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Haunted Artworks:

Oscar Wilde and the British Ghost Story

Naben Ruthnum

Department of English

McGill University, Montreal

April 2011

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements

of the degree of Master of Arts

© Naben Ruthnum 2011 Ruthnum 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page 1

Table of Contents 2

Abstract 3

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 6

Chapter 1 12

Chapter 2 38

Chapter 3 65

Conclusion 102

Works Cited 110

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Abstract

This thesis explores Oscar Wilde’s influence on the British ghost story at the fin- de-siècle and the early years of the twentieth century. Arguing that Wilde’s influence is reflected in the frequently occuring topos of haunted artworks in supernatural fiction, the thesis begins by establishing the significance of the

Wildean haunted artwork in relation to Wilde-as-cultural-figure, The Picture of

Dorian Gray, Decadence, and the public conception of the male homosexual that would emerge in the wake of the Wilde trials. The succeeding chapters of the thesis examine the manner in which haunted artworks featured in ghost stories by

Henry James, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Robert Hichens, and E.M. Forster respond to Wilde, and the manner in which these stories address anxieties over male same-sex desire.

Résumé

Cette thèse explore l’influence d’Oscar Wilde sur les récits surnaturels britanniques durant la période de “fin de siècle” et au début du vingtième siècle.

Soutenant que l’influence de Wilde est évidente dans le topos de l’oeuvre d’art hanté dans les récits surnaturels, la thèse établit d’abord l’importance et la signification de l’œuvre art hanté en relation avec la représentation sociale de

Wilde en tant que personnalité culturelle, le roman Le portrait de Dorian Gray, le mouvement du décadentisme ainsi que la conception publique de l’homosexualité masculine qui émerge dans le sillage des procès de Wilde. Les chapitres suivants de la thèse examinent la façon dont certaines représentations de l’oeuvre d’art Ruthnum 4 hanté retrouvées dans les récits surnaturels de Henry James, M.R. James, E.F.

Benson, Robert Hichens et E.M. Forster relèvent de l’influence d’Oscar Wilde – et également la façon dont ces récits abordent les angoisses et inquiétudes liées au désir homosexuel masculin.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Professor Miranda Hickman for her patient and perceptive criticisms of this thesis as it evolved over the past two years. Dr. Joel Deshaye’s comments and proofreading encouraged me to interrogate my ideas and to produce better work; I owe him many thanks. Professor Allan Hepburn helped me to come to grips with E.M. Forster, and Charlotte Dykes was a consistent source of encouragement and intellectual stimulation. I am grateful to my officemates

Justin Pfefferle and Ian Whittington for an ideal place to work or not-work. Grant

Bellamy gave my high-school French a much-needed polish. I have tossed many a flat idea at Ben Barootes, and had it returned to me as a stimulating starting-point for the next day’s labour. Simon McNabb and David Bertrand have ensured that my writing life remains lively and diverse.

Darrell Abbot, R. Brown, Vincent Paul Abbot and Philip Anselmo provided invaluable support during my most difficult periods of research and composition.

Thanks also to Sam, Kay, and Mandy Ruthnum for having had so many of these stories on their bookshelves, waiting to be read.

This thesis was written with the generous support of the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Introduction

“Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double – for what they were and for what they are.” Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

The double-counted ghost that my epigraph suggests is not the looming influence of Henry James over the ghost story: it is Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde the writer and Oscar Wilde the cultural figure: Wilde, W----, the utterance that would get schoolboys slapped by their mothers in the early decades of the twentieth century, the image that would function as fearful, then tragically noble, representational shorthand for male homosexuality in the years following his trials and their fatal aftermath.

Oscar Wilde’s contribution to the British ghost story is not directly obvious. In fact, its hidden nature is intrinsic to its existence. The impact Wilde would have on writers within the genre exceeds the comfortable shivers created by his only tale with a ghost in the title: “The Canterville Ghost,” a charming, conventional story that belongs in the grouping of his gentle fairy tales, and which provided no compelling fodder for Wilde’s accusers at the various trials. The

Picture of Dorian Gray, however, figured prominently in the courtroom as evidence leveled against Wilde1. Dorian will serve as a constant reference in my

1 Ed Cohen, who examines contemporary newspaper accounts of the trials in Talk on The Wilde Side, notes that prosecutor Edward Carson attempted to align Oscar Wilde with a reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a perverse text—a “representational conjunction” that “established an interpretive frame” for how “Wilde’s relationships with the men named in the plea of justification” could be Ruthnum 7 exploration of Wilde’s particular influence over crucial supernatural works during the fin de siècle and the ensuing years, a time when the British ghost story reached a peak of quality and took on characteristics and formal concerns that would be embedded in the genre and used to great effect by writers such as Robert

Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, and Elizabeth Jane Howard.

The ghost story, as it evolved from the fin de siècle onwards, has more in common with Wilde’s Dorian Gray, The Sphinx Without a Secret and The

Portrait of Mr. W.H. than it does with The Canterville Ghost, as evidenced by the inclusion of Sphinx in one of Aickman’s important 1960’s Fontana anthologies of

“Great Ghost Stories.” The term “ghost story” is blessed and cursed with what

Julia Briggs calls “latitude… it can denote not only stories about ghosts, but about possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead…” (12).

Tales of haunted artworks fit among these stories, which “reached the peak of their popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when supernatural beliefs of all kinds, and especially those of Christianity, were under attack” (23). Briggs is correct to indicate the influence of a cultural crisis of faith and a growing interest in the occult in this time period, but this brief précis omits crucial cultural moments that occurred during the fin de siècle. Kelly Hurley adds to Briggs’s points in her own work on the supernatural, which groups British ghost stories into the wider category of the Gothic:

“read” (165). Carson’s reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a corrupt text produced by a corrupt man was adopted by newspaper and critical coverage of the novel, establishing a link between readings of Dorian Gray and portrayals of Wilde and what he came to represent. Ruthnum 8

Materialist science described a human subject thoroughly circumscribed

within a grossly material body…In late-Victorian psychology human

subjectivity was fissured by the uncanny space of the unconscious…

evolutionary sciences emphasized the changeful and chaotic nature, and

the regressive tendencies, of the abominable human body. This was a

profoundly difficult period of cultural transition particularly needy of what

the Gothic can do. (Hurley 203-204)

Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story, 1840 – 1920 is notable for its inclusion of economic crisis as a factor in the development and perpetuation of the ghost story, a reading that ties in neatly with Jacques Derrida’s work on the ghost as ideological and historical presence in Specters of Marx (a text that I will return to in my second chapter). Still, something is lacking from this description of the genre-influencing aspects of that “difficult period of cultural transition” known as the fin de siècle: the trials of Oscar Wilde, and the resultant distillation of a particular cultural idea of the homosexual male. Wilde’s influence on the genre has as much to do with his written legacy as it does with the evolution of Wilde as a cultural figure during the fin de siècle, both before and after his trials. I intend to show the indelible impact Wilde had on the supernatural genre by examining the ways in which certain ghost stories composed after Wilde’s trials incorporate artworks, portraiture, and a negotiation of the formal boundaries between art forms into their haunted architecture. Much as The Picture of Dorian Gray is a seminal text in the treatment of the supernatural in the fiction of the fin de siècle and beyond, the picture of Dorian Gray has a persistent presence in ghost stories, Ruthnum 9 taking on the status of a recurring and morphing symbol that is to recur repeatedly in texts haunted by Wilde.

The placement of Oscar Wilde as a representational figure of sexual anxieties at the end of the nineteenth century can possibly be overstated, but this would be difficult. Alan Sinfield’s study of Wilde-as-cultural-figure in The Wilde

Century explains how Wilde came to represent “(t)he principal twentieth century stereotype… not just the homosexual, as the lawyers and medics would have it, but the queer” (3). Wilde’s three trials were instigated by a libel suit he filed against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had publicly insisted that Wilde was a sodomite. After the failure of Wilde’s suit, the state held two trials in which Wilde was the defendant, the second of which ended with his conviction for “acts of gross indecency” with another man. The sentence was two years of hard labour, a result that effectively ended Wilde’s active career and considerably shortened his life. The cultural consequences of the extremely public trial were significant; as

Ed Cohen notes, “by the time of his conviction, not only had Wilde been confirmed as the sexual deviant for the late nineteenth century, but he had become the paradigmatic example for an emerging public definition of a new ‘type’ of male sexual actor: ‘the homosexual’” (2).

Damion Clark has noted a specific resonance between the Wilde trials and a key horror text of the period, Dracula, a book that falls somewhat outside the reach of the particular influence that I will be discussing, but usefully indicates the effect of the trials on the genre.

Dracula reacts to a set of cultural anxieties and phobias that, rather than Ruthnum 10

being speculative, seem rooted, for Stoker, in hard evidence. Wilde, as a

homosexual Irishman, posed a double threat to the British norm: sexual

and cultural. Furthermore, as with previous British notions that equated

the Irish with an inferior species, race and class, the equation between the

Irish and sexual deviancy seemed, after Wilde, inevitable. In his novel,

Stoker, a heterosexual Irishman, works to separate Wilde’s sexual

perversion from his nationality. In reacting to the Wilde trials, Stoker

creates an Other that his readers will recognize as threatening to

heterosexual normativity, and by modeling Dracula after Wilde, Stoker

demonstrates that what they need to fear is sexual Otherness, not cultural

Otherness. (Clark 169)

The capacity of Wilde-as-cultural figure to incarnate multiple threats against culture and society is crucial to his influence over the ghost story, and, as Clark indicates, over horror fiction in general. Talia Schaffer argues that Dracula

“represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895. Dracula is

Wilde-as-threat” (472). Clark and Schaffer see the figure of Dracula as an embodiment of homosexual panic. Clark also views Stoker’s creation of the vampire as an attempt to emphasize and condemn the sexually deviant aspects of

Wilde, rather than his foreignness—Stoker wishes to redeem the place of the staunchly heterosexual Irish male in British society. The haunted artworks within the stories that I will be discussing incarnate Wilde in a similar fashion—even those artworks which appear in texts by Wilde himself. While it would be absurd Ruthnum 11 to posit “Wilde-as-threat” as being foremost in Wilde’s mind during the conception of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel and all it contains became the source of multivalent readings as soon as it was released. It was impossible for fin de siècle Britain to separate the man’s work from the man, as the use of

Wilde’s literature in the courtroom suggests. Consequently, Wilde’s literary output—his production of artworks, and the place of these artworks in the

Aesthetic and Decadent movements—was also attached to his sexual activities in the public perception. An analysis of the influence of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the place of the haunted artwork the plot hinges upon, thus becomes an analysis of Wilde and the anxieties he represents. The haunted artwork is both a hiding place and a place of exposition, a supernaturally charged device that serves as a metonym for sexual anxieties, potentiality, and the genre itself. Every effective ghost story is itself a haunted artwork, a work with the potential to simultaneously conceal and reveal the anxieties embedded in its form and content.

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Chapter One

While it is not my intention to produce a formal study of the British ghost story, a delineation of definitional boundaries is necessary, as I will be analyzing literary productions that continue to be termed “ghost stories,” despite the frequent absence of any traditional ghostly apparitions within their pages. Terry Castle seeks a similar clarification of terms in the titular chapter of The Apparitional

Lesbian: “But how, one might object, to recognize (enough to remark) something as elusive as a ghost effect?” (31). Castle finds her answer in exploring certain texts in which “apparationality envelops—and ultimately obscures—the representational field” (31). The answer to the questions I will be posing about ghost stories will be explored through examples of ghost stories written during the fin de siècle and the years following Wilde’s trials, years during which the form underwent subtle changes that led to a “pinnacle of popularity and achievement”

(Hennegan 198). Castle’s description is an excellent summation of the particular type of ghost story on which I am focusing, a type in which the ghost is not necessarily a spectral revenant, but a transparent representation of obscured anxieties.

