Branding Oscar Wilde 9780815365945, 9781351260169

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue: Enhancing Criticism through the Brand
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Synopsis of the Evolution of Branding
PART I: The Path to Brand Development: An Interval: Seeing Wilde Inhabiting His Works
1 Growing Up with the Brand
2 Early Days in London and the Tour of America
3 The Conquest of London
4 The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand
PART II: Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages: A Second Interval: How Brand and Art Blended
5 The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays
6 Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection
7 Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
8 De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: Writing a New Brand into Existence
PART III: Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings: A Final Interval: Where Does It All Lead
9 The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work
10 A Close Reading of The Importance of Being Earnest
Appendix: A Selected Survey of Critical Approaches to Wilde’s Writing
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Branding Oscar Wilde

Branding Oscar Wilde traces the development and perception of Wilde’s public persona and examines the impact of interpretations of his writing. Through calculated behavior, provocative language, and arresting dress, Wilde self-consciously created a brand initially recognized by family and friends, then by the British public, and ultimately by large audiences over the world. That brand changed over the course of his public career—both in the way Wilde projected it and in the way it was perceived. Comprehending the fundamental elements of the Wilde brand and following its evolution are integral to a full understanding of his art. The study focuses on how branding established important assumptions about Wilde and his work in his own mind and in those of his readers, and it examines how each stage of brand development affected the immediate responses to Wilde’s writings and, as it continued to evolve, progressively shaped our understanding of the Wilde canon. Michael Patrick Gillespie after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of ­Wisconsin in 1980, taught for twenty-nine years at Marquette University as an Assistant, Associate, and a Full Professor and finally as the inaugural L ­ ouise Edna Goeden Professor of English. He has written a dozen books (on the works of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, William Kennedy, Chaos Theory, and Irish Film) and two monographs. He has edited eight other works, including two volumes in the Norton Critical Edition of authors. He has also written over eighty articles and book chapters relating to English and Irish studies. He has been on the advisory boards of a half dozen scholarly journals, and has served as a reader for fourteen ­ ational Endowment for presses. He has received fellowships or grants from the N the Humanities, the American Philosophical S­ ociety, the ­Humanities Research Center, the William Andrews Clark Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wisconsin Humanities Council, and M ­ arquette University. He has been named as a featured speaker in the Joseph Schick Lecture Series and gave one of the Lawrence McBride Memorial Lectures. He is the only American recipient of the Charles Fanning Medal for Distinguished Work in Irish Studies. He came to Florida International University in the fall of 2009 and currently serves there as a Professor of English, having for five years directed the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment. He has been named a Distinguished Scholar by Florida International University, and is a STEM Institute Founding Fellow. Gillespie has been on the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation and on the Board of Consultants for the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. He has been Secretary, Vice-President, and President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

23 Saving the World Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Edited by Allison Giffen and Robin L. Cadwallader 24 Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing Edited by Monika Elbert and Susanne Schmid 25 Fashion and Victorian Popular Culture Double Threads Madeline Seys 26 Traumatic Tales British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature Edited by Lisa Kasmer 27 Three Traveling Women Writers Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Brazil, Patagonia, and the U.S., 1859–79 Natália Fontes de Oliveira 28 For Better, For Worse Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women Edited by Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw 29 Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century Laura Olcelli 30 Branding Oscar Wilde Michael Patrick Gillespie

Branding Oscar Wilde

Michael Patrick Gillespie

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Michael Patrick Gillespie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-0-8153-6594-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26016-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.” —The Picture of Dorian Gray

For Paula

Contents

Prologue: Enhancing Criticism through the Brand Acknowledgments Introduction: A Synopsis of the Evolution of Branding

ix xiii 1

Part I

The Path to Brand Development: An Interval: Seeing Wilde Inhabiting His Works13   1 Growing Up with the Brand15   2 Early Days in London and the Tour of America

22

  3 The Conquest of London32   4 The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand

39

Part II

Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages: A Second Interval: How Brand and Art Blended

47

  5 The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays50   6 Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection60   7 Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray77   8 De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: Writing a New Brand into Existence

88

viii Contents Part III

Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings: A Final Interval: Where Does It All Lead

101

  9 The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work103 10 A Close Reading of The Importance of Being Earnest118 Appendix: A Selected Survey of Critical Approaches to Wilde’s Writing Works Cited Index

133 139 145

Prologue Enhancing Criticism through the Brand

In December 2008, my wife and I visited Florence for the first time. Our youngest daughter, who had been to that city a few years before as part of an art history class, had given us a list of things that we absolutely had to see. Foremost was Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Galleria dell’ Accademia. Seeing any popular work of art in Europe during the tourist season can prove to be a test of strength and endurance. However, visiting the Accademia in the winter, with none of the congestion of the summer, proved to be an easy and pleasurable experience. We could stand in front of the statue for as long as we wished, walk around it, pause to consider other perspectives, and then do it all again. We were never rushed, never felt crowded, and were never aware of anything but the work before us. I expected Michelangelo’s carving to be beautiful, but I never anticipated the power of such a creation to sweep over me as it did. The size of the work produces a sense of majesty that I had not expected. The pose of the figure captures a range of attitudes from youthful innocence to quiet confidence. The majesty of the human body in proportion and grace simply overwhelms the viewer. I have never forgotten the time I spent absorbing the magnificence of that creation. It was the most marvelous aesthetic experience of my life. In retrospect, I understand how fortunate my wife and I were that so few people were in the museum the day we visited it. I now see what a gift we were given by being able to linger over this work of art with no one jostling us impatiently and no cacophony of other voiced responses clouding our thoughts. In the half hour or so we spent wandering around Michelangelo’s creation, we accumulated, at leisure, a range of impressions that became for each of us a powerful, unified appreciation of that work. I also now comprehend how the lack of specific expectations aided my observations. Unlike my daughter, I have never taken an art history class. I came to Michelangelo’s sculpture without the formal preparation that would have prescribed hierarchal ways of seeing, and by extension of understanding, the work before me.

x Prologue Furthermore, as I thought back on them, I found that those moments with David expanded my recollections of other viewings. It overlaid memories of trips to the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other wonderful galleries. In this pleasurable amalgamation, all my artistic remembrances of things past were enhanced. This observation is not a dismissal of art history. I freely acknowledge the importance of insights given to us by individuals who have devoted their lives to understanding the stages of creative growth that shape creative efforts and imaginative responses. However, I do feel something along the lines of Alexander Pope’s observation that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” With a limited sense of art history, that awareness of the protocols appreciation would have circumscribed my experience, pushing me to see certain things and to ignore others. This is a problem that can often vex literary studies. As a matter of course, we employ disciplined, organized, analytic approaches, but, as a consequence, this can lead us to segregated ways of seeing that produce narrowed interpretations. Some even do so with a religious-like fervor that resolutely eschews amalgamation, claiming, implicitly or sometimes even explicitly, that conclusions based on a narrowly defined point of view can produce a full understanding, and denying or ignoring the ­efficacy of any other way of knowing art outside the bounds of our preferred approach. I do not advocate giving up the focused investigations that well-­ constructed methods of criticism produce. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that we can improve the value of our judgments by enhancing our points of view. To that end, my aim in this study is ecumenical rather than ­parochial. I do not wish it to supplant other ways of interpreting Wilde’s canon. Rather, I believe that bringing a sense of the influence of brand on the creative process will augment any reading.

The Guiding Principle The central assumption upon which I base this study is that the social, cultural, and historical forces that surround an artist before, during, and after the creation of a work occupy crucial roles in the imaginative and the interpretive processes. A corollary of that assumption is that an awareness of these settings will enhance one’s understanding of the works that emerged from them. Of course, the influence of extra-­ textual features will vary from work to work as well as from interpreter to interpreter. Consequently, for the fullest possible understanding of a writer like Oscar Wilde, one needs to be mindful of the particular ­elements that most shaped his world without allowing that mindfulness to lead to mechanical or prescriptive responses to his writing. To cite an analogous situation, critics are widely aware that allusions to Catholic beliefs, liturgies, and institutions run through the writings

Prologue  xi of James Joyce. This is because the dominant influence exerted by the Catholic Church on almost every portion of the Irish world that Joyce experienced in his youth could not fail to make impressions on his ­consciousness. His engagement with so many facets of that institution, positive and negative, provided images, experiences, and ideas upon which he drew for the metaphoric elaboration of his creative process. The features of Joyce’s Catholicism, like many other features of Dublin, remained fixed immutably in his recollections of a world he left in 1904.1 For readers, then, his narratives take on fuller meaning, if we familiarize ourselves with the Catholicism—very different from the ­current one—from which those writings emerged. Wilde’s public persona—embodied in his brand—stands as a unique influence no less dynamic but far more mutable than Joyce’s Catholic world. 2 Begun during his university days as a series of calculated interactions with society meant to establish a particular set of impressions, Wilde already was allowing his branding to have a significant influence on his imaginative process. It informed contemporaneous receptions of his work. And—thanks to the efforts of a range of literary critics—it has continued to evolve long after his death. In the pages that follow I will examine particular approaches to Wilde’s canon. I will touch on how a number of readers have applied perceptions of portions of his brand in the process of understanding his work, and I will suggest how these views can be expanded by a fuller integration of the brand.

Plan of Work Understanding the way Wilde shaped his public self and how that image affected the composition and reception of his writing presents organizational challenges. It involves close attention to the same issues and events from different perspectives and with different aims. To help readers understand more clearly the plan of analysis that I am following, I offer here a brief outline of the study’s structure. I have organized my study in stages that develop the idea of a brand and then apply those concepts to approaches to understanding Oscar Wilde’s writing. I begin in my Introduction with an overview of the concept, first as applied to artifacts and then as it became associated with public identities. In Part I, I trace the rise and fall of Wilde’s brand over four distinct stages. Having established the various iterations of the brand, I turn in Part II to an overview of how each stage shaped a specific phase of Wilde’s maturation as an artist. In Part III, I illustrate the application of my ideas by demonstrating how an awareness of branding can create an understanding of Wilde’s two most famous works, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. Finally, in the Appendix, I offer a broad survey of various established methods for interpreting Wilde’s writings, and suggest how a great sense of branding would expand their insights.

xii Prologue

Notes 1 That has not prevented critics from offering a wide variety of responses to Joyce’s Catholic heritage, illustrating how much independent thought ­remains in within the bounds of integrating an extra-textual element into interpretations. See, for example, the following selection. William T. Noon. Joyce and Aquinas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. J. Mitchell Morse. Sympathetic Alien: Joyce and Catholicism. New York: New York University Press, 1959. Robert Boyle. James Joyce’s Pauline Vision. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Mary Lowe-Evans. Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Gert Lernout. Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Chrissie Van Mierlo. James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 2 Throughout this study, I will use the terms brand and public persona synonymously.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to a number of individuals whose insights, advice, and patience have done much to improve the work that follows. The generosity and support of such good friends mean a great deal to me, and listing them here is hardly an adequate recognition of all they have done. In Boston: Thomas Hachey and John Paul Riquelme In Chicago: James Fairhall, David Gardner, Matthew Gillespie, Elizabeth Kelly, and James Murphy In Dublin: Eugene Finn, David Norris, Sunniva O’Flynn, and Fran O’Rourke In Miami: Maneck Darwala, James Doan, Tiffany Fajardo, Paula ­Gillespie, Kenneth Johnson, Patrick McCarthy, Asher Milbauer, Eddie Munster, Anne Prestamo and the staff of the Florida International University Library, Mary-Jane Rochelson, Heather Russell, John Stack, James Sutton, and Douglas Wartzok In Milwaukee: Timothy McMahon and Albert Rivero In New York: Carol Bemis, Nicholas Fargnoli, Ann Gillespie, John ­Harrington, Robert Lowry, Phillip Sicker, and Keri Walsh In Paestum: Assunta Petrone In Paris: David Rose, Emily Eells, Emmanuel Vernadakis, and Xavier Giudicelli In St. Louis: Eamonn Wall In St. Paul: James Rogers

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Introduction A Synopsis of the Evolution of Branding

Juliet tells us that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and Gertrude Stein asserts, more insistently and less lyrically, that “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Each is correct as far as her observations go, but, equally, each leaves to her auditors or readers the task of fleshing out their descriptions from the complex emotional, physiological, and spiritual relationships that we all construct around the concept of the rose—what some might call its brand. It is that broadly acknowledged, highly subjective, and insistently ephemeral emotive quality that shapes an individual’s perceptions of a great many persons, places, and things and that acts as the impetus for this study.

A Brief Explanation of My Use of the Term This is a book that focuses specifically on the various manifestations of the brand associated with the writer Oscar Wilde. It examines the ways by which the brand created and developed by Wilde, in all its various versions or phases, affected his writing, and it gauges the ongoing effects of stages of that brand upon interpretations of his works. Before turning to Wilde, however, I want to acknowledge the challenges to any effort to apply such a fluid concept within a rigorous analytical project.1 The term brand, whether applied as a noun, adjective, or verb, has grown well beyond its original designation relating to product identification through simple, visual marks or signs. As marketing became less parochial, products more diverse, and consumer satisfaction more complex, imaginative and emotional features became part of the brand concept. Our current understanding of the term has now come to include all the elements—concrete and abstract—that combine to shape public conceptions of an entity. Above all, a successful brand is active, organic, and even, to a degree, unstable. It interacts with those who perceive it, and, to be successful, it must have the durability to evolve over time, reformed and renewed by brand’s experiences and by the expectations of its audiences. Further, its perception has so expanded that we now regularly see it as part of an individual’s public persona.

2  Introduction Two related features are of particular interest to this study. As Wilde’s brand grew, the distinction between it and Wilde became more and more difficult for the public, and often for him, to discern. Furthermore, with its growing success, Wilde’s brand exerted increasing control over his public actions and creative endeavors. To understand this process, let us first review the development of the brand.

Western Origins of the Concept: A Brief Summary Initially, product recognition was a relatively simple process, relying on little more than a personal familiarity with the goods and their creators. Buyers could make distinctions between superior and average workmanship, even when not observably evident, with a high level of confidence as long as all manufacturing and consumption remained indigenous. As expanding trade and growing commercial sophistication created customers increasingly further from products’ places of origin, consumers needed more than local awareness to be sure of the quality of specific goods produced by particular creators. Branding began as a means of distinguishing otherwise similarly appearing products from one another. Any collection of vases, for instance, might look comparable to a casual observer. However, those that were produced by a more skilled artisan or those with a superior grade of clay or simply those with a tradition of quality would have greater value than similar seeming artifacts lacking such associations. In many objects, discerning such features proved challenging. Thus, time and expense were saved when recognizable marks distinguished one grade of vase from another. As individuals or areas gained reputations for particular skill in the fabrication of certain items, artisans perfected the practice of singling out their work with marks attesting to the good’s value. Seeing a familiar brand on a product would evoke a series of assumptions about it before one had used or even examined it. In short order, these associations began to carry semiotic significance. Like words on a page, signs linked to a particular piece of goods elicited responses based on associations held in one’s memory. Archeologists discovered evidence of craftsmen signing their creations on artifacts made in Greece as early as the sixth century B.C. A potter, apparently named Sophilos, put his identifying mark on fragments of two wine basins unearthed in Athens and on other pottery found elsewhere in the Greek world. The branding indicated the pride Sophilos had for his work, but it also suggested that others would be glad to know that he was the creator of these basins. 2 When the reputation of a certain artisans spread, artifacts produced by that individual became more sought after. However, such notoriety did not exclusively adhere to individuals. At around the same time that

Introduction  3 Sophilos was marking his pots, for example, the city of Toledo in Spain was earning a reputation for producing superior swords, and weapons associated with any workshop in that town came to be held in high esteem. Over thousands of years of commerce, as manufacturing moved from cottage industries to workshops and eventually to factories, brand identification took on increasing importance. These marks not only offered assurances of the qualities of a particular artifact no matter where or by whom it was sold. Eventually, they came to guarantee the quality of a product no matter which anonymous laborer fabricated it. With the broad gulfs between producers and their customers created by industrialization, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, brands and their identifying trademarks had become an integral part of consumer consciousness.3 Wedgwood in England, for example, assumed the role of a byword for top quality pottery. Waterford crystal in Ireland enjoyed such strong renown that it lasted through the period from the original firm’s closure in 1851 until its revival nearly one hundred years later. Reputation always provided the foundation for a strong brand, so anything that helped to corroborate the product’s origin, and in that way to certify its attributes, proved to be an extremely effective mode of identification. The concept continues to this day, with extensive marketing campaigns now achieving what word of mouth initially accomplished: the brand distinguishes the merchandise and its maker. Although the association may seem simple and straightforward, in fact a brand can generate impressions that go well beyond the material value of a product. In consequence, by the twentieth century, when any number of competing mass-produced products—from cigarettes to automobiles—evinced little recognizable material difference, branding tactics shifted. Companies sought to attract customers through emotional and psychological associations with their products. Branding became even more elaborate. Industries evolved—marketing, advertising, and public ­relations—to shape consumer perceptions and to attach psychological as well as material value to a range of products. One finds a good example of this process in a promotion that took place over the period from 1954–1999. During that time, the Philip Morris Tobacco Company ran a carefully constructed and extremely successful marketing campaign to promote sales of its Marlboro cigarettes. Advertisements, both in print and on television (until 1970 when U.S. law prohibited broadcasting tobacco ads), featured a series of men dressed as cowboys in settings evoking the American West. Without specifically saying so, the ads associated manly traits with the sort of person who chose to smoke Marlboro cigarettes. Neither the models nor most of those who purchased the cigarettes worked on ranches, but the impression of conventional manliness created by the branding of that image was enough to generate significant sales.4

4  Introduction

Branding Becomes Personal The effort devoted to developing a strong brand has never been confined to marketing manufactured goods. The de facto practice of shaping a public persona into the equivalent of what we now call a brand evolved coincidentally with the development of the very first social groups. It grew out of the cult of personality so important to many leaders, and the benefits of inspiring favorable psychological attractions and strong emotional attachments motivated many such figures to devote time, energy, and money to shaping the way that the world saw them. Over 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great was able to put his image on coins and erected self-celebratory statues to remind people of his military conquests and of the associations that came with those successes. ­Julius Caesar served as his own press agent in composing The Gallic Wars, exaggerating his military and political achievements in the process. Over the next millennium, from Constantine to Louis XIV, any number of major historical figures used buildings, coins, statues, paintings, musical compositions, and other material artifacts to increase their renown well beyond what they initially earned through their achievements. The rise of new media expanded branding even further. The printing press allowed the broadsides and pamphlets of the seventeenth century to grow into the newspapers and journals of the eighteenth. 5 The reading audience also grew proportionally, and Ellen Moers tells us that “[t]he early years of the nineteenth century were marked by the gradual extension of literacy to the lower classes, and the achievement of wealth, leisure, and self-confidence by the middle classes.”6 The daily and weekly publications numbered in hundreds in the British Isles. The number of provincial papers, for example, increased from 200 in 1846 to 750 in 1865, and the appetite for items to fill their pages grew exponentially as well.7 Changes in economics, technology, and public taste over this period fueled society’s fascination with such personal display and public spectacle. More to the point, people developed a wide-ranging interest in the events of the world around them and a taste for information on the lives of others. In consequence, as Jon Klancher points out, in England a range of diverse concerns, varying tastes, and a wide range of social backgrounds produced multiple categories of readers.8

The Rise of the Dandy Books, newspapers, and magazines were quick to capitalize on the diverse interests that were a consequence of the rise in literacy. One area of particular note were studies in the individual mores of well-known social figures, often labelled Dandies, figures whose derived public notice by setting themselves forward as arbiters of taste, celebrating their

Introduction  5 eccentricities as demonstrations of their refinement and superior position. These were the descendants of the fops of the late seventeenth century and the macaronis of the eighteenth. Their lineage goes back further of course, and we see earlier figures of this disposition lampooned in the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and lesser writers. In the 1820s, public curiosity about the dandies led to celebratory novels like Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828). The 1830s produced responses that were more critical. Most noteworthy, in 1833 and 1834 Fraser’s serialized Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which, though broadly propounding Carlyle’s social views in its critique of public behavior, introduced the term “dandiacal” in the title the tenth chapter of book three, “The Dandiacal Body.” A few years later Fraser’s took lampooning a step further, serializing William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Yellowplush Papers (1837), a view of the degraded dandy’s life style as observed by his servant, Charles Yellowplush.9 Throughout the second half of the century, Punch or the London Chivarari continued this trend, making great sport of those, including Oscar Wilde, who had the temerity to celebrate themselves.10 Nonetheless, whether facing admiration or scorn, strong personalities who showed the courage to flaunt their unique responses to the world dominated the imagination of society for most of the century. The cleverest ones took the process a step further, and demonstrated a canny sophistication in dealing with the writers who alternately celebrated and lampooned them, knowing how to ensure that their brands prospered in either case. This was the tradition that shaped Wilde’s approach to crafting a public persona, and one that he proved highly adept at manipulating.

Evolving from Celebrity to Brand The notoriety of the Dandies was not solely the result of canny efforts by publishers. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, individuals began to put a great deal of energy into moving from being celebrities to cultivating their individual brands.11 Although that term would not come into common usage for nearly two hundred years, there was already a changing sense of how one could distinguish oneself in society. Display was fast displacing achievement. Since Ellen Moer’s groundbreaking book, social commentators have been giving a great deal of attention to individuals’ efforts to forge unique identities and to have them verified by the opinions of society.12 Such recognition seemed to be sufficient recompense for the effort that went into gaining notoriety. (Beau Brummell’s flight to the Continent in 1816 to escape his creditors—a journey Oscar Wild, initially using the name Sebastian Melmouth, would replicate eighty-one years later under similar circumstances—strongly suggests that financial gain did not serve as the prime motivation for cultivating the dandiacal life.)

6  Introduction However, equating brand success with achieving a measure of public familiarity can produce misconceptions and false assumptions of how the term functions in our society. “Being known for being known,” while a common shorthand synopsis for branding, conveys a deceptively passive characterization. It does not capture the complex nature of how an individual’s brand comes into existence or how it shapes the perceptions of those who encounter it. That is not to say that establishing and maintaining a strong public persona occurs simply by chance. To establish and maintain a successful brand demands a great deal of energy and a talent, or at least a knack, for a certain type of behavior. To gain initial attention, a personal brand must present specific traits that captures the interest of the public. However, those traits cannot remain static or predictable if the brand is to hold public interest. The unrefreshed brand becomes familiar, stale, and eventually self-caricaturing. A true brand is created with care and curated with determination. Lady Gaga, for example, is a brand because of her calculated and continued efforts to impress upon the public a sense of her unique public persona. She performs her brand in a tightly controlled manner because she understands, as did Oscar Wilde at least for most of his adult life, the effect of its public consumption on her life and on her art.13

The Impact of the Literary Brand Examining a writer’s brand grows naturally out of the critical commonplace that says for a full understanding of a work literature the impact of extra-textual influences on the creative process needs as much attention as does the force of the intra-textual ones. From Homer’s Odyssey through Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to literature being produced at this very moment, cultural context always exerts a profound impact on both the creation and the comprehension of any work. Authors write out of their environment, in several senses of the term—Dante in his exile, Jane Austen in Steventon parsonage, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in various gulags, Samuel Beckett in his Paris apartment, Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton, Ana Menendez writing in Miami of the Cuba of her parents’ recollections—and the physical, emotional, and spiritual elements that constitute those surroundings cannot fail to shape writers’ imaginative natures and to inform the creative impulses that produce their works. At the same time, the dynamics and mutability of branding make provisional any perspective that one chooses to adopt. As the dandies of the nineteenth century and superstars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown time and again, even those who begin building a brand on personal achievement and endeavor to control every aspect of its dissemination find that, as the brand gains notoriety, the dynamics of the process shift control out of the hands of the brander. In some

Introduction  7 instances, the stability and definitiveness of the brand come into question, and then all aspects of one’s nature are, to use a chestnut that Jacques Derrida borrowed from Martin Heidegger, sous rature, under erasure/absent but present. (I will examine the postmodern, nihilist features of branding later in this study in my comments on The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Nonetheless, engaging this material stands as a continuing and important part of any interpretive process, and in this study, I propose a strategy for making that subjective world view more accessible, specifically through an analysis of the Wilde brand.

The Wilde Brand This study brings concepts of branding into the process of literary criticism. It seeks a better understanding the work of Oscar Wilde by looking at how branding shaped his creativity. It also touches on how Wilde’s readers, from his own time to the present, found their interpretations of his writings influenced by the sense they had of the Wilde brand. In the chapters that follow, I will trace the development, maturation, and disintegration of his brand. I will comment on its relation Wilde’s art, with emphasis on the evolution of his public persona and how it contributed to changes in his habits of composition. And I will examine how branding shaped and continues to shape readers’ responses to Wilde’s writing, showing how the brand continues to evolve and with it a series of new ways of seeing and understanding of the Wilde canon. My aim is not to offer specific, new interpretations of his works, at least not in the prescriptive sense of the process. Rather, I seek to supplement the various approaches to interpretation that have already been applied to Wilde’s works, showing how understanding his changing brand enhances any approach to interpreting his writing. I will also demonstrate how this process requires a continual refinement of the perspectives that readers adopt in trying to understand him and his work. Hesketh Pearson offers a witty snapshot that captures the image of Wilde’s impulse for change: “The man who in 1880 has satisfied his histrionic nature by adorning his body in remarkable apparel was in 1890 adorning his thoughts in astonishing language.”14 I seek here to elaborate on that rendering with a series of more detailed representations.

Wilde Performs the Brand Oscar Wilde took on the role of a performance artist a century before the term came into vogue. From his early adulthood onward, he showed an ability to capture public attention, initially on the basis of very little achievement to merit such renown. Nonetheless, too often readers and critics have treated the numerous accounts of his extravagant behavior and his provocative opinions as mere charming eccentricities. Scholars

8  Introduction have often relegated them to little more than demonstrations of the self-indulgence and self-satisfaction that punctuated Wilde’s life. That reductive approach misses the opportunity to explore the imaginative/ creative relationship between the character of Wilde and the scope of his work. In fact, Wilde made outlandish behavior a defining feature in his public to the same degree that he incorporated it into his art. His approach was neither capricious nor haphazard, but rather it formed an integral part of his efforts to stockpile expectations that would shape the way the public came to understand him and his writings. As I will illustrate in this study, accoutrements like blue china, sunflowers, gold-tipped cigarettes, and green carnations were not mere affectations for Wilde. They were part of a series of ever-changing emblems of his brand, and they facilitate understanding the various stages of his development as an artist. “Life has been your art”—the words of Lord Henry to Dorian Gray, late in that novel—also apply to Wilde, but with a significant difference.15 Wilde did not substitute life for art but rather melded the two. In this approach, Wilde was not unique to his time. A number of contemporary writers, painters, and actors followed similar paths towards defining themselves in the public eye. Max Beerbohm, James McNeil Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Lily Langtry, and Sarah Bernhardt are just a few who demonstrated equal inclination for display. However, Wilde evinced an ability to distinguish himself from them all through a deeper understanding of the process and a firmer commitment to carrying it through. From the time he arrived in at Trinity College-Dublin, and probably even before that, he actively cultivated his persona. Unlike other eccentrics, however, he wanted to be more than someone famous for being famous. While still at Oxford, he sketched the trajectory he hoped to follow with his already well-established aphoristic skill: “Soon I shall… be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar’,” suggesting without detailing the idea that careful calculation underlay all he was doing.16

Final Thoughts I propose taking the concept of branding as seriously as did Wilde to examine further a thesis that I introduced several years ago, noting how cultivating dualities and privileging paradoxes, the both/and construction of Wilde’s public persona, shaped his writing.17 In that earlier reading, I saw these constructions intensifying society’s sense of Wilde’s identity through the oscillating perspectives that he encouraged: as someone whose sexuality playfully hinted at both homoerotic and heteroerotic sensibilities; as someone whose nationality asserted both Englishness and Irishness, as someone at the center of Society; and, as someone always clearly marked as marginal. These dandy-like qualities set Wilde apart

Introduction  9 and pervaded his writing, and the pluralistic perspectives that they generated enabled a range of often contradictory readings to coexist within his works.18 The most graphic illustration of this approach comes from a negative example. Once his 1895 prison conviction erased in the public mind the possibility of both/and qualities informing Wilde’s nature, his written work became equally unambiguous and far less engaging.19 For me, a clear connection exists between the impact of Wilde’s public persona on English society and quality of the art that he produced. This thesis goes beyond saying that Wilde wrote well when he achieved public notoriety. I believe that his public persona defined the way he wrote and vice versa. We need to understand one to comprehend the other. Further, the public persona was not a static element, like a costume to be put on whenever a performance was required. The brand that Wilde created matured and changed over the course of his life. It took on very different attributes during his early, middle, and late periods. It exerted different influences on his creative process at various stages of his artistic life. No single impression of the brand can apply to readings of the entire canon. We must shift our expectations as dexterously as Wilde changed his public self.

Notes 1 What follows is a selective representation of the concept of brand as applied to the approach followed in this study. The definitions I offer are specifically tailored to the analytical approach followed in this study. For broader examinations of the concepts of brands and branding, see Marcel Denesi. Brands. New York, London: Routledge, 2006. David E. Carter. Branding: The Power of Market Identity. New York: Hearst, 1999. Jonathan Gabay. Brand Psychology: Consumer Perceptions, Corporate Reputations. Philadelphia and London: Kogan Page, 2015. 2 See, John Beazley. Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters, Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1956, pp. 37–42. 3 Clearly, both branding and industrialization has occurred on a global basis in different periods in different parts of the world. My examination of Wilde’s branding grows out of Western European tradition, the heritage that most shaped his thinking, and so throughout my study I have drawn my examples from that milieu. 4 The fact that a number of those models died from lung cancer underscores the disparity between the material product and psychological associations that buyers linked to the cigarettes. Matt Pearce. The Los Angeles Times, online version. 27 January 2014: www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/­la-nann-marlboro-men-20140127-story.html. 5 The first daily newspaper appeared in 1702. For most of the eighteenth century, the readership remained limited to the upper and middle classes. Kevin Williams. Read All about It: A History of the British Newspaper. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 49–72. 6 Ellen Moers. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and ­Warberg, 1960, p. 50. This remains the best introduction to the dandy in nineteenth-century England.

10  Introduction 7 David Newsome. The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change. New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997, p. 145. 8 For a detailed account of this period, see John P. Klancher. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, pp. 8–14. For an overview of this area of the publishing industry in the early to mid-nineteenth century, see John Sutherland’s essay “Henry Colburn, Publisher.” Publishing History 19 (1986): 59–84. Cf. also Mark Louis Parker. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 135–156. 9 For additional details, see Patrick Leary’s “Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847.” Victorian Periodical Review. 27.2 (Summer 1994): 105–126. 10 Carlyle’s antipathy for dandiacal behavior did not prevent Wilde from owning the former’s writing desk. See Sherard’s Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, pp. 28 and 101. As will be examined later in this study, by the end of the century self-promoters like Wilde well understood how to manage both ostensibly good and putatively bad publicity. 11 The concept of celebrity in reference to an individual was a relatively new condition in Regency England. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Samuel Johnson referring to himself as a celebrity in a 1751 issue of The Rambler. The first employment of the term individual brand as synonymous with an individual’s public persona seems to have occurred in 1997 in a journal article written by Tom Peters. “The Brand Called You.” It appears in the journal Fast Company. August/September 1997. www.fastcompany.com/28905/ brand-called-you. For the remainder of this study, I will use the terms brand, individual brand, and public persona synonymously. 12 For some of the most recent examples, see Nigel Rogers. The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma. London: Bene Factum, 2012. Kate Irvine. Artist, Rebel, Dandy: Men of Fashion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Elizabeth Amann. Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Several subsequent critics have examined other motivations for embracing dandyism, a gendered perspective proving to be a popular, if narrow, line of inquiry. See for example, James Eli ­Adams. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. A study like this might lead to interesting sociological insights were it pursued from a more sophisticated and informed perspective, but a full understanding of the branding process and of its consequences must take care not to allow tightly focused thematic studies to substitute for thorough examinations. 13 The process of celebrating celebrity was well established in America by the middle of the twentieth century. Daniel J. Boostin, writing over a half-century ago offers the following useful delineation, long before the term individual brand came into vogue: “The Hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.” The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in A ­ merica. 1962; New York: Vintage Books, 1987, p. 14. Neil Postman gives even greater focus to the entertainment aspect of celebrity, again foreshadowing branding, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985. 14 Hesketh Pearson. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1946, p. 181.

Introduction  11 15 Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2007, p. 179. Subsequent quotations from this novel will come from this edition and will be cited by page number in the text. 16 Merlin Holland (ed.). Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003, p. 4. 17 Michael Patrick Gillespie. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996, pp. 1–16. 18 Ibid., pp. 115–132. 19 Ibid., pp. 155–173.

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Part I

The Path to Brand Development An Interval: Seeing Wilde Inhabiting His Works Many literary critics, when working with the writings of an author whom they deeply admire, struggle to understand the mind and motivations behind the creations. Wilde’s efforts at branding give as clear a picture as one could hope to have of the imaginative undercurrent shaping his work. Rather than a direct declaration of artistic intentions, the kind of statement that often represents a highly inaccurate self-assessment, Wilde’s branding presents a series of actions that demonstrate, without the need for declaration, the attitudes and perspectives that held imaginative significance for him. For this reason, I believe that any effort at understanding Wilde’s canon must begin by comprehending the various stages of his brand. All of the manifestations of that entity, assiduously cultivated over the course of his adult life, defined his public self, shaped his writing, and created clear interpretive expectations among his readers. It is at the heart of Wilde’s creative consciousness, and one must grasp its characteristics in order to engage with confidence the art that grew out of it. Parts I and II of this study are constructed with that aim in mind. Each covers the same biographic period, but each does so from a ­distinct analytic perspective. Rather than fostering redundancy, this structure highlights, in a functional fashion, the relationship between the brand’s development and Wilde’s application of it to his art. When combined, the two parts produce an enhanced awareness of Wilde’s creative achievements. Wilde himself pointed out the importance of this sort of approach, for he made a number of observations that clearly encourage us to see links between his performative personality and his creative output. Such comments appear over the course of his public life. However, I will cite just three examples from remarks Wilde made when his brand and his art were at the height of their commercial and critical success. From his university days onward, Wilde always took his branding very seriously, and at times, he would even go as far as to distort its relationship to his art to make a point of the importance of his public

14  The Path to Brand Development persona. In one instance, claiming to prefer appearance over endeavor, Wilde told Andre Gide, whom he met in Paris in late November 1891, that “I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.”1 While his remark does an injustice to the effort he devoted to his writing—a commitment that he took great trouble to conceal by always publicly treating the act of composition cavalierly—the fact that he was invoking a concept that, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he had Lord Henry assign to Dorian, underscores the inner-connectedness in his own mind of branding and creativity. 2 Regardless of such self-indulgent flippancies, Wilde had a very clear awareness of the symbiotic relationship between his brand and his art. In a response to praise of The Picture of Dorian Gray from an otherwise unknown admirer, Ralph Payne, Wilde wrote, on 12 February 1894, a summary of how his public persona shaped not only his sense of his works but that of his readers as well, in ways that he showed an inclination to exploit: I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps. (Letters, p. 585) Nevertheless, to be successful Wilde’s branding process had to maintain a clear boundary between it and his nature. When this barrier slipped, branding threatened to shape him as much as he did it. No better example of this exists than in the middle of his prison letter, De Profundis, composed in 1895. There Wilde unselfconsciously appropriates an iconic status as he lamented the change that his incarceration had produced on his persona. In a single, sweeping sentence, he erased the difference between artist and public figure, telling Lord Alfred Douglas: “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age” (Letters, p. 729). Whether or not the general public, or even Wilde’s most devoted followers, shared this perception remains immaterial. The fact that he saw himself in this fashion testifies to how brand informed his writing and how it still indirectly shapes our sense of it. Over the next two parts of this study, I will elaborate on the interdependence of brand and art. For now, I simply wish to underscore the importance of coming to a sense of the evolution of the former before attempting to apply that knowledge to interpretations of the latter.

