THE
OSCHOLARS
___________
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Vol. IV |
No. 10 |
Is
AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?
To the Table of Contents of this page | To hub page | To THE OSCHOLARS home page
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for the main pages of the current is
In our last is
(i)
a short informal essay by Dr
(ii)
The draft of a paper by Dr
Kate Macdonald that was given at Varieties of Voice,
the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) annual
conference, Leuven, 13th-16th December 2006 on ‘Orality and voice in John
Betjeman’s “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”: from the 1890s to
the 1920s, and back again’.
(iii)
Six abstracts of papers dealing Irish
women certainly known to, and possibly by, Oscar Wilde, given at the Conference ‘Irish Feminist Thought’.
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1. ‘Thinking in Stories’: Oscar Wilde’s ‘The
Sphinx Without a Secret’, an original essay by Bruce Bashford |
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2. Oscar Wilde and the dynamics of reputation
by Trevor Fisher, a paper given at
the Durrell School,
Corfu, in 2007. |
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3. Masoschisms: Cruelty, Desire, and
Subversion between Victorian Women by Robin Chamberlain, excerpted from the proposal
for her doctoral thesis at |
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4. An
article, part essay part review by |
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We thank all four for these. We are pleased to publish also this month a review of Zemlinsky by Dr Bashford in our section ‘The Critic as Critic’ and a bibliography of his writings in our Bibliographies section.
I.
‘Thinking in Stories’: Oscar
Wilde’s ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’
Bruce Bashford
André Gide reports that Oscar Wilde, annoyed
by an article praising him ‘for ‘knowing how to invent pleasant tales the
better to clothe his thought’,’ objected that his critics ‘believe that all
thoughts are born naked. . . .They don’t understand that I can not think
otherwise than in stories. The sculptor
doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble,
directly’.’ (1) Richard
Pine’s much more recent observation suggests that critics have come to
understand Wilde’s fiction better: ‘Wilde’s stories are distinctive since in
the place of action is thought: despite their simplicity, their morality and
their charm, they are intensely speculative and intellectual.’(2) Still, as a glance at the criticism will
show, Wilde’s specific purposes in his works have proved elusive: it’s apparently
possible to know that he’s thinking in these works without knowing what
he’s thinking. Part of the
difficulty is that we lack developed critical methods for the analysis of
fictional works developed in service of ideas.
The term most readily available for these works, ‘didactic,’ suggests
the loose, inorganic relation between story and thought that Wilde
rejected. According to Wilde’s figure of
the sculptor, an artist thinks through the process of shaping his work. It may be useful, then, for understanding
Wilde distinctive kind of intellectual fiction to ask in a particular case, how
does he construct his story?(3)
My choice of a text for this inquiry may seem
odd: ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’ is hardly among Wilde’s better known works
and has attracted scant attention from critics.(4) It’s actually, however, a promising place to
examine Wilde’s manner of constructing stories. Studying the surviving manuscripts of
Wilde’s plays, Josephine Guy and Ian Small describe an early stage of this
process as ‘the assembly of discrete blocks of dialogue, often revolving around
a particular joke or paradox.’ They
continue, ‘It is as if Wilde’s very creativity itself was manifest via the
composition of small, discrete units.
The early drafts of the plays are often little more than a profusion of
free standing comic gems. Subsequent
drafts show that the most difficult part of writing for Wilde was
narrative--that is, the connection of these gems, the discrete comic exchanges
or aphorisms, into a dramatic structure, with a coherent exposition of plot and
character development.’(5)
‘The Sphinx’ seems clearly the result of such a composition process: the
‘gem’ being the title itself, which reappears at a crucial point in the
story. (Wilde made the gem more
prominent when he republished the story by changing its title from ‘Lady Alroy’
to ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’.)
Furthermore, the title phrase is a paradox, the form of expression we
associate most closely with Wilde. It
works, as Wilde’s paradoxes generally do, through a reversal: a sphinx is
supposed to pose a riddle–to be a riddle–and to conceal an answer, but
here we have a sphinx without a secret.
On the assumption that this paradox was part of the story’s origin, I’ll
ask how Wilde went about what according to Guy and Small was his typical task:
turning a paradox into a narrative.
Approached this way, the story turns out to be more artful than it may
appear, and once Wilde’s achievement is apparent, it’s possible to conjecture
as to why the story hasn’t elicited more critical response.
When Wilde republished the story he also
added the puzzling epigraph, ‘An etching’.
A clue to the epigraph’s significance is provided by a remark Wilde
makes in a review of Whistler: ‘He has done etchings with the brilliancy of
epigrams’.(6) The
equation of an etching with an epigram is perhaps another sign of Wilde’s
attraction to his title phrase (the title isn’t an epigram as it stands but
Wilde has Harry make it one in The Picture of Dorian Gray when he
defines women as ‘Sphynxes without secrets’ [143]. Presumably, however,
the epigraph refers to the entire story as well, and thus the equation also
indicates that Wilde saw the story as having the impact of a compact artistic
form. This makes the story’s brevity
itself part of Wilde’s compositional task: if the story is to have its effect,
Wilde has to invent a narrative that we can take in quickly.
This is a problem of what Wayne Booth taught
us to call ‘rhetoric’: the techniques a fiction writer uses ‘to help the reader
grasp the work’.(7) In The
Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth says explicitly that he’s concerned with
‘non-didactic fiction’; as readers of such fiction, we undergo a course of
experience in response to the unfolding fates of characters ‘we are made to
care for’(p.6). In a short work of this
kind, in which ‘economy [of presentation] is at least as important as
precision’ [p.10], we must come to care for characters quickly, and so Booth is
willing to defend Boccaccio’s use of explicit authorial comment in a tale from The
Decameron–of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’–on the grounds that, ‘Unless
the story is to be lengthened unduly with episodes showing that [the hero] is
worthy–the narrator must give us briefly and directly the necessary information
about his character’ [p.12]. With the
possible exception of some of the fairy tales, Wilde did not write this kind of
fiction. We do frequently judge the
worth of his characters, and in moral terms, but we’re not pulled through his
works by our desire that these characters meet the ends they deserve (we don’t
turn the pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray hoping Dorian will get his
comeuppance). Therefore when Wilde
attempts to explore ideas in a short work, his rhetorical task differs from
Boccaccio’s: rather than give us an estimate of his characters, he has to let
us know quickly what the topic of the work will be.