In an attempt to be as specific as possible, I am not using the term “the ghost story,” but “the British ghost story,” a genre that was as directly influenced by Oscar Wilde and his trials as was the category of male homosexuality. Castle’s study of the spectral encoding of lesbianism covers similar ground as my project, and her use of the spectral to envelop / obscure the representation of homosexual Ruthnum 13 desire directly pertains to my intention of illustrating the impact of Wilde’s work and persona on the supernatural genre. Castle, however, isolates the texts she analyzes as specifically representative of lesbianism, not male same-sex desire, and emphasizes her disagreement with the notion that the fin de siècle period was one of marked changes in the perception of same-sex desire.

I fly in the face here, I realize, of that theory—popularized by historians of

sexuality influenced by the late Michel Foucault—which holds that

lesbianism, at least in the flagrantly sexualized sense that we usually

understand the term today, is by and large a fabrication of late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century male sexologists. Before Kraft-Ebbing,

Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and others “invented” the notion of female

sexual deviance around 1900, or so the argument usually runs, there was

no such thing as lesbian identity, not any self-avowedly “homosexual”

behavior on the part of individual women. The lesbian only became

possible, supposedly, after she was “produced” by turn-of-the-century

clinicians. The argument is bolstered by the fact that lesbian and

homosexual are indeed relatively recent terms, first given currency by

medical writers in the later nineteenth century. What did women do who

happened to desire one another before the crucial nomenclature appeared?

According to the most extreme proponents of the sexological model, they

mainly sat about doing needlework, pressing flowers into albums, and

writing romantic letters to one another. (Castle 8)

Michel Foucault, the only sexual historian mentioned by name in this passage, Ruthnum 14 would certainly not support the claim that Castle constructs in order to refute. The existence of acts that would later be termed homosexual was not made possible by the creation of a “crucial nomenclature”; the first volume of Foucault’s History of

Sexuality clearly evidences that his theories were not based on ignoring the existence of homosexual acts until the arrival of a historical time in which that they could be classed into categories, but on an exploration of when and why these categories came into existence. By narrowing the focus of her argument to lesbianism, Castle is able to present the emphasis on the importance of the creation of homosexual categorization in the late-nineteenth century as a naïve act of retrospective oppression by scholars. Foucault speaks of the nineteenth century as a time when the discretion of texts dealing with “sodomy” was replaced by category-defining discourses of power:

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry,

jurisprudence, and literature made possible a strong advance of social

controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the

formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak on its

own behalf… (Foucault 101)

Kraft-Ebbing, Freud, and Havelock Ellis “invented” male homosexuality as much as they invented lesbianism, which is to say, equally not-at-all. All three

“sexologists” discussed pre-existing sexual behaviour (Freud, notably, used examples from literature spanning several centuries to bolster his arguments) in order to establish that these “inverted” behaviours had been constantly present in human life. The decision to agglomerate various behaviors and tendencies as Ruthnum 15 categories—gay, lesbian—did not preclude the knowledge that these acts and tendencies had taken place long before the categories had existed, and historians and critics who acknowledge the importance of the fabrication of the terms are not thereby attempting to extinguish an entire history of homosexual acts on the page and in history. Castle extends her study of spectral homosexuality far into the history of literature, while I focus on the crucial fin-de-siècle moment and the early twentieth century. This is not a suggestion that the spectral and the ghostly did not function as representational signifiers for acts of same-sex desire in pre- fin-de-siècle fiction; rather, it is an assertion that a distinct change took place in the representation of anxieties about male same-sex desires when the category of the homosexual took definitive shape. This cultural moment aligned the image of

Oscar Wilde and the various elements of his notoriety with homosexuality, a change that is made manifest in the British ghost story immediately following the fin de siècle. The haunted artworks that appear in fin de siècle ghost stories bear the influence of Wilde’s writing and his cultural status: these ghostly representations are fraught with the male same-sex anxieties that were inextricably attached to Wilde during his trials.

The attachment of particular “deviant” qualities to Wilde was a maneuver that was also applied to his fiction. Alan Sinfield explores the distribution of

Wildean “queer” attributes—the defining characteristics of this new type of male sexual actor--among the characters in Wilde’s writing, parceling them out thusly among the characters of Dorian Gray:

Hallward comes closest to same-sex passion and is an artist, so we have Ruthnum 16

one correlate in the Wildean queer image. But he is also idealistic and

moralizing; other factors are disposed elsewhere—immoral debauchery

(Dorian) and amoral, leisured insouciance (Wotton). This is an original

move—more exciting than the more popular idea that Dorian, somehow,

must be like gay men today. (Sinfield 101)

The principal effect of Sinfield’s analysis of Dorian Gray is to make it clear that the novel can only be read as a homosexual text if the “Wildean queer image” that would only come to exist later is imposed upon the text, and the various qualities that Wilde was understood to stand for are distributed among the characters. He underplays the extent of same-sex desire between the characters, in order to emphasize the extent to which the Wildean queer image informs any post-trials reading of Dorian Gray. Sinfield explains that “careful commentators” have seen that Hallward’s love for Dorian is not sexual, but steadily virtuous (100). This reading is complicated by at least two passages in the novel.

Hallward describes his first encounter with Dorian Gray in a passage that suggests the linkage between same-sex passion and horror:

When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of

terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one

whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it

would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself… I had

a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite

sorrows. (Wilde, Dorian 9-10) Ruthnum 17

Hallward and Lord Wotton later discuss the enshrining of Hallward’s passion in the aesthetic value of the painting itself, a crucial moment in the formation of the topos of the haunted artwork in the ghost story:

‘Then why won’t you exhibit his portrait?’ asked Lord Henry.

‘Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all

this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never cared to

speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know anything

about it. But the world might guess it, and I will not bare my soul to their

shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry--too much of myself!’

‘Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is

for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

‘I hate them for it,’cried Hallward. ‘An artist should create beautiful

things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age

when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We

have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world

what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of

Dorian Gray.’

‘I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the

intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell me, is Dorian Gray very fond of

you?’

The painter considered for a few moments. ‘He likes me,’ he answered

after a pause; ‘I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find Ruthnum 18

a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for

having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and

talk of a thousand things.

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a

real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away

my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his

coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's

day.’ (Wilde, Dorian 14-15)

This passage functions as a Rosetta stone to all the mystery and contradiction of

Wilde’s book and his use of the supernatural. Hallward expresses his feelings for

Gray as a “curious artistic idolatry,” but Wotton is quick to cast that abstraction aside when he speaks of how useful “passion is for publication.” This call to the erotic is embedded in what seems to be a discussion of art, showing that the two are inseparable in Hallward’s painting: male same-sex desire emerges in the form of Basil’s artwork. Hallward does not protest, and the conversation turns from a discussion of the painting’s lack of an “abstract sense of beauty” to whether

Dorian “likes” Hallward or not. Hallward replies with a mention of one of

Wildean aestheticism’s most famous sigils: the disposable buttonhole flower. The ease in which this discussion of a painting passes from male homoerotic desire to broken hearts, from a theory of art through to romance and finally fashion accessories, effectively describes the interrelatedness of these elements in the text and in the public mind, an interrelatedness that formed a threat to conceptions of art and sexuality in the fin de siècle. Even before the trials, Wilde became a locus Ruthnum 19 of these distressing associations, both in his persona and in his art; I will return to this point in my arguments on Decadence.

Sinfield’s description of the distribution of “Wildean queer” qualities between the characters in the novel omits the least easily describable vessel of the queer image: the titular picture. It is the painting that takes on the stain of corruption, just as the book itself would after Wilde’s trials—and the nature of that stain would be as clearly imposed upon the fictional painting as it would upon the text. Dorian’s crimes are elusive; Wilde’s “crime” was not, but the use of the novel as evidence against Wilde created a clear interpretation of Dorian’s

“crimes” as homosexual acts. The haunted artwork is a crucial element of this reading of Dorian’s acts as sins of male same-sex desire. While Wilde’s description of Dorian’s sins is consistently ambiguous, the unambiguous “evil” of the canvas provides a representation of the perceived ugliness and fearfulness of male same-sex desire.

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 and aging face on the

canvas…(Wilde, Dorian 141).

The distribution of queer attributes among the characters in the novel is arrested and unified in the haunted artwork, and in a retrospective, post-trials consideration Ruthnum 20 of Wilde-as-queer. Manifesting Basil’s passion for Dorian, supposed Decadent ideals of art, Dorian’s debauchery, and Wotton’s amoral, corrupting influence, the painting’s supernatural transformation came to stand for a growing space of anxiety as the “new sexual type” of the male homosexual emerges in public discourse after the Wilde trials.

The haunted artwork that appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in later supernatural stories influenced by Wilde continued to be associated with the artistic movements that Wilde’s name would draw into infamy: Aestheticism and

Decadence. The trials served to amplify and focus public anxieties about the potential threat posed by the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, both of which were closely allied to Wilde in the public mind. Wilde accepted and explored this association within his own writings. As Kirsten MacLeod notes, both movements were publicly mocked and stigmatized before the trails, and would afterward become associated with the image of Wilde-as-queer, and queerness in general.

The parceling of these artistic movements with the Wildean image in the public mind was a crucial factor in the formation of the “haunted artwork” topos—the association of anxieties around Wilde with anxieties around the Decadent suggested that art was, indeed, something to be feared. The link drawn between corrupting artist and corrupting artwork was an important part of this. The artwork began to be seen as a manifestation of the author’s decadent behavior, and as a stimulant to decadent behavior in the reader. Kirsten MacLeod’s description of the public attitude toward Decadence (as it was manifested in reviews of Dorian Ruthnum 21

Gray) persuasively suggests that this link between decadent author and Decadent artwork resulted in an association between art and moral character:

One of the more distinctive features of the attacks on Dorian Gray…is the

employment of the term ‘Decadent’ to describe the story…Wilde’s critics

identified his combination of a Naturalist interest in ‘leprous[ness]’ and

‘garbage’ with the ‘sensuous and hyperdecorative manner’ of

Aestheticism as ‘Decadent’. Criticism became more personal in nature,

and increasingly, the moral character of the writer was brought into

question. (MacLeod 81)

This vague fear of the moral turpitude of so-called Decadent literature took more definite shape after the trials. The critical linkage between “corrupt” artist and

“corrupt” artwork that was found in the Dorian Gray reviews moved into the courtroom during Wilde’s trials, and this assumption of a linkage would be registered in the haunted artworks of British ghost stories. The public anxieties over Decadence, which was the movement most closely associated with Wilde at the time of his downfall, were in part due to the indefinability and “catch-all” nature of the term “Decadent.” Despite the many referents of the word, what emerged most clearly was that the movement was “against” what was considered natural, as the title of J.K. Huysman’s influential A Rebours (Against Nature) suggests. As MacLeod notes, despite efforts on the part of pro-Decadent critics to

bring precision to the term…this precision was lost when taken up in

popular discourse. Decadence was used loosely by critics to describe

everything from Naturalism and Impressionism to Realism and New Ruthnum 22

Woman fiction. At the same time, with the advent of a medical discourse

that associated artistic genius with criminality and degeneracy, Decadent

writers and artists were increasingly subject to ad hominem attacks in

which their art was represented as a direct reflection of their own

pathological condition. (MacLeod 6)

MacLeod acknowledges the instability of the term “Decadence,” referencing

David Weir’s argument that the definition of Decadence is predicated on an opposition to “arbitrarily defined terms,” (Weir 10) and its meaning thus “changes in relation to its context” (MacLeod 19). As is suggested by the examples

MacLeod selects—Naturalism, Impressionism, Realism, and New Woman

Fiction—the artworks that critics labeled decadent were those that deviated from the literary mainstream, and were potentially “transmitters” of the supposedly pathological nature of their creators. The indefinable and fluid nature of the term

“decadence” was attached to fin de siècle artworks that were perceived as having a corrupting influence, or being corrupt in themselves, and the alignment of this perceived corruption with the male same-sex anxieties that Wilde would come to represent was manifestly clear after the trials—the sins of the Decadent, which had previously been difficult to define, now took on a definite form: the homosexual. Following Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency in 1895, a

National Observer reporter offered the following formulation, tying Decadence to

Wilde at the peak of his infamy: “There is not a man or woman in the English- speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a Ruthnum 23 deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the high

Priest of the Decadents” (Constable, Denisoff, Potolsky 1).