1 Growing Up with the Brand

At the apex of Oscar Wilde’s brand, the popularity and the imaginative genius of his writing combined with his spontaneous yet always sophisticated behavior to achieve acclaim across London society. Accounts of these triumphs make it all too easy for contemporary critics to use that period in his life as the basis for judging his body of work and for measuring his general popularity. That view, however, collapses the multiple stages of Wilde’s art and the various phases of his public persona into a reductive summation. In the process, it leads us to overlook the impact of a great many crucial elements that informed his writing at different periods. A full picture of the interpretive possibilities growing out of the interaction of the author’s milieu with his process of composition must begin by acknowledging his Irish background and by highlighting the challenges that it posed in his efforts to charm British society. The class-­ conscious British world in which Wilde moved throughout his adult life instinctively and unabashedly denigrated anyone and anything deemed “not English.”3 From Oxford to London and beyond, people would immediately recognize Wilde’s Irish roots.4 Although polite society would not openly remark upon it, that ancestry would marginalize him in the eyes of many in society. At the same time, despite the sweeping generalizations society might make about Wilde’s Irish identity, his Irishness was, like so many of his characteristics, unique. As urban, Anglo-Irish, Protestant, and upper-­ middle class, it stood as distinct from many of his countrymen as it did from the English who judged him for it. The peculiarities of his ­family further heighted those differences, for they had a disparate and at times contradictory sense of what it meant to be Irish, and a particularly unique sense of national identity. Wilde’s father, William, was born in 1815 in rural County Roscommon and had a lifelong nostalgic attachment to many aspects of Irish life. He had a love of the countryside, writing books on the Boyne Valley and Loch Corrib. He wrote a book on Irish antiquity, and contributed a chapter—“The Ancient Races of Ireland”—to a book by his wife, Jane, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. At the

16  The Path to Brand Development same time, his travels in Europe and the Middle East, his highly successful medical practice, and his work on the census of 1841 gave him a cosmopolitan enthusiasm for English life and customs, culminating in a knighthood from Queen Victoria. Wilde’s mother had an equally complex relationship with her native land. She began her unique articulation of Irishness well before Oscar was born. While still a young woman, Jane Francesca Elgee declared a fierce commitment to her Irish identity. She created a sensation with a series of nationalist poems and editorials published in Nation in the late 1840s, risking possible imprisonment in the process. After her marriage, to William Wilde, she adopted a less militant but no less assertive expression of her nationality, sharing her husband’s keen interest in Irish folklore and mythology. In that spirit, she wrote A Memoir of Gabriel Beranger and His Labours in the Cause of Irish Arts and Antiquities (1880) and Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1888). At the same time, like her husband, she found it easy to balance her nationalistic fervor with a love for English society, something she indulged directly when, three years after her husband’s death in 1876, she joined her two sons in London. There, thanks to her husband’s knighthood, she was happy to be known as Lady Wilde. 5 The contradictions surrounding his parents’ political sympathies were only some of many paradoxes characterizing the family’s Irish milieu. Sir William and Lady Wilde reveled in the notoriety brought on by their eccentricities, and they freely indulged their idiosyncrasies as signs of their genius. They were self-absorbed, and much given to spectacle with an abundance of self-confidence buffering them from any criticism. Hesketh Pearson describes their living conditions in the following manner: Undoubtedly the Wilde household was queer. It was of the kind that Charles Lever reveled in: dirty and daring, disorderly and picturesque. If the doctor was conscious of his importance, garrulous, quick-tempered, and addicted to alcohol, his wife was certain of her genius, majestic, self-contained, and addicted to poetical recitations. The dress, habits and manners of both were out of the ordinary, and they were probably the most talked-of people in Dublin.6 Pearson is too discrete to mention the scandals that arose from Sir ­William’s promiscuity and his growing financial problems which contributed to heavy drinking in the final years of his life. However, that too informed the environment that Dubliners saw surrounding the family. In short, there is ample proof that Sir William and Lady Wilde set a pattern of flamboyance similar to that which their son would replicate in his own life, comfortably oscillating between positions situated at the very center and at the outer most margins of their society. Exactly when Oscar chose to adopt that approach to a public persona is less clear.

Growing Up with the Brand  17 Once he began his studies at Oxford, one can see a great deal of evidence of Wilde’s unflinching dedication to creating and sustaining a brand. Prior to that time, little evidence remains regarding his attitudes and actions, so it is difficult to pinpoint precisely when this commitment began. No reminiscences on Wilde’s childhood behavior from parents or friends seem to have survived, and the meager information that one can derive from his own accounts gives little to go on. Only one letter written by Wilde during his time as a boarding student at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen remains extant, and in its unselfconscious, juvenile solipsism. It includes thanks for a hamper full of delicacies that their father sent to Oscar and his brother Willie, mention of going to a yacht race, and of the school’s triumph over the 27th Regiment in a cricket match. All in all, it demonstrates not much more than the precociousness one would expect from the future writer.7 Recollections of his time at Trinity College, Dublin—a venue with nearly the same degree of claustrophobic Anglo-Irishness as that of ­Portora Royal School—depict Wilde as hardly out of the ordinary, and indeed perhaps a bit shy. Like many individuals at that age, Wilde was still forming his personality, and showed little inclination to throw himself into the role of the languid esthete that would shortly dominate his public self. In fact, a classmate, Horace Wilkins, recounts an incident antipathetic to later poses but which serves as a useful reminder of the complexity of Wilde’s nature at every stage of his life. After another student sneered at a poem written by Wilde, Oscar challenged the fellow to a fight: “No one supposed that Wilde had the ghost of a show, but when he led out with his right it was like a pile-driver. He followed the surprised bully up with half a dozen crushers and that ended it.”8 An Oxford classmate, Sir Frank Benson, recalled a similar incident at Magdalen College when several drunken students tried to vandalize Wilde’s rooms only to be beaten soundly by their intended victim.9 Nonetheless, despite these occasional displays of physical prowess, once he left Ireland Wilde began the assiduous cultivation of his brand. At the same time, though punctuated by arresting gestures or engaging epigrams, these early efforts still had the air of being spur of the moment and unfocused. It took a bit of time to acquire the skill and subtlety in the art of self-publicizing that would become a hallmark during his days in London. One sees, for example, in contemporary photographs that Wilde looked very much like any other undergraduate of the time. In them, he is wearing the broad checked suits and bowler hats favored by many of his classmates, and his demeanor in these pictures seems to be very far from that of the confident young man of a few years later. Nonetheless, he was already harboring ambitions of achieving renown. As he told two friends, David Hunter-Blair and W.W. Ward, when asked about his

18  The Path to Brand Development ambitions in life: “I won’t be a dried up Oxford don, anyhow. I will be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”10 He began to distinguish himself by the decoration of his rooms at college and the cultivation of an aura of heightened refinement to match the decor. A classmate recalls that Wilde had a more luxuriant fancy [than other students], and even his chairs were covered with ‘bibelots’ and Tanagra statuettes. His scout had to wear felt slippers—a creak would have caused him agony—and the operation of extraction of a cork from a bottle was performed in his bedroom. The vulgarity of a ‘pop’ was thus obviated.11 As with any recollections, of course, the imperfections of memory and the desire for interesting anecdotes can supersede a strict recreation of facts. For example, several sources at Oxford, incorporated by Ellmann in his biography, reported that Wilde fretted over his ability to live up to his blue china.12 It remains unclear whether such a remark originated with Wilde or that he simply embraced the witticism as his own. However, for the purpose of this study, answering that question would provide a distinction without a difference. The blue china quip summed up for Wilde, as it now does for us, the public persona, the brand, that he seemed to wish to project to the world at that point in his life. As striking as it might seem, however, it stands as only one of a series of events highlighting Wilde’s efforts—through his dress, his language, and his actions—to underscore his creative uniqueness and to suggest the public persona others might increasingly expect to see.13 Admittedly, he was challenged to distinguish his form of eccentricity from all the others flourishing in that academic hothouse that so readily nourished self-absorption and self-aggrandizement. In a tight-knit world of self-promoters, Wilde must quickly have realized the need to set himself apart. Richard Ellmann, exercising his tendency to speak ex cathedra, tries to sum up the evolution by saying, “And so Wilde created himself at Oxford.” Like many other instances in the biography, the phrase itself is misleadingly reductive regarding Wilde’s aims and the complexity of his nature at any point in his life. Nonetheless, one must credit Ellmann with an aphorism that captures some sense of Wilde’s unshakeable determination to make his public persona unique and arresting.14 Early on, Wilde’s correspondence shows a flair for articulating a flamboyant view of his environment, though it also suggests that he still was searching for the persona that he wished to project. A 28 June 1876 letter to his classmate, Reginald Harding, offers a good example of these early efforts:

Growing Up with the Brand  19 My dear Kitten, Many thanks for your delightful letters; they were quite a pleasant relaxation to us to get your letters every morning at breakfast. (This is sarcasm.). … Bouncer’s people stayed up till Monday … I like Mrs. Bouncer immensely and the eldest Miss B. is very charming indeed. (Letters, p. 17) Nine months later, he provides evidence of a growing ability to project greater subtlety, taking serious subjects lightly but at the same time not trivializing them. In an early March 1877 letter to William Ward, he alludes to a possible conversion to Catholicism. In an interesting juxtaposition, he glosses—delicately balancing flamboyance, flippancy, and longing—the spiritual and material consequences of his possible decision: I have got rather keen on Masonry lately and believe in it awfully— in fact would be awfully sorry to have to give it up in case I secede from the Protestant Heresy. … altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman … If I could hope that the Church would wake in me some earnestness and purity I would go over as a luxury … [but] to go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great gods ‘Money and Ambition’. (Letters, pp. 38–39, author’s emphasis) Wilde’s efforts at establishing a unique identity were not lost on his classmates. A letter written by George Macmillan to his father—one of the founders of the Macmillan publishing house—gives a keen description of Wilde’s already well-formed public persona. It also touches on the contrasting elements that the most refined of his friends would remark upon for all of Wilde’s life: He is aesthetic to the last degree, passionately fond of secondary colours, low tones, Morris papers, and capable of talking a good deal of nonsense thereupon, but for all that a very sensible, well-informed and charming man. (Letters, p. 44) Despite all this performative extravagance and a great deal of other poses and gestures that came down to calculated flummery, Wilde had much loftier goals than merely cultivating a reputation as a campus character. A 14 May 1877 letter written to William Gladstone, then head of the Liberal Party, shows at its inchoate stage and admittedly demonstrated in a very clumsy fashion the impulse that Wilde showed over all his adult life to cultivate influential people: Sir, Your noble and impassioned protests, both written and spoken, against the massacres of the Christians in Bulgaria have so roused

20  The Path to Brand Development my heart that I venture to send you a sonnet which I have written on the subject. I am little more than a boy, and have no literary interest in ­London, but perhaps if you saw any good stuff in the lines I send you, some editor (of the Nineteenth Century perhaps or even the Spectator) might publish them. (Letters, p. 46, author’s emphasis) A final Oxford letter, again to William Ward and written around 24 July 1878, shows a charming balance of sardonic dismissiveness and genuine pride as he recounts public reaction to his winning the Newdigate Prize for Poetry and to gaining a Double First (top honors for his work in two areas of academic study, Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores): “It is too delightful altogether this display of fireworks at the end of my career. … The dons are ‘astonied’ beyond words—the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!” (Letters, p. 70). Despite or perhaps because of the university’s unselfconscious parochialism, the reception that he received at Oxford was just the recognition that Wilde sought. It gave him the confidence to build his brand without the support of the family and the friends with whom he had grown up. It showed how he could distinguish himself without simultaneously becoming isolated. And it demonstrated that among bright, idiosyncratic young men, he still had the ability to place himself at the center of attention. However, as significant as these triumphs were, a far greater challenge awaited in London.

Notes 1 Andre Gide. Oscar Wilde in Memoriam. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949, p. x. Merlin Holland conjectures that it was November 27. See, Oscar Wilde. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000, p. 496, fn. 3. All subsequent quotations from Wilde’s letters come from this edition and are cited by page number in the text. 2 The remark is an abbreviated variation of what Lord Henry tells Dorian Gray, late in the novel: “I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art” (DG, p. 179). 3 Examples of this abound, but for a good illustration of the casual application of this reflexive bias against the other see Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, published in 1876 at the same time that Wilde was at Oxford. With no clear knowledge of his origins numerous characters in Trollope’s narrative casually dismiss Ferdinand Lopez as a “Portuguese Jew” and so unfit for the society of the novel. Awareness of this attitude gives one a fuller sense of the bitter-sweet satire of the English obsession with origins lampooned in The Importance of Being Earnest and alluded to throughout Wilde’s writings. 4 Richard Ellmann. Oscar Wilde: A Biography. New York: Knopff, 1988, p. 38, gives several examples of the patronizing English attitude that Wilde encountered at Oxford.

Growing Up with the Brand  21 5 Ellmann, pp. 7–8. 6 Pearson. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit, p. 9. 7 See Oscar Wilde. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, pp. 3–4. 8 Quoted in Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith’s Oscar Wilde Discovers America. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936, pp. 8–9. 9 Frank Benson. My Memoirs. London: E. Benn, Ltd., 1930, pp. 137–138. 10 David Hunter-Blair. “Oscar Wilde as I Knew Him.” In Victorian Days and Other Papers. New York: Longmans, 1939, p. 118. 11 G.T. Atkinson. “Oscar Wilde at Oxford.” The Cornhill Magazine 64 (May 1929): 559–560. 12 Ellmann, p. 45. 13 E.H. Mikhail has published extracts from a number of memoirs by Wilde’s Oxford classmates that give a useful picture of how others saw him then and what ploys he undertook to advance his brand. See, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections. Vol. I. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, pp. 3–28. 14 Ellmann, p. 98. Ellmann’s biography, though generally well regarded shows less discrimination that one expects from a scholar who amassed high praise for his work chronicling the life of James Joyce. For example, Ellmann makes liberal use of sources like Frank Harris’ life of Wilde. ­However, if one looks at the prefatory matter to the 1930 American edition of H ­ arris’ biography, the difficulty of judging the accuracy of many statements becomes ­immediately apparent. Frank Harris. Oscar Wilde: His Life and ­C onfessions, pp. xi–xlvi.

2 Early Days in London and the Tour of America

Though we have obsessed about its nature for a century and a half, conventional generalizations about the Victorian era have not provided a useful foundation for examining that society with any specificity. Indeed, for nearly half a century, scholars have been showing us that sweeping statements about the Victorian world are rarely useful and often inaccurate.1 My study avoids broad assertions about the period. Instead, it looks at the way that Wilde interacted with that segment of late nineteenth-century London that he inhabited and assesses the responses—social and aesthetic—made to the public persona that he presented. Despite the enormous self-confidence he showed throughout his adult life, Wilde faced formidable obstacles to gain the acceptance he sought. Although he had enjoyed considerable success at Oxford, his initial ­efforts in London produced mixed results. Despite his flamboyant ­nature, witty speech, and performative skills, during his early life in the metropolis he encountered significant competition as he strove to get people’s attention and shape impressions of his public persona. Of course, his environment had changed markedly. In Dublin and in Oxford, Wilde inhabited sheltered, parochial, homogeneous precincts of privilege easily dominated by a few strong personalities. London, by virtue of its size and its diversity, attracted many more clever and talented individuals, and, as a consequence, it offered more formidable challenges for an outsider seeking to distinguish himself within an already stratified and not particularly welcoming society.

Whistler’s Competing Brand Strong public personae had been celebrated in society London for ­centuries, though the precise nature of the more formidable brands ­continuously evolved. By the middle of the nineteenth century, figures like Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli played their parts quite differently than did the fops, macaronis, and dandies—mentioned in the Introduction—who preceded them. In the process, they democratized

Early Days in London and the Tour of America  23 the role of a public figure, legitimizing the pursuit of a unique brand and making it a nearly normative feature of Victorian society. There was none more adept at following their lead than James ­McNeill Whistler, an American painter living in England. He did so with a wit and flamboyance that exuded both confidence and an almost boundless appetite for recognition. 2 Although twenty years older than Wilde, they travelled in the same circles, and, of all the emerging individual brands, his offered the most formidable challenges to Wilde’s efforts at recognition. A twenty-one-year-old Whistler left America in 1855, and before settling permanently in England he went to Paris to study painting. While on the Continent he met a number of French artists, writers, musicians and critics, including Charles Baudelaire. The experience gave him a grounding in aesthetic theory and a sense of his own uniqueness, whether justified or not. His biographers attest to Whistler’s wit and energy for self-promotion, and his jealous, often intemperate, protection of his brand.3 Not content with being reported upon, he guided the public on how he was to be perceived by writing self-aggrandizing articles and letters to editors of journals and newspapers.4 Whistler’s thin skin and inability to laugh at himself limited his effectiveness in shaping his brand, and in consequence, during his increasingly acerbic public exchanges with Wilde, the mean-spiritedness that emerged undermined much of what he tried to establish as his public persona. Nonetheless, this rivalry gave Wilde a significant challenge in his quest for brand dominance, and it doubtless did much to help him refine his efforts. (I will discuss their competition in greater detail in Chapter 3.) Of course, Whistler and Wilde were not the only ones committed to branding in the last quarter of the century. Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, for instance, grew prominent as public figures by following as best they could the pattern that Wilde had established. Nonetheless, their efforts remain closer to eccentric indulgences than to the branding process that Wilde pursued. Beardsley capitalized on the impact of his illustrations with tasseled canes, bad haircuts, and an emphatic assertion of aesthetic hypersensitivity that Punch had lampooned for years. 5 Doing caricatures of others while attempting to dress as a modern-day dandy let Beerbohm think of himself as arbiter of public taste and social customs, but public opinion was not so sanguine. In the end, however, Wilde’s performative efforts, unfolding as witty, effective social interactions, set him apart from the others. For this reason, understanding the Wilde brand, and by extension the artistic efforts that grew up alongside and influenced by it, demands the same type of unique approach as that which he took himself.

24  The Path to Brand Development

Wilde Defines His London Brand In London, the eccentricity per capita would have been much less than in a university town. Nonetheless, its sheer size, particularly in contrast to that of a claustrophobic Oxford, made gaining public recognition of any sort a far greater challenge. As a result, even at this early stage in his branding process, Wilde had to develop a range of personae that he could deploy at will to create impressions best suited to particular situations. Hesketh Pearson, one of Wilde’s earliest and still one of his most underrated biographers, highlighted two highly distinct personality traits that played off against each other to ensure that arresting features manifest in Wilde’s performative nature went well beyond mere eccentric behavior. The boy in Oscar accounts for his numerous poses, above all for his love of showing-off, whereat the man in him was sometimes amused and sometimes bored. These two selves, the immature emotional self and the over-mature intellectual self, were clearly discernible at every stage of his career…6 This interplay of anachronistic youthfulness and hyper-erudition could have combined to undo Wilde, as these traits did for many of his contemporaries. However, ambition and discipline, qualities he rarely let the public see, kept these impulses in equilibrium. A keen attentiveness to social dynamics doubtless aided his efforts. From the very beginning, Wilde understood that mere uniqueness, unsupported by approval from those already held in regard, quickly lost its allure, and so he set about ingratiating himself with those whose opinions society valued. His letters from that time show him contacting and quickly charming academics, writers, painters, publishers, and people of the theater. In short order, he ingratiated himself to London society, at a number of levels, and mastered the skill of attracting interest and admiration—through his extravagance in words, gestures, and dress— without ever going so far as to provoke censure. Wilde began by paying court to actress Ellen Terry, writing a poem to her by way of introduction. He tried to cultivate the opera singer and actress Genevieve Ward, inviting her to tea and promising the company of Lily Langtry and Lady Constance Lonsdale (Letters, pp. 81 and 90–91). He had already become an intimate of Lily Langtry’s by performing a number of useful tasks: “[b]esides acting as her amanuensis, Wilde also advised and instructed her on other matters” (Letters, p. 91, n. 5). Nor did he scruple at extravagant gestures as a way of establishing acquaintance. Ada Leverson gives an account of the effectiveness of Wilde’s throwing an armful of lilies at the feet of Sarah Bernhardt when she arrived in Folkestone. “Bernhardt was charmed. She soon inscribed her signature on

Early Days in London and the Tour of America  25 the white paneling of Thames House as one of Wilde’s guests, and one night she offered to show how high up the wall her foot could kick.”7 The letters chronicle Wilde’s methodical efforts to cultivate a range of other celebrities. The fact that they were usually women suggests a shrewd awareness of whose opinion facilitated social renown. He also understood the importance of leavening flamboyance with charm. As Lady Bracknell would later tell Algernon, “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”8 In all of these efforts, Wilde strove to highlight his wit as a means of giving distinction to his brand. London’s society provided Wilde with numerous occasions for its display, but it also presented stronger competition for attention than he had heretofore experienced. He met the challenge by making himself entertaining, and, despite his lack of material accomplishments, in short order became much in demand as a dinner guest. The Polish actress, Helena Modjeska, who encountered Wilde shortly after he had come to London, summed up the astonishment, perhaps tinged with envy, that many who sought their own measure of recognition no doubt felt: What has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes, he talks well but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act—he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.9 Modjeska’s grudging remarks contained more insight than perhaps she realized, for few discerned how much effort Wilde put into doing “nothing but talk.” He understood that those who heard his bon mots and took delight in repeating them would spread his reputation as the source of startling and amusing views. In short order, this made Wilde a figure much in demand. Frank Harris, when asked to compare the humor of Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, gives a good indication of the source of Wilde’s success: I have often been asked to compare Oscar’s humor with Shaw’s. I have never thought Shaw humorous in conversation. It was on the spur of the moment that Oscar’s humor was so extraordinary, and it was this spontaneity that made him so wonderful a companion.10 Hesketh Pearson spent a great deal of time gathering anecdotes that turned on Wilde’s dazzling conversational command. Many of these accounts were simply charming vignettes, illustrating the powerful and positive impact that Wilde had on listeners. One recollection, however, goes beyond that to describe how exhausted and empty Wilde could seem after a long weekend of holding the attention of an expectant and

26  The Path to Brand Development demanding audience. Pearson concludes with a melancholic observation in a tone unusual for his biography: He certainly had to pay for those luncheon-parties, dinner-parties, and week-ends. A famous actor is usually exhausted after performing a strenuous part; but Wilde gave two or three one-man shows daily, sometimes almost a non-stop performance, in an endless ­ever-changing repertoire, and had to make up his parts as he went along.11 To distinguish himself further, Wilde became an outspoken advocate of art for art’s sake, offering extravagant aesthetic opinions couched in language far less solemn than that used by his tutors John Ruskin and Walter Pater. He also took on the role of a daring presenter of arresting behavior. He employed a number of techniques to attract attention, but one can come to an understanding of the whole process through insightful comments Pearson makes on the effectiveness of Wilde’s use of clothing to express aesthetic tendencies: [T]he part he took was dictated firstly by a love of masquerade and secondly by the fact that, from poetry to wall-paper, all arts had their recognized high priest except that of dress…. After all one cannot walk about draped in the latest pattern of wall-paper or carry a table of the most up-to-date-design on one’s back or hang a picture of the modern school round one’s neck. But the dress-reformer is his own publicity agent, and to the rage of many artists who were producing good work in other fields Oscar gained the kudos which should have been theirs and got them laughed at into the bargain.12 These efforts made Wilde a London notable in short order, reported on and even caricatured in various London journals.13 He was also being parodied on stage, most notably by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in several plays that lampooned aesthetic sensibilities. Like most burlesques, these spoofs could not come close to doing justice to their inspiration. Wilde combined flamboyance, facetiousness, and wit to capture attention, but he always knew how to set limits on his extravagant behavior, and he was careful to be sure that his actions, at this point in his public career, stopped well short of looking foolish or of provoking censure. Nonetheless, he never hesitated to make a bold move, as his American tour illustrates.

America Discovers Oscar Wilde Wilde’s 1882 North American lecture series might seem, at first glance, as little more than a display of quixotic narcissism. Unlike Charles

Early Days in London and the Tour of America  27 Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Martineau, and others who preceded him, Wilde had almost no literary achievement to recommend him to the American public.14 He had only self-published his Poems, and his attempts to get his play, Vera, produced in London, after some initial interest, had come to nothing. (The play had been scheduled for a morning performance at the Adelphi Theatre on 17 December 1881, but it was cancelled three weeks before the presentation.15) His notoriety came from the word of mouth publicity he had generated in London through his eccentric behavior and idiosyncratic observations, supplemented in a fashion by lampoons of his public persona in newspapers, magazines, and plays. That in itself, however, proved sufficient for someone who believed in the commercial value of a strong brand. Richard D’Oyly Carte, a highly successful English theater producer, was just such a person, and he had the idea of using his production in New York of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (which contained a thinly veiled lampoon of Wilde and his aesthetic posturing) to promote Wilde’s talks and likewise to have Wilde’s talks rouse public interest in the operetta.16 In both regards, the scheme proved to be quite profitable, so much so that D’Oyly Carte extended Wilde’s tour from engagements on the East Coast to bookings across the country and in Canada. Beyond the financial benefits of its material success and the ego gratification produced by its public acclaim, the North American tour offered Wilde valuable lessons on how best to shape his brand. The fact that D’Oyly Carte saw Wilde’s excursion as a means of promoting Patience underscores the prominence that it had already attained. Nonetheless, Wilde was not content to rest on his initial successes. He used this time away from England to test various ways of capturing unrestricted approval, learning by trial and error how best to enhance his brand. Wilde began developing his American public persona from the ­moment of his arrival on 2 January 1882. As he prepared to enter the country, he was asked by a Customs officer what he had to declare, and cavalierly responded, “nothing but my genius.”17 The energy with which he enforced that view, however, quickly belied the languidness of the statement. In short order, he adapted to American marketing strategies. As Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, early chroniclers of Wilde’s U.S. tour tell us: “The public was fond of buying pictures of notables and of filing them in albums…” In consequence, while he was in New York City, Wilde had a series of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony, at that time “the most spectacular photographer of celebrities.” Sarony took pictures of Wilde extravagantly posing in a seal-skinned hat, a fur-lined coat, and knee breeches. The copies that Sarony produced quickly became enormously popular, both as mementoes of Wilde’s lectures and as a consolation for those who did not hear him.18

28  The Path to Brand Development Although Wilde cultivated an aura of insouciance at every appearance, his time on stage was always carefully orchestrated. He relied on two set lectures as the staple of his tour: “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” On any specific night, he chose the talk he felt best suited to his audience, though in fact the impact of his presentations relied on Wilde’s skill as a performer rather than on the content of his presentation. The intent was to entertain rather than to illuminate, and to that end the Wilde public persona was the key to creating audience expectations and evoking a strong response. With foregrounding his brand as the real aim of every lecture, Wilde indulged his love of flamboyance, measuring and modifying that tendency in response to its effect upon a range of audiences from the East Coast to San Francisco. His remarks to a reporter from The New York Daily Tribune, ostensively directed at costume, highlight the broader psychological approach he took throughout the tour and indeed for the duration of his successful branding efforts: provide enough eccentricity to capture attention while stopping short of giving genuine offense. The essence of good dressing is perfect congruity. One must be careful not to be too premature, but I feel that at present velvet is the most beautiful dress for a man. As a rule I wear gray or brown velvet myself.19 Wilde was always the performer, and his brand was always a role that he took on and not something incorporated into his nature. Walt Whitman’s impressions of Wilde, formed when Oscar visited the poet’s home, offer an interesting contrast between the man in private and the brand he was publicly promoting, and underscore the self-conscious artificiality of what Wilde was doing. “He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly. I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him. He has the ­English society drawl, but his enunciation is better than ever I heard in a young Englishman or Irishman before.”20 At the same time, even with Whitman’s praise of Wilde’s genuineness in mind, one cannot ignore the calculation that shaped his progress. During the tour, he not only repeated the approach used to gain a brand foothold in London, cultivating American writers and i­ntellectuals— in addition to Whitman, he charmed Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, Julian Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott—and professionals in publishing—like William Henry Hurlbert and J.M. Stoddart, who later published the novella version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde accumulated anecdotes, like the story he often recounted and one repeated by subsequent biographers and critics of his dinner with Colorado silver miners inside deep inside a mine in Leadville. He went there after one of his performances at the invitation of a number of miners who had attended the talk, and these hard-living men

Early Days in London and the Tour of America  29 were amazed and delighted to discover that his capacity for drink far ­surpassed their own. 21 Wilde also understood the need to disseminate among friends in ­London reports of his success in America, and he readily assumed that task as well. On March 27, for example, he described his reception in San Francisco to his friend Norman Forbes-Robertson, a playwright and one of a family of actors, as follows: There were 4000 people waiting at the ‘depot’ to see me, open carriage, four horses, an audience at my lecture of the most cultivated people in ‘Frisco, charming folks.... I am really appreciated—by the cultured class. The railway have offered me a special train and ­private car to go down the coast to Los Angeles, a sort of Naples here, and I am fêted and entertained to my heart’s content. (Letters, pp. 158–159) Three weeks later he told Forbes-Robertson of being in St. Joseph, Missouri, a week after Jesse James was killed. The description neatly blended nonchalance and melodrama to announce the event and its consequences: Outside my window, about a quarter of a mile to the west there stands a little yellow house, with a green paling, and a crowd of people pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train-robber and murderer, Jessie James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic-hunters. (Letters, p. 164) I have highlighted events from the North American tour in some detail because it marked Wilde’s most aggressively performative branding ­efforts to date. He was either literally or figuratively on stage for most of his waking hours in America, and this had a refining effect upon the brand. At around the midpoint of his travels, a reporter from The New York Daily Tribune offered a succinct assessment both of the skepticism many journalists felt regarding Wilde’s efforts and of his success in spite of that attitude: What [the] American press appears to resent is that Oscar Wild should have achieved such a position in their country without his being generally looked up to at home. The idea that he is fooling their public seems to irritate them extremely, but in my opinion this is a most erroneous opinion. Oscar Wilde’s message is one which is really wanted in the United States, and without some grotesqueness and exaggeration he would not have secured a hearing. 22

30  The Path to Brand Development Wilde was as deeply affected as were his American audiences. He came away from the United States tour with a clearer and more confident sense of his brand and of the self behind it. As he told Robert Sherard shortly after they met in Paris in the spring of 1883, [I]t is now months since I discarded my eccentricities of costume and had my hair cut. All that belonged to the Oscar of the first period. We are now concerned with the Oscar of the second period, who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly. 23 Whatever one wishes to say about the motivations for Wilde’s behavior, one must keep in mind not only the immediate impact it had on Wilde’s brand but the effect on his ongoing calculations regarding the next stage of its development.

Notes 1 We have multiple examples of this beginning with the work of Steven ­Marcus. The Other Victorians. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969 showing the range of Victorian sexual attitudes. And continuing to Julia Baird’s recent study showing us that the woman who gave the era its name was far more complex than many assumed. Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire. New York: ­Random House, 2016. 2 For an overview of Whistler’s attempts to capture the attention of Society, focusing specifically on the issues that arose because of the Whistler-Ruskin trial, see Mary Zajac’s “How James McNeill Whistler Became a Brand and Fought for It in Court.” Humanities 35.5 (September/October 2014). Available online at neh.gov/humanities/2014/septemberoctober/feature/ how-did-james-mcneill-whistler-create-his-distinctive-brand. 3 See, for example, Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, James McNeill ­Whistler: Beyond the Myth, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1994. And Lisa N. Peters, James McNeill Whistler, Smithmark, New York, 1996. 4 Whistler’s correspondence, archived at the University of Glasgow, can be accessed online at www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/. 5 See, for example, Chris Snodgrass. Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the ­Grotesque. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 113–122. 6 Pearson, p. 37. 7 Ellmann, p. 117. 8 Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2005, p. 51. All subsequent quotations of the play will come from this edition and be cited in the body of the text. 9 Quoted by G. T. Atkinson in “Oscar Wilde at Oxford.” The Cornhill ­M agazine. LXVI (May 1929): 64. Author’s emphasis. 10 Frank Harris. My Life and Loves. Ed. John F. Gallagher. New York: Grove Press, 1963, p. 17. 11 Pearson, p. 191. Some scholars might criticize the informal methods of research that Pearson followed, but the accounts that he collected serve

Early Days in London and the Tour of America  31

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

perfectly to illustrate the impact that the Wilde brand had on a number of that author’s contemporaries. It was and remains the product of subjective impressions, and the power of that brand comes from the feelings in creates and not from the verifiable accuracy of every detail in the stories that describe its impact. One need only look at the Ellmann biography, particularly the endnotes, to see that Pearson’s approach was readily adopted, if not so readily acknowledged, by many more traditional academic writers. Pearson, p. 39. His grandson, Merlin Holland, reprints a number of the sketches, lampooning Oscar and the brand he advocated, that appeared in various magazines during Wilde’s first few years in London. Holland, pp. 56–59. Amanda Adams. Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature Tour. London: Routledge, 2016, p. 21. Letters, p. 98, n. 2. See Ellmann, 151. Lewis and Smith Oscar Wilde Discovers America, p. 39. Lewis and Smith, p. 39. For reproductions of some of Sarony’s photographs, see Holland, pp. 64–92. David M. Friedman goes into great deal describing the process Sarony followed in taking pictures of celebrities and gives a good sense of how the photographs of Wilde were distributed, and in some cases pirated. See his Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 88–103. “Theories of a Poet.” New York Daily Tribune, 8 January 1882, p. 7. “Oscar Wilde and Whitman.” Philadelphia Press, 19 January 1882, p. 8. Lewis and Smith, pp. 317–318. Until recently the Lewis and Smith study was the primary reference for Wilde in North America. It is as much a cultural history as an account of Wilde tour. Roy Morris’s recent book is less expansive, more focused, and seems to rely more on secondary sources. Roy ­Morris, Jr. Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. The Hofer and Scharnhorst volume, collecting interviews given Wilde to American newspapers, offers a first-hand view of his tour. Matthew Hofer & Gary Scharnhorst (eds.). Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Friedman’s Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity mentioned above distills many of the journalistic accounts and at several points provides interesting cultural contexts. “What Mr. Wilde Says about Himself.” New York Daily Tribune, 11 June 1882, p. 9. Sherard, The Real Oscar Wilde, p. 198.

