An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

Concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Issue no 47 : November / December 2008

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EDITORIAL PAGE

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

Since November 2007 split this page has been split into two sections. SECTION I now contains our Editorial, short pieces that we hope will interest readers, and innovations. SECTION II is a Guide or site-map to what will be found on other pages of THE OSCHOLARS with explanatory notes and links to those pages (formerly to be found on the Editorial page). Each section is prefaced by a Table of Contents with hyper links to the Contents themselves. For Section I, please read on.

For Section II, please click

Clicking takes you to a Table of Contents;

clicking takes you to the hub page for our website;

clicking takes you to the home page of THE OSCHOLARS .

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THE OSCHOLARS is composed in Bookman Old Style, chiefly 10 point. You can adjust the size by using the text size command in the View menu of your browser, Internet Explorer being recommended. We do not usually publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form.

TABLE OF CONTENTS I: ITEMS ON THIS PAGE
I. NEWS from the Editor; changes to our team; innovations on the website; our discussion forum.	IV. OSCAR WILDE : THE POETIC LEGACY	XII. VIDEO OF THE MONTH
II. In the LIBRARY	V. ON THE CURRICULUM: TEACHING AND RESEARCHING WILDE, THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE, ÆSTHETICISM AND DECADENCE	XIII. WEB FOOT NOTES
III. NEWS, NOTES & QUERIES	VI. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	XIV. OGRAPHIES
1. Notes Towards an Iconography of Oscar Wilde.	VII. DANDIES, DRESS AND FASHION	XV. MAD, SCARLET MUSIC
2. Lady Wilde	VIII. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH	XVI. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES
3. Oscar Wilde and the Oxford Companions (2)	IX. LETTERS FROM BELGIUM, IRELAND, JAPAN & SWEDEN	XVII. COLOUR SUPPLEMENT
4. Two broadcasts	X. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS	XVIII. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS
5. Work in Progress	XI. OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE /WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE	XIX. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
6. A Wilde Collection
SUPPLEMENT: Melmoth #2, edited by Sondeep Kandola.

TABLE OF CONTENTS II : GUIDE TO ALL PAGES Click for the Guide itself, or GO to reach the pages directly
Awards	Special Issues	Publications	Strange Webs
Being Talking About	Going Wilde	The Rack and The Press	The Sibyl
Bibliographies	Guidance for submissions	Reading Groups	Teleny Revisited
Conferences, Lectures	Library	Rue des Beaux Arts	Upstage
Editorial, News & Notes [previous issue]	Mad, Scarlet Music	Shavings	Visions
Editorial Team	May I Say Nothing?	Society News	Wilde Societies
The Eighth Lamp	Moorings	Some Sell & Others Buy	Appendices

Nothing in THE OSCHOLARS © is copyright to the Journal save its name (although it may be to individual contributors) unless indicated by ©, and the usual etiquette of attribution will doubtless be observed. Please feel free to download it, re-format it, print it, store it electronically whole or in part, copy and paste parts of it, and (of course) forward it to colleagues.

As usual, names emboldened in the text are those of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS, who may be contacted through oscholars@gmail.com. Text in blue can be clicked for navigation.

I. NEWS FROM THE EDITOR

Innovations

Since our last issue we have again strengthened our Editorial team, reflecting and contributing to our ever-increasing coverage of period and topics. More information about them can be found by clicking .

· Gwen Orel, a New York theatre critic, has taken over from Patricia Flanagan Behrendt as American Theatre Editor. Patricia will continue to contribute other material from the United States for us.

A major innovation is the introduction of a new section: our Colour Supplement. Some will remember a strip cartoon by Dan Pearce called ‘The Millennium Man’ that appeared on the Internet some years ago and subsequently disappeared again. Click the illustration to take up the tale:

Pictured: The original door of cell C.3.3, Reading Gaol, now part of the HM Prison Service Collection housed at the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham.

This issue contains the second supplement dealing with late Victorian Gothic as a trope of decadence – MELMOTH, edited by Sondeep Kandola. This comes at the end of this page.

Our special supplement on Teleny, was published in October 2008. This was guest edited by Professor John McRae of the University of Nottingham, whose edition of Teleny was the first scholarly unexpurgated one to be published. Teleny Revisited now becomes a major on-line resource and further articles will be considered for publication. Contact Professor McRae @; see Teleny Revisited .

So many chances and changes have necessitated constant revisions in our publishing schedules, with only RUE DES BEAUX ARTS under Danielle Guérin’s editorship maintaining its intended two-monthly appearance on time, although THE OSCHOLARS seems back on track with an intended appearance in two-monthly instalments (the last was September/October). This has been balanced by our publishing new content on our website nearly every day, and announcing this in weekly reports on our ‘yahoo’ subsidiary. The number of our readers who have joined this has been growing, and it is increasingly our medium for making announcements in the place of mass mailings, which more and more fall foul of anti-spam traps either at the sending or receiving end. We do urge readers to sign up to this group. Our NOTICEBOARD also serves all our journals. Here we publish short term announcements of lectures, publications, papers and other items of interest submitted by readers. This does not replace notice in any of the journals, but is intended to be of value between issues. The ‘yahoo’ forum and NOTICEBOARD can be reached via their icons:

II. THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

From time to time, we have invited readers and others who have published articles on Wilde in anthologies or journals that are only readily accessible in university libraries (and not always then) to republish them (amended if desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website. We also republish older articles on Wilde from anthologies and festchriften, made obsolete by the march of scholarship, but which may still have some value in charting how he was viewed by earlier writers.

In September 2007, we began a year-long project of putting such articles on line at the rate of one a week, and have been very happy with the response. This systematic project has now come to an end, but we will continue to put articles up on an ad hoc basis. These appear in our section called LIBRARY. Its logo, which can be clicked for access, is

This will bring you to a Table of Contents, arranged thematically, from which you can link to each article. A subsection, IN OTHER BOOKCASES, is similarly arranged but gives links to articles that appear elsewhere on the internet.

We also link to French language articles similarly republished in rue des beaux-arts.

These articles are copyright to their authors, and thus usual rules for citation and against further publication apply.

New postings are announced on our discussion forum

III. FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED AND WELL-INFORMED: NEWS, NOTES, QUERIES.

Notes Towards an Iconography of Oscar Wilde.

One of the least known portraits of Wilde, we think, is the drawing by Boldini, shown at the exhibition ‘Marcel Proust and His Time’, at the Wildenstein Gallery, 147 New Bond Street, London, in 1955. This was reproduced the Exhibition Catalogue, where it is plate XIII. The catalogue number, 176, is reticent, revealing only that it was lent by a Dr Robert Le Masle. More information on this is eagerly sought.

Lady Wilde

I’m looking for any critical studies done on Meinhold’s work - The Amber Witch and Sidonia the Sorceress. I’m aware only of the Diana Basham book The Trial of Woman – which briefly covers Amber Witch - and a few mentions in more recent articles. Is there anything written on these works at all? I’m also very interested to find any comments - correspondence etc – from the two translators of the novels – Duff-Gordon for the Amber Witch, and Lady Wilde on Sidonia. Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

n Jodi Gallagher @

Oscar Wilde and the Oxford Companions (2)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of French Literature, edited by Joyce M.H. Reid (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976) has a brief article of five lines on Wilde:

Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900), the Anglo-Irish poet and dramatist, had many association with French literary circles and latterly lived, and died, in Paris. He wrote his Salomé in French in the first instance. [p.665].

There is also an eight-line entry for Salomé, p.571.

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, edited by Peter France (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1995) has no article on Wilde or Salomé.

Broadcasts

The Salomé of Florent Schmitt was broadcast on France Musique and other European wireless channels on 4th December; The Nightingale and the Rose was broadcast on the wireless station BBC 7, on 7th December. We announced these at the time on our forum, and hope that we can extend these notifications about broadcasts with the help of readers.

Work in Progress

In December 2006 we published a list of fin-de-siècle doctoral theses being undertaken at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a similar list in December 2007. Naturally we hoped to bring this up to date for the current academic year, but a fairly prolonged examination of the Birkbeck site was unable to locate the list. We will inquire. We should very much like to hear from readers at other universities with news of similar theses they are supervising or undertaking. We welcome all news of research being undertaken on any aspect of the fin de siècle. There is a list of dissertations on Irish literature held on the Princess Grace Irish Library website (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_gazette/disserts/a/) but it seems to be impossible to gain access.

A Wilde Collection

There is no universal handbook or vade mecum to the various Wilde Collections, and we have made a start here with an occasional article. Sometimes where a collection’s contents are published in detail on-line we will simply give an URL; or we may be able to give more details ourselves. We will then to be able to bring these together as a new Appendix. We would be very interested in publishing account of privately held collections, suppressing the owner’s name if that is preferred.

In 1891, an Oxford undergraduate named Bernulf Clegg, having read The Picture of Dorian Gray, wrote to Wilde asking him where in his other work he ‘may find developed that idea of the total uselessness of all art.’ Wilde, not directly answering Clegg’s question, responded: ‘Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct or influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility.’

