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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f this polemical atmosphere, one in which he realized that it was possible to make a name for oneself by transgressing rules and taboos and that it was possible to ground his own personal quest by reference to Greek antiquity.∞≠
Oscar Wilde himself had manners that were quite e√eminate, and he
seems to have cultivated this stance as part and parcel of the aestheticism he wanted to incarnate. When, for example, he traveled to the United States in 1882 to give a series of lectures, many members of one of the clubs that invited him, the Century Association, refused to be introduced to him. One of the older members of the club went around saying, ‘‘Where is she? Have you seen her? Well, why not say ‘she’? I understand she’s a Charlotte-Ann.’’∞∞
Ellmann’s biography provides a whole series of testimonies to his sashaying walk, his provocative demeanor, his audacious play with the codes of sexual appearance. It comes as no surprise, then, to find the New York Times printing (in January 1882) the malicious observations of a former classmate of Wilde’s, claiming that Wilde lost any chance of ever obtaining a teaching post at Oxford because ‘‘he assumed a guise that sturdier minds thought of as epicene. ’’∞≤
In fact, Oxford students seem to have had little doubt as to Wilde’s
personality. Ironic comments on his e√eminate manners were to be heard even during his student years, before he arrived at Oxford, when he was still at Trinity College, Dublin. The plays on words to be found in the Suggestion Book of the Philosophical Society, where students were free to write their commentaries, are unambiguous and make persistent fun of Wilde’s mannered aestheticism. On one page of this book, there is a caricature of a policeman, reprimanding Wilde for a nocturnal adventure that was perhaps not purely aesthetic in character.∞≥ It is also quite clear that at the time aestheticism, or aesthetic leanings, or simply the choice of artistic pursuits were tantamount to a renunciation of virility, and further, that they laid someone open to suspicion of homosexuality. Equally clearly, for many homosexuals, the aesthetic pose was one way of a≈rming and expressing their homosexuality. An artistic air, a fervor for the arts, or an aesthetic temperament—all of which were ways of expressing a revolt against the normative masculinity of the dominant class in England—also allowed many homosexuals to adopt publicly a recognizable set of gestures, of manner-isms, of tastes, of cultural references. They created a ‘‘role’’ in which one’s sexuality and one’s personality could find expression. This was true to such
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an extent that toward the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth ‘‘artist’’ was closely associated with ‘‘homosexual.’’ In any case, Wilde’s classmates perceived things in this way. Wilde detested the athlet-ically inclined among the students at university, and they were happy to return the favor. Many stories, true or false, circulated regarding the cruelties they inflicted on him. One evening a group of them went to visit him, four of them having been charged to beat him up and destroy his furniture—the symbols of his aesthetic taste (which is to say, of his rejection of the values they held dear), symbols of his supposed homosexuality. Much to everyone’s surprise, Wilde defended himself so successfully that he was able to throw his assailants out the door.∞∂
The humiliation of the homosexual or of the e√eminate man by means of a violent manifestation of ‘‘virile’’ force is a strikingly constant occurrence, one attested to in many historical periods. It hardly needs to be said that things have not changed greatly from Wilde’s moment to our own.∞∑
5
Moral Contamination
Symonds’s and Pater’s books were clearly of immense importance to Oscar Wilde. He was passionately interested in ancient Greece from his school days onward. As we have seen, if he chose to name the hero of his only novel Dorian, it was a reference to the milieu of Oxford Hellenism in which he had immersed himself. At the time of his trial, he would recall in his defense all the cultural references that went into his formation. The circumstances are well known: the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglas, left a calling card for Wilde at Wilde’s club. On that famous card he wrote: ‘‘Oscar Wilde, posing as a Somdomite [ sic].’’ Queensberry, who had left school at a young age to join the navy, only barely knew how to read and write, so his spelling mistake in writing the word ‘‘sodomite’’ is hardly surprising. For him the word probably had little meaning other than as an insult. Wilde takes him to court for defamation—even though the porter at the club had been careful to put the card in an envelope, ensuring that the insult was in no way a public one. How could Wilde have been so foolish? In De Profundis, he would accuse Alfred Douglas at some length of having urged him on to this fatal error. Douglas, Wilde claims, motivated by a vengefulness for a father he despised, pushed Wilde to take legal action against that father, thereby setting in motion a disastrous chain of events. Wilde’s friends, on the other hand, did all they could to prevent him from taking the matter to the courts.