The alliance of the Decadent movement with the earlier works of

Aestheticism is clear, particularly in the public and critical alignment of Wilde with both movements, but the difference between the two categories is unclear.

MacLeod subtly indicates the affinity between the two categories when she describes Wilde’s stylistic shift in The Picture of Dorian Gray as a “move toward the darker Aestheticism of Decadence.” Just as the difference between the two movements can be discussed as a matter of gradation, Decadence can be discussed

(especially in the context of this project) as a shifting term with a definition that was largely fixed by public and critical perception—a perception that often tended toward the fear or repulsion that was manifested in supernatural narratives of the haunted artwork. Charles Bernheimer, following Richard Gilman, explores

Decadence as a term and movement that evolved in response to an artificial construction: according to Berheimer’s interpretation of Gilman, Decadence demands that “a positive norm must be constructed in relation to which certain modes of behaviour can be designated as regressively deviant” (52). Gilman sees the essential flaw of Decadence as its refusal to acknowledge the constructedness of the norm that it opposes. Bernheimer persuasively argues that the stress upon artificiality in Decadent texts such as A Rebours is itself an acknowledgment of the artificiality of all cultural and social constructs. This artifice is also manifest in

Dorian Gray, a text that presents a false gesture toward defining Decadence and Ruthnum 24 codifying elements of “regressively deviant” behaviour in a novel that hinges upon a piece of art invested with the desires of three male characters.

Efforts toward a definition of Decadence and Aestheticism in the public mind at the fin de siècle were performed in a compiling, cataloguing manner that used the various manifestations of Decadent art alongside speculation over the public and private lives of so-called Decadent artists (which, as MacLeod reminds us, were often characterized as “pathological”) to construct a “regressively deviant” image of the movement. The process of classifying the Decadent was, crucially, tied to the classification of the various aspects of the Wildean

“degenerate” (effeminacy, artistry, male same-sex desire) in the category of the homosexual. As MacLeod notes, “Decadence, like Aestheticism before it, was mocked mercilessly in the pages of Punch and other magazines” (5). This mockery of the form took on the shape of mockery of its practitioners, including

(most prominently) Wilde. Behind this mockery was a fear of the corrupting influence of the form and the man, a fear that soon found a defined shape during the trials of Oscar Wilde. Charles Bernheimer regards The Picture of Dorian Gray as Wilde’s own elegantly deceptive definition of decadence—“Dorian’s subjectivity is constituted as decadent insofar as it is a function of the desire of the

Other” (60). The Other, in this case, is represented by both Hallward and Wotton, both of whom invest the titular painting with their desire for Dorian. The locus of

Dorian’s subjectivity is this decaying portrait, which becomes the focal point for a popular interpretation of the novel: “this most famous of English decadent novels is reassuringly interpreted as a devastating critique of decadence” (Bernheimer Ruthnum 25

59). The picture becomes hideous as Dorian’s acts grow uglier, and Dorian’s appearance is revealed to be a beautiful lie when he attempts to destroy the picture. Perversion and the worship of beauty are punished, and the result is death.

Bernheimer points out that this interpretation ignores Dorian’s failure to realize that the painting is not his soul, but an identity constructed by an Other:

It is this dynamic of identity de-formation and alienation that Dorian

rejects when he falls in love with his painted alter ego and volunteers to

give up his soul to always look like it. Thereby Dorian equates his soul,

that is, his moral center, his essential being, with a perfectly static image

of his unchanging physical beauty… But he has misread himself. His

painted body is actually the projection of the souls of his lovers. Their

souls are mobile instruments of desire. Dorian’s, in contrast, is a

repressive agency that punishes transgression. By identifying with this

soul, Dorian ensures that his decadence will be massively condemned, as it

has been by countless readers eager to associate themselves with his right-

thinking spiritual essence. But such condemnation mistakes Wilde’s

decadent subject, which is betrayed by Dorian’s overly conscientious soul.

(Bernheimer 60)

Bernheimer explains Wilde’s ending as a preemptory “comic send-up” of the ethical misreading of the tale: the reader who follows Dorian’s mistake and views the painting as his soul will make the “mistake” of “imagining that life is anything other than art, that a soul is anything other than a style of representation, that a normative standard of ethics is anything more than a mannerism, or that Ruthnum 26 decadence can judge itself in any other way than by betraying its own aesthetic premises” (60). As an interpretation of Wilde’s particular use of Decadence and an interpretation of a particularly slippery term / movement that defines itself in opposition to a fictional norm, Bernheimer’s argument provides an admirable précis. Placed in the particular historical context of the fin de siècle, however, with the shadow of the Wilde trials looming in two temporal directions, the popular misreading of Dorian Gray that he debunks seems nearly irrelevant. The tale was certainly not looked upon as an ethical, moralizing text by Wilde’s prosecutor, Edward Carson, nor was it lauded for its righteousness in contemporary reviews. Instead, it was viewed as a coded compendium of the illicit and anti-social acts that Decadence and the figure of Wilde stood for in fin- de-siècle society. The haunted artwork is indeed invested with the desires of

Hallward, Wotton, and Dorian, and as such becomes a locus not only of Dorian’s subjectivity, but of the contemplation of male same-sex desire and its relation to the Decadent conception of art. These notions were held to be associated and corrupt in the courtroom, a perceived affinity that persisted in depiction of and fears related to the figure of the Wildean homosexual in ensuing years.

A conception of the artist as threat—and the alliance of this threat to anxiety over male same-sex desire—is crystallized in an exchange between Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry’s advocate, Edward Carson. Carson is asking

Wilde to defend a document, a letter sent by him to Lord Alfred Douglas: Ruthnum 27

‘I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary

letter. You might as well cross-examine me as to whether King Lear or a

sonnet of Shakespeare’s is proper.’

‘Apart from art, Mr. Wilde?’

‘I cannot answer apart from art.’

‘Suppose a man who was not an artist had written this letter, would you

say it was a proper letter?’

‘A man who was not an artist could not have written that letter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because nobody but an artist could write it. He certainly could not write

the language unless he were a man of letters.’

…‘I do not profess to be an artist; and when I hear you give evidence, I am

glad I am not.’ (Hyde 116)

Carson singled out passages such as “red rose-leaf lips of yours” in his efforts to establish the perversity of the letter, which Wilde insists is an artwork that is immune to the speculations that could arise were the lines part of an “ordinary letter.” Carson’s victory lies in seating those speculations of perversity in the artwork, and in the artist that he is glad he is not. The slipperiness of the category of artwork works against Wilde; when he attempts to lift the letter above the category of an ordinary missive, he places it in a realm already charged with anxieties during the Decadent era. The fact that the letter is not a letter, but an

“artwork” that falls outside the normal bounds of communication, functions as Ruthnum 28 additional proof of Wilde’s deviance. This alignment of anxieties with the artist and the artwork would prove crucial to the development of the British ghost story.

After 1895, the haunted artwork comes to be freighted with a collection of associated anxieties—but what, exactly, are these anxieties? The “complex fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments” that Talia Schaffer reads in

Dracula? Well, yes. But of what significance is it that the haunted object is an artwork, an image that would recur in later supernatural works? The very vagueness of this category—“artwork”—evokes the threat that Wilde represented to a pre-existing cultural conception of art, a threat that would eventually be directly associated with his sexual conduct and persona. An exploration of the role of paintings will bring precision to my preceding arguments on to the artistic movements that informed the artworks of the fin de siècle, and will illuminate the particular role that the supernatural investment of Dorian’s picture with queer significance carried in Wilde’s work and beyond.

Alison Hennegan’s essay on “Aspects of Life and Literature in Fin-de-

Siècle England” draws and implies several connections among sexuality, the ghost story, and shifting definitions of the artwork at the fin de siècle. “The new movement [l’art pour l’art] brought an emphasis on the prime importance of style and form, and the beginnings of an aesthetic philosophy which taught that the boundaries separating the arts—music, painting, sculpture, dancing, poetry and prose—are sometimes more apparent than real” (Hennegan 172). To this list of arts that were being pushed outside of their traditional boundaries, at least in the aims of the aesthetes and the cultural perception of late nineteenth-century Ruthnum 29

Britain, I would add an important element of Wilde’s artistic persona, and indeed an essential part of his output: conversation. Wilde’s verbal epigrams and his talent for scintillating talk at dinner parties (and courtrooms, among other places) became the intrinsic factor of his celebrity, an inextricable part of his written artistic work, and part of what Sinfield terms “the Wildean queer image.” His

“sparkling wit and engaging conversation,” paired with his exotic dress, “won

Wilde a place in London’s elite intellectual and artistic circles” (Kingston 25) and formed the bedrock of his public persona. Wilde performed a speaking tour of

America before publishing any major works, having been hired to represent “the aesthete” in advance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a show that aimed to spoof the Aesthetic movement. He was willing to cannibalize his conversations for use in his plays and novels (while in prison, he aligned himself with Lord

Henry Wotton when a fellow prisoner called him Dorian Gray), and contemporary works of satirical parody such as Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation founded their success on replicating Wilde’s conversation.

Hennegan illuminates the threat that Wilde, the public’s chosen representation of the Aesthetic movement, posed to contemporary conventions of art, by recounting an “insult” orchestrated by W.P. Frith, one of the foremost mid-

Victorian painters. “His target was two-fold: a movement, Aestheticism, and a man, Oscar Wilde” (Hennegan 170). By 1883, Frith’s career was threatened by the rising innovations that he related to the Aesthetic movement. Frith himself described his intentions in painting The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881: Ruthnum 30

Beyond the desire of recording for posterity the aesthetic craze as regards

dress... I wished to hit the folly of listening to self-elected critics in matters

of taste… I therefore planned a group, consisting of a well-known apostle

of the beautiful, with a herd of eager worshippers surrounding him. He is

supposed to be explaining his theories to willing ears, taking some pictures

on the Academy walls for his text… On the left of the composition is a

family of pure aesthetes absorbed in affected study of the pictures.

(Hennegan 170-171)

Hennegan explains that the apostle in question is, of course, Oscar Wilde. And, just as Dorian Gray’s painting morphed within the book and in its textual interpretations following Wilde’s trial, Frith’s painting underwent a telling change: “Missing the visual clues which tell us whom to mock and whom to admire, we can only see that Wilde dominates the picture. He does so partly by virtue of sheer size—in Life as in Art: he was well over six foot—, partly by sheer beauty” (Hennegan 182).

In a reversal of Dorian’s corruption, the garments and grooming that were intended to render Wilde ridiculous instead render him glorious. This, however, is a reading of the painting that emerges after the significance of Frith’s visual clues has dissipated, long after the fin de siècle. The complicated role played by Wilde- as-cultural-figure in a re-evaluation of artistic standards at the fin de siècle was intimately bound up in the interrogation of morality and sexuality that his work and life would provide. As Wilde’s celebrity predated his literary output, his status as a cultural figure was a constant influence on contemporary readings of Ruthnum 31 his work—readings that would be “confirmed” or revised when his crimes were articulated during the trial and shaped into the composite idea of the homosexual.

Wilde’s lasting impact on the ghost story genre manifests at a cultural moment when anxieties about male same-sex desire, the Aesthetic / Decadent conception of art, and the relation between art and the newly defined figure of the homosexual are housed in the figure of Wilde. As Hennegan attests, the work the aesthetes performed toward complicating an idée reçue about existing lines between artistic forms was related to the movement’s disruption of received ideas of morality. As these tensions aligned, Oscar Wilde’s placement of a painting as the centerpiece and “moral” showpiece of The Picture of Dorian Gray emerged as a charged formal gambit. What the painting conceals, it also reveals—a formula that could also be applied to the evolving Wildean image and its relationship to homosexuality. Hennegan’s essay eventually enfolds the place of the ghost story at the fin de siècle.

