OK, wild and sexuality, probably the most famous thing about Wild were the trials in 1895 and his conviction and sentencing to two years of hard labour. It dominated, as I said, criticism for decades. And it's also meant in some ways that the idea of wild as a homosexual writer has become a very strong sort of idea and concept in approaching wild workings.
Now, one of the things that I want to start by doing is warning against this idea of wild as a homosexual is in many ways anachronistic in that before the 90s, there were in many ways not a sense of the idea of the homosexual as a type.
In other words, there were homosexual acts, but there was not an idea of mannerisms and psychology and a pathology and behaviour and traits and all the rest of it by which the homosexuals could be identified or pathologies or understood, etc. Rather, those are much more fluid understanding in all sorts of ways, and that this idea of the homosexual in many ways is created in some ways retrospectively.
So if you look at the work of Alan Shenfield and Ed Cohen, for example, great books, Allanson Fields of the Wild Century and Ed Koans, a talk on the Wild Side, both of them. Great title. You kind of want to think that in both of those books, what they partly do is look at how far at the end of the 19th century to the point where, as Fusco's written about in history, sexuality and all sorts of other writers have looked at since then.
There's this tendency towards the creation of types and pathology I of individuals in all sorts of ways, and sort of pathology in psychology as well as behaviour in the 19th century. And that means towards the end of the 19th century, there starts to be a lot of interest in what are seen as, quote, abnormal types. And that actually, as well as the beginning of the early investigation into sexuality, are not unnoticed in investigating sexuality and all sorts of ways.
But the work of people like have localism, craft ebbing and so on towards the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century. Now, whilst trials meant that and his conviction meant that, he became quite simply the most famous gay man in the 19th century. And what happened, Sanfield and Cohen have shown, is that in many ways his personal behaviour and traits then became what was seen as homosexual mannerisms and traits.
So things like his deliberate effeminacy in some ways, the ways in which he sort of you know, he he didn't do utilitarian, hard working manliness in a kind of very traditional Victorian way. And a lot of the things that he did, the kind of extravagant dress, the extravagant speech, the emphasis on like button holes or lilac coloured gloves or whatever else. But those became retrospectively markers for homosexuality.
And in this creation of the type in that way and the way which it remained at a type for a long time. So, for example, in the 1930s, Docker's slang for a gay man was an Oscar.
So in that sense, it's hugely ironic that while having spent so much of his life and writing challenging the idea of Type's challenged in the idea of those kind of fixed judgements upon people himself gets made into this kind of this way of categorising people, of limiting them in some ways, though, arguably in other ways, of giving the gift of a kind of visibility, which, you know, being able to recognise yourself as well as to recognise other people.
But in that sense, what you want to watch out for is interpreting markers of what at the time would have been seen as traits of, say, aestheticism or Scolinos and so on, as necessarily an unquestionably big markers of homosexuality, because there's a kind of anachronistic retrospective vision involved in that. Now, it's very important to recognise your sense, especially around Wild's trials and the decisions leading up to them and all the rest of it.
And there's often a kind of temptation to see Wilde as having in some way sacrificed himself for deliberately martyred himself. Or there's a book by Melissa Knox called Oscar Wilde A Long and Lovely Suicide. It's it's a perfect example of what I would hate to advise you not to get involved in that kind of pre-emptive decision about what Wilde was doing. And one of. That works as a useful warning against this, against that kind of distorting hindsight is the case of Fannie and Stella.
Now, Fannie and Stella were the sort of stage names, the popular names of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. And they were two young men who spent years dressing in women's clothing and picking up men around London.
And the wonderfully wonderful there's a new MacKenna biography of the two of them that's, I think, hugely entertaining and funny and stellar were arrested, both of them by a rather overzealous policeman in 1870 and prosecuted for attempted sodomy and indecency in attempting to pick up men. And there were all sorts of assumptions operating that they were prostitutes, which there's absolutely no evidence they were in any shape or form and.
They went to trial now to give you an example of a kind of to try and also the mind set you might have over this, I think a perfect example of giving it a different sense of the world in which it was operating is the rhetoric of their defence counsel. I don't need to give you the prosecution's address because the defence counsel, you can work out what the prosecution had said from the defence counsel.
So a defence counsel called upon the jury in the following terms, my friend, the attorney general, in the course of his eloquent peroration, asked you to perform your high office. And no doubt he produced an effect upon you at the time, which is when he said he invited you to stop this plague. Gentlemen, I call upon you to perform a higher, a kinder and a more patriotic office.
I call upon you to do something which will be of greater utility, and that is to pronounce by your verdict that they leibel the morality and character of this country who say that that plague exists.
I trust your verdict will establish the moral atmosphere of England is not yet tainted with the impurities of continental cities, and that free as we are from our island position, we are insulated from the crimes to which you have had illusion made and you will pronounce by your verdict on this case at all events with regard to these facts that London is not cast with the sins of Sodom or Westminster are tainted with the vices of Gomorrah.
