"Sebastian Melmoth":
Wilde's Parisian Exile as the Spectacle
of Sexual, Textual Revolution
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
This article was first
published in Victorians Institute Journal
28 [2000]: 39-63, and is here
v Samuel Lyndon Gladden is an
Associate Professor and the Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English at the
v Endnote references are given
thus (1), hyperlinked to the
endnote. Other numbers in the text refer
to pages in the works cited. Some other
small changes in format have been made for stylistic or web
publishing purposes, but the text is unaltered.
I. Foreword
Exactly seven years ago, as
I concluded my first week as a newly hired Assistant Professor of English at
the
As I write in the essay,
“Wilde’s exile, though certainly compromised by poverty, personal struggles,
and professional humiliation, nonetheless afforded him the pleasure of the
spectacle of revolution [. . .], the subversive victory of Wilde-as-‘Sebastian
Melmoth’.” As “a walking, talking,
text-to-be-read,” Wilde functioned as “a kind of embodied narrative, a
corporeal code,” and his exilic pseudonym “operate[d . . .] as a screen upon
which an entire constellation [. . .] of fin-de-siècle anxieties”
appeared. In both person and experience,
the exilic Wilde “embodied the conditions of excess that framed the nineteenth
century—the excesses of the French Revolution and their textual embodiment in
the form of the Gothic, and the excesses of fin-de-siècle decadence and their
corporeal embodiment in the figure of Wilde himself.” For me, Wilde stands as a nexus of two forms,
the textual and the corporeal, that offer occasions and opportunities for
subversion.
Recent scholarship has urged
for a reconsideration of the ways in which we understand, classify, and
represent the meanings and effects of Wilde’s life and work. In his essay “Biography and the Art of Lying”
(The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde,
ed. Peter S. Raby, Cambridge, 1997), Merlin Holland writes that Wilde
“confessed that he lived in permanent fear of not being misunderstood,” that
Wilde’s was “not a life which can tolerate an either/or approach with logical
conclusions, but demands the flexibility of a both/and treatment, often raising
questions for which there are no answers” (3, 4). Likewise, in his introduction to The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), Shelton Waldrep suggests that “the definition we have
of Wilde—our current general assessment of his work—is not only in flux but in
need of radical rethinking and a comprehensive reformulation” (xiii). For
Waldrep, “Wilde’s belief in the importance of the spoken word (both the
dialogue and aphoristic fragment), the mixing of genre and media, and the
centrality of the recurring idea of the mask—especially in its relationship to
reinvention of the self—are key to understanding Wilde’s influence in the
twentieth century and beyond” (7).
In Wilde, subversion took a
radically personal form, as did its consequences (legal prosecution and
lifelong excoriation), but in the century since, as Julia Wood writes in The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde: A Cultural Afterlife (The Lutterworth
Press, 2007), Wilde has continued to be resurrected and rehabilitated as a
symbol for the perils and pains of difference—and as a figurehead for their
larger effects in a broadening and increasingly tolerant culture. Collectively,
the work of Wilde scholars in the past decade or so has encouraged us to see
Wilde differently; in looking back at the last few years of Wilde’s life, we
may consider anew the opportunities for subversion “Sebastian Melmoth” made
possible. The lessons of Wilde’s life
are many; the lessons of his exilic years, I believe, have yet to be truly
understood and appreciated.
In 2008, Broadview Press
will publish my edition of The Importance
of Being Earnest, a volume that represents the culmination of my work on
Wilde these past seven years. The
***************************************************************
II.
"Sebastian
Melmoth": Wilde's Parisian Exile as the Spectacle of Sexual, Textual
Revolution.
Many men on their release carry their
prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their
hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and
die. It is wretched that they should
have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force
them to do so. . . . . For I have come, not from obscurity into the
momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of
eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it
required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one
step, if as much as one.
Oscar
Wilde, De Profundis
Every one is born a king, and most people
die in exile, like most kings.
Oscar
Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
Exile, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad.
Ambrose
Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
In recent years, much scholarship has been devoted to a
re-evaluation of Oscar Wilde, arguably the most famous—and certainly the most
infamous—of all late nineteenth-century British writers; such scholarship, in
particular Ed Cohen's groundbreaking study of fin-de-siècle constructions of
masculinity in Talk on the Wilde
Side, has demonstrated the centrality of the figure of Wilde to late
nineteenth-century British culture and to emerging debates over the pathology
of sexuality and disease or, to use an appropriate but unfortunately ubiquitous
Deconstructionist metaphor, dis-ease.
