty’s argued that ‘colour is generally acknowledged to be an invaluable agent in refining and elevating the mind’ and revealed that the basis of the company’s dyes ‘were of old Persian origin, which for beauty and softness of colour are unequalled’.

  But above and beyond this, the hall in general was greater testimony to the close connection between the rational dress and women’s lib movements. The show presented costumes that would enable women to take men on in almost any activity. There were outfits that would allow women greater freedom to skate, boat, play tennis, ride a tricycle or play cricket. There was even one dressmaker who had imagined a mountaineering dress for one particularly adventurous client.

  Mrs Nettleship presented, among other items, a ‘Ladies’ Walking Costume’, which had wide trousers beneath it. The inclusion of trousers enabled the dressmaker not only to lift the level of the skirt from the ground but also to reduce the weight of an over-skirt by half. As another exhibitor explained in her marketing material, ‘the trouser covers the body fully and evenly and thereby fewer layers are necessary’.

  In addition to various trouser options, the exhibition also featured divided skirts inspired by Viscountess Harberton’s own designs, and a stall dedicated to Japanese costume. Lilley and Skinner showed visitors options for ‘sensible boots and shoes’, while another exhibitor presented eight different outfits for working women. There were even some futuristic costumes for women, imagined by Mrs E. King, the secretary of the society. These included short knee-length dresses and loose jackets, underneath which ladies wore trousers or bloomers to cover their legs. Costumes such as these indicate how utterly avant-garde the rational dres
s movement was. And the press saw it as such, constantly ridiculing its ambitions and suggestions, and often depicting its members as, frankly, potty.

  By March 1885 Oscar had spent more than three years on the road lecturing. Now he turned his attention more fully to journalism. He became a regular contributor to both the Dramatic Review and the Pall Mall Gazette, and his association with the latter no doubt eased the path to publication for Constance’s letter. She enjoyed the novelty of seeing herself in print and wrote to Otho to tell him so, adding, ‘Oscar is very pleased with it and sorry that I did not sign it.’11

  Constance had been mulling over a literary career for some months. In July 1884 she had told her brother she intended to write a piece of fiction which she described as a ‘practical romance’. If it was written, it does not survive. But it was not long before Constance did become a published author. First, however, she had some other ambitions to explore.

  Apropos of her desire to go on the stage, an opportunity for Constance to try her hand occurred in 1886. Not least through his work on Tite Street, Constance and Oscar were, of course, on very close terms with Edward Godwin. And so when the architect turned impresario and decided to stage a spectacular Classical production, a reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Helena in Troas that would accommodate both professional actors and amateurs drawn from his circle of friends, it was quite natural that Constance should be considered.

  There had been growing interest in Classical subjects in the 1870s and 1880s. Aestheticism in its quest for beauty found much to admire in Classical precedents. Oscar had already likened Lillie Langtry to Helen of Troy in his poem ‘The New Helen’, and painters such as Burne-Jones were exploring Classical motifs in their art.

  Moreover, new archaeological approaches were making the Classical world accessible in new and vivid ways. In the 1860s the innovative archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, instead of just recovering artefacts from the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as his predecessors had done for a hundred years, concentrated on clearing debris from the site so that for the first time the architecture and streets could be viewed. This new kind of excavation and display of private houses and civic buildings suddenly generated interest in the everyday life of the Classical world. Cities, and the people who once populated them, arose phoenix-like from the ashes.

  No wonder, then, that the everyday wear of ordinary Classical Greek folk was being cited as a model for the reform of everyday wear for nineteenth-century Londoners. And no surprise either that throughout the 1880s theatre began to look back to its Classical roots.

  In 1880 Agamemnon had been performed at Oxford, and then the production had come to London. It had been the first attempt to perform Greek theatre in an authentic historical manner. Other attempts had followed. In 1885 a young Cambridge Classicist, Harry Marillier, had sought Oscar out to invite him in his capacity as drama critic to attend a version of Eumenides in Cambridge’s Theatre Royal.12

  Although Marillier and those preceding him had set the tone and made great strides in imagining Greek costume, and the manner of Greek acting and direction, they had been handicapped by the theatres in which their productions were staged. Greek theatre performed on a raised oblong stage could never feel properly authentic. For that one would need an amphitheatre. Godwin understood this. His Helena of Troas was to be staged in a circus space, which with its semicircular arrangement could recapture something of the original amphitheatre performance.

  And so Constance found herself heading into the centre of London on 17 May 1886 and making her way to the stage door of Hengler’s Circus in Argyll Street, just a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus.13 Hengler’s had a low-level, circular performance space and raked seating, and here Frederick Charles Hengler, the son of a tightrope artist, had been staging a circus with everything from acrobats on horseback to Rubin Raffin and his Porcine Wonder – a clown with a performing pig which not only jumped through hoops but also, to the delight of assembled Londoners, braved blazing gates.