So what's the defence counsel is doing? Is calling for not the jury not to find Fredrick Bolton guilty of attempted sodomy, but rather declared that they were English gentleman, they were English. So it's unthinkable. They called upon the jury to say that, no, these things don't happen in this country. And some impeller funny and Stella sorry, Bolton and well, let off. They got off completely and got that important idea.
The idea of the not wanting to know of the preference for invisibility, the actual dislike of the idea to trying to dig into people's personal lives and drag this stuff to the light and how far it tainted what people saw as the public sphere. And it's that impulse of which Wilde was very, very well aware. I can't remember who it was, Bolton or Parks, but one of them, when previously arrested, gave his name to the arresting officer as federal Graham Cecil Graham being anybody.
Anybody got the name Sefl? Graham, yes. Or Graham and excellent. And Cecil Graham is one of the dandies in Lady with Sam. So Wild is absolutely aware of them. And he's playing a little thing about the thing with Wolf is how far he's playing inside games. For those in the know, there's absolutely a kind of language going on there. All sorts of coded references in there for those who wish to read it, for those who wish to know it, but those who do not wish to know it, absolutely no need to do so.
And it's that thing throughout Wilde's writing that kind of instability have multiple meanings, multiple audiences playing around with genre. And this idea that also how far while exploiting this idea that if you can recognise it, you're guilty of knowing about it. So the desire not to know, but also that idea of how the invisible tax works. Now, another example for you to show it sort of warn against the dangers of hindsight and distortions turns to the back of the handout pictures this week.
So fantastic picture on the left comes from Ellman's Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. It's in there titled As it is here, Wild in Costume as follow me. Now, when I first read Ellman's biography, I kind of got to the picture. I always look at the pictures first and anything I read. I'm sure you're much more mature than that. And there's this great picture of wild in the jewelled bra in the skirt being Siloam in a long flowing wig.
And I thought there'll be a bit in the biography when you get to where he puts on the jewelled bra and the long flowing skirts and gets his photo taken the Salemi and there was no mention the whole way through that book of when this happened, what he was doing, all the rest of it. And it was about this picture was reproduced in all sorts of work on Wild until Merlin Harland, Wilde's grandson, found out that finally managed to trace who it really was.
And it's actually a picture of a Hungarian opera singer called Constance Coslovich, and it was taken in around 1912. So it was found in an archive. This photo, which somebody said it does look a bit like, wow, really. I mean, if he was going to wander around putting on your bras and skirts, then I guess he might look a bit like that, but.
It's a sign of the fact so it went into the album biography because it just there was no chance as that book went to press as Richard Ellman's Don't Mention Your Disease to check on the provenance. Nobody at that point knew otherwise. And what's really interesting is I will swear I know enough people who are still coming across that photo in works and world. And how far what you've got in that photo is, in a sense, it tells you all sorts of things about the concept of the homosexual.
So Wild was attracted to other men. Ergo, he must have put on Joe bras and skirts and wigs and danced around a celebrity on a regular basis. Big hair. That's what I mean by it's not just hindsight, but it's also a distorting hindsight that how far there are notions of the homosexual. It's the kind of limiting type of presuppositions about individuals and their behaviour that are in many ways limiting and constricting in all sorts of ways.
And certainly in many ways, I think influence readings of wild. The other picture there is a cartoon from Punch which shows model who in his corpulence and his hair and his attitude and everything else looks very recognisably as it was a caricature of world model and the choice of a profession. So model, says Mrs Brown, how consummately lovely your son is. Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown, a philistine from the country, says what? He's a nice, manly boy. If you mean that, Mr Moodle.
He's just left school, you know, and wishes to be an artist model. Why should he be an artist, Mrs Brown? Well, he must be something mortal. Why should he be anything, why not let him remain forever content to exist beautifully? Mrs. Brown determines that at all events, her son shall not study art and immortal. Now, again, that inevitably read very, very clearly a cartoon about wild sexuality, about his interest in young men. And as the court case had it, his desire to corrupt young men.
That cartoon by Joe DiMaria was published in 1851. Now, according to pretty much all the biographies of Wilde, it was around 1896 when he first had a relationship with Robbie Ross, that Wilde started being actively homosexual. That he had his first relationships with sexual relationships with men. There are some accounts that say Cook's work on Wilde suggests much, much earlier ones at school.
But quite simply, there is no way in 1881 that Gerald marry or anybody at Punch or anybody else had a clue about wild sexuality. In that sense, it is not a cartoon about wild corrupting young men sexually. It is the cartoon about his undermining ideas of masculinity. It is an ad cartoon about ideas of that are not about necessarily social usefulness and manliness and all sorts of things connected with both aestheticism and wild and so on.
But it's not what it seems to be. Its primary meaning is anachronistic. OK, could be prescient. Could have been that Joe DeMaria knew all sorts of things that we didn't know at that point, but the chances seem small. So those two, I think work is a very useful reminder in what you're saying when you're looking.
