by Oscar Wilde
“Lady Alroy” likewise appears initially to center on the heterosexual romance (or lack of it) between the awkward, possessive Lord Murcheson—who confesses that he “doesn’t understand women well enough” and “cannot love where I cannot trust”—and the elusive, beautiful Lady Alroy. Lady Alroy’s motives for breaking off relations with Murcheson and pursuing a double life in a shabby part of the city, where she rents a room privately under an assumed name, are of special interest. The unnamed narrator tells Lord Murcheson that there is nothing sinister to her motivations, that she is “a woman with a mania for mystery” and “merely a Sphinx without a secret.” But the narrator, a man of the world who over the course of the story assumes the importance of a character in his own right, knows Lord Murcheson to be distraught at Lady Alroy’s evasions, and we ignore at our peril any consideration of what motivates the conclusions the narrator draws. For instance, he has previously mused to himself that Lady Alroy had “the face of some one who had a secret,” and we know, too, that he is cavalier with the truth (he told us previously that Murcheson “would be the best of fellows if he did not always speak the truth”). Moreover, his offhand remark that he found Murcheson “so handsome,” taken together with his flippant attitude to heterosexual courtship as such (“he looked anxious and puzzled.… I concluded it was a woman, and asked him if he was married yet”), suggests that he harbors unspoken sexual secrets of his own. That Lady Alroy is “a Sphinx without a secret,” then, might well be a deliberate evasion—an assertion designed to keep Murcheson in blissful ignorance of Lady Alroy’s motives as well as an entirely private recognition on the narrator’s part that he shares affinities with Lady Alroy in her drive for privacy. The real “Sphinx” of the story, it turns out, is not Lady Alroy but the narrator himself. Once again it is the unspoken relations between men that acquire greatest interest.
There is a homoerotic strain to “The Fisherman and His Soul” too, especially in the yearning of the unloved Soul for the body of the young Fisherman, and this is sharply represented in Charles Ricketts’s 1891 illustration. The Fisherman’s passion for the mermaid and the personal struggle this precipitates, however, take center stage. What is important here is that his passion, like that of the dwarf for the princess in “The Birthday of the Little Princess,” is illicit and ultimately proves fatal. By falling in love with a mermaid, he has broken a civilized taboo and allied himself with a sensuous pagan world to which institutionalized Christianity stands opposed: “love of the body is vile … vile and evil are the pagan things God suffers to wander through His world,” thunders the priest, sounding a lot like Iokanaan in Wilde’s biblical play Salome; “thy leman is lost, and thou shalt be lost with her.… Accursed be the sea-folk, and accursed be all they who traffic with them.”
In some respects, the Fisherman’s defense of his passion for the mermaid echoes the romantic idealism of the Nightingale in “The Nightingale and The Rose”: “Love is better than wisdom and more precious than riches,” declares the Fisherman, echoing the Nightingale’s “love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals.” Such idealism ultimately proves fatal in both cases. Unlike with the Nightingale, however, the Fisherman’s love for the mermaid results in his excommunication from the civic and religious polity; it is only when he listens to the treacherous pleadings of his own soul that his love for the mermaid is undone, in a clear act of self-betrayal, resulting in a climax of heartbroken deaths. As with “The Birthday of the Little Princess,” Wilde makes a point of emphasizing the tragic fatality of unorthodox and illicit passion. More than this, he emphasizes its fundamental humanity through the consistent sympathy he evokes for such “accursed” figures as the dwarf and the Fisherman, and elicits our outrage at the treatment they receive from an unforgiving, heartless world.
Charles Ricketts, illustration to “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from A House of Pomegranates (London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine, 1891).
It is hard not to attribute the growing pessimism of Wilde’s short fiction, as well as the central importance attached to fatal and illicit passion, at least partly to the circumstances in which the stories were written. In late 1886 Wilde began a lengthy secret affair with seventeen-year-old Robert Ross, who notwithstanding his youthfulness was more sexually experienced and uninhibited than the older man. Like Wilde’s swallow, Ross—who was present in the room when Wilde died, impoverished and bereft of his former glory, in 1900—devoted much of his life to his “happy prince.” He oversaw Wilde’s affairs while he was in prison, cared for him when he was released, arranged Wilde’s funeral and burial in a pauper’s grave upon his death, and dedicated the remaining eighteen years before his own death to the restoration of Wilde’s estate and reputation as well as the well-being of his orphaned sons.52 It isn’t positively known if Ross was the first of Wilde’s many male sexual partners, although both Wilde and Ross later represented this as the case. Certainly, Wilde’s friendships with young men had often been passionate, even flirtatious, for years before he met Ross. What seems indisputable, however, is that Wilde’s affair with Ross brought him into conflict with a harsh new law criminalizing “gross indecency” between men that came into effect in 1885.