As has been widely reported in the international press, the letters of Wilde and Clegg, along with some 50 handwritten pages, including nine manuscripts of Wilde’s poems and the earliest surviving letter from Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, are contained in a red leatherbound volume that was recently given to the Morgan Library & Museum by Lucia Moreira Salles, a Brazilian philanthropist who had owned it for more than two decades. Its whereabouts were unknown to scholars for half a century. Mrs Moreira Salles owned the volume with her husband, Walter Moreira Salles, a Brazilian banker and diplomat who died in 2001. The book also includes a manuscript of Wilde’s short story for children ‘The Selfish Giant,’ handwritten by Wilde’s wife, Constance. Two letters to Douglas are given in the Nouvel Observateur.

‘The contents are remarkable,’ William M. Griswold, the director of the Morgan, is quoted as saying. He added that the gift was particularly significant because, in addition to its collection of letters by Wilde, the Morgan also owns the earliest manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mr Griswold said he learned of the volume’s existence shortly after Christine Nelson, a curator of manuscripts at the Morgan, was contacted by Merlin Holland at the Morgan, which in 2001 organized the exhibition ‘Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts,’ in collaboration with the British Library. About two years ago Mrs Moreira Salles contacted Mr Holland to see if he would be interested in editing a facsimile of the book. He in turn told her about the Morgan’s extensive holdings of Wilde’s letters and manuscripts. This summer, Mrs Moreira Salles decided to donate the book to the Morgan. ‘It was one of those happy surprises,’ Ms Nelson said. ‘It was last seen in a 1953 London sale catalogue.’

The Morgan plans to show the volume in an exhibition of acquisitions from 17th April to 9th August 2009.

News from the Royal Historical Society Bibliography, Irish History Online AND London’s Past Online

We have introduced new links to the detailed display of records for books and for recent articles in books. These links search Google Books for the work that you are viewing. If you follow the link you will be presented with a Google results page which tells you if there are any results and also indicates whether you can see online text, and, if so, whether full or limited view is available. See our help pages. We would welcome your feedback on the effectiveness and usefulness of these links – you can use the feedback form, or send an e-mail to @.

Tutorials: To help you to get the most out of the Bibliography, the RHS Bibliography has introduced new tutorials, that you can either view online or download to your own computer as Word documents or in pdf format. Please go to our Tutorials page for more information.

IV. OSCAR WILDE : THE POETIC LEGACY

The Irish poet Paul Muldoon has been described by Stephen Knight in the TLS as ‘the most significant English language poet born since the Second World War’ and by Ruth Padel in The Guardian as ‘possibly the biggest influence on all original British poets who began writing after the mid-seventies’. His poem Two Stabs at Oscar appeared in his collection Moy Sand and Gravel (London: Faber & Faber 2002 p.65), and is here reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Two STABS AT OSCAR

As I roved out between a gaol

and a river in spate

in June as like as January

I happened on a gate

which, though it lay wide open,

would make me hesitate.

I was so long a prisoner

That, though I am now free,

the thought that I serve some sentence

is so ingrained in me

that I still wait for a warder

to come and turn the key.

A stone breaker on his stone bed

lay no less tightly curled

than opposite–leaved saxifrage

that even now, unfurled,

has broken through its wall of walls

into this other world.

V. on the Curriculum : Teaching Wilde, Æstheticism and Decadence.

We are always anxious to publicise the teaching of Wilde at both second and third level, and welcome news of Wilde on curricula. Similarly, news of the other subjects on whom we are publishing (Whistler, Shaw, Ruskin, George Moore and Vernon Lee) is also welcome. Andrew Eastham is developing a study of the teaching of Wilde, which we hope will be helpful to others who have Wilde on their courses; in tandem Tiffany Thomas is looking at undergraduate response. Andrew Eastham presented his introductory declaration in our July/August issue . To participate in this, contact THE OSCHOLARS at oscholars@gmail.com or Andrew Eastham at @.

Programs & Initiatives – Moments of Change – 2008-09: The Turn of the 20th Century (1889-1914). This is a course at Penn State University. Consult http://iah.psu.edu/programs/early20thCentury.shtml. The course co-ordinator is Martina Kolb, Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature.

A list of Doctoral Students in Sweden and their research topics (literature in English) can be found on the GABLE website.

VI. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

This issue’s review section contains reviews by Gert Buelens on Michèle Mendelssohn on Henry James and Oscar Wilde; Gwen Orel on The Selfish Giant and An Ideal Husband in New York; Leonée Ormond on Molly-Whittington-Egan on Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde; Linda Dryden on W.E. Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson; John McRae on Hirschfeld and Roellig on Homosexuals in Berlin; Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on John Glendening on The Evolutionary Imagination; Richard Toye on John Partington on H.G. Wells.

These can be seen by clicking .

Last issue’s review section contained reviews by Aoife Leahy on An Ideal Husband in Dublin; Mathilde Mazau on Dorian Gray in Edinburgh; Gwen Orel on The Selfish Giant in New York; Ruth Kinna on David Goodway on Anarchism; Lucia Krämer on Angela Kingston on Oscar Wilde; John S. Partington on Ruth Livesey on Socialism and Æstheticism; Kathleen Riley on Christopher Stray on Gilbert Murray; Annabel Rutherford on Mary Fleischer on Symbolist Dance; Eva Thienpont on André Capiteyn on Maeterlinck; Jessica Wardhaugh on Sébastien Rutés on Oscar Wilde and French Anarchism.

These can be seen by clicking .

Clicking will take you to a Table of Contents for all our reviews, which we are updating. We welcome offers to review from readers.

VII. DANDIES, DRESS AND FASHION

Editor for this section: Elizabeth McCollum

We recommend a visit to http://www.dandyism.net/. This represents a serious attempt to get to grips with dandyism, and blends the disciplines of a magazine and a website. We cull this snippet, only commenting that it is a pity that the young man forfeits any dandiacal status by apparently wearing a made-up bow tie and having forgotten to shave:

‘Brioni has apparently raided the 1880s wardrobe of Oscar Wilde for inspiration. Its latest advertisement in Men’s Vogue features this Bunthornian velvet topcoat with shawl collar and embroidered button fastenings.’

‘Swann & Oscar’ pairs Proust’s Charles Swann with Oscar Wilde as the name of a gentleman’s outfitter at 19 rue d’Anjou in the fashionable eighth arrondissement of Paris, adding an echo of London’s Swan & Edgar. Click their banner.

VIII. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH

At the Rome Film Festival which ended on 31st October 2008, Al Pacino showed a pre-première few minutes montage of his long-awaited Salomaybe. Release is planned for 2009 with the following cast: Al Pacino, Serdar Kalsin (himself / Herod), Kevin Anderson (himself / Jokanaan), Jessica Chastain, Estelle Parson (Salomé), Roxanne Hart (Herodias), Philipp Rhys (the young Syrian), Jack Huston (Lord Alfred), Richard Cox (Robert Ross)…

The English actress Rebecca Hall has joined the cast of Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray in the rôle of Sibyl Vane. She shares th cast with Ben Barnes (Dorian), Colin Firth (Lord Harry), Ben Chaplin and Rachel Hurd.

Posters

After appearing here, these are posted on their own page, called POSTERWALL, gradually building up a gallery that will make the images more accessible than by searching the Internet. This can be found by clicking the icon. This month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin.

IX. LETTERS FROM OUR EDITORS

$C:\Users\David\Documents\Documents\wilderness\IMAGE BANK\flags\Belgium.jpg$ LETTER FROM BELGIUM $C:\Users\David\Documents\Documents\wilderness\IMAGE BANK\flags\Belgium.jpg$

Koenraad Claes

Dear Oscholars

Although it has taken me a while to gather a few interesting titbits on fin-de-siècle events in Belgium, I have still found hardly anything relating to specifically ‘Belgian’ topics. It is surprising to see that my humble country, usually quite hung up on its late-nineteenth-century fame, this past Autumn seems to have directed its attention to other periods and schools.

Not as surprising, however, as the news that reached me this week about a Walloon theatre troupe tackling one of the most eccentric French plays in a rather provincial venue. The collective Rives d’Art will perform my beloved Ubu Roi this weekend (13th-14th December), at the Auvelais cultural centre in the charming town of Sambreville. Their aim is to show that the bleak world of Alfred Jarry is still very much our own. The naughty disclaimer ‘que toute ressemblance avec des situations ou des personnages existants serait tout à fait volontaire’ probably indicates that some inspiration has been found in the notorious surrealism of contemporary (Belgian) politics.

In October, a brighter view of the end of the French nineteenth century was presented at two lunchtime concerts, entitled ‘Belle Époque’. On Wednesday the 22nd at the Opera of Antwerp, and on Friday the 24th in Ghent, rising Portuguese soprano Ana Quintans and mezzo-soprano Inez Carsauw brought art songs by Fauré, Debussy, Satie and Reynaldo Hahn. They were skilfully supported by pianist Jef Smits, a staple of classical music in Flanders. The unique repertoire, and its elegant delivery, made all who attended hope that more of such initiatives would follow in the near future. These particular concerts were part of the ‘Quinzaine Française - Antwerpen 2008’, the second edition of an annual multidisciplinary cultural festival organized by the French consulate to Belgium and the city of Antwerp.