Oh, how far is all that stuff that you get in Salaman, so on about how far it's the look of that project's onto what you're looking at now, together with this desire to while this sort of often unconscious typing of wild another way in which wild sexuality often kind of impinges, not colours, direct interpretations of his, what it's sometimes the desire to see Wild as a crusading gay rights writer that's inevitably problematic.
You have to remember that Wild First prosecution was brought against Queensberry in challenging in prosecuting him for libel, for describing him as posing some tonight. So he was very much not out in any sense in that way. And I think probably his lowest ebb, the point when Wild's defences were low, when he was most desperate, was in prison, when he wrote to the home secretary and he wrote to the home secretary begging to be let out of prison.
And he wrote in the following terms, the petition of the above named prisoner humbly show us that if he does not attempt to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty.
But to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science, but by modern legislation, notably in France, Austria and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed on the grounds that they are diseases to be cured by a physician rather than crimes to be punished by a judge in the works of eminent men of science such as Lombroso and no to take to take merely two instances after many.
This is especially assisted on with reference to the intimate connexion between the madness and the literary and artistic temperament. Professor NORDO and his book On the Essence, published in 1894, having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law.
Now, what Wilde was suffering, I think, is an indication of how deeply Wilde was suffering in prison, that he was willing to speak of himself and his own instincts and his own character in those terms and to, in effect, validate the kind of thinking and the kind of prejudice and the kind of barbarity that he himself had been subject to.
It's his very, very lowest ebb. And significantly, the home secretary refused his petition and importantly, in De Profundis, in every version, be it the shortened version or the full manuscript version, the one published in 1985. In all of those versions, quite specifically, Wild rejects the laws under which he was condemned as wrong and unjust laws. But what's useful? So both that shows how far at his lowest ebb. I'm not characterising his beliefs or his behaviour and so on by that.
But what it does show the difference between the enormous difference between the way he's speaking, then the language and the assumptions he's working on in on then and how he writes otherwise how when he is himself and in command of himself and has power over himself or what he writes as he at that point did not have in prison, that then he writes in an incredibly different way than he does not buy into this kind of typing.
He does not buy into these kind of judgements. And his languages are not terribly different from this. So I think this is useful to give you a sense that this is a point of him using the validated language and thinking of the time. And at this moment, at his lowest ebb, he buys into it in desperation to get out of prison. Elsewhere, he can found it utterly and undermines its very principles.
So if we're looking for wild and gay rights, then probably the most famous declaration he makes about same sex love and simultaneously a defence of same sex, friendship and homoeroticism in many ways.
And the idea that same sex love, whatever, the kind of love that might be, not just as validated but actually as ennobling as an enormously important force in cultural history and artistic history and literary history, in a sense, very early point of trying to establish a chronology and alternate history. But nowadays, thank God, we can kind of begin to take for granted in that visibility and recognition and the pride in what so many writers and individuals have achieved.
That moment, the probably most quotable bit comes from the trials. And I'll just give you this comes rather the me reading it. You can have Stephen Fry doing it is one of Truelove which fills the hearts of and go with mutual. And there is another I love that dare not speak its name. We'll have to explain to you. I think it's clear there's no question this one is certainly not, is it not perfect. But the love described relates to natural and unnatural love.
No, no. Then what is the double speak tonight? The love that turned out to speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man, as there was between David and Jonathan, Claytor made the very basis of his philosophy. And such as you may find in the science of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the light that would speak its name and on account of its own place where I am now.
It is beautiful. It is fine. It is the noblest form of affection. There's nothing wrong with that. Intellectual and it repeatedly exists between an elder in the government and the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, the glamour of life before him as it should be. So the world does not understand. The world looks at it and sometimes puts in the period before it.
There you go, that's there and it's characteristically, again, it's a statement in which all sorts of things still remain ambiguous. So the degree of sexuality involved in there, quite apart from friendship, what love means there is left indeterminate. But what's absolutely clear is that same sex relationships are being celebrated and celebrated with an enormously important tradition that goes all the way back to Plato through classical literature,
renaissance art and so on. And it was in many ways, it's kind of important moment, I think, in all sorts of ways now for wild writings about homosexuality and in that sense, the overt in that way.
And I think the lack of openness is really important. And what I want to offer a ways of reading around while treatment of ideas of sexuality and homosexuality and same sex love without necessarily trying to dive into them for single readings, for the idea of a single hidden text which dominates others, but rather the way in which Wilde is constantly destabilising.
So, for example, the portrait of Mr. W.H, one of his generally collectors, one of his short stories, interestingly, rather than within his criticism and from Mr. W.H, is a wonderfully convoluted tale in which the narrator meets up with his friend Erskin.