Concealment, detection, disclosure: those elements link works as diverse

as R.L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Ibsen’s Ghosts (first

translated into English in 1885), Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

(1895) and James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898)… the ghost story, which

reached a pinnacle of popularity and achievement during the last decades

of the century, shares the qualities of uncovering, unveiling. (Hennegan

198)

A further height of achievement would be reached in the ghost story genre in the years following Wilde’s trials, as the genre emerged from the fin de siècle while Ruthnum 32 employing a form of masking that differed from works produced before the infamous trials. The concealment of male same-sex desire as a supernatural manifestation emerged as a manner of exhibiting anxieties around this desire and its exposure, while also functioning as a covert manner of exhibiting the existence of male same-sex desire. Haunted artworks encoded male same-sex desire, simultaneously concealing and revealing anxieties that had arisen around the figure of Wilde.

The placement of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on Hennegan’s list of stories relying on concealment is telling. John Fletcher has capitalized on an observation of Leon Edel’s to argue in favour of the existence of a link between the Wilde trials and the James’s supernatural tales: “As Leon Edel noted fifty years ago in his edition of The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, apart from four early tales in the late 1860s up to the mid-1870s, James’s dozen or so mature spectral narratives are all concentrated in the 1890s or later. The majority of these follow the three trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895” (Fletcher 57) The manifestation of the “queer stereotype” that Alan Sinfield argues coalesced after the trials became a primary haunting figure in ghost stories written after 1895.

Wilde’s linked usage of the supernatural and the language of painting was made manifest before Dorian Gray, in the “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” Originally composed in 1889, the story is a strange combination of literary criticism and fiction which uses a painting as a crux, a tale which brings the themes and tensions I have discussed above into focus, and establishes strategies around the use of the haunted artwork in the ghost story that would recur in the crucial years Ruthnum 33 following Wilde’s trials.

“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” begins with the story’s narrator being shown the titular “portrait” by his friend Erskine. The picture depicts Willie Hughes, the boy-actor whom Erskine’s late friend Cyril Graham believed to be the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The narrative is wrested from our initial narrator for the majority of the tale, as Erskine recounts the construction of Cyril Graham’s theory. (This nesting of narratives is by no means unique to the ghost story, but the engagement of the nested story with the larger narrative is a technique that occurs in a large proportion of the particular stories that I will be analyzing in the forthcoming chapters. This method of drawing attention to the charged, anxiety- laden creative potential of storytelling and conversation is treated in Robert

Hichens’s How Love Came to Professor Guildea, as well as Henry James’s The

Turn of the Screw). Graham, who himself was a remarkable boy-actor of female parts in Shakespeare plays during his schooldays, has become convinced that all pre-existing theories as to the identity of the “onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets” are false. The muse that Shakespeare discusses, Graham has decided, must be the actor who originally played Shakespeare’s female characters. Graham has found clues indicating that Mr. W.H. shared Shakespeare’s first name, and a series of puns indicates that the boy’s last name was Hughes. Graham admits that it is discomfiting to wonder who the “young man of Shakespeare’s day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the strange worship, and are almost afraid to turn the key that unlocks the mystery of the poet’s heart?” Ruthnum 34

(Wilde, Complete Short Stories 43). The homosexual indications are clear, and once again, spread between the characters—the beauty of the young man in the portrait is hailed by our initial narrator, even as it is deemed effeminate, and

Graham’s theory causes Shakespeare’s creation of his female heroines to become an act of romantic tribute towards a young, male muse. Graham downplays the possibility that Shakespeare is discussing the art of the sonnets within the sonnets: it must be the plays Shakespeare is referring to, as the sonnets “were to him but slight and secret things” (Wilde, Complete Short Stories 43). This marginalization of a particular form is something that I will return to as I look at ghost stories—it is remarkable to note the volume of important ghost story writers (such as Henry

James, who called The Turn of the Screw an “irresponsible little fiction”) who regarded their supernatural works as hobby-caliber divergences from their more serious works. The language of simultaneous concealment and exposure is at work here. The “secret” nature of the sonnets allows them to become the most direct window into Shakespeare’s true inspirations and motives, in Graham’s reading, and provokes the scavenger hunt that results in the portrait of Willie

Hughes.

The portrait, interestingly, is a forgery. Graham and Erskine (Erskine has been completely convinced by his friend’s theory but will not allow it to be presented until the existence of the Elizabethan boy-actor has been proven) search countless records but emerge with no proof of the boy’s identity outside of the sonnets themselves. Desperate to convince his friend, Graham invents an implausible tale of discovering a trunk with the initials “W.H.” stamped upon the Ruthnum 35 exterior. Once again, as Erskine narrates, that which hides also shows:

One morning, however, he (Graham) saw that one of the sides of the chest

was much thicker than the other, and looking more closely, he discovered

that a framed panel picture was clamped against it. On taking it out, he

found it was the picture that was now lying on the sofa. It was very dirty,

and covered with mould; but he managed to clean it, and, to his great joy,

saw that he had fallen by mere chance on the one thing for which he had

been looking. Here was an authentic picture of Mr. W.H… (Wilde,

Complete Short Stories 46)

Cyril Graham’s dramatic discovery of the hidden, his unveiling of the obscured, is revealed to be a lie. The painting is a forgery, created by a skilled artist who has been paid off by Graham. Shamed by Erskine’s discovery, Graham shoots himself: “Some of his blood splashed upon the frame of the picture, just where the name had been painted” (Wilde, Complete Short Stories 47).

The “ghost” in this story is, of course, Willie Hughes, conjured from the words of Shakespeare and the analyses of Cyril Graham, who has a pre-existing investment in proving the theory right: as a former boy-interpreter of

Shakespeare’s heroines, he would be validating what Erskine viewed as his

“remarkable talent” by promoting this potentially existing actor to the ascendant role of Shakespeare’s muse. The narrator of the story is entranced by the beauty of the portrait and the romantic soundness of Graham’s theory; he too becomes embroiled in an obsessive quest to prove the theory correct. As he comes to realize, “The only evidence for the existence of Willie Hughes is that picture in Ruthnum 36 front of you, and that picture is a forgery” (Wilde, Complete Short Stories 58).

The haunted artwork reveals many elements of male same-sex passion—an admiration of male beauty, a mutually creative act between two men—but must be neutralized in its status as a forgery: that which is incarnated must then be banished. The haunting aspect of the portrait, its ability to incite passion, cannot be neutralized: the narrator’s passion re-convinces Erskine as to the truth of the theory, until Erskine too dies and leaves the painting to the narrator.

The painting has become a vessel for a ghost that comes to bear many of the traits of male same-sex desire throughout the complicated workings of the narrative. Alan Sinfield argues that the story “enacts not the discreet presentation of an existing queer identity, but the elusiveness of the quest for such an identity”

(19). Just as is the case in Sinfield’s work with Dorian Gray, a queer reading of the tale is made explicitly possible in the wake of the Wilde trials. The quest that

Sinfield writes of may be elusive, but it leaves a trace of its existence even at the end of the tale, after Mr. W.H.’s two faithful believers have fallen. The painting is a physicalized trace: it comes to represent the quest itself and the aim of the quest, simultaneously. Just as a ghost is not dead by virtue of its existence as a ghost, the painting does not represent the failure of the quest—if the ghost of Mr. W.H. can be embedded in an artwork, the search for a “queer identity” has proved its own validity. By enacting the forgery of the evidence, Cyril Graham provides proof of the “queer identity” he wishes to find in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In

Derridian terms, the painting is the specter which is “a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit… some Ruthnum 37

‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (Derrida 5). The specter is created by the “spirit” of an interaction between men—by Erskine’s doubt and Graham’s need—and comes to incarnate that relation.

Terry Castle argues that the apparitional has been used to “derealize the threat of lesbianism.” The conviction of Oscar Wilde shows the extent to which homosexual desire between men was held to be a threat in the fin de siècle. The apparitional was used to incarnate anxieties about male same-sex desire, as well as the causes of those anxieties themselves. The haunted artwork does not deny male same-sex desire; as demonstrated by the works by Wilde that I have discussed thus far, “hiding” these sexual matters in haunted artworks allows them a simultaneously hidden and exposed identity, a position that was to affect the ghost story form itself. A ghost story is a haunted artwork in itself, and therefore an ideal form in which to enact the encoding of anxieties over male same-sex desire in embedded haunted artworks.

In the following chapter, I will examine two works by Henry James: The

Tragic Muse (1890) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). The timing of these publications, one emerging during Wilde’s rise to fame and one after his downfall and the consequent social repercussions on thought and anxiety around male same-sex anxiety, provides an encapsulation of the developing use of the haunted artwork as a device for negotiating male same-sex desire and the figure of Wilde, as well as an introduction to the rubric of associations that the haunting figure of

Wilde would bring to the British ghost story. Ruthnum 38

Chapter Two

“The truth is, painting people is a very absorbing, exclusive occupation. You can’t do much to them besides.”

Henry James, The Tragic Muse

“What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or to let a spirit speak.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Oscar Wilde’s influence over the form and content of the haunted artwork during the fin de siècle and ensuing years, a time when the ghost story reached new artistic heights, was a consequence both of his work and of his status as a public figure before and after his trials. In the years of his mounting artistic achievements, Wilde’s fame grew in the public consciousness, which accounts for the massive ghost he left behind. “As the year 1890 drew to a close, Wilde was poised to take the London literary scene by storm. The following five years were to see a meteoric rise in his celebrity” (Kingston 93). Dorian Gray would begin this period of rising fame, which would be capped by Wilde’s successful plays and transformed into infamy by his trials. In order to trace the earlier portions of

Wilde’s literary influence through to the later impact left by his trials, I will examine two pieces by Henry James, a writer and public figure whose career intersected with Wilde’s at crucial moments, and whose work is richly populated Ruthnum 39 by hauntings and discussions of art that bear the Wildean motif I am attempting to define.

In the microcosm of fin de siècle English letters, Wilde’s presence is pervasive enough to evoke Derrida’s summation of the lasting effects of Marx:

“In proposing this title, Specters of Marx, I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems to me to organize the dominant influence on discourse today” (45). The work of Henry James is particularly reflective of Wilde’s capacity to influence discourse before and after the trials, particularly in the area of male same-sex anxiety. The 1890 James novel The

Tragic Muse is unique among the texts I am discussing in that its publication predates that of Dorian Gray. The two pieces were written almost concurrently, with Muse appearing in The Atlantic from January 1889 to May 1890, and Dorian

Gray first appearing on June 20th, 1890 in Lippincott’s Magazine. The closeness of these publications and their overlapping treatment of the ghostly theme in painting is, I argue, a case of Wilde’s character, the cultural figure of Wilde, reaching into James’s text as an influence. I will move from a discussion of The

Tragic Muse to that text which seems inevitably to enter any discussion of either

James or the ghost story: The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, and richly haunted by the specters of exposed, fearsome sexuality that the Wilde trials created for James. An analysis of these two works will allow me to trace Wilde’s spectrum of influence before and after the trials with some specificity, in order to delineate this influence in a manner that will prove applicable to my next chapter’s exploration of the post-trials British ghost story as a genre. Ruthnum 40

Recent scholarship on Henry James has discussed two essential aspects of my project without unifying the two. Christopher Lane has explored the

“homosexual art of painting” in James, while Shoshana Felman and Neill

Matheson, among others, have discussed the linkage between homosexual panic and James’s ghostly tales. In this chapter, I connect these separate strands of analysis, to show how paintings and ghosts function similarly in James: as a site of hiding and showing, expressing male same-sex desire in terms set out by the life and work of Oscar Wilde—terms which would have an enveloping effect on the genre of the ghost story.