Another event that was given some press attention, was the temporary relocation of the well-known sculpture of Balzac by Rodin, which for two months found a home in the Middelheim gardens of Antwerp. This open-air museum has a permanent exhibition of some 200 sculptures, among which another Rodin and several more artistic highlights. During the stay of this eminent visitor, an accompanying exposition was held on the genesis and history of the sculpture, with background information on both sculptor and sculpted. By 15th December it will return to its regular spot in the Royal Art Museum of Antwerp (KMSKA).

The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, an international cooperation with strong Belgian connections, was officially launched in the British Library on Monday 8th December. Editors Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor chose the Ghent-based Academia Press to publish this reference work in joint venture with the British Library, and it has been partly funded by Flemish grants. Even if Professor Demoor were not my supervisor at Ghent University, I would have been very excited about this book. Its ODNB-style presentation makes it highly practical in use, and it contains an abundance of information on people, periodicals and topics of the nineteenth-century press. The Nineties have not at all been neglected, as besides on Oscar Wilde (naturally), we find – among many others - individual entries on Woman’s World, Ella Hepworth Dixon, John Lane, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Ella D’Arcy, Richard Le Gallienne, Leonard Smithers, William Sharp, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson, G.B. Shaw, Gleeson White, Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, Frank Vizetelly, Aubrey Beardsley, and the Yellow Book, Savoy, Pageant, Dial, Hobby-Horse and Dome. It will no doubt be seen as an additional asset that several Oscholars have contributed to this volume. A web-based version of the book will shortly be added to the C19: The Nineteenth Century module of ProQuest, which already hosts the invaluable Wellesley Index and the British Periodicals database.

LETTER FROM IRELAND

Aoife Leahy

Christmas greetings from Ireland to all of the Oscholars.

On the subject, of Christmas, there will be a ‘Warming Words at Christmas Time’ story reading at The New Theatre inside Connolly Books, Temple Bar, Dublin as part of a programme of seasonal Temple Bar events. Children’s author Catherine Ann Cullen will read a variety of stories including Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ on 13th December at 1.15pm. See http://www.templebar.ie/home and click on Christmas Programme.

Cork born actress Fiona Shaw, who was recently seen in Beckett’s Happy Days in The Abbey Theatre, has joined the cast of Oliver Parker’s new film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Various sources report that Shaw will play ‘Agatha’, presumably meaning that we will see her as Lord Henry’s Aunt Agatha. Although Aunt Agatha is a relatively minor character in the novella, she brings various elements of the plot together. Lord Henry’s first gossip about Dorian comes from his aunt, who hopes that the young man with the beautiful nature will assist with her charitable projects in London’s East End.

I contributed a paper entitled ‘Wilde Over There’ at The Irish Diaspora Conference in the University of Limerick on the 1st of November 2008. The paper focused on Wilde’s 1882 tour of America and Canada and his subsequent comments on the better quality of life in America for the working man and the poor. The Irish Diaspora Conference was organised by Dr Tina O’Toole, Dr Kathryn Laing, Dr Caoilfhinn Ní Bheachtáin, Ms Yvonne O’Keeffe and Ms Heather Goggans. Many international scholars attended and gave papers.

The Department of English in NUI Maynooth has announced that Dr Deaglán Ó Donghaile has been awarded a Clark Library Short Term Fellowship to carry out research on Wilde in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California in April 2009. The Clark Library holds the collection ‘Oscar Wilde and the 1890s.’ See http://english.nuim.ie/news.shtml

The entertainment production company Arcana has made a ‘Massive Head’ of Oscar Wilde that can be worn by brave tour guides on scheduled Walkabouts of Dublin Streets and Cultural Organisations. In Hiberno-English slang, massive means both ‘enormous’ and ‘marvellous’! A photograph of the Massive Head Wilde with a Massive Head Brendan Behan and a Massive Head James Joyce can be found on http://culturenight.ie/detail.asp?ID=165.

The Irish Ferries website describes the company’s newest ship The Oscar Wilde as ‘the most luxurious ship to sail between Rosslare and France.’ The car ferry Wilde ship has 11 decks and can accommodate 1458 passengers and 580 cars. Oscholars who would like to sail in The Oscar Wilde can look at http://www.irishferries.com/ships-oscarwilde.asp for more information.

LETTER FROM JAPAN

Atsuko Ogane

(translated and summarised from the French by D.C. Rose)

For this my first Letter, I attended the 33rd Annual Congress of the Japanese Oscar Wilde Association, held on the 6th December at Komazaswa University in central Tokyo. I was able to address the Association on behalf of THE OSCHOLARS and the Société Oscar Wilde en France, and this rapport was welcomed. My report on the proceedings of the Congress is given on the page of THE OSCHOLARS devoted to Wilde Societies; in subsequent letters I will report on the state of Wilde studies in Japan.

Sweden LETTER FROM SWEDEN Sweden

Tijana Stajic

Greetings from Sweden to all of the Oscholars! I am delighted to have a chance to communicate news on our common enthusiasm for Oscar Wilde and related matters.

Wilde and fin de siècle continue to attract scholarly attention as well as popular interest in Sweden. The biggest event recently was a plenary lecture at the conference ‘Urban and Rural Landscapes: Language, Literature, and Culture in Modern Ireland’ at DUCIS, Dalarna University, November 6-7 2008, given by professor Jarlath Killeen of Trinity College, Dublin. Entitled ‘Oscar Wilde, the Irish Land Struggle, and Fairy-Tale Solutions: The Case of ‘The Selfish Giant,’’ the lecture offered Wilde’s fairy tale as a metaphor for ownership and potentially a paradigm of solutions to land conflicts in Ireland. For more information on the conference, please see http://www.du.se/templates/Page____7524.aspx?epslanguage=SV.

Professor Killeen also chaired the panel entitled ‘Visible Mysteries: Irish Literature and Photography from the Fin de Siècle to the Early Twentieth Century’ that offered two papers: ‘Picturing Darkest Dublin: Photography and the Geography of Poverty, 1980-1913’ by Justin Carville from the institute of Art, Design and technology, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, and ‘Fatal Misreading of the Work of Art in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Tijana Stajic from the University of Gothenburg. The entire conference has been streamed and the contributions above can be specifically seen at mms://media.du.se/2008ht/Konferens/081107_ducis_4_fo5.wmv.

Another piece of research inspired by fin de siècle is Sofia Wijkmark’s thesis presented at a final seminar at th University of Gothenburg, 28th November. Originally from Karlstad University, Wijkmark has written a thesis on gothic elements in the shorter fiction by a Swedish female author Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1949) who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1909. Wijkmark’s thesis deals with, among other texts, Osynliga länkar (The Outlaws) (1894), En herrgårdssägen (A Legend of the Country Manor) (1899), Mårbacka (1922) and Löwensköldska ringen (The Ring of the Löwenskölds) (1925).

Wilde continues to attract the attention of undergraduate students, and so another paper, originally written in 2004, and addressing the decadent theme, is recently made available at the Swedish website for undergraduate research work www.uppsatser.se. The author is Jenny Siméus of Växjö University and the title of the paper is ‘A Study of Art and Aestheticism in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

The daily newspaper ‘Trelleborgs Allehanda’ from southern Sweden published 29th October an article entitled ‘Wilde ska locka forskare till Ystad’ (‘Wilde is Supposed to Attract Researchers to Ystad’) about the City library, which possesses about 1,900 books primarily by or about Wilde, as well as some other contemporaneous figures such as Aubrey Beardsley. Originally donated by the librarian John Andrén (1897-1965), the books are a part of the so-called Andrén collection and may present an important source for international researchers. In order to attract scholars, the foundation has employed the researcher Lena Olsson who works at cataloguing the titles and suggestions for the acquisition of new books. For the original article, please see www.trelleborgsallehanda.se.

Besides scholarly work, Oscar Wilde still inspires popular culture and frames important gender issues in Sweden. In August 2008 appeared the first issue of ‘Dorian’, the first gay magazine in the country. The sub-title ‘Gay Life in Style’ best defines the main preoccupations of the journal: travels, beauty products, fashion, celebrity interviews, and sex, all appear in a sophisticated frame, and with illustrations à la Aubrey Beardsley. For more information, please check www.dorianmagazine.com.

X. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS

Here we now only note Calls for Papers or articles specifically relating to Wilde or his immediate circles. The more general list has its own page, updated every month; to reach it, please click . We hope these Calls may attract Wildëans.

‘British Æstheticisms’ are the subject of a conference being organised by Bénédicte Coste and Cathérine Delyfer at the University of Montpellier in October 2009. The Call for Papers is published in English and French at www.esthetismes.com. Deadline 1st December. We will publish the programme as soon as it is available. This would appear to offer a wonderful chance of a gathering of fin-de-siéclistes in the celebrated university town in the south of France.

The Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes (http://www.sfeve.paris4.sorbonne.fr/) is inviting contributions for issue number 72 (October 2010) of its journal Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (http://www.cervec.org/) devoted to the Theatre of Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde has become a legend: an outstanding and witty dandy who was a real success in society dinners, but also a man whose image is tainted by scandal and provocation. The recent publication of several biographies, among which Richard Ellmann’s is seen as a reference, as well as letters and the detailed account of his trial by his grandson Merlin Holland (A Life in Letters, 2003 and The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, 2003), all seem to indicate a desire for historical truth to be eventually revealed in a world now freed from homophobia. But once more, the analyses shed light on a character, a man and the role he created for himself. They do not offer a thorough analysis of his work. Actually one of the numerous aphorisms which Oscar Wilde is famous for, according to which life imitates art, and which he developed in his dramatic monologue De Profundis must not overshadow the primary importance of his literary and artistic creation. This issue of the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens devoted to Oscar Wilde’s theatre aims at a return to the stylistic analysis of his plays, which were too often dismissed as trivial and considered as light entertainment for the higher classes of Victorian society. We will try to show how rich and creative his writing is, combining light comedy and poetic drama. Moreover, as a milestone and authoritative work of lasting significance, Wilde’s theatre is very often performed today: how can one explain that plays so deeply- rooted in the Victorian era, representing outdated social and moral values, are still arousing the interest of stage directors and gathering a faithful audience? We will thus study how stage directors adapt his plays to find a new public. As a playwright, but also as a stage director of his own public and private life and as a performer of a variety of roles, Oscar Wilde is above all a man of the theatre. This issue of the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens will thus try to avoid a mere biographical point of view to put his theatrical creation itself on the front stage.

A CV and an abstract in English (no more than 300 words) should be sent by 30th March 2009 to Marianne Drugeon, special editor of this issue. Marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr The article should follow the presentation of the M.L.A.Handbook.

Notes for contributors: Articles submitted for consideration. Length: 30 to 40,000 characters (6000 to 7000 words). Two hard-copies of the article should be sent along with the e-mail copy to Marianne Drugeon.

M.L.A. Style Sheet Specifications; Rich Text Format (RTF). Use footnotes, not endnotes. Illustrations are welcome but the author is responsible for obtaining all necessary copyright permissions before publication. The bibliography should come at the end of the article. For more details and to send your submission, please contact: Marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr

Marianne Drugeon, MCF, Special Editor of the CVE, Université Montpellier 3, Route de Mende, 34199 Montpellier Cedex 5 FRANCE.

XI. OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE / WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE

Alcohol taken in sufficient quantities (1):
Oscar Wilde Irish Pub, Friedrichstraße 112A, 10117 Berlin. Click the illustration for the website.

The following letter has been received from one of our readers:

‘…I wanted to alert you to something, if you are not already aware of it. I attempted to go to the OScholars’ website from my public library in Tacoma, Washington, USA, and it was blocked because, the warning message said, the site is “pornographic”!!! I guess I will have to wait until I am home in North Carolina to view the site, but how distressing!’

XII. OSCAR WILDE: THE VIDEO

Our video this month is ‘The Ghost of Canterville Hall…Oscar Wilde’s play put on by the Rocky Mountain Theater for Kids’, Boulder, Colorado, 27th & 28th October 2007.

We also draw readers’ attention to the videos in the Theatre Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. These can only be viewed in the Museum’s Reading Room, a restriction imposed as part of the recording conditions. To date the videos are The Importance Of Being Earnest, Old Vic Theatre, August 1995 directed by Terry Hands; The Importance Of Being Oscar by Michéal Mac Liammoir, Savoy Theatre, May 1997, directed by Patrick Garland with Simon Callow as Mac Liammoir as Wilde; and Lady Windermere’s Fan, Theatre Royal Haymarket, May 2002, directed by Peter Hall.

XIII. Web Foot Notes

A look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as elsewhere.

All the material that we had thus far published in the ‘Web Foot Notes’ was brought together in June 2003 in one list called ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’. New websites continue to be reviewed here, after which they are filed on the Trafficking for Strange Webs page, which was last updated in May 2008: a new update is in the course of preparation. A Table of Contents has been added for ease of access. ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’ surveys 48 websites devoted to Oscar Wilde. The Société Oscar Wilde is also publishing on its webpages two lists (‘Liens’ and ‘Liaisons’) of recommendations. To see ‘Liens’, click here. To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click .

We recommend two websites of fin-de-siècle theatre interest. The first is devoted to Lillie Langtry: www.hurstmereclose.freeserve.co.uk/html/lillie_langtry.html. The second is a good bibliography about Sarah Bernhardt:
www.templeresearch.eclipse.co.uk/sarah/bibli.htm.

Andrew Martin of the Irish Newspaper Archive has announced the opening of the ‘largest online database of Irish Newspapers ever published on the Internet, 1763 to the present. Institutions can search, retrieve and view Ireland's past in the exact format as it was published ... the most comprehensive and complete Irish Newspaper archive in the world. Each word is retrievable and every paper is date ranged indexed by title, date month and year. The resource now covers the majority of Ireland's counties and continues to grow on a monthly basis.’ www.IrishNewspaperArchives.com.

Irish History Online is an authoritative guide (in progress) to what has been written about Irish history from earliest times to the present. It has been established in association with the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History (of which it is now the Irish component) and London's Past Online. Since the most recent update (February 2008) IHO contains over 63,000 items, drawn mostly from Writings on Irish History, and covering publications from 1936 to 2004 (in progress). In addition, it contains all the Irish material currently held on the online Royal Historical Society Bibliography. (The latter is less comprehensive but covers a longer period of publications, up to the most recent). In summer 2008, publications for 2005 will be made available for online searching. During the current phase of funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006-9), particular attention is being paid to enhancing coverage of the Irish abroad: at the most recent update almost 500 new records on the Irish abroad were added, including many references collected in libraries in the U.S.A. and Canada.

XIV. OGRAPHIES

We continue to expand our sections of BIBLIOGRAPHIES, DISCOGRAPHIES and SCENOGRAPHIES and this is now a major component of our work. Click the appropriate icons. Updates are announced regularly on our forum.

XV. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

News of the Wilde Societies is published on their own page. We are very pleased that we now (December 2008) carry news of the Oscar Wilde Society of Japan. To reach the page, please click

XVI. THE OSCHOLARS COLOUR SUPPLEMENT

Readers of our sister journal RUE DES BEAUX ARTS will be familiar with its long running strip cartoon on Oscar Wilde by Patrick Chambon. In the issue of November 2008 this was joined by a new strip by Dan Pearce, translated into French (as Oscar Wilde: La Resurrection) by Danielle Guérin. With this issue of THE OSCHOLARS we begin its serialisation in English (as Oscar Wilde: The Second Coming).

Our hope is eventually to bring all three strips into one folder, where they can be read straight through as graphic novels.

· For a Bibliography of Wilde in graphic novel form compiled by Danielle Guérin, click here.

XVII. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS

All our journals appear on our website www.oscholars.com. Each has a mailing list for alerts to new issues or special announcements. To be included on the list for any or all of them, contact oscholars@gmail.com.

The Eighth Lamp

The second issue of this journal of Ruskin studies has been published on our website, under the vigorous editorship of Anuradha Chatterjee (University of South Australia) and Carmen Casaliggi (University of Limerick). Dr Chatterjee has produced a splendid new issue, and issued a Call for Papers for the third. THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day will shed much light in new places, and places Ruskin studies firmly in conjugation with Wilde studies.

Rue des Beaux Arts

The seventeenth issue of our French language journal under the dedicated editorship of Danielle Guérin was published before the end of November. It continues to reflect and encourage Wilde studies in France and the Francophone countries.

Shavings, Moorings and The Sibyl

New issues of these journals devoted to George Bernard Shaw (co-edited by Barbara Pfeifer), George Moore (edited by Mark Llewellyn) and Vernon Lee (edited by Sophie Geoffroy) are published as material is accumulated. We recommend joining their mailing list for alerts.

Visions and Nocturne

In the spring of 2008 we gathered together all the visual arts information that was scattered through different section of THE OSCHOLARS into a section called VISIONS. The third edition was published this autumn and a new one is planned for the spring. Subsequently we will be calling for papers. VISIONS is co-edited by Anne Anderson, Isa Bickman, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Nicola Gauld and Sarah Turner. NOCTURNE, our journal devoted to Whistler and his circle, is now being incorporated into VISIONS.

The Latchkey

After various teething problems, the first issue of THE LATCHKEY, a journal devoted to reporting and creating scholarship on The New Woman, is now ready for publication. The co-editors are Jessica Cox, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sophie Geoffroy, Lisa Hager, Christine Huguet, Kathleen Gledhill and Alison Laurie.

XVIII. Acknowledgments

THE OSCHOLARS website continues to be provided and constructed by Steven Halliwell of The Rivendale Press, a publishing house with a special interest in the fin-de-siècle. Mr Halliwell joins Dr John Phelps of Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Mr Patrick O’Sullivan of the Irish Diaspora Net as one of the godfathers without whom THE OSCHOLARS could not have appeared on the web in any useful form.