And his friend Erskin tells him how his friend Cyril Graham has recently come up with this theory that Shakespeare's sonnets, a huge number, Shakespeare's sonnets, were addressed to Mr W.H, Mr W.H being his fairy, a boy actor, a boy actor in Shakespeare Company, and that that trigrams theory.
So Graham is, incidentally, a hugely attractive, a very beautiful young undergraduate who is always at school and university, played the girl's parts and played women's parts so much better than women can play them far more attractive, far more women far more convincing. And several Graham the beautiful Silver Graham has come up with his theory about the sonnets.
And a huge amount of the short story consists of close readings of different sonnets for what is basically become a kind of central idea within criticism on the sonnets, an absolute given, which is there a certain number of to the Dark Lady and a huge number addressed to a young man and nowadays taken addressed to the young man, not simply in a kind of fatherly it's time you had children way, but rather in a kind of deeply homoerotic admiring of beauty.
You know, the borderline between between sexual attraction, sexual love, consummated love, and something very, very blurred all the way through. And that's become an absolute Shakespeare scholarship. And Wilde is one of the very, very first to write about that. But one of the interesting things is he's writing about it. So you have Cyril Graham comes forward with this theory about the sonnets and Cyril Graham because the skin is utterly unconvinced by this.
He said you have no evidence that there ever was a boy actor called Will Hughes. So he found all sorts about Werlin, about Hughes and about acting and lots and lots and lots about this young man being attractive and all the rest of it. But you've had nothing, no evidence this person ever existed. So then Sarah produces a portrait of Will Hughes and says, there we go. I found the evidence. There's a portrait, but then it's Erskin then finds out that actually it was forged and I don't believe so.
Your theory doesn't work. And so Graham commit suicide. Now, Erskin tells all this to the narrator and the narrator, having heard all about the forgery, all about theory, then get absolutely gripped by the theory and goes back into the sonnets and finds more and more and more textual evidence in the sonnets to support this theory. More and more close readings of individual sonnets and lines, finding things that support this idea.
And then he writes to Erskin and says Several. Graham was right and his wife writes at great length, at which point, having written at great length and convert, convinced Erskin he then finds himself utterly unconvinced. He's going to passed on the conviction like a kind of disease or something that he is now free of. And it ends with Erskin saying, no, no, no. Now you've convinced me. And the right says no, it's all nonsense. I told you so nonsense. I believe that for a while.
But I doubt and Erskine says I believe in it so much that like so Graham, I'm going to commit suicide over it. And he goes no. And rushes to Erskin and to find out that he's dead, he's arrived too late. But he then finds out actually he's dead of consumption, which he's been dying of over a really long period. So it wasn't a suicide at all. And then it ends with does the narrator now believe it to.
Not so within the courtroom, Mr. W.H, there's a huge amount of close reading of the sonnets and looking at the homoeroticism, at the relation at the worship of male beauty at all, the kind of things which we absolutely take for granted about the Sonics now that so obviously they're but were not spoken about, at very least back at the time with his writing. But it's all framed within a story that is in arguing for or against that interpretation. Is it supporting it? Is it undermining?
Utterly impossible to say what the framing narrative does and the framing of this kind of close reading in there is absolutely question what constitutes proof and what constitutes proof when it comes to literary criticism. So does the point when the portrait before it was shown to be a forgery, does extra textual evidence validate reading? Because the fact is the reading is there, the meanings of the words, the ways of understanding them.
Do you need further evidence to support that? What is it that convinces or otherwise of a reading? What constitutes proof or meaning in a text which the story itself? And what does the story mean for us to understand about the sonnets is frankly called into so many layers of conviction and forgery and all the rest of it, that what's authentic, what's proven, what's true becomes utterly impossible to separate in there.
And ultimately, you put it next to something like the writings of the artist and the idea that it's up to the reader to interpret things that it's very much about the reader projecting. Again, it also I asks questions about how far a reading should be authenticated or can be authenticated in relation to a historical moment.
So whether we'll use existed or not, does that necessarily change what the fact that the sonnets could fit with that or if will doesn't exist, does it necessarily change the meanings, the echoes, the subtext, the emotions, the relationships that are being uncovered in the process of looking at those lines up, the sort of slipperiness that mutability, the complexity of poetry, which is echoed again in Wilde. It's one of the things Wilde was tried on in 1895.
So at the trial of the Marquis of Queensbury for libel, Edward Carson Queensbridge Counsel Challenged World. I believe you have written an article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets was suggestive of unnatural vice and wild replies. On the contrary, I've written an article to show that they were not.
I objected to such a perversion being put upon Shakespeare, which would seem to be wild, saying no. I wrote the article to show that only madman who had become obsessed with a theory and forged paintings could possibly believe this. But in another sense, given that Carson's question is what? You have written an article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets were suggestive of, quote, unnatural vice.