However, comparatively little substantive criticism has been written
about Wilde's brief life following his release from Reading Gaol on
Wilde's oft-repeated "deathbed" remark,
"Either the curtains go, or I do," reminds us of the writer's
lifelong association with æstheticism, his appreciation for beauty. In truth, Wilde's remark preceded his death
by about a month,(1) when he did indeed disparage the decor of
his embarrassingly thrifty rooms in the Hôtel D'Alsace, rooms whose ambiance
dramatically lowered the standards to which Wilde had become accustomed long
before his sudden fall from success and his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, where
he served two years hard labor in punishment for acts of "gross
indecency." Wilde's clever remark
nevertheless figures as an important paratext for the final phase of his life,
for his anxiety over the decor of his last room metonymizes the whole history
of Wilde's retreat into exile following his release from prison in 1897. Rather than following other critics in
dismissing Wilde's final years as completely devoid of artistic or personal
meaning, I want instead to chart the ways in which Wilde's Parisian exile
demonstrates a revolutionary impulse even amidst the dramatic decline of the
writer's tragically abbreviated life; specifically, I want to unravel the
threads of meaning woven throughout Wilde's exilic pseudonym, "Sebastian
Melmoth," in order to demonstrate how that name functions as a code for
the revolutionary.(2)
Following his release from prison, Wilde left
[My
mother] and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and
honoured, not merely in literature, art, archæology, and science, but in the
public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low
people. I had dragged it through the
very mire. I had given it to brutes that
they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym
for folly. What I suffered then, and
still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. (27-28)
The passage effectively
announces Wilde's disinclination to review the history of his disgrace and
shame; more importantly, the passage anticipates Wilde's decision to abandon
both the name and the nation that witnessed his decline. In assuming an alias and in moving away from
England, Wilde's desire not to record the history of his downfall will, he
hopes, be realized, and indeed, in France, "Sebastian Melmoth" would
find what Oscar Wilde lost in England—freedom, contentment, and some measure of
self-respect.
More generally, the significance of Wilde's alias
resonates on the broader levels of politics, history, art, and identity formation. "Sebastian Melmoth" imbricates two
nineteenth-century manifestations of revolution by conjoining a code for an
emerging identity, the homosexual (suggested by the name
"Sebastian"), and shorthand for a style of writing, the Gothic
(suggested by the name "Melmoth," the title character of the 1820
Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, an
enormously popular work penned by Wilde's great uncle, Charles Robert
Maturin). Wilde's alias calls to mind
both the textual strategy that marked early nineteenth-century responses to the
French Revolution and the notorious lifestyle that galvanized fin-de-siècle
discourse as the site and the sight—the space and the spectacle—of an erotic
revolution that threatened to return the world to the chaos of another Great Terror. As we shall see, Wilde's fin-de-siècle
self-exile conflates a revolutionary identity and a revolutionary literary
style, so that in retreating into infamy, Wilde-as-"Sebastian
Melmoth" embodies a complex hybrid of nineteenth-century manifestations of
subversion, dissent, and chaos—in short, the fabric of revolution.(3)
From the earliest days of his fame, Wilde had been
recognized—marked—as a symbolic figure for a literary or artistic style as well
as for the lifestyle of the Decadent.
Max Nordau's 1892 tome on the decay of modern society, Degeneration, pointed specifically to
Wilde as the emblem for this anti-social, unhealthy movement: "[t]he ego-mania of decadentism, its
love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity
and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the
importance of art, have found their English representative among the
'Æsthetes,' the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde" (317). Wilde, Nordau argues, "despises nature,"
is "a 'cultivator of the Ego,'" and revels in "inactivity,"
"[c]ontemplation," "immorality, sin and crime" (320-321).
Wilde's elevation—or decline—to the level of symbol was
not lost on the writer, who self-consciously represented himself as such upon
the publication of The Ballad of Reading
Gaol, a meditation on public humiliation, notoriety, shame, and redemption,
which Wilde wrote while in prison and for which he substituted his prison-cell
identity, "C.3.3," in place of his own name on the title page
(Ellmann 559). Astonished when the poem
sold 5099 copies—barely three months after its first printing—Wilde agreed to
insert his own name in brackets next to "C.3.3" to claim authorship
directly (560). By this time, of course,
such a gloss was hardly necessary, for the poem's readers knew that Wilde and
"C.3.3"—name and number, identity and symbol—were
one-in-the-same. The frontispiece to the
1924 Metheun and Company edition of the Ballad,
a woodcut by Frans Masereel, neatly comments on Wilde's status as symbol: the author's face—his image—is obfuscated by
a text-box, or cell, which contains Wilde's cell-block identity, reminding the
reader that in falling into infamy, Wilde "shifted" from author (one
who produces text) to text itself (that which is to be read), from one who
composes or controls meaning (subject) to one who is mastered by the
disciplining eyes of others (object).
Wilde's self-representation-as-symbol percolates
throughout De Profundis, his lengthy
prison-house letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, as well: Wilde recognizes his status as " . . . a
man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very
dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards" (36).
Among the letter’s most heart-wrenching passages is Wilde's account of
his transfer to prison, during which his protracted stay on a railway platform
exposed him to the taunts and jeers of passersby:
Everything
about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; . . .
