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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1989), p. 10. 2. Michel Foucault, An Introduction: Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1978), p. 37. 3. Richard Kaye provides an excellent overview of sexuality-based Wilde schol- arship up to 2004, including the controversy over Christopher Craft’s ‘Alias Bunberry’, which represents The Importance of Being Earnestt as a coded gay text; see Richard Kaye, ‘Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde’, Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 189–223, and Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosocial Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 106–39. The identification of Wilde as unprob- lematically ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ continues, especially in texts that are not centrally engaged with questions of sexuality. Heather Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theoryy (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 10, for instance, identifies Wilde as ‘a gay man’, and Paul L. Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2007) consistently uses ‘gay’ throughout his book on the con- sumerist Wilde. 4. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 277. 5. For intriguing interpretations in the context of Wilde’s subversive politics of precisely the texts I push to the background see Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1996). 6. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 281. 7. Ian Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2000), pp. 37–8. 8. Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 281. 9. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 127–8. 10. E. M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 159. 11. A landmark case of similar age in the UK is Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, a 1981 case decided by the European Court of Human Rights to the effect that the UK’s 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (the law under which Wilde was convicted) was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. This case was in turn cited by the US Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in 2003. 12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 35. 196 Notes 197 13. Compare to Thomas K. Hubbard, ‘Introduction’, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 7–8: ‘There was, in fact, no more consensus about homo- sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today.’ 1 Sexual Gnosticism: Male Procreation and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ 1. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 297. 2. Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 154. 3. See Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 4–11, for background on Johnson Cory’s foun- dational status for the Uranian poetry movement. Brett succeeded his father as Viscount Esher in 1889 and became a confidant of Edward VII and a great influence on British military politics leading up to the First World War. 4. See Alan Sinfield The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. vii, 156. 5. The Picture of Dorian Grayy is specifically cited in Queensberry’s plea of justi- fication, which formed the basis of Edward Carson’s defence during the first trial. Carson cites the 1890 Lippincott’s version of Dorian as well as ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ throughout the first day of the libel trial; see Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 290 for the plea of justification, pp. 26–151 for the first day’s testimony. ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ is alluded to in the libel trial when Wilde claims that his literary theme of homoerotic adoration was ‘borrowed from Shakespeare I regret to say’ (p. 92). Carson replied with an accusation that Wilde had written an ‘article pointing out that Shakespeare’s sonnets were practically sodomitical’, to which Wilde countered with ‘I wrote an article to prove that they were not so . I object to the shameful perversion being put on Shakespeare’s sonnets’ (p. 93). 6. Joseph Bristow’s Oxford edition reprints both versions of the novel, mak- ing a comparison between them readily accessible. I refer here to the kinds of changes in the 1891 text that Bristow delineates in his introduction; see CWOW3, pp. lii–lv. I take up the textual history of Dorian Grayy more exten- sively in Chapter 2. 7. Horst Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: Its Composition, Publication, and Reception (Braunschweig: Technische Universität Carolo- Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig Seminar für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), p. 25. 8. Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, pp. 25–6. 9. For more on the dissolution of the Bodley Head partnership see James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Headd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 266–79. See Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Centuryy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 171–6 for a 198 Notes description of the Bodley Head’s tentative plans for the book version. See Ian Small, ‘Wilde’s Texts, Contexts, and “The Portrait of Mr W. H.”’, Oscar Wilde in Contextt, ed. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 374–83, for the importance of seeing ‘Mr W. H.’ as a text with multiple versions that hail from various stages in Wilde’s writing career: to make my position explicit, I see ‘Mr W. H.’ as the primary repository of many of Wilde’s ideas about male–male love as these ideas developed, and I am thus most interested in the posthumous version of the story as the representation of his most fully developed conceptualization. 10. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 31–101 (p. 41). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. As the Oxford Complete Works of Oscar Wilde edition of Wilde’s short fiction is not pub- lished at the time of this writing, and as Robert Ross’s 1908 Edition prints only the earlier, shorter text, there is still no commonly accepted standard edition of the longer ‘Mr W. H.’ I have thus chosen to use Linda Dowling’s 2001 Penguin edition, which I checked against the manuscript of the longer version housed in the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. This manuscript consists of a copy of the shorter version as printed in Blackwood’s with Wilde’s handwritten additions either as marginalia or as interspersed sheets of paper. 11. The tracts were entitled A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891); Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), pp. 203–4 contends that Wilde must have read them but offers no material evidence. 12. Scots Observerr, 5 July 1890, iv, p. 181; cited in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 75. 13. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 324. 14. Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (New York: Hyperion, 2000), pp. 14–17. 15. For the significance of Jowett to the Oxford study of classical culture gener- ally and Plato specifically, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially pp. 64–77. Jowett’s Clarendon edition of the dialogues was published in four volumes in 1871, just a few years prior to Wilde’s arrival at Magdalen College. 16. Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 116–17. 17. Danson, Wilde’s Intentions, p. 125. 18. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, pp. 125–7. 19. Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988) offers a fascinating relationship with the spectre of Wilde from the perspective of a self-identified gay male Londoner in the mid 1980s. Much of the text involves the negotiations involved in deter- mining whether Wilde is the very basis of an accepted definition of gay or whether his historical and cultural distance disqualifies him from bearing the signifier. 20. William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 213. Notes 199 21. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 51. 22. ‘Perceiving a fallen art world and an unregenerate public, Wilde had two alternatives: he could respond cynically or idealistically. He chose both alternatives and developed two distinct styles to represent them’, Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 19. 23. Wilde used ‘Mr W.
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