Return to Table of Contents | Return to hub page | Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page

SUPPLEMENT

Melmoth

A Digest of the Victorian Gothic and Decadent Literature

Edited by Sondeep Kandola, University of Leeds

No. 2: November 2008

For Melmoth no.1, please click here.

Reviews:

Andrew Eastham on Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James by Anna Kventsel

Stefano Evangelista on Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales by Patricia Pulham

Abstracts:

Fiona Coll on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘A Strange Story’

Sondeep Kandola on The Picture of Dorian Gray

Evan Mauro on Futurism in America

Jeffrey Renye on Robert W. Chambers

Work in Progress:

Heather Braun on Salomé

Bibliography:

Dissertations on the Anglo-Irish Gothic, 1973 – 1989 compiled by D.C. Rose after William O’Malley

Reviews

Anna Kventsel, Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 13: 978-0230008274 (hardback) 248 pp.

James’s relationship to the cultures of Aestheticism and Decadence is a fascinating narrative of youthful embrace, ambivalent identification, disavowal and, in his late work, a rich and strange form of assimilation. If his early dismissal of Baudelaire’s immorality suggested a rigid distinction between an ethics of fiction and the poetics of decadence, there is another sense in which the style of James late fiction exemplifies the formal appetites of Decadence. In his classic definition of decadent literary form, Arthur Symons diagnosed ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement’. We might well say the same of James tortured hypotaxis; the excessive refinement of consciousness which is manifested some of the most baroque literary experiments of the early twentieth century. But the Decadent opacity of his late style is in marked distinction to the aesthetic openness of his youthful impressionistic work. A reading of his beautiful early travel essays, later collected in Italian Hours, is enough to reveal that Walter Pater’s influence was fundamental on his ways of seeing and reading. In this sense his novels from Roderick Hudson onwards are to some extent the diary of a developing self-critique. In a series of early and middle phase works such as The Portrait of a Lady, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ and The Tragic Muse, James formulated a coherent critique of Aestheticism which subtly reiterated the discourse of Paterian Hellenism and the aristocratic dandyism that would flourish when Aesthetic Culture was transformed by the infusion of French decadence in the Nineties. James’s complex relationship of affinity and *disavowal with these cultures was obscured for some time, since moral critics such as F.R. Leavis and Dorothea Krooke tended to construct a Manichean opposition between a moral James and a dangerous Aestheticism. To some extent this opposition was reiterated in Jonathan Freedman’s classic study, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. But if Freedman still tended to maintain an identification of Aestheticism with moral danger, he made the important move of situating James’s dialogue with Pater and Wilde as the reflection of an internal dialogue with his own aestheticising vision. In this model, Aestheticism is a ‘contagion’ – an invasive principle which could never be entirely contained. The physiological metaphor suggests the ways that James’s complex and affinity and struggle would develop in the culture of Decadence. The 1890’s witnessed a process of contagion and reciprocal infection, where aesthetic discourse was increasingly marked by the traces of its physiological sources. Rather than a taste to be refined, the bodily matter of aesthetics was now visible as nervous excitability or, in more extreme cases, the monstrosity that was figured in Dorian Gray’s portrait as the other side of Aestheticism’s gospel of beauty.

In Decadence and the Late Novels of Henry James, Anna Kventsel’s densely textured and richly perceptive study, these curious transitions in Decadent culture between aesthetic consciousness, nervous embodiment and moral disorder are acutely focused. One of the many virtues of Kventsel’s readings is a persistent awareness of an often grotesque physicality in James’s metaphoric language and vision of character. Kventsel demonstrate that the late Jamesian corpus is deeply interfused with metaphors of psychic frailty, fluidity and expansiveness, and an apparently contrary tendency towards containment and reactive rigidification. Whilst her study gives little contextual account of Decadent culture, it does provide a very suggestive theoretical focus on physiological analogues for degeneration, deduced from Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic. This is not a theoretically consistent study, however, and therein lies the root of its originality and its occasional frustrations. The Foucauldian focus on bodily discourses is only a starting point for a series of transitions; physiognomic metaphors of degeneration are elided into the elucidation of ‘shadowy, tortuous spaces, like the decaying rococo interiors in the Wings of a Dove, and the haunted, rotund and crooked passageways of Fawns in The Golden Bowl’ (18). This is typical of the kind of gothic poetics which Kventsel applies to Late James. Her focus on the psycho-physiognomy of minor characters and the poetics of interior space tends to represent James as a kind of modern Dickensian, a comparison that is accentuated by continuous and often perverse deciphering of * name-puns. According to this gothicized version of James, Kventsel deliberately usurps material from the late trio of novels to fit the vampirism theory of The Sacred Fount. One of the fruits of this perspective is a highly detailed sense of the psycho-sexual symptomatics that *exists on a subliminal level in James’s text, but on a more general level, Kventsel establishes a highly mobile and condensed critical medium which is resolutely literary.

Kventsel begins her study with Norbert Elias’s socio-historical theory of the civilizing process – the cost of civilization on sensuous experience and ‘affective action’. James’s protagonists undergo an ‘ordeal of consciousness’ which ‘involves a destabilization of rigid psychic defences, that is of internal mechanisms of screening and control, instrumental to self-steering in the regulative channels of a culture shaped, increasingly, by forces of the market and processes or cultural imperialism’ (2). This presents an ambitious remit, combining the discourses of an emergent psychoanalysis with an attention to cultural dynamics and, specifically, James’s relationship with the marketplace. This has already been a significant feature in readings by Freedman, Ross Posnock and Richard Salmon, all of whom are cited by Kventsel in her very sparing footnotes, but her methodology is quite distinct from this post-Adornian wing of James studies. The focus is sustained less in theory than by a highly attuned poetic awareness which is constantly bringing together the registers of the psycho-dynamic, the economic, the aesthetic,* and the religious.

In her reading of The Ambassadors, Kvnetsel chooses to focus the religious and mythical dimensions, setting up a sacramental and sacrificial vision of culture heavily rooted in the vampire thematics of The Sacred Fount, and in an Augustinian concept of the Eucharist. According to this schema, Strether’s trans-Atlantic narrative is an ‘inverted pilgrimage’ towards sensuous communion, which ‘moves away from the desacramentalized reality inherited *from the Puritans, to the palpable, passional Presence of Christ in and as ourselves’ (9). In this hyper-civilised mimicry of pilgrimage, the Parisian femme du monde occupies the place of the sacred virgin, as well as being a Venusian figure for sensuous flux. Such a mythical reading seems overdetermined when applied to the single figure of Mme de Vionnet, but becomes increasingly suggestive when applied to the image of Paris, or the condition of European culture itself. Strether becomes a Christ-like protagonist, his aesthetic impressionability allowing an excessive vulnerability to the ‘exquisitely remorseless’ wounds inflicted by ‘Chad’s lady’. Kventsel brings out the perverse remnants of the religious imagination that resurface in Strether’s confession of this predicament; ‘sacrificing so to strange gods’, and in Little Bilham’s sense of being a willing sacrificial victim, with ‘but the bleached bones of a Christian’. Readers of the Oscholars are likely to find consonances with the sacrificial condition suffered by Wilde and the Christian turn of De Profundis here, and it might have added a dimension to Kventsel’s study if she had suggested James’s place in the broader theological condition of Decadent culture – the propensity for Catholic conversion, the increasing importance of Dostoevsky, the Schopenhauer craze, and the confrontation of literature with nihilism. The absence of context is also surprising when Kventsel goes on to focus on *physiological and cultural consumption, on ‘gustatory acts of consuming and being consumed’ (47). Considering the recent work on consumption models of economics and aesthetics by Regenia Gagnier and others, we might expect a greater sense of the cultural and intellectual context to which James’s figures of consumption emerged. In a sense, however, Kventsel’s study is strengthened by her decision to abstain from contextual work which others have done well. It allows her to maintain a close combination of psychological and figural perception, which slowly accumulates a broader cultural and historical sense.