Wilde’s fictional rhetoric is occasionally as
direct as Boccaccio’s: the epigraph to ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,’ for
instance, announces that the story is ‘A Study in Duty’ [160]. In ‘The Sphinx,’
however, he proceeds more obliquely, letting his unnamed narrator introduce the
topic through a compressed process of reasoning. (Wilde prepares us for this process by
immediately characterizing his narrator as contemplative: he’s observing ‘the
strange panorama of pride and poverty that pass[es] before him’.) Upon meeting Gerald, the narrator registers
a change: at
To move the inner story along briskly, Wilde
has Gerald fall in love with exactly the wrong person, creating the maximum
tension between Gerald’s affection and his rule. The ‘trust’ Gerald requires is how ‘truth’ appears
in the social realm: not as the accuracy of a claim about the world, but as a
reliable, transparent relation between persons’ actions and their inner
thoughts and feelings. Gerald is
‘frank,’ forthcoming; Lady Alroy is ‘mysterious,’ secretive. While she’s
receptive enough of Gerald’s attention for a relationship to develop, she
remains partially opaque; as Gerald aptly observes, she’s ‘like one of those
strange crystals that one sees in museums, which are at one moment clear, and
at another clouded’. Having presented
this tension, Wilde resolves it by having Gerald happen on evidence suggesting
Lady Alroy is having an affair, the quintessential betrayal of trust in a
romantic relationship. Gerald’s
confronting Lady Alroy with his suspicion is the decisive event in the plot of
the inner story. He explicitly demands
that his rule be satisfied: ‘Can’t you tell the truth?’ When he thinks she
doesn’t, he breaks off their relationship in anger and leaves the country, only
to learn upon his return he learned that Lady Alroy has died from a chill.
While the inner story’s plot is complete with
Lady Alroy’s death, Wilde has Gerald continue to recount his visit to the house
he saw Lady Alroy enter, where the landlady assures him that Lady Alroy met no
one. At this point, the narrator solves
the enigma of her behavior by invoking the paradox of the title: Lady Alroy
tried to create an identity for herself through secrecy, even though she had
nothing to conceal. By inserting the paradox
in the story in this manner, Wilde has created a narrative structure of some
complexity. The peripety of the inner
story’s plot is the confrontation between Gerald and Lady Alroy that destroys
their relationship (if this were a story depending on our aspirations for the
characters, this downturn in the plot would place it in the genre of
tragedy). It’s Lady Alroy’s pursuit of
mystery, her visiting the house with her veil down, that precipitates the
confrontation. In Aristotle’s terms, we
have a peripety without a recognition, that is, a reversal in the action
without understanding its significance.
In fact, this is the very focus of the story, what to make of the puzzle
of Lady Alroy. It’s in the outer story that
we get the recognition in the form of the narrator’s solution to the puzzle. This does what recognitions are supposed to
do. It unifies the plot considered as a
sequence of events: now we see the cause of Lady Alroy’s various actions–her
breaking an appointment with Gerald, insisting on receiving her mail at the
library and so forth. And it interprets
this unity by lifting it to the level of thematic meaning: the purpose behind
Lady Alroy’s ‘mania for mystery’ was to create a fictional life, to ‘imagin[e]
she was a heroine’.
This recognition is also both peripety and
recognition in the outer frame story.
The protagonist of that story is the narrator, and its action is his
changing his mind about the answer to the question Gerald puts to him as the
inner story begins: is Lady Alroy’s face–and so Lady Alroy herself–‘truthful?’ Looking at Lady Alroy’s photograph, the
narrator initially isn’t certain: he can’t tell ‘whether [her] secret was good
or evil,’ but he seems sure that hers ‘was a beauty moulded out of many
mysteries--the beauty, in fact, which is psychological, not plastic’. When Wilde republished the story, he had the
narrator make explicit the allusion to Pater’s meditation on the Mona Lisa,
declaring, ‘She is the Gioconda in sables’.
But Pater’s woman is replete with exotic experience, ‘All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they
have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual
ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias’.(9) As the
narrator reflects on the inner story that Gerald recounts, he reverses his
initial view through his recognition. He
was precisely wrong: Lady Alroy’s beauty isn’t ‘moulded’ from a rich inner
content: there’s nothing there at all.
To return to Guy and Small’s account of Wilde’s process of composition,
Wilde may well have had difficulty inventing narratives, but in ‘The Sphinx’ he
goes far beyond merely creating a situation in which he can trot out his
‘gem’. Rather he turns the title
paradox into a story by giving the paradox a determining role in shaping both
the story’s inner and outer plot lines.
While I’m still praising Wilde, let me note
one more aspect of his art in constructing ‘The Sphinx’. As a literary rhetor, Wilde knows when to
speed up and when to slow down. In the
tale from Boccaccio that Booth discusses, the heroine’s first husband has to
pass away in order that she marry the worthy male protagonist. As Booth notes, the same basic situation
presented from the first husband’s point of view would have a quite different
effect, but Boccaccio fashions the tale so that we simply want the first
husband out of the way. One could also
imagine ‘The Sphinx’ presented from Lady Alroy’s point of view: Gerald’s false
accusation, her ineffectual efforts to clear her name, followed by her sudden
death would leave us with a sense of loss and regret. But that isn’t the story Wilde’s writing;
shortly after bringing his inner plot to its peripety, he dispatches Lady Alroy
in two sentences so we keep our attention on what he is doing. If we’re to accept the narrator’s
paradoxical explanation of Lady Alroy’s behavior, however, we have to accept
his view that the landlady told Gerald the truth, and therefore Wilde devotes
what is, given the scale of the story, a substantial paragraph to Gerald’s
encounter with the landlady. Wilde has
Gerald himself describe the landlady as ‘a respectable looking woman’ and her
response to the news of Lady Alroy’s death–‘Oh, sir, I hope not!’–is one of
several instances of speech that sound genuine.
Gerald may remain uncertain about the narrator’s explanation, but Wilde
provides just enough evidence so we don’t.(10)
If ‘The Sphinx’ is done with such art, why
haven’t critics shown more interest in it?