If you take it in the portrait, this is advocating that theory is advocating that layer of meaning is anything but unnatural as anything but advice. So, again, there's a kind of another ambiguity folded in there in World's response and so on. Now, when it comes to the subject of wild and sexuality, the text, which most obviously springs to mind, is the picture Dorian Grey. And sure enough, it was it's now often read as kind of overtly homosexual text.
But as I said last week, the furore over picture Dorian Grey was not necessarily about any ideas of sexual deviant, but rather a lot of it was about his style, the artificiality, theatricality and all the rest of it. Nonetheless, there were certainly reviews at the time which quite specifically concentrated on the text indecencies, the sexuality of it, as something which rendered it unhealthy.
So, for example, the following review, which was printed in the Scots Observer in July 1890, why go grubbing in muck heaps? The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy minded men and honest women to those that have fallen or unnatural is great. Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten.
And while the picture of Dorian Grey, which he contributes to Liping cuts, is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art for its interest is medicolegal. It is false to human nature, for its hero is a devil. It is false to morality, for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity.
The story, which deals with matters only fitted for the criminal investigation department or a hearing in camera, is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr. Wilde has brains and art and style, but if he can write for none. Lord noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes the tailoring or some other decent trade, the better for his own reputation and the public morals.
Now, just in case the point being made here was missed, this review of Dorian Grey was followed up by a letter which condemned Welles again in tones which highlighted homosexual implications. So the following letter was sent to the editor of Cox Observer asking, Does an artist break the march of his story with tedious dissertations upon jewels and wearisome catalogues of furniture?
And does he not, when dealing with an avowedly delicate topic, refrain as Marlowe Refrains and Edward, the second from superfluous detail and exotic sentimentality Mr. Walsh has provided as proof that he lacks the tact and restraint to give us the artistic representation of a hero who is half Jack the Ripper, half Gaveston and the reception that has been recorded. His story must be peculiarly painful to him. Now, what's in the head?
When I say the explicit, not this explicit, the specific references to homosexuality, but only for those in the know. So medicolegal with one of the terms very often used the idea that only doctors and the criminal investigation department go near any kind of anything but normative heterosexuality. Isn't that that reference there to none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys?
That's a reference to the Cleveland Street scandal of a few years before, which again was about relationships between Telegraph boys and a certain number of noblemen who either prosecuted or ran. You know, that they basically ran from the boat train and fled to the continent so as not to be prosecuted and jailed again. Edward the second and Galveston Gaveston being one of Edward the second favourites, one of his lovers that in Marlos place.
Well, if you look at Derek Jarman's brilliant film, it's made very, very explicit what their relationship is. But in that sense, they're those are the kind of codings. So even when a newspaper is condemning the work, it's doing so in terms that can be understood by those in the know but will be over the heads of those not in the know.
So that idea of speaking multiple languages, the idea of speaking so again, the idea of the family, newspaper and family reading as something that's meant to be accessible to the whole family. So you only those who are already no longer innocent already have the knowledge, can therefore understand the coded meanings within it.
It's that that's interesting. It's that kind of world that while in a sense operating within that's offering these kind of spaces for saying things, but not necessarily making them as old, meaning this idea that multiple meanings are there all the time within text at that point and on the subject.
So what you've got there with this kind of condemnation, it's not just for the the subject matter, but for Wald's approach to it, importantly for the lack of condemnation for frivolity, ornamentation, theatricality, insincerity. Now, in that sense. So there's a lot of it is what failure and Dorian Grey to stand aside from the subject matter. So the subject matter, the idea that what you've got within Dorian Grey is a worshipping of Dorians, beauty of male beauty.
You've got close network between men. You've got Dorian accused of suspected of ruining a huge number of young men, as well as a huge number of young women. But unquestionably, what you've got is a kind of homosexual content, possible content buried in there. What are the relationships between Basil Holmwood and Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian? What are the relationship between Dorian and the young men he ruins in that sense?
For those who can read that kind of cotting or read that kind of implication within, it's there. But then remember, well, turning back on the critics with books saying the sins of Dorian are in the reader's mind. So it's very, very useful using that kind of idea that what do you remember back to the appeal by the defence counsel, Stanley and Stella. Let us not think that such things exist. So that kind of was absolutely playing with that kind of turn it back upon the audience.
What you think of is what you see is what's in you in that sense. Now, the letter got that question of how far it's legible, how far the relationships and sexuality and so on is legible. In the text. The earlier Lippincott version was distinctly more explicit, so wild in the process of writing and extending it for publication as a standalone novel. He added in huge passages, a description of the stuff on jewels and carpets and all the rest of it in Chapter 11 and so on.
But he also cut out large sections of Basils declared feelings for Dorian Grey. So. You get the following, I've given you excerpts from Long Passage, a couple of page passages in the original Lippincott version. Let us sit down, Dorian, said Horwood, looking pale and pained. Let us sit down. I will sit in the shadow and you shall sit in the sunlight. Our lives are like that. Just answer me one question.