. On
Wilde's status as spectacle found no reprieve
inside the prison walls, either; writing in the
The
door closes. It's Wilde. His first gesture is to stretch out his arms;
then he takes off his cap. He is barely
recognizable. Not that he has lost so
much weight—his frame is still hefty, his shoulders broad. . . . His face seems to give the appearance
of health, despite the yellowish tinge which has replaced the rosiness of
before. The change is all in his head,
hideously shaved, almost bald in an awful prison tonsure that reduces Wilde's
head to insignificant dimensions, dull, doll-like, expressionless. . . . Several of us [left] the observation post
behind the barred window, so overcome were we by the spectacle. (trans. and qtd. in Erber 574-575)
Clearly, Wilde had become,
as he recognizes at the close of De
Profundis, the "enfant de mon siècle" (119), an exhausted, fallen, beleaguered embodiment of an age
drained by what Karl Beckson characterizes as "the damnation of
Decadence" (32). In another passage from De Profundis that echoes the language of Nordau's Degeneration, Wilde casts his own body
as a corporeal manifestation of the degenerate text, lamenting that
. . . I am quite conscious of the fact that
when the end does come I shall return an unwelcome visitant to a world that
does not want me; a revenant, as the
French say, and one whose face is grey with long imprisonment and crooked with
pain. Horrible as are the dead when they
rise from their tombs, the living who come out from tombs are more horrible
still. Of all this I am only too
conscious. (6)
In private conversation,
Wilde observed that he could not possibly out-live the fin-de-siècle culture
which he came to symbolize: three months
before his death, Wilde remarked that "'If another century began, and I
[were] still alive, . . . it would really be more than the English could
stand'" (qtd. in Coakley 215). But
the twentieth century nonetheless kept alive Wilde's spirit—or his demon, as
many might have disparaged it—as a symbolic embodiment of the outcast, the
"other": much like the
Spaniard of Melmoth the Wanderer,
upon whose presence “[a]ll order is broken, all discipline subverted” (Maturin
162), “[i]ntellectual, artistic and erotic life in the years leading up to
World War I was lived in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde debacle," writes
historian Ian Young, for "[t]he persecution of Wilde served to frighten
and mute intellectual and sexual heretics for decades" (264).
Wilde's symbolic life extends even beyond the death of the writer's
physical body, too; in late twentieth-century, pop-culture references to Wilde
still conjure the specter of homosexuality, whether in covert affiliations with
"the love that dare not speak its name" or as an epithet of derision.(4)
Wilde's meteoric rise and fall collapses any clear
distinction between the categories of public and private, as well as the
corollary categories of production (of the text) and pleasure (of the
Decadent). Recalling what he
characterizes as "the Romantic '90s," Wilde's friend Richard Le
Gallienne situates the author as a symbolic figure for the Decadent age, a
latter-day Caliban whose response to his own horrifyingly primitive image
remains endlessly conflicted: Le
Gallienne writes, "[h]e is, beyond comparison, the incarnation of the
spirit of the '90s. . . . . Out of the
1890s chaos [Wilde] emerged [as] an astonishing, imprudent microcosm. In him[,] the period might see its own face
in a glass" (156, 157). Sixteen
years after Wilde's death, another of the writer's contemporaries, John Cowper
Powys, agreed with Le Gallienne's assessment, writing of Wilde that "[h]is
influence is everywhere, like an odour, like an atmosphere, like a diffused
flame. We cannot escape from him"
(417). Powys’ assessment is, admittedly,
a complicated and ambivalent one, for even as he seems to pay homage to the
figure of Wilde, the image he constructs of an age attempting to
"flee" from Wilde's influence suggests a lingering anxiety over the
author's symbolic place in British culture, his ambiguous status as both hero
and villain, both angel and devil.
A good deal of Wilde's later correspondence addresses the
problems of self-representation, the traps of symbolic status. In an April 1898 letter written in response
to a poem by Henry D. Davray, Wilde considers the role and meaning of the
outcast, and he carefully distinguishes the outcast from the more general
category of the underprivileged by aligning the outcast with figures of
notoriety—of, one could suggest, rampant publicity; in exemplifying the
outcast, Wilde names Lord Byron, another literary giant whose notorious
reputation chased him into exile, as well (Letters
729). Just one month before, Wilde wrote
to Robbie Ross about his situation in exile, musing cynically on his status as
an outcast, particularly as it had emerged in English press attacks on his work
and lifestyle: citing W. E. Henley's
hostile review of The Ballad of Reading
Gaol, Wilde writes that, "I am quite obliged to [Henley] for playing
the rôle of [the Devil's Advocate] so well.
Without it my beatification as a saint would have been impossible, but I
shall now live as the
We see in Wilde's own words, then, his understanding of
his status as a symbolic figure as well as his struggle to come to terms with
his new role as a particular type of martyr, an exile, one who has been pushed
"out" of British culture even as his absence—his emptiness, his
reduction to pure symbol, his devaluation to the status of no-thing—assumes a
central place in British culture as the image of the "other," that
figure whose very difference threatens to undermine the bases of mainstream
British society. Perhaps in response to
this recognition, Wilde begins traveling and corresponding under a name of his
own invention, thereby creating for himself a new identity. Wilde's letters connect his motivation for
taking on an alias with his desire to travel and to correspond undetected, to
"pass" in European culture as something other than its
"other," despite the fact that he understood himself to be a
spectacle no less recognizable to—and no less sought after by—English tourists
than the Eiffel Tower (Ellmann 586).