My hunch is that ‘The Sphinx’ can appear so completely summed up in the
narrator’s discovery, the title paradox, that there seems little left to
say. But I’ve just been praising Wilde
for incorporating the paradox into the very structure of the story, which
should prevent this response. To see why
it doesn’t, let me return again to Guy and Small’s view that Wilde typically
began with epigrams and paradoxes which he then turned into narrative
works. Recent commentary has emphasized
the way in which the reversals in Wilde’s paradoxes do political work through
‘inverting binaries’ or revaluing important social concepts.(11) For my purpose, what’s important about this
process is less the revaluing of the concepts than the change in meaning the
concepts undergo, the way they modify each other through the reversal. Both aspects of the process are at work in
Wilde’s aphorism ‘Only the shallow know themselves’ [1244]. If the attainment of
self-knowledge is an achievement, then the aphorism does revalue upward the
condition of being shallow. But this
isn’t the condition as we ordinarily conceive it, since if shallowness is to
know itself, it must possess a capacity for self-reflection--which shallowness,
almost by definition, doesn’t have. And
self-knowledge is being modified too: we expect it to probe the depths of the
self, but now all there is to know is surface.
In ‘The Sphinx,’ the equivalent to the
concepts in a paradox–being shallow and having self-knowledge above–are
Gerald’s and Lady Alroy’s approaches to life.
Lady Alroy’s approach requires a reversal even to state it. In Gerald’s case, the reversal takes the form
of his rule, his requirement of trust as a condition of love, undoing
itself. His rule causes him to demand
truth, but when he directly gets it, when Lady Alroy truthfully says, ‘I have
told it’, he doesn’t recognize it and so loses the woman he loves. These equivalents in the story to concepts
in a paradox, however, don’t interact to modify each other: they simply
collide. Gerald doesn’t change his
policy as a result of meeting Lady Alroy, and her pursuit of mystery is
independent of having met him.(12)
To restate this in terms of the ‘thinking’ in
the story: on Wilde’s own principle that the construction of the story and the
thought are one, the story’s opening establishes a focus on Gerald’s policy
that love requires the form truth takes in social life, trust. While that policy seems strict–the narrator
is immediately doubtful–Wilde may well have felt that it was endorsed widely
enough by ‘earnest’ Victorian society to be worth examining.(13) The logical form of the story, as it were,
consists of testing Gerald’s rule against an example, as though Wilde were
conjecturing, ‘suppose a man with this policy became attracted to a woman like
the following ...’ The example Wilde
invents, a woman whose pursuit of an imagined identity necessarily involves
duplicity, isn’t merely a hard test but an outright counter-example, and the
effect of the failed love story is to cast doubt on Gerald’s policy. For the story’s logical form to work, when we
finish the story, we have to take the counter-example all the way back to the
rule and ponder its implications for the rule.
We would be more likely to do so if we could understand Lady Alroy only
in relation to Gerald, if their approaches to life really modified each other
in meaning. Since they don’t, and since
Lady Alroy’s approach has the self-sufficiency of a paradox, we may separate
off the counter-example as the whole point of the story--a curious human
possibility but one the narrator makes intelligible.
Finally, there’s a further reason that the
thought in the story is difficult to recover, one having to do with Wilde’s
general mode of thought. ‘The Sphinx’
can strike a reader as a piece of something larger, as having a significance
for its author that doesn’t get fully expressed even though the story is
complete in its own terms. I believe the
story is part of a more encompassing project, Wilde’s inquiry into the concept
of truth. In ‘The Critic as Artist,’
Wilde has Gilbert answer the question ‘[w]hat is Truth?’ by saying, ‘In matters
of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived, In matters of science, it is the ultimate
sensation. In matters of art, it is
one’s last mood’. [1143] Gilbert’s answer reflects Wilde’s sense that
a concept like truth takes on different meanings in different regions of human
life. The way to grasp the concept is to
identify these several meanings, and as Gilbert is beginning to do, examine
them side by side. ‘The Sphinx’ adds
another region to Gilbert’s list: it’s asking what truth might look like in
relations between men and women, and it embodies Wilde’s doubts about an answer
with apparently some social currency, trust in the rigorous form Gerald
requires. Whatever intellectual value
this instance of ‘thinking in stories’ had for Wilde is obviously only
partially available to a reader of this text alone. A full appreciation of the story would
require seeing how it both draws on and contributes to a more comprehensive
philosophical project--an inquiry not just into truth but into a whole cluster
of concepts that interested Wilde.
Gaining this overview of Wilde as a thinker would itself be a large
project, but certainly one worth attempting.(14)
·
Bruce Bashford is Associate Professor of English
at
NOTES
1
André Gide, Oscar Wilde,
trans. Bernard Frechtman (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 11.
Emphasis in the original.
2
Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995),
161.
3 One
might wonder why given the social and political interests of criticism for the
last several decades we haven’t developed a theory of literature in service of
ideas. Perhaps such a theory has to
start with the older formalist view that literary works considered as works of
art are not directly discursive. For a
thoughtful discussion of how ideas appear in literary works that does start
this way, see Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Chicago:
Chicago UP, 1964).
4 The
story originally appeared in The World, 26 (
5 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar
Wilde’s Profession (
6 ‘The
Butterfly’s Boswell,’ Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, ed. Anya
Clayworth (
7 Both
phrases from Booth are from the first page of ‘Preface,’ The Rhetoric of
Fiction (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1961).
I take the phrase ‘we are made to care for’ from Sacks (15). This is the type of fiction the author and
literary theorist Lætitia Prism has in mind when she says of her lost
manuscript, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’ (376). Sacks would infer that her novel was ‘comic,’
since in comic novels ‘in order to satisfy expectations aroused in the work,
the final stabilization of relationships ha[s] to ensure for each character a
fate . . . commensurate with his moral desert’ (20-21). He’d also remind Miss Prism that there are
novels, including many great ones, in which the good don’t get rewarded and the
bad punished, but he’d share her view of our desires as readers of
‘non-didactic’ fiction.
8 For
a reading of the story that attributes a different topic to it, namely,
Protestant suspicions of Catholicism, see Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of
Oscar Wilde (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39-43. For
9
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: UCal
Press, 1980), 98-99.