3 The Conquest of London

Although he completed his American tour when still in his late twenties, Wilde already had developed a highly refined sense of what he must do to ensure the continuing approbation of his public persona. His lecturing in the United States had enhanced his self-assurance and increased the acclaim of his brand, so that he no longer needed the outlandish public displays that punctuated his early days in London to command public attention. In the next stage of development, he turned to burnishing his reputation for wit and to cultivating the perception in others of his suitability as a centerpiece in any public event.

Affirming the Brand in the Provinces On returning to England, Wilde’s first steps were blatantly pragmatic, beginning with capitalizing on the interest that news of his American lecture series had aroused at home. To that end, he quickly undertook a tour of the United Kingdom that would let him introduce to the B ­ ritish provinces the public persona that Americans had found so pleasing, extending beyond London society awareness of the public persona that had come out of his time in the United States. In the process of recounting, and no doubt embellishing, his experiences abroad, he was able to build a more sophisticated and less flamboyant brand than its previous iteration. At these engagements, Wilde maintained the same sort of nonchalance that he had used to such great effect in the United States to make the whole process appear effortless to those who heard him speak. Nonetheless, the requirements of these regional lecture dates often proved to be far more tedious and exhausting than glamorous and exciting. As Robert Sherard recalled in describing the tensions between financial exigencies and the need to satisfy his audiences: It was a real penance to him, and I could understand this after I had seen how his lectures were advertised in provincial papers. But his money needs were pressing, and perforce he had to lend himself to this exploitation of the notoriety gained.1

The Conquest of London  33 Nonetheless, as tiresome as the process may have been for Wilde, it insured that the public would continue to talk about him.

A New Phase in London Back in London, he continued to build his brand, although in some ­instances that did not actually require that Wilde to do anything beyond observing his ordinary routine. For example, the following notice appeared in the 26 December 1883 edition of the World: Mr. Whistler’s last Sunday breakfast of the year was given in honor of two happy couples, Lord Garmoyle and his fairy queen [Lady Garmoyle], and Oscar and the lady he has chosen to be châtelaine of the House Beautiful [his then fiancé, Constance Lloyd]. (Letters, p. 225, n. 2) Though admittedly mundane, this news item does prove noteworthy for showing that Wilde’s dexterous ability to attract attention had already earned him the distinction that he prophesied as an Oxford ­undergraduate—being recognized solely by his first name. 2 The news item above is also distinct in its tone of apparent, albeit pompous, cordiality. On most previous occasions, the public attention paid to Wilde and his brand generally had an edge of contentiousness, and often indulged in heavy-handed mockery. This shift in emphasis reflects a reorientation of public attitudes towards the Wilde brand. He was no longer simply a source of amusement, but was in fact a force with which to be reckoned. The amiability of the press, however, was offset by the antagonism of others seeking to advance their brands, most notably that of his breakfast host, James McNeill Whistler. Despite the brief show of hospitality recorded by the note in the World, growing friction began to characterize many of Wilde’s interactions with Whistler, and a sampling of them offers some insights as to how Wilde continued to build and refine his brand, particularly in the face of strong competition. More often than not, the exchanges between the two men were not so much disagreements as they were efforts to achieve primacy in the quest for the attention of the public. A careful look shows that it was more than back and forth bantering. Although Wilde gave the impression of seeing these encounters as little more than quibbles over prestige, he made them part of the ongoing branding process and used them as much more than ­occasions for distinguishing himself from his would-be opponent.

Wilde v. Whistler Verbal sparring characterized the Whistler-Wilde “friendship” almost from the moment of its inception, and, no matter how flippant

34  The Path to Brand Development the exchanges seemed, both Wilde and Whistler took the contest very seriously.3 Despite the stakes, Wilde was rarely as heavy-handed as ­W histler. At the same time, the seeming understatement of his wit could be ­devastating. Very early in their acquaintance, in a letter to Whistler written a month or so into his American tour, Wilde announced his success, and, in a sentence that used flippancy to mask dismissiveness, contrasted his success with a backhanded jab at Whistler’s ineffectualness: “My dear Jimmy, They are ‘considering me seriously’. Isn’t it dreadful? What would you do if it happened to you? Yours OSCAR” (Letters, p. 139, author’s emphasis). After several years of this sort of repartee, and perhaps sensing himself at a disadvantage regarding public perception, Whistler sought out a platform for an extended critique of Wilde. On 20 February 1885, he devoted his “Ten O’Clock” lecture, ostensively on art, to an extended and none too carefully concealed effort at sneering at Wilde’s aesthetic views. Wilde, of course, did not let the event pass without comment. He responded quickly in several venues with a series of subtle but pointed warnings about brand infringement. (I will discuss the exchanges over Whistler’s lecture in detail in Chapter 6. Both the letters and the reviews that Wilde wrote at the time in response show how strongly brand and brand encroachment affected his process of composition.) Time and again in their contests, Wilde demonstrated a clear advantage in wit, but Whistler, with public ambitions no less grand than Wilde’s, could not keep silent. He had more at stake than just ego involvement. He had his own brand to protect, and that doubtless impelled him to engage Wilde time and again. Unfortunately, replicating the pattern that he followed in earlier exchanges proved to be no more effective than his previous barbs. Whistler’s self-absorption led to a vigorous assertion of his own renown, but the persistent tone of self-congratulation made him less appealing to the audience that Wilde cultivated so successfully. In the end, Wilde showed himself quite capable of relegating Whistler to the role of an also-ran. Instances illustrating this ability abound, but let one example suffice: a response made to something written by Whistler that had appeared in the 2 January 1890 issue of the journal Truth. In it Whistler had claimed to be the unattributed source of a phrase that Wilde had used in “The Decay of Lying.” Wilde had endured defamation a decade earlier when students in the Oxford Union rejected the gift of a copy of his Poems charging that in too many instances his verse imitated that of more famous poets. He clearly had no intention of remaining silent in the face of a similar slander. In the 9 January 1890 issue of the journal, a week after Whistler’s remarks, Wilde castigated the “venom and vulgarity” of Whistler’s prose, and dismissed as spurious Whistler’s claim to originating the phrase in question. Wilde closed his note by summing up Whistler’s abilities in a brief but telling sentence that left no room for rebuttal: “the only

The Conquest of London  35 thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority over painters greater than himself” (Letters, p. 420).

The Views of Others Accounts of contests with rival brands are not the only or the best gauge for measuring the impact of Wilde’s public persona. One also finds insights into Wilde’s nature from comments made by those who had no stake in the success or failure of the brand. Wilde met a great many people over the course of his public life, particularly after he became editor of The Woman’s World in 1887, and many of those who knew him professionally preserved recollections in memoirs and autobiographies. Wilde began his editorship with great enthusiasm. Early in his tenure, he wrote enthusiastically to Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid, then General Manager of Cassell’s, the publishing house that owned The Woman’s World, saying that “I am resolved to throw myself into this thing, and have already had to give up work for several papers…. I grow very enthusiastic over our scheme, and with your assistance will make it a ­success” (Letters, p. 300, author’s emphasis). Arthur Fish, who served as Wilde’s assistant editor, when interviewed by Harper’s Weekly, praised the authors whom Wilde had secured to write articles for the magazine calling them “a brilliant company of contributors which included the  leaders of feminine thought and influence in every branch of work.”4 In a fuller reminiscence, written a decade later, Fish also chronicled what must have been evidence of Wilde’s loss of interest in the affairs of the magazine: The position was perhaps one of the most extraordinary ever occupied in Oscar Wilde’s extraordinary career. It was, indeed, a case of ‘Pegasus in harness’. True it only incurred his attendance at La Belle Sauvage twice a week—on the mornings of Tuesday and ­T hursday— but the very fact that regularity in any form became a factor in his life seemed an incongruity.5 While Fish’s mildly patronizing summation of Wilde’s efforts may have conveyed Wilde’s growing resistance in the later stages of his editorship to traditional work schedules, it hardly gives the full picture of the commitment that he made to the project. Another perspective from the same period reminds us of the complexity of the Wilde brand at this stage. Helen Maria Swanwick, who became acquainted with Wilde when still in her early teens and later wrote an article for him when he was editor of The Woman’s World, had a far more open and far less critical sense of Wilde’s nature. In her memoirs, she offered a brief sketch neatly

36  The Path to Brand Development contrasting the well-known brand with a trait evident in his public and private lives: Oscar was called a poseur. So he was. Poseur of genius and perfectly aware that he posed and making an art of the pose. But he had two genuine characteristics which were not pose, which were constant and which made him loveable. One was his joyousness. During the seven or eight years I knew him he was, and showed he was, a happy man. His friendly eyes, his full warm voice, his cordial laughter brought sunshine. People interested him. Though he talked so well, he listened too, and was personal in his attention.6 William Butler Yeats’ impression, if less elegiac, is equally illuminating in its precise delineation of Wilde’s discourse. Yeats was still a young, relatively unknown poet when he came to know his countryman, but Wilde showed him the same generosity of spirit that he bestowed on so many. His recollection of the features setting off their first meeting has a particularly striking quality, since it comes from an artist who throughout his own life showed a deep commitment to public display: “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.” 7 A final witness, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presents a more relaxed but no less interesting account in his sketch of a dinner with Wilde on the evening in 1889 when J.M. Stoddart commissioned both him and Wilde to write pieces for Lippincott’s Magazine. (In response to Stoddart’s request, Doyle wrote The Sign of Four, and Wilde produced the novella length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.) It shows Wilde as much more than a performer, and suggests a complexity that made his brand much more than a simple iteration of outlandish behavior: His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact…. He took as well as gave but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning, which were peculiar to himself.8

Completing the Transition Despite occasional public outbursts, like his epistolary feuding with Whistler, for the most part, over the second half of the 1880s Wilde settled into the less extravagant representation than that which he had

The Conquest of London  37 adopted during the gaudy days of introducing his brand to London. He put an end to lecture tours and took a more subdued approach to public appearances. He devoted more energy and attention to developing the brand through writing and more conventional engagements with ­London society. Although to the public he seemed to fall into a period of domestic tranquility and social regularity, significant changes were on the way beginning around 1886 when he met Robert Ross.9 He had married Constance Lloyd in 1884, and she gave birth to two sons in quick succession, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). He accepted the editorship of The Woman’s World in April of 1887, and in addition to managing the production of each issue, the need to fill space and his own writerly ambitions led him increasingly to take on the role of contributing author. At around the same time, he began a second life, kept relatively secret because of Victorian conventions, though precise details of how and when Wilde reconfigured his sexual orientation are simply not available. As I will discuss in detail in subsequent chapters, beginning in 1888 Wilde went through an extraordinarily productive seven years, becoming one of the most successful writers of the age. In the process, he did not give up paradox and the impulse to shock, but he also assumed a more mandarin-like role, demanding that his position as arbiter of the finer points of taste and art be taken seriously. The change is noteworthy for several reasons, but it stands out because for the first time some disjunction appeared between that latest public persona and the tone of the art he was producing. Heretofore, Wilde’s brand evolved from previous impressions and into new, though not radically different, representations. For the most part Wilde dexterously stayed one step ahead of society’s expectations. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, of whom “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,” Wilde showed himself a master of anticipation. When he came to Oxford as an Irish interloper, he gained notoriety when he began behaving as the center of university aesthetic life. Arriving in London as one unknown to the general public, he rapidly set himself up as an intimate of a number of the most famous names of the era. After the success of his American and provincial tours, he assumed the role of residential authority on public taste. Initially, his public self had to be flamboyant to deter any impulse others might have at questioning Wilde’s artistic credentials. However, as he accumulated an ever-growing body of work, this kind of persona ran the risk of overstatement. If his behavior remained outrageous, it threatened to distract the public mind from contemplation of his writing. If he receded into the role of the ordinary middle-class man, much of the renown that he worked so hard to achieve might slip away. The solution to this new set of conditions evolved naturally when he made his public persona that of an established man of letters. At the

38  The Path to Brand Development same time, he remained sensitive to how his condition was perceived and quick to respond to any criticism. If anything, he became more protective of the image that he had painstakingly built up. It could no longer be the case that any publicity was good publicity, as was the case in the early 1880s when Punch lampooned him so freely. Nor would he submit with good nature to barbs cast by those who sought to take his place as arbiters of taste. Rather, the slightest challenge had to be met vigorously, even as he strove to seem unconcerned by such disputes. His record of success in these encounters was mixed, and in the next chapter I will examine them more closely and discuss their influence on the emergence of this third stage of his branding.

Notes 1 Sherard, Oscar Wilde: the Story of an Unhappy Friendship, p. 88. 2 As previously quoted from Holland, p. 4. 3 One of the earliest accounts of their public interactions remains a useful source. Wilde v. Whistler, Being an Acrimonious Correspondence on Art between Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. London: [private ­printing], 1906. 4 Arthur Fish. “Oscar Wilde as Editor.” Harper’s Weekly. 58 (1913): 18–20. 5 Arthur Fish. “Memories of Oscar Wilde.” Cassell’s Weekly. (2 May 1923): 215. 6 H.M. Swanwick. I Have Been Young. London: Victor Gollancz, 1935, p. 68. 7 W.B. Yeats. Autobiography. London and New York: Macmillan, 1916, p. 79. 8 Arthur Conan Doyle. Memories and Adventures. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924, p. 178. 9 Ellmann, p. 275. Others have referred to Ross as Wilde’s first lover but without solid evidence. See Gary Schmidgall. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. New York: Dutton, 1994, pp. 199–200, for this assessment, based on references in Punch, of a more retiring Wilde.

4 The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand

Paradoxically, the wider prominence that Wilde enjoyed after 1888 narrowed his options for further development. As he became more ­renowned, society increasingly connected specific traits with his public persona. Those associations shaped the assumptions of his audiences (readers, viewers, and society in general) when judging whatever he did next. Public perspective did not automatically make the brand stagnant or inert. However, as Wilde contemplated modifying it, increasingly he had to consider what society anticipated in his behavior and in his art. Instituting any changes in his persona meant Wilde had to walk a fine line. He had already shown numerous times that he knew that the brand had to be refreshed regularly for it to remain distinctive in the public imagination. However, if any modification went too far beyond the form already established in their minds, society would reject it as alien.

The Maturation of the Brand Much of the time, Wilde demonstrated great dexterity in managing these conflicting needs for change and predictability. Nonetheless, there were instances when he was caught between his intentions for development and society’s refusal to accept those proposed modifications. One can find a good example of this struggle by looking at the tensions that arose after “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was published in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine. This novella version of The Picture of Dorian Gray brought immediate reaction from the press in England. The harsh reviews in turn led Wilde to make a spirited defense of his work. Editors loved the controversy and were delighted to print the furious epistolary exchanges between Wilde and the English critics who saw in this new work attitudes strikingly different from what they expected of a now familiar public persona. The defense that Wilde mounted against these attacks was a much more serious effort at brand protection than were any of the flippant responses offered in the early 1880s to lampoons of his views on aestheticism or even the pointed jibes that he made during to the public

40  The Path to Brand Development duel of wits between himself and Whistler that unfolded over the middle years of that decade. In Chapter 7, I examine in detail what Wilde and his critics said about reactions to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and in Chapter 9, I offer a detailed reading of the novel length version. At this point in the study, I wish to focus on the controversy’s impact on further iterations of the Wilde brand. The central issue—a sense of outrage over the perception that Wilde had finally gone too far—is best summed up in the opening lines of one hostile review, appearing in 24 June 1890 issue of the St. James’s ­Gazette and entitled “A Study in Puppydom.” It offers a good example of how critical outrage was fueled by impressions of the brand inextricably linked in the public mind with his arts: Time was (it was in the ‘70’s) when we talked about Mr. Oscar Wilde; time came (it came in the ‘80’s) when he tried to write poetry and, more adventurous, we tried to read it; time is when we had forgotten him, or only remember him as the late editor of The Woman’s World—a part for which he was singularly unfitted, if we are to judge him by the work which he has been allowed to publish in Lippincott’s Magazine and which Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co. have not been ashamed to circulate in Great Britain. (DG, p. 352) This attack, and similar diatribes that appeared in other journals and newspapers in Great Britain, marked a notable shift in the public’s response to Wilde’s brand. Unlike the broad lampoons of Gilbert and ­Sullivan in their composition of Patience, or the jejune sneering in James McNeill Whistler’s letters to various newspapers, the reviewers of the novella went beyond dismissive comments on perceived idiosyncrasies. They vehemently denounced the novella as reflective of defects in both Wilde’s character and his art. Although the back and forth between Wilde and the journal editors died out after a few months, Wilde remained sufficiently concerned about the objections that had been raised to make a preemptive effort to redefine the terms of the debate. He wrote a Preface for the novel length versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In it he endeavored to reinforce the perception of his brand that had prevailed before this controversy had erupted. At the same time, he resisted complete retrenchment, articulating ­concepts in “The Preface” that could be used to justify the new creative approaches presented in the novella and only slightly modified in the novel.1 I want to underscore here the pivotal importance of “The Preface.” It is a rare example of Wilde making an unalloyed defense of his art and aesthetics. Even in the essays of the late 1880s and early 1890s, examined in some detail in Chapter 6, the tone was far less serious and the assertions were much more oblique.

The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand  41 After this one instance of directly confronting those who challenged the way his public persona was developing, Wilde changed tactics. He seemed to sense that arguing with critics over a clear-cut distinctions between moral and immoral art did the brand no good. In response, he took another approach.

Recalibrating the Brand Patterns of changes in his public persona were integral to Wilde’s efforts to establish himself. For most of his adult life, his branding had been successful because of his unique approach to self-promotion. He did not simply call attention to himself. He presented a succession of personae that engaged the public imagination. He configured stages of the brand to encourage a range of possible perspectives, each sufficiently flexible to sustain multiple interpretations and each subtly distinct from the previous iteration. From the period when he took the role of the blue china worshipping effete at Oxford to his phase as the well-established society figure who chose to wear a green carnation in his lapel at the first night’s performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde sought to provoke any number of responses without prescribing the terms of anyone’s reaction. He did this because he perfectly controlled the dynamics of the environment in which he operated. His genius lay in keeping his public persona in a state of flux, and one might well ask: what in fact was the Wilde brand by this point? For the decade of the 1880s, he had worked to establish himself as an arbiter of taste, pushing what was accepted to the extreme without making his statements, beliefs, or behavior intolerable to his public. During that time, there were ample instances of his using his wit to shock and amuse his listeners, yet he rarely went so far as to offend the general public. He punctuated his conversations with marvelous hyperbole without slipping into heavy-handed falsehood. He was interesting because he seemed almost, but never quite, dangerous. In the 1890s, he showed an inclination to relax his fascination with extravagant public performances, and, without completely abandoning his inclination for cultivating moments of self-promotion and self-­ celebration, he chose a less vigorous approach to branding, more intent on reaping the benefits of a well-established reputation than on aggressively developing it further. Hesketh Pearson sums up the change in Wilde: “In this world there are only two tragedies,” he said before prosperity transformed him. “One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy.” By 1894 he had got what he wanted, and the tragedy had overtaken him. 2

42  The Path to Brand Development The situation was exacerbated to no little degree by changes in Wilde’s demeanor and behavior, a lack of restraint and discretion that produced growing resentments that would become strikingly evident in society’s response to the scandal that grew out of the Queensberry trials. As Pearson noted in an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of Wilde’s failings: Now he surrounded himself with a crowd of parasitic young disciples, who followed him everywhere, singing his praises, repeating his sayings, eating and drinking at his expense, and receiving cheques, cigarette cases, tie-pins, and what-not in return for the flattery and admiration. He took offense at criticism, and even resented honest advice…. As he became more prosperous, he became more preposterous, and the hatred of him which blazed forth in the spring of ‘95 and pursued him for the rest of his life was in some measure the product of the three years between Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, when society fawned on him, while secretly envious of his success, annoyed by his assumption and condescension, and enraged by his insolent independence of thought and behavior.3 In retrospect, one can see how easy it was for Wilde to feel invulnerable to any threat of censure. His plays—Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest—enjoyed a series of commercial successes, and his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas which began in 1892, tumultuous as it was, seemed to provide a great deal of personal satisfaction. The lawsuit that, at Douglas’s instigation, Wilde brought against Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry, changed all that. The lawsuit came to trial in April 1895, and led to revelations regarding Wilde’s personal conduct that, in the minds of the Victorian public, removed all ambiguity from his public persona. The subsequent Crown prosecution, in light of the details that emerged in the civil action, invalidated public impressions that Wilde had so meticulously cultivated over twenty years.

Losing the Brand The original suit seeking damages against Queensberry for slander was dismissed, and the evidence that Queensberry produced in his own defense then led to Wilde’s subsequent prosecution for immoral behavior. As shown in the transcripts of the proceedings of the three trials that came out of his legal actions, Wilde used his court appearances to enforce the characteristics that had defined his public persona throughout his time in London. However, the paradoxes that had previously worked so well on the imagination of English society proved his undoing within the tightly defined protocols of the British legal system.

The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand  43 At the first trial at the Old Bailey, under examination by his attorney, Sir Edward Clarke, Wilde initially succeeded, through his testimony, in sustaining the brand that he had so carefully cultivated—that of a witty and carefree individual whose only offense was that he did not take societal mores terribly seriously.4 However, as soon as he came under cross-examination by Edward Carson, the judicial system’s insistence on precision and clarity in a witness’ statements immediately began to move that impression from flippancy to gross indecency. Initially, Carson made Wilde admit to relatively trifling evasions and represented them instead as evidence of a propensity for untruths. He established, for example, that Wilde had dropped two years when he gave his age at the beginning of his testimony. 5 Carson went on to a sharper and more focused interrogation that subtly moved to an attack on Wilde’s character, using questions to link his behavior, for example, with that in a homosexual story, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” written by Jack Bloxam. In the process, Carson forced Wilde to respond under conditions that undercut the advantage usually Wilde gained when he invoked the hyperbole and ambiguity at the heart of his brand. When Carson denounced Bloxam’s story as “blasphemous,” Wilde simply said, “it violated every artistic canon of beauty.” Carson then pressed the issue, drawing on “The Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and demanding to know if Wilde felt “that there is no such thing as an immoral book.” When Wilde assented to that view, Carson continued to build a case for the blasphemous quality of the story.6 Throughout the exchanges, Wilde maintained an insouciant air, and at times he was able to exercise his wit at Carson’s expense. At one point, for example, Wilde expressed his preference for champagne, despite his doctor’s orders not to drink it. “Never mind your doctor’s orders,” said Carson. “I never do,” responded Wilde.7 In the end, however, the insouciant wit that delighted so many dinner parties was not enough to bring about success in the suit against Queensberry or to forestall the criminal prosecution that followed. After the jury found that Wilde deserved no damages for Queensberry’s inflammatory statement—“for Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]”— the evidence against Wilde’s character that had been brought forward in Queensberry’s defense led to criminal charges. During the subsequent proceedings, Wilde continued to maintain in his testimony the persona that he had so carefully cultivated throughout his public life. Time and again, however, Carson, who again prosecuted the case, used blunt, unambiguous language to build a damning legal case that rested on a relentless application of English law interpreted, with no little amount of hypocrisy, through the prism of conventional nineteenth-century moral values. Carson culminated this assault by engineering a series of questions that led Wilde to say that he would not kiss a sixteen-year-old servant

44  The Path to Brand Development because he thought the boy ugly.8 Ultimately, the studied frivolousness with which he met Carson’s interrogation could not overcome the relentless linearity of a cross-examination that ignored form and focused only on a single issue. It would travesty the serious injustice perpetrated by the trials to suggest that Wilde’s brand brought about the jury’s guilty verdict. However, it is fair to say that the outcome of the last trial revealed the limits of a brand’s power to affect public perception. Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment proved to be a personal, financial, and public disaster. It brought about the dissolution of his marriage. It provoked theater managers to cancel his plays, booksellers to drop his published works, and, through the malevolence of the Marquis of Queensberry, it led creditors to force him into bankruptcy. Perhaps most tellingly, it destroyed the public persona that Wilde had been constructing during his entire time in England.

The Final Public Persona Recovery from this devastating loss was slow and painful. The two years that he spent in prison produced for Wilde experiences unlike any he had previously encountered, and by his own testimony, they left enduring psychological scars. One illustrative incident, familiar to many Wilde scholars, is the public humiliation he faced during his transfer to Reading Gaol. It occurred on the railway platform at Clapham Junction on 20 November 1895. While he was waiting for the connecting train, Wilde was recognized and accosted by a mob who ridiculed him and threatened him with physical violence. The experience produced such a traumatic effect that, as he recounts in De Profundis: From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at…. When people saw me they laughed…. For a half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. (Letters, pp. 756–757) In place of the brand that had dominated Victorian society for a decade and a half, a much different public persona would slowly emerge. At first, of course, in the anonymity of her majesty’s prison system, Wilde had no public identity, and the harsh conditions of his incarceration lead to problems with his health and profound depression.9 His designation did not go beyond that of the cell he inhabited, and so when “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” first appeared the author identified himself simply as C.3.3, the location of that cell in the prison at Reading.

The Zenith and the Nadir of the Wilde Brand  45 Nonetheless, in the immediate months before his release, Wilde again began to reconstruct, in his own mind at least, a new version of the brand. In writing De Profundis, ostensively a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde undertook an extensive examination of the behavior that he felt led to his imprisonment. Admittedly, it is highly subjective. However, whether one sees this account as true or factual is really beside the point for the subject of this study. What the prison letter does is lay out for us Wilde’s self-perception as a persecuted artist. It became the brand that he adopted for the remainder of his life, and its nearly stereotypical quality, particularly when compared to previous iterations, shows how Wilde’s creativity suffered when it lacked the support of a strong and positive public persona. With De Profundis as a guide to Wilde’s plans for reforming his public self, one can hardly be surprised to find that, when released from prison in 1897, Wilde appeared as a far more subdued figure. He quickly left England for the Continent, and at first travelled under the name Sebastian Melmoth. He became a rootless individual, moving often and living off the charity of others. Again, one must tread carefully to avoid any implication that would diminish the gross injustice of what Wilde had to endure over the last five years of his life. However, one can acknowledge all that, and still note the striking change of his artistic profile after the radical transformation of the Wilde brand. Wilde’s late works—“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and De ­Profundis— are not nearly as artistically successful and certainly nowhere nearly as ambiguous as those that preceded it. In both, a linearity prevails, and the malleable relationship to one’s audience that ambiguity conveys is absent. Instead, each moves forward driven by clear polemical aims, and the very intensity of those feelings blunts the creative force that had given so much charm to Wilde’s previous works. Stripped of the former key elements of his brand, Wilde now felt ­tethered to an uninspiring, pitiable public persona quite unfamiliar to himself and others who had previously known him. In consequence, Wilde’s writing became predictable and less engaging. Quite simply, he had lost the ability to leave us, like the Oxford dons of his school days, “astonied,” returning only in brief flashes like, if the apocryphal story is to be believed, his telling Claire de Pratz two days before he died: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us or the other has to go.”10 After Wilde’s passing, however, his brand showed a gradual return to the complexity that had faded in the final days of his life. In the ­t wenty-first century, with his appeal as someone persecuted simply for daring to live outside prescribed tradition, he has become an iconic figure of pop culture. Literary scholars, finding renewed value in his works, have shown a revived interest for interpreting the persona from which they emerged. And students of cultural studies have seen in his branding

46  The Path to Brand Development efforts, even if they did not label them as such, a model for the sophisticated manipulation of social contexts. In the next section of this study, I will go back chronologically to ­examine Wilde’s creative efforts regarding what I have just said about his branding to explore the consequent interpretive insights. I will survey the work over three distinct periods in his public persona. I will relate how the way that he and others saw Wilde shaped his writing during each of these phases. And I will point out how those public impressions continue to influence contemporary interpretations.

Notes 1 As an indication of the care Wilde took to reframe the public debate, “The Preface” first appeared as a free-standing piece in Nineteenth Century, ­several months before the novel length version came out. 2 Pearson, p. 216. 3 Pearson, p. 216. 4 H. Montgomery Hyde (ed.). The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: University Books, 1956, pp. 116–120. 5 Hyde, p. 120. 6 Hyde, pp. 120–123, 140–164. 7 Hyde, p. 144. 8 Hyde, p. 150. 9 Ellmann, pp. 493–504. 10 Quoted in Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, p. 581.

Part II

Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages A Second Interval: How Brand and Art Blended Oscar Wilde, like anyone skilled in individual branding, knew that the key to his success rested upon carefully constructed and painstakingly balanced distinctions between his approach to the world and society’s. He also knew that the extent of those dissimilarities needed to be ­ calculated judiciously. Thus, he strove always to be a figure willing to challenge assumptions of the world he inhabited, but he never wanted to take his positions so far as to become an outcast. Clarity remained a key feature in this method. Wilde relied on a loose sense of aesthetic sensibilities to create that perception, unity, and coherence. He cultivated a wide-ranging responsiveness to various theories of creativity and diverse artistic attitudes that he encountered, modifying them to suit whatever stage his brand occupied at the time. No matter how extravagant his behavior, it would seem less threatening if society could discern a pattern behind it. Wilde began the process at Oxford in a fairly conventional fashion. As a student of both Ruskin and Pater, he absorbed their aesthetic values. However, as I will show in my analysis of his Newdigate Prize Poem, “Ravenna,” he did not allow the theories of either to circumscribe his public agenda. Their writings supplied useful terms when speaking in generalities about the importance of art, but in his specific responses he relied more on personal taste and on an instinctive sense of what others wished to hear.1 Once in London, he began to introduce his brand by hyperbolic public embodiments of his tutors’ views. However, his modest creative output, both in poetry and drama, did not stray far from traditional values. The discussions that follow of his Poems and the plays Vera and The ­Duchess of Padua, amply illustrate that Wilde was still learning how to amalgamate his public persona with his personal imagination to produce art. In the second half of the 1880s Wilde became more settled in his brand, some might even say more bourgeois, and more comfortable with letting it guide his creativity. He also became committed to presenting

48  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages a more rigorous aesthetic position; although, he still expressed his positions on art and imagination through paradoxes and contrariness. In a series of essays begun late in the decade—like “The Decay of Lying” and “Pen, Pencil and Poison”—I will show how one sees a more confident voice emerging, independent but determined to show the logic behind his opinions. As society increasingly accepted his public persona and attendant aesthetic theories, he became even more secure. He tested this security by presenting artistic efforts that sought to arrest the reader’s attention rather than to persuade. The high-water mark of the conjunction of his creative daring and brand approval came with his novella, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” By frankly dismissing the morality of the period, it challenged fundamental societal beliefs. Because of the strong reaction against its frank dismissal of Victorian values, something I will examine in detail in Chapter 7, the writing that followed, beginning with the Preface to the 1891 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, reflected a calculated creative retrenchment, one that favored a more subversive representation of his views. With that in mind, Wilde organized his domestic plays of the early 1890s—Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest—around a series of views markedly different from conventional wisdom but couched in aphorisms that never so directly challenged traditional values as had his novella and novel. Though his branding also became less aggressive, it remained central to his public life. Indeed, Wilde quite possibly considered his branding efforts at least as important as his artistic output. When he and a group of friends came to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan ­wearing green carnations, for example, it generated a great deal of attention, and it played the double game of suggestion and denial. Graham ­Robertson recalls Wilde saying, in response to his question about the significance of the flower: “Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.”2 The same pride of creation holds true in his assuming the self-conscious, sexually ambiguous role of the innocent among decadents, which he grandiloquently describes after the fact in De Profundis as “feasting with panthers.” Unfortunately, as discussed in Chapter 4, that pose reflected a carelessness in measuring consequences that helped undermine his established brand when the Queensberry scandal arose. The Wilde brand evolved over the years by efforts that alternately emphasized aspects of the Aesthete, the Sensualist, and the Wit. His aim always was to keep dichotomies in play. In his last years, when sustaining ambiguities became impossible, his creative output shrank, and what he did write proved far less daring, and infinitely less interesting, than all that had preceded it. For most of his creative life, Wilde’s brand was complicated and evolving, and as such, might be best understood as a succession of roles or

Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages  49 projections, a series of personae, related without being duplicates. Comprehending its successive manifestations stands as an essential feature of any interpretation of the canon. With that in mind, I move from this overview of his life to a consideration of the brand’s impact on Wilde’s creativity during three distinct periods in his artistic career by a selective sampling of representative works. In this section, I do not present exhaustive analyses. Rather, I use ­selections from his writing to trace the intersections of brand and c­ reative development. Showing this interdependence does not prescribe a single approach to Wilde’s writings. Rather, it offers other readers additional perspectives for enhancing their own examinations.

5 The First Creative Steps— Poetry and Plays

As detailed in Chapter 2, between entering Oxford in 1874, c­ ompleting his North American tour in 1882, and his lectures in England in 1883, Wilde’s brand underwent a marked evolution. When he arrived at ­Oxford, he was still content to let the force of his personality delineate his public identity. Over his time there and during the early days in ­London, he came to see the need for a more focused agenda and began to impose a clearer direction on his performative impulse. In this chapter, I examine how Wilde’s creative abilities went through a similar development, albeit one not nearly so rapid or so sweeping. He began to publish while he was still an Oxford undergraduate, but his initial efforts at poetry invoked a conventional tone and presented programmatic associations of well-known literary models that did little to differentiate his efforts from those of his contemporaries. The same holds true for the two plays written during his early London years. Like his other earlier writings, these efforts evinced far less performative flamboyance and much more attentiveness to convention than did his concurrent attempts at establishing a public persona. Indeed, at this point in his career, being recognized as a writer—that is to say, having one’s works in print no matter how it came about or what the quality of the work—seemed of primary importance to him. That goal was linked to the desire for a strong brand: success in one area could not fail to contribute to acclaim in the other. This symbiotic relationship persisted throughout Wilde’s creative life. At various times he gave greater emphasis to his art or to his brand, but his approach towards one always had the other in mind. In consequence, no full interpretation of a work by Wilde can ignore the range of extra-textual elements shaping it. Likewise, no complete understanding of his brand can come about without a full acknowledgment of how his writing ­delineated it.