  Godwin boarded over the sandy floor and laid tiles in geometric patterns that would provide guidelines for the movement and dance of his fifteen-strong Greek chorus. In the midst of what he had now transformed into a semicircular Greek ‘orchestra’ he placed an altar to Dionysus. Behind the orchestra and opposite the audience he built a raised stage reached by two low flights of steps. Godwin decorated the lower part of the stage with reliefs featuring the battle of the Amazons and Centaurs. Two doorways framed by Greek pilasters gave on to painted scenes of the Greek coastline and provided the means of entrance and exit for the chorus and the other characters. This was King Priam’s palace.

  Constance had the elevated role of one of Helen’s two handmaidens. Her companion was played by a Miss Hare. Helen herself was played by the actress Alma Murray, dressed in yellow silk. The handmaidens were in green and white linen. The clothes were as authentic as possible, the linen unbleached and, where dyed, done so with soft vegetable dyes for authenticity. Oscar’s friend the painter Louise Jopling had a role, as did a number of the Wilde ‘set’, including Mr and Mrs Beerbohm Tree as Paris and Oenone respectively.

  For six nights Constance and the rest of the cast braved the audiences. With the exception of Punch, which of course had a field day laughing at the Aesthetes undertaking their latest project, the newspaper reports were generally favourable. Oscar himself provided a positive write-up in the Dramatic Review. With professional propriety he was careful to mention all the leading ladies except his own wife. However, Constance was noted on at least a couple of occasions by other less compromised critics. Her notice in The Era is typical:

  The graceful form and appropriate action of Mrs Louise Jopling, who was Hecuba’s tire woman were noticeable; Miss Hare’s refined style and beautiful features drew attention to one of the Handmaidens; and Mrs Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic poses and picturesque appearance were admired in the representative of the other. The performance was witnessed by an audience which included his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and many artistic and dramatic nobilities; and was well worth seeing for once, simply as a curiosity of archaeological research and conscientious reproduction of the Past.14

  This was the first and last time Constance took to the stage. If she had hoped that, like so many of Oscar’s female friends, she might make her name treading the boards, she ultimately lacked either the talent or perhaps the genuine opportunity. With one child to manage, perhaps a stage career might have been conceivable, but with two children the notion of late nights and hard graft might have felt too much even for a woman as determined as Constance. For as Constance stood in King Priam’s imaginary palace she almost certainly knew that her second child was already on its way. In May 1886, less than a year since the birth of Cyril, she was three months’ pregnant.

  The contrast between Constance’s first and second pregnancies could not have been more profound. While the first was fired with a sense of excitement and adventure, the second was dull and laborious. Oscar, who only a year earlier had been so accommodating of his wife’s bouts of prenatal sickness and frailty, was now less sensitive to these unavoidable symptoms. The journalist and author Frank Harris, a friend of Wilde’s, claimed that years later Oscar recounted to him how during this period his sexual attraction to Constance plummeted:

  When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself around the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and – oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome.15

  The accounts of the graceful Mrs Wilde as she appeared in Helena of Troas fail to match Oscar’s alleged picture of his wife with child, but nevertheless, as her second pregnancy progressed, Constance and Oscar’s marriage suffered. With the fi
rst flush of sexual infatuation greatly diminished by its consequences, they cheered themselves with the notion that they might have a girl, the perfect complement to the adorable Cyril. They even had a name ready for her: Isola. Oscar had had a sister called Isola whom he had adored but who died when she was just nine years old, the victim of childhood fever. Perhaps Oscar had hoped that with a baby daughter the loss of his sister might finally be eased, or even replaced.

  Constance went into labour on a miserable November day. Charles de Lacy Lacy barely made it in time from his home in Grosvenor Street to Tite Street, the fog was so thick. But instead of delivering the little girl that everyone wanted so badly, another boy was born. Unlike Cyril, who had been robust and healthy, Vyvyan, as he was christened, was a less than ideal infant.16 He was small and ailing from the start. Instead of the flourish of activity that attended the arrival of Cyril, there was less fascination with the second addition to their family. While the exact moment of Cyril’s arrival had been celebrated in the commission of horoscopes and a bout of letter-writing, no such activity seemed to attend Vyvyan’s introduction to the world. In fact, Constance and Oscar didn’t even register his birth for several weeks, and when they did, they could not remember the exact date of his birth other than it had occurred in the first week of November. The 3rd of that month was therefore registered without any certainty of accuracy.

  Even the appointment of godparents hadn’t gone quite according to plan. The Wildes asked the great critic John Ruskin if he would oblige. To have a figure of such high cultural esteem and social standing would have been a coup indeed for the newly arrived Vyvyan. But Ruskin wrote back and said he felt too old. So the services of the painter Mortimer Menpes were sought instead. Menpes was a great friend of Godwin and Whistler, with whom he shared a passion for things Japanese. Like Walter Harris, he had the spirit of an adventurer and explorer. Not long after Vyvyan was born, Menpes set off on a year-long tour of Japan, bringing back on his return not only a huge amount of artefacts but also an enormous collection of work he himself had produced in response to the country, which he subsequently exhibited.