Have you noticed in the picture something that you did not like, something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you? Suddenly I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say. It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time.
Perhaps, as Harry said, really grown person is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality has had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you.
You were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish. Still, of course, I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would have not have understood it. I did not understand it myself. One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret.
I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt Dorrian, that I had told too much. Then it was. I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. So what you got there that that more? Is it an explicit declaration that more suggestive to use a very well. The term passages are very much toned down in the second published version, at the same time as the unevenness of tone, that slipperiness that changeability that mutability.
All the complexity of the novel is actually, if anything, played up in the second version. So there's no sense in which Wilde is doing anything in any way to distance the novel from the homoeroticism. That's absolutely central to its atmosphere, that kind of worship of Doreen's beauty, but carries on all the way through it.
It's also worth noting that if Hollywood is the most openly, the most apparently homosexual character in the book, the most apparently pulled into relationships and feelings towards a young man. He's also the closest the novel has to a moral touchstone. He's the only character in the novel who is in any sense really morally conventional and has a kind of strong moral standards and a sort of voice within the novel.
So he's the one who tries to get going to repent and try to get him to pray and all the rest of it. And he's the one who has a distinct kind of inner integrity in a way that pretty much none of the other characters do. So in that sense, the novel is doing nothing but distancing itself from Battle Hollywood as a character and his feelings. In that sense, it doesn't set up any kind of moral binaries around that topic in any sense at all.
But it's also what's important, I think, within the novel is this idea of blurring of boundaries and complexity of judgement. So it's there in the hole, the idea of doubles within that that whole idea of what's the relation between Dorian and his portrait of the dividing line between reader and text being blurred, the dividing line between what's known and unknown now in criticism of Dorian Grey, one of the text was regularly used by reviewers as a healthy contrast to Dorian Grey.
Almost useless kind of stick to beat Dorian Grey. Why couldn't it be more like was Robert Louis Stevenson's, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? There are a whole load of reviews that say it's not like Jekyll and Hyde. Now, interestingly, Jekyll and Hyde, very like Dorian Grey, has a very intimate circle of male friends within it.
It's all there's a kind of tight circle of men who are spending that they are all sort of complete company for each other, but also importantly in Jekyll and Hyde, as Jekyll's friends become worried about this friendship he seems to have with this young man, Hyde, who's coming and going from his house always notably as one critic, as pointed out by the dark back passage of that,
Hyde is this young man who has some kind of hold over Jekyll, and they're clearly worried that it's a kind of blackmailing hold. In other words, that one of the unspoken things that they're concerned about is the idea that this loathsome Mr. Hyde has got some kind of sexual relationship and blackmail relationship with Jekyll.
One of those textual possibilities in there now, importantly, by contrast with how one has to read Dorian Grey, which is it's very, very hard to read Dorian Grey keeping Dorian himself at a distance, saying condemning him all the way through a sense in which the whole narrative invites you into sympathy with him and certainly invites you into you don't you're not offered another point of view.
But Dorian said most of that novel. There's also the fact that Dorian looks beautiful constantly, that whole thing of Silvanus brother, you know, kind of cornering him and then seeing him as so beautiful that he cannot think that this young man is possibly looking to young Panopto committed those crimes.
Now, by contrast, in Jekyll and Hyde, there's an absolutely unceasing revulsion to a tide the whole time, the idea that he's monstrous, even when he can't even identify what the markers of monstrosity are. So, for example, this is Jekyll's friends. Autism's first reaction to hide Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish. He gave an impression of deformity even without any nameable malformation.
He had a displeasing smile. He had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness. And he spoke with a husky whispering and somewhat broken voice. All of these were points against him. But not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Otterson regarded him. There must be something else, said the perplexed gentleman. There is something more.
If I could find a name for it. God bless me. The man seemed to be human. Something troglodytic, shall we say. Oh, can it be the old story of Dr. Fell, or is it the mere radiance of a fowl soul that thus transpires through an transfigures its clay continent? The last, I think four. Oh my poor old Harry Jekyll. If ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
Compare that sentence signature upon the face that unnameable revulsion, disgust, loathing, fear compared that with all the descriptions of Dorian Grey and all the responses to Dorian. And that sense that gives you an idea of that's the kind of way in which wild is complicating so many of those kind of Gothic ideas and narratives. And that idea of double and above all, he's undermining categories, he's blurring boundaries.
And again, he's blurring genders as well. And importantly, that's what Wall does in his writing. He blurs boundaries. He challenges judgements between moral and immoral, appearance and reality, life and art. And that I think it's an enormously important thing. That's a methodology he uses throughout his work.
And that, I think, is really important when you're approaching Walt's treatment of sexuality because, well, treatment of sexuality is not about some kind of single homosexual gay meaning buried in there. That becomes the true reading of the text. That kind of reading very often goes with this kind of distorting hindsight, the idea that we can now see exactly what he really meant.