Success at Oxford The circumstances around Wilde’s first publication underscore the combination of luck and skill that informed much of his professional career.

The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays  51 In the spring of 1877, between college terms, Wilde took a trip to Italy and Greece with an old family friend and tutor from Trinity College, The Rev. Dr. John Pentland Mahaffy. Near the end of the tour, Wilde left Mahaffy to meet friends in Rome. The detour proved so enjoyable that he did not return to the university until halfway through Oxford’s six week Easter term. The authorities at Magdalen College were not pleased by his casual approach to the university calendar, and expressed their disapproval by suspending him from the campus until the beginning of the October term. With little sign of remorse and a determination to continue enjoying himself despite his academic exile, Wilde went to London for the period, staying with a friend, Frank Miles. While there, he attended the first exhibition of the season at the Grosvenor Galley, initially going to a private showing on April 30 and then appearing at the official opening the following day. (Already attuned to opportunities for establishing his brand, Wilde drew a great deal of attention by wearing a specially made coat that had a sheen of bronze or red, depending upon how it caught the light, and that was cut so that from the rear it resembled the silhouette of a cello.) After the exhibition, he wrote a review that appeared in the Dublin University Magazine, although, according to Ellmann, the journal’s editor, Keningdale Cook, was uncomfortable with “a number of Wilde’s comments and mannerisms” that ran through the piece. 3 In fact, however, it contained nothing more flamboyant or idiosyncratic than the efforts of a precocious young man endeavoring to show his cleverness. Wilde might have been preening, but he was not yet ready to challenge established views. Wilde’s first literary work of distinction, his Oxford Newdigate Prize poem, “Ravenna,” gives further evidence of that attitude. Again, good fortune seemed to have some effect on the process. Because of his visit to the city during his tour of Italy a year earlier, Wilde had a distinct advantage when the Prize Committee, by a happy coincidence, assigned “Ravenna” as the topic for the 1878 competition. While submissions had to follow certain guidelines, as Wilde noted in a September 1878 letter to Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J., the form was hardly restrictive: The metre is heroic couplets, but as you have seen perhaps from my poem, of late years laxity is allowed from the horrid Popeian jingle of regular heroics, and now the subject may be taken from any country or time and there is no limit to the length. (Letters, p. 70, author’s emphasis) Nonetheless, despite this supposed resistance to the prescribed rhyme scheme, once Wilde began the writing process, the poem quickly fell under the influence of the dogmatic rhetorical strictures of the

52  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages undergraduate world from which he was emerging. Its lines selectively called up elements of the city’s history and brushed against its culture, and, in a number of places, the poem paid tribute to well-known figures associated with Ravenna—most notably Lord Byron and Dante. Much greater attention was given, however, to the literary tradition that was more immediately familiar to Wilde’s teachers. Its style mimicked the work of any number of celebrated English poets of the nineteenth century—like Percy Bysshe Shelly, Algernon Swinburne, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Alfred Tennyson—and at various points added a dash of internationalism—with a nod to the likes of Omar Khayyam—to confirm the author’s cosmopolitan awareness. Even a cursory reading shows that the poem was far less about Wilde’s impressions of the city than about the effect of his university education. To that end, “Ravenna” makes a deliberate display of seemingly offhanded erudition aimed at appealing to the Oxford dons who would be judging the Newdigate prize entrants. This perception of a tendency towards accommodation on Wilde’s part is confirmed by the recollections of David Hunter-Blair, a friend and a classmate, and recent convert to Catholicism. Hunter-Blair had challenged Wilde on his willingness to modify expressions of his own catholic/Catholic opinions to accommodate the tastes of his Oxford judges by suppressing admiration for Pius IX. The response was charmingly disingenuous, for the poem’s tone and content were much more deliberate that Wilde seems to admit here: “Don’t be angry, Dunskie. You must know that I should never, never have won the Newdigate if I had taken the Pope’s side against the King’s.”4 That calculated construction tells us a great deal about Wilde’s management of his emerging public personality, particularly in the way it was beginning to shape his artistic production. Already its lines hinge on what would become an integral feature of his creative and public lives: an awareness of the need to spark interest without ever going so far as to offend and a keen understanding of the need to shape his presentations to the tastes of his audience. Of course, this formula did not do much to make the work timeless. Indeed, the cumbersome, ostentatious tone cannot fail to put off contemporary readers. One sees, for example, a disingenuous artificiality in the opening of the fourth stanza of part six—“But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all, /Thy ruined palaces are but a pall.” And, with all too obvious genuflections to Shelly and Byron running through the stanza, and similar signs of obeisance to other writers elsewhere, the poem came closer to an anthology than to a revolutionary approach to composition. However, for someone striving to establish scholarly credentials and show links to a poetic tradition, this and other passages fit nicely into a plan for presenting Wilde’s bona fides. “Ravenna” adheres to the same circuitous form one sees in the work of so many of nineteenth-century English poets, like Tennyson’s “So

The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays  53 dark a mind within me dwells, /And I make myself such evil cheer/ That if I be dear to some one else/ Them some one else may have much to fear” from Maude or Rossetti’s “Gather a shell from the strewn beach/ And listen at its lips: they sigh/The same desire and mystery/The echo of the whole sea’s speech” from “The Sea-Limits.” Wilde also indulged his admiration for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (Letters, pp. 26–27, 31, 48) by imitations throughout the poem of Browning’s cadence and vocabulary, as exemplified in the opening of Aurora Leigh— “Then, land!—then, England! Oh, the frost cliffs/Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home/Among those mean red houses, through the fog.”5 Though it might appear to some like lazy plagiarism (a charge, as noted in Chapter 2, leveled by the Oxford Union at verse in his Poems), Wilde was in fact showing his teachers that, however nonchalant his attitude in the lecture halls, he had absorbed a great deal. As he said in a previously quoted letter to his friend William Ward summing up his impact on the Oxford academy, “The dons are ‘astonied’ beyond words—the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!” (Letters, p. 70). It might seem, in light of the observations that I have made, that I am dismissing “Ravenna” as nothing more than an exercise in pandering to the tastes of the powers that be. Such a view, however, would too quickly brush aside Wilde’s real achievement. There is, in the calculated construction of the poem, the canny sense of using the prize (along with the Double Firsts he had achieved in his studies) not simply as a capstone of his university career but as a projection of the promise of his life as an artist and public figure. Together the poem and the nonchalance he employed whenever referring to the award throw into relief its author’s understanding of what he must do initially to establish himself as an artist and a brand: show himself as a figure who demonstrates respect for the canonical heritage while offering at least a whiff of independence in his public persona.

Turning to Drama Initially, life in London did little to change Wilde’s pragmatic approach to creativity or to branding. As he did in Oxford, Wilde was making his public persona daring, and at the same time producing writing that was quite traditional. That disparity reflects the oscillating efforts typical throughout Wilde’s artist life: using society’s impressions of his brand to enhance its views of his art or employing his art to support perceptions of his brand. Just as the Newdigate Prize, with its implicit emphasis on conventional composition, served to counterbalance the notions of irresponsibility created by his conduct at Oxford, the predictable familiarity of his first published works in London offset the frisson created by his flamboyant public behavior. I have discussed his early London behavior in Chapter 2. Now, it would be useful to turn to the writings that came

54  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages out of the same period, beginning with his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, published in the fall of 1880 at Wilde’s expense. Allan Bird has called attention to Wilde’s attempts, exploiting some of the social connections he had so assiduously courted when he first came to London, to get Vera produced. According to Bird, he sent it “to the leading actresses of the day.”6 Those efforts came to nothing, and a quick summary will explain why Vera failed to spark the interest of figures like Ellen Terry. The play follows a familiar plot line and develops its characters according to that pattern for melodramas that was quite popular on the London stage at that time. The Prologue establishes in abbreviated form the context, motivation, and tone for the rest of the drama. It relies heavily on exposition, outlines a predictable plot, and suggests how limited it will be in its characterizations. Act I continues this arrangement, now presented in expanded form. There, we are assaulted by sincerity in the lovers, Alex and Vera, bombarded by the dogmatism of the ­Nihilists, and smothered by tedium all around. Act II gains a measure of energy and sporadically sparks audience interest by the introduction of Prince Paul, a character who shows much the same kind of wit as figures from Wilde’s writings of the early 1890s—Lord Henry, Lord Darlington, Lord Illingworth, Viscount Goring.7 Sadly, Act III goes back to the heavy-handed rhetoric of the first act, presenting far too many tedious details of the Nihilists’ plot to assassinate the new czar. Only the random inclusion of Prince Paul, now assuming a Machiavellian role, offers any moments of interest. Act IV brings the play to a predictable conclusion, falling back to the melodramatic form with the title character giving her life for love.

Parsing the Effect Whatever one’s complaints about Vera—a work best summed up as a tentative and conventional effort—its flaws grew logically out of the environment from which Wilde had just emerged. Oxford gave him a very strong sense of the literary tradition, and this play shows his ability to evoke that tradition by constructing a clear, accessible work that follows a formula that would be familiar to the audiences of his times. At the same time, though admittedly a mediocre work, it does not fall significantly below the quality of the didactic plays that George Bernard Shaw would begin producing in such profusion a decade later.8 Vera indirectly underscores Wilde’s awareness that at this stage his art lacked certain flexibilities that his brand enjoyed. His social successes had fostered a keen understanding of the best approaches for presenting himself to the public. He had come to know how far to take his extravagances, and, if he occasionally overstepped the mark, his charm would redeem him. The crass commercial world of publishing made no

The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays  55 provisions for such redemptions. There were no second chances once something appeared in print, and so initially, at least for Wilde, the more conservative approach to demonstrating his creative ability was the safer one. At the same time, one needs to take care not to interpret Wilde’s ­materialism as the dominant drive propelling his art. Certainly, he sought recognition and financial gain. Nonetheless, an emphasis on branding illuminates the importance to him of the sort of lasting renown that genuine creative success brought, giving concrete evidence to substantiate impressions previously supported only by the force of his personality. Throughout his artistic career, Wilde searched for the same kind of imaginative tension in his writing that he had achieved much earlier in the development of his brand. Vera shows that the initial steps are his most tentative. Resolving this gap between the presentation of his brand and of the development of his writing proved to be an ongoing central concern, and one that he never completely resolved. Vera was slow to make a claim upon the public’s attention. Sara ­Bernhardt had agreed to star in a single presentation of the drama scheduled for 17 December 1881, shortly before Wilde was to leave England to begin his American tour. That performance was rather abruptly cancelled, supposedly because of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, though that reason seemed spurious since the killing had taken place nine months earlier. Wilde eventually secured production of the play in New York at the Union Square Theatre. It opened on 20 August 1883, but ran for only a single week.9

A New Dramatic Effort Undaunted by Vera’s lack of commercial success, Wilde began working on another play, The Duchess of Padua, while he was still on his North American tour. The resulting piece shows little evidence that he gained any creative insights from his previous experience. At the same time, it does reflect a more aggressive campaign to move the project forward. This marketing began well before Wilde had completed the drama. As with Vera, he tried to give his work credibility by interesting a ­well-known theater figure in it, writing to the American actress, Mary Anderson, in September 1882 to see if the outline of the proposed play that he had given her had aroused interest. He followed up this overture on 25 March 1883, sending a full version of the play to Anderson. Unfortunately, the actress was not impressed, and within a month she had turned it down. While one can understand Wilde’s desire to see the play produced, even a cursory reading will confirm Anderson’s judgment. The Duchess of Padua is little more than a clumsy, programmatic effort much like Vera. The plot is characteristic of the most mediocre entertainments of

56  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages the period, and heavy-handed evocations of scenes from Shakespeare, mark the limits of this stage of his creative development. Though confident when interacting in London society, Wilde still showed inclinations in his writings to take on the role of the bright if lazy Oxford student who has a strong knowledge of the field but lacks the confidence, the energy, and perhaps, at this point at least, even the ability to produce original material. Kerry Powell, who has written most perceptively on Wilde’s later plays, has generously noted in both The Duchess of Padua and in Vera, hints of the qualities that distinguish Wilde’s domestic dramas of the 1890s; but Powell, like many other readers, finds little internal merit in either play to sustain one’s interest.10 Such assessments can hardly surprise anyone familiar with Wilde’s life. As biographies, memoirs, and contemporaneous letters make clear, during his early years in London Wilde was giving much more of his time and attention to the cultivation of a persona rather than to the development of his skills as a writer. That in itself, however, presents a useful perspective. While authorship stands as an important long-term goal for Wilde, in the early 1880s, gaining public recognition clearly takes precedence over all else. This does not make the writing produced over the period any better, but it does offer a more complicated explanation for its mediocrity.

Early London Poems Despite all of this negative criticism of Wilde’s early writing, it remains important to keep in mind how Wilde must have assessed his own his literary efforts. He was an extremely well-educated individual with highly refined aesthetic values. He was fully capable of judging the merits of his writings, and it would be naïve to think that he did not comprehend the mediocrity of his plays. All this has to be kept in mind when we undertake our own examinations. It is simply not enough to acknowledge that the early plays are not as good as the later ones. We need to foreground the fact that at this stage of his career it had not yet become important to Wilde to write well. I find this perspective useful when analyzing the verse that he was also producing at this time, particularly a fairly complex poem, “The Sphinx.” Wilde began writing it while still at Oxford. Although it did not appear until 1894, according to Hesketh Pearson, Wilde had “more or less completed it in Paris” in 1883.11 The structure of the poem, reflecting some of the same formulaic limitations already noted in “Ravenna,” gives strong support to Pearson’s dating it as an example of an early stage in Wilde’s writing. Nonetheless, in one significant fashion, it demonstrates a marked advance over works produced only a year or so earlier. “The Sphinx” shows evidence of an author becoming aware of the need for balancing focus and complexity

The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays  57 rather than the inclinations to indulge self-referentiality and the hyperbole that one finds in the verses that appear in Poems.12 Certainly, much as he did in Vera and The Duchess of Padua, Wilde, with perhaps excessive schoolboy pride, intersperses “The Sphinx” with diverse references to Greek mythology, Roman history, and the literature of the Classical world. There is also the weakness for voluptuous language that one finds in much of Wilde’s earlier works. Nonetheless, he is beginning here to show a sense of compositional discipline not evident in previous, more self-indulgent writing. The poem shows both a measure of imaginative independence, and a conservative stylistic disposition. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange sum this up nicely in their anthology of nineteenth-century English poetry. [I]n the startling, and amusingly, decadent poem, “The Sphinx,” the reader is surprised to observe that the meter is none other than Tennyson’s In Memoriam stanza printed in two lines rather than four.13 This seemingly offhand observation deftly foregrounds the inclination towards duality that will soon become ingrained in Wilde’s habits of composition: the verse acknowledges his lingering devotion to the imitative skill that allows him to slip easily into the style of established writers while they simultaneously support efforts to distance himself from these predecessors by turning to a more daring theme. When one juxtaposes the poem with Wilde’s contemporaneous ­public life, the resulting perspective reinforces insights into each area. Renown and financial gain, garnered by his American tour of 1882 and his British lecture series immediately following, established Wilde as an accomplished performer and a well-known figure on two continents. The acclaim gave him a measure of confidence to push his art further than he had in his Poems. At the same time, his prominence was not so firmly established as to support a truly daring departure from conventional writing. Just as he did with his public pose, Wilde shaped his compositions to attract attention, perhaps even to startle, but at this stage not to challenge received opinions. Wilde still had not settled into a creative posture that fully suited him. Another poem, “The Harlot’s House,” that he wrote at around the same time that he was working on “The Sphinx,” and that he published a few years later in an issue of the Dramatic Review, serves as another gauge of his artistic growth. Unfortunately, it too highlights the shortcomings of his early efforts. “The Harlot’s House” is by no means a polished work. The rhyme scheme is a bit too bouncy, and the predictable perspective of the main voice articulates the stereotypical ennui of a young man. The subject matter gives it an aura of sensationalism, and the dismissive characterizations of the whores and their customers has a tone of juvenile cynicism.

58  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages At the same time, the poem’s point of view is strictly that of an outsider with the speaker never crossing the threshold of the bordello. We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the Harlot’s house. *** But she, she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in; Love passed into the house of Lust.14 All in all, at this stage Wilde’s writing showed in equal measures the confidence and caution one would expect in a precocious, talented individual who remained at all times highly sensitive to public opinion. The body of early work shows a budding artist, gradually allowing his creative impulse to draw less directly on the examples of literary antecedents and to mix new styles with the continued use of the forms that attracted him. As yet, Wilde was neither a mature writer nor an established brand, but he had grown exponentially during his short time in London society. Both as an author and as a personality, Wilde had set himself apart and put himself in a position to become a dominant figure in art and society. As I will explore in the next chapter, over the next few years, impelled by more ambition and displaying more energy than he might wish to acknowledge, Wilde continued his efforts to distinguish himself and to move beyond notoriety to acclaim.

Notes 1 Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand have made a careful study of two notebooks kept by Wilde at Oxford—“Notebook on History and Philosophy” and “Commonplace Book. Smith and Helfand show Wilde’s interest not only in Ruskin and Pater but in a number of other philosophers, social scientists, and scientists. They offer useful insights on Wilde’s mind as an undergraduate. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 2 W. Graham Robertson. Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham ­Robertson. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1945, p. 135. 3 Ellmann, pp. 78–79. 4 Ellmann, p. 91. 5 I am most grateful to my colleague, Maneck Daruwala, for her guidance towards this connection and others that she shared with me. Much of the insight I have into “Ravenna” is the result of my borrowing, no less shameless than Wilde’s, from her. I have also benefitted from her essay, “Good Intentions: The Romantic Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde’s Criticism.” Victorian Institute Journal 12 (1984): 105–132.

The First Creative Steps—Poetry and Plays  59 6 Alan Bird. The Plays of Oscar Wilde. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1977, p. 11. 7 As the list suggests, despite his occasional barbs at the aristocracy, Wilde reserved the best lines in his works for those in the highest levels of British society. 8 For proof see Shaw’s first collection, Plays Unpleasant (1893)—a title more apt and less ironic perhaps than he realized. 9 For a detailed account of Wilde’s efforts to arrange productions of Vera, Bird, pp. 11–15. 10 Kerry Powell. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 11–12. For a study of the responses of contemporary critics to Wilde’s plays, see Walter W. Nelson’s Oscar Wilde and the Drama Critics: A Study in Victorian Theatre. Lund: Bloms Boktryckeri AB, 1989. 11 Pearson, p. 76. 12 There is little concrete evidence of the date of composition of individual works in Poems. According to Ellmann, thirty of the sixty-one verses that appeared in had already been published “in magazines” (p. 137). It further suggests that any number of other works in the collection were also composed while Wilde was at Oxford. Since I have taken up that period with “Ravenna,” I am turning to “The Sphinx” as an example of a work matured beyond Wilde’s university days. 13 Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968, p. 757. 14 Writings, p. 539.

6 Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection

As detailed in the last chapter, much of Wilde’s activities over the first period of his residence in London highlighted the differences between the strategies he followed for developing his public persona and those that guided his creative impulses. Between 1878 and 1884, his brand enforced the image of the languid, even disinterested aesthete without any apparent concern for the consequences of his ostentatious behavior. At the same time, in his artistic creations he adopted cautious, conventional approaches. For the second stage of his branding, Wilde shifted his emphasis from public presentations aimed at garnering renown to artistic efforts meant to convince society of the creative merits of the artist behind the persona that had captured their attention. This new dedication led to subtle but significant changes in his approach to writing. What he produced in the first period lacked the full assurance needed to offer a work that might prove to be a unique creative contribution. In the second period, as his brand became more established, Wilde’s writing, particularly the essays, grew increasingly more confident and his output more prolific. Of course, other projects occupied him as well. In tandem with exploring new creative areas, Wilde worked in two very traditional forms: he wrote a number of fairy tales, collected in two volumes, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1889) and The House of Pomegranates (1891), that grew out of fantasies that he would create for his young sons to entertain them at bedtime. He also composed some very conventional pieces of short fiction, often elaborations of anecdotes that he would relate at dinner parties and other social gatherings to entertain various figures in society. They first appeared separately in Court and Society Review and World throughout 1887 and then were later brought together in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891).1 The quality of these works is quite good, but, because his essays offer more direct exposure to conceptions shaping his artistic consciousness, I will focus on them. 2 Wilde’s nonfiction writing at this time demonstrated his growing literary talents, and highlighted a carefully constructed campaign linked with his brand to influence the public’s perception of his significance as a writer.3 Between the fall of 1884—when an essay entitled “Mr. Oscar Wilde on Woman’s Dress” appeared in the October 14 issue of the Pall

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  61 Mall Gazette—and early 1891—with the publication of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in the February issue of the Fortnightly Review— Wilde brought out works in sufficient quantity and at a level of worth to make his claim credible—reiterated both covertly and overtly in each essay—to a new role that was an amalgamation of artist and critic.

Emergence of an Authorial Persona As already noted, during his first five years in London, Wilde spent a great deal of time orchestrating carefully calculated public performances, like throwing flowers at the feet of Lily Langtry while she walked along the city’s streets. He was clearly giving priority to introducing himself and his attitudes to society. Over the next five years, Wilde shifted his emphasis. He moved from the faux seriousness of making offhand “art for art’s sake” pronouncements to producing carefully constructed nonfiction pieces that presented a more unified and creative assertion of his developing talent. In a more overt manner than in previous stages of his public persona, a new iteration of his brand nicely complemented these creative efforts. After having established himself through his wit, he turned to publishing his views on art in an organized and deliberate manner that allowed the public persona, writer, and aesthete to coalesce to inform the reception of his creativity. These nonfiction writings relentlessly reiterated a range of arguments regarding the merits of productions of those commenting on public taste, often claiming, overtly or through inference, that such efforts deserved the same esteem accorded to the work of conventionally recognized artists. As part of this campaign, Wilde labored tirelessly to keep his views before the public eye. He produced several hundred reviews, essays, and public letters, many of which were reprinted almost immediately after they appeared.4 This output seems all the more impressive considering his time spent as editor of The Woman’s World between 1887 and 1889 and his increasingly active social life throughout the 1880s. The underlying thrust of all this nonfiction was to forward an aesthetic that, among other things, gave not just legitimacy but primacy to the forms of writing that Wilde was producing at the time. With this in mind, I will focus on what can be learned from a few selected articles from that period that demonstrate Wilde’s intellectual range, show his creative energy, and, most importantly, give evidence of the more mature voices evolving in both Wilde’s function as an artist and as a brand.

Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’clock The emergence of the more mature public persona of the second half of the 1880s exerted a marked influence on Wilde writing. One finds

62  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages an excellent illustration of this in the extended public disagreement between Wilde and the artist James MacNeill Whistler, in 1885 over a lecture given by Whistler early that year. 5 Open bantering was not a new thing for Wilde and Whistler. They had tweaked one another for several years in essays and letters to editors over various trivial topics, but in these exchanges the stakes were clearly much higher. What might at first glance seem little more than a battle of wits between two strong egos, each clamoring for public attention, it in fact was a struggle to assert the dominance of the brand that each had so assiduously cultivated over the previous half decade. A summary of it highlights the themes that would occupy Wilde’s attention for the latter half of the 1880s. It began with lecture given by the painter, now generally referred to as “Mr. Whistler’s 10 O’clock.” In retrospect, this decision to give a talk seems like a very public effort by a well-known, even notorious, artist to claim the position of arbiter of public taste that Wilde had been striving after since the time that he first arrived in London, though Whistler would hardly have needed a specific reason for offering his opinions in a public forum. His sense of self-importance presumed that there would be interest in any ideas he would care to express, and he was clearly a man intoxicated by the sound of his own voice. Nonetheless, his growing competitiveness with Wilde certainly spurred this performance.6 In any event, the talk that he gave at Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, on 20 ­February 1885, showed far more self-indulgence than introspection and a great deal more venom than intellectual curiosity. Whistler loaded his lecture with histrionics and sarcasm—speaking of “false prophets, who have brought the very name of the beautiful into disrepute.”7 Given the flamboyance characterizing all his public efforts, this disquisition was doubtless more interesting when it was p ­ erformed than it now seems when read. Seen dispassionately, it unfolds as little more than Whistler’s shameless celebration of himself and a mean-­ spirited, malevolent attack on the competition. His single-minded promotion of his brand becomes insistently obvious through its relentless verbal assault and eschewing subtlety while emphasizing self-­absorption. The talk reveals a great deal about Whistler and his nature, but, in the context of this study, it is most useful for what it discloses about the motivation for so many of Wilde’s subsequent essays. Whistler’s most arresting assertion situates art in the individual—not in Nature, the populace, or the Nation. “Listen!—there never [Whistler’s emphasis] was an artistic period. There never was an art-loving nation.” Then, without the slightest acknowledgment of the inconsistency, Whistler laments the current lack of aesthetic awareness, pointing to “previous ages” when art was dominant in people’s lives because it surrounded them. Everything, down to household items, he said was made by artisans. From this premise, Whistler indicts the Industrial ­Revolution, responsible for the rise of cheap manufactured goods that overwhelmed bourgeois taste and elbowed artistic artifacts aside.

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  63 Whistler, as Wilde would a few years later, publicly asserts that art does not have a moral or a didactic aim, but rather it seeks only its own perfection. However, Whistler sharply limits legitimate interpreters of the truly beautiful, stating only those who have labored to create are capable of understanding what is achieved in a piece of art: “How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in Nature, is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration, daily produced, by a very foolish sunset.” At this point, Whistler’s blatant need to establish his primacy as arbiter of public taste begins to emerge. Hardly attempting to conceal his compulsion for self-aggrandizement, Whistler tells his audience that the true artist does not imitate his surroundings but renders them in a more perfect state. Thus, he says, the London fog, shunned by most of the populace, becomes the starting point for the creation of an object of beauty.8 (Although it seems tame to most of us, his audience would hardly need to be reminded of the controversy that arose over the Impressionistic style of just such a painting done by Whistler.) Well into the talk, when Whistler takes up the status of the art critic, the way that his attitudes diverge from Wilde’s views becomes most apparent and most illuminating. Whistler creates a strawman who, acting as an unwanted intermediary, imperfectly and inappropriately applies techniques for understanding literature to the judgment of paintings. “For some time past the unattached writer has become the middleman in this matter of Art—and his influence, while it has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture.” (For his audience this “unattached writer” reference would have been unmistakably aimed at Wilde.) The real point of the talk emerges as Whistler’s rhetoric builds to a crescendo. Not content with this sneering generalization, Whistler goes on to offer a much more direct attack upon Wilde, Wilde’s aesthetics, and indeed Wilde’s brand. In the process, however, he can hardly c­ ontain his venom, and whatever merit there might be in his critique succumbs to the rhetoric of bombast: “And now [Whistler’s emphasis] from their midst the Dilettante stalks abroad!—The Amateur is loosed—the voice of the Aesthete is heard in the land—and catastrophe is upon us!” In Whistler’s view, Art needs no outside mediator. The artist is the sole qualified arbiter of aesthetic beauty, and the talk ends with the Messiah-­ like invocation of the coming of “the chosen” upholding tradition as one “who shall continue what has gone before,” though “modesty” again prevents Whistler from self-identification.

What He Really Said In some ways, this lecture presaged much of what Wilde would say later in the decade. Whistler and Wilde both forcefully challenged conventional societal attitudes towards art and aesthetics. They both went on

64  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages to argue that the person of refined sensibilities has both a right and a duty to explain art to the public. Finally, they both made a strong argument that the public should acknowledge the judgment of this individual of refinement as the ultimate aesthetic authority. Of course, implicit in each of these positions was the idea that the speaker was just such a person of refinement. With such similar views, conflict was inevitable. Nonetheless, while their overall perspectives on aesthetic criticism show many similarities, when we see them elaborating their positions, important distinctions emerge. Tone highlights the differences. Whistler’s aesthetics rest solidly on the principal of self-aggrandizement. He asserts the authority of his position as arbiter of tastes, often without bothering to elaborate with evidence to support such a claim. He does this in a voice that remains consistent to the brand he has established, and his aim seems to be to dismiss with contempt, rather than with logic, any challenge to that role, particularly one made by Wilde.

Wilde v. Whistler The bluntness of Whistler’s assault on the public persona that Wilde had been so assiduously cultivating put Wilde in a delicate position. Until he had produced a more substantial body of creative work, he had a strong interest in defending the status of the professional critic. At the same time, he had to do so in a fashion that did not call attention to the supposed disparity between creator and commentator to which Whistler alluded. In six years, in the essay “The Critic as Artist,” which I will discuss later in the chapter, he would finesse the supposed differences with great skill. In 1885, he took a different tact.­ Wilde was too clever to fall into the trap of appearing to take ­W histler’s ideas seriously by attempting a direct rebuttal to the attack on his credentials. At the same time, he knew that he could not let the remarks go unchallenged. Consequently, on 21 February 1885, in the Pall Mall Gazette, Wilde published a review entitled “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’clock.” It presented a selective and at times flippant summary of the previous night’s talk. He ridiculed both the speaker and the ideas that Whistler propounded, representing him as a gadfly who could not resist sneering at the very people whom he proposed to instruct—“a miniature Mephistopheles, mocking the majority.” At the same time, Wilde did not wish to appear to question the legitimacy of any public figure offering interpretations of art to society. Instead, Wilde, in an amusing rather than a strident fashion, implicitly identified himself, rather than the artisan, Whistler, as a voice of discernment and taste with important contributions to make on the topic. Unsurprisingly, Whistler could neither remain silent nor respond gracefully to this riposte. On 25 February 1885, he wrote a letter the

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  65 World, and again succumbed to the temptation to use heavy-handed sarcasm. In a passage quoted earlier, he noted that “nothing is more delicate, in the flattery of ‘the Poet’ to ‘the Painter’ than the naïveté of ‘the Poet’.”9 This petulant, ad hominem barb provided just the opening that Wilde needed to make additional points in his favor in this struggle for pre-eminence as an aesthetic arbiter and to do so on his own terms. Wilde’s strategy was to remind readers that Whistler’s claims as a critic rested on the questionable assumption that his presumed pre-eminence as a painter automatically translates into a keen interpretive sense. He did so initially in a letter to Whistler published in the World on February 25, insouciantly challenging that supposition: By the aid of a biographical dictionary I have discovered that there were two painters, called Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche [two painters mentioned by Whistler in a February 21st letter to Wilde], who recklessly took to lecturing on Art. As of their words, nothing at all remains. I conclude that they ­explained themselves away. Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood. (Letters, p. 250) Though wonderfully cutting in an oblique fashion, the letter still treats Whistler and his claims to interpretive authority with a measure of ­restraint. That, however, merely served as a prelude to a more direct assault on Whistler’s legitimacy as a critic that Wilde launched three days later. Wilde’s a short essay, “The Relation of Dress to Art: A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler’s Lecture,” played on the title of Whistler’s 1871 painting Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1 (also known as Whistler’s Mother). It appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on 28 February 1885, and it stands as a brilliant precis of Wilde’s critical and creative powers. However, it does more than reassert his preeminence as the judge of the beautiful and the pleasing. It shows how Wilde saw himself, and, of course, how he wanted to be seen, at this particular moment of his development. Perhaps sensing the need to quash Whistler’s scurrilous insinuations and feeling that dismissiveness would not suffice, Wilde’s essay took on a more serious tone than did his letter of three days earlier. It was the approach of someone with a large stake in the outcome of the argument and with no inclination to suffer fools gladly. After a methodical debunking of Whistler’s ideas, Wilde reinforced the legitimacy of views that he had articulated elsewhere: “For the arts are made for life, and not life for the arts.”10 He goes a step further, openly disputing the claim that an artist is automatically qualified to be a critic or, for that matter, that an artist inevitably has the perspicacity

66  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages to take on such a role: “Whatever comes from Mr. Whistler’s brush is far too perfect in its loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even his own.” Shortly thereafter, Wilde makes a statement that a subsequent essay, “The Truth of Masks,” will develop in great detail and with much complexity: “For all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up.” In the process, Wilde first shows Whistler that words have meaning, and then goes on to demonstrate the consequences of inattentiveness to denotations. Wilde concludes, in a backhanded swipe at the idea that the artist creates beauty, by turning Whistler’s ideas against him. Stressing that beauty should be found “in the streets” and celebrated as such, he equates the authority that Whistler claims with that dictated in academies and imposed upon a docile society. Then, after a series of Biblical metaphors—double-edged and parodic—to describe Whistler’s lecture, he offers this summation: Considered, again, merely as an orator, Mr. Whistler seems to me to stand almost alone. Indeed, among all our public speakers, I know but few who can combine so felicitously as he does the mirth and malice of Puck with the style of the minor prophets. Given what was at stake, one might marvel at the relative mildness of this response, particularly in light of the venom that Whistler had spewed so recklessly. However, the self-assurance of the tone adopted by Wilde in his essays, and in his letters to Whistler that were published in London newspapers, proved to be a far shrewder rhetorical stance. Whistler used a shrill and strident approach in trying to dismiss Wilde as yet another ­ ilde’s rejoinders example of an “upstart crow.” The easy confidence of W conveyed a sense of the strength of his position that did not require similar vehemence to brush aside foundationless assertions. In subsequent essays, Wilde continued this dual agenda: establishing his credentials as an arbiter of artistic taste and conveying the impression that those credentials need no establishment but simply should be taken as a matter of fact.

A Brief Aside In the last few paragraphs, I have highlighted both the similarities and the differences between Wilde and Whistler. Before turning to his other essays, it would be useful to make a final point on their contrasting brands. Whistler’s paintings caused an uproar in the art world because of their inchoate Impressionism, marking an aggressive break with the traditional painting style of the century, and his brand conveyed an “antic disposition” that complemented such creative impulses. Wilde’s writing

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  67 took a much more conventional form, but its content forwarded the appreciation of individuality at the heart of his brand. His brand did not eschew sensation, but it acknowledged the importance of equilibrium, and through this complexity more firmly established its prominence.

Essays of the Late 80s The analyses that follow of selected Wilde’s essays underscore the effectiveness of this new iteration of the brand, the public thinker who could offer personal, cultivated judgments applicable to all of society. In countless public pronouncements, he forwarded the concept of interpretive subjectivity as an argument for seeing all of his work as creative, and he employed his writing to complement the way he wished his public self to be perceived. Championing the legitimacy of the subjective reactions of readers and viewers gave Wilde’s public persona and creativity the uniqueness he sought without pushing either his brand or his writings outside the acceptance of society. To build this argument, Wilde steadily wrote essays from 1885 to 1891 that in various forms highlighted the importance of the subjective way of seeing things, particularly when that perspective was offered by an individual with highly refined tastes. To get a clearer sense of how brand and artistic output complemented one another during this period, I will look at “The Truth of Masks,” “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” “The Decay of Lying,” and “The Critic as Artist.” As a measure of the importance of the topic to Wilde, and of his emerging sense of its complexities, it is worth noting that he revised each essay significantly before collecting them in 1891 in Intentions, and so I have used these final versions in the analyses that follow.11 When taken together, these final versions neatly summarize the ­fi nished state of the second stage of Wilde’s brand and highlight his aims as an artist in this middle period: by the beginning of the 1890s, he had moved from the flamboyant articulation of “art for art’s sake” that ­featured throughout the first period of his public persona to a brand iteration that adopted a less disruptive and more authoritative voice. Further, by advocating generalized application of his individual interpretations, he advanced the proposition that such writings were in fact demonstrations of his creative production.