The formal method bears fruit when Kventsel goes on to ask interesting questions about the temporal experience of narrative and the temporal condition of aesthetic consciousness. The propensity of aesthetic consciousness towards experiences of merging are uncovered through the mythic *image of the sea-change, and its tragic *parallel, the shipwreck, suggesting the tenuous oscillation between aesthetic openness and abjection which defines a number of James’s late protagonists. The most significant of these figures is Milly Theale, and the reading of The Wings of a Dove is the dark heart of Kventsel’s book. It is at this point that she begins to properly assess a relationship with Aestheticism, beginning with Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, in which the call to quickened consciousness via the recognition of mortality clearly prefigures Milly’s condition. Kventsel goes on to uncover a dense undertexture of mythic allusion – the image of Lorelei and the Wagnerian figure of the Rhine-maiden, both of which hint at the shadow the novel casts across Milly’s immersive aspirations, and the associated metaphor of the shipwreck, which is conflated suggestively with Milly’s fragile yet defensively opaque ‘vessel of consciousness’. From this metaphoric substratum, Kventsel develops a complex and convincing argument about the contradictory nature of Milly’s subject formation. On the one hand, Milly’s bid for passional experience is constituted on an acute awareness of bodily existence and its frailty, yet Milly frequently displays a reactive and protective ‘military posture’, in which she experiences her own body as ‘an alien, rigidified, embattled posture’ (64). Kventsel relates this psycho-physical duality to a fundamental ambivalence towards the idea of character as action, or what we might call in more recent terms, the performative assumption of identity as an experience of bodily subjection. We might go further than Kventsel and relate this to the condition of Paterian Aestheticism, where the call for a passionate attitude of sensuous enjoyment sits uneasily with the idea of a diaphanous personality who cultivates a peculiarly disembodied aesthetic subjectivity in order to disrupt the assumption of any singular or habitual identity. Rather than continuing to pursue the Paterian context she has suggestively mobilized, Kventsel prefers to articulate Milly’s ambivalent corporeality in terms of the different layers of religious iconography she accrues – at once the immaterial angel or wind-spirited dove and, at the same time, an incarnation and fall into embodied humanity. The extent to which Milly ever does complete such a ‘fall’ is debatable. Kventsel reads the famous Alpine scene as a demonstration of Milly’s renunciation of sublime elevation for ‘life in the flesh’ (65), but the certainty of her ascription of a choice here begs important questions. Can we ever ascribe a definitive sense of agency and volition to Milly at this point, when what the scene primarily reveals is the vicarious passions and fantasy life of Susie Stringham, the follower and apostle who is condemned to live a vicarious life through Milly’s sublime example? Does James’s method, at least in Wings, ever allow aesthetic subjectivity to be contained and identified?

Some of *Kventsel’s central and most suggestive ideas relate to the temporal condition of Decadence; first in her reading of the circularity of Pater’s concept of aesthetic experience, and second, in her sense of the way that the novel’s ‘symbolic matrices’ produce a static, or we might say statuesque, aesthetic personality, which is defined precisely by its estrangement from the temporality of that aesthetic experience which it ostensibly embraces. Again in relation to Milly’s narrative, the novel’s allusive and mythic texture creates an ‘attenuated’ presence which ‘blocks the fluency of her fictional life’ (67). This is an important idea, since it goes some way towards explaining an aspect of late James’s fiction which is not perhaps addressed or confessed often enough – the uniquely frustrating stylistic labour and the often tortuous demands it makes on the reader, who is denied, perhaps systematically, the developmental pleasures of the bildungsroman. That James should deny such pleasures precisely in those novels which are most concerned with aesthetic bildung is one of the most elliptical questions of his career, both in terms of his formal development and in terms of his developing sense of the condition of aesthetic subjectivity. Why, it needs to be asked, could James begin his earlier treatment of the Aesthetic personality, The Portrait of a Lady, in a style not unrelated to the bildungsroman as we know it from Goethe, whilst the deliberate opacity and static temporality of the initial movements of The Wings of a Dove and The Ambassadors appear to deny either sympathetic identification or the avuncular ironic regard of his earlier narrative position?

Kventsel takes up James’s negotiation with the bildungsroman alongside a consideration of his attitude to the romance genre. As Kventsel suggests, ‘Milly is drawn to Europe in pursuit of bildung’ (112), but she is precisely unable to experience the developmental time of bildung in her Symbolist retreat: the more she consolidates herself in Venice the more she becomes immobilized in something akin to a Symbolist drama or painting. Kventsel describes this as a convergence of realism and romance ‘in a movement toward annihilative, Symbolist consummation’ (114), and goes on to make an important argument about the fate of bildung in Decadent culture; ‘The latter half of the novel systematically subverts the conventions of Bildung, of tutelage and initiation, which frame the early part of Milly’s European adventure’ (114), hence the ‘dove-like’ condition she assumes is contra-bildung, against developmental nature. Kventsel’s analysis of Wings here shows a rigorous formal attention which allows her to articulate some of the most important intellectual aspects of James’s project; the fin-de-siècle transformation of Aestheticism, the fate of idealist culture, and the conditions of modern narrative.

The study continues to elucidate these issues in the concluding analysis of The Golden Bowl. Adam Verver’s mid-life conversion to the gospel of art is one of James’s most fascinating interior portraits of aesthetic subjectivity, and Kventsel suggestively analyzes his decadent condition as a reactive but also reflective relationship to imperialism and the new economies of culture operating at the turn of the century. Adam’s interior rehearsal of Keats’s Sonnet ‘On Reading Chapman’s Homer’ suggests a series of cultural transitions: ‘Keatsian Romanticism is translated into fin-de-siècle decadence, and the spirit of Regency England into the plutocratic spirit of Gilded-Age America’ (146). The afterlife of Romanticism thus highlights the ‘imaginative belatedness of Adam’s historical moment’ (145), and the consequence of this belatedness is a hieratic and defensive emulation of the work of art itself. Adam ‘embodies in his role as an animate museum piece the siphoning off of subjectivity from the aesthetic sphere he has come to inhabit’ (150). Kventsel demonstrates how this process of siphoning results in a petrifying of the aesthetic process; like Milly’s journey from aesthetic openness to symbolist rigidification, Adam’s increasing assimilation into the art-objects he collects ‘recalls the compression of Milly’s trajectory’ (164). The analogue is consolidated by the mutual trajectory of the two Jamesian Aesthetes towards an angelic yet sacrificial position. Yet it is Charlotte Stant, rather than Adam, who appears as the focal image of this reading; uniquely and representatively opaque, like the texture of late Jamesian fiction itself, Charlotte seems to generate the linguistic hypotaxis and figural ellipsis which protect her from analysis. Kventsel returns repeatedly to the image of Charlotte as a ‘long loose silk purse’ who is ‘well-filled with gold pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together’ (73), and her continued pressure gradually forces the image to bear its elusive suggestions – the imbrication of the aesthetic in the economic, and the morbid constriction of the ideal of refinement which Charlotte exemplifies. As the image of Decadence, Charlotte emerges in Kventsel’s reading as another sacrificial victim, an uncanny counter-point to the more traditionally Christ-like victims, Milly Theale and Maggie Verver.

The sacrificial logic of narrative emerges as perhaps the most forceful unifying theme in a study which orchestrates its diffuse concerns more often through metaphoric architecture than linear theoretical argument. This is a work which demands patience from the reader to discover its originality; its poetic organization has a diffuse but accumulative effect. In her Afterword, Kventsel arrives at larger assertions about the condition of James’s fiction and the relation between aesthetic subjectivity, tragic narrative and sacrificial mechanisms: ‘The late-Jamesian novel is […] an imitation of the quintessential action of the mind, as it reaches past patterns of sacrifice, dislodges the tragic, stretches and bends it and loosens its bonds’ (210). This is Kventsel’s concluding sentence, and to some extent it expresses a desire that James should point the way out of both cultural decadence and a tragic model of character – towards Modernism, perhaps, since Kventsel’s conclusion might be more applicable to Woolf than James. Yet the study is very much the testament to a literature in transition, attentive to its hieratic opacity and its poetic remainders as much as its iridescent openness to impression. One of the strongest legacies of Kventsel’s study is a style of thought – a critical sentence and organization which is particularly appropriate to James’s late style, and the peculiar density of its ethical, metaphoric and mythic registers.

Andrew Eastham

Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 188 pp, £ 45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-5096-6.

In her collection of essays, Belcaro, Vernon Lee gives a psychological definition of ghost:

‘By ghost we do not mean the vulgar apparition which is seen or heard in told or written tales; we mean the ghost which slowly rises up in our mind, the haunter not of corridors and staircases, but of our fancies. … a vague feeling we can scarcely describe, a something pleasing and terrible which invades our whole consciousness, and which, confusedly embodied, we half dread to see behind us, we know not in what shape, if we look round.’

In her Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, Patricia Pulham rises up to the challenge of unravelling what for Lee defies semantic fixity by its very nature. Lee’s treatment of the psychological supernatural is read through the prism of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory of the ‘transitional object’. According to Winnicott, the child’s subjectivity is formed in the act of playing with toys or other items through which it learns to differentiate what is external and what is internal to the self and to negotiate its separation from the mother; in adult life art and culture take the place of these ‘transitional objects’ of childhood. Pulham applies this theory to Lee’s writings: she argues that the genre of the supernatural is a free space in which Lee ‘plays’ with art objects in order to search for alternative subjectivities and explore gender ambiguity.