10 For
an analysis of the story as a projection of Wilde’s situation in life, see Nils
Clausen, ‘Lady Alroy’s Secret: ‘Surface and Symbol’ in Wilde’s ‘The Sphinx
Without a Secret’,’ The Wildean 28: 24-32. Clausen treats the story as autobiographical,
as Wilde, who has recently begun a double sexual life, writing a story about a
secret. The narrator, ‘a surrogate for Wilde,’
is also leading a double life: ‘What,
one wonders, is the narrator’s reason for being in
11 The
most influential statement of this analysis is Jonathan Dollimore’s ‘Different
Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,’ Textual Practice
1, no. 1 (1987): 48-67.
12
It’s tempting to see Gerald’s rule as undone as well by his very attraction
to Lady Alroy: as he says, ‘I was infatuated with her: in spite of the mystery,
I thought then--in consequence of it I see now’. When Wilde republished the story, however,
he extended Gerald’s remarks by adding, ‘No; it was the woman herself I loved. The mystery troubled me, maddened me’. The addition keeps Gerald’s rule in tact even
after his encounter with Lady Alroy, which is necessary if the story is to
treat his rule, initially at least, as a live possibility.
13
Since writing this sentence, I’ve come across a discussion lending
support to this view of Wilde’s topic, or perhaps better, target: Steven
Shapin’s ‘Man With a Plan: Herbert Spenser’s theory of everything,’ The New
Yorker (August 13, 2007): 75-79.
Shapin, an historian of science, claims that ‘Spencer was, arguably, the
single most influential systematic thinker of the nineteenth century’, even if
that influence was ‘short-lived’ (75).
Shapin presents evidence of the widespread attention Spencer received in
his time, and we know from Wilde’s undergraduate Notebooks that he was well
acquainted with Spencer’s work. ‘For
Spencer,’ according to Shapin, ‘the importance of being earnest could not be
underestimated; the truth was all that mattered. Science, and a scientific approach to all the
problems of social life, was another mode of sincerity. . . .’ (79) The allusion to Wilde’s play isn’t Wilde’s
only presence in the piece: Shapin closes by opposing Spencer’s insistence on
truth-telling to Wilde’s endorsement of ‘lying,’ or fiction making, in ‘The
Decay of Lying’ (80).
14
Rodney Shewan also places the story in the wider context of Wilde’s
thought, describing Lady Alroy as ‘a living exponent of Wildean mythopoeia
fighting the good fight of fancy against annihilating fact’; for Shewan, the
story’s ‘chief purpose is to prove Wilde’s contention that ‘Nowadays it is only
the unreadable that occurs’,’ and thus the story ‘points straight towards the
mythopoeic practice of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ and the precepts of ‘The
Decay of Lying’’; Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (London: Macmillan,1977),
26. It was Shewan’s insightful remarks
that originally made me reconsider the story.
I believe his notion of ‘mythopoeia’ is compatible with my view that the
story’s ultimate topic is truth. However, if ‘annihilating fact’ refers to Lady
Alroy’s death--what Shewan calls ‘formless accident’ elsewhere in his
comments-- he appears to me to confer thematic meaning on what is merely a
means of stopping short the inner story.
It’s also not clear to me that the story does endorse Lady Alroy’s ‘good
fight’. Shewan is surely right, though,
that Wilde champions ‘mythopoeic practice’ in other works, and this raises the
important question of whether Wilde always presents even the concepts that he
endorses in the same light. For more on
Wilde’s investigating concepts by examining how they appear in different
situations, see my ‘When Critics Disagree: Recent Approaches to Oscar Wilde,’ Victorian
Literature and Culture (2002): 623.
II.
Oscar Wilde and the dynamics of
reputation
Trevor Fisher
This conference is devoted to literary reputation,
and in this paper I want to focus on how a dynamic reputation was made for one
highly significant cultural figure – Oscar Wilde. I suggest that a dialectic of
making and remaking a public image is central to Wilde’s history, his downfall,
and his subsequent reinvention as a major cultural figure.
Few figures illustrate the power of image and
celebrity in the modern world more than Oscar Wilde. In his lifetime Wilde
commanded attention by his flamboyant personality. Wilde’s enduring
significance since his death owes much to the scandal surrounding his downfall
and symbolic emergence as a victim of sexual intolerance. His literary work is
now inescapably linked to his personal life. As academic interest has grown in
the last half century, culminating in the decision of the Oxford University
Press to embark on the publication of his complete works, (a) assessing the
manner in which the impact of Wilde’s personalities and behaviours have
affected literary judgements is now inescapable.
Considered as a purely literary figure, Wilde can
hardly rate as highly as his two contemporaries and acquaintances Bernard Shaw
and André Gide, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. Yet neither of the latter
figures attracts anything like as much attention, academic or non academic, as
Oscar Wilde.
It may well be that Wilde is top of the second
division of Victorian writers rather than being in the Premier League. From
Wilde’s death onward, it was suggested that Wilde had not created a body of
work which would last, and that he was of the second rank. (b) Yet Oscar is a
major cultural figure in the way few other writers of the later nineteenth
century are. It is easy to see how the circumstances of his trials and
imprisonment focussed public attention on his private life, creating an
enormous popular cult. However it is less easy to grasp the strong link between
the non literary elements of his life and times and his literary reputation.
Decoupling the literary work from the personality
cult is intellectually challenging. In this paper I will focus on the creation
of Wilde’s persona and the role of his public behaviour to clarify some key is
I see the evolution of Wilde’s public reputation
in four distinct phases. As an undergraduate, Wilde created a public image of
the aesthetic dilettante which thrust him firmly into the gaze of the educated
public. Abandoning this image on returning from his American tour in 1883 Wilde
recreated himself as a reviewer and magazine editor. By the end of the 1880s,
he jettisoned this second persona to launch himself into an increasingly
successful literary career. He developed superlative gifts of self publicity,
but these could not prevent the third phase imploding in the trials which he
initiated in 1895. Remarkably, Wilde appeared convinced that he could persuade
the Old Bailey to accept his version of reality. This mistaken assessment led
to two years imprisonment, exile, and premature death in 1900 aged only 46.