Framed at the eleventh hour as an amendment to new legislation designed principally “for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes,” Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act ran as follows: “any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.”53 Rushed and vaguely worded, this criminal statute was to have the most pernicious and longstanding ramifications for British society. By outlawing “gross indecency” rather than any specified sex act, this section of the 1885 Act made even the most innocent, private, and consensual actions liable to criminal prosecution. The criminal standard was loosely defined and subjective, and the burden of proof dangerously low. It has been said that Section 11 brought the modern male homosexual into being, for it created panic, paranoia, and a new sense of sexual identity among both men with same-sex desires and those most desirous of policing them. The statute quickly became known as the “Blackmailer’s Charter”: “gross indecency” was a catch-all phrase, and two years before he fell afoul of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1895, Wilde himself was subjected to blackmail by virtue of letters that he had recently written to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas and that Douglas had incautiously let fall into the hands of the blackmailer, Alfred Wood.54
Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act had the profoundest impact on the subsequent course of Wilde’s life and career. It was under this act that Wilde was convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency in 1895, and shortly before his death he was to proclaim that “the road is long and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good.”55 Insofar as Wilde’s short fiction is concerned, in concert with his affair with Ross, the statute activated a newfound sense that love must be pursued in secret, illicitly, because it conflicted with the strictures of the state. Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann writes that “homosexual love roused him from pasteboard conformity to the expression of latent desires. After 1886 he was able to think of himself as a criminal, moving guiltily among the innocent.”56 It seems just as likely that, in light of his affairs with Ross and other men, the new criminal statute exacerbated in Wilde a sense of himself as one of society’s victims, precipitating a fisherman-like conflict between his desires and his “soul.” He must tread warily henceforth if his love for men was not to end tragically. Or perhaps even while composing “The Birthday of the Little Princess,” he already possessed a sense that he was, like the dwarf, a “missha
pen thing,” a “grotesque monster … not properly shaped, as all other people were,” and that his life as a lover of men was bound to end tragically? A “note of Doom” runs through all his books and plays, he writes in De Profundis. As he had written (quoting scripture) in the sonnet that prefaced his 1881 Poems:
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?57
Wilde’s concern with the fatality of illicit passion reaches its culmination in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play Salome. But he gives his most frankly homosexual treatment to the topic in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” the penultimate story in this collection and one with a deep resonance for our own times. On one level, the story concerns the mysterious identity of the “fair youth” addressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets: in Wilde’s hands, Shakespeare’s lover is the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” to whom the first quarto of the sonnets is dedicated, and the sonnets are one of the most passionate, albeit carefully coded, expressions of male same-sex love in all literature. In a series of brilliant readings of individual sonnets, inspired partly from a theory first espoused in the eighteenth century by the scholars Thomas Tyrwhitt and Edmond Malone, Wilde hypothesizes that Mr. W. H. was a young actor named Willie Hughes, in Shakespeare’s own theater company, with whom Shakespeare fell deeply in love and who thereby became the inspiration for his greatest writing. The story’s framing narrative, however, concerns the lengths to which three well-educated gentlemen of Wilde’s own day go to prove Hughes’s historical existence (and thus the truth of Shakespeare’s love for him). The pursuit of Willie Hughes shapes the lives and even the deaths of these men, and in the vicissitudes of their search for the identity of Shakespeare’s lover, they are each forced to confront the limits of their own desire. At this level the story suggests the difficulty, even impossibility, of “knowing” homosexual love in a world of heterosexual hegemony.
Following its publication in the July 1889 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, Wilde expanded the story considerably, saying that he had “many more points to make.”58 Among other important additions, he buttressed the evidence from Shakespeare’s sonnets concerning Hughes’s existence and considerably enriched his portrait of the Renaissance as a period when masculinity was fluid, cross-dressing was commonplace in the world of the theater, and love between men was openly celebrated.59 Wilde returned to the story repeatedly over the remaining eleven years of his life in a series of failed attempts to secure book publication for it.60 Selections from the expanded version, first published in 1921, appear in the Appendix to the present edition. Taken together they make a compelling argument for the artificiality of modern gender constructs and the acceptability of same-sex love, an argument grounded in impressive historical and philosophical research as much as Wilde’s own imagination.
However, we should not forget that “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is a story—one, moreover, which both Wilde and his publisher briefly considered republishing in Tales from Blackwood, an occasional gathering of the best stories to appear in Blackwood’s Magazine. And if the expanded version is grounded in richer, more detailed, historical research, leading even Wilde himself to refer to it on occasion as an “essay” or “study,” it is the modern-day fictional setting and plot—essentially complete in the 1889 version—that carries the story’s emotional charge. For in their search for the identity of Shakespeare’s lover, each of the principal protagonists becomes a willing slave or disciple to the Willie Hughes theory, and each dedicates a large part of himself to the pursuit of corroborating evidence. Two of them even use their own deaths as a kind of martyrdom or sacrifice to convert others to the theory.