The book is therefore structured around four ‘transitional objects’ used by Lee in her tales: the operatic voice, the statue, the doll, and the portrait. In the first chapter Pulham moves from a wide-ranging discussion of music, singing, and voice in Lee, to a series of readings of ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, ‘A Wicked Voice’, and the lesser-known cross-dressing drama Ariadne in Mantua. Pulham builds her argument around the body of the castrato, which is recurrently employed by Lee as a spectral manifestation of gender indeterminacy. The castrato, a figure that occupies an important position in this study, is a slippery synthesis of man, woman, and boy; it is an aesthetic being that is artificially created for artistic pleasure and as such provides Lee with an ideal, complex figure to explore her own authorial self and to deconstruct gender boundaries in her tales. The second chapter deals with Lee’s stories of animated sculptures, ‘Marsyas in Flanders’, ‘St Eudaemon and His Orange Tree’, and ‘The Featureless Wisdom’. Pulham reads these by tracing the relationships between the mythic figures of Venus, Marsyas, Dionysus, and Orpheus, tracing intersecting patterns of androgyny in their myths. Like the castrato, the hermaphroditic and metamorphic body that is the subject of these mythic tales enables Lee to express transgressive subjectivities and sexual ambiguity. Pulham argues that the pagan in Lee functions ‘as a transitional and transformative space in which identity is constantly allowed to shift’ (65) and is therefore as a privileged space for the exploration of homoerotic desire and fantasies of infantile regression. In the third chapter the transitional object under scrutiny is the doll, viewed from the point of view of its uncanny associations with the statue and the (disfigured) female corpse – an image that clearly fascinated Lee. Here Pulham focuses on Lee’s engagements with the maternal and Marian bodies in tales such as ‘A Wedding Chest’ and ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, providing inventive readings of the use of erotic triangles in Lee’s fictions and of the resulting conflation and complication of sexual identities. The last chapter focuses on the Lee’s ambiguous relationship to the portrait. The stories analysed here are among Lee’s best known – ‘Amour Dure’, ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and ‘Dionea’ – all from her successful collection Hauntings. Pulham examines the figure of the femme fatale or phallic woman in these writings, who resists being captured and ‘framed’ in art and ultimately eludes the male artist’s and scholar’s desire for possession and control.

A fundamental premise of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales is that the fantastic tales provide Lee with an ideal genre for a freer play with gender and sexuality than her copious critical writings, in which she is constrained by having to sustain a more stable, ‘male’ authorial persona. Pulham deftly disentangles the fluid gender configurations and shifting patterns of desire that inhabit the supernatural spaces of Lee’s stories. Much twentieth-century criticism has been burdened with a narrow understanding of Lee as a ‘lesbian’ writer – from the dated but useful The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style) by Burdett Gardner to more recent titles. Pulham is rightly impatient with this restrictive definition. She offers a sophisticated discussion of Lee’s experiments with gender, which ranges from androgyny to her use of late-Victorian models of male homoeroticism. In this respect the choice of a psychoanalytic approach seems particularly fruitful: it teases out, without flattening them, the complexities of a slippery writer who inhabits liminal zones in terms of genre, periodisation and, of course, themes. But psychoanalytic theory also enables Pulham to bring to light the evocative, semi-hidden mythic patterns that Lee’s work follows as it fluctuates freely between the genres of fantastic writing and criticism, connecting different art forms and striving for semantic open-endedness.

The poetic duo ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) once described Lee as ‘a museum, rather untidily arranged.’ There is a large dose of bitter irony in these words, and yet they also capture a certain truth about Lee. In this book Pulham, always a sympathetic critic of Lee, takes her readers on an evocative tour through the sometimes intimidating collections of art objects and cultural references that make up this museum. She weaves together literature, myth, aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history in order to make justice to Lee’s impressive, cosmopolitan erudition: her readings constantly bring Lee together with the likes of Balzac, Gautier, Winckelmann, Heine, Hoffmann, Mérimée and Freud. More than any of the existing critical studies of Lee, Pulham’s book is successful in situating Lee in the cosmopolitan European tradition to which she belongs. Pulham has already made a strong contribution to the recent critical revival of Lee’s work in the form of critical essays and an edition of her supernatural tales (co-authored with Catherine Maxwell). Her new monograph is an important step in the revaluation of a writer who, as Pulham says, inhabits a ‘literary borderland’ that is full of productive ambiguities.

Stefano Evangelista

Trinity College, Oxford

Abstracts

40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Feb. 26-March 1, 2009, Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

Panel: ‘Gothic Excess’

Exceeding the Mental Sciences in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story

…and tell me, O practical reasoner, if reason had ever advanced one step into knowledge except through that imaginative faculty which is strongest in the wisdom of ignorance, and weakest in the ignorance of the wise…

- Margrave, in A Strange Story (389)

Edward Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story (1861) is many things, not least a supernatural tale, brimming with elements of gothic romance, the sensational and the fantastic. The novel pays a great deal of attention to the kinds of mental phenomena that fascinated the Victorians of the mid-19th century: trance, mesmerism, clairvoyance, somnambulism, imagination, dreams, memory, even monomania and the problem of criminal responsibility when in an altered mental state. So much does this discourse of mental science inform the novel, in fact, that three-quarters of the way through the narrative, its protagonist, Allen Fenwick, declares that he is ‘sick of the word ‘mind’” (317).

That this exhaustive and exhausting catalogue of mid-century theories of mind is constitutive of the novel’s gothic qualities is apparent – the boundaries of rational scientific inquiry dissolve under the pressure of these multiple, conflicting explanations of mental process throughout the narrative. This problem of conceptual excess is made explicitly textual in what might be the most fascinating aspect of Bulwer Lytton’s novel – the system of footnotes that simultaneously frame and disrupt the story as a whole. There are nearly 50 footnotes appended to the novel, ranging in complexity from simple, one-line textual references or definitions to sprawling, 60-line expositions. This paper argues that the overflowing of text into this extra-diegetic space functions to ensure that the excesses of the novel remain ultimately uncontained, despite the otherwise conventional closure of the narrative. In this way, A Strange Story positions gothic excess as a necessary antidote to the over-determining power of scientific discourse in the mid-Victorian period.

Fiona Coll

University of Toronto

Sixth Annual Conference of the North East Irish Culture Network

14 – 16 November, 2008, University of Sunderland.

Union and ‘the Ascendancy Outlook’: Gothic Re-imaginings of Ireland in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

This paper explores the ways in which Oscar Wilde’s Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray deploys the generic tropes of psychic instability, malign influence and racial alterity in fin-de-siècle London (clearly envisioned as an imperial metropolis suffused with violence, poverty and affluence) to produce a powerful, if displaced, rendition of Ireland’s position in the Union. More particularly, this reading will examine how the anxieties about racial absorption and hybridity that the novel relays – as is apparent, for example, in the scene where contact with opium and Malays threatens to deracinate the indigenous English working class – allow Wilde to articulate his conflicted response to the growing fear of political marginalisation and dispossession which troubled Ireland’s own ‘hybrid’ and ‘hyphenated’ people, the Anglo-Irish, at the end of the nineteenth century. Clearly, at the level of overt narrative representation, the novel is concerned with the cultural formation of contemporary England and yet, strikingly, as this paper will argue, that the motifs of projection, violence and abjection that insistently shape Wilde’s Gothic vision of his host culture call to mind influential discussions of Irish affairs such as Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature suggest that the novel engages with ‘the Irish question’ at the level of symbol and metaphor. In this, the paper proposes that the interrelation of the novel’s figurative representation of the Irish question and its overt examination of the English social question indicate that Wilde read Irish affairs as the psychological underpinning to, or perhaps even the root cause of, England’s social problems. Significantly, the metropolitan, rural and liminal spaces of The Picture of Dorian Gray (London, Selby and the docks, respectively) figure England in various states of social conflict and, here, the paper will conclude by arguing that the vision of aristocratic indifference to working-class poverty that the novel offers not only undermines any historic sense of English political equanimity but also challenges England’s unequivocal confidence in the liberality of its institutions and, by extension, disputes the United Kingdom’s status as a consensual political formation.

Sondeep Kandola

University of Leeds

1st Annual Graduate Conference of the American Studies and Victorian Studies Associations, Binghamton University

Panel: Decadence at the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle

“Futurism in America: the biopolitics of the aesthetic”

Starting from an expansive definition of literary and cultural decadence that stretches into the modernisms of the twentieth century, this paper argues in two directions: first, that putting decadence and Italian Futurism into the same lens reveals that they respond differently to a common historical and political shift around the turn of the twentieth century; and second, that the specific reception of Futurism in America is similar to the American decadent movements outlined by David Weir in his Decadent Culture in the United States (2008) in important respects.

My paper will briefly survey the links between decadence and Futurism, links that are both genetic – in that conservative Italian criticism has always used the term il decadentismo in the pejorative to dismiss post-romantic literature, and especially Futurism, for its sickness and its iconoclasm – as well as thematic, in that F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifestoes were actively engaged in re-purposing decadent tropes like death, the inorganic, and the degeneration from the page to the word for an entirely new political project. These genetic and thematic links both point to an underlying historical link between the two movements; it is possible to consider both movements as differently modulated responses to emerging political rationalities at the closing of the imperialist era. More specifically, my paper will take up the following questions: can Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower help explain the transition from a decadent discourse that refers itself to the end of empire, and a utopian, Futurist project of the perfectibility of the population as a species and a race? That is, does the transition from decadence to Futurism register what Foucault refers to as the shift from territory to population as the objects of state management? And what similarities exist in the parallel transatlantic itineraries of Futurism and decadence? Weir’s argument that Decadence found surprisingly receptive conditions in Progressive Era America are well taken. How was Futurism received, if at all, in an avowedly technophilic, modernizing America, without an ancient regime to scandalize? An answer will be outlined.