However in these final years Wilde entered a fourth phase, which produced the
material on which has been constructed his current image as a tragic but
significant literary and cultural figure – Oscar Wilde, “Poet and Martyr”. (c)
THE FIRST STAGE; PRINCE OF THE AESTHETES
Wilde discovered his ability to project a
compelling persona at
He also discovered the ability to capture
attention. Wilde showed astonishing self confidence at the opening of the
Grosvenor Gallery on
But he did not display outstanding literary
talent. He wrote a play, Vera, which was not produced in
Above all, he was able to exploit fashionable
interest in art for art’s sake to his own ends. When Gilbert and Sullivan
produced their satire of the Aesthetics PATIENCE in 1882, the central character
of Bunthorne was sufficiently closely modelled on Wilde for Doyly Carte to
invite him to tour the
Doyly Carte exploited Wilde’s fame as an aesthete.
Wilde had become so well known that when Walter Hamilton produced his book THE
AESTHETIC MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN in 1882 he devoted a chapter to Wilde. While in
New York, Oscar had Napoleon Sarony photograph him as an aesthete – wearing
knee britches, long hair, velvet jacket, lying languorously at times on a
settee. It was an image which persisted even when Wilde had adopted
conventional dress and short hair. Wilde had developed the ability to
scandalise the Respectable, very much a lasting legacy.
THE WILDE OF THE SECOND PERIOD
Wilde returned from the
Wilde’s second period was so uncreative that he
took a regular job, editing the magazine The Lady’s World. It gave him
the breathing space to start publishing prose, publishing short stories in
literary journals such as the Court and Society Review, conventional in
all respects. The Pall Mall Gazette noted in September 1887 that “Oscar’s
star has been low in the horizon since he cut his hair and became ‘Benedick the
married man’”. (h)
In 1888, Wilde’s image was that of a minor author
and editor. He was writing inconsequential short stories, and rather more
consequential children’s fiction which tended to bolster his image as a
conventionally married man – The Happy Prince and Other Tales
appearing in May 1888.
Wilde enjoyed a particularly friendly relationship
with the Tory W E Henley. When Yeats first met Wilde at an event at
STAGE THREE; DECADENCE AND SUCCESS
Wilde’s literary reputation rests almost
exclusively on the body of work he created from 1888 to the Ballad of
Reading Goal ten years later, covering the third and fourth phases of the
development of his reputation. Through
1888 he turned increasingly to relaunching himself as a writer, pursuing three
new approaches. Immediately, he found children’s fiction a rewarding pursuit,
the Athenaeum comparing him with Hans Christian Anderson. (i) Along with
this he explored society fiction, which would provide the muse for his
sparkling light comedies. And from January 1889, he pur
Wilde, who was intimate with the French literary
scene in
Wilde was now undermining his appeal for
Respectability. His next major essay, The Portrait of Mr W H, postulated
the idea that the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets was a young actor
unusually close to the playwright. This passed with little comment but his
journalist friend Frank Harris said it was much talked about and played into
the hands of Wilde’s enemies. The story, published in the July 1889 edition of
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, drew a hostile comment only from
Dorian Gray contained decadent, homosexual
overtones, leading to a firestorm of criticism. W H Smith removed this edition
of Lippincott’s from its shelves. Critical reaction in the Morning
Chronicle, the St James’ Gazette, and Henley’s Scots Observer was so savage that Wilde felt he had to defend
himself. An extensive correspondence en
Fortune now allowed Wilde to make a successful
return to the theatre through an American actor and producer, Lawrence Barrett.
Barrett staged the Duchess of Padua in New York anonymously and with the
new title of Guido Ferranti in January 1891. It is a testimony to
Wilde’s standing in New York that the New York Tribune reviewer
commented that the author was ‘a practised writer and a good one’, naming the
writer as Oscar Wilde. Though the run only lasted three weeks, it boosted
Wilde’s fortunes as a dramatist. He was invited by George Alexander to write a modern
play for the St James’s Theatre and responded with his first light comedy, Lady
Windermere’s Fan. This successfully premiered on 20th February 1892. Wilde and his friends wore the Green
Carnation, which the Respectable failed to recognise as the badge of
homosexuality. However when Wilde smoked on stage while acknowledging the applause,
this outraged Respectability. Alongside his new reputation as a successful
author of society comedies, he was revisiting his previous reputation as a
figure who flaunted a deliberate heterodoxy.
Wilde’s aesthetic in this third period had little
consistency. Ellmann suggests Wilde was reacting against each work by writing
the exact opposite, a theory which only works for 1891-92 and Dorian Gray,
Lady Windermere’s Fan, and Salome. Wilde reacted to the experience
of writing a light comedy by writing a work of heavy decadence in Salome,
which he completed in January 1892. It was consciously French, written in that
language and attracting praise from literary Paris. Scawen Blunt wrote in his
diary that Wilde was ambitious to become a French Academician. (o) This was
unachievable, but Wilde was seen as the outrider of French decadence in
England, perhaps the underlying reason why the theatrical censor terminated
plans to stage the work on the London stage. The English translation was
illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, rising to the height of his genius. This was
published almost contemporaneously with the emergence of the first edition of The
Yellow Book, often seen as the bible of the decadent movement. This was
certainly the view of the Times, who editorialised that it was “A combination
of English rowdiness with French lubricity”, (p) Wilde was not a contributor to
the Yellow Book. Yet his reputation was such that it was widely assumed that
Wilde was part of its genesis.
Wilde’s reputation by 1894 was dangerously double
edged. Professionally he was wooing London’s theatreland, producing another
sparkling light comedy, A Woman of No Importance in 1893. This success
led to him working on two more glittering works, An Ideal Husband and The
Importance of Being Earnest, both of which opened with massive success in
the New Year of 1895. However even within the theatre going public, Wilde knew
an undercurrent of antagonism existed, proven by his reception at a theatrical
perfomance in late 1894. In his own words, “the bows and the salutations of the
lower orders were so cold that I felt it my duty to sit in the Royal Box with
the Ribblesdales, the Harry White’s and the Home Secretary”. (q) This passage
has a double meaning. Overtly, Wilde was simply recording the fact that while
spurned by the theatrical audience he was moving in High Society. But to Bosie
Douglas, to whom the letter was addressed, the fact that Wilde joined Asquith
possessed a delicious edge. Both Wilde and Douglas, Wilde’s lover, knew Wilde’s
sexual practices were illegal. But both men felt his ambiguities were such that
he could associate with the man charged with upholding the law while flouting
it. Wilde appeared to have total control over his reputation, a belief Wilde
now tested to destruction.