Henry James did not escape Wilde’s social and political reach. The success of Wilde’s plays rankled James, whose attempts at the theatre with The

American and Guy Domville were unmitigated failures (Hyde, Henry James at

Home 65). In an attempt to distract himself from opening-night jitters when

Domville was launched, James decided to attend another recently-opened play: An

Ideal Husband. The ecstatic audience reaction he witnessed caused him to doubt

Domville’s chances, as he told his brother in a letter: “‘How can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?’ It couldn’t—but even then the full truth was, ‘mercifully’ not revealed to me; the truth that in a short month my piece would be whisked away to make room for the triumphant Oscar”

(James, Letters 239-240). Guy Domville was cleared from the stage to make way for a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, but, as H. Montgomery

Hyde notes, a “short month” after that, “the ‘triumphant Oscar’ was to be arrested and both his successes were to disappear from the London theatre, never to be Ruthnum 41 revived in his lifetime—after (producer George) Alexander had pasted strips of paper over the author’s name on the playbills in a desperate attempt at prolonging the life of the money-spinning comedy” (Hyde, Henry James at Home 65). This was by no means the last attempt at the erasure, the premature ghosting, of Oscar

Wilde, nor was it the first. Despite claiming to find nothing interesting in Wilde,

James had devoted a considerable portion of what was to be the longest novel of his career, The Tragic Muse (1890), to the development of Gabriel Nash, a character closely aligned with the Wildean persona. The themes and even character names2 in Muse and Dorian Gray novels bear many resemblances, due largely to the inextricable presence of Wilde-as-cultural-figure that is (and was, even in 1890) integral to each text. The contrary James was adamant that his interest in Wilde began with the trials:

It has been, it is, hideously dramatic and really interesting; — so far as one

can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a

sickening horribility. It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all—of the mere

exposure—that blurs the spectacle. But the fall from nearly 20 years of a

really unique kind of ‘brilliant’ conspicuity (wit, ‘art’, conversation – ‘one

of our 2 or 3 dramatists’ etc.) to that sordid prison cell and this gulf of

obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats—it is beyond

any utterance of irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the

2 Basil Hallward, Dorian’s painter, has his name echoed in James’s text by the actor “Basil Dashwood.” One of the proposed stage names for Miriam Rooth, the charismatic actress in The Tragic Muse, is “Gladys Vane,” which is remarkably similar to the name of Dorian’s briefly beloved actress, Sibyl Vane. Ruthnum 42

smallest degree interesting to me—but this hideous human history has

made him so—in a manner. (James, Selected Letters 79)

James reaches Lovecraftian heights of florid adjectivism in this passage from a letter to Edmund Gosse written three days after Wilde’s arrest, bespeaking an interest that is far from freshly born. The language of horror is at work here—

“squalid,” “gulf of obscenity,” “ghoulish,” “hideous”… the arrest and impending trial add viscera to the haunting presence of Wilde in James’s work and life. J.

Hillis Miller and Angela Kingston are among the many critics to indicate that

Wilde appears in The Tragic Muse, in the guise of a character named Gabriel

Nash. Nash is transparent and omnipresent; while he seems to disappear for long stretches of the double narrative, which flits between the budding careers of actress Miriam Rooth and painter Nick Dormer, he is constantly mentioned, and the philosophy he expounds in epigrams and conversation becomes an essential part of the lives of all the characters.

James launches his preface to the New York Edition of The Tragic Muse from a position of vagueness, unusual in the prefaces to his work, as he kept meticulous track of his ideas and working process in a series of notebooks. (Save for my references to the Preface, I will be using a text based on the unrevised

1890 edition, as my project demands that the text be approached as it appeared in

Wilde’s lifetime). “I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin and growth of ‘The Tragic Muse’…” (James, Tragic Muse NYE v). While this lapse in memory may be explained by the length of James’s writing career, the lack of any mention of Gabriel Nash in the Preface is positively odd. Nash is Ruthnum 43 the most enigmatic and interesting character in the narrative, but James avoids the character in this examination of the novel, which analyzes the other characters in depth. Erasure is associated with painting in the novel, just as art is associated with effeminacy—the mnemonic elisions of James’s preface fit The Tragic Muse perfectly. The fading, disappearing painting of Gabriel Nash which is to be the last remnant of his presence in the narrative is echoed in James’s elision of Nash’s character from the preface; in both cases, there is a sense that a deliberate forgetting is taking place, an erasure that leaves an eloquent gap. In her study of

Wilde’s fictionalized appearances in the fin de siècle (Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction), Angela Kingston insists that Gabriel Nash is a clear stand-in for Wilde and that Nash is central to the narrative of The Tragic Muse. It is Nash’s encouragement that causes Dormer, the novel’s protagonist, to turn away from a career in politics in order to embrace the life of a painter, a choice which involves the sacrifice of material wealth, heterosexual marriage, and potentially his very manhood.

The novel’s double plot has always been, as Paul Beidler points out, its

“problem” (Beidler 13). The story of Nick Dormer’s sacrifices as he embraces his vocation is counterbalanced by the rise of Miriam Rooth on the London stage, where she uses her “plastic” nature to excel as an actress. Despite her own esteem for art, Miriam cannot quite respect the man who chooses it as a career: “She ranks painters more or less with her own profession, about which already, new as she is to it, she has no illusions. They’re all artists; it’s the same general sort of thing. She prefers men of the world – men of action” (James, Tragic Muse 438). Ruthnum 44

Mrs. Julia Dallow, the widow whose love means a fortune and a career in politics to Nick, is also unable to accept his choice of profession. When Nick gives up his parliamentary seat and takes up a studio in London, the newly arrived Miriam

Rooth becomes Nick’s first model, posing as the titular “Tragic Muse.” J. Hillis

Miller asserts that, “In this novel, heterosexuality is coded as the respectable vocations of politics and diplomacy, while homosexuality is, to some degree covertly, coded as a devotion to art” (33). This homosexual “coding” is, at first, difficult to trace, as it is initially carried out by the presentation of heterosexual desire as a form of corruption.

Heterosexual desire manifests itself in the painter’s studio, and is interpreted for the hapless Nick Dormer by Gabriel Nash, who refers to Miriam, acting as Dormer’s model: “While you were engaged in transferring her image to your sensorium you stamped your own upon hers” (Tragic Muse 371). Miriam’s fascination with Dormer grows as he arrests her image upon the canvas that he will later hide, incomplete, in his studio. The intimacy of the studio is what causes the irreparable rift in his relationship with Mrs. Dallow, who discovers Nick painting Miriam and is perturbed by the closeness of the scene.

She had taken a step forward, but she had done no more, stopping short at

the sight of the strange woman, so divested of visiting-gear that she looked

half-undressed, who lounged familiarly in the middle of the room and over

whom Nick had been still more familiarly hanging. Julia's eyes rested on

this embodied unexpectedness, and as they did so she grew pale—so pale

that Nick, observing it, instinctively looked back to see what Miriam had Ruthnum 45

done to produce such an effect. She had done nothing at all, which was

precisely what was embarrassing; she only stared at the intruder,

motionless and superb. She seemed, somehow, in indolent possession of

the place, and even in that instant Nick noted how handsome she looked;

so that he exclaimed to himself somewhere, inaudibly, in a region beneath

his other emotions, ‘How I should like to paint her that way!’ Mrs. Dallow

transferred her eyes for a single moment to her friend's; then they turned

away—away from Miriam, ranging over the room. (James, Tragic Muse

285)

Julia Dallow’s shock at coming upon Nick chambered with his subject is soon transmuted into feelings of horror and repulsion directed at Gabriel Nash, who greets her familiarly upon her exit from the studio, mistaking her for Miriam.

“‘That man – that man who spoke to me?’ Julia asked, startled into a shuddering memory…‘That’s what you like – doing what you were this morning; with women lolling, with their things off, to be painted, and people like that man’”

(James, Tragic Muse 293-294). Mrs. Dallow’s easy shift from horror at the heterosexual tension suggested by the “lolling” Miriam to a shuddering fear of

“people like that man” is intrinsic to the structure of the novel, which soon places the suggested corruption of the studio atmosphere in the person of Nash:

Though the hour was late, he (Dormer) found Gabriel Nash established in

his studio...Trying it late, on the chance, he had been told by Nick’s

servant that Nick would sleep there that night, and he had come in to wait,

he was so eager to congratulate him… Gabriel was indeed more wonderful Ruthnum 46

than ever, while he lolled on a divan and emitted a series of reflections that

were even more ingenious than opportune. (James, Tragic Muse 371)

“Lolled” recurs as a verb, this time applied to Nash, in this studio which is now also a sleeping-chamber. “Lolled” is, of course, a word that was associated with effeminacy and Decadence at this period, and would soon be connected to sexual relations between men—Ed Cohen presents a quote from the April 3, 1895

Evening News coverage of the Wilde trials that suggests this link:

While Wilde was in the box the peer looked implacably across the court to

where the poet, with his hyacinthine locks and air of easy abandon, almost

lolled in the witness box. (Cohen 139)

After Miriam is displaced by Nash in Mrs. Dallow’s formulation, and

Miriam’s presence in the studio is gradually overtaken by Nash, the studio effectively becomes what John Fletcher refers to as a “Gothic closet” space in his essay on James’s 1890’s ghost stories: “a fiercely defended, newly solitary space of libidinally charged male secrets, of intrusion, doubling and paranoia” (62). The language of “secrets, intrusion, and paranoia” is spread throughout the heterosexual love triangle between Miriam Rooth, Julia Dallow, and Nick

Dormer. The “male secret,” in this case, is art, coded as a homosexuality, a combination effected in the transformation of the studio into a sleeping chamber, intruded upon by the effeminate Nash.

The closet-work involves the spectral production of condensed and over-

determined, composite figures, split off and disavowed alter egos as in

dreams. Like Stevenson’s Hyde or Dorian Gray’s portrait or the spectral Ruthnum 47

figures of James, they cannot be translated unequivocally as ‘gay’

representations but are none the less the homoerotically charged

productions of the Gothic closet. (Fletcher 62)

While Nick Dormer’s studio functions as one of these “closet spaces,” painting and spectrality transgress the bounds of this space. Gabriel Nash exists at an indeterminate place in society and in reality (Dormer is unaware of where he lives, or who his friends could be), but his presence and the damaging aspects of

Nick’s painting career are hauntingly present in every part of the novel.

Having completed this encoding of painting as heterosexual corruption,

James allows the “haunted closet” of the studio to provide a direct treatment of the homosexual aspect of the painting act, implying an intimacy and transference in the act that parallels the sexualized atmosphere encountered by Julia Dallow during her intrusion into the Rooth sitting. Miriam Rooth herself suggests the circumstances that will allow James’s treatment of the homosexual aspect of the painting act to be illustrated:

‘You’ll find other models; paint Gabriel Nash.’

‘Gabriel Nash as a substitute for you?’

‘It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too…paint

Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb.’

(James, Tragic Muse 502)

Miriam, imbued by this time in the narrative with a wisdom that would have been incongruous with her pre-portrait character, displays her ability to absorb and reflect the impulses of those around her in this uncanny analysis of the power Ruthnum 48 present in the act of portraiture. Her definition of the act of painting as the exorcism of a “throb” is one that is reflected in later texts such as E.F. Benson’s

The Judgment Books (which I will discuss at length in the next chapter), and even in Dorian Gray. The “throb” represents a source of anxiety, one that becomes increasingly confused in the shadow of Wilde: is this anxiety about the artistic impulse, with the anti-social associations that Decadence and Aestheticism provoked in fin-de-siècle society, or is it an anxiety over male same-sex desire? In the post-trials era, the two concepts would grow increasingly muddled after they were unified in the disgraced figure of Wilde: The Tragic Muse prefigures this conflation of anxieties by drawing upon different aspects of the multi-faceted

Wilde character before the trials--effeminacy, artistry, a lack of concern for the workings and opinions of conventional society--and marrying them to James’s own preoccupations. J. Hillis Miller interprets Miriam’s quotation to mean “that painting a portrait kills the painter’s personal interest in the one he paints” (Miller

42), a reading which is swiftly contradicted when Nash reenters Dormer’s life, and the painter takes the opportunity to capture him on the canvas:

“You're so remarkable that, more than ever, I must paint you," Nick

returned, "though I'm so agitated by your prophetic words that my hand

trembles and I shall doubtless scarcely be able to hold my brush… Let me

at any rate have some sort of sketch of you, as a kind of feather from the

angel’s wing, or a photograph of the ghost, to prove to me in the future

that you were once a solid, sociable fact, that I didn’t utterly fabricate you.

