THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

‘Misremembering Wilde: Oscar Wilde, His Critical Legacy, and His Critics’

Megan Becker-Leckrone

This is the text of a paper given at the Northeast Victorian Studies Conference, Yale University, April 1999. and is here published by the kind permission of the author.

In 1987, respected biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann published Oscar Wilde, a work that proved to be a significant intervention in our century's process of remembering Wilde as both a writer and a cultural figure. Not only a bestseller, Ellmann's book also quickly came to be regarded as authoritative – ‘canonized,’ as one critic puts it – the benchmark and source to which subsequent Wilde scholarship would look without fail, even if differing with his interpretations or quibbling with his factual claims. As many have noted, earlier biographies suffer by comparison for the relative degree of self-interest and suspicious motivation – not to mention myth and error – their narratives betray. Wilde's grandson, himself a perceptive critic and vigilant caretaker of Wilde's legacy, sums up Ellmann's place aptly: ‘Good biography is like good journalism,’ he writes, ‘you have to know just how much fable you can mix with your facts. Richard Ellmann spent twenty years of his life trying to get the proportions right in [his book], hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a biographical masterpiece and undoubtedly destined to become the definitive work on Wilde’ (Spectator, 24/31 Dec. 1988).

Though he does not theorize the claim implicit in this compliment, Holland speaks to the dynamic I would argue extends to literary and cultural criticism as much as it does to biography – that is, the degree to which ‘fable’ perhaps necessarily mixes with ‘fact’ in the course of critical commentary, even in commentary that achieves the largest consensus and makes the greatest claims to truth. I would argue that Wilde critics, in particular, must cope with the agon between fact and fable – often fables of their own creation – to an exceptional degree. Not least of the reasons for this is that so much of Wilde's work – particularly his critical work – seeks to complicate our notions of just what distinguishes fable from fact, lying from truth, fiction from nonfiction, art from life. Wilde questions the very borderlines between the categories and challenges the assumption that the latter in each of these pairs indeed has primacy. Holland's observation that even discourses seemingly defined by their claims to truth depend as well upon their supposed opposites, then, is an especially Wildean thing to say. Ironically, however, while critics give considerable attention to the ideas expressed in Wilde's critical commentary – in works such as PPP, ‘The Critic as Artist,’ ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ ‘The Decay of Lying, ‘ and others – only a disproportionate few acknowledge any correspondence between the critical activity Wilde theorizes and performs in those texts and their own. Put another way, Wilde's criticism is far more often read for what it says about art, or how it demonstrates the methods of aesthetic criticism, but rarely as a proleptic commentary on what we say about Wilde and our own methods for saying it. For instance, while it is commonplace to acknowledge his penchant for paradox, posturing, and equivocation, it is also common for Wilde commentators ultimately to decide unequivocally what Wilde ‘really’ means. Analyzing this phenomenon suggestively in his 1996 book, Oscar Wide and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Michael Patrick Gillespie further underscores the irony of this epistemological absolutism in light of both Wilde's radical ‘ambiguity’ and the supposed lessons of post-structuralism: ‘Such criticism reverts to just the sort of epistemology that it seeks to overturn: one that enforces a prescriptive dominant perspective while suppressing all alternative views’ (137).

Of course, I cannot achieve here the breadth of Gillespie's study, and there's little use in making ungrounded generalizations about a large and diverse critical discourse. Instead, I will focus on one specific topic within recent commentary that strikes an uncanny resonance with the critical situation Wilde himself depicts and has his characters act out in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ where a series of wayward critics attach themselves to a forged portrait in order to provide evidence for the otherwise unsubstantiable argument that Shakespeare's sonnets were addressed with love to a boy actor named ‘Will Hughes.’ To trace the genealogy of the topic I mean to discuss, we must go back to its unwitting source – namely, the Ellmann biography of Wilde Holland rightly praises so highly.