The theory had originated, the story goes, with a brilliant young drama student named Cyril Graham who, with his clear affinities to Willie Hughes—as a young actor, Graham is “always cast for the girls’ parts” since, as in Elizabethan times, women were not allowed to act in Victorian student productions—feels that Shakespeare’s sonnets must have been written for “some wonderful boy-actor of great beauty.” Graham’s friend Erskine, who confesses he was at one time “devoted” to Graham and found him “the most splendid creature I ever saw,” admits that the textual evidence which Graham uncovers from the sonnets themselves is brilliant. Nonetheless Erskine remains unconvinced without some independent evidence corroborating Willie Hughes’s historical existence, whereupon Graham constructs the faked Elizabethan portrait of Hughes that gives the story its title. This portrait in turn briefly convinces Erskine that Graham’s theory must be true. But when Erskine accidentally discovers that the portrait is a forgery and he is the victim of a deliberate deception, he angrily confronts Graham—who tells him, “I did it purely for your sake. You would not be convinced in any other way. It does not affect the truth of the theory”—and the next day Graham is dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
When Wilde’s story opens, Cyril Graham is long dead and Erskine gives this account of Graham’s brief life, death, and the origins of his theory to the story’s unnamed narrator, a man a “good deal” younger than himself who has come to dine and now sits in Erskine’s library, conversing privately over coffee and cigarettes. While giving his account to his young interlocutor, Erskine is still skeptical of Graham’s theory, although he has by no means recovered from the “horrible blow” of Graham’s suicide. As he listens to Erskine’s account, however, the narrator, undeterred by Erskine’s skepticism, becomes utterly convinced of Graham’s theory—a living reincarnation or disciple of Graham in a sense—and resolves to “take up the theory where Cyril Graham left it, and … prove to the world that he was right.” So far as the narrator is concerned, Cyril Graham is nothing less than “the youngest and the most splendid of all the martyrs of literature.”
Roughly a third of the 1889 story (and a good deal more in the expanded version) concerns the lengthy period in which the narrator dedicates himself to the discovery of further details about Willie Hughes’s existence through study and research. Although he uncovers no positive corroborating “evidence” of the kind Erskine had required, he finds a great deal more circumstantial and textual support for the theory, and at the end of three weeks (extended to two months in the longer version), convinced that he has now put the necessary flesh on the bones of Graham’s theory, he writes to Erskine in a fresh effort to persuade him: “I went over the whole ground,” Wilde’s narrator tells us, “and covered sheets of paper with passionate reiteration of the arguments and proofs that my study had suggested to me. It seemed to me that I was not merely restoring Cyril Graham to his proper place in literary history, but rescuing the honour of Shakespeare himself from the tedious memory of a commonplace intrigue. I put into the letter all my enthusiasm. I put into the letter all my faith.”
However, in the act of transcribing the “evidence” for Erskine to read, on the understanding that what had previously been a theory has now acquired the status of a historical fact, the narrator immediately and surprisingly becomes disenchanted with his own creation. “A curious reaction came over me,” he tells us: “It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory … that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject.… Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.” It is a necessary reminder that, as Wilde puts it elsewhere, “to be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.”61
Erskine’s reaction is even more surprising. The older man is now suddenly convinced of what he’d doubted all along, telling the narrator “you have proved the thing to me. Do you think I cannot estimate the value
of evidence?” Now Erskine, too, becomes Graham’s disciple, determined to devote his life to the theory and do justice to Graham’s memory, while the narrator occupies the skeptical position previously held by his older friend. In a repetition of his earlier breech with Graham, Erskine parts from the narrator “not exactly in anger, but certainly with a shadow between us.” After two years in which they never see one another again, the narrator receives sudden news that Erskine is now dead, ostensibly by his own hand in a last desperate effort to convert his young friend by an act of martyrdom in the name of Graham’s theory. “The truth was once revealed to you, and you rejected it,” Erskine tells the narrator in his final letter. “It comes to you now stained with the blood of two lives,—do not turn away from it.”
“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” on one level extends the concern with fatal and secret passion that runs through much of Wilde’s other short fiction. Like the Nightingale, we might say, Wilde sings “of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.” But here such passion is directed to an idea rather than a person—and not to the Platonic ideal of love for which the Nightingale surrenders her life, but rather to the idea of love between two men as suggested by Shakespeare’s sonnets, where it becomes the basis of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic creativity.62 Homoerotic desire is at best indirectly expressed in the story’s frame narrative. Despite occasional gestures of affection between them, the story’s central characters do not openly commit or represent themselves as lovers of other men. Instead they sublimate their erotic and emotional lives into a literary text—albeit one that also sings loudly of an immortal, profound love between two men—which they read and argue over passionately as if their very lives depended on it.63