Of course I shall be able to say to myself that you can’t have been a Ruthnum 49

fable—otherwise you would have had a moral; but that won’t be enough,

because I’m not sure you won’t have had one.” (James, Tragic Muse 508)

There is an eerie resonance between this summation of Nash’s character and the societal and moral gap left in the wake of Wilde’s trials and death. Perhaps even more striking is the similarity of the discussion of morality and art found here to that found in Wilde’s epigrammatic introduction to the bound edition of Dorian

Gray, which would come out some years after its magazine publication, and would be published once again in the records of Wilde’s trial. Placing Nash within an artwork is a fraught gesture, pushing this representative of effeminacy and allied anxiety-drawing elements into the amoral domain that Wilde suggested ideal art should occupy: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book ...

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” (Wilde,

Dorian 3). Dormer is aware that Nash provides no moral or meaning—only the discomfiting effects of his being, a challenge his existence poses to accepted ideas that Dormer has strayed from under the influence of Nash. “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital” (Wilde, Dorian 3). The fears surrounding the corrupting influence of the Decadent artist manifest here, and as Dormer becomes an artist himself, distancing himself from a “manly” career in politics, the fear that Decadent corruption can be passed along is confirmed. The horror that Nash elicits in Julia Dallow is contrasted by Dormer’s admiration; Dormer’s move to re-make himself, to draw out latent desires and wishes that thrive under Ruthnum 50

Nash’s influence, demonstrates the effect of Nash-as-living-artwork. This effect is furthered when Dormer attempts to “fabricate” Nash as a painting as he expresses sentiments that indicate his desire for Nash. The painting scene involving

Dormer’s portrait of Nash suggests that effeminacy and male same-sex desire are closely linked to the practice of artistic creation. Dormer’s trembling discomfort is complemented by a parallel discomfort in his sitter; Nash “was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely so” (James, Tragic Muse 510). This uneasiness with the incarnated mutuality the charged act of painting implies leads to a direct consequence for Nash: he must vanish.

Dormer’s sitter disappears from the studio, from London, and apparently from the world. His disappearance becomes even more pronounced in the fate of his incomplete portrait:

“Nick had the prospect, for the future, of the harmless excitement of

waiting to see when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further diversion

(it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a second

unfinished portrait on his hands) of imagining that the picture he had

begun had a singular air of gradually fading from the canvas. He couldn't

catch it in the act, but he could have a suspicion, when he glanced at it,

that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little (for all the world

as in some delicate Hawthorne tale), making the surface indistinct and

bare -- bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral of the

Hawthorne tale would be that this personage would come back on the day Ruthnum 51

when the last adumbration should have vanished.” (James, Tragic Muse

511-512)

The fading of the canvas confirms its position as a haunted artwork, a vehicle for the anxieties and potentialities that Nash has brought into Dormer’s existence.

The disappearance of Nash as a “solid, sociable fact” is replicated in the fading of this painting, an erasure of the welter of challenges that Nash presented to

Dormer’s way of life. These challenges—effeminacy, male same-sex desire, an exploration of the artistic impulse, all unified in the person of Nash, and in Nash’s portrait—must disappear if Nick is to return to a “normal” life with Julia Dallow and a proper career. As the canvas fades, so too does the novel, confirming itself as an artwork whose continuance and existence is reliant on the slippery presence of Nash. But the ghost cannot be exorcised, just as Dormer’s “throb” cannot be

“eradicated”—he ends the novel waiting for Nash to reappear. An immense amount of plot is consigned to the few pages of the novel following Nash’s disappearance, much of which follows the pattern of Nash’s unsettling predictions about Dormer’s future; James has allowed Nash to resolve the fate of Nick

Dormer through a supernaturally charged prediction, thereby rendering the resolution of the plot in the narrative unnecessary. Miller insists that the painting of Nash is a fatal act: “James, if not Nick, in effect kills him off… He has absented himself, it may be, to avoid being killed the moment the portrait is complete” (43). The banishment of Nash is necessary in order for the associated anxieties he brought into Nick’s masculine, heterosexual, socially-engaged life to be banished, but the vanishing is mitigated by the presence of that painted canvas. Ruthnum 52

Nick’s continuing obsession with Nash’s painting and the prospect of his return contradict this “killing” of Nash in the narrative: his ghost, fading from the canvas, lingers powerfully in Nick’s “sensorium,” proving that Nash eludes easy definition on the canvas or in the narrative. Nash haunts as effectively as he lives in The Tragic Muse—the specter of male same-sex anxiety that he represents cannot be completely banished, despite its insubstantial ghostliness. The bond between Dormer and Nash, which begins to become an uncomfortably intimate and physical fact when the painting is created, must be banished—must be ghosted—if Nick Dormer and the society of characters that surrounds him are to return to normalcy.

Why painting? And why ghosts? Christopher Lane proposes the following passage from another James short story about a painter, The Liar, as an example of how “Painting, like psychoanalysis, reveals the subject to itself by representing aspects of identity and the past that consciousness has repressed” (Lane 933).

‘He’s such a rare model – such an interesting subject. He has such an

expressive face. It will teach me no end of things.”

‘Expressive of what?’ said Mrs. Capadose.

‘Why, of his nature.’

‘And do you want to paint his nature?’

‘Of course I do. That’s what a great portrait gives you.’ (James, “The

Liar” 345)

This description of portraiture could also be applied to the work Dormer does in painting Nash—the process leads him to him seeing “the indefinite and the Ruthnum 53 elusive. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there (except that he couldn’t catch them) which he had not hitherto counted on” (James, Tragic Muse 510). We are in the realm of Nash’s nature, here; Dormer’s attempts to capture it are only partially successful, due to the ghostly transparency of what he eventually does capture on the canvas, only to see it fade away. Lane complements his analysis of the painter’s ability to “reveal the subject to itself” by pointing out that in Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward “claims to have conveyed too obvious an interest in his subject—‘I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it” (Lane 935). The painting, specifically the portrait, is a place of mutual exposure: that of the painter and that of the subject.

And why ghosts? That is a question best answered by texts written after the trials of Oscar Wilde, though The Tragic Muse suggests it: what is revealed must be hidden, must be ghosted. Ghosts do indeed count double, for what they were and what they are, but they also count not-at-all, because they cannot be there. The impulse simultaneously to reveal and conceal is ideally represented by the haunted artwork, and the use of these works in fiction that bears a Wildean influence suggests a connection between these artworks and the outcome of the

Wilde trials. The trials resulted in the construction of a new type of male sexual actor, as Ed Cohen notes, and the conviction was a cultural movement toward designating this “type” as deviant and banishing it from society. The fact of its existence, however, could not be banished—hence the haunting presence of Wilde in British society, and in the ghost story. The spectral presence that the haunted artwork encodes is fraught with male same-sex desires, but as the associated Ruthnum 54 elements of the Wildean queer would frequently be aligned in opposition to the ghosted desire in these narratives, the ghost story began to suggest fractures in this recent definition of a new type of male sexual actor. I will explore these fractures in my next chapter, but I will first continue my delineation of the

Wildean influence on James.

James’s most famous ghosts appear in the pages of The Turn of the Screw.

Or, as Edmund Wilson indicated in “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” they do not appear at all. Wilson’s essay was the first to challenge the reading of The Turn of the Screw that had been taken for granted. The essential question he posed dealt with the reality of the ghosts—are they truly revenants, haunting the two children under the nameless governess’s care, or is this nervous young woman conjuring visions and convincing those around her of their reality? Haunted artworks enter

James’s text subtly, beginning with the governess’s first sighting of the ghost of the departed seducer, Peter Quint: “The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as clear as a picture in a frame” (James, “Turn” 16). The narrating governess pronounces a linkage between the reality of the apparition and the concrete existence of a picture—a strategy that recurs in the next paragraph, in a slightly altered form:

He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it

struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the

letters I form on this page… (James, “Turn” 17)

The proximity between the language of painting and this direct reference to the act of writing links both acts to representation, a point to which I will return. The Ruthnum 55 relation between painting and ghosts does not disappear after the first sighting of

Quint; it is evoked repeatedly as the governess attempts to prove the existence of the two ghosts to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Her initial attempt to describe the apparition to Mrs. Grose begins with a minor detail: that he has no hat. “Then, seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a deeper dismay, found a touch of a picture, I quickly added stroke to stroke” (James, “Turn” 27). Harold Goddard’s article on this tale points out that Mrs. Grose seizes upon the vaguest details to make her initial confirmation of the specter’s identity, ignoring features such as the “red whiskers” that the governess mentions and embracing ambiguously described articles of clothing to make her identifications. In a later chapter, in order to allay any doubts Mrs. Grose may have, the governess reminds her that she “had only to ask her how, if I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them” (37-38). This is a false reassurance; the “pictures” that the governess provided were either vague or potentially inaccurate descriptions that

Mrs. Grose only responds to due to what Goddard calls her “high degree of suggestibility…an image is already hovering in the background of her mind, waiting to rush into the foreground at the faintest summons” (256). When Mrs.

Grose is given an opportunity to “see” the ghost of Miss Jessel at the governess’s indication, she sees nothing.

At this point, it is essential to recall the framed narrative structure of The

Turn of the Screw. The governess’s story is read aloud at a country house Ruthnum 56 gathering by a man named Douglas, who grew to know her in the years following the incidents she describes in “the packet” that Douglas has sent up from his own.

The story, as it is presented to the reader, is not a record of Douglas’s reading: it is

“an exact transcript of my own made much later” (James, “Turn” 4) presented by the narrator of the tale’s introduction, a transcript bequeathed to the narrator by the now-dead Douglas. None of these characters appear again; Douglas, this introductory narrator, and the assemblage at the country house all disappear as soon as the governess’s story begins, and none appear after the story comes to its close. The introduction cements the existence of the “packet,” the “transcript,” the

“narrative” as a tangible intangible object, a physical artifact of a story that consists either of ghosts or delusions. When the governess confirms the existence of the ghost of Quint by comparing his reality to that of a painting, or that of “the letters that I form on the page,” the effect is to doubly remind the reader of the potential falseness of the narrative at the same time as it reminds us of its existence as a narrative. The frame that the governess mentions in her description of Quint’s ghost—“as clear as a picture in a frame”—is a frame that evokes the use of framing as a structural element in James’s work. Paul Beidler explores these frames at length in his monograph on Frames in James. In his treatment of

The Turn of the Screw, Beidler concentrates on linking the frame-narrative to

Derrida’s concept of the “parergon,” the “beside-work… which is not a part of the work of art but without which the work cannot exist as a work” (49)—in this case, the frame. His argument is that the frame reveals that the governess’s story has no beginning (it is supplanted by the prologue) and lacks an ending (we are not Ruthnum 57 returned to the story-time of the prologue, nor are any of the issues in the narrative resolved): “We learn of the lack not from the work but from the frame itself” (Beidler 52). That which is contained in a frame is at least as compelling as the frame itself—while the notion of a lack implied by the presence of a frame is crucial, the governess’s consistent pattern of filling the frame with paintings, representations, and ghosts indicates that the “lack” surpasses a wish for the recovery of a beginning, or a conclusive resolution. While the tale’s shape suggests an impossible struggle to establish a complete representation of the past, the tale’s content connects this effort to represent with an attempt to negotiate sexual anxieties.