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
It is the central theme of this paper that Wilde’s
literary reputation cannot be separated from the behaviours which Wilde
exhibited in his wider social life. This is pre-eminently true for Wilde’s
downfall. The events surrounding the opening of The Importance of Being
Earnest on Valentine’s Day, 1895 are abundantly well known. The Marquis of
Queensberry, Bosie Douglas’s manic
father, provoked Wilde to
Yet though the trials and imprisonment have some
of the elements of Greek tragedy, the outcome for Wilde’s reputation was
complex. Wilde could never operate in any capacity in England again, going into
exile on release and dying, aged only 46, in Paris in 1900. Yet it is not the case
that prison ended Wilde’s career. Indeed, the collapse of Wilde’s ability to
operate within England and his very public labelling as a homosexual began a
fourth, final stage in the development of his reputation. This has rarely been
given the attention it deserves.
THE FOURTH PERIOD
Wilde’s reputation in England after the trials was
that of a pariah, although some of his work was republished, ® testifying to a
continuing audience of sorts. The trials did not make Wilde a pariah on the
Continent, however. France saw the first production of Salome. News of this (on 11th February 1896) reached
Reading Goal with positive effects for Wilde. Particularly in France and
Germany, Wilde’s reputation both as an artist and the most famous homosexual of
the period were enhanced, particularly around Salome. Richard Strauss
was sufficiently attracted by the work to put it to music in the early years of
the twentieth century.
Wilde was not destroyed psychologically by prison.
Indeed, once he was moved to Reading and received writing materials, he wrote
the highly significant prison letter to Douglas known as De Profundis.
This was followed by a small body of work provoked by his prison experiences.
(s). The most important work Wilde produced after his release – and virtually
his only creative work – was the poem The Ballad of Reading Goal, which
was released anonymously on 9th April 1898. It was a great success; four
printings of 5000 copies being needed in the first three months. By the seventh
printing, in June 1899, Wilde was persuaded to put his own name alongside his
prison number, C.3.3, a sign that he was not longer unmentionable in some parts
of polite society. The letters published in newspapers on prison reform, and
the Ballad, reinforced the view of liberal and left wing opinion that
Wilde was a victim of a repressive social system. Wilde’s reputation was still
a pariah for most of British public opinion but he was becoming a martyr for
liberals and the left. .
Most of Wilde’s work was available to the public
by late 1899 (t), the most significant unknown work being De Profundis,
which Wilde intended to account for his behaviour up to the trials, and which
was clearly intended for eventual publication. (u) Its publication history
however is highly controversial. The version produced in 1905 by Robert Ross,
Wilde’s literary executor, was severely edited to exclude two thirds of the
text. Ross expunged all references to Bosie Douglas and his father, the Marquis
of Queensberry. This produced Hamlet without the prince, but this was not known
at the time. The expurgated version sold 10,000 copies in weeks, and 14
editions were brought out within three years. The version which Ross produced
appeared to be a mediation on art and religion from the prison cell, and in
this form was to circulate till 1949, shaping Wilde’s intellectual reputation
for the first half of the twentieth century in a way which avoided controversy.
Wilde’s literary reputation until the publication
of the Collected Letters edited by Rupert Hart Davis in 1962 was dominated by
the comedies. The superlative scholarship of Hart Davis allowed a many faceted
version of Wilde to emerge, but it was perhaps the decriminalisation of male
homosexuality across the Western World in the sixties which was formative in
establishing Wilde’s current stature. However the reputation of Wilde as a
cultural figure, which is decisive for his current high literary status, is
highly ambiguous. Joseph Bristow has written pertinently of the
“somewhat implausible image of a literary man who has at
times been portrayed as a homosexual martyr, revolutionary thinker and original
genius. While I applaud the fact that Wilde now enjoys greater respect as a
literary author than ever before, I have some reservations about the tendency
in the various biographical spin offs – as well as the growing bulk of academic
scholarship on him – to distort what he accomplished and what he stood for.”
(v)
I share Bristow’s reservations. Wilde’s
reputations, both literary and cultural, are becoming that of a chameleon.
Disentangling fact from fiction, and fiction from its roots in self publicity,
is a vitally necessary task.
A paper of
this kind normally sets out a definitive view of the subject, but where Oscar
Wilde’s reputation is concerned we are at a point where Wilde’s reputation has
become peculiarly problematic. Moreover the extensive industry developed for
Wilde studies has failed to develop an apparatus to distinguish between Wilde’s
literary work and his celebrity status. The task of decoupling the two is one
which, despite or because of the explosion of Wilde Studies, has hardly begun.
Perhaps by understanding some of the ways Wilde himself manufactured his
persona, the is
Trevor Fisher
1st May 2007
NOTES
(a)
OUP began this with Wilde’s Collected Poetry, with De Profundis appearing along with Dorian
Gray in 2005.
(b)
On his death, the Pall Mall Gazette wrote that ‘Mr Wilde’s gifts included supreme
intellectual ability, but nothing he ever wrote had strength to endure”. Edmund
Gosse wrote to Andre Gide in 1910 that “Of course he was not a ‘great writer’…
his works, taken without his life, present to a sane criticism a mediocre
figure” (quoted in COLLINS COMPLETE WORKS p1.
(c)
The phrase is used in a letter of 18th March
1898 (date conjectural) from him to his literary executor, Robert Ross, printed
in THE COMPLETE LETTERS p1041. It was used as the banner headline of the TLS on February 9th 2001, without
quotes.
(d)
Wilde himself said “My Irish accent was one of
many things I forgot at Oxford”, while Wilde’s perfect sentences seemed to
Yeats to have been “written overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous”.