Just as the publication of Wilde's collected letters did a generation earlier [1962], Ellmann's work helped breathe new life into Wilde studies by testifying that his literary achievement and true complexity of character deserved to be taken seriously. Along with a number of other critics writing in the 1980s, furthermore, Ellmann sought in earnest to rescue the figure of Wilde from the sensational, ultimately tedious, taint of obscenity and scandal that seemed so tenaciously attached to him in the cultural memory for much of this century. Part of the biography's impact was likely its timing: at a moment when literary critics were increasingly turning to methodologies founded on sophisticated accounts of the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and desire; when the social and political contexts of literary production were being articulated by some of criticism's most innovative theorists, and when critical discourse began to expand provocatively its notion of textuality to include ‘texts’ from a heterogeneous array of cultural objects from art as well as life, Ellmann helped to remind critics that Oscar Wilde was an object of study almost too good to be true. As a number of recent commentators have attested, he did so in large part by reading Wilde's sexuality in complex conjunction with his work, moving far beyond the simplistic equation assumed by trial prosecutors that works such as Dorian Gray were coded ‘evidence’ of Wilde's homosexuality, that art merely unmediatedly expresses life. Because of the very publicity of that trial, far out of step with the attention political institutions or popular culture typically accords to literary figures, his homosexuality was not, by any stretch, a secret Ellmann uncovered. But his biography did coincide with a particular set of intellectual conditions that made the 1980s especially ripe for remembering anew Oscar Wilde's rich relevance to questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and representation.

For its timeliness, then, as well as its scholarship, Ellmann’s work has come to assume in critical discourse an aura of privileged primacy, a status as original source that that is, I believe, worthy of scrutiny. My motivation for dwelling on this biography – even at the risk of overstating its centrality – is to set the stage for one particular subplot in the twentieth-century story of Oscar Wilde that was spawned solely by Richard Ellmann's book: namely, Wilde's relevance to a cultural studies of transvestism or cross-dressing. I want to provide a background for pointing out that this subplot, created in 1987, has had a curious double affect in the critical conversation on Wilde: First, critics after Ellmann have retroactively attached it to a history that extends back a century to Wilde himself, thus revising earlier critical memory of this artist and the meaning of his work – allowing critics to suggest, in other words, that they are able to remember what a repressive cultural hegemony would have us forget. Second, as the subplot gained popularity in critical discourse, commentators came to forget that Ellmann was indeed its creator and source, giving the transvestite theory a strangely autonomous life of its own.

I am referring to a remarkable photograph included within Ellmann's Oscar Wilde that, in the seven years following its publication caused something of a critical sensation and, since 1994, a minor academic scandal. The photograph, according to Ellmann's caption, is ‘Wilde in costume as Salome’ [see figure one on handout]. In the book, it appears as the last photo in a series of sketches, portraits, and caricatures of Wilde and friends corresponding to the first half of the 1890s. It immediately follows a caricature of Wilde in a puffy-shouldered, full-length dress, smoking a cigarette and holding a fan. A number of prominent scholars responded with provocative readings that featured the photo as compelling evidence for a transvestic reading of Wilde's play. At least two influential and well-received books, Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy (published in 1990) and Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests (published in 1992) include a reproduction of it among their own illustrations.

Ellmann himself makes no reference to the photo in his text or his footnotes and no gives no suggestion it bears an apparent relevance to his discussion of Wilde's Salome play. Cross-dressing as such and, moreover, the notion that Wilde had the least penchant for it, never comes up in the biography, with regard to Salome or anything else. This is a discrepancy Showalter herself acknowledges but quickly shakes off in Sexual Anarchy; the richness of the photo's visual message, it seems, outweigh its dubious status in Ellmann's text. It was too good to pass up, the overdetermined richness of a transvestic Wilde-as-Salome too good to be true.

And, as it turned out, it was too good to be true. While, according to Holland, there had been doubts as to the photo's authenticity since its publication, ‘no one was anxious to put them into print’ (TLS, 22 July 1994). Critic John Stokes did so in a February 1992 letter to the London Review of Books, but without conclusive proof or positive re-identification. In 1994, with the help of a Wilde scholar from Germany, Holland would finally get the scoop in the July 22nd issue of the Times Literary Supplement, positively identifying the photo as that of Hungarian opera singer, Alice Guszalewicz. It, and several others, were taken during the 1907 Leipzig production of Strauss' opera, where Guszalewicz played the starring role. Holland included in his article Ellmann's unwitting forgery alongside another photo of the singer in Salome garb. In the same costume, but from a slightly different angle that displays a more clearly female figure, the re-identification proves unequivocal.

Holland makes a point to exonerate Ellmann from the charge of shabby scholarship he implicitly levels at others, explaining the editorial machinations by which the photo came to be included in his book. Ellmann's editor saw the photo in Le Monde in March of 1987, where it was illustrating the review of a new French biography of Wilde (a biography, incidentally, that itself neither included the photo nor attested to its existence). She showed it to Ellmann, who was terminally ill at the time and unable to verify its source. Ellmann died weeks later but, according to Holland, his publishers, ‘sensing a scoop ... made sure it was included, and much has been made of it ever since.’ ‘Such is the morphology of the myth,’ Holland concludes with some bemusement and disapproval. Holland's skepticism once again echoes Wilde's own critical observations, this time Wilde's more sanguine recognition of the instrumental role critical mythology plays in the morphology of aesthetic reception in ‘The Critic as Artist.’ In light of the critical myth I will explore, Wilde's comment seems especially suggestive. Explaining the process by which Pater's idiosyncratic and willful reading of Leonardo's Mona Lisa comes to influence its subsequent viewers, the critical dialogue's main speaker, Gilbert, explains: ‘And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing’ (1029). Uncannily, Wilde seems to predict, perhaps not disapprovingly, the precise critical myth that would emerge around his own supposed picture.