The specter of homosexuality is omnipresent in The Turn of the Screw, obscured by a strategic, veiling deployment of corruption and unspeakable vices that exceed those used in The Tragic Muse. The countless Freudian readings of

James’s ghost story fixate upon the governess’s repression of her own heterosexual desires, which are sublimated into the pedophilic ghost-fantasy that she conjures around her young charges. One indication of homosexuality in the tale stands out clearly: Miles, the governess’s young male charge, has been expelled from his boarding school because he is “an injury to others” (James,

“Turn” 11) despite being “scarce ten years old” (11). Though years of hackneyed jokes about the homosexual antics at boys’ boarding schools have both obscured and confirmed the existence of these pastimes, it is important to note that these jokes and pastimes did indeed exist before, during, and after the nineteenth century. Neill Matheson, building upon an argument proposed by Michael Moon, Ruthnum 58 suggests that the “‘intolerable question’ of (Miles’s) dismissal would thus be relatively legible to many nineteenth-century readers as associated with anxieties about schools as places where boys were exposed to the contagion of masturbation. The story seems to hint that Miles, himself already corrupted, threatens to infect other children” (Matheson 725). Beyond “seeming to hint” at a sinister masturbation ring, the story suggests the potential of a mutually gratifying form of male same-sex love. A particularly relevant representation of the “injury” that Miles is potentially visiting on others could be found in Wilde’s own art collection: “Love amongst the schoolboys,” a painting by Simeon Solomon

(Reynolds 26),3 illustrated both the existence of sexualized relationships between boys at school and a suggested alliance between this form of love and the principles of the aesthetic movement. The governess’s fraught attitude towards sexuality quickly demonizes the sexual relationship between Quint and her own predecessor, Miss Jessel; as she masks her own desires with an elaborate fantasy designed to lure the object of her desire (her employer, the uncle of her charges),

3 Simeon Solomon was convicted of sodomy in 1873, an incident that effectively destroyed his career. Solomon’s role as a precursor of Oscar Wilde, in the functions of artist and cultural figure, is briefly noted by Elizabeth Prettejohn, who believes that the painter importantly prefigured the link between effeminacy and male same-sex desire that Wilde and Wilde’s work would come to represent. The link was present in Solomon’s (much less famous) persona as well as in individual examples of his work: according to Prettejohn, “the same words that describe the picture’s distinctive aesthetic approach also characterize its eroticism, as if in acknowledgment that, in Solomon’s work, the aesthetic and the erotic are indistinguishable from one another (75). Solomon’s paintings, lauded by critics such as Sidney Colvin and Walter Pater, linked effeminacy and male same-sex desire to the coalescing ideals of the aesthetic movement. According to Prettejohn, “the same words that describe the pictures’ distinctive aesthetic also characterize its eroticism, as if in acknowledgment that, in Solomon’s work, the aesthetic and the erotic are indistinguishable from one another” (75). Ruthnum 59 she also projects a fantasy onto Miles’s homosexual leanings, enabling her to disguise them as a precocious sexuality encouraged by the older, corrupt Quint.

As Matheson points out, “Her assumption is that the ghosts’ interest in the children operates along same-sex lines; Miss Jessel, the former governess, pursues

Flora, and Quint wants Miles” (Matheson 719). This allows the ghost of Quint to take on Miles’s burden of homosexuality in her narrative, the fictionality of which the reader has been constantly reminded, through the multiple mentions of its existence only as words on a page, as words uttered at a fireplace gathering. As the ghost of Quint has all the reality of a painting, homosexuality has been doubly subsumed into a haunted artwork. The “lacking” narrative reminds us of its status as an artwork, a ghost story, and the governess’s use of the language of painting engulfs the ghosts in another layer of representation.

The obscurities of the final confrontation between the governess, Miles, and the ghost of Peter Quint are partially cleared by the application of a certain frame: that of a trial. A frame of a different sort introduces the scene: “The frames and squares of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure… Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldn’t see?” (James, “Turn” 80-81). The governess interprets Miles’s gaze, which is directed at the grounds of the Bly estate, as seeking out something invisible within a frame—a glance outward is interpreted as the contemplation of a framed, ghostly object that evades perception. It is the governess herself who sees Peter

Quint appear within this frame, during her ensuing interrogation of Miles. Ruthnum 60

The crime that Miles is accused of is the theft of a letter, the letter the governess had written to summon the boy’s uncle to the estate. He confesses to the initial sin, to her delight, but it is then that her probing truly commences:

‘Is that what you did at school?’

Oh, what this brought up! ‘At school?’

Did you take letters?—or other things?

‘Other things? He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and

that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach

him. ‘Did I steal?’

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were

more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it

with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world.

(James, “Turn” 82)

This view of Miles as a “gentleman” who has taken a “fall in the world” evokes

Wilde, in language that runs close to the James letter I quoted at the opening of this chapter. The narrative imposes adult terms on the offense committed by the boy, whose young status as a gentleman has hardly risen to a height from which it could take a fall. Miles, too, is to stand as a vehicle to express anxieties over relationships between men. When the governess’s interrogation intensifies, homosexuality enters the substance of this trial:

‘Well--I said things.’

‘Only that?’

‘They thought it was enough!’ Ruthnum 61

‘To turn you out for?’

Never, truly, had a person ‘turned out’ shown so little to explain it as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite detached and almost helpless. ‘Well, I suppose I oughtn't.’

‘But to whom did you say them?’

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it. ‘I don't know!’

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added separation. ‘Was it to everyone?’ I asked.

‘No; it was only to--’ But he gave a sick little headshake. ‘I don't remember their names.’

‘Were they then so many?’

‘No--only a few. Those I liked.’

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that Ruthnum 62

I had nothing now there to keep him from. ‘And did they repeat what you

said?’ I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with

the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will.

Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of

what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable

anxiety. ‘Oh, yes,’ he nevertheless replied--’they must have repeated them.

To those they liked,’ he added. (James, “Turn” 84-85)

The corruption that Miles transmits is revealed to be one associated with affection—the boys he “liked” passed on these words to the boys they “liked,” until Miles was scapegoated for this unspoken, unspeakable crime of corruption, framed for the governess in the image of Quint at the window, as she cannot reconcile the sexuality she fears with the image of the dying boy in her arms.

Neill Matheson argues that the ghosts function as an incarnation of the

“fear of exposure” that the Wilde trials evoked—but they function equally as safe places, as hiding places, through dint of their very invisibility. The exposed horror is allowed to vanish into the supernatural, in the genre shelter of a ghost story that

James would later call a “perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction”

(James, “Turn” 117). Though Matheson pays tribute to Joseph Litvak’s assertion that “for James exposure and display are associated as much with pleasure as with fear”(Matheson 741), this relation is not carried through to James’s use of ghosts to muffle this impulse to pleasure by their capacity to simultaneously conceal what they expose. Again, the language of painting in James collaborates with the Ruthnum 63

Gothic, ghostly language of horror to ensure that what is feared can also be hidden: just as Gabriel Nash’s painting fades away, the ghosts in The Turn of the

Screw are what “couldn’t be seen” through haunted panes, what manifests in order to disappear. The governess’s desire for others to see the ghosts, to admit that they can and always have seen the ghosts, represents a simultaneous wish for exposure and concealment. This wish echoes James’s own marginalization of The Turn of the Screw and other Wilde-influenced ghost stories within his own literary output, a trend that recurs in the treatment of ghostly fictions by the writers I will discuss in my next chapter.

While James’s correspondence seemingly evinced a disdain for Wilde’s works and his person, the specter of Wilde flits between the pages, paintings, and frames in James’s fiction. While it is hardly necessary to add speculations about

James’s own sexual habits to the arguments I have presented above, his literary interest in male sexual anxieties is thoroughly documented in his volumes of prose: from Winterbourne’s inability to express his passion for Daisy Miller through Strether’s decision to deprive himself of marriage to Maria Gostrey in

The Ambassadors, James’s output is full of male characters who find themselves unable to accept heterosexual marriage, or any alternative less conventional than celibacy. The Wildean factor in The Tragic Muse and The Turn of the Screw allowed James to incarnate the sexual fears that pervade so much of his work: these are fictions that conjure ghosts in order to banish them, without denying the lingering presence of the specter. Wilde’s ghost, and the charged combination of art and homosexuality that his iconization imprinted upon ghost stories, exists in Ruthnum 64 the unknown fate of Gabriel Nash and the insoluble mysteries of the governess’s haunting, despite James’s complicated strategies of concealment.

Ruthnum 65

Chapter Three

“You will expect me now to say that the fantastic asks us to accept the supernatural. I will say it, but reluctantly, because any statement as to their subject-matter brings these novels into the claws of critical apparatus, from which it is important that they should be saved. It is truer of them than of most books that we can only know what is in them by reading them, and their appeal is specially personal -- they are side-shows inside the main show. So I would rather hedge as much as possible, and say that they ask us to accept either the supernatural or its absence."

E.M. Forster, Aspects of Literature

The preceding chapter was intended to distill the manner in which I see the

Wildean influence operating in the ghost story. The clearest way to describe this rather complex influence (which stems from Wilde’s written output, from his celebrity, from his status as a representative of aestheticism and the Decadents, and from his post-trials incarnation of the anxieties over male same-sex desire that were to reach across all of the associations I have mentioned above) was to examine Wilde’s influence over The Turn of the Screw, the most critically accepted and commonly studied ghost story of the period I am discussing. Using the society novel The Tragic Muse to prefigure many of the postures toward art and the supernatural that would appear in The Turn of the Screw indicates the pervasiveness of the Wildean influence over Henry James, who felt the clutch of Ruthnum 66 male same-sex anxiety before the Wilde trials. In this chapter, I intend to show that the influence I detailed in Chapter Two is noticeable in the genre as a whole after 1895, and that this influence therefore had a defining effect on the content and status of the ghost story. This was an era of aftermath for the ghost story genre, for conceptions of art, and for many cultural values and established beliefs that had been violently agitated during the fin de siècle. While maintaining focus on the genre and on Wilde, I will make use of the work of Kelly Hurley, Kirsten

MacLeod, and Hal Foster to attempt to delineate the perimeters of the large-scale changes that wrought such an influence over the minor form of the ghost story.