Introducing the Argument “The Truth of Masks” had a varied publishing history before appearing in Intentions in 1891, and its revisions and emendations followed, without exactly mirroring, the concurrent evolution of his brand. The essay began as a piece entitled “Shakespeare on Scenery” in the ­Dramatic ­Review in March 1885. Two months later, he used much of it, augmented

68  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages with a fuller argument, in “Shakespeare and Stage Costume” for the Nineteenth Century. Finally he further revised and retitled it for inclusion in Intentions.12 In this essay, Wilde developed strategies for readers seeking to understand Shakespeare’s creative process by arguing for the centrality of what seems an ancillary aspect of any production. He asserted that the costumes advance, enhance, and even explicate the action. In consequence, Wilde argued that in staging any of Shakespeare’s plays one must not attempt to confuse the presentation by introducing anachronistic costumes. Rather, the costuming should foster and fulfill the same expectation for the audience that the dialogue does. He did not want productions to take liberties with costuming because he believed that deviations from the costumes originally intended by Shakespeare change the audience’s artistic experience and in consequence threaten integrity of the work every bit as much as would changes in the words he had written. However, what might seem a very orthodox approach to Shakespearian staging, in fact used a paradoxical turn to enforce a deeper point. The implications of display always fascinated Wilde, and in “The Truth of Masks,” Wilde took inordinate pleasure in immersing himself in the language of dress. He could not stop citing examples of its efficacy and inefficacy in various productions until the reader becomes nearly numb from the recitation. That may well have been the purpose of the exercise. Wilde turned his voluptuous flow of images and the rich cadences of his language to a much bigger end than celebrating a traditional approach to staging. His rhetoric created and then solved problems that enforced the crucial function of the critic: helping us understand art. Wilde presented himself as a guide through the complexity of his ideas that he simultaneously had been generating. Through this process, he built on the argument that he used in confronting Whistler, but now endowed with a far more serious task, the dual role, underscored by its closing lines, of mediation and recovery through language that itself offers aesthetic pleasure. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realize Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.13 With this conclusion, Wilde signaled that the essay’s agenda as going well beyond simply presenting a purist’s perspective on Shakespearean staging. He had no desire to have this piece confused with a conventional academic disquisition, with every statement fully footnoted to

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  69 defend against any possible criticism. Rather, in this and the other three essays under consideration, Wilde, like any creative writer, showed the charming inventiveness of his way of seeing the world. Shakespeare is the launching point for observations at once more universal and more subjective than the essay initially suggests. In talking about the distortion that contemporary dress produces in Shakespeare’s plays, Wilde both imitated and dismissed the authoritative tones of traditional criticism. In its place, he privileged the idea that mutability lay at the heart of aesthetic satisfaction. At the same time, Wilde was not promoting egalitarian responses to art. Privileging subjectivity had to be balanced against a hierarchy delineating who was qualified to make responses. That issue remained a subtext in every essay written during this period, and it was the one that he explored uninhibitedly in the next piece I examine.

Writing to Match a Sensational Brand Wilde’s essay on the Regency artist, forger, and murderer, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright—“Pen, Pencil and Poison”—was first published in the January 1889 issue of Fortnightly Review. By this point in his brand development, Wilde’s public persona had grown increasingly distinct from his idiosyncratic behavior during the first half of the decade. However, Wilde still needed to make that dissimilarity unarguably clear so that he might establish and maintain the evolved brand. To facilitate this process, he built up in this essay an argument for the validity of a single, fundamental assumption from a range of seemingly distinct perspectives, using Wainewright’s complex character to argue for the primacy that should be accorded to the enlightened aesthetic perspective no matter what the moral character of the person who ­articulates it. Beginning with a provocative title—“Pen, Pencil and Poison”—Wilde announced his intention to juxtapose crime and imaginative power, ­ignoring the possibility that the former could delegitimize the latter. As the essay progressed, such a position proved to be less radical than it might seem on initial examination. Wilde did not offer an amoral view of the world, but rather used something as horrible as the taking of a human life to underscore the independent status of artistic creativity. With carefully argued logic, Wilde reasserted his view that judgements of art must have no connection to assessments of morality: in essence, linking values and aesthetics corrupts both. Modern audiences have any number of recent and graphic examples of the corrosion of art by ideologies and continual reminders from social media that the imperfections of artists are simply sources for our entertainment. Nonetheless, in an age where duty stood as a primary concept governing behavior, this essay takes a provocative position.

70  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages Regenia Gagnier pointed out three decades ago, in an argument that remains deeply insightful, Wilde’s subtle critique during his early London days of simplistic “art for art’s sake” views.14 In fact, “Pen, Pencil and Poison” played on a similar approach by focusing on the complexities teased out of Wainewright’s nature. By acknowledging the significance of his crimes yet insisting that his art be judged independently, Wilde reiterated a view that informed his nature throughout his creative life. Wilde identified Wainewright as a dandy and a man who earned money writing articles on popular taste under pennames, or masques as Wilde chose to call them. Wilde went on to cite long passages of Wainewright’s art criticism, and devoted nearly two-thirds of the essay to examining Wainewright’s creative life as an artist, critic, and connoisseur, carefully collapsing the three roles into one. Then, he briefly noted Wainewright’s crimes—three poisonings and a history of forgery—not blurring the two areas but rather emphasizing the duality of that separate coexistence. Wilde ended on a sardonic, perhaps even cynical, note by pointing out that society’s judgment of criminals, particularly talented and charming ones, inevitably changes over time. As with “The Truth of Masks,” this essay was more than just another example of Wilde’s delight in exploring paradoxes. Likewise, one misreads this essay by seeing it as a defense of being a bad boy, which by extension becomes a justification for Wilde’s behavior. A more sophisticated understanding, one that takes branding into account, would see that Wilde had a keen sense of the subjective and the transitory nature of the judgment of society. At this stage in his public life, Wilde had come to a more refined awareness of how one makes an impact on society, though as he wrote the essay he could not know of the ironic demonstration of the accuracy of this pronouncement that his own life would soon offer.

Art and Individuality The composition of “Pen, Pencil and Poison” coincided with that of “The Decay of Lying,” which Wilde first published in the January 1889 issue of Nineteenth Century and then significantly revised for inclusion in the Intentions volume. It presents in general terms his perspective on a pluralistic approach to understanding fiction, and serves as one more way of reiterating the duality that is becoming an increasingly formalized aspect of his brand: art is open to individual interpretations because of the multiplicity of the aesthetic experience. At the same time, and this is inferred rather than stated, the complexity of art means that most of us must rely upon the skilled interpreter to guide us towards a full understanding. (All of Wilde’s writing during this period kept both concepts in mind, though he rarely gave both equal attention in any one piece. “The Decay

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  71 of Lying” lays greater emphasis on the first premise of this duality. The essay I will examine after it, “The Critic as Artist,” gives prominence to the second.) “The Decay of Lying” begins with an inversion of the chestnut about art imitating nature, a view that Wilde has been obliquely challenging in a number of his essays preceding this one. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.15 Near the end of this airy dismissal of Nature, Wilde very subtly changes his tone. Going beyond the presentation of a simple, playful paradox, he sketches the variety of ways that subjective responses from the imagination of the viewer creates the traits that some too quickly praise as inherent features of Nature. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her. (pp. 165–166) This key concept of this stage of the Wilde brand—the power of subjective perceptions—forms the central argument of the essay. Its supposition legitimizes his claim to the role of the Artist and thereby contributes to the renown of his public persona. As in all the essays of this period, Wilde here seeks to privilege the individual imagination as the most important feature of creativity. Taking a seemingly more egalitarian view than did Whistler, he does not limit its possession to the artist, whose creations go beyond the material limits of the world observed. He also celebrates the public observer who offers the sprightly articulation of the responses of his imagination, unfettered from a concern for accuracy, for the amusement of others. With that gesture, of course, he legitimizes all of his critical writings—which make up the bulk of his authorial productions to date—as Art. Once he has insinuated this idea in his reader’s consciousness, the remainder of the essay becomes a demonstration of the efficacy of such a view of artistic performance. To that end, Wilde makes the term “lying” synonymous with imaginative freedom. To be sufficiently creatively requires continual cultivation of openness so that one does not lapse “into careless habits of accuracy.” He dismisses Robert Louis Stevenson, Ryder Haggard, Henry James, and other contemporary writers for their devotion to realism—a form of literature that would presumably need no explanation since it is in itself an exposition of what we already see.

72  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages Wilde completes the critique by turning to examples from the French. He contrasts Zola’s “unimaginative realism” with Balzac’s “imaginative reality,” to underscore the inadequacy of rote recording when held against the creative power of subjective observation. He concludes by highlighting the corrosive effect of so-called objectivism with the most memorable line of the essay: “Certainly, we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts” (p. 175). From this deft disparaging of the competition, he moves to establish his central concern: an argument for the re-conception of the scope of the creative function. He breaks this down into a simple series of assertions. Art offers a perfection of Nature, rendering a representation free of the injunction of including its deficiencies. It is the enlightened individual who, the critic, perceives this and who conveys this marvel to others. These claims serve a double purpose. They raise the level of his essay to the category of art, and they enhance the stature of his brand, making it the public persona of an artist. Of course, Wilde cannot proceed with the argument through conventional adductions of logic and evidence. To prove his point about avoiding “habits of accuracy,” he turns to apparent facetiousness with a series of examples that privilege imagination over fact. In affirming that the weather has changed because of art, for instances, he states that, while there may always have been fogs in London, as painters have come to celebrate them fogs became a greater part of the world as we know it.16 In fact, Wilde’s ideas about material reality would seem markedly less capricious sixteen years later when Einstein’s theory of special relativity made similar unorthodox claims about time.17 Even without the support of post-Ensteinian science, Wilde’s argument sets up a clever demonstration of the insightful way of seeing the world that came out of his brand in the late 1880s. The self-containment of Art absolves it from the need for meticulous Naturalism. He concludes by giving a dispensation to a special form of lying, that which employed in the service of Art. “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art” (pp. 193–194). This makes the kind of outrageous statements which punctuate the essay, and for which his brand had come to be known in all of its iterations, forms of Art and Wilde, as the one who uttered them, an Artist. “The Decay of Lying” appears on the surface to be a lament that the nineteenth-century Benthamite impulse towards utilitarianism suppressed a true understanding of the role of Art in a society. Most readers today would see that is true. However, in making that point, the essay celebrates the value of the Wilde brand for its continual resistance to the subversion of accuracy and for its flamboyant power of creativity to enhance society’s experiences through its refined view of the world.

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  73

The Need for a Guide The final example of Wilde’s proselytizing efforts during this period, “The Critic as Artist,” summarizes the arguments he had been developing over the past five years, and makes the most overt argument yet for elevating his essays to an art form. It was first published in July 1890 in Nineteenth Century, and was reprinted after significant revision in Intentions. In the process, it came to encapsulate Wilde’s current sense of his brand and his art as both evolved from the new found eminence of the 1880s towards an expectation of pre-eminence that appeared in the early 1890s. With the task of building brand credibility in mind, Wilde proceeded with, for him, great meticulousness. He did not discuss the status of the critic until about two-thirds of the way through the essay. Instead, he offered a more wide-ranging view of the place of art in our lives and of the role of the artist’s audience. In doing so, he reiterated his rebuttal of the aphorism of Nature imitating Art to make the point that Art, and by implication those who interpret Art for us, conditions and in fact improves the way we perceive our lives and the world around us. When viewed with the other essays that I have taken up in this chapter, one might be tempted to feel restive over the redundancy of seeing this position developed time and again in such detail. That may well be the case for us in retrospect, but Wilde remained intent on giving full legitimacy to his brand, and this required reiterating a strong argument against views on Art that have been inculcated into society’s consciousness for centuries. Further, what we have in this essay is the capstone of the argument that he has built since his public exchange with Whistler: Art works to perfect our sense of the world around us and in having discerning individuals who can underscore that process for us we have our experiences intensified. Perhaps to avoid the possibility of charges of repetition that I note above, the essay begins by offering seemingly random thoughts on memoirs. However, this strategy actually allows the author to introduce a central concern of the essay in an oblique fashion: the pedestrian appreciation of banality that impedes the efforts of true artists. Wilde sets the essay as a dialogue between two friends: Gilbert, speaks as Wilde’s voice throughout, explaining points essential to the thesis of the work; his friend Ernest raises issues on which Gilbert can elaborate. Wilde also uses Ernest to anticipate opposition to his views. Ernest raises the question of the value of art criticism, arguing that the best art came in times without art critics. Gilbert then responds with a reminder of the value of the individual’s independent creative power. Thus, the essay reaffirms the individuality at the heart of the creative impulse, reminds us that perception is a creative act, and then moves to link creativity and criticism. To give this statement a tone of legitimacy, Gilbert asserts that all Classical Greeks were critics and that their recorded views have left us

74  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages with a tradition of the value of interpretation by discerning individuals. (It is a neat shift in the logic of the argument, for Wilde had no wish to imply that anyone can interpret art, but rather that the views of a privileged few able to explain Art give them the same status as that accorded to those who create the works.) The essay turns quickly to Plato’s thoughts on Art and to a detailed look at Aristotle’s views. This allows Wilde to show how any considered articulation has value not only in the astuteness of its views but also in the pleasure these ideas produce in readers. From there it becomes an easy connection between art and commentary. Indeed, he says quite directly that there is no fine art without self-consciousness and that self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one (p. 212). Thus, criticism is essential to the vitality of art (p. 213). After further elaboration, Gilbert comes to the point toward which his argument has been building, identifying criticism as an art. He asserts the idea that the critic does more than the artist since the artist has the world to draw on for his subject while the critic has only the imperfect work of art (pp. 220–221). He uses Walter Pater’s commentary on da Vinci as an example, saying the essay made the Mona Lisa “more wonderful to us than it really is” (p. 224). From there, the leap to the primacy of the critic becomes a relatively easy move. “The highest Criticism, then is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not” (p. 225). Gilbert concludes with a detailed argument that, not surprisingly, privileges writing over painting, music, and sculpture. Of course, this is self-serving, but that seems to me to be clearly ­Wilde’s intention (as the punning title of the collection of these arguments suggests). He has been working diligently for five years to give his brand not just recognition or even acceptance, but rather to establish it as a noteworthy position. His epistolary battles with Whistler, his steadfast determination to promote individuality, and his unflagging effort to refocus the public sense of the meaning of Art all stem from a determination to make his brand esteemed.

Nearing the Apex By the time Intentions appeared—containing revised versions of “The Decay of Lying,” “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Truth of Masks”—Wilde and his brand had evolved into the fully mature stage of his development that these essays celebrated. In the 1890s, his growing stature as a writer of fiction and plays continued to have a pronounced impact on the way that he saw the world, and would result in yet another stage of the public persona and further development of the creative process. Nonetheless, understanding the middle period of brand building remains an important aspect of a full comprehension of

Essays 1885–1891—Moments of Public Reflection  75 Wilde’s works. It underscores the need to view his writing of the context of his social development, and it reminds us that analytic criteria that are quite appropriate for the work that emerged from one period should not be transferred without modification to analyses of work for other times in his creative life.

Notes 1 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 230. 2 For additional remarks on both the fairytales and short stories, see my ­Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, pp. 26–34. 3 For a good selection of Wilde’s essays from this period, see Literary ­C riticism of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 4 See Guy and Small pp. 286–297 for a detailed list. 5 Some of this material has already been noted in Chapter 3’s discussion of Wilde’s brand in the 1880s. I return to the topic here, now giving attention to the writing that came out of their conflict, to underscore the interconnection of brand and art in his life. 6 Ellmann goes a bit further, suggesting that the lecture came about purely out of a competitive malice for Wilde. As often is the case, Ellmann offers no evidence to support this speculation. However, events leading up to the talk and Whistler’s subsequent behavior make such a supposition seem quite plausible. Cf., Ellmann, p. 271. 7 All quotations from the lecture used here come from the version appearing online on the University of Glasgow website for The Correspondence of James McNeil Whistler, whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/miscellany/tenoclock/. 8 Christine L. Corton offers perspectives that both support and challenge such a view in her book, London Fog: The Biography. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015. 9 In the next few paragraphs I will go over some of the same material referenced in Chapter 3. In this instance, I am emphasizing writing over brand, but the necessary redundancy shows how the two are intertwined. 10 Text available online from Google books. All citations are from this webpage: books.google.com/books?id=FiXc6Kq5ek4C&pg=PT67&lpg=PT67& dq=The+Relation+of+Dress+to+Art:+A+Note+in+Black+and+White+on+ Mr.+Whistler%E2%80%99s+Lecture&source=bl&ots=Yc2iLvoxfn&sig= t N J hTG Yv x I B p -xc 0lve _ g CwZ Un A& h l= en& sa=X&ved= 0 a hU K E wjVmdbHwIjSAhVsylQKHfXNDmUQ6AEIJzAC#v=onepage&q=The%20 Relation%20of%20Dress%20to%20Art%3A%20A%20Note%20in%20 Black%20and%20White%20on%20Mr.%20Whistler%E2%80%99s%20 Lecture&f=false. 11 For me, the title of that collection sums up the creative arc of the six years preceding its publication. The essays included in the volume reflect, from a variety of points, his unflinching desire to establish his artistic credentials and his deft use of the public persona that he had already established both to guide his writings and to prepare his readers to interpret them. 12 Cf. Guy and Small p. 238. 13 Oscar Wilde. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Dorset Press, [n.d.], p. 914.

76  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages 14 Cf., Idyls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986, pp. 34–39. Cf. my comments on ­Gagnier in Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, pp. 40–41. 15 “The Decay of Lying.” Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, p. 165. All subsequent quotations of this essay and of “The Critic as Artist” come from this edition and are identified in the text by page numbers. 16 This is probably more a sly dig a Whistler—who as noted earlier was renowned for painting fogs—than a prescient example for those a century later who would deny climate change. At the same time, when one sees a similar assertion becoming a key feature of the Corton book cited earlier, London Fog: The Biography, the impact of the imaginative power of perception unfolds as more than playful flippancy. 17 That too is proving to be an ongoing revelation as illustrated by Alan ­Burdick’s Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

7 Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Although the central concern of this study rests on developing clearer and deeper understandings of Wilde’s creative process, Wilde’s approach to art will always bring branding back into the discussion. The interpretive challenge to this perspective comes out of the fact that he never adopted a fixed persona or a single creative point of view. For Wilde, branding and art were never static conditions, and alterations in one inevitably shaped the makeup of the other. Over the course of his career, Wilde became a series of different artists as he took on various public personae. Consequently, the fullest comprehension of his canon comes through an awareness and responsiveness to this mutability.1 As his brand became more sophisticated and his writing more complex, Wilde made coordinated efforts to guide the public to understand both his persona and his work, often using one to complement and illuminate the other. As noted in the previous chapter, in one instance, to forward these ends Wilde used a series of essays to argue for the reconfiguring of generally held concepts for judging the artist and the artist’s work according to criteria more amenable to his nature and to his achievements at that point in his career. For the purpose of this study, the objective validity of Wilde’s claims about aesthetic standards is unimportant. What is crucial instead, is the understanding the Wilde transformed the features of his art with the same regularity that he changed his public persona. No single interpretive view can yield a full understanding of the entire canon. Critics must change as he did, and the beginning of the 1890s brought new configurations of both his brand and his art.

A New Creative Direction Wilde’s creative output, delineated as works that met more traditional standards for judging art, increased markedly during the first half of the 1890s. He published his novella, revised it into a novel, published two collections of short fiction, and began writing conventional social dramas at a frenetic pace. As the catalogue of his own imaginative works grew, he quietly transformed his attitude toward the artist and the critic.

78  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages In the sections that follow, I will examine the strategies that he employed to facilitate this pivot to provide insights into how best to interpret the third stage of his development as a brand and as an artist—the presumption of pre-eminence. As with his earlier work, a series of fortuitous circumstances exerted a pronounced influence on the volume and of course his writing. In the fall of 1889 the American publisher, J.M. Stoddart, travelled to England in search of work from promising writers. At a dinner meeting in London, Stoddart commissioned Wilde to produce a novella length piece of fiction for Lippincott’s Magazine, a journal that he edited. 2 The two men had met seven years earlier during Wilde’s U.S. tour, so it is quite likely that Stoddart’s interest in Wilde’s work had come in part at least from the brand that Wilde had established while lecturing, though the final result proved far different from anything that Wilde had done in America. From the start, the process was not as simple or as straightforward as Stoddart may have hoped it would be. Wilde initially proposed a short story whose structure put it clearly in the second stage of his creative period, “The Fisherman and His Soul.” Apparently more concerned with bulk than anything else, Stoddart judged that it simply was not of a sufficient length to meet the Lippincott’s requirements, and so Wilde had to set aside plans to use a short-cut for fulfilling the commitment and furnish something entirely new.3 Wilde came up with a narrative markedly different from the whimsical fiction that he wrote during the 1880s. In a 17 December 1889 letter, Wilde told Stoddard that he had “invented a new story that is better than ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ and I am quite ready to set to work on it at once” (Letters, p. 416). Wilde sent Stoddard the initial draft of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in early 1890. It was quickly accepted, and with some editing from Stoddart the final version appeared in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine, jointly published in England and America.4 Nearly a decade had elapsed since Wilde’s lecture tour. Consequently, for many in the United States, he was a relatively unknown writer. Perhaps because of that, American readers took Wilde’s writing at face value, without expectations related to the public persona behind the work. They simply enjoyed the novella as it was, and American critics responded positively. In Great Britain, readers and critics alike were quite familiar with the Wilde brand of the 1880s, and based on that awareness they had very clear expectations for his creative work. He had published conventional short stories—“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” and “The Canterville Ghost” in 1887—and his book of fairy tales—The Happy Prince and Other Tales—had appeared in 1888. The public and critics had judged them all, as indeed they judged Wilde at the time, as light entertainment,

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray  79 relying on frivolity and hyperbole to create fiction that provided diversion without demanding intellectual engagement. However, in the short period that had elapsed since those writings, much had changed with regard to Wilde’s brand and his artistic perspective. He had left the editorship of the Woman’s World in October 1889, though his involvement had been diminishing for some time before he made the decisive break. He had become a coveted guest for many s­ ociety gatherings, and overall, he was living more as an unattached bachelor than as a husband and father. He had acquired a more secure place in the world he inhabited, so that both socially and creatively he was not governed by the same attitudes and expectations that had influenced him for much of the 1880s. 5 Wilde clearly articulated the changing direction of his brand and his creative point of view when he composed “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Wilde presented a radical alternative to Victorian life, labeled New ­Hedonism, and seductively articulated it in a polished narrative. The perspective it outlined seemed to eschew the playful moral ambivalences of earlier works and adopt a frankly contemptuous view of conventional values. (In fact, as I will discuss in Chapter 9, it was the most overtly radical of all Wilde’s works.) In response, a number of English reviewers unhesitatingly condemned the work as decadent filth, and they declared it unsuitable for reproduction in a mass circulation magazine.

Society’s Reaction Given the tone and content of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” such reactions could hardly be surprising. The novella did much more than laugh at the conformity of most of the English of the time. It ridiculed belief in any metaphysical system, dismissing moral values as naïve and foundationless. There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral. (DG, p. 198)6 I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. (DG, p. 217) There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt. (DG, p. 290) When British readers encountered these cynical articulations in the witty dialogue of Lord Henry and their implementation in the rapacious

80  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages hedonism of Dorian Gray, many were revolted by Harry and Dorian’s full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the readers’ conventional morality.7 The anonymous attack printed in the St. James’s Gazette on June 24, epitomizes the harsh reactions made by many of the English critics to this new stage in Wilde’s writing. It is entitled “A Study in Puppydom,” and it reflects a great deal more venom than one would normally expect, even in a review of a piece of fiction that greatly displeased the writer.8 Its opening sentences sum up Wilde’s career as a series of aesthetic inadequacies that society had tolerated.9 Turning to the work itself, the review claims that Wilde now has reached a new stage of clandestine voyeurism. Then, declaring that this work cannot be discussed without offending decent readers, it moves to sweeping generalizations to fix its condemnation on the author rather than on the writing putatively under review. In concluding, it turns on those responsible for bringing the story into print, expressing the hope that criminal action will be taken against Wilde and his publisher: Not being curious in ordure, and not wishing to offend the nostrils of decent persons, we do not propose to analyse “The Picture of Dorian Gray”: that would be to advertise the developments of an esoteric prurience. Whether the Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worthwhile to prosecute Mr Oscar Wilde or Messrs Ward, Lock & Co., we do not know; but on the whole we hope they will not. The puzzle is that a young man of decent parts, who enjoyed (when he was at Oxford) the opportunity of associating with gentlemen, should put his name (such as it is) to so stupid and vulgar a piece of work. “A Study in Puppydom,” St. James’s Gazette¸ 24 June 1890 (quoted in DG, p. 352) Looking at this critique nearly one hundred thirty years after it first appeared, fair-minded readers will instinctively see it as a hysterical reaction, blinded by prejudice and fear, to fiction that the reviewer did not understand but nonetheless felt no inclination to tolerate. However, relegating this response to little more than a reflexive aversion to any description of behavior challenging convention oversimplifies the objections that this writer and others were making to Wilde’s life and his writing. They did not merely respond with aversion to material that they found offensive. They saw things in the narrative which they did not expect from Oscar Wilde, and that recognition produced an anger that seemed to be fueled by a sense of betrayal. As the reviewer suggests in the portion of the paragraph quoted in Chapter 4, from the late 1870s to the late 1880s, society had known Wilde as a witty eccentric. He was someone who would say outlandish

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray  81 things that people did not have to take seriously because Gilbert and Sullivan, among others, found them safe enough to lampoon in their sanitized fashion. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” announced a new brand that would not simply stand at a slight distance to existing values but rather sought to dismiss those principles as absurd. Though society would not become fully aware of the subversive implications of Wilde’s new brand until after the Queensberry trials, these reviews signal that some had already begun to sense the change and felt the need to react.

Shifting Answers Wilde was quick to respond to his critics, though his original position proved to be difficult to sustain. Initially, he forcefully asserted that he held very different assumptions from those of the reviewers, and he demanded to be judged according to his standards, not theirs. He also made a vigorous defense against assertions that he had offended moral sensibilities, but their relentless repetition of ad hominem attacks wore his patience thin. A 26 June 1890 letter to the St. James’s Gazette highlights Wilde’s frustration: I do not propose to fully discuss the matter here, but I feel bound to say that your article contains the most unjustifiable attack that has been made upon any man of letters for many years. The writer of it, who is quite incapable of concealing his personal malice, and so in some measure destroys the effects he wishes to produce, seems not to have the slightest idea of the temper in which a work of art should be approached. (DG, p. 357) Wilde goes on to assert, there and in subsequent correspondence, that the charges that his writing aimed at undermining public morality simply missed the point of his artistic purposes. He knows the distortions that morally driven interpretations would impose reductive readings of his novel. He also understands how much his previous successes had depended upon impressions that harmless dichotomies and innocuous ambivalences lay at the heart of who he was and of what he said. The strength of his brand, and by extension of his creative work, rested upon sustaining ambiguity around all he said, did, and wrote. Discussions on the morality or immorality of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” whatever literary judgments the exchanges led to, would inevitably damage or even dispel that aura of uncertainty. For the sake of the brand and all the benefits that accrued through it, Wilde struggled to prevent this from occurring. As it grew clear that journalists would not give up the idea of linking Art and Morality, Wilde’s concern for his position became increasingly

82  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages evident. He could not change what had already appeared on the printed page. As a result, his only alternative was to change the conclusions being reached by popular interpretation. One sees evidence of this shifting approach in a response to the editor of the Daily Chronicle. It contains a statement which comes perilously close to making a case for the book’s merit based on morality, though Wilde labors to show that many other artistic elements supersede it. The real moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its laws as a general principle, but realizes itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the object of the work of art itself. (DG, p. 365) In the end, perhaps, Wilde had no other choice. Over the course of this epistolary debate, played out in various journals over the course of several months, moral posturing came to subsume all other considerations.

Prescriptive Implications of the Brand The controversy coincided with a complex moment for his public persona. By the time he published “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890), Wilde had begun to articulate a third stage of his branding process. He was now well established socially, so he no longer needed to make extravagant public gestures to call attention to himself and his views. Certainly, throughout the early nineties he was still capable of striking gestures. On the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan, he gave an author’s curtain speech that congratulated the audience for the good taste they displayed in appreciating his drama almost as much as he did. That he did so while smoking a cigarette, what several considered a mild breech of decorum, showed even further disregard for the tender sensibilities of Victorian theater audiences.10 These displays, however, were far more restrained than any of the buffoonery of earlier periods of his time in London. By and large, this third edition of the Wilde brand called for him simply to accept his status as arbiter of taste and artistic worth, and take no notice of any disapproval. (Overall, history proved this to be the right approach. Five years later though, during the Queensberry trials, he resurrected the strategy of offhandedly dismissing harsh criticisms, and the results were disastrous.)

Efforts to Regain the High Ground To refocus critical thinking about his writing and to downplay some of the most inflammatory reactions to elements in “The Picture of Dorian

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray  83 Gray,” Wilde wrote a broad declaration of his aesthetic values. He constructed his argument in the epigrammatic form which had yielded much success in the past and which allowed him to remind the public of how much they enjoyed his frivolity and ambiguity. At the same time in privileging the freedom of the artist, as he had done in “Pen, Pencil and ­Poison,” he affirmed the newest stage of his brand and of his art. This defense his writing and of his role as an artist was first published as an independent piece in the March 1891 issue Fortnightly Review, though he made his intentions unmistakable with its title, “A Preface to Dorian Gray.” Four months later, when Ward, Lock & Co. brought out the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, this declaration preceded the narrative in a section simply title, “The Preface.” While its aphoristic style seemed to discourage reading it as a unified manifesto, its form gave Wilde exactly what he wished to convey in the reassertion of his brand. Its discursiveness, unpredictability, and multiplicity reaffirmed the persona that had been challenged by the previous year’s frustrating public exchanges with journalists and editors. Nonetheless, despite the aura of insouciance, a sample of his statements attest to their cumulative aim to answer the critics who attacked Wilde’s public self by using the pretext of literary criticism as a convenient vehicle for their attempts at character assassination. Wilde’s thoughts follow a choric form, speaking out against determinism, conventionality, linearity, and closure in brief, self-contained observations. Taken together, they reaffirm the independence of his art and artistic efforts from the constraints that these putative arbiters of public morality sought to impose. “The Preface” outlines the parameters of the Wilde brand that will dominate the first half of the 1890s, and provides justification for both the daring of the novel and the more conventional approaches of the social dramas that would soon follow. It is less ostentatious than his 1880s remarks on aesthetics because of Wilde’s confidence in its renown earned through the diligent efforts of the previous decade. At the same time, it is a bit more cautious in asserting the differences of its views with those of the general public. In a clever, understated fashion, Wilde combines reconciliation with individuality. He describes the features of the public persona that he has become, and that society has come to recognize. In the process, he makes concepts of the term artist synonymous with his new self. He begins, almost disingenuously, by offering a simple definition and a delineation of his purpose: The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. He then evokes standards of criticism that he has recently promulgated in “The Critic as Artist”11 and implicitly compares himself and his work

84  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages to those who fall short of these ideals, turning the arguments of his ­ ersecutors back against his accusers: p The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. *** Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt ­without being charming. This is a fault. He next attacks the legitimacy of the extra-literary generalization that forms the basis of the critics’ condemnations of his novella: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. After a series of observations characterizing those who respond properly to art and those who do not, he goes on to play on seeming triviality to raise doubts about the ontological assumptions of his critics while he insinuates the aesthetic purity of his own perspectives. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. Then, after that relatively mild introduction, Wilde offers a more ­robust delineation of the artistic temperament, using a few lines to sketch the outline of the persona that he has been cultivating for over a decade. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. Finally, he preempts the possibility of rebuttal by taking art out of the category of issues to be scrutinized to determine their utilitarian places in society. All art is quite useless. (DG, pp. 3–4) Through this series of pithy, declarative phrases, Wilde reclaims the image of capricious creativity, undisciplined imagination, and unfettered insight that he had been cultivating since his arrival in London. Both the barbed criticisms of the reviewers of the novella and his vigorous responses to them had threatened to undermine this version of the brand. Those exchanges had suggested that a conjunction of Morality and Art had an aesthetic legitimacy of the sort that Wilde had tried diligently to undermine all his adult life. “The Preface” worked vigorously to restore

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray  85 the concept of Art existing on a plane separate from that of Morality. It also made important points about Wilde’s creative efforts and gave strong indications as to the perspective that one should adopt when ­approaching them. Most significantly, its position in the text of his novel reframed expectations about the narrative and the writer. “The Preface” reoriented readers to the aesthetic assumptions of the author. It signaled clearly the type of work they were about to encounter. And it announced the ­interpretive demands that its narrative would make upon them. Like much of Wilde’s previous writing, paradoxes and even contradictions run through “The Preface.” Nonetheless, it does make one unambiguous point about the novel’s interpretive possibilities: no moral position informs the composition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and reading one into the narrative distorts its meaning. (This, of course, says nothing about amorality in the novel, an issue that I will take up in Chapter 9.) Equally, “The Preface” has a determined if unstated agenda that offers important insights into the intellectual, imaginative, and emotional context from which the novel emerged: as a well-established brand, Wilde does not wish to be imposed upon or redefined by competing attitudes or values. In the end, no further defense of the novel was necessary. The publication in July 1891 of The Picture of Dorian Gray passed with no sign of the uproar that marked the novella’s appearance, and one might see the deafening silence as a mute testament to the author’s success at re-branding.