Probably the critic who made the most of it was Marjorie Garber, in the 1992 work Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. For her, the photo of Wilde-as-transvestite-Salome is ‘a radical reading that tells the truth’ a long history of the myth's transmission had been deceptively evading up until Wilde's time, and that critics have continued to evade since. By means of a complexly problematic logic, Garber reads the photograph as the secret truth whose name Wilde's play dare not speak, and in turn, that the play uncovers the secret truth that two thousand years patriarchal textual appropriations had forgotten. Acknowledging how very taciturn Matthew and Mark are about the details of the story in the New Testament – for instance neglecting to mention Salome's name, or the name of the dance – Garber nevertheless proceeds as if those details were ‘in’ these original narratives all along.

Leaping from the better-grounded claim that Wilde's play explores the dynamics of desire across an ambiguous field of sexual difference, Garber proposes we go ‘one step further and ask what would happen if the object of the gaze were, not a woman or a man, but a transvestite?’ She has been talking about Salome's gaze, which would logically suggest she's here proposing John is the transvestite, but that's not what she means to suggest, for it's in the next paragraph that she unveils the Ellmann photo and indicates that Salome is her transvestite. She explains this logic succinctly: ‘Thus: Wilde the author, Wilde the libertine, Wilde the homosexual, as Salome.’ As I have argued elsewhere, Garber and a number of other critics assume a logic of amnesia as a substitute for recognizing the significant creative role Wilde took in calling her dance the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,’ for he was the first interpreter of the myth to do so.

Her treatment of the Wilde photograph assumes the same logic of amnesia, and moreover allows her to assert absolutely that the photo helps us to remember a forgotten truth. In Wilde's play, she asserts – notably not later dramatic interpretations of that play, but Wilde's play itself – we are presented with ‘a transvestite dance – that is the essence of the dance itself’ (VI, 342). Garber's ‘one step further’ becomes, thus, her own evidence for the true meaning not only of Wilde's play, but of the entire history of the myth. Citing Ken Russell's campy film, ‘Salome's Last Dance,’ in which the dancer's final veil reveals with anatomical certainty a dancing boy rather than a dancing girl, Garber endorses her own transvestic interpretation. The ‘substitution’ of man or woman with a transvestite is ‘a rereading of [the Salome story] that makes all the sense in the world – makes sense, for example, of the cultural amnesia that omits to mention the dancer's name, or the name of her fabled dance.’ Implying it is a truth Wilde himself helps unveil, Garber elides the significant role dramatic interpreters and critics like herself have had in shaping what Salome has become at the end of our own century.

As I suggested earlier in the paper, Elaine Showalter makes use of the Ellmann photograph somewhat more reservedly, yet her logic is similar. In the September 2, 1994 Times Literary Supplement, Showalter published a grudgingly gracious mea culpa in response to Merlin Holland's article, acknowledging that he had ‘scotched a potent academic myth.’ Nevertheless, she held steadfast to her original argument in which the photo was featured as evidence. Entitled ‘It's Still Salome,’ Showalter's chief aim in the TLS piece is to take exception to Holland's ‘hint that contemporary critical readings of Salome as a story of veiled homoerotic desire depend on the photograph’; the hint, she writes, ‘needs some response.’ Showalter counters that ‘on the contrary, the critical history of [Wilde's] Salome has always been linked with Wilde's homosexuality.’ While in one sense she is right, her argument too ‘needs some response.’ The article indeed traces a copious history of interpretations that read such a subtext in the play, going back to what is arguably the play's first important interpretation – Aubrey Beardsley's famous illustrations. Here she reiterates the argument she made in Sexual Anarchy, an argument I find often persuasive but, like Garber's, rather unselfconscious about the degree to which subsequent interpretations of Wilde's play get retroactively read into Wilde's play, in order to recover a secret sense one cannot unequivocally maintain was ‘there’ all along. To do so, she conflates Beardsley's illustration with the text of the play by authorizing Beardsley as a privileged reader of Wilde's true meaning [quoting Wilde's often quoted inscription in the copy of the play he presented to Beardsley: ‘the only artist, besides myself, who knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is ...’]. Showalter also elides, moreover, any distinctions among the artist's homosexuality, the illustrations' insistent androgyny, and the more specific strain of transvestism she traces in the Salome myth. In the TLS response, this elision bears particular scrutiny: for while Holland's discovery might not invalidate the first two categories, it does poke serious holes in transvestic readings of Wilde's play.