But Wilde, unable to resist ‘‘Bosie,’’ went ahead with his suit against Queensberry. Unfortunately for Wilde, the law authorized the defendant in a trial for defamation to introduce evidence to prove the accuracy of the statements that had been made. Queensberry hired private detectives to undertake a secret investigation that would furnish all the evidence he needed.∞
During the first trial, Wilde was interrogated first by his own attorney and then cross-examined by Queensberry’s attorney, Edward Carson. When
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asked a question by his own attorney regarding a love letter he had written to Douglas and which had been stolen by a male prostitute hoping to use it for blackmail, Wilde replied that he told the young swindler the letter was a prose poem. He then recounted a threatening surprise visit he had received from Lord Queensberry, whom he asked, before showing him the door, ‘‘Do you seriously accuse your son and me of improper conduct?’’ Then he gave Queensberry’s reply: ‘‘I do not say that you are it, but you look it . . . and you pose at it, which is just as bad.’’ During cross-examination, Carson asked Wilde about The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘‘The a√ection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency?’’ Wilde replied, with all the characteristic scorn of the aesthete he was: ‘‘I have no knowledge of the views of ordinary individuals.’’≤
As is well known, Wilde lost his case against Queensberry, and this
inevitably set in motion further judicial procedures. If Wilde had not been defamed, the legal authorities could assume that Queensberry’s accusation had been proved and that Wilde should himself be tried for ‘‘indecent acts.’’
It was during the second trial that the prosecutor asked Wilde about the poems Alfred Douglas had written, notably about the verse that mentions the ‘‘love that dare not speak its name.’’ Wilde, whose wit had up to this point provided him with ample means for denials, lies, and pirouettes, launched into an eloquent extended statement in defense of homosexuality: The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great a√ection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual a√ection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of a√ection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man
has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not
understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the
pillory for it.≥
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f Wilde’s eloquence provoked spontaneous applause from the audience in the Old Bailey, but the prosecutor, feet firmly planted on the ground, remarked that this fine definition, which refers to the purity—the absence of sexuality—of a pedagogical relation, seemed hardly applicable to Wilde’s relations with the male prostitutes who were implicated in the a√air. Wilde was forced to admit that such a love as he described is unlikely to be met with more than once in a lifetime. Still, his eloquent and spirited outburst saved him from losing this first prosecution against him. The jury was unable to come to unanimous agreement to convict him. (It seems that one juror favored acquittal whereas eleven others were willing to condemn him.) The case therefore had to be retried. Wilde’s sentence came at the end of the second trial against him. Before announcing the sentence, the judge turned to Wilde and his co-defendant, Alfred Taylor, and said: ‘‘It is no use for me to address you.
People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any e√ect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried. That you, Taylor, kept a kind of male brothel it is impossible to doubt.
And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt.’’∂ Earlier, the Crown’s prosecutor had laid out the terrible charges to the jury in the following terms: ‘‘You owe a duty to society, however sorry you may feel yourselves at the moral downfall of an eminent man, to protect society from such scandals by removing from its heart a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint it all.’’∑ Wilde had doubtless intended to head o√ a charge like this when, during the second of the three trials, he invoked the pure and intellectual character of the love that is the basis of Plato’s philosophy and Michelangelo’s sonnets. We see here then the functioning of this pair of notions—we might better say of mental schemas: for some
homosexuality is a form of social corruption, while for others, those trying to legitimate it, it is related to purity, nobility, and art, to what is most elevated in society. In Wilde’s trials we witness the brutal confrontation of these two conceptions, and that confrontation sheds light on the pages written by Symonds twenty years earlier, in which he insisted on contrasting the noble and the vulgar, the high and the low, the pure and the impure. Or on the pages written by Pater in which he invokes the grandeur of art and the possibility of another renaissance produced by the spiritual fecundation of a younger man by a philosopher-lover. Symonds and Pater had tried to establish a counterdiscourse. They had undertaken to provide a historical and philosophical rejoinder to the dominant ideology (the one found in the
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mouths of Wilde’s prosecutors) that claimed that homosexuality meant the ruin of civilization. Wilde gave voice to the discourse of Pater and Symonds in the courtroom. But the encounter did not take place on level ground.
Those who favored eradicating or silencing homosexuality held the positions of power. They were the ones deciding the men’s fate. So, after expressing his personal indignation at the ‘‘horrible charges’’ leveled at the two accused men (Wilde and Taylor), the judge sentenced them to two years of hard labor.