Where This Led Him For years, Wilde had been advancing the argument that he was an ­artist simply because of his refined aesthetic sensibilities. His vigorous exchanges with Whistler demonstrated his determination to enforce this idea, and the elaborate essays that followed provided the intellectual ­basis for his argument. The tone of a number of these essays suggests that Wilde felt pleased with the reception afforded his statements and even a bit complacent about the impact of the argument. All this changed with the hostile journalistic responses to his novella. These reviewers shifted the grounds of the argument, repeatedly using charges of moral turpitude as the basis for dismissing Wilde’s work and by extension Wilde’s status as an artist. Wilde understood the threat this posed and the need to protect his brand from perceptions that would lead to the public’s rejection of it. Through “The Preface,” and through his behavior in the year following the publication of the novella, Wilde worked to show the public that the new version of his brand was still within the bounds of what they were able to accept. Though he did not renounce what he had written, he did

86  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages make discrete emendations when revising his narrative for book length publication.12 Further, with the exception of Salome, a work initially composed in French, none of his social dramas, produced from 1892 to 1895, offered the direct challenge to conventional sensitivities that one finds in The Picture of Dorian Gray. This condition becomes important to keep in mind when one engages his major works of the 1890s. As I will elaborate in the interpretations that appear in the final section of this study, two of Wilde’s finest works, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Ernest, offer important alternative perspectives of the multiplicities that sum up the Wilde brand and present a good sense of how even as his brand was evolving in one direction Wilde was capable of modifying it to accommodate the public. Dorian and Ernest underscore the advantage of brand awareness when reading Wilde, showing that at the height of his creative powers Wilde actively managed his public persona to insure the best results for his art and his brand.

Notes 1 The development of Wilde as an artist and a brand might best be understood through a comparison with to other Irish authors from the generations immediately following Wilde’s. W. B. Yeats, who as a young poet living in London knew Wilde, had a career which showed even more mutability than Wilde’s. He moved from a fin de siècle poet, to a dramatist of Irish mythology, to an outspoken nationalist writer, to a meta-artist who drew creative inspiration from the process of writing. One does not understand Yeats’ poetry as a whole but through perspectives for each of these distinct phases. James Joyce, despite the radical departure from traditional creative ­approaches of his writing, was a far more stable brand He left Ireland in 1904, and moved successively from Pola to Trieste to Roe to Trieste to ­Zurich to Trieste to Paris and then back to Zurich. In all of these peregrinations, he never led anything other than a bourgeois existence, albeit one frequently troubled by lack of funds. From Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, the brilliance of his imagination manifested itself in a pattern of clear development of a single vision from one work to the next. All three came from a similar Irish environment, though of course from markedly different social situations. Yeats and Wilde chose to live their art far more publicly than did Joyce. As a consequence, their lives exerted greater and different impacts on their art. 2 Arthur Conon Doyle was also at the dinner, and at Stoddart’s request produced the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, for the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s. See Letters, p. 478, fn. 1, for more details. 3 Details of Wilde’s negotiations with Stoddart must be inferred from W ­ ilde’s correspondence. “The Fisherman and His Soul,” eventually appeared in his second short story collection, A House of Pomegranates, published in ­November 1891, which contained work similar to that found in Sir Arthur Savile’s Crime and other Stories, which had appeared four months earlier. Guy and Small go so far as to speculate that “The Fisherman and His Soul,” written very much in the style of Wilde’s work of the 1880s, had in fact not yet been completed when he proposed it to Stoddart. See, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, p. 233.

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray  87 4 Throughout this study, I have distinguished references to the novella from those to the novel by using quotations marks for the former and italics for the latter. 5 Cf. for example Ellmann’s accounts, pp. 305–335. 6 All quotations come from “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition. 7 Originally, Wilde took his accounts of sensuality even further than what appeared in the Lippincott’s version. Examination of the typescript that Wilde sent to Stoddart shows that the editor made significant changes to avoid scandalizing the magazine’s readers. See Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, pp. 50–51, for further discussion of Stoddart’s emendations and Wilde’s acquiescence to them. In Chapter 9, I will use the perspective of the third phase of Wilde’s branding to examine in detail the nihilism that it reveals in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although some of the more controversial points of its narrative were modified from the novella, it remains an openly scathing critique of Victorian social institutions. 8 The Oxford English Dictionary (1971) identifies the term puppydom as a nineteenth-century appellation denoting immaturity. In this context it also connotes the offensive, undisciplined behavior that one encounters in an untrained animal. 9 In Chapter 4, I quoted this portion of the paragraph to illustrate society’s inclination to collapse assessments of Wilde’s writing with response to his brand. Looking at the second half of that paragraph shows how harshly society responded to a work that it felt went beyond expectations created by that brand. 10 Pearson offers the text of that address, as provided by one of the St. James’s Theatre staff to George Alexander. The italics indicate “the actual words [Wilde] stressed”: Ladies and Gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself. (Pearson, p. 199) 11 When that essay appeared in two parts in Nineteenth Century (July 1890 and September 1890), the essay was initially titled “The True Function and Value of Criticism; with Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing ­ Nothing: a Dialogue.” 12 See Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, pp. 50–56, for a more ­detailed account of the changes that Wilde made.

8 De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” Writing a New Brand into Existence

After the harsh resistance that critics made to Lord Henry’s philosophy and Dorian’s life, Wilde never again composed any other work that so openly challenged popular conceptions. Instead, he turned to writing social dramas, imitating the melodramatic form that had been successful for others in the field, and infused this writing with the unique features of his brand. Then, after the disgrace that came out of the Queensberry trials and his subsequent incarceration, his public persona and writing lost all subtlety. For the first time in his life, Wilde’s public persona and his art simultaneously became unambiguous and undistinguished.

A Vision of Understated Bitterness For the first half of the decade, changes in brand and in art progressed steadily but not sharply noticeable. The social dramas that Wilde wrote in the early 1890s—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1894)— followed, on the surface at least, the patterns of the most popular melodramas of the times, and by and large were equally undistinguished. I will not examine these plays in detail here, but I will touch briefly on their relation to the concurrent stage of the Wilde brand and the way that portions of these three works preview the achievement of The Importance of Being Earnest.1 In an appreciable manner, Wilde’s writing went back to habits of composition that had characterized its earliest form. Just as he had mimicked successful poets in his verse, and relied on conventional literary structures in his poems, short stories, and fairy tales, Wilde arranged his later plays along the lines of traditional approaches to social comedy. His public rewarded that effort, as those plays brought Wilde wide-spread renown and a great deal of money. The first three were determinedly similar, presenting sympathetic ­depictions of the struggles of noble and at times naïve individuals against the machinations of ruthless individuals and/or the narrow societal strictures for acceptable behavior: Lady Windermere’s Fan portrays the travails of a naïve young woman who comes perilously close to an

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  89 adulterous affair. A Woman of No Importance inverts the situation with an impressionable young man coming under the influence of an immoral aristocrat. An Ideal Husband offers a variation on the two plots, examining the actions of a clever man who is simultaneously sophisticated and idealistic. Nonetheless, despite the programmatic delineation of these plots, Wilde could never write strictly commercial pieces that did not draw on his personal feelings. 2 After the harsh experience caused by his bitter exchanges with critics over responses to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde’s attitude towards Victorian society grew even more censorious than it had been in the past. At the same time, that experience had made him more circumspect in expressing his disapproval. The central male figures in these three social comedies—Lord Darlington, Lord Illingworth, and Lord Goring—still offered up the sardonic social commentaries that had become Wilde’s popular trademark. However, none came close to echoing Lord Henry’s blunt dismissal of Victorian beliefs or Dorian’s disdain for principles that he categorized as without value in contemporary life. As a rule, the main characters in these plays follow the heretofore guiding standard of the Wilde brand. They delight in making unconventional observations, but in fact they never go quite so far as to provoke a response to their views. A selection, from An Ideal Husband, of Lord Goring’s remarks provides a series of exemplary instances of the liberated but not offensive form they followed: That is the reason they are so pleased to find out other people’s secrets. It distracts public attention from their own. *** Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. *** I am sure she adores scandals, and that the sorrow of her life at present is that she can’t manage to have enough of them. (Writings, pp. 418, 421, 423) At the same time, these writings show that Wilde recognized, possibly for the first time, the power of society to wound him. He neither forgave nor forgot those assaults, and he deftly used some of the minor characters in these plays to offer offhandedly harsh critiques of the falseness he perceived in the world around him. Indeed, assuming much the same

90  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages sardonic worldview that one sees in figures from Restoration dramas, their deadpan deliveries go so far as to suggest a deplorable lack of concern over their own degeneracy. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, for instance, the Duchess of Berwick highlights society’s hypocrisy in lashing out at the weak and innocent rather than at the guilty and powerful as she reveals the cruel and unjust treatment she intended to mete out to her maid—a punishment that as good as destroyed prospects for other employment—as a way of dealing with her husband’s wandering eye. She compounds her callousness with a correction noting that, in fact, she had simply sent her servant to her sister’s household with results she blithely calls “most unfortunate”: It was only Berwick’s brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, ­every material. In fact, before the honeymoon was over, I caught him winking at my maid, a most pretty, respectable girl. I dismissed her at once without a character—No, I remember I passed her on to my sister, poor dear Sir George is so short-sighted, I thought it wouldn’t matter. But it did, though—it was most unfortunate. (Writings, p. 342) Lady Plymdale, in A Woman of No Importance, goes even further than the Duchess of Berwick. She makes degeneracy seem second nature in her cynical and calculated response to situations that she finds inconvenient, urging a friend to play the pander by taking Lady Plymdale’s husband to a lunch with a woman of dubious reputation: He has been so attentive lately, that he has become a perfect ­nuisance. Now, this woman is just the thing for him. He’ll dance attendance upon her as long as she lets him, and it won’t bother me. I assure you, women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other people’s marriages. (Writings, p. 353) At this stage, however, such critiques were little more than sporadic expressions of discontent. Wilde left it to his most impressive dramatic work of the period, and one that remains a remarkable achievement to this day, The Importance of Being Earnest, to present a relentless social criticism. However, even in this play Wilde did not risk the same directness that one finds in his novel. Instead, he overlaid this harsh view of the hypocrisy of the world with careful crafted language, highlighted by extremely witty dialogue, which can lead one to underestimate the force of its critiques. (In Chapter 10, I will explore more fully this subtle subversiveness.)

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  91

Decline and Fall The predictable thematic structures of his domestic plays stood in stark contrast to a brand that was careening towards the dysfunctional. As his writing, at least on the surface, became more conservative, Wilde’s public conduct had become increasingly reckless, eroding the brand of an established eccentric through behavior that openly affirmed inclinations of a much less ambiguous nature. He entertained telegraph delivery boys, a group whose profession was already linked to male prostitution, and other young working-class men at the Café Royale in a fashion that he knew would antagonize the public. His tempestuous relations with Lord Alfred Douglas, had they been as open, would have appeared equally scandalous to most of society. Nonetheless, there was no immediate public reaction to this behavior. The community that had lauded him felt no need to apply closer scrutiny to such actions, and Victorian society had already developed the well-honed habit of ignoring or at least downplaying unpleasant public events.3 By this point in Wilde’s career, London’s disposition towards him and his actions arose not from kindness but from inertia. In the early 1890s, he had achieved an eminence that would have daunted most from criticism, and his previous inclinations towards flamboyance dissuaded critical tendencies to judge contemporary performances as harshly as they otherwise might. (Even the most acerbic attacks on “The Picture of Dorian Gray” focused attention on the attitudes that critics saw expressed in Wilde’s writing and not on appraisals of his personal life.) His good friend, and noted wit, Ada Leverson, who came to know Wilde in 1892, neatly caught the impression he made as follows: “Before I first met Oscar… I had been told that he was rather like a giant with the wings of a Brazilian butterfly and I was not disappointed. But I thought him far more like a Roman Emperor who should have lived at the ­Pavilion at Brighton with George IV.”4 Nonetheless, a dispassionate observer could see that Wilde’s escalating outrageousness made the likelihood of his overstepping social tolerance only a matter of time. It came suddenly in the form of the Queensberry scandal and the guilty verdict of performing immoral acts. These events destroyed in a matter of days the brand that Wilde had labored to create over two decades. Suddenly, the unvoiced criticisms that had been building for a number of years burst forth, often in harsh retrospections. Constance Wilde summed up views that emerged only after the Queensberry scandal became public in a devastatingly direct phrase: “He has been mad these last three years.”5 The abrupt material, emotional, and psychological devastation that he experienced with his conviction paralyzed Wilde. Once in her majesty’s custody, visits with friends and family were strictly limited as was his ability to write letters. Beyond a few notes sent to friends, little of

92  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages his correspondence over the course of his imprisonment seems to have survived, and for most of the period of his incarceration he did not seem inclined or able to undertake writing of a more ambitious nature.

A New Phase This changed during his last few months in Reading Gaol, specifically between January and March 1897. With the support of the prison warden, Major J.O. Nelson, Wilde was given both the materials and the time necessary to compose a long, rambling piece that was preserved by his friend, Robert Ross.6 In tone and content, it marks a radical departure in both Wilde’s brand and his art. The work came to be called De Profundis, and it was ostensibly a letter to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, summing up Wilde’s thoughts on their relationship and on the consequences of the public scandal that it had created. On leaving prison, he entrusted the manuscript to Ross, requesting that he deliver it to Douglas. Instead, Ross retained the manuscript, and had a typed copy sent to Douglas, who later claimed not to have received it. Eight years later, and nearly five years after Wilde’s death, Ross published a heavily abridged version of De Profundis in 1905. It contained about half the original letter according to Merlin Holland’s estimate. Ross released a slightly fuller version in 1908. In 1949, Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland, published what was at the time considered to be the complete letter, though, again according to Merlin Holland, it was one marred by a number of transcriptional mistakes, unintended transpositions, and simple omissions. A carefully edited, restored version, totaling nearly one hundred printed pages, appears in the Merlin Holland/Rupert Hart-Davis 2000 edition of Wilde’s letters.

Wilde’s Voice from the Depths For anyone familiar with Wilde’s previous writings, De Profundis can seem like the work of some other author. The letter lacks the playful wit, the fascination with paradox, and most of all the joie de vivre that illuminated even the most casual of Wilde’s previous compositions. Instead, a whining self-pity, atypical even in his private correspondence of that period, dominates its tone. The circumstances surrounding its composition and preservation make it difficult to know if Wilde had ever intended it for publication, but that ambiguity does not lessen its value as a key to understanding, at this stage in Wilde’s artistic life, the relation of brand and creativity. Whatever difficulties might arise in classifying De Profundis within the canon, when viewed on its own its structure and content come across quite clearly. Wilde divided the document into three thematic parts: the

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  93 first presents a detailed criticism of Douglas’s selfish behavior over the course of their relationship, with some acknowledgment of how Wilde’s pliancy contributed to it. The second segment examines Wilde’s emotional and spiritual state while in prison. The final section returns to chastising Douglas, with the focus on some of the events surrounding the trials. Early in the narrative, Wilde enumerates the flaws in Douglas’s character and dwells on instances of the self-indulgence of the young man’s behavior: “Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely… Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much” (Letters, p. 684). Once such criticism begins, Wilde makes no effort to restrain himself. He berates Douglas for being idle and indolent, ignorant of the creative process, and an impediment to Wilde’s writing. Despite a nod towards self-abnegation, he shifts to Douglas the bulk of the responsibility for any shortcomings in Wilde’s creative e­ fforts: “While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my Art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree” (Letters, p. 687). ­However, this is more than a reassessment of a relationship. The scolding tone sharply contrasts with earlier exchanges, like ­Wilde’s witty dismissals of Whistler, with individuals with whom Wilde had disagreements. In those instances, Wilde demonstrated the ability to highlight all of an adversary’s shortcomings while maintaining a reserve that enforced the sense that Wilde would never take these shortcomings, or indeed the exchanges, seriously. In De Profundis he shows no such reserve or distance. Instead of assuming the role of a commentator standing above the fray, Wilde unfolds his narrative as a victim’s chronicle shaped by emotions still raw and unmitigated by the slightest measure of detachment. As the narrative progresses, the writer’s tone remains consistently self-­ absorbed, and his sense of injury becomes increasingly shrill and more detailed. One sees this, for instance, when the usually generous Wilde speaks of spending money on Douglas’s entertainment in a manner that is grudging, petulant, and whiny. Perhaps even more striking is the unrelieved self-centeredness that permeates the work. When he was promoting previous versions of his brand, Wilde had a keen sense of an audience and exercised firm ­discipline regarding what he revealed through his public posture. No matter how extravagantly he wrote or how recklessly he behaved, Wilde remained aloof and untouched by any emotional engagement with the subject. His earlier deportment calls to mind Stephen Dedalus’ vision of the artist who should function “like the God of creation [who] remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”7 In contrast, the author of De Profundis becomes an unapologetic Lear figure—“more

94  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages sinned against than sinning.” The consequent absence of emotional distance between writer and narrator produces bathos rather than pathos. A bit less than halfway through the letter, Wilde begins to clarify the emerging features of his new brand, a persona, not yet fully public, that gives an almost exclusive emphasis to his own travails. Unselfconsciously and melodramatically, he moves from detailing what he categorizes as the purifying effects of his own suffering to an embarrassing analogue drawing not so subtle parallels between himself and Jesus. He caps the figure by talking about his resolution to forgive Douglas and about the cleansing effect that will produce. Whatever one might think of Wilde exercising the all too human inclination to dramatize his own misery, this is not the most important reaction to this rhetorical gesture. Rather, the degree to which Wilde continues to show the deep pain he feels, a description devoid of the flourish and flippancy for which he had become so well known, gives arresting evidence of the profound change in attitude and of its impact on his artistic perspective. He is re-aligning his sense of brand from a disposition that had aimed at creating admiration in the minds of those exposed to it to one determined to draw sympathy from them. In the course of this recalibration, worked out through his process of composition, Wilde reassesses his previous artistic and branding efforts. He reveals a great deal about his sense of their impact upon society and on his art, and, in conjunction with this retrospection, he outlines the new direction that he now takes. Unfortunately, many readers will see only that he seems to have lost the acute sense of balance that tempered flamboyance with implicit irony. Certainly, like much of the letter, extravagance of emotion threatens to overwhelm the usefulness of these comments, but that only comes from a literal reading. Whatever factual inaccuracies accrue, the importance of Wilde’s assessments lies in what they tell us about his overall sense of the creation and sustainment of his brand. The nostalgia that permeates his remarks suggests the new, less complicated representation—the persecuted individualist whom society cannot abide—that will emerge of the final stage of his public persona: I was 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. *** The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  95 did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched it characterization: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less that what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. (Letters, p. 729) This is Wilde speaking as he never would have in earlier public descriptions of himself. In former iterations of his brand, he knew that the very act of pointing out the success that his public persona had achieved would have undercut its impact. We now see a voice much less confident and consequently feeling the need to be so much more assertive as to what the brand had achieved. In the next paragraph, Wilde offers an equally detailed assessment of the degradation of his branding efforts and of his subsequent fall. Here, one can see an overt articulation of the new strategy, one that gives precedence to the role of martyr over that of artist: Along with these things, I had things that were different. I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me curious joy. Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops. I ceased to be Lord over myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul, and did not know it. (Letters, p. 730) From that retrospection on what his brand had been, Wilde turns to a more specific deliberation of how to implement this new projection of self. He writes of transforming the suffering he has endured in prison

96  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages into a spiritual experience. This leads to a long meditation on true happiness and on sorrow as a means of enlightenment. He takes up the theme of redemption, without invoking that word, and in the process, he moves from private self-effacement to public apotheosis, unabashedly declaring “a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist” (Letters, p. 740). This shift is disquieting for those who have followed the development of Wilde’s public persona. He no longer approaches the branding process with the serene confidence that he had displayed for years. Instead, he mixes remorse with braggadocio, invoking the previously referenced phrase “feasting with panthers” as a measure (seemingly without irony) of the daring of his former life and as an indication that it too can help form his new public persona (Letters, p. 758). At the same time, he cannot resist the temptation to return to blaming Douglas’s behavior that played upon Wilde’s indulgence and affection for selfish ends. He implicitly acknowledges a loss of the complexity of earlier brand versions and now embraces the domination of an idée fixe: the wounded genius who has become a martyr to public opinion. Consequently, we see in De Profundis a work stripped of all previous artistic power. In place of Wilde’s usual creativity, we have the painful account of one battered by suffering presented in the dull, repetitive fashion of a person so wounded as to be unable to organize his words in a manner that would engage the reader’s interest and imagination. Wilde writes without the wit and force that had electrified his previous compositions. The change challenges our interpretive effort. It is not sufficient to say that these deficiencies simply reflect the way he would write something not intended for publication. Even the most cursory examinations of his earlier letters, which themselves were not intended for public consumption, shows that prior to his incarceration the same liveliness that animated his published works enlivened his letters. Clearly, the public humiliation and institutional punishment that he endured in consequence marked him deeply and produced a radical change in his creative abilities.

Swan Song De Profundis, the first composition by Wilde written without the support of a widely acclaimed brand, marks a formal initiation of his effort to create the final, and perhaps least successful, stage of the Wilde public persona: the persecuted martyr forced to suffer because of the prejudices of society. It would subsequently serve as an enabling force in writing “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” but this new public persona, obsessed with the physical, emotional, and spiritual injuries consequent to ­Wilde’s

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  97 trials and imprisonment, offered little more than a repeating loop of selfpity that could sustain no further creative efforts. The poem, like the prison letter that preceded it, announces the presence of a very different creative imagination shaping Wilde’s writing. Opinions differ on the merits of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” For me, it stands as a work inhibited by an almost naive sentimentalism and a maddening simplicity of style that is absent even from “Ravenna,” his earliest published verse. However, despite this dismissive attitude (one that is not shared by a great many other readers), seeing the poem as an articulation of the newest version of the Wilde brand—one celebrating the author as persecuted individual—underscores for me its unflinching acknowledgment of the dignity that one can discern intermingled within the flaws of humanity. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” offers a lyrical account of events ­surrounding the execution of a fellow inmate. It focuses attention on a murderer justly condemned to death for killing his lover: “The man who killed the thing he loved, /And so he had to die.” Indeed, in his picture of “the guardsman” who awaits execution, Wilde never attempts to meliorate or even expiate the horrific deed that has led to the man’s sentence. Even his fellow inmates seem to take the sentence as just or at least as inevitable: “That fellow’s got to swing.” Rather, the poem catches the humanity of that individual and that of his sympathetic fellow prisoners as the day of execution approaches. At the same time, Wilde’s verse does not dwell on the guardsman’s crime. Instead, it focuses attention on the prisoner as an embodiment of the dignity one can assume in the face of suffering brought on by one’s own behavior: He did not wring his hands, as do Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun, And drank the morning air.8 This is the mirror image of Wilde’s new brand: the public persona of a man who was now self-exiled to the Continent, making no effort to deny the humiliation inflicted upon him and instead responding with a stoic appreciation of the world he now inhabited. For contemporary readers, who do not accept the idea of the punishment meted out to Wilde as just in any way, difficulties quickly arise in seeing a complete parallel between the poem’s author and the ­poem’s protagonist. Nonetheless, the perspective of the guardsman very accurately sums up Wilde’s understanding of the environment that his public persona would face. Few would openly challenge the injustice done to

98  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages him, and, after his release, though he spoke at times of prison reform, the course he adopted for the next iteration of the brand focused on the attitude of the one who suffered rather than on the legitimacy of the suffering inflicted. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” enforces the potency of this perspective when it signals the despair common to all who have lost their sense of individuality and humanity. It articulates the role of the noble sufferer spread among the poet’s fellow prisoners: We were as men who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope. (p. 734) And at the same time, it predicts the ongoing suffering that one condemned by social mores must endure as it highlights the callousness of the warders and the indifference of the Chaplain: They mocked the swollen purple throat, And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud In which the convict lies. The Chaplain would not kneel to pray By his dishonoured grave: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross That Christ for sinners gave (p. 739) In sum, by underscoring the noble demeanor shown by the man facing execution while obliquely condemning the self-righteousness of society’s representatives, the poem suggests the public persona that Wilde hoped to assume: one resigned to accept suffering and condemnation at the hands of society but one nonetheless one determined to do so with dignity. None of this for me makes the poem great. As the closing lines attest, on the creative level it remains a stark regression from all of Wilde’s previous artistic efforts. And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word.

De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”  99 The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! (p. 742) Nonetheless, when I read it as a manifestation of the final version of ­ ilde’s brand, a testament to the public persona that he had determined W to adopt for what would be the last three years of his life, I am inclined to find in it less bathos, less maudlin self-indulgence than I had previously. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” lays out Wilde’s blueprint for his post-incarceration public persona. The poem’s publication attests to a measure of optimism he felt about the ability of this new version of the brand to spur his creative output. Sadly, the poem itself demonstrates the inadequacy of this new iteration to bring Wilde back to the artistic eminence that he had previously enjoyed. In focusing on the aesthetics of flagellation, it presents a stagnant artistic vision, and forecasts an end to the creative achievements that distinguished ­W ilde’s previous work. He left Reading Gaol as a man whose health was broken, whose brand was all but eradicated, and whose art had become crippled.

Notes 1 There have been a number of detailed studies of these works. A work that I have already cited, Kerry Powell’s Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, gives a very good sense of Wilde’s work in terms of the theatrical tastes of the period. 2 Sos Eltis, building on a similar assumption, argues that they embody p ­ olitical values reflecting Wilde’s social conscience. See her, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. While I agree completely that Wilde’s views made important contributions to the structure of his plays, I see the values and attitudes he chose to incorporate into his dramas as a bit more personal. 3 Official response to the Cleveland Street scandal amply illustrates this ­inclination. The affair took its name from a male bordello in Fitzrovia, ­London, raided by police in 1889. Though reports of the event shocked English society, it more notable for the unwillingness of the authorities to pursue judicial action against the house’s well-born clients. For a detailed examination, see H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Cleveland Street Scandal, 1976. 4 Ada Leverson. Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde: with Reminiscences of the Author. London: Duckworth, 1930, pp. 31–32. 5 Pearson, p. 232. 6 Early critics believed that De Profoundis was composed under very rigid conditions because of a 4 April 1897 letter, written by the warden at Reading to the Prison Commissioners. In it Nelson affirmed that Wilde was given a single blank sheet of paper each day and that prison authorities retrieved it after he had written on it that sheet. He then received a new blank one the next day. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, has explained that in fact

100  Representative Writing at Various Brand Stages Nelson allowed Wilde full access to the manuscript and made the remarks summarized above because he was in fact controverting established rules by this action. See Letters, p. 683, fn1, for a full explanation. 7 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. John Paul Riquelme New York: Norton, 2007, p. 189. 8 Complete Works, p. 728. Further quotations from this volume are cited in the text.

Part III

Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings A Final Interval: Where Does It All Lead After surveying the evolution of Wilde’s brand in Part I and examining its influence on various phases of Wilde’s writing in Part II, I have established the general principle that Wilde’s evolving public persona and his maturing creative impulses were inextricably linked. It follows from this proposition that when speaking of his writing one always needs to maintain an awareness of the brand behind it. This is a perspective not an epistemology. My aim is to offer a view that augments rather than supplants methods of reading Wilde’s canon. The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest ­illustrate two distinct instances of Wilde’s public persona exerting a shaping impact on his creative process. In Part III, by taking a close look at how the perspective of branding can increase understanding of his two most important works, I hope to demonstrate how my approach can both independently illuminate Wilde’s writing and also enhance readings of his canon that are based on other epistemologies. Wilde’s evolving social sense, from the mid-1880s to the first half of the 1890s, ultimately led him to an aesthetic orientation that explored in his works the consequences of what we would now call a postmodern sense of human existence. In The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde created environments in which characters dismissed the legitimacy of the social institutions that framed their environments and denied the possibility that metaphysical values— morality—shaped their sense of the world. In the process, they create a nihilistic reading of society that post-World War II existentialists would have recognized and endorsed. The Picture of Dorian Gray began as a novella, composed at a ­moment when Wilde’s confidence, because of the renown of his brand, was seemingly unassailable. The uproar of English critics after its appearance forced him to defend himself publicly and privately, and to make some minor modifications in the narrative. Nonetheless, the work’s overall thematic daring remained intact when Wilde published it in novel form a year later.

102  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings Four years later, however, after having had three domestic dramas— Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband—highly successful both critically and commercially, produced on the West End, Wilde was far more deeply invested in public ­attitudes. He was no longer on society’s margins, seeking attention through flamboyant displays. He was at its center, serving as an arbiter of public taste. His basic attitudes had not changed, but he had learned the c­ onsequences of expressing those feelings too directly. The Importance of Being Earnest is by no means a “tame essence of Wilde,” a term Stephen Dedalus sardonically applies to another character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Although a patina of lightheartedness gilds the dialogue and action, scrutiny of the characters and of their searches for identity ultimately reveals an attitude as chilling as that expressed in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The play depicts a world in which materiality has completely replaced metaphysics: there can be no abstract measurement of one’s nature—good, evil, and other such traits don’t exist in the purely material world. In consequence, characters turn to arbitrary forms to establish ways of defining themselves. Although it does not say so in terms as stark as those of the novel, the play also outlines an arbitrary world without meaning beyond physical appetites. The dark readings that I draw from the novel and the play outline a harsher worldview than others have found in these works. Nonetheless, when one keeps in mind the license Wilde felt from the success of his brand and the ensuing turmoil that resulted, seeing those attitudes mirrored in his most successful writing seems inevitable. Even for those who will not wish to take interpretations as far as I have, contrasting the two works fully illustrate the enhanced understanding achieved by reading Wilde’s various writings from the perspective of the stages of the brand that coincided with the compositions.

9 The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work

In 1890, Wilde was at the height of his social powers. His brand ­dominated English society, and the acclaim he enjoyed appeared to make him feel that he could say or do almost anything. He put that a­ ssumption to the test when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, for it articulated the strongest challenge he would make in his writing to the views of the world he inhabited.1

Lord Henry’s Postmodernism Wilde’s assault on the assumptions that supported the Victorian world view begins early in the novel. In Chapter 2, the artist, Basil Hallward, asks his friend, Lord Henry Wotton, to amuse Dorian Gray while the young man poses for a portrait. In a rambling monologue, meant to be as seductive to readers as to the young man who listens to it in Basil’s home, Lord Henry presents a clear-eyed assessment of the hypocritical world he believes that he inhabits. In opposition to the insincere values of society, he articulates a set of alternate principles that he feels should govern human behavior, aptly labeled New Hedonism. The offhanded way that Harry delivers his disquisition can make New Hedonism seem, at first glance, to be little more than discursive fireworks, the flippant advocacy of a shallow, self-indulgent lifestyle. In fact, he orchestrates a devastating critique of the values governing Victorian life offering a radical materialism in its place. 2 A contemporary reader will see much in Lord Henry’s views and in Dorian’s behavior that anticipates the postmodern vision that would emerge a half-century later. Because that term enjoys broad usage and multiple denotations, ­before going further, let me offer my very specific sense of postmodernism. When I use that term here, I evoke the concept of living in an arbitrary world with meaning resting only on a purely material basis. The moral precepts that serve as the foundations for social institutions—like family, church, nation—can have no impact on postmodern lives because the values upon which they rest and which they purport to exemplify in fact do not and cannot exist in a world without metaphysics. 3 In such an

104  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings environment, references to good, evil, and any other abstract concept are meaningless. Only the physical has existence, and so no basis exists for judging individuals by anything other than the material consequences of their behavior.4 This incipient postmodernism marks a radical departure from Victorian convention, and Wilde’s narrative announces this position early on, though, surprisingly, some of its earliest representations come from the supposedly idealistic painter, Basil Hallward. Describing the effect of Dorian Gray on his art, Basil, in a moment out of character, presents a perspective presaging the views of late twentieth-century poststructural materialism, by saying of the young man that “He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there” (DG, p. 14). Like Jacques Derrida three quarters of a century later, for Basil absence is presence.5

The Counter-Argument of Spirituality Of course, some might argue that Basil here is emphasizing the spirituality of Dorian’s influence, and there are a number of instances in the narrative that make clear the painter’s commitment to the metaphysical. When Basil describes his best work to Harry, for example, he uses mystical terms to convey his meaning: Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. (DG, p. 9) In fact, the details of his artist/subject relationship with Dorian contradicts all that he says in the quotation above. While he claims Dorian as an ephemeral influence on his art, Basil grounds his aesthetic and his ethical sensibilities on the material. When asked how often he sees Dorian, Basil tells Harry: “Every day. I couldn’t be happy if I did not see him every day. He is absolutely necessary to me…. He is all my art now” (DG, pp. 12–13). The profound effect of Dorian’s beauty clearly attests to the centrality of the physical in the creative process. At the same time, as he suggests in the passages quoted previously, Basil cannot free himself from a deep nostalgia for the metaphysical. Later in the narrative, his expression of this longing will enrage Dorian, and in consequence precipitate Basil’s murder. Dorian, on the other hand, embraces the material openly and unreservedly. From his initial expression of aversion to the process of aging through the calculated self-gratification that dominates his life, sensation is everything. Even what some have called the moral ending of the

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  105 novel, with its Gothic evocations, occurs because of Dorian’s momentary nostalgia for signs of spirituality which produces physical rage at the materialist response by the painting.

Embodying New Hedonism Of course, Lord Henry stands out as the figure who introduces and ­tirelessly sustains the novel’s postmodern attitude. In the opening pages, speaking to Basil Hallward, he sums up his postmodern inclination in a witty epigram that will evoke moral concepts familiar to the contemporary reader: “I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world” (DG, p. 12). Dismissing values is just the first step. Celebrating the physical world stands at the center of his approach to life. Unlike Basil or Dorian, Harry feels not the slightest nostalgia for a belief in a moral system. In his introduction, to Dorian and the reader, of his theory of New Hedonism, Lord Henry cleverly develops the concept of materialism by using aphorisms to meliorate the hardnosed outline of his sense of reality. In an extended disquisition, whose frivolous tone masks its far-reaching skepticism, Harry constructs an alternative world view. It demolishes the values of the Victorian society that surrounds him, and indicts those who adhere to those values as fools. Selections abstracted from his ­presentation show the ruthlessness of his philosophy. Harry begins by pointing out the distorting effect produced on an individual by the influence of conventional values: He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. (DG, p. 19) Lord Henry then moves to express his contempt for those inadequately committed to solipsism: People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. (DG, p. 19) And he ends with the dismissal of those afraid to face nihilism: The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us…. [T]he bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars

106  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the ­luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. (DG, pp. 19–20)

The Postmodern Connection When viewed in this concentrated form, one can see how effectively Harry’s suave language masks his devastatingly harsh and arrestingly amoral conclusions. However, this is not shallow, reflexive cynicism. A close reading shows his sentiments, and those which will define the ethos of the novel, coinciding perfectly with those of a postmodernist society. He celebrates sensuality as the only valid principle of behavior in a world without metaphysical values, and he expresses contempt for anyone too timid or too stupid to acknowledge that the scope of human life does not extend beyond its materiality. Like the views expressed by characters in the works of another Irish exile, Samuel Beckett, at the core of Lord Henry’s exposition stands his perception of an arbitrary world that offers nothing beyond physical actions and reactions to explain the way events unfold. Much as Beckett does in Waiting for Godot, in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde argues for our powerlessness to comprehend or to influence the environment that surrounds us in anything other than a transient, material fashion. Of course, Beckett’s characters tend towards resentment and bitterness at living in a world without some system of values that would give their actions metaphysical significance. In contrast, Lord Henry urges one to glory in the freedom derived from the absence of moral restrictions. (As I will note in the next chapter, Wilde does this again in his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, though the frivolity that runs through the dialogue makes its darker vision even more difficult to discern.)