Thus failing in its intended value as a shield around the notoriously
symbolic figure, Wilde's alias operates instead as a screen upon which an
entire constellation of differences is projected, a map across which a variety
of fin-de-siècle anxieties may be cartographized. Just as Wilde exemplified the corporeal
manifestation of otherness, of, to borrow Beckson's phrase, "the damnation
of Decadence" (32), so, too, did his alias emerge as a textual
manifestation of the very forces for which he had been excoriated. Specifically, these may be described as the
forces of revolution, both sexual and textual, private and public.(6)
While residing at the Hôtel d'Alsace in
You asked me about
"Melmoth:" of course I have
not changed my name: in
Wilde's explanation rings
with double-entendre, primarily with
the description of Maturin's novel as "curious," a term which by the
late 1890s had entered English parlance
as slang, or code, for homosexual (Holder 53) or, to use a term Wilde himself
might have invoked, for "Uranian"; secondarily, Wilde's characterization
of the novel as "a pioneer" must also be read symbolically, for
surely Wilde was a pioneer as well, not only in the sense that he was the first
generally recognized Uranian, but also in that in leaving his homeland and
making a place for himself in Paris, Wilde, like a pioneer, was staking out new
territory to claim a space for himself in a seemingly distant and exotic
land. In another letter, Wilde describes
William A. Cohen observes that at least since the
onslaught of the trials of 1895, for Wilde, " . . . posing had become a particularly
literary question, since Wilde was understood [by those in the court] to
represent himself—that is, to pose—in his literary persona" (216). Of course, such a claim is proven in the
records of Wilde's trials, where the author's works were placed in evidence to
support the Marquis of Queensberry's charge, notoriously misspelled on the
calling card that set off the explosion of the trials, that Wilde was
"posing [as a] Somdomite [sic]." For Wilde, "posing" named a
complicated activity that included both corporeal and textual embodiments, both
private life, or pleasures, and public presence, or reputation, conflations
which remind us of the ways in which the focus of gossip—its specifically
demonized object—figures both
corporeally and textually, since, after all, gossip textualizes
corporeality. Wilde, the object of much
scandalous speculation, becomes a walking, talking, text-to-be-read, and, as
such, he functions as a kind of embodied narrative, a corporeal code.(8) The phenomena linking
the narratives—the histories, the tales—of Melmoth and Wilde are uncanny: Melmoth's imprisonment in a maniac's cell
predicts Wilde's own incarceration; Melmoth's suffering under the omnipotence
of the Inquisition finds form in Wilde's courtroom examination and exposure;
and Melmoth's assumption of false identities results in corporeal decline
culminating in death, as does Wilde's.
That Melmoth epitomizes the figure of the Wandering Jew is strikingly appropriate,
for, like the Wandering Jew, Wilde-in-exile is a text-to-be-read, a
story-to-be-told, and even in his attempts to shield himself in the textual
anonymity of an alias, Wilde remained nonetheless a recognized and symbolic—a readable figure: like the exilic Wilde, Melmoth is marked by
"an indelible stain, like original sin itself" (Baldick xii), and he
becomes "an existence made up largely of report, reputation, and expectant
surmise" (xvi), a figure whose strongest presence takes the form of
absence and whose "direct presence, corrosive as it is, is not necessary
to [the] dissolution of stable identities" (xvi). While the pose of "Sebastian
Melmoth" may have succeeded at the level of the textual, it failed at the
level of the corporeal, never effectively covering over the spectacle of Wilde
himself, never shielding the sometimes-reluctant celebrity from public view,
for Europeans in general never failed to recognize as the defamed celebrity in
exile. In short, Wilde-as-Sebastian
Melmoth-as-Wandering Jew suggests the author's centrality to a
nineteenth-century literary trope, for the wandering narrator figures
prominently from the earliest examples of the Gothic mode, epitomized by
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, throughout the Romantic and Victorian ages
and right up to Wilde's own Picture of
Dorian Gray, in which the need to tell the secret becomes the undoing not
so much of the teller of the tale as of its listeners, its would-be gossips.
The Gothic, a form of writing for which the mere name
"Melmoth" serves as a kind of talisman, has itself been recognized as
the textual embodiment of a revolutionary force. In his study of Seven Gothic Dramas, Jeffrey N. Cox argues that not only is the
Gothic " . . . a particular response to the literary, theatrical, and
political pressures of the age of revolution," but that what Cox describes
as the "second phase" of the Gothic is exemplified in the works of
Maturin, where Gothicism functions less in the spirit of entertainment than in
the interest of political protest (4, 58).
In short, Cox regards the Gothic as a deliberately subtle attempt to
work out and to spectacularize both the ideological and the aesthetic problems
that plague the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (12). In the same vein, Judith Halberstam argues
that the designation "'Gothic' describes a discursive strategy which
produces monsters as a kind of temporary but influential response to social,
political, and sexual problems" ("Technologies of Monstrosity"
339). More specifically, Cox argues that
"the Gothic setting and plot . . . could be read as embodying the rhythms
of the [French] Revolution and its liberation of enclosed spaces from the
powers of the past" (18). In the
end, Cox insists, the first interest of the Gothic is the celebration of the
potential of Revolution; the second, the vindication of the villain-as-hero
(30-31). (9)
Cox situates the Gothic as a liminal form, as "a
meeting point between high and low culture" (4). Matthew C. Brennan agrees that the Gothic
"undermines boundaries" (3), that the mode of writing might best be
described as "an aesthetics of nightmare, . . . of crossed or open
boundaries" (6). Halberstam draws
these boundaries more specifically, finding in the Gothic a tension and a
constant threat of the breakdown " . . . between good and evil, health and
perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, [and] inside and
outside," all of which "dissolve and threaten the integrity of the
narrative itself," not to mention the stability of the culture out of which
the Gothic text emerges (Skin Shows
2). As a liminal site, the Gothic
functions as the space against which, as Halberstam recognizes, "deviant
subjectivities" are produced "opposite which the normal, the healthy,
and the pure can be known" (Skin Shows
2). The Gothic thus functions contra hegemony in order to produce—to
embody—the "other" against whom society defines itself, the threat
which must be disciplined, if not eradicated, for the maintenance of hegemony
to continue uninterrupted.