Richard Ellmann’s description of that labor and of the prison conditions under which those sentenced to such labor were required to live is quite simply terrifying. Such a sentence often meant a quick death shortly after release from prison. This fate was all the more likely for someone previously unaccustomed to manual labor—which was evidently the case for Wilde.
Wilde would in fact die three years after his release from prison. In his 1901
article, Gide describes the ‘‘weakened and broken’’ Wilde ‘‘whom the prison returned to us,’’ a man so di√erent from ‘‘the prodigious being he was at first.’’∏
If I have given so much space to the trial of Oscar Wilde, it is because we see in it the intersection of a certain number of themes that must be taken into account in any approach to gay culture. Even if we decide to think that Wilde was highly imprudent in taking Queensberry to court for defamation, we should probably accept, as Ellmann does, that he was headed for a fall.
This is not to countenance some stereotypical idea of inevitable downfall—
an idea that haunts both gay and homophobic literature throughout the first half of the twentieth century (and films until the 1960s). But it remains true that because he played with the limits imposed by English society in the nineteenth century, because he (consciously or unconsciously) politicized his way of life, Wilde could not help but provoke a strong reaction against him. His way of displaying his homosexuality, of surrounding himself with young men who were for the most part lovers or former lovers of Alfred Douglas, obliged him to find his way between, as Ellmann puts it, ‘‘blackmailing boys and furious fathers,’’ the former being all too ready to sell themselves or him.π So sooner or later, given a society in which homosexuality could only be lived out discreetly or secretly, an artist who exhibited scandalous behavior was bound to find himself convicted and broken by
‘‘justice’’ and by prison.
∞∫≠
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f As Neil Bartlett puts it, Wilde was not convicted simply for being homosexual, but for being a public figure who was also homosexual, and further, who refused to remain silent and hide what he was. Perhaps this was, in Henri de Régnier’s words, a ‘‘chronological error’’: ‘‘Mr. Wilde imagined himself to be living in Italy during the Renaissance or in Greece in the age of Socrates. He was punished—severely—for this chronological error, given that he lived in London, where this anachronism is apparently quite common.’’∫ Even if the tail end of de Régnier’s sentence does qualify the idea of the anachronism (suggesting rather that the reality being described was both widespread and well-known), still his notion might help us to see that Wilde’s fate was sealed as soon as the scandal became public knowledge.
Wilde would at that point have to be silenced. Gide, in his ‘‘In Memoriam,’’
recounts something Wilde had said to him a few years before his downfall:
‘‘Prudence! But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible . . . I can not go further . . . Something must happen . . .
something else . . .’’Ω Indeed, Gide seems deeply convinced that Wilde was destined for a terrible end. Proust too describes Wilde’s conviction as the fulfillment of a destiny. In fact, this is one of the examples he uses at the outset of Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), when he speaks of the curse laid on the race of inverts, ‘‘their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet one day fêted in every drawing-room and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head.’’∞≠ Wilde himself, in De Profundis, his long prison letter to Alfred Douglas, repeatedly invokes ‘‘Destiny,’’ and even
‘‘Doom,’’ to describe what has happened to him. And was not the idea of an unavoidable fate already the very subject of The Picture of Dorian Gray?
By studying Wilde’s trials, one can also learn to what an extent the question of blackmail has been central to the history of homosexuality—throughout the world. Ulrichs, in his struggle to decriminalize homosexuality, had already put forward this argument (and Hirschfeld would repeat it): blackmail places honest men under the influence of scoundrels who have them at their mercy, and a single unfortunate encounter can thus destroy a man’s whole life. How many broken lives, tragedies, a
nd suicides have been caused by blackmail? In light of the Wilde trials, it becomes apparent how great the solitude of a gay man could be once justice had dealt with him publicly. If,
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among all those in high society who had only a few months previously
delighted in Wilde’s company, no one was willing to take it upon themselves to intervene to prevent the legal proceedings from getting underway, this is because everyone realized that any intervention in Wilde’s favor would rebound on whoever tried it. Any such persons would be suspected of sharing Wilde’s tastes and of wishing to protect themselves.
Surely this was the case with the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, who had privately been accused by Alfred Douglas’s father of having led Drumlanrig, Queensberry’s oldest son, who was also Rosebery’s personal secretary, into the accursed practice of homosexuality. Drumlanrig’s suicide, in October 1894, was perhaps the result of his fear of becoming the victim of a blackmailer and ruining the minister’s career. This would easily explain both Queensberry’s fierce anger at Wilde and Rosebery’s hesitancy about intervening on Wilde’s behalf, even though he knew him and had dined with him on a number of occasions.∞∞
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 26