Actually, he always means multiple things and he's absolutely writing about sexuality and absolutely including homosexuality and that it's enormously important. But it's important to the fundamental way that Wilde writes and thinks. So the most fundamental thing I think my take on world is world belief in individuality, the right of the individual to be who and what they choose to be and who and what they choose to be moment to moment consistently is utterly overrated.
You can change what you want to be second to second, and you are not to be confined by categories, by judgements, by other people's views, by ideas of consistency, any of that. And that becomes the most fundamental human right and what is more fundamental to individuality and identity and so on, the one sexuality.
So in that sense, world is absolutely condemning, undermined and challenging, complicating, destroying the kind of grounds on which Taiping judgement, moral judgement, condemnation, all the rest of it happen. And that way that mutability and flexibility and changeability the complexity of the text is exactly what challenges that kind of way of thinking and those kind of categories. And in that sense, that resistance to try and challenge the judgement.
It's there in all of his essays is there and criticism artists and decay of lying and soul of man and so on. It's there in although short stories I was talking about and I'm really importantly, if they're in all his plays, hugely, they're in his place. Wild. Right. And it's interesting, it's been noted there've been several reading of WorldSpace.
Homosexuality is always good in lots of ways because somebody was plaisir about the idea of a secret, the dark crime, the dark secret, the unknown thing in the past that characters are trying to escape from a burial, not be condemned by. That's a kind of fundamental one of the fundamental structures he uses is what was hugely popular.
It's kind of the most popular, dramatic. At the end of the 19th century, which was known as the Fallen Women Play Huge, is partly a reaction to increase in sort of the campaigning and so on for women's rights and the rise of, you know, kind of late 19th century, what became known as feminism and so on. And one way is to say, well, women who then move outside of men's control, then what happens to them is they then become sexually vulnerable and then they're gone before and they're ruined.
And any woman who has had sex outside of marriage is used goods, but also somehow corrupt and devious and immoral and a kind of poison that has to be excluded from society. And there are a huge number of plays written on that topic that begin the probably most famous play in the 19th century on that would be to my thesis, Vladimer Cameleer. Well, but there are huge number that follow that.
So pretty much all the plays by Henry Jones, by offering Pineiro by Sidney Grundy hadn't even heard of those names. But there are swathe of plays by playwrights, the end of the 19th century on this. Now there's a way in which this idea of the dark secret, the sexual secrets and so on can be read as about homosexuality is that one can read one for the other.
And I think one of my favourite sort of versions of reading that is Litten straight cheek, who was one of the more sort of extravagant characters at the end of the 19th and 20th century. I love his summary of a woman no story in 1997 revival and described it in these terms. Mr Trick, that's Beerbohm Tree who was playing the Lord Illingworth in the play. Mr Tree is a wicked lord staying in a country house who has made up his mind to [INAUDIBLE] one of the guests, a handsome young man of 20.
The handsome young man is delighted when his mother enters. She sees his lordship and recognises him as having populated with her twenty years before the result of which was a handsome young man. She appeals to lottery, not to [INAUDIBLE] his own son. He replies that it is an additional reason for doing it. Oh, he has a very wicked Lord, wonderful and straight inaccurate but wonderfully some sort of dark atmosphere that in many ways runs through weinerman importance.
And it's there. Every kind of version of certainly every film version of wild, wild plays has to kind of negotiate with that as an assumption operating around it in a different way. So the the Parker Oliver Parker film of an ideal husband, which I think is rather wonderful in all sorts of ways, it opens with Rupert Everett playing Lord Ellingsworth and Rupert Everett being that actually out there.
Pretty rare in Hollywood playing playing sorry, Lord Goring at the beginning, they have him naked in bed with a woman sort of just to go. Right, OK, I just got he's straight. OK, he's got it straight. Straight. Don't think of all that's going to exclude all that other text and then he brings it back in.
So. So Robert Chilton is trying to bury, trying to forget, tried to buy his way out of a crime committed in his youth and the extent to which that crime committed his youth, which was a financial one of insider trading and selling secrets, the way in which that can also be read as a kind of sexual one.
And the way it relates to that, those ideas brilliantly reintroduced in the film were just when his wife is trying to work out why he's giving in to these, what effectively blackmail demands and doing things that he's never done before in a kind of morally dubious way there at the opening night in the film of an ideal husband there at the opening night of the importance of being earnest and at the end of being honest, Wilde comes up in front of the curtains to make the curtain speech.
They made it Lady Windermere's Fan. I'm technically anachronistic and the wife looks at Wild and looks at her husband. He looks at Waldenbooks. The husband says You haven't done something in your youth which you're ashamed of, which I don't know about because. Oh, you know, so it kind of in that sense, it kind of reintroduces the sex to a dark secret in that it just it kind of alludes to it and buries it again in that way.
And that idea of the double life in that sense, it has obvious relevance, total clear relevance in the idea of how far wild at this point is leading a double life is. You know, there are all sorts of things he is and feels that his society will not accept and condemns. It doesn't mean, however, that what you have to do is read the place that's necessarily about that.