The particular threat of the Gothic lies in what Cox
characterizes as that form's propensity for "seduction," one of the
many threats embedded within the Gothic's "theater of shock, surprise, . .
. and terror" (13), a sensational mixture that threatens to
"[uncover] the desires repressed by modern culture" (7): Brennan, quoting William Patrick Day, agrees
with Cox's assessment, adding that the Gothic "addressed 'those parts of
the nineteenth-century reader's inner life that were disordered and
fragmented'" (5). Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick locates the seductive potential of the Gothic in its celebration of
the trope of "the 'unspeakable'" (94), which she situates in Melmoth the Wanderer at the site of the
text itself: throughout Maturin's Gothic
tale, Melmoth is cursed, doomed to suffer until he can find another to listen
to his story and assume his heavy burden of guilt and shame; but time and
again, as Sedgwick observes, Melmoth's very narrative itself becomes
"unspeakable" as "[t]he manuscripts crumble . . . or are 'wholly
illegible,' the speaker is strangled by the unutterable word, or the
proposition is preterited as 'one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to
listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it'" (94, Maturin
qtd. in Sedgwick). In Wilde's day, of
course, the "unspeakable" would have included—ironically, would have spoken of—"the love that dare not
speak its name," so that Wilde-as-Gothic-Monster or Wilde-as-Melmoth or
Wilde-as-text embodies the unspeakable—viz.
homosexuality, a antihegemonic engagement which, as Sedgwick compellingly
demonstrates, finds form in the Gothic (90-92), so that once again we see the
collusion of sexuality and textuality in a deviant form (the Gothic in general
and Wilde in particular), which hegemony recognizes and excoriates—casts out—as
dangerous, as revolutionary.
Because the Gothic explodes the ideological forces that
lead to repression and entrapment, because the Gothic makes explicit the link
between political and erotic freedom (Cox 25), and because the Gothic explores
border-crossings, repressed desires, and the specter of homoeroticism, so too
might the Gothic serve as a meta-narrative for Wilde's very public fall, his
punishment, and, finally, his move into exile, an experiential space that may
be characterized as Gothic given its status as a space outside of—or in exile
from—conventional morality (14). In
Wilde's exilic surname, then, we find the textual embodiment of this
revolutionary mode of writing, a code whose narrative suggests Wilde's
deliberate celebration, rather than his ambivalent erasure, of his own
“curious” stature—his "villainous" nature, his infamous
"crimes."
Just as Wilde's exilic surname textualizes political
revolution, his exilic Christian name, "Sebastian," celebrates,
rather than declaims, sexual revolution—Wilde's own profligate past. Most scholars agree that Wilde adopted the
name "Sebastian" from the Christian martyr, whose appeal to Wilde was
three-fold: first, Saint Sebastian
represents a protracted triumph over earthly defeat, or punishment; second,
Saint Sebastian affords the viewer a homoerotic pleasure, for he is generally
represented as a comely and semi-nude youth; third, Saint Sebastian's
arrow-pierced—multiply penetrated—body corporealizes the spectacle of gay male pleasure
even as it anticipates Wilde's own body-to-be-clothed in a standard-is
Yet another meaning lies latent in the name
"Sebastian," one which, I believe, is perhaps more apropos of Wilde's exilic attitude
toward his own identity as a criminal or villain, as his culture's other. A number of scholars have recuperated Wilde's
exile as, at least in part, a mitigated victory, for in exile we find Wilde
beyond the constraints of English law and order, and, at least to some degree,
removed from the gaze—the prying eyes, the gossipy nature—of Englishmen in
general. While a great many critics
dismiss Wilde's exile as a period of loss or failure (see note 2), many others
regard Wilde's exile as a personal and ideological victory, as the triumph of
queer pleasure. Jonathan Dollimore
argues that Wilde's aesthetic avoids Angst
and, quite to the contrary, activates a flight into jouissance (73), but Dollimore's abstraction is perhaps better
qualified by the more concrete memoirs and accounts of Wilde's contemporaries
and biographers. Rupert Croft-Cooke
characterizes Wilde's final years as offering "fulfillment of another
kind. There were no more attempts to
write, or even think about writing; friendship with Bosie was without passion
or strain, and [Wilde] lounged about the boulevards and amused himself with
young male prostitutes and wrote supremely entertaining letters about them to
[Robbie] Ross and Reggie Turner" (238).
Croft-Cooke includes these letters among many written during Wilde's
final years which, "for the most part," suggest the image of "a
cheerful man chuckling over the absurdities of life about him and his own
misfortunes; . . . a comic artist turning every grotesque or whimsical incident
to a laugh . . . " (279). In fact,
Wilde wrote to Robbie Ross from Paris that "[l]ater on in life, humour
goes, but laughter is the primaeval attitude towards life—a mode of approach
that survives only in artists and criminals" (Letters 767), and in a letter to W. Morton Fullerton, he
characterized the humor of nonsense as "a form of art the French are rich
in, but the English sadly to [sic]
seek" (804).