Yeats marvelled he could speak in conversation in full sentences. (quoted
Ellmann p37). The comments about Wilde at 20 were made by his contemporary J E
C Bodley, written up in the New York
Times in 1882 at the time of Wilde’s tour of America. At 26, Wilde had
become a figure to be written about, and a wholly different person from the man
who arrived at Oxford 6 years earlier.
(e)
Wilde had a successful academic career and
gained a first in classical moderations in 1876, his second year at Oxford. In
1878 he gained a first in litterae humaniores. The award of a double first was
rare. The examiners are said to have told Hunter Blair that in both years
Wilde’s examination was the best of his year (Ellmann p94). But although
Wilde’s academic ability was undoubted, he had made enemies. The book of poems had initially been solicited
by the secretary of the Oxford Union for its library, but the Union voted twice
– first in open session, then as a ballot of the membership – to reject it.
There was clearly a groundswell against Wilde. George Curzon was furious, but
his support was of little value given his unpopularity. The Union even voted
against having the book for the Coffee and Smoking Room (18th October 1881:
Ellmann pp139-141)
(f)
Bunthorne’s song in Patience has him claiming
“Though the philistines may jostle,
you will rank as an apostle, in the high aesthetic
band,
if you walk down Piccadilly,
with a poppy or a lily, in your mediaeval hand,
And everyone will say, as you walk your flowery
way
If he’s content with a vegetable love, which would
certainly not suit me,
Why what a particularly pure young man, this pure
young man must be!”
Wilde was not of course mediaeval, having
abandoned Ruskin’s view of Art for Pater’s focus on the Renaissance while at
Oxford. Nor was he particularly pure. The
New York quote: Ellmann p130.
(g)
Ellmann p 208.
(h)
Pall Mall Gazette 16th September 1887. First
edition of The Lady’s World under Wilde’s editorship November 1887.
(i)
Letter of June 1888 so dated by Gladstone,
Complete Letters p350. Ellman claims it was written in November 1885 while on a
visit to Cambridge, not directly for his son Cyril. (op cit p252-253).
Comparison with Andersen, Ellman p282.
(j)
Wilde’s relationship to French decadence is
vital for the third period. Wilde’s admiration for Baudelaire well known, his
use for inspiration of Huysmans’ work evident. Rimbaud, and his relationship
with Verlaine which was violent, criminal and homosexual was less obviously a
factor. But Rimbaud had a successful poetic career, though he remained poor.
When on November 10 1890 Rimbaud died (Page p42), a crowd of 10,000 followed
his coffin to its grave. But homosexuality was not illegal in France. To
emulate such a figure in a homophobic culture had an appeal for Wilde.
(k) The early stories were not decadent. In 1887 he published The Sphinx, published as Lady Alroy in The World on 25th May, and The Model Millionaire in the same journal on 22nd June. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, in which Lady Windermere is first mentioned, was published in The Court and Society Journal later in the year. Only after they had already appeared in magazine form did he have them published in more permanent form in 1891 in the collection Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories in 1891, bizarrely together with The Canterville Ghost. All had been published in 1887. This was Wilde’s practice for his remaining prose works through to his embrace of drama. The decadent current began in January 1889 when Wilde embraced antinomianism by publishing The Decay of Lying in The Nineteenth Century, discussing the idea of the secret life especially in relation to the poet Chatterton. In Pen Pencil and Poison, which his close friend Frank Harris published in The Fortnightly Review he considered murder as an art form in the career of the forger, artist and murderer Thomas Wainwright. Both played on themes of illegality, secretary, and the manufacture of illusion. They were republished in the 1891 volume of essays Intentions. Neither as magazine articles nor in book form did they cause outrage. It was left to Dorian Gray to break the mould.
Apart from Poison and Lying, Intentions also includes The Critic as Artist, published in Harris’s Fortnightly Review in July and September 1890, and The Truth of Masks, published in The Nineteenth Century in May 1885.
(l) 6th July 1889. Wilde wrote Henley an offensively arrogant letter about this. Complete letters p409. Harris Comment Ellmann p282.
(m) The dinner was on August 31st 1889. Doyle’s story, the second Sherlock Holmes tale, appeared in Lippincott’s in February 1890. See Complete Letters p413 ff.
(n) Wilde wrote to the Gazette on the 25th June responding to their negative review which elicited two more editorial responses and two more (published) letters from Wilde. On the 28th he complained to Ward Lock & Co, the agents for Lippincott’s, that the magazine was circulating material puffing the book on the ground that a publisher should not publish an opinion on the value on what they are publishing. Wilde was becoming very sensitive about the reaction to the story. On the 30th June he wrote to the Morning Chronicle to counter the views of their reviewer. He had become so worried by the St James Gazette that he went to see the editor, Sidney Low, who called in the reviewer, Samuel Jeyes, who told Wilde “you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days” (Quote from Jeyes, Ellmann p303). After Wilde’s conviction in 1895, Jeyes editorialised (Gazette 27th May) that the Gazette had been right to argue Dorian Gray was a matter for the police, not the critic. Most worryingly for Wilde, Henley’s Scots Observer commented that the story was “false art… Mr Wilde has brains, and art and style, but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better”, a heavy reference to the Cleveland Street brothel scandal where rich men had paid for sex with postal workers, and Lord Arthur Somerset had been forced into exile. The review was anonymous, but Wilde was upset that Henley should have sanctioned it, and in his reply on 9th July commented that “it was unworthy of so distinguished a man of letters”. The sequence of letters is in Complete Letters pp428-435.
(o) Scawen Blunt quoted Ellmann p320.
(p) The Times 20th April 1894. There was no contribution from Wilde, but the cover was by Beardsley. The English language version of Salome with Beardsley illustrations was published on February 9th 1894.
(q) c. November 9th 1894, Complete Letters p622. Asquith was married to Margot Tennant, to whom Wilde had dedicated ‘The Star Child’ in A House of Pomegranates.
(r) The Soul of Man under Socialism was republished on 30th May 1895, and a six shilling – and therefore expensive – version of Dorian in October 1895. Clearly it was felt that there was interest in Wilde, hardly surprising after the events of the spring.
