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Oscar Wilde's Queer Vision of 18th Century Society
- 1. O S C A R W I L D E ’ S Q U E E R 1 8 T H - C E N T U R Y V I S I O N @ J O H N C B E Y N O N
- 30. Hair so big it's closer to God! #eng178 #OnPoint 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
- 31. "Put a feather in his cap, and called it macaroni!" Is a reference to a style, not noodles! #eng178 #ilovecollege
- 32. From this to this. Well, that escalated quickly. #eng178
- 37. J O H N C . B E Y N O N F R E S N O S T A T E J B E Y N O N @ C S U F R E S N O . E D U @ J O H N C B E Y N O N
Editor's Notes
- Oscar Wilde’s Queer Eighteenth-Century Vision I want to make a few remarks about the tendency of individuals who lived long after the eighteenth century to retrospectively consider the British eighteenth century as a queer time teeming queer objects, people, and behavior. Specifically, I want to consider one writer’s representation of a queer eighteenth century
- —Oscar Wilde, whose life so patently straddles the identities of sodomite and homosexual. There are many reasons to consider the eighteenth century’s influence on Oscar Wilde—
- he revived the droll banter and keen social satire characteristic of Restoration comedy in his own comedies of manners.
- His pithy epigrams owe much to the clever and paradoxical witticisms of the famous Augustan poets.
- The flamboyant costumes for which he was notorious owe something to the showy fashions typical of eighteenth-century gentlemen.
- And The Picture of Dorian Gray is indebted to earlier Gothic novels by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and William Beckford.
- In fact, William Beckford—an earlier object of scandalous conjecture as to his same-sex propensities—makes a cameo, of sorts, in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
- In chapter VIII (and I refer to the 1890 version of the novel published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine)
- having detected in his portrait the signs of his degenerate and hedonistic behavior, Dorian Gray summons “the celebrated frame-maker” Mr. Ashton to remove the portrait to the upper room of Dorian’s London home—
- the room that served as Dorian’s playroom and study in his younger years. As the frame-maker and his “somewhat rough looking assistant” prepare to move the cumbersome portrait, Ashton casually tells Dorian that “I have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. Picked it up at a sale. Old Florentine. Came from Fonthill, I believe. Admirably suited for a religious picture” (179).
- That Ashton references a Florentine frame—very likely a 15th-century frame like the massive, ornate and architectural housing that nearly overwhelms da Fabiano’s Adoration of the Magi (1423)—is significant. After all, Ashton, the young bit of rough trade assistant, and Gray struggle with the unwieldy portrait, whose frame Wilde draws particular attention to:
- “The elaborate character of the frame had made the picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious protests of Mr. Ashton, who had a true tradesman’s dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian put his hand to it so as to help them” (180). But what I most want to draw attention to is Ashton’s comment that the Florentine frame is probably from Fonthill
- —a reference to William Beckford’s elaborate Gothic revival country house, Fonthill Abbey. Through this minor character’s seemingly insignificant sales-pitch, Wilde connects his Gothic exemplar of decadent hedonism to one of the eighteenth-century’s quintessential voluptuaries,
- William Beckford—who, a century before Wilde penned The Picture of Dorian Gray, and within five years of its publication, was tried and convicted of “gross indecency”—also scandalized British society when newspapers publicized the details of his affair with his young cousin,
- William “Kitty” Courtenay. The allusion to Beckford in chapter VIII of Wilde’s novel, also functions to prepare the reader for the Beckfordian hallucination that follows in chapter IX.
- This is the notoriously ponderous (at least my students find it puzzling and arduous) digression in which Wilde’s narrator recounts Dorian’s obsession with the yellow book—the curious, but fascinating “novel without a plot” that Lord Henry gives to Dorian.
- Most critics identify as the inspiration for this book Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel, À Rebours, which was printed with a yellow paper cover. Others claim Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean or his study of the Renaissance. Indeed Wilde’s teachers and mentors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, exert a powerful influence of this chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray, allowing Wilde to associate Dorian’s illicit desires and decadent tastes to his attraction to the Italian Renaissance.
- I see in this chapter, however, a strong connection to Beckford’s Gothic and Orientalist fantasy, Vathek (1782), whose title character immerses himself in an orgy of sensuous and epicurean pleasure
- —much as Dorian is driven to do as a result of reading the poisonous yellow book.
- In the opening chapters of Beckford’s novel, the caliph Vathek is addicted to pleasure—so much so, that he constructs five palaces to gratify each of the five senses.
- As Dorian obsessively collects exotic objects that appeal to the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell (perfumes, fabrics, gems, musical instruments)
- Vathek seeks gratification by surrounding himself with sumptuous luxuries designed to appeal to body’s sensory organs. Many critics have found in Vathek an attempt to reflect queer desire by melding two genres of fiction that allowed writers to explore deviant passion in the eighteenth century:
- the Gothic novel and the Oriental tale. Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, too, owes much to Gothic eroticism and sensual Orientalism.
- Recently I taught The Picture of Dorian Gray to English majors enrolled in my Fresno State Lesbian & Gay Literature course, and during a discussion of chapter VIII, one student drew my attention to another queer vision that I think is worth considering alongside the reference to Fonthill and allusions to Vathek that afforded Wilde the opportunity of cataloging Dorian’s queer tastes and inclinations.
- While roaming through “the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country-house,” Dorian admires the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins” (204). As he does so, he asks himself whether “some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own;”
- here the reader is left to wonder whether Dorian’s illicit sexuality and depraved temperament were a matter of influence (Lord Henry and his gift of the poisonous yellow book) or heritage (Dorian’s licentious ancestors). As he wanders through the picture-gallery, Dorian stops before a portrait of his forebear, “George Willoughby
- with his powdered hair and fantastic patches. How evil he looked! The face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain. Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century” (204).
- Amelia Rouser has observed that the eighteenth-century macaroni, a precursor of the nineteenth-century dandy, “represented an apotheosis of aristocratic values that seemed to fly in the face of calls to sober, masculine virtue.”
- During the class in which a question about the macaroni was raised, I gave my students an impromptu lecture on the macaroni. I described his tenuous grasp on manliness and the ways in which he exceeds standards of good taste. Because this is a course in which all my students use computer tablets, even during class,
- I suddenly found our course hashtag on Twitter populated with images of macaronis that delighted my students to no end.
- …
- …
- What’s more, they quickly connected Wilde’s reference to the macaroni to his novel’s preoccupations with dandyism, effeminacy, illicit sexual desire, and the homoerotic male triangle at the center of the work. But unlike, the whimsical, if pointedly satirical, images of macaronis that circulated in Britain in the 1770s,
- Wilde’s macaroni is a menacing, sinister figure whose twisted smile betrays an evil disposition. In other words, within the context of the elements of horror that imbue these later chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde manages to create a Gothic macaroni—a figure that resembles the grotesque image that Dorian attempts to hide from his friends, servants, and acquaintances.
- My effort to read these moments of Wilde’s novel through the lens of eighteenth-century aesthetics and imagery is an effort to understand how later generations turn their eyes to the eighteenth century and behold queer visions through which to understand their own culture’s configurations of sexual deviance.
- Thus, it is precisely by locating and capitalizing upon a nexus of queer aesthetic elements in the eighteenth century that Wilde is able to knit together the illicit desires of Gothic sexuality, worrisome male effeminacy, and male same-sex desire in a work that heralds the arrival of the modern homosexual subject.
- Thank you