H. Montgomery Hyde's assessment of Wilde’s final years
concurs with Croft-Cooke's; he notes that "[t]he return of freedom gave
[Wilde] back the sense of humour . . . " (Oscar Wilde: The Aftermath
209), and while Wilde may have been "disgusted at the implication that he
would be welcomed back [to England] for his 'airy mood and spirit,' but only if
a conversion of his sexual preference could be extorted from him"
(Schmidgall 341), Hyde recounts moments in which Wilde managed to turn his
controversial sexuality—such as his experiments at a (heterosexual) brothel in
Dieppe—into marks of his own queer victory:
"'The first in these ten years,' [Wilde] said to Dowson in a low
voice, 'and it will be the last. It was
like cold mutton!' And then, raising his
voice so that the crowd could hear, he added, 'But tell it in
Having
helped a few years earlier to prepare a biographical introduction to an edition
of his great-uncle's novel, Wilde knew the history and reputation of the Revd
Charles Robert Maturin, Anglican curate of St. Peter's in Dublin, novelist,
playwright, eccentric, and failure:
Maturin had died in poverty in 1824, his literary efforts frowned upon
by his ecclesiastical superiors in Dublin, slighted by most of the critics in
Edinburgh, and laughed off the stage in London.
In
Perhaps Wilde’s own exilic
flourishing is best exemplified in the sexual relationships he enjoyed after
being released from prison: in addition
to a brief though ultimately unhappy reunion with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde
enjoyed the company of a variety of young men in the years between his release
from prison and his death in Paris in 1900.(11) Wilde’s exile, though certainly compromised
by poverty, personal struggles, and professional humiliation, nonetheless
afforded him the pleasure of the spectacle of revolution—of the attenuated
triumph, of the subversive victory of Wilde-as-“Sebastian Melmoth.”
The name "Sebastian," I argue, textualizes the
“deviant”—specifically, the homosexual—pleasures that marked Wilde's exile, for
the name functions as a code for the emerging identity of the Uranian, that
creature who, under the contemporary designation "invert," had been
pathologized as a chaotic amalgamation—a blur, a border-crossing—of male and
female. Surely Wilde must have
recognized the gender-blurring associated with the name "Sebastian"
in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in
which the character Sebastian is, at one point, mistaken for Viola, who herself
has donned male disguise. More locally,
Wilde's appropriation of the name as an in-the-know gay code reappears in his
one-time friend André Raffalovich's conversion to Catholicism and admission
into the lay order under the name "Brother Sebastian" (Rosario 162),
an appellation Wilde would certainly have recognized as paying
homage—intentionally or not—perhaps to Wilde's exile and certainly to
Raffalovich's own gay past as well as to his ongoing amorous relationship with
John Gray, the beautiful young poet who, many have argued, provided the model
for Wilde's own Dorian. Richard Ellmann notes (although perhaps
pejoratively), that Sebastian has, traditionally, been "the favorite saint
among homosexuals" (71n), and Camille Paglia describes Sebastian as the
image in which "[h]omoerotic iconicism goes full circle" (112). Ellmann also reproduces Guido Reni's highly
eroticized painting of the arrow-pierced body of that Saint, which he describes
as one of Wilde's favorite works. Ian
Young comments on the significance of Wilde's appropriation of the name
"Sebastian," as well, arguing provocatively that "[t]he
sado-masochistic image [of the martyred saint] is intensified . . . by his
traditional depiction as suffering a kind of ecstasy as he is penetrated by a
gang of men—Roman soldiers with arrows.
Here is male beauty, oppressed, penetrated, and transformed, a perfect
icon for the homosexual in Christian culture, who is so often characterized as
suffering, nobly or ignobly, and dying young" (16). "Sebastian" thus designates Wilde
as a martyr, in the tradition of the Christian saint and, later, Keats; as a
metaphor for Wilde-as-prisoner; as a gay icon, in the image of the comely,
nearly nude, penetrated youth; and, finally, as a corporeal manifestation for a
play across the lines of gender, a blur between "manhood" and
"womanhood," a pleasure in the repose of inversion.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has argued that
"[b]order-crossing was absolutely necessary to Wilde, whose sexual
orientation gave him a marginal, not to say criminal and subversive, subject position
. . . .
Wilde believed that the creative artist must cross gender borders,
representational borders, truth borders and law and order borders, in order to
realize fully his personality in his art" (140-141). Wilde's ultimate physical location,
Elsewhere in his letters, Wilde's sense of alienation
from
Hyde characterizes the Decadent period as " . . .
the culmination in England of the movement which had developed in France with
the concept of personality in the Revolution a century before and which had
reached the height of a collective expression on the other side of the English
Channel in the glorification of Napoleon" ("Introduction"
xi). Hyde's characterization of
Decadence as an originally French phenomenon imported to
Wilde's turn to France seems an appropriate response to
his excoriation by an English public who, before the spectacle of Wilde's fall,
loved and adored the writer as if he were one of their own; that is, at his
height, Wilde's popularity seemed to erase the difference—specifically, his
Irishness—that set him apart from mainstream English culture, but after his
fall, Wilde was attacked and rejected on the basis of a whole spectrum of
differences—now including much more serious charges, of course, than mere
Irishness. While the term "Natural
Enemies" had long been used in British newspapers as shorthand for an
ongoing English/French tension (Abrams 940n8), in the case of Wilde, that
tension finds literal embodiment, and thus Wilde's body continues to function
as a nexus for the textual and the corporeal.