(s) His letters to the press on prison conditions may have had some influence on the Liberal party. Haldane, subsequently a minister in the 1906 Liberal government, had secured Wilde’s move to Reading Goal and Wilde knew Asquith and his wife Margot. However on the reformation of punishment for Children, Pat Thane does not mention Wilde, arguing in THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE WELFARE STATE (Longman 1990) that the 1908 Act ‘consolidated the legislation of the previous half century concerning the treatment of children by the law… since the mid-nineteenth century, minors under 16 had been progressively withdrawn from adult forms of trial and punishment’. Nevertheless the brutal treatment of children remained within the prison system in the 1890s, and Wilde testified to this. Probation was established in 1907, and children were barred from prison by the 1908 Act.
(t) The playscripts of The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were published on February 1899 and July 1899 respectively, the first dedicated to Robert Ross, the second to Frank Harris. (Ellmann p528)
(u) Writing to Ross, Wilde wrote apropos the prison letter “Some day the truth will have to be known: not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglas’s; but I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time”. (Complete letters p780) For the history of De Profundis see Merlin Holland’s introduction to the Facsimile Edition, British Library, 2000, p9. This essay is the best short account of the history of Wilde’s letter.
(v)
Joseph Bristow ‘Biographies’ IN Palgrave
Advances in Wilde Studies, (Ed. Frederick S Roden, 2004, pp8-9). Bristow goes
on to ask “Why have mass culture and higher education come to appreciate Wilde
with ever increasing amounts of zeal in recent years?” It is an increasingly
pertinent question.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Richard Ellmann OSCAR WILDE Penguin 1988
Trevor Fisher OSCAR AND BOSIE A FATAL PASSION
Sutton 2002
Norman Page A WILDE CHRONOLOGY
Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart Davis THE COMPLETE
LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE fourth Estate 2000
·
Trevor Fisher is the author of Oscar
and Bosie: a Fatal Passion, a study of the relationship of Oscar Wilde and
Lord Alfred Douglas. His contribution to
our Richard Ellmann assessment can be found by clicking 
.
III.
Masoschisms: Cruelty, Desire, and Subversion between
Victorian Women
Robin Chamberlain
This
dissertation traces the rhetorics of female masochism in a range of mid- to
late-Victorian texts (covering the period from 1870 to 1901), attempting a
recuperative reading of Victorian lesbian masochism as not simply an extension
of normative power dynamics and female oppression, but as a practice that draws
attention to the constructedness of power itself, showing how it becomes
falsely but perniciously attached to ideas about gender, race, class, and
sexuality. When power is normalized through the solidification of
categories of identity, avenues for resistance become increasingly difficult to
recognize. Masochistic practices and desires,
however, enact the construction of power, thereby showing how it is always
contextual and involves some kind of participation on the part of the oppressed
or supposedly powerless party. To show
that power is constructed means, in masochistic practices, to show that
identity is constructed as well, and that categories like gender, race, class,
dominant, and submissive, are products of socio-linguistic conventions and
tacit agreements. Masochistic desire,
then, enables us to see not only the fact that power and identity is
constructed but, often, the mechanisms by which they are both constructed and
maintained. My project is pan-generic,
focusing not only on canonical literary texts, but also on
medico-(pseudo-)scientific and erotic texts, in an attempt to show the
pervasiveness of masochistic rhetoric in Victorian society.
My
introductory chapter is primarily theoretical, and it is here that I position
my reading of (Victorian) masochism vis-à-vis other readings
of (Victorian) sexualities. Although there has been little written
about Victorian masochism—or masochism at all, for that matter, Victorianists
have long been intrigued by the dynamics of power and sexuality, as evident in
the continued status of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction as the ur-text of Victorian studies (and, perhaps, of
sexuality studies as well). Yet sadomasochism figures only marginally in
Foucault’s study. In the few studies of Victorian masochism, almost all
focus on male masochism. Even these do not fit neatly into the category
of Victorian studies, as they tend to focus Venus in Furs, which, as it
was written in German by an Austrian writer, cannot properly be labeled
“Victorian.” Such texts, while, more often than not, incisive and
subversive, continue to ignore female masochism, to say nothing of lesbian
masochism. To position myself theoretically, then, I have had to look
outside of Victorian studies, to the few books that do take female masochism
seriously, rather than relegating it to a symbol of women’s complicity in their
own oppression. In this, I have found Hart’s Between the Body and the
Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism particularly instructive.
My
next chapter deals with sexological texts, focusing not only on the work of
Richard von Krafft-Ebing (an Austro-German psychiatrist), who coined the term
“masochism” from Sacher-Masoch’s name, but also on the work of Havelock Ellis
and Edward Carpenter. I then move from works of theory to works of
practice, or at least of practical imagination: Victorian erotica.
My third chapter is about Beatrice, an
anonymously authored Victorian erotic novella that deals with BDSM between
women. The fourth chapter examines
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Here,
I discuss the heroines’ (Maggie Tulliver and Gwendolen Harleth) masochism in
connection to their conflicted relationships with other women (Lucy Deane in
the case of Maggie, Lydia Glasher in that of Gwendolen). In this analysis I modify Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s ideas in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(1985) to argue that Maggie and Gwendolen’s erotic relationships with men
are closely related to their feelings—which combine desire and repulsion—about
other women. I argue that the strong
masochistic element in Maggie’s sojourn on the river with Stephen, and in
Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt, stem in large part from their thwarted
desires for, respectively, Lucy and Lydia (desires that are both homosocial and
erotic. In the next chapter I discuss
Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862). My analysis of this
poem is similar to the one I undertake of Eliot’s novels in the preceding
chapter, in that I am particularly interested in the relationship between the
sisters’ sadomasochistic forays into the goblin market and the social sanctions
that curtail their erotic relationship with each other. My final chapter deals with several poems by
Algernon Charles Swinburne, a poet famous for his poetic explorations of
lesbianism and sadomasochism. I end with
a brief epilogue on recent appropriations of Victoriana in lesbian
sadomasochistic texts, whether these be in historical fiction like the popular
novels by Sarah Waters or in the use of items such as the corset in
sadomasochistic fantasy. Here, I look at the way in which Victorianism
itself has been fetishized and re-imagined by lesbian practitioners of
sadomasochism.
·
Robin Chamberlain works in
nineteenth-century British literature and theories of gender and sexuality.
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