Perhaps the strangest instance of the photo's incorporation into a critic's account of literary history occurs in an essay where the photo itself makes no visual appearance: Richard Dellamora's 1990 essay ‘Traversing the Feminine in Oscar Wilde's Salome.’ It is specifically strange for the extent to which it giving the transvestite theory a strangely autonomous life of its own, detached from the only substantial piece of evidence it ever had. Thus while his appropriation of the photo is much more subtle than either Garber's or Showalter's, the logic behind that its usage is far more problematic. For Dellamora unselfconsciously grafts the recent critical myth of a transvestite Salome not only onto Wilde's play, but to a tradition supposedly initiated by Walter Pater's Renaissance. While Dellamora relies liberally on Ellmann as an authoritative source, even while disagreeing with him at points, it is Ellmann's 1968 essay on Salome that he cites in most of his footnotes, not the 1987 biography that contains the photograph. His first mention of Pater, ‘whom Ellmann names one of the prime precursors of [Wilde's] Salome’ is also his last accurate reference to either Pater's Renaissance or Ellmann's biography. Ellmann's 1968 essay does indeed trace Wilde's play to Pater, but never does it assert the utterly baseless claim Dellamora asserts offhandedly in his next paragraph – namely that, ‘within the Paterian tradition Salome is a male transvestite.’ Surely Dellamora feels justified making this claim because of the critical climate created by the photo's supposed signification, yet he apparently feels no obligation directly to attach that piece of evidence to the transvestic tradition he comes to take for granted. On the next page, he once again offhandedly mentions the photo, but does not grant it much attention. In fact, he takes it so much for granted that instead he wants to launch a theory that goes beyond it: ‘Accordingly, and despite the fact that Ellmann in his recent biography includes a semi-nude photograph of Wilde dressed as Salome ..., Salome is a significant document in the history of a specifically female sexuality’ (248).

A few more pages in, he returns to the notion of a ‘Paterian’ transvestism, this time, even more curiously, to criticize Ellmann's own remembrance of literary history: ‘Ellmann misses,’ he writes, ‘the extent to which [Wilde's] Salome celebrates in dramatic form the male transvestism already present in Pater's 1969 essay on Leonardo da Vinci.’ Never does Dellamora go on to cite Pater's text to show his readers just what Ellmann ‘misses.’ I suspect his unspoken reasoning bears some resemblance to the logic at work in Garber and Dellamora, for a reading of Pater's essay asserts absolutely no mention of cross-dressing, but only a very pervasive interest in androgyny and subtle valorizations of homosexuality. In fact, there are only scanty references to Salome at all. Pater does spend slightly more time with John the Baptist, whose ‘woman's hair’ and ‘treacherous smile’ may vaguely suggest some alignment with Leonardo's Mona Lisa [and indeed, reproductions of these paintings included in Donald Hill's edition of Pater's text lend further credence to the idea]. More notably, Pater makes a point not of John's vestments, or the fact that they might be womanly, but rather that he is ‘one of the naked figures Leonardo painted.’ Dellamora does not explain how one could be a naked transvestite. While there is, then, ample implication that Pater establishes androgyny and homoerotic subtext as a ‘tradition’ Wilde would himself exploit, Dellamora's particular emperor has no clothes.

By way of a rather rough transition to some concluding remarks, thus, I would highlight once again the uncanny resonances this recent critical myth has with the story Wilde himself tells exactly one hundred years earlier in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ In that essay, which is – not insignificantly, both a fictive creation and a work of literary criticism – three different critics

Garber's devil-may-care approach to factual evidence, ironically, is one which Gilbert, in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ might indeed approve of heartily. For it is in that essay that Wilde has his Socratic protagonist call ‘the highest Criticism,’ explaining to Ernest, his skeptical interlocutor, that such criticism ‘treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation ... To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises’ (1030).

Showalter's gesture in the TLS article effectively responds to Holland by saying, ‘I know very well, but just the same’ – curiously the very insistence Wilde's literary critics make in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ – and much to their peril.

• Megan Becker-Leckrone is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas where she specializes in Literary Theory and 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature.  Her book Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory  was published by Palgrave in 2005.

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