In its account of Wilde's trial on 6 April 1895, for example, The Daily Telegraph fueled anti-French
sentiment in its demonization of the besieged Wilde: "Everybody can see and read for himself,
every honest and wholesome-minded Englishman must grieve to notice how largely
this French and Pagan plague has filtered into the healthy fields of British life" (qtd. in Goodman 76).(13) In moving into exile
and, finally, in settling in Paris, Wilde returns to the prototypical
nineteenth-century site of Revolution, for that city's name continued to
resound throughout the age with the ring of political upheaval and erotic
license.
Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy that was enjoying great success at
the time of the writer’s arrest, comments on the "proper" English
excoriation of all things French: Lady
Bracknell, that play's primary voice of traditional British values, responds in
horror when she is told that Bunbury, the symbolic figure whose always-absent
body metonymizes a range of decadent pleasures—including deceit, treachery,
and, Christopher Craft has argued, homosexuality (14)—has died
or, to quote Algernon Moncrieff exactly, has been " . . . quite
exploded," Lady Bracknell exclaims,
"Exploded! Was he the victim
of some revolutionary outrage?" (act 3).
While Algernon admits that Bunbury's demise resulted not so much from
corporeal as from textual explosion—he was, Algernon says, "found
out," or read—earlier in the
play another Bunbury's death is more specifically located: arriving in the country, Jack Worthing
announces that his brother Ernest (a figure who, for Jack, fulfills the same
purpose as does Bunbury for Algernon) has " . . . died abroad; in Paris,
in fact" (act 2). When Jack adds
that Ernest " . . . expressed a desire to be buried in
Wilde once celebrated France as "manag[ing] . . .
better" the split, the distance between public and private lives
("The Soul of Man Under Socialism" 1034), thus situating the country
which in his final years he came to call home as a safe haven for the object of
gossip, as a land that respects the boundaries between the personality one
exercises in public and the pleasures one enjoys in private. In France, Wilde-as-"Sebastian Melmoth"
embodied the conditions of excess that framed the nineteenth century—the
excesses of the French Revolution and their textual embodiment in the form of
the Gothic, and the excesses of fin-de-siècle decadence and their corporeal
embodiment in the figure of Wilde himself.
As the site of revolution moves throughout the century from one odd
tendency to another, at first textual and finally sexual, Wilde's retreating
figure—retreating both in its disinclination to respond to the wrongs
perpetrated against it, and retreating in its decided move out of England and into Paris—looms as the spectacle of
nineteenth-century revolutionary potential.
At once sexual and textual, "Sebastian Melmoth" functions not
as a shield of anonymity but as a badge of defiance, a sign that announces
Wilde's self-identification as his culture's "other," a
self-inflicted mark of Cain that articulates Wilde's allegiance to a sexuality
and a textuality his fellow Englishmen excoriated as the sites of revolutionary
excess.
During the recitation of his tale to Maturin’s Melmoth,
the Spaniard remarks with some ironic pleasure on his status as an
outsider: “Doors were clapped to
wherever I was heard to approach; and three or four would stand whispering near
where I walked, and clear their throats, and exchange signs, and pass audibly to the most trifling topics in
my hearing, as if to intimate, while they affected to conceal it, that their
last topic had been me. I laughed at this internally” (101). Wilde’s experience in exile strikes a
parallel chord: Croft-Cooke observes
that though "[l]
NOTES
1. In fact, Wilde's remark was no
"deathbed" declaration at all:
Ellmann reports that Wilde uttered the clever quip to Claire de Pratz on
2. A great many critics dismiss Wilde's exile
as a period of aesthetic and ideological loss or, even worse, as a personal
failure. Among these, the following are
the most representative. Frank Harris,
Wilde's friend and sometime-companion during the writer's final years,
remembers how Wilde's rooms "affected [him] unpleasantly," those
"ordinary, mean, little French rooms, furnished without taste";
"[w]hat struck me was the disorder everywhere; . . . [t]he sense of order
and neatness which he used to have in his rooms at Tite Street was utterly
lacking. He was not living here, intent
on making the best of things; he was merely existing without plan or
purpose" (307). Near the end of his
memoir, Harris admits that "the truth [about Wilde] is still more
appalling," and he goes on to catalogue the symptoms of Wilde's plunge
into decline, including physical illness and excessive drinking (316). Sadly, Harris's disgust resounds throughout
the one-sentence paragraph that follows his account of Wilde's death: "[e]ven the bedding had to be
burned" (316). Philippe Jullian
draws on the recollections of Wilde's friend Vincent O'Sullivan to remark that,
in his final years, Wilde habitually "[passed] a trembling hand over his
face as if to brush aside a nightmare"
(391, emphasis added); according to O'Sullivan, Wilde once admitted to him that
"'I died in prison'" (qtd. in Jullian 392). Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, follows
Frank Harris's lead in his book-length homage to his grandfather, The Wilde Album: he writes, "[w]ith little left to live
for, Oscar's last two and a half years were a long slide to the grave. He spent them wandering aimlessly around
3.