Evan Mauro

McMaster University, Ontario

1st Annual Graduate Conference of the American Studies and Victorian Studies Associations, Binghamton University

Panel: Decadence at the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle

‘The White Lethal Chamber: A Degeneration of Mental and Ethnic Borders in Robert W. Chambers’s The Repairer of Reputations.’

Until recently, interest in and recognition of late-nineteenth-century American Decadence as a discernable artistic mode remained relatively scarce. As the reputations of British and Continental literary esthetes remain more or less intact since their initial publication over a century ago, few readers outside of connoisseurs of American speculative fiction know the work of Robert W. Chambers, a writer contemporary with his European counter-parts Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. Though the bulk of his work consists largely of unremarkable historical romances and fashionable society melodramas, my paper proposes that the collection titled The King in Yellow reveals Chambers’s co-opting of images and figures from the small body of fantastic work contained in the oeuvre of Ambrose Bierce for the purpose of expanding upon that material’s allusive potential and thereby representing the spirit of Fin de Siècle America as one that exists under a collective shadow of cultural uncertainty cast by an anxiety-ridden society. More specifically, I argue that “The Repairer of Reputations,” through that story’s unreliable narration and insistent paranoia over a forbidden text, operates as a grotesque reflection of American xenophobic fears at the turn of the nineteenth century. Such fears reveal themselves in that decade’s belief that the integrity of U.S. borders had to be secured against immigrants, and that members of certain domestic ethnic groups needed to be expelled for the sake of national sovereignty. At the same time, the continued pursuit of those policies compliant with manifest destiny creates the need for the repressive layers of security in this not-so-alternative America of the future in which the story is set. Such an evaluation of the psychological, moral, and physical decay of American lives and society in Chambers’s work adds an otherwise neglected perspective to the set of studies that address Decadence on the other side of the Atlantic.

Jeffrey Renye

Temple University

Work in Progress

‘Calling Out from Below: Decadence and Sensual Exhaustion in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé’

Imminent concerns about the degenerative effects of sexual disease and unsanctioned erotic excess inspired the Decadent movement in literature and painting, one of Romanticism’s final declarations and developments. Such varied fin de siècle concerns as the integration of Jews, the syphilis epidemic, and Jack the Ripper challenged writers to invent forms capable of containing lingering nostalgia and Gothic excess. Broadly speaking, Decadent writers sought to embrace such excess, rejecting bourgeoisie values of moderation and progressive cynicism. As the clash between artistic excess and the functionality of form deepened, these writers faced an unusual creative dilemma: how to depict such tensions between Decadence and conventionality using artistic modes that had already been exhausted.

Perhaps most characteristic of this movement’s artificiality and art-for-art’s-sake philosophy was the period’s obsession with the Decadent femme fatale, an aesthetic creation that resembled the independent Victorian woman while embodying an allure the “redundant” woman could not. The Decadent femme fatale was a figure whose sexual abundance and desires led inevitably to her cultural and aesthetic ruin. Oscar Wilde was especially drawn to such tragically corrupt figures, perhaps, in part, because of their compelling mix of beauty tinged with the unmistakable threat of death. Wilde often took literally Walter Pater’s maxim that “the desire of beauty [was] quickened by the sense of death” (Watt 1). In his French play Salomé (1894), Wilde re-imagines a silent biblical figure in the form of a Decadent goddess who presents morbid and often alarming conceptions of the beautiful and the deadly.

Salomé embellishes the biblical tale of Herod and Herodias by giving vibrant voices to its secondary observers and underground dwellers. In the secular world onstage, sacred scripture dances shamelessly with sensual excess as all eyes turn to the decadent Salomé. This secular world at first mirrors and then collides with conventional biblical doctrine as Salomé gazes below, into that captivating darkness from which emerges the sonorous voice of Jokanaan, King Herod’s haughtily disapproving prisoner. Obligations to the moral and spiritual vanish as the play’s femme fatale invites us into a Decadent world where sensual form eclipses narrative action. Wilde’s virgin-seductress, daughter of Herodias, expresses those purely physical desires that mark the play’s departure from moral duty into the visceral needs of the body. With Salomé, Wilde enacts the fatal potential of an “art for art’s sake” philosophy in its purest, most degenerative extreme. She complements and then turns against Decadent visions of languid, mute women, unable to move or speak.

Unlike Salomé, Wilde’s homme fatale calls out from the depths of the holy and self-righteous, yet his unflinching rebuke of the secular and sensual reveals a continual awareness of the magnetic lures of each. Jokanaan is the only character in the play who refuses to look directly at Salomé: his sanctimonious monologues respond to and then intensify her allure and the perverse undertones of her physical demands. It is through this exchange of the rich textures of the upper world and ominous resonances of the lower that sordid and suppressed desires are vividly formed and fatally punished. In the song-like exchange between Salomé and Jokanaan, visual elements such as extravagant colors and Oriental luminosity merge with the enchanting rhythms of these two voices, whose refrains combine and eventually deny the enduring allure of both vision and voice.

Salomé wears veils only to increase the allure of removing them. Her character both tempts us to look and warns us against looking too long or too deeply. In its depiction of a claustrophobic world where authoritarian rule crushes artistic self-expression, Wilde’s play captures an anti-climactic moment of female self-consciousness, when veils are removed and mirrors reflect an implicit dialogue between sex and death. Salomé calls down to Jokanaan, audaciously telling him her desire to kiss him, consume him, and, later, destroy him. Once Salomé hears Jokanaan’s voice, she awakens immediately to her own brazen sexuality, an awakening that clashes sharply with the notes of disdain and self-denial rising up from Jokanaan’s prison-cave. It is therefore Jokanaan, not Herod or Herodias, who initiates and completes the transformation of Wilde’s femme fatale from a passive princess to a relentless queen, from an unwitting temptress to a shrewd assassin. In this moment, as Salomé learns to express her desires and use her allure to satisfy them, the dissonance of the underworld dissolves into and eventually displaces all sound and action on the main stage.

Salomé’s manipulative, minimalist Dance of the Seven Veils is an appropriately Decadent gesture: the final decade of the nineteenth century expressed a weariness of the excess of female sensuality, the abundance of a satiated industrial market, and a surplus of wealth and leisure opportunities. In response to such superfluity, Wilde’s play exposes only later to recant the full expression of sensual desires Salomé awakens but is ultimately denied. In this way, her dance and Wilde’s refusal to describe it complete a kind of revenge against Jokanaan: as she holds his head and gazes into his dead eyes, she reverses the male gaze that has dominated throughout the play: namely, men looking at or anxious about looking at Salomé. Almost immediately after Jokanaan’s execution, Herod, repulsed by the sight of Salomé, turns to her executioners and sternly commands: “Kill that woman.” According to Richard Ellmann, Herod experiences a progression from “sensual delectation…to spiritual revulsion…to outraged conscience” (Ellmann 99). While Salomé’s finale may disappoint modern audiences, for late nineteenth-century viewers, the demise of this excessively sensual woman might seem far more than predictable. Even Herod, aware of the danger and deception lurking within acts of self-reflection, warns: “[o]nly in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks” (Salomé 93-94). Such advice was ignored, of course, both by the characters of his play and Wilde himself, as he famously proclaims in “The Decay of Lying” a vision of art that does not merely reflect the world as it is: “She is a veil rather than a mirror” (“Decay” 306).

Although Wilde leaves out an actual description of the Dance, he does inform us of its erotic charge. Here, Wilde’s eroticism is presented with far less subtlety than we get in his other plays, where sexual tensions are unveiled gradually in the witty exchanges among leisurely, flirtatious drawing room characters. In his extremely popular comedies, characters are led into and out of gardens where they are tempted or reminded of temptations from their pasts. The eroticism of Salomé, however, remains crucial to its central action. A play that combines biblical and erotic themes, Salomé foregrounds a female character whose sexual motivations are clearly absent from Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts of Herodias’s daughter. In the eyes of this fictional society, Salomé’s passions are excessive and perverse: she lusts after a prisoner and then after a dead man. Still worse, she appears both immature and remorseless in her desire for revenge. Salomé’s excessive appetites for flesh and revenge against men also mark the moment when this overdone stereotype begins to produce numbness and apathy.

Much of Salomé’s strangeness lies in its rhythmic pacing and repetitive phrases. The play’s ballad-like form, which provides little character development, focuses almost entirely on uncommon desires that his heroine both inspires and articulates. The abrupt and shocking finale of Wilde’s play calls attention to its own poetic shape and repetitive movement, a call-and-response framework that separates Salomé from her biblical heritage and protects her, for a time, from the retributive powers that will eventually consume and destroy her. For Wilde, however, as for most of his characters, the only thing we ever truly see when reflected back in the mirrors of the play is deception itself, not its source or its lingering secrets. Salomé has forcibly stripped away society’s masks to reveal the tragic emptiness and paralysis lying beneath them.

Bibliography: Works Cited

Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Watt, K.E. “Femme Fatale.” Watt Works. New York City Opera, 2003. 1-2. <www.kewatt.com/Salomé.html>

Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar

Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Random, 1969.

---. Salomé (1893) in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Heather Braun

Macon State University