Resisting a Moral Interpretation That is a much more radical perspective than the majority of Wilde’s readers have been willing to adopt. Many instead see the attitudes of Harry and the behavior of Dorian as invitations for rigorous examinations of moral values.6 Such interpretations of Wilde’s novel regularize it according to the same linear patterns of thinking—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—that dominate conventional perceptions of the Victorian world. Following the impulse to regularize patterns of behavior, these readings of the novel seek to blunt the force of New Hedonism in the

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  107 narrative or at the very least to redirect its purpose, seeing it as a goad to move readers towards positive values. In fact, Wilde’s text takes a decidedly different track. It posits an arbitrary existence with absolutely no values to anchor it. Understanding this position is easier if we keep in mind the ideas that he outlines in his preface. There Wilde shows no interest in putting metaphysical views into his creative efforts. Quite the contrary, he appears to step away from them: “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” Wilde does not see art as a means to an end, but rather he affirms it as an end, self-contained and purely aesthetic creation. “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” He strives toward an impractical valueless experience rather than a utilitarian one that leads us to some truth or insight. “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (DG, pp. 3–4). Wilde speaks of creating a work outside the boundaries of ethical behavior, outside the advocacy of particular political, social, or spiritual beliefs. In this fashion, his art employs the same existential assumptions as Beckett’s would, though admittedly expressed in much more optimistic tones. At the same time, Wilde’s narrative style, intentionally or not, can create misleading interpretive expectations. He was adept as both a reader and a writer, clearly shaped by the literary tradition from which he emerged, and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde attests to that intellectual heritage, blending many of the features of familiar genres into his narrative. Although when he does, he truncates, redirects, or otherwise distorts the expected patterns to suit his creative aims. This subversive gesture may not be immediately apparent to many disposed to see Wilde’s novel as a conventionally structured narrative typical of a great deal of nineteenth century English fiction. Certainly, similarities abound between The Picture of Dorian Gray and more conventional, contemporaneous works. Wilde’s novel focuses on a central character learning how to make his way in society, and it explores the results of the choices made in the process. An awareness of the strong literary tradition linking moral consequences to human behavior will lead us to believe that Dorian’s evolution into an increasingly debased sensualist produces disfigurement in the painting because it reacts to his behaving as no decent man should. However, from the opening pages, the mutability of the narrative of The Picture of Dorian Gray raises problems that do not yield to easy referential resolution: it seemingly begins as a homoerotic love story, or at least a tale of obsession for beauty. It appears to move to a bildungsroman as Lord Henry works to enlighten Dorian through New Hedonism. It suggests a psychological thriller as Dorian pushes the limits of his behavior through the transformation of his portrait. And, it apparently ends as a morality tale when Dorian, after trying to reform, dies because he seemingly cannot bear the weight of his own

108  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings conscience. Because inconsistencies in each of these categories disrupt the application of whatever conventions that readers might wish to invoke to understand this discourse, none of these classifications provides a clear direction for interpretation. This in turn raises questions regarding how we are to understand the work, and I now believe that the most comprehensive approach follows the stark perspectives of postmodern thinking.

The Anti-Faustian Moment This nihilistic view challenges the basis of many received readings because our interpretations, and I include my own in this categorization, have come out of our own assumptions rather than from elements of the Wilde brand that shape the work. By looking at a pivotal scene in the novel, Dorian’s deep resentment coming out of the first viewing of his picture, one can see both how easy it is to read familiar archetypes into the narrative and how important it is to see the text’s subtle resistance to such conventional expectations. How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that. (DG, p. 25) The moment—particularly Dorian’s offer of his soul—seems to portray the prototypical desire to overcome human limitations by trading earthly success for eternal damnation. However, it is important to keep in mind the components that conventionally define such a compact. It is not enough to make an offer. Someone must accept the proposal. Eve had the serpent; Faust had Mephistopheles. Numerous other figures seeking similar “bargains with the devil” all have a respondent. There is no such partnership here. The passage highlights Dorian’s nostalgia for metaphysics, not the narrative’s. What Dorian does not see, despite all his materialism, is that in the silent universe of postmodernism souls do not exist nor is there anyone to reply to his offer if they did.

Interpreting the Picture The picture, of course, does begin to change,7 and Dorian’s response to noticing the first evidence of the portrait’s deterioration, coming immediately after his rejection of Sybil Vane, shows how easily observation shifts to subjective analysis.

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  109 [Dorian] went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly most strange. (DG, pp. 76–77) The narrative makes crystal clear that it is recording Dorian’s response to the painting—“the face appeared to him to be a little changed”— but what stands out here is not just the subjective tone—“appeared to him”—but the immediate leap to judgment of the subsequent ­observation, “One would have said there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.” Of course, the narrative gives strong evidence throughout that the ­picture changes physically. However, there is not parallel evidence ascribing metaphysical forces—good, evil, cruelty, mercifulness—as ­generating this metamorphosis. In the passage above, Dorian imposes a moral explanation for the change, but nothing in the universe of the novel substantiates such an assumption. In subsequent chapters, the narrative goes into great detail describing Dorian’s sense of connection to the painting and his fascination with its changes. It also highlights Dorian’s determination to see the alterations from a moral perspective. Without hesitation, Dorian accepts the metamorphosis of his portrait as a harsh commentary on his behavior, and then assumes the role of artist using his actions to reconfigure the form on the canvas. Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. (DG, p. 106) Even as Dorian invokes the vocabulary of morality—the face is not just “aging” it is “evil”—in his efforts to interpret the paintings changes, the logic of the narrative undercuts his efforts. Although the passage goes on to mention Dorian’s thinking of the contrast between the beauty of his person and the corrosion of his soul, the images remain resoundingly physical. Dorian has no deep interest in a metaphysical world. He certainly does not ponder why he escapes the physical ravages consequent to

110  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings debauchery. Rather, in his essence his concern is solely with the ­material consequences. Although some readers might still be tempted to believe that the ­picture has a spiritual sensitivity to Dorian’s actions, there is simply no concrete evidence in the narrative that the portrait’s mutation come about as consequences of violating some moral system, no matter what Dorian believes. Further, the painting does not make Dorian what he is: in conventional terms a selfish, self-centered individual. He was that when he first met Basil Hallward. In fact, the painting does not change Dorian’s character in the least. Instead, it shields him from general public awareness of his dissolution by absorbing the physical evidence of his excess, giving him license to indulge his appetites without any evidence of his behavior.

A World without Metaphysics In keeping with its postmodern outlook, the narrative discourages any belief in value systems, particularly through the eloquence of Lord Henry. By proselytizing New Hedonism from the early pages of the novel, Harry continually challenges the moralistic tendencies ingrained in all of the characters and in most of the novel’s readers. It is the clash of amorality in the narrative with our disposition towards values that makes the impact of the narrative’s views so powerful. Harry freely proclaims his devotion to self-indulgence, encourages others to see the world from the same perspective, and refuses to accept any responsibility for the consequences his views might have on others. In Chapter 3 of the novel, at a luncheon at the home of his Aunt ­Agatha, Harry transfixes the other guests with his account of New Hedonism. When challenged by Mr. Erskine over the possible impact of those views on the Duchess of Harley, Lord Henry blithely dismisses any thought of responsibility for what he has said. And now my dear young friend [says Mr. Erskine], if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch? “I quite forget what I said,” smiled Lord Henry. “Was it very bad?” Very bad indeed. In fact I consider you extremely dangerous, and I anything happens to our good Duchess we shall all look on you as being primarily responsible. (DG, pp. 39–40) Harry’s natural flippancy makes his expression of forgetfulness difficult to read. As he says late in the novel: “Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  111 away” (DG, p. 175). However, whether his words are actually so inconsequential that he does not remember them or whether he simply rejects the connection between his ideas and any sort of moral consequences, the conclusion is the same. Harry affirms his belief in a world that is ­material, transient, episodic, and arbitrary. Throughout the novel, Lord Henry stands steadfast in this disbelief, showing no intention of succumbing to any form of morality, conventional or otherwise. Admittedly, he remains essentially a passive adherent to New Hedonism, a voyeur more interested in observation than in action. Nonetheless, he is inflexibly tied to the materialist system that his New Hedonism embodies. This becomes quite evident, late in the narrative, when Dorian stands on the brink of confiding to him, an instance of the consequences of completely unrestrained behavior. Lord Henry refuses to entertain the possibility of assigning an ethical status—signaled by his rejection of the term murder—to the act to which Dorian alludes. “What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?” said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had spoken. I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn’t suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure it is true. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. (DG, pp. 175–176) Just as he did when confronted with Mr. Erskine’s accusation of culpability, Harry deflects his friend’s confessional impulse with a rhetorical flourish that barely acknowledges the other’s assertions. Nonetheless, his point stands quite clear. Harry has no interest in hearing conventional acquiescence to the morality that his New Hedonism has so readily dismissed.

Dorian’s Lack of Faith As alluded to earlier in the chapter, Dorian has a more conflicted view of the world. It is one inflected by a metaphysical value structure from which he has never completely divested himself. The picture, demonstrably a facilitator of New Hedonism, takes on an additional role in many of the novel’s interpretations because of the significance that Dorian imposes on it, believing that it reflects the moral consequences of his behavior. Dorian’s view of morality has a paradoxical leaning that lies somewhere between Harry’s dismissal and Basil Hallward’s unsuccessful

112  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings efforts to balance artistic sensuality and naïve piety. As seen in this interchange between Dorian and Basil, taking place just before the latter’s murder, Dorian maintains a scornful dismissal of overt invocation of ­religious belief, but his demeanor is that of one who believes that he is beyond salvation rather than that of someone denying that salvation exists. Dorian Gary turned slowly around and looked at him with teardimmed eyes. “It is too late, Basil,” he faltered. It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’? Those words mean nothing to me now. (DG, p. 132) Dorian is not indifferent to belief, although Basil’s socializing efforts through its application enrage him. Dorian sets his own standards for behavior, and he will not conform to anyone else’s. Nonetheless, his faith is as fragile as that of any ambivalent religious devotee. When his values are challenged, he responds violently. One sees this when Basil expresses hope in the efficacy of the supernatural, a sense of divine intervention as a means of restoration, moments before his death. The invitation to engage in public confession not only meets with Dorian’s disdain. It questions his materialism, and this challenge to a system in which he does not have full confidence provokes in him the murderous frenzy that leads to his fatal attack on Basil. Because Dorian lacks the unwavering commitment of Lord Henry, we see him near the end of the narrative expressing belief in the possibility of earning salvation. When he resists the temptation to seduce Hetty Merton—“Suddenly I determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her” (DG, p. 173)—he trumpets the act as a gesture of reform. Lord Henry quickly undercuts the force of Dorian’s assertions by recasting the experience in material terms, seeing it as simply an extension of the fundamental tenet of New Hedonism that bases life solely on sensation: “I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, Dorian” (DG, p. 173). Despite Harry’s dismissal, Dorian persists in the idea that a good deed will not only reform his character but will reverse the signs of its degeneration on the picture. A few pages after the exchange above, the narrative articulates Dorian’s expectations and his disappointment, and it prepares us for the violent reaction that these misperceptions will provoke. As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed…. He went in quietly… and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  113 indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. (DG, p. 182) In fact, the narrative plays with the kinds of moral affinities that readers would bring to the work only to underscore their absence. What Dorian considers to be a good act does not reverse the picture’s degeneration. Instead, he sees another mark of the corrosion of aging appear, and Dorian, still nostalgic for a moralist point of view, cannot avoid using metaphysical terms and interprets this change as a rebuke from the painting, a reflection of puritanical displeasure over his enjoyment of eschewing the seduction of Hetty. However, that position strains credulity. Even within a system of behavior informed by moral protocols, a great many acts, labeled as good deeds, are initiated because they bring pleasure to the agent. That ­motivation by no reasonable measure in any ethical system invalidates the impact of the gesture, any more than what the same system would call an evil act would cease to be so if the person performing it did not enjoy doing so. Ultimately, as Dorian will discover to his dismay, his attempts to use links to traditional morality to understand the painting’s metamorphosis prove to be no more effective than the conventional metaphysical images that others impose on the world of the novel. If anything, the picture stands as a testament to the amorality of actions in Dorian’s world. Physical conditions provide the narrative’s only explanation for the painting’s material transformations. Dorian is a sensualist committed to living that life fully. Such patterns of behavior take a marked physical toll. That toll, generally reflected on the body of the sensualist, in Wilde’s story appears in Dorian’s representation on canvas.

Nostalgia for Morality Much like Vladimir’s musings on the Good Thief in Waiting for Godot, Dorian yearns nostalgically for a conventional system of values that would allow one to dismiss the emptiness consequent of the solely ­material world, but the narrative provides no evidence that such a system exists. There is no mind/body dichotomy. In the world of the novel, I do not exist because I think, Cogito ergo sum. Rather, like any other animal, I think as a consequence of my existence, Sum ergo cogito. This material explanation provides a logical explanation for the ­action of the narrative, although it leads to a more chilling conclusion. The picture is a yardstick of material life. It registers physical changes as exertions that wear out the body, but that degeneration is common to all.

114  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings [T]ell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth. You must have some secret. I am ten years older than you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. You are really wonderful, Dorian. You have never looked more charming than you do tonight. You remind me of the day I saw you first. (DG, pp. 177–178) Of course, there is a much closer physical similarity than Henry realizes. The vigorous hedonism of Dorian places great physical demands on the body and lead to an accelerated degeneration in the portrait. Lord Henry, who is less actively committed to New Hedonism, follows a slower pace. The paradox is that Dorian’s decay, though greater, remains invisible. Lord Henry’s lassitude has led to a more sluggish physical erosion, but his ugliness is on display for all to see. The painting provides the means to escape the consequences of living a solely material life in an environment that remains nostalgically committed to metaphysics. It registers the consequences of Dorian’s sybaritic existence without offering judgment. Dorian fails to understand this, even when Harry bluntly describes the solely material world that surrounds them. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance. How grave you are! Don’t be so serious. What have you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul. (DG, p. 177) Although it might seem anachronistic to employ the term, for most of the narrative Dorian acts as a postmodern man. After his initial shock over the death of Sybil Vane, in which his impulse to act according to what he sees as society’s expectations is easily quashed by Lord Henry, he behaves as an animal, satisfying physical urges without qualm. Everything he experiences over the course of his life suggests that materiality is all there is to the world.

The Revised Reading The apparent clash in the novel that many critics have seen between conventional and radical reconfigured moral systems is in fact a false dichotomy. New Hedonism is not an ethical system, but rather the systematic rejection of such a possibility. It embraces the arbitrariness of the world through its privileging of experience. It proclaims that sensation is everything, leaving unsaid the fact that sensation is the only thing. Problems arise late in the narrative because Dorian shows nostalgia for the old moral condition. This produces psychological contradictions

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  115 that he cannot overcome. In the end, he appears to be destroyed not by New Hedonism but by his rebellion against the system that shapes it or, more precisely, by the void that surrounds it. At first glance, this assertion runs contrary to the novel’s conclusion. Dorian’s decision to attack the painting, because of its failure to respond to his efforts at moral reformation and the fatal consequences he endures because of that act, seems to refocus narrative perspective on a highly conventional view of morality. But, in fact, the events at the end of the narrative do the opposite. They make no endorsement of any metaphysical convictions. The picture has taken on the physical consequences of Dorian’s dissipation. When he attacks it, he attacks the object that has sustained his visible condition. The picture relinquishes its role and returns to its original form with the whole episode simply affirming the arbitrariness of human existence. In this it remains consistent to the ­narrative direction from the opening pages. What does this mean for one’s reading? Our judgment of the novel’s characters must change in light of an absence of morality. Readings that emphasize a particular philosophical disposition—from the moral universe to queer theory—have significance only to the extent that they are subservient to New Hedonism. The simple fact of my argument is that The Picture of Dorian Gray extends ideas that probably began even before with The Book of Job and stand out most overtly in the works of Samuel Beckett. We can find a great many invocations of various views of morality throughout the book’s narrative, but by its conclusion we have evidence that all of those ideas, at least in the world of the novel, have no significance whatsoever.

The Impact of Dorian Gray My point is simply that readers in 1890 who first encountered “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as a novella in Lippincott’s Magazine had every right to be shocked. Wilde’s narrative did not simply challenge the moral ethos of his age. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” dismissed it. Current readers may too quickly discount that shock as Victorian prudishness, but that is a simplistic reading that misunderstands the environment from which Wilde was writing. The success of his brand brought Wilde to a sense of invulnerability, and the exploration in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” of the consequences of amorality demonstrates this. As noted earlier, the public outcry that resulted after the novella appeared apparently caused Wilde to have second thoughts about what he could say in his writing. His confidence in his brand remained sufficiently strong to allow his personal behavior to become even more reckless than it had been. However, his writing took a very conservative turn in the domestic dramas he created.

116  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings It was not until The Importance of Being Earnest did Wilde again present an artistic work that resembled his brand, but he did not attempt the same direct confrontation that provoked so much outrage with the publication of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” While he introduced subversive ideas in his final completed play, he was careful to do so in an oblique fashion. In the next chapter, I will this illustrate the creative effect of this strategy by examining selected scenes in greater detail.

Notes 1 As noted earlier, after the harsh criticism to which some English reviewers subjected the novella version, Wilde made some changes in his narrative before publishing The Picture of Dorian Gray as a book. Clearly, he was already becoming aware that his ideas would not be accepted without question, and he seemed to feel the need to forestall further attacks. Nonetheless, as he asserted in the Preface that he wrote for the novel, the fundamental views of the novel did not change. For this reason and because the novel rather than the novella is the more widely studied, I have used it as the basis of my analysis. 2 I use the term radical to underscore Harry’s complete rejection of the immaterial and the communal and his denial of the right of any social institution to curb individual appetites or inclinations. 3 To clarify my sense of the term metaphysics, let me highlight morality as its key distinction from abstractions. Abstractions deal with non-finite concepts that have no moral implication, like mathematical computations. Metaphysical issues place use value as an inherent element of the concept under consideration. The general notion of sin goes beyond abstraction because a negative connotation adheres to it. 4 Other critics who have looked at post-Modernism in Wilde’s works have focused on manifestations of it that they perceive in his essays. However, I have not seen extended discussions of aspects of post-Modernism in his novel. See, for example, Daniel T. O’Hara’s “Prophetic Criticism: Oscar Wilde and His Postmodern Heirs.” Contemporary Literature 25, 2 (Spring 1984): pp. 250–259. Andres Hoefle’s “Oscar Wilde, or the prehistory of postmodern parody.” European Journal of English Studies 3.2 (1999): pp. 138–166. And Jonathan Kemp’s “The Importance of Being Postmodern: Oscar Wilde and the Untimely.” The Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 52.3 (2013). http://rupkatha.com/the-importance-ofbeing-postmodern-oscar-wilde-and-the-untimely. Accessed 9 January 2017. 5 Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 6 See, for example, the reviews of the novella version of The Picture of Dorian Gray collected in the Norton Critical Edition, pp. 345–384. For examples of the range of responses made by more recent critics, see San Juan Epifiano, Jr.’s The Art of Oscar Wilde. Christopher Nassaar’s Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Philip K. Cohen’s The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. Reginia Gagnier’s Idyls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986. Norbert Kohl’s Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Ed Cohen’s Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. Alan Sinfield. The Wilde Century:

The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Post-Modern Work  117 Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Jerusha McCormack. The Man Who Was Dorian Gray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 7 For me, this is the most problematic element in the novel. The spontaneity of the change goes unexplained. Indeed, it goes unexamined. No epistemological perspective offers a satisfactory integration of this extra-ordinary phenomenon into any interpretation. We as readers are left with the choice of simply accepting it or of ceasing to read the narrative. Like most others, I have with some reluctance accepted it.

10 A Close Reading of The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest premiered at the St. James’s Theatre in the West End of London on Valentine’s Day, Thursday, 14 February 1895. From that time to the present, it has posed complex interpretive challenges for directors, actors, audiences, and—once the play was published in 1899—for readers as well. The Importance of Being Earnest stands out as a product of the self-confident Wilde of the early 1890s, but it also reflects the caution that tempered his writing after he experienced harsh critical responses to the initial, novella length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. My comments come out of an awareness of the effect that those contrasting attitudes had on the play’s composition and from a sense of the impact that Wilde’s brand, in its complex late stage, continues to exert on our readings.1 The specific approach I am using grows out of ideas I developed in an earlier study that assessed how characters in various works by Wilde embody traits associated with the dandy. 2 I have long felt that Wilde understood the degree to which his success depended upon the kinds of provocative gestures—in print and in society—that drew immediate attention but that never quite reached the point of provoking condemnation. Studying him as a brand makes readers much more aware of the calculation and coordination behind each flamboyant act or statement, and it gives a deeper sense of the interpretive consequences of this strategy.

First Impressions From this brand perspective, one can see how the play’s subtle distinctions in attitude and behavior take us beyond predictable responses. For instance, most viewers or readers understand the opening scene—an interaction between Algernon Moncrieff and his butler Lane—as an introduction to Algy’s character and an orientation to the play’s central concerns. However, attentiveness to the clash of brands—as Algy and Lane each struggle for control of their discourse—provides a fuller comprehension. It highlights subtleties of personality and behavior that will shape the dynamics of many subsequent interactions.

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  119 It all begins in the sitting room of Algy’s flat, with Lane arranging the afternoon tea and the sound of Algernon playing the piano offstage. After the music ceases, Algy joins Lane, and the true performance commences. Their first few words suggest that the scene will unfold in a predictable, melodramatic fashion: as master of the house and Lane’s employer, Algy takes initial control of the dialogue. He sets the topic and endeavors to dominate the tone of the exchange. ALGERNON:  Did you hear what I was playing, LANE:  I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir. ALGERNON:  I’m sorry for that, for your sake.

Lane?

I don’t play accurately— anyone can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for life. LANE:  Yes, sir.  (TIoBE, p. 5) Since presentation always stands out as a distinguishing feature of any strong brand’s engagement with society, Algy’s behavior appears to establish the essential traits of an assertive and independent public persona. When he first appears before the audience, Algy’s flippant characterization of his piano playing underscores his desire to garner attention through his efforts, while simultaneously foregrounding his disregard for the standards that conventionally measure such presentations: “I don’t play accurately.” And he demonstrates what he takes as his cleverness by praising himself with what he takes as a witty pun: “As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte.”3 That heavyhanded wordplay runs counter to the attributes of a polished performer, and it provides the first suggestion that any interpretation of the scene based on the supposition of the primacy of Algy or of his brand will be insufficient. Recourse to the social context from which the play emerged gives one analytic guidance that is more precise. Wilde’s public persona had ­existed, indeed had thrived, because of its ability to move back and forth between the margins of society and the centers of its social institutions. The most successful brands, the ones that assume this oscillating ­approach to characterization, must be intensely and continuously aware of the subtle details that define and influence their immediate environment. The affected self-absorption that dominates Algy’s description of his playing suggests how little he understands anything outside himself, and his ingenuousness reveals a defect that is fatal to any aspirations for a dominant brand. Lane, on the other hand, maintains a much more complete awareness of the dynamics of his environment, and he carefully calibrates his responses to accommodate those conditions. Admittedly, one must

120  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings read astutely to see how completely he manages the exchange. His few i­nitial lines—“I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir” and the simple “Yes, sir”—in themselves seem little more than commonplace, even obsequious, responses. Nonetheless, they mark the beginning of his calculated maneuvering for advantage in the subtle linguistic contest about to ­unfold, and attentiveness to such signals gives us a fuller sense of what transpires. Like any strong brand, Lane shows dexterity in managing the contrasting and, in some cases, the conflicting elements shaping his world. Most significantly, he demonstrates the strength of mind necessary to sustain his dignity, tempered by a pragmatic resolve to do so without jeopardizing his employment. This duality of purpose informs his ­efforts to maintain an equilibrium between his feelings of self-respect and his awareness of economic realities. Lane knows the implicit but very real restrictions imposed upon the scope of a servant’s conversation with his master, yet he also understands the power of irony to push those ­constraints to their limits. The key moments of Lane’s presentation, a much more difficult and far more understated performance than Algy’s, begin to unfold through what seems to be a playful, if one-sided, verbal contest between Master and Servant: ALGERNON:  Oh!…

by the way, Lane. I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed. LANE:  Yes, sir; eight bottles and a pint. ALGERNON:  Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. LANE:  I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. ALGERNON:  Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? LANE:  I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person. ALGERNON:  (Languidly.) I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane. LANE:  No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.  (TIoBE, p. 6, author’s ellipses) At first glance, Algy’s remarks seem unambiguous. He is slightly bored and in search of some trivial topic that would amuse him. He first exercises

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  121 his wit, to the extent he has any, by a pompous observation that raises an implicit criticism of Lane’s management of the household accounts: “I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed.” Lane understands the game that is being played far better than Algy does, and he immediately establishes a measure of subtle control by having the temerity to respond to his employer’s inanity with a correction that establishes both the exact amount—“and a pint”—and asserts his unwillingness to be imposed upon. Algy is sufficiently aware of the drift of the conversation to make­ ­another effort at asserting dominance, through a feeble attempt at irony: “Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne?” A hasty reading would conclude that Lane’s reply merely continues the conversation along the lines that Algy has introduced. “I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.” In fact, Lane’s reply, a condescending deflection of a patronizing question, demonstrates who is truly in command of the situation. With a few well-chosen phrases, Lane asserts his pre-eminence both as a connoisseur of wines and as a keen judge of domestic situations. Algy, who at his core remains a not terribly clever Philistine, does not appear inclined to continue a discussion of the attributes of fine ­champagnes. Instead, he makes a verbal nod towards the alternative topic introduced in Lane’s remarks—“Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that.” The languid facetiousness of Algy’s statement ­suggests that he has neither the energy nor the wit to sustain his place in a contested discourse. Lane, on the other hand, is now in full control of the conversation, and he demonstrates, in the manner of a forceful brand, how a master of ennui offhandedly conveys a lack of concern for even the most stressful of domestic crises. By summing up his marriage as “a misunderstanding between myself and a young person,” Lane leaves unstated, though on consideration it seems patently obvious, the sort of “misunderstanding” that leads to a wedding. Further, he at once intensifies and dismisses the seriousness of his situation by choosing not to take the trouble to clarify whether or not he has remained married. Algy, giving up any attempt at cleverness, seeks to end the discussion with dismissive rudeness. “I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.” However, Lane, the individual truly aware of what one must do to sustain an impressive public persona, refuses to relinquish his command of the moment. Instead, he has the last and wittiest pronouncement. He establishes the indisputability of his position of authority by a far more dismissive riposte, one that reveals features of a complex personality shaped by a ruthless indifference to others: “it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.”

122  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings

Subversions of Types The interpretation I have just outlined relies on assumptions about brands to offer a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest that is resistant to the expectations imposed on conventional nineteenth-century English melodrama. My approach sees Wilde recasting standard roles in comedies of manners in an unexpected and sophisticated fashion. Algernon is not the urbane bon vivant—a character familiar on stage since the Restoration Comedies of Wycherley and Congreve—seen as adrift in a society that bores him until he encounters the plot of the comedy to engage his interest and abilities. Nor is he merely the bumbling, dim-witted master under the thumb of his benignly tyrannical servant, like the ménage encountered in the P.G. Wodehouse stories, featuring Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. Rather, Algy is someone who has embraced and then cultivated the brand of a man-child. He has become a figure accustomed to privilege and deeply pleased with himself, yet he feels no concern, except in the most superficial fashion, about how the world around him functions. At the same time, while he may not be terribly intelligent, branding makes us aware that his type is more complex than one expects to see in light comedy. Thus, understanding him and the consequences of his actions requires more than a programmatic approach that applies critical commonplaces to an interpretation of his nature. Lane, too, assumes a complexity well beyond the typical comedic servant, as depicted by Molière or Shakespeare. Lane neither cringes nor plots. He shows no interest in flattering or manipulating his master, and might be said to show no real interest in his master, period. Rather, he demonstrates a full understanding of the circumscribed world in which he must exist, and he asserts the will to retain his independence and dignity within those limitations. The dynamics of the exchange between Algernon and Lane highlight their uniqueness as each strives against theatrical types. Something special is going on in their interactions, and a sensitivity to public personae will attune us to subtle possibilities we might otherwise miss. It will also orient us toward the best way to read similar scenes in which c­ ompetition between rival brands, sometimes overt and in other instances covert, will drive the action of the play.

Brand Importance to Characters in the Play We quickly can see the value of such a view when we are given a much more comprehensive display of a formidable public persona as Jack seeks Lady Bracknell’s permission to marry her daughter, Gwendolen. Here, as in the opening scene, someone with a fully formed brand confronts another character whose communal self has not progressed beyond its

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  123 inchoate stage. The disparity of brands does more than erase any presumption of social equality between Lady Bracknell and the others. It highlights the radically different types that, thanks to branding, can emerge and flourish within a seemingly highly prescriptive environment. Lady Bracknell’s public persona possesses the same strong features of Lane’s without any of the inhibiting social or economic restraints. Jack, on the other hand, has no more sense than does Algy, and feels demonstrably insecure in his dealings with a prospective mother-in-law. Thus, Lady Bracknell can dominate with direct assaults while Lane has to settle for controlling obliquely. Her conversation with Jack rapidly unfolds as a contest in which the stakes are considerably higher than they were in the struggle between Algernon and Lane. At the same time, it is one in which the outcome never stands in doubt. Gwendolen, another public persona still in its formative stages, precipitates events when she tells her mother that she has become engaged to Jack. Lady Bracknell immediately takes command of the situation, dispelling any ambiguity about how matters will be resolved. Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone. When you do become engaged to someone, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself. (TIoBE, p. 16, author’s ellipses) That opening, despite its bluntness, merely hints at the conjunction of public attitudes and Lady Bracknell’s dominant nature. It is only subsequently, over the course of her interrogating Jack, that we come to see the full force of Lady Bracknell’s brand. Her first question sets the tone for the exchange, and it calls to mind the tension between concepts of seriousness and triviality that anchor the subtitle of Wilde’s drama (“A trivial play for serious people”): LADY BRACKNELL:  Do you smoke? JACK:  Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. LADY BRACKNELL:  I am glad to hear it.

A man should always have an

occupation of some kind. 

(TIoBE, p. 17)

Adopting an assertiveness that can go unregistered only by someone as fatuous as Jack, Lady Bracknell has made clear that she expects a ­son-in-law not simply to be idle but, more to the point, to remain inconsequential. By doing so in a fashion that appears to compliment Jack in a ridiculous manner, Lady Bracknell shows us just how confident she is in

124  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings her ability to manage matters, and to do so at whatever level of rudeness she chooses to impose. As the exchange continues, Lady Bracknell also demonstrates her belief in a presumptive right to discover the nature of the man who wishes to marry her daughter and to shape it actively. To this end, she turns her inquiries to Jack’s mind with a condescending determination that leaves little doubt of her intentions: LADY BRACKNELL:  I have always been of opinion that a man who desires

to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know? JACK:  (After some hesitation.) I know nothing, Lady Bracknell. LADY BRACKNELL:  I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.  (TIoBE, p. 17) While acknowledging the necessity of a son-in-law, Lady Bracknell is making clear the contempt that she feels for any man with the impudence to wish to take on that role. True enough, she sometimes relies on heavy-handed irony to gild her views, to some small degree, with circumspection, but this does not come out of any inclination towards caution. Rather, it shows her presumption that elaboration or any other form of explanation would be unnecessary and to some degree unseemly. For instance, the public persona that Lady Bracknell has cultivated would never be so crude as to say that she wishes her daughter to marry someone stupid, though the pragmatist in her knows that such a union will be easiest for her, and ultimately for Gwendolen, to manage. Rather, in spite of her directness in coming out in favor of “natural ignorance,” she still embraces the both/and attitude essential to a complex public persona. Saying the thing that most would consider preposterous, yet putting it in a perfectly conventional construction lies at the heart of her ability to maintain a dominant position in society. In the process, she makes her views known with hyperbolic exuberance, tempered only by a keen sense of her brand, worthy of the most self-confident orator. As the scene goes on, Jack’s painful inability to match wits with his prospective mother-in-law emerges as unquestionably evident. Lady Bracknell probes for information about Jack’s homes, his financial condition, and his politics, and with some seeming success he demonstrates his conventional desirability as a son-in-law. In fact, Jack, at best an emerging public persona, little realizes and never acknowledges the degree to which he is being redefined by Lady Bracknell’s mode of interrogation. This transformative scheme stands as a key factor in understanding the scene. Lady Bracknell, acting on the inclinations of her brand, seeks to reshape the world around her to suit her own intentions. Just as Lane

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  125 read the environment and manipulated the action far more deftly than did Algy in their exchange at the opening of the play, Lady Bracknell has a much fuller, much more complex, sense of how to control matters than does Jack. Early on in the exchange, she shows that she understands the importance of molding a potential husband for Gwendolen into a character who will suit the needs of both mother and daughter, and their ostensive interview is in fact a compressed lesson on how to be her son-in-law.

The Vital Importance of Identity Of course, like any pre-eminent social force that enjoys enduring success, Lady Bracknell has a very sophisticated sense of the confines laid down by the milieu that she chooses to inhabit. She knows full well how far to take her resistance to those conventional boundaries, and she will not allow her actions to go beyond the limits of society’s tolerance. The telling moment in their discourse occurs when she turns to a line of questioning that she categorizes as “minor matters.” Given what we know about a strong brand’s approach to exercising power, this calculated phrase underscores the importance of her inquiries: LADY BRACKNELL:  Now to minor matters. Are your parents living? JACK:  I have lost both my parents. LADY BRACKNELL:  Both?… To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing may



be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy? (TIoBE, p. 18, author’s ellipses)

Origins lie at the center of the way public personae are recognized, s­ ustained, and even protected, particularly in Lady Bracknell’s ­environment. The cynical inversion of popular clichés—“the purple of commerce” and rising “from the ranks of the aristocracy”—shows at once her acknowledgment of tradition while asserting her confidence in being able to apply it as she chooses. The last point is telling. The play hints at the modest social background from which she emerged, so for Lady Bracknell, as for any public presence, the management of social antecedents is tremendously important.4 Lady Bracknell’s displeasure with Jack’s ambiguous response makes clear the significance of identity in giving legitimacy to any social transaction. From that point onward, subtlety disappears, and the high stakes of the ongoing negotiations come to the foreground. Lady Bracknell’s world can accept indolence, stupidity, and a range of other vices. What it cannot compass is lineal indeterminacy.