Wilde, as history and
4.
Specifically, I am thinking of the appropriation of the name and image
of Wilde in two instances: first, by the
British pop singer Morrissey, who has used such symbology for the last decade
and a half to signify his affiliation with what Lord Alfred Douglas and, later,
Wilde, referred to as "the love that dare not speak its name";
second, by a moment in the 1995 American film Clueless, in which a homosexual newcomer is "outed" by a
heterosexual classmate's string of epithets, including the interesting phrase
"Oscar-Wilde-reading . . .
." Richard A. Spears notes
that in the twentieth century, the term "Oscar" functioned as a
euphemism for what mainstream culture might still consider a
"deviant" identity and action:
as a noun, the term names "a homosexual male"; as a verb
(“oscarizing”), it describes the act of "commit[ting] pederasty" (284).
5.
Wilde and Keats may also be connected in terms of their deaths: though Keats's demise resulted from
consumption, or tuberculosis, and Wilde's, depending upon which account one
consults, from either a botched ear infection or tertiary syphilis, both deaths
symbolically manifest the vituperance of outraged critics on the body of the
embattled artist, thus registering textual invective as corporeal decline. Keats, as Byron famously remarked, was so
weak that he was, in effect, killed by criticism: to Percy Bysshe Shelley, he wrote that “I am
very sorry to hear what you say of Keats—is it actually true? I did not
think criticism had been so killing” (601), and to John Murray he confided that
“ . . . I did not approve of Keats’s poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his
abuse of Pope; . . . . [h]owever, he who would die of an article in a review
would probably have died of something else equally trivial” (661). Wilde, too, symbolically succumbed to public
outrage, admitting to Vincent O'Sullivan that "'Lucien hanged himself,
Julian died on the scaffold, and I died in prison'" (qtd. in Jullian
392). Both Wilde and Keats suffered
death at the level of the textual, not only because their writing came under
heavy attack from conservative readers and critics, but also because arsenals
of criticism were launched against them; ultimately, such "fatal"
offensives led to their downfalls, symbolically hastening their real, physical
deaths.
6. For readings of the press coverage of the
Wilde trials in terms of the textualization of the corporeal—the discussion and
depiction of Wilde's body-as-narrative—see Cohen and Goodman, passim.
7. The letter, though quoted in
Coakley, is inadequately documented, and its correspondent remains
unidentified.
8. Jan B. Gordon defines gossip as "the
(often) studied resistance to propriety—the
ownership of discourse marginalized to be self-same or identical" (Gossip and Subversion xii);
"[g]ossip, speech that is trafficked as opposed to being held in reserve,
would obviously assume values antithetical to those of Western liberalism's
vulnerable 'inner voice': repetition
rather than a self-identical 'sincerity'; the loss of a private self; an
enforced conformity with institutional demands; an instrumental posture toward
the self; and a dissonance which subverts self-knowledge" (300). Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks devotes an entire
study to the discussion of the mechanisms of gossip; see her book, Gossip.
9. A more
recent book by David Punter, Gothic
Pathologies: The Text, The Body and The
Law, situates the Gothic as the locus of a variety of strategies of
transgression, all of which work against and must be contained by culturally
sanctioned apparatuses, such as the law.
10. Wilde
plays on the multiple significations of his arrow-scored prison uniform in
another passage from De Profundis: "[o]ther miserable men when they are
thrown into prison, if they are robbed of the beauty of the world are at least
safe in some measure from the world's most deadly slings, most awful
arrows. They can hide in the darkness of
their cells and of their very disgrace make a mode of sanctuary. The world having had its will goes its way,
and they are left to suffer undisturbed.
With me it has been different.
Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the prison doors in search of
me; they have opened the gates wide and let them in" (33). Wilde's lament invokes the physical image of
the prison uniform and raises the image of the (prisoner's) body to the level
of the (prisoner's) experience, textualizing the corporeal by way of the figure
of speech "slings and arrows," always understood to be
verbal—textual—taunts that attack at the level of the corporeal, but here also
including the very condition of the (prisoner's) body itself, which registers
those slings and arrows as actual arrows,
as the sight and the site—in short, as the spectacle—of excoriation.
11. For accounts of Wilde's exilic escapades, see
Wilde, Letters 563-844; Harris, Oscar Wilde 264-322; Croft-Cooke
238-282; Jullian 358-398; Ellmann 527-589; and Schmidgall 331-344.
12. In writing to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison,
Wilde, though clearly cognizant of the bleak prospect the future held for his
return to the pleasures of old, nonetheless looks forward to his move away from
England as an opportunity for a kind of purification: "The sea, as Euripides says in one of
his plays about Iphigeneia, washes away the stains and wounds of the
world" (De Profundis 115).
13. In
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Wilde considers the current vogue
for the term "unhealthy" in criticism of the arts, and he concludes
that "[i]n fact, the popular novel that the public call healthy is always
a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel
is always a beautiful and healthy work of art" (1033).
14. See
Craft’s “Alias Bunbury: Desire and
Termination in The Importance of Being
Earnest” for a reading of the play’s central device of “bunburying” as,
among other things, “a pragmatics of gay misrepresentation, a nuanced and
motile doublespeak, driven both by pleasure and, as Gide puts it, ‘by the need
of self-protection’” (28).
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