They are inclusively, but not exclusively about that in the sense that the place of so much about sexuality and they are a challenge to sexual judgement. About four minutes left to make the case they'll do more on this next week. But essentially what you've got, say, later, Windermere's Fan, Mrs Allen, is the fall. A woman who has abandoned her daughter in the past is coming back trying to buy her way into society.
And her daughter thinks that she's having an affair with her husband, with her son in law. It actually is and runs away. And this is all in sacrificing her own reputation in rescuing her daughter from social disgrace. And in that sense, it seems to be a play about the fact that. She looks like a bad woman, but actually she's also a good woman because she will rescue her daughter and she is not a Christian redemption. She's committed a sin of adultery and abandoning her daughter.
But now she's come back and she sacrificed herself. So she is redeemed. That all sounds very, very morally conventional. What makes it, though? It's also asking for forgiveness for the fallen woman. There are still good things in her and all that. Actually, what I think is happening in the last act, that play is much more complex than that.
So, Mrs. Arlynn, yes, she sacrifices herself for a daughter, but then she does not she will not be typed as a mother any more than she'll be typed as a bad woman. What she does. And she then turns around and rejects the role of mother as well. She rejects the simple world in which her realising her daughter has to live by illusions, has to believe in this dead good mother that never existed. And instead, the play at that point starts undermining judgement and catagories itself.
So the complexity of who knows what and doesn't know what the play ends on a conflicted judgement. It ends on the wife, on the husband condemning his mother in law, who he thinks is simply an unredeemed fallen woman as a very clever woman. And his wife corrects him and says, no, she's a very good woman. But that very goodness is premised on the wife not actually knowing that she's her mother.
So there's a whole thing. What is good and bad at this point? What does good mean according to whose judgement and that wonderful little moment where wild in that play takes on the form of the the woman play so you can do it in the fall. And woman play is it's about ejecting the fallen woman from society. It's about uncovering her dark past and condemning her for it.
And very importantly, it must always contain a repentant scene. So in the second, Mrs. Tancred abide by Pineiro, this point where the fallen woman is confronted with her past and sure enough, she tries to fight it off. And then a minute later she lies, you know, sobbing hysterically on the ottoman. That's what all women do. They sob hysterically. They long the innocent past, and then they mostly shoot themselves or take poison or into convents.
Mrs. Allen does none of that is she explicitly rejects repentance as out of date and doesn't go with modern dress. And she also this point when Lord Windemere, in a classic kind of form with the genre, is trying to prod her into repentance. And so he says to her, I wish that my wife would give you the photo that she keeps by her bed, a miniature she kisses every night. And it's a miniature of the mother that they do the mere thought she had of the mother who died young and pure.
And Lord Lord Windemere says it's a miniature she kisses every night before she prays. It's the miniature of a young, innocent looking girl with beautiful dark hair. So he think, well, you sort of like this was the young. It's a moment in which she's clearly meant to go because I was in a different world. So I got my head now. But oh, so there's a kind of emphasis on that. And Mrs. Allen replies, without absolute poise.
Oh, yes. I remember how long ago that seems it was done before I was married. Dark hair and an innocent expression. What the fashion and Windemere total school. No nuggets in there. And she's under she's undermining further the idea. How can you judge me then any more than you can judge me now? How do you know from a parents who are what I am? You've got types of good women and bad women here. They don't work. How do you know this is my natural hair colour?
Now, in that sense, it's all about undermining those kind of roles. So in that sense, Lady Windermere's Fan, just like a woman unimportance after it, it looks at the ways in which those kind of judgements about sexuality are really about shoring up power within society. They're about shoring up money, they're about controlling people's behaviour, and they're incredibly crude and they destroy lives. That's what's so in a woman of no importance.
You've got Mrs. Arbuthnot repenting her own fall from earlier on, but using that repentance to keep control of her son. So the play ends with the man who supposedly seduced her, so she offers this kind of narrative of herself as the young innocent girl who was tricked by Lord Illingworth. And the play moves in that sense from being supposedly it's the redemption of the fallen woman in the sense it becomes all the man's fault.
But in another sense, read through law dealing with responses, and they're all absolutely coldly rational and indeed the and witty. And there's a conflict in the play there between the good characters to be tedious and the wicked characters who will have just the best lines.
So, well, again, kind of confusing judgement in that sense. But importantly, Wilde wrote of that play, several plays have been written lately that deal with a monstrous injustice of the social code of morality at the present time. It is indeed a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women. I think there should be no law for anybody. And I'll leave you with that.
I think there should be no law for anybody. I'm going to talk next week a bit more about the importance of being honest in the ways in which the kind of multiplicity of text works there and all sorts of ways. But next weeks about the plays and the importance, being honest and an ideal husband will be the main text for that. Thank you.