126  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings To that end, Lady Bracknell presses for a clarification of origins. Jack, in a bit of a panic, though clearly not fully grasping either the source or the extent of Lady Bracknell’s concern, attempts to redeem the situation by offering whatever details he has of his roots, revealing that he is a foundling, discovered in a valise in a cloak-room at Victoria Station. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort. (TIoBE, p. 19) Lady Bracknell’s response makes it clear to the audience, if not to Jack, both her sense of the seriousness of the situation and her idiosyncratic views on European history. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognized position in good society. (TIoBE, p. 19) In the final lines of the scene, the gap in social consciousness between the public personae of Jack and of Lady Bracknell becomes stunningly clear. Jack, in his naiveté, shows the he has no real sense of the conventions of the milieu that he presumes to inhabit. Grasping at his faith in a utilitarian world, he offers to produce the handbag as concrete proof of his origins. Lady Bracknell, with her infinitely more complex understanding of their environment, rejects the offer peremptorily. At the same time, keeping true to her public persona, she cannot do so without a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish. “You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing!” (TIoBE, p. 20). Throughout, this scene underscores the profound usefulness of bringing a sense of Wilde’s brand to the assessment of his plot and characters through close reading. Without mindfulness of the particular traits of his public persona and awareness of how these features shaped his representations of figures throughout the play, one might easily dismiss

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  127 Lady Bracknell as simply a snob, Lane as little more than a servile minor ­character, and Jack and Algy as models of charming, vacuous young men. However, with the dynamics of Wilde’s brand in mind, one comes to see that there is much more, or in some instances much less, to various characters than thematic, archetypal, or ideological approaches will yield.

Contextualizing the Play Invoking Wilde’s brand, however, does more that give one a clearer sense of individual characterization in The Importance of Being Earnest. It makes more apparent the struggles within the play for Darwinian preeminence. The insistent efforts of every character to bring his or her brand to the foreground reflects not simply the urge to gain renown but the need to assert the primacy of their natures in an environment where nothing beyond material ascendency is valued. As with The Picture of Dorian Gray—though represented in a much more benign fashion—­ social injunctions and physical restraints stand as the only forces able to exert any influence on human action. Moral values never arise as a topic of discussion, and they certainly are given no consideration as benchmarks for shaping behavior. Appearance in the form of branding is all that matters. The first exchange between Jack and Algy shows branding at an early stage, more aspirational than established. Their limitations make them evenly matched, and so they never feel the need to go beyond performative facetiousness as they seek to assert their natures. JACK:  (Pulling

off his gloves.) When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring. ALGERNON:  And who are the people you amuse? JACK:  (Airly.) Oh, neighbours, neighbours. ALGERNON:  Got nice neighbours in your part of Shropshire? JACK:  Perfectly horrid! Never speak to one of them. ALGERNON:  How immensely you must amuse them!  (TIoBE, p. 7) Even with brand immaturity, Jack and Algy have a great deal to recommend them as comic leads. They can be witty, particularly at the expense of others not present, but each lacks the dexterity and the aggressiveness of a dominant public persona. Jack and Algy are well versed in preening, but they take no real steps to distinguish themselves. They are domesticated versions of more aggressive brands, like those of Lane and Lady Bracknell, so their exchanges never rise above the level of banter. Nonetheless, they are striving to create distinctive personalities that operate outside conventional social restraints. However, rather than

128  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings achieving this by making their existing personae more complex, both men bring alternative public figures into sporadic existence: Jack has created a brother in town named Ernest who repeatedly “gets into the most dreadful scrapes,” and Algernon has fashioned a sick friend, Bunbury, whom he must often leave London to attend. They invoke these personae whenever they feel the need to escape their current brand and to adopt a pose which allows greater freedom of action. For some readers and viewers, these fictitious figures function simply as an extension of the harmless silliness that they see in both Jack and Algy. However, that explanation is hardly sufficient to explain fully the motivations behind of their actions. As Algy tells Jack, in summing up their discussion of alternative brands, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!” (TIoBE, p. 10). That remark bears further examination. Jack and Algy use fictitious characters to escape public duties being imposed upon them. These alternatives give both men options for indulging themselves without having to face the consequences of their conduct. This behavior may well be seen as a farcical rendition of the rejection of societal restraints. ­Nonetheless, it echoes Dorian Gray’s situation discussed in the previous chapter, and the consequences of the opportunity to act outside conventions carry the same force. As with Dorian’s world, for the society inhabited by Jack and Algy, brand is more important than principles. When their alternative, more subversive personae come to light, no one questions either young man regarding how he behaves outside the social world that defines him. Rather, whatever displeasure society expresses comes from the inconsistencies resulting from overlapping public personae. Morality is not an issue. Creating personal brands that compete with, rather than evolve from, the ones previously established produces the real upheaval. Gwendolen Farifax and Cecily Cardew have developed even more ­cautious approaches to the branding process. Unlike Jack and Algy, the two young women maintain safe distances from the brands that they bring into existence, conceiving of them as personae projected onto other individuals. At the same time, they are determined to derive the benefits they believe will accrue when these brands perform for them. Gwendolen has agreed to marry Jack on the strength of the traits of the brand that she associates with his given name, Ernest. Equally, she rejects other names because of the features of their brands. “Jack is a notorious domesticity for John. And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John…. The only really safe name is Ernest” (TIoBE, p. 15). Cecily has inherited the name Ernest, Jack’s putative younger brother, from the tales related by her uncle. She goes on to create an epistolary version of the brand. Ignoring her uncle’s discrete intimations of Ernest’s dissolution, she elaborates, exaggerates, and configures her

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  129 sense of Ernest to create in her imagination a brand that conforms to her romantic tastes. This too gives her a sense of assurance because of an implicit faith in the branding process, as she very neatly echoes Gwendolen’s sentiments. “There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest” (TIoBE, p. 37). As with Jack and Algy, their behavior emerges as less capricious and far more calculated than it initially seems when put in the context of branding. Both women are committed to a brand rather than to a person. Each expresses an unwillingness to marry an individual who cannot guarantee the possession of the public persona that she believes is assured by the name Ernest. Conversely, they are won over to Jack and Algy when the two men reveal plans to be christened as Ernest. In the minds of the women neither nature nor nurture creates the individual. Branding does. When each prospective husband has embraced the public personae that the women have created, each man has become that brand.

Identity Sous Rature The interconnection of branding and characters’ identities is a concept that is key to grasping the play’s far more cynical sense of human nature than its outward frivolity suggests, although the resolution of the marriage plot comes with a head-spinning rapidness that is easy to dismiss as artificial. I think it makes more sense to see the conclusion as Lady Bracknell does: accepting the legitimacy of the unified public persona that comes into existence once Jack and Algy become Ernest. Algy too has evolved into a new, unified brand—the younger brother—though Cecily’s embracing it without the consequent change of name might seem, without recourse to branding, to be a flaw in the plot. However, Jack’s final words give readers concerned with such details a means to resolve matters. “I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest” (TIoBE, p. 59). For literary critics, this line has long been seen as problematic. A theater audience could not be expected to discern the Ernest/Earnest difference simply from what it hears, and it certainly could not intuit that what he says mimics the title by the script’s capitalizing the initial letters of three of the play’s last four words. While the simple explanation is to put it all down to Wilde’s inside joke, that does the conclusion an injustice. The lines in fact encapsulate the dynamics of social interaction that have driven plot and characterization throughout the play, and, by the way, validate Cecily’s pragmatic adoption of what becomes the accepted order of branding. The word “Earnest” implies dedication or commitment, but it does not synonymously invoke honesty or sincerity. “Being earnest” involves a commitment to act with a singleness of purpose, something any successful brand must follow. The final lines, read with

130  Applying Brand Concepts to Close Readings Wilde’s brand in mind, do not suggest a reformation of Jack Worthing or an intention to embrace a new given name. They declare rather the maturation of Jack’s brand through a new understanding of the singular importance of committing to a public persona. Algy, Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen, and Cecily have all done that as well. Calling the ending artificial—meaning mechanistic—gives the wrong construction to what has transpired. The Importance of Being Earnest demonstrates the integral role of public personae in the s­ ociety that it represents and has made legitimate any behavior or attitude founded on the acceptance of evolving brands. One can find numerous other opportunities in the remainder of the play for applying the template of Wilde’s sense of brand to his characters and themes. Nonetheless, the passages examined here amply illustrate the keys to successful illumination of the piercing social commentary that goes on beneath the flippancy of the play’s dialogue. It is not enough to linger over every line and to parse the meaning of every word. That only leads to digressive confusion. Rather, the best close readings follow a clear set of assumptions, and balance them with the suppleness of Wilde’s dialogue to come up with a clear and convincing response to the play.

Final Remarks Authorial branding did not begin or end with Oscar Wilde. He may have been one of its foremost practitioners, but over centuries of writing a great many authors self-consciously tailored their public personae to gain readership, and in turn the expectations created by such brands have informed their creative output. Even those who did not deliberate fabricate a persona had their writings and interpretations of that work shaped by the way the public saw them. Pursuing that perspective is an important part of any effort to understand an author’s writing fully. Identifying an author’s brand will not exhaust all other approaches to reading, nor will it even eliminate some epistemologies while privileging others. Rather, it enhances and extends what we already know. In the appendix that follows this study, I have noted a number of different approaches to reading Wilde’s canon, and I have suggested how they can be enhanced not simply a greater sense of Wilde’s work but a greater enjoyment of it. I hope others may find this useful not only for reading Oscar Wilde but for any number of other authors whose writings engage their interest.

Notes 1 A number of critics have explored general issues relating to the context from which the play emerged. Representative examples are collected in the ­Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Raby

A Close Reading of  The Importance of Being Earnest  131 has written a useful account of the play’s composition. See “A Genesis of the Play,” in, pp. 183–195. Regina Gagnier has discussed Wilde’s compositional aims in “Creating the Audience,” pp. 85–93 and Joseph Donohue responded to Gagnier in his essay “Wilde and the Idea of a Theater,” pp. 78–85. 2 The Importance of Being Earnest, pp. 166–182. 3 The forte piano, originating in the eighteenth century, was a forerunner of the modern grand piano. Algy’s feeble pun makes sentiment his strength and his instrument. 4 In a memorable West End performance of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1993, Maggie Smith underscored this tension by playing Lady Bracknell as herself a parvenu.

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Appendix A Selected Survey of Critical Approaches to Wilde’s Writing

Initial Critical Responses For well over half of the twentieth century, Wilde’s brand was so strongly embedded in the public consciousness that his written work received very little attention. Indeed, within a short time of his death, a cottage ­industry of Wilde biographies and anecdotal references in the memoirs of others sprang up.1 The accuracy of most has proven to be tenuous at best, and, in general, they lack any scholarly apparatus that would enable an independent judgment of their veracity. Nonetheless, they answered a strong demand, and still stand as a good measure of how the Wilde brand fared, particularly in the years immediately following his death. One of the earliest of such works was Robert Sherard’s Oscar Wilde: the Story of an Unhappy Friendship. This was the first of over a half dozen books by Sherard dealing with Wilde from the perspective of a loyal, if perhaps somewhat naïve, friend. 2 In these works Sherard repeatedly presents an unapologetic defense of a man whom he deeply respected and admired, focusing in particular on time that they spent in Paris. As with other biographies, Sherard’s work has been criticized as presenting only a partial and biased view of Wilde. Nonetheless, his approach and the reaction of others to it show the strength and appeal of the Wilde brand even after the author’s death. The series of recollections/self-justifications written by Lord Alfred Douglas gives perhaps the best indication of how radically various stages of that brand, particularly the later ones, could be transformed when it was presented by others with agendas of their own. Ostensively aimed at defending Wilde’s reputation, Douglas’s books offer more self-­justification than anything else. The often mercurial oscillations in perspective, the relentless self-justifications, and the incessant rationalizations stand in sharp contrast to Wilde’s pointed criticism of Douglas that run through De Profundis.3 As in other examples cited here, the ­objectivity of Douglas’s recollections, or of Wilde’s for that matter, is less important than the way his continued assertions emphasize that Douglas felt, even forty years after the fact, the power of the Wilde brand and did not hesitate to attempt to modify it.

134  Appendix Frank Harris’s problematic biography, like his volatile relationship with Wilde, bears mention but defies categorization. He first published it in 1916. It was revised two years later to include a twenty-page recollection by George Bernard Shaw. And the edition (1930) cited here has a “full and final confession” attributed to Lord Alfred Douglas.4 As with Harris’ autobiography the work is quite entertaining with the passages of fact and those of fiction impossible to discern or distinguish. Nonetheless, its notoriety sustained elements of the late iterations of Wilde’s brand in the public consciousness during a period when his work had a much smaller readership than is currently the case. (The Lewis and Smith study, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, stands as an important academic exception to this trend.) Hesketh Pearson produced one of the most charming collections of anecdotes from Wilde’s life.5 Pearson was born in 1887, a year after Wilde’s younger son Vyvyan. He was an uncritical recorder of the impressions of a number of individuals who knew Wilde and who were still alive for him to interview when he wrote his book. That causes the work to be shaped by the imperfect recollections and unvoiced agendas of many of those whom he consulted. Nonetheless, his book gives one a very good sense of the impression that Wilde made on a range of people who knew him and of the diverse effects that Wilde brand made on those exposed to it. After the Pearson biography, interest in Wilde flagged until 1968 when Phillipe Jullian’s Oscar Wilde changed the approach to some degree by linking portions of Wilde’s art to certain aspects of his brand. On b ­ alance, however, the work remained a straightforward account of Wilde’s life. That was followed seven years later by another study, ­focusing almost exclusively on the various phases of the brand over the art produced at the same time. It was written by H. Montgomery Hyde, who had in 1948 presented an account and edited transcripts from the Queensberry trials.6 Both authors were free of the intimate links to Wilde that shaped earlier accounts, and they offered lucid overviews of Wilde’s world. Neither claimed to offer a rigorous scholarly examination, but they did restore a sense of balance to a general understanding of Wilde’s life if not to his writings. Over the next decade a number of short lives written by academics appeared.7 While many of these efforts did not attempt detailed criticism of Wilde’s writing, they did begin to acknowledge its existence. In 1987, Richard Ellmann published his study of Wilde’s life. Because of Ellmann’s notoriety for his biography of James Joyce, his examination of Wilde gained immediate renown. Scholars have subsequently come to questions some of Ellmann’s conclusions in both works.8 Nonetheless, Ellmann’s work overall was a serious, traditional academic effort, pulling together many of the details of Wilde’s life, in most instances gleaned from a range of previously published sources. However, that has not prevented some subsequent scholars from using some of the dubious recollections and reckless speculation to produce to unjustified conclusions about the life and brand of Oscar Wilde.9

Appendix  135

A Shift to Interpretive Emphasis By the middle of the twentieth century, literary criticism generally began to move away from a concern with authors’ lives, and in short order that inclination took root in Wilde studies. Norbert Kohl identifies Epifano San Juan’s study, The Art of Oscar Wilde, as the first full-length approach that focused on close readings across the canon, while showing little interest in Wilde’s life.10 Other authors proved reluctant to give up any engagement with Wilde’s life when they looked at his writings. However, their interest was selective, using anecdotes that favored a particular approach rather than considering the full social context from which the writings emerged. A number of works in the decade of the 1970s followed that pattern. Christopher Nassaar’s Into the Demon Universe, in emphasizing the fin de siècle as a period of self-indulgence, interprets Wilde’s canon as the works of an author offering “an interpretation of decadence.” To insure no confusion about his own position, Nassaar characterized his work as “a guide through the dark and fascinating maze of the 1890s.”11 Rodney Sherwin did not ignore the events of Wilde’s life, but did endeavor to distance the writing from the turmoil created by the Queensberry trials. Rejecting what he called “the psycho-sexual approach,” Shewan saw Wilde’s work as an examination of self with the writings an expression of the author’s emotional and psychological life.12 J.E. Chamberlin’s study, Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour, articulated a perspective midway between Nassaar and Shewan. He endeavored to give a broad view of the extra-textual environment from which Wilde’s writing emerged, and attempted to avoid sensationalism by setting Wilde’s aesthetic in relation to his age.13 Phillip Cohen’s The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, the final work of this nature that appeared in the decade of the 1970s, offered a Manichean examination, seeing Wilde’s writings as expressions of struggles between good and evil.14 Though they receive little attention now, the works of the 1970s articulated agendas for study that remain relevant today. Coming at a time when scholarly efforts had rarely gone beyond Wilde’s life, these thematically grounded inquires raised important questions and focused a great deal of attention back on the written word while acknowledging the importance of remaining aware of key details in Wilde’s life. At the same time, their emphases on understanding the canon from a dominant single perspective inevitably ignored a great deal of other complex features.

Polemical Readings For a good portion of the 1980s Wilde studies consisted of thematic readings that offer interpretations grounded on the dominant social attitudes of the period. They varied from those of the previous decade only

136  Appendix in their tendencies to look at individual works rather than to examine the entire corpus. However, near the end of the decade a new critical trend emerged. It advocated a more detailed concern with ­Wilde’s public persona, but it did so from a highly polemic point of view, using Wilde’s life and work as evidence of the validity of broader social assertions. As Queer Theory and Gender Studies gained increasing prominence across humanist disciplines, some critics saw Wilde’s canon as offering ample instances for applying such approaches. Ed Cohen proclaimed this shift in emphasis in his 1987 PMLA essay, “Writing Gone Wilde,” expanded six years later to a book-length study, Talk on the Wilde Side.15 Others followed Cohen’s line of inquiry. They produced a great many useful insights, but, like their predecessors, they were too specialized to take into account fully how various stages of the brand shaped different phases of Wilde’s writing.16 The drawbacks of such methods were examined when, in response to what Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small have called the master-narrative of the gay Wilde, other critics challenged this emphasis as too narrow and over-determined.17 In fact, in many approaches whose central aim was to forward ­particular social agendas often gave disproportionate emphasis to selected elements of his writing. One sees this apparent in an approach that examined the impact of Irish exile and Irish Nationalism on ­Wilde’s writing.18 Certainly, his Irishness merits attention along with the other elements mentioned as ongoing influences of his consciousness. ­However, none provides a consistent or sufficient perspective for understanding all of his writings.

Amalgamation Instead of Exclusion Alternately, with a growing interest in Cultural Studies, it followed logically that readers would turn to fuller considerations of the world in which Wilde existed to come to a better understanding of him and his writing. This approach has provided important grounding for a range of methodologies, but its breadth raises problems as well. While interpretations founded on Cultural Studies greatly enhance our broad understanding of the milieu in which Wilde found himself, they do not necessarily give a clear idea of the all of the elements in this environment to which he was most drawn or how that attraction shaped different stages of his creativity. This study addresses that question of specific effect by exploring the creative repercussions of the reciprocal relationship between Wilde and society. It also focuses attention on the evolutionary nature of Wilde and of his writing. Linking readings to the development of the Wilde brand provides important insights into the creative process that can enhance a wide range of approaches to his canon.

Appendix  137

Notes 1 Norbert Kohl, in his Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, has made a careful study of a century of responses to Wilde and gives a good overview of the way biographical criticism shaped many responses. See especially, pp. 1–9. 2 For a representative sampling, see Robert Sherard. Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship. 1905; New York: Haskett House, 1970. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Laurie, 1906. The Real Oscar Wilde. London: Laurie [1915]. Oscar Wilde: Twice Defended from André Gide’s Wicked Lies and Frank Harris’s Cruel Libels. Chicago: Argus, 1934. Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde. London: Laurie, 1937. For these and other citations in this chapter I have relied on E.K. Mikhail’s excellent work, Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. 3 Lord Alfred Douglas. Oscar Wilde and Myself. London: Long, 1914. The ­Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas. London: Martin Secker, 1929. Without Apology. London: Richards, 1938. Summing Up. London: ­Duckworth, 1940. 4 Frank Harris. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. Garden City, New York: Star Books, 1930. 5 Hesketh Pearson. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946. Pearson’s biography, though written over seventy years ago, remains a solid effort, though one admittedly still ill at ease with Wilde’s homosexuality. It consequence he does at times adopt the tone of an apologist. 6 Philippe Jullian. Oscar Wilde. Trans. Violet Windham. New York: Viking Press, 1969. H. Montgomery Hyde. Oscar Wilde: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975. And The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, Limited, 1948. 7 See Kohl, p. 414, for bibliographical information on them. 8 For a comment on this in Ellmann, see “Ellmann and Success.” In Revaluing and Re-evaluating Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde: An Assessment Commissioned by The Oscholars to Mark the Twentieth Anniversary of the Publication. Ed. Michèle Mendolssohn. www.oscholars.com/Ellmann/Ellmann. htm#MPG. 9 See, for example, Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 10 Epifanio San Juan. The Art of Oscar Wilde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. See also Kohl, pp. 9–10. 11 Christopher Nassaar. Into the Demon Universe: a Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. 12 Rodney Shewan. Oscar Wilde: Art & Egotism. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977, p. 1. 13 J.E. Chamberlin. Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde. New York: Seabury Press, 1977. 14 Phillip Cohen. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. 15 Ed Cohen. “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation.” PMLA 102. 5 (October 1987): pp. 801–813. Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1993.

138  Appendix 16 For an overview of queer approaches from that period, see Roger Luckhurst’s review essay, “Queer Theory (and Oscar Wilde).” Journal of Gender Studies 4.3 (1995): pp. 333–340. 17 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde’s Profession, pp. 2–8. Guy and Small also question the efficacy of nationalist and cultural context ­readings as well. 18 Davis Coakley. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House, 1994. Richard Pine. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995. Jerusha McCormack (ed.). Wilde the Irishman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

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142  Works Cited Nassaar, Christopher. Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of ­Oscar Wilde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Nelson, Walter W. Oscar Wilde and the Drama Critics: A Study in Victorian Theatre. Lund: Bloms Boktryckeri AB, 1989. Newsome, David. The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Noon, William T. Joyce and Aquinas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. O’Hara, Daniel T. “Prophetic Criticism: Oscar Wilde and His Postmodern Heirs.” Contemporary Literature 25.2 (Summer 1984): 250–259. Parker, Mark Louis. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pearce, Matt. The Los Angeles Times, online version. 27 January 2014: www.­ latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-marlboro-men-20140127-story.html. Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Peters, Lisa N. James McNeill Whistler. New York: Smithmark, 1996. Peters, Tom. “The Brand Called You.” Fast Company. August/September 1997. www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you. Pine, Richard. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985. Powell, Kerry. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1990. Robertson, W. Graham. Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945. Rogers, Nigel. The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma. London: Bene Factum, 2012. Rose, David. Oscar Wilde’s Elegant Republic: Transformation and Fantasy in Fin de Siècle Paris. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. San Juan, Epifiano. The Art of Oscar Wilde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Schmidgall, Gary. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. New York: Dutton, 1994. Sherard, Robert. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Laurie, 1906. . The Real Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1915. . Oscar Wilde: Twice Defended from André Gide’s Wicked Lies and Frank Harris’s Cruel Libels. Chicago: Argus, 1934. . Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde. London: Laurie, 1937. . Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship. 1905; New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970. Shewan, Rodney. Oscar Wilde: Art & Egotism. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977. Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Smith, Philip E. and Michael Helfand. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A  Portrait of Mind in the Making. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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Index

Adelphi Theatre 27 aesthetics 40, 59n5, 63–64, 69, 83–85, 99 Alcott, Luisa May 28 Alexander the Great 5 Alexander II 55 Anderson, Mary 55–56 Aristotle 74 Arnold, Matthew 27 Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1 65; see also Whistler’s Mother “art for art’s sake” 26, 61, 67, 70 The Art Institute of Chicago x Austen, Jane 6 Balzac, Honoré de 72 Baudelaire, Charles 23 Beardsley, Aubrey 8, 23 Beckett, Samuel 6, 106–107, 115; Waiting for Godot 106–107, 115 Beerbohm, Max 8, 9n6, 23, 26 Benson, Sir Frank 17, 21n9 Bentham, Jeremy 72 Bernhardt, Sarah 8, 24–26, 55 Bloxam, Jack 43; “The Priest and the Acolyte” 43 blue china 8, 18, 42 The Book of Job 115 Bosie see Lord Alfred Douglas brand/branding as a process 1–14, 15–21, 22–26, 32–35, 39–45, 60–62, 70–71, 115–130, 133–136 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 53 Brummell, George Bryan “Beau” 5, 9n6 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 5; Pelham 5 Byron, Lord George Gordon 52 Carlyle, Thomas 5, 10n10; “The Dandiacal Body” 5; Sartor Resartus 5

Carson, Edward 43–44 Catholic Church xi Catholicism xi, 19, 52 Caesar, Julius 4; The Gallic Wars 4 C.3.3 44; see also Oscar Wilde Chamberlin, J.E. 135, 137n13 Chaucer, Geoffrey 5 Clapham Junction 44 Clarke, Sir Edward 43 Cleveland Street Scandal 91, 99n3 close reading 101–116 Cohen, Ed 136, 137n15 Cohen, Philip K. 135, 137n14 Constantine 4 Cook, Keningdale 51; Dublin University Magazine 51 Court and Society Review 61 Daily Chronicle 82 dandies/dandyism 4–8, 9n6, 70, 95–96, 118 Dante 6, 52 Darwin, Charles 127 Derrida, Jacques 7, 104, 116n5 Dickens, Charles 22, 27 Disraeli, Benjamin 5, 22; Vivian Grey 5 Douglas, Lord Alfred 14, 42, 45, 91–96, 133–134 Doyle, Arthur Conan 36, 38n8, 86n2; The Sign of Four 36 D’Oyly Carte, Richard 27 Dramatic Review 57, 67 Dublin University Magazine see Keningdale Cook Einstein, Albert 72 Ellmann, Richard 18, 20n4, 21n5, 21n12, 21n14, 30n7, 31n11, 31n16, 46n9, 46n10, 51, 58n3, 58n4, 59n12, 75n6, 87n5, 134, 137n8

146 Index Fish, Arthur 36, 38n4, 38n5 Forbes-Robertson, Norman 29 Fortnightly Review 61, 69, 83 Fraser’s Magazine 5, 10n9 Gagnier, Regenia 20, 76n14, 116n6, 131n1 gender studies 136, 138n16 Gide, Andre 14, 20n1, 137n2 Gilbert, W.S. and Arthur Sullivan 27, 40, 81; Patience 27, 40 Gladstone, William 19–20 green carnation 8, 41, 48 Grosvenor Gallery 51 Guy, Josephine M. 75n1, 75n4, 75n12, 86n3, 136, 138n17 Haggard, Ryder 72 Harding, Reginald 19 Harper’s Weekly 35, 38n4 Harris, Frank 21n14, 25, 30n10, 134, 137n2, 137n4 Hawthorne, Julian 28 Heidegger, Martin 7 heteroerotic 8 Holland, Cyril 37 Holland, Merlin 11n16, 20n1, 31n13, 31n18, 38n2, 92, 99n6 Holland, Vyvyan 37, 92, 134 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 28 Homer 6; Odyssey 6 homoerotic 8, 107, 137n15 homosexuality 43, 137n5 Houghton, Walter E. 57, 59n13 Hunter-Blair, David 18, 21n10, 52 Hurlbert, William Henry 28 Hyde, H. Montgomery 46n4, 46n5, 46n6, 7, 8, 93n3, 134, 138n6 identity 8–9, 15–16, 19–20, 50, 102, 125–127, 129–130 Ireland 15–17, 87n1, 136, 138n18 Irishness xi, 8, 15–17, 28, 37, 86n1, 107, 136 James, Henry 71 James, Jesse 29 Joyce, James xi, 21n14, 86n1, 100n1, 102, 134 Jullian, Philippe 134, 137n6 Keats, John 52 Khayyam, Omar 52

Klancher, John P. 4, 10n8 Kohl, Norbert 117n6, 135, 137n1, 137n7, 137n10 Lady Gaga 6 Langtry, Lily 8, 24, 61 Leverson, Ada 24, 91, 99n4 Lewis, Lloyd 21n8, 27, 31n17, 31n18, 31n21, 134 Lippincott’s Magazine 37, 40, 78, 115 Lonsdale, Lady Constance 24 Louis XIV 4 Macmillan, George 19 Macmillan publishing house 19 Magdalen College, Oxford 17, 51 Mahaffy, John Pentland 51 marketing 1–4, 27–28, 55 Marlbro Man (Philip Morris Tobacco Company) 3 Martineau, Harriet 27 Melmoth, Sebastian (alias Wilde used when he went to the Continent in 1897 after his release from prison) 45 Menendez, Ana 6 metaphysics 103–104, 110–114 The Metropolitan Museum x Michelangelo’s David ix–x Miles, Frank 51 Moers, Ellen 4, 10n6 Modjeska, Helena 25–26 Molière 122 Morrison, Toni 6; The Bluest Eye 6 “Mr. Whistler’s 10 O’Clock” 62 Nassaar, Christopher 116n6, 135, 137n11 The National Gallery x Naturalism 73 Nelson, J.O. 92; see also Reading Gaol Newdigate Prize 20, 47, 51–53 The New York Daily Tribune 28–29 Nineteenth Century 20, 31n14, 46n1, 68, 70, 73, 87n11 Norton, Charles Eliot 28 Oates, Joyce Carol 6 Oxford Union 34, 53 Oxford University see University of Oxford Pall Mall Gazette 64–65 Pater, Walter 26, 47, 58n1, 74

Index  147 Patience see Gilbert and Sullivan Payne, Ralph 14 Pearson, Hesketh 7, 16–17, 24–26, 30–31n11, 31n12, 41–42, 56–57, 58n1, 87n10, 99n5, 134 performance 7–9, 26–29, 41–42, 55, 61–62, 71, 87n10, 91, 119–120, 131n4 Plato 68, 74 Portora Royal School 17 postmodernism 103–104, 106–116, 117n4 poststructural 104 Powell, Kerry 56, 99n1 Pratz, Claire de 45 “The Priest and the Acolyte” see Jack Bloxam Puis IX 52 Punch or the London Chivarari 5, 23, 38, 38n9

Shewan, Rodney 135 Small, Ian 75n1, 75n4, 75n12, 86n3, 136, 138n17 Smith, Henry Justin 21n8, 27, 31n17, 31n18, 31n21, 134 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 6 Sophilos 2–3 sous rapture 7, 129–130 Spectator 20 Stange, G. Robert 57, 59n13 Stoddart, J.M. 28, 36, 78, 86n2, 86n3, 87n7; Lippincott’s Magazine 36, 78, 87n7 Stein, Gertrude 1 Stevenson, Robert Louis 71 “A Study in Puppydom” see St. James’s Gazette Sullivan, Arthur see Gilbert and Sullivan Swanwick, H.M. 35–36 Swinburne, Algernon 52

Queensberry, Marquis of see Queensberry trials Queensberry trials 42–44, 48, 81–82, 88, 91, 134–135 queer theory 115, 136, 138n16

Terry, Ellen 24, 54 Tennyson, Alfred 52 Thackeray, William Makepeace 5; The Yellowplush Papers 5 Toledo steel 3 trademark 3, 10n13, 89 Trinity College-Dublin 8, 17, 51 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 26 Trollope, Anthony 20n3; The Prime Minister 20n3 Truth 34

Reading Gaol 44–45, 92, 99, 99–100n6 realism 71–72 Regency England 10n11, 69 Reid, Sir Wemyss 35 Restoration Comedies 122 Robertson, W. Graham 48 Ross, Robert 37, 38n9, 92 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 52–53 Ruskin, John 26, 30n2, 47, 58n1 Russell, S.J., Matthew 51 St. James’s Gazette 40, 80–81 San Juan, Epifiano 135 Sarony, Napoleon 27, 31n18 Swanwick, Helen Maria 35–36 Sebastian Melmoth (Oscar Wilde’s alias on the Continent) 45 self-promotion 23, 41–42 sexuality 8 Shakespeare, William 1, 5, 37, 67–69, 122; Antony and Cleopatra 37; Romeo and Juliet 1 Shaw, George Bernard 25, 54, 59n8, 134 Shelly, Percy Bysshe 52 Sherard, Robert 30, 33, 133

Union Square Theatre 55 University of Oxford 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 33–34, 37–38, 45, 47, 50–56, 80 Victorianism 22–23, 30n1, 37, 42, 44, 48, 79, 82, 87n7, 89, 91, 103–106, 115 Ward, Genevieve 24 Ward, Lock & Co 40, 81, 83 Ward, William 17, 19–20, 53 Waterford crystal 3 Wedgwood pottery 3 Whistler, James McNeill 8, 23, 30n2, 30n3, 30n4, 33–38, 40, 62–74, 75n7, 76n16, 85, 93 Whistler’s Mother 65; see also Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1 Whitman, Walt 28

148 Index Wilde, Constance 33, 37, 91 Wilde, Lady Jane Francesca Elgee: “Speranza” 16; Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland 16; A Memoir of Gabriel Beranger and His Labours in the Cause of Irish Arts and Antiquities 16 Wilde, Oscar (writings of): “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” 44–45, 96–99; “The Canterville Ghost” 78; “The Critic as Artist” 64, 67, 71, 73–75; “The Decorative Arts” 28; “The Decay of Lying” 34, 48, 67, 70–72; The Duchess of Padua 47, 55–56, 57; “The Fisherman and His Soul” 78, 86n3; The Happy Prince and Other Tales 60, 89; “The Harlot’s House” 57–58; “The House Beautiful” 28; The House of Pomegranates 60; An Ideal Husband 42, 48, 88–90, 102; The Importance of Being Earnest xi, 20n3, 25, 41–42, 48, 118–131; Intentions 67–68, 70, 73–74; Lady Windermere’s Fan 42, 48, 82, 88–89, 90, 102; “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime” 78; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and

Other Stories 60; “Pen, Pencil and Poison” 67, 69–70, 83; “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (novella) 78–82, 89, 91; The Picture of Dorian Gray 20n2, 83, 85–86, 101–102, 103–117, 118, 127; Poems 34, 47; “The Preface” 83–86; De Profundis 92–96; “Ravenna” 47, 51–53, 56, 58n5, 59n12, 97; “The Relation of Dress to Art: A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler’s Lecture” 65; “The Soul of Man under Socialism” 61; “The Sphinx” 56–58, 59n12; “The Truth of Masks” 66–70, 74; Vera; or the Nihilists 27, 47, 54–58; A Woman of No Importance 42, 48, 88–89, 102 Wilde, Sir William 16; “The Ancient Races of Ireland” 16 Wilde, Willie 17 Wodehouse, P.G. 122 The Woman’s World 35–37, 40, 61, 79 World 33 Yeats, W.B. 36, 86n1 Zola, Émile 72