I used the word pervasive to describe Wilde’s influence over the Henry

James works I analyzed in Chapter Two; this adjective is well-suited to the effect

I read Wilde as having had over the genre as a whole. The claim I will avoid is that Wilde’s multi-faceted influence had all-encompassing effects over every story to be written in the ghostly, supernatural, and horror genre after 1895. I would compare the influence of the Wildean to the influence of the theory of evolution over horror fiction, which Kelly Hurley has detailed in her work on the

“abhuman.” Hurley also talks about the field as a whole in her chapter on “British

Gothic Fiction 1885-1930” in the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature, which forms a useful adjunct to the argument I am establishing. While she overstates the reach of the body-related uncertainty that informed so much horror fiction of the era, she nonetheless makes a persuasive argument that the fears over male same-sex desire incarnated in supernatural fiction can be explained by the same transitional fears that informed Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Ruthnum 67

Hurley classes the anxieties that manifest in supernatural fiction into a rubric of uncertainties brought about by developments in science and psychology

(the Hurley quotation on page 8 of this thesis details these categories). Drawing upon Elaine Showalter’s arguments pertaining to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hurley finds space for anxieties over male same-sex desire in her discussion of a society reacting to revolutionary changes in scientific and psychological thought. “Hyde enacts desires that must be banished from both late-Victorian society and the late-

Victorian male consciousness. The cultural figuration of homosexuality as

‘monstrous’ is literalized by Hyde’s hideousness…” (199). Hyde, however, falls short of fully representing the category that Wilde would come to stand for even before his trials, as suggested by Max Nordau’s description of the writer in

Degeneration (1893). Alan Sinfield points out that Nordau makes no allusion to same-sex desire in the chapter dedicated to Wilde, the “chief English aesthete”:

His aesthetic attire is attacked on the utilitarian ground that the proper

function of adornment is to attract the opposite sex, whereas Wilde’s

‘strange costume… excites disapproval instead of approbation’. In

ignoring the imperative that each sex should dress to attract the other,

Wilde is opting out of normal sexuality; but not, apparently, into another

sexual domain. Effeminacy, here, correlates with degenerate leisure-class

uselessness and its perverse ratification in aestheticism, but scarcely with

same-sex passion. John Stokes is suitably circumspect when he remarks

that ‘morbid’, a key term in the decadence debate, ‘was also adopted as a Ruthnum 68

provocative euphemism for homosexuality’; the instance he quotes from is

from 1905. (Sinfield 96-97)

I posit that Showalter and Hurley are only partially right in considering

Stevenson’s Hyde to be a representative figure of cultural fears of same-sex desire; the connection can only be partial due to the sheer amount of “missing” associations that the Wildean incarnation of male same-sex desire is able to supply. As I argued in my Chapter One discussion of Wilde’s link to Decadence and Aestheticism , the “vagueness” of the anxiety surrounding Aesthetic /

Decadent “effeminacy’s” supposed opting out of sexuality disappears after

Wilde’s conviction. It is banished by the definition that ties Decadence to Wilde, and Wilde to the archetypal image of the queer: effeminacy is linked to Wilde’s acts of male same-sex love (as Ed Cohen details in his examination of contemporary newspaper accounts of the trials) and becomes an element of the

Wildean incarnation of male same-sex desire, which in turn becomes a strong image of “the homosexual.” Hyde bears no relation to Aestheticism, carelessly ugly as he is in both appearance and behavior. He is clearly distant from any notion of effeminacy or artistic expression, notions that would be bound into the image of the homosexual-as-Wilde, and would be explored with agitation and fear in post-1895 ghost stories. The degeneration represented by Hyde is, in its way, simple and purely evil, able to be banished and destroyed by Henry Jekyll’s decision to kill himself (and Hyde) when the science that brought Hyde into being fails to send him back into oblivion. Ruthnum 69

The Picture of Dorian Gray was far more successful than Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde in parceling the various elements of the Wildean queer image that would eventually coalesce into a united, threatening notion after the trials, as was evidenced by the hostile critical reception the book faced, and by its use against

Wilde in his trials. The formative connections among aestheticism, effeminacy, and male same-sex desire were present in the distribution of these elements among the characters in Dorian, and in their concentration in the haunted artwork.

Stevenson’s book was a popular success, while Dorian added to Wilde’s dubious reputation and formed a new touchstone in the linkages among art, male same-sex desire, aestheticism, and the “morbid” (John Stokes has provided us with another fitting adjective for this discussion of the link between ghosts and the specter of male same-sex desire). The Henry James treatment of the supernatural, and the cluster of supernatural tales surrounding and following the Wilde trials, point to categories that can be added to Hurley’s catalog of fissures in this “profoundly difficult period of cultural transition”: the uncertain role of art (implied by the widespread discomfort with Decadence that I discussed in Chapter 1) and the incarnation of the male homosexual after the Wilde trials.

Decadence was one of the aspects of the newly parceled aspects of the

Wildean queer that was to surface, spectrally, in the ghost story. Kirsten MacLeod views the relation between Wilde and Decadence as one that had marking effects on the production of British fiction, far beyond the ghostly genre. She begins her analysis of the aftermath of the Wilde trials with a discussion of Arthur Machen’s

The Hill of Dreams, that author’s attempt to “write an artistic novel, one that Ruthnum 70 would not be governed by the demands of the marketplace” (MacLeod 135). As

MacLeod goes on to establish, the artistic parameters that Machen set for himself were those that were outlined by Decadence, and the limitations of the marketplace were those imposed by the anxieties that emerged in the wake of the

Wilde trials. Machen also composed supernatural tales that formed a model for the Lovecraftian approach to the horror story—Stephen King would later write that Machen’s “The Great God Pan” was “as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale” (364). MacLeod partially agrees with Wesley Streeter’s assertion that The Hill of Dreams was “a monument and an epitaph for the aesthetic-decadent period” (MacLeod 135) but goes on to argue that

…most Decadents stayed actively involved in the literary field, in direct

contrast to the myth of the isolated Decadent… Decadence may have died

in 1895 but the Decadents… did not. Instead, they adapted themselves to

the transformations in the literary field that the Wilde trials occasioned, re-

opening the lines of communication between themselves and an

audience… (MacLeod 135)

Part of this adaptation, for professional writers (such as Arthur Machen) and casual writers (such as E.F. Benson) alike, involved an exploration of the potential of the ghost story as a popular form that could contain obscured expositions of anxieties related to the decadent—anxieties that could be “ghosted”: both hidden and shown. Decadent artistic discourse was under attack; Wilde’s trial had served to solidify a divide between the artist asserting a superior viewpoint and the morals of the “ordinary individual” (MacLeod 139). Another part of the fearful Ruthnum 71

Decadent scheme was the dismissal of hard boundaries between art forms, a carry-over from aestheticism which could be argued to have found a second life in the Modernist movement. However, disdain for the Decadent surfaced in such

Modernist landmarks as Wyndham Lewis’s magazine, Blast. The Lewis-allied modernists declared a severance of ties with the Decadents on the grounds of the effeminacy and associated unsavoury aspects of the movement; much as the modernists wished to break with society, they wished to break with this earlier, misguided and corrupt rebellion (Hickman 50), even as they hid their covert attraction to it: “Vorticism’s forcible rewriting of Wilde, designed to evacuate any lingering association with effeminacy, makes it at once Aestheticism’s inheritor, betrayer, and transformer; it both emulates it and strains to ‘correct’ and purify it”

(72). In an equally roundabout gesture of “support” for the movements that had been cast into social disgrace due to their association with Wilde, authors and editors with Decadent sympathies conveyed their own loyalties by aligning themselves against high Modernism. “(John Collings) Squire attacked high

Modernism as ‘dirty living and muddled thinking’ and as ‘fungoid growths of feeble pretentious imposters,’ charges that are strikingly similar to those leveled at the decadents in the 1890’s” (MacLeod 146).

MacLeod presents evidence of a direct lineage between Decadence and popular forms of literature, a category that includes the ghost story. In the pre-trial era, Decadence was appropriated by “popular writers, the press, and counter-

Decadents”: working writers such as Corelli used “popularized representations of the Decadent artist” to boost their own sales figures far beyond those of practicing Ruthnum 72

Decadent artists (MacLeod 45). In the wake of the trials, the fame and popularity of the Decadent, married to the image of Wilde, conspired once again to marginalize the output of Decadent artists: instead of a “popularized representation of the Decadent artist” that gave short shrift to the complexity and quality of works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, the popular imagination had emerged with an image of horror and monstrosity, a concept of corruption that allied fears around Wilde to fears around the Aesthetic and Decadent notions of art. The fictions built around representations of the Decadent artist became, in part, warnings about the dangers of a disjunction between an artist and the public, and the corruption that such a disjunction between individual and heteronormative mass might imply. My addition to MacLeod’s arguments around this continuance is to indicate the placement of Decadent ideals and the fear of those ideals in a form that became a place of hiding and showing: the marginal genre of the ghost story became a venue for presenting an exploration of Decadence in art and testing the newly inextricable relationship of this art to perceptions of male same- sex desire. The place of Decadence, Aestheticism, and Wilde in popular fiction would have less to do with mockery and censure than it would with fear and anxiety once the man himself had been socially erased, and the associations built around his name had been unmentionably immortalized. The ghost story was to engage in an exploration of the anxieties surrounding Wilde. In doing so, several of these stories would interrogate the solidity of the bonds between the associations that composed the Wildean queer image and the resultant cultural conception of the homosexual. Ruthnum 73

Before approaching a selection of representative examples of ghost stories produced after 1895, I will invoke a theorist to explain my frequent use of the term “aftermath.” I have borrowed from and temporally re-cast Hal Foster’s explanation of the position of art in the wake of the perceived death of the modern and post-modern to capture the shift that took place after the Wilde trials. Foster uses aftermath to approach an idea of spectral continuance: something has to explain the continuing existence of art and art criticism, dead as it is supposed to be. Hearkening back to Adorno’s statement that “Philosophy, which once seemed absolute, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed,” Foster asks whether “art (may) be granted the ambiguous stay of sentence that Adorno grants philosophy—the possibility of ‘living on’?...Maybe this ‘living on’ is not a repeating so much as a making-new or making-do with what-comes-after, a beginning again and/or elsewhere” (129). This is a version of the aftermath I am looking at in the presentation of haunted artworks (and ghost stories themselves as marginalized, haunted artworks) in the post-Wildean era. The artworks that Foster points to as examples exist “in the shadow not only of traumatic history but of significant art; the first helped to charge the second, the second to frame the first, and in the process both were transformed…” (133). The artworks embedded in the ghost stories I will be looking at function in this reciprocal manner: as indicators of anxiety and as reflections of art’s capacity to inform, reflect and obscure such anxiety. Foster’s relationship between history and art is manifest in the development of the haunted artwork within the ghost story genre; as these stories attempted to deal with the anxieties that Wilde came to represent, anxieties that Ruthnum 74 were also placed in readings of his artistic creations, the genre made strategic use of the haunted artwork. The haunted artwork functions similarly to the complex figure of Wilde: each encodes fears of male same-sex desire and a wish to contain these fears within designated boundaries that can then be marginalized.

Robert Hichens is historically well placed to head this section of my argument, as his writing was presented alongside Dorian Gray at Wilde’s trial as evidence of corruption. The Green Carnation, the short 1894 novel that transparently satirized Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, is one of the two works for which Hichens is now best known. A journalist who later turned to short stories and novels, Hichens had the good fortune of spending time among Wilde’s circle, a period of time that resulted in the quick composition of his satirical novel

(Gaunt v-vii). The Green Carnation was one of those popular works that explored the anxiety around Decadence and Aestheticism while palely reflecting the artistic output of those movements—it particularly seeks to capture Wilde’s verbal brilliance. Hichens’s other significant contribution to literary history is a ghost story entitled “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” first published in

1900. A reading of The Green Carnation indicates that the later ghostly tale is engaged with the ideas of aestheticism and the accompanying, threateningly modified view of artworks that Professor Guildea’s strange manifestation of

“Love” depends upon.

The Green Carnation is slight in size and in artistic merit, and its great success was due to its topical nature. On the second page of the novel, Reggie

Hastings sends an inflammatory telegram to his angry father: “What a funny little Ruthnum 75 man you are,” it reads, in wording identical to an infamous telegram sent by Lord

Alfred Douglas to his father at the outset of the feud that would end in the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. This unsubtle parodic parallel at the outset of the tale reflects Hichens’s strategy in the rest of this roman à clef: Reggie Hastings =

Lord Alfred Douglas, and Esmé Amarinth = Oscar Wilde. The portrait of the two men is by no means entirely malicious, and Hichens was deeply grieved that the novel was used against Wilde in the courtroom—he withdrew it from publication, despite the virtual guarantee of high sales in the furor surrounding the trials. Of the many tepid re-creations of Wildean verbal brilliance in the book, one stands out as being completely in line with a view of art as a method of obscuring and communicating sin, a sin which the book will eventually ally with male same-sex desire. The gradual enfolding of decadent conceptions of art (which, in the novel, are defined primarily by their ability to corrupt “the innocent,” a role filled by the young son of Amarinth’s female love interest) with male same-sex desire prefigures the union and interrelation of these two concepts in the figure of post- trials Wilde.

To sin beautifully, as you sin, Reggie, and as I have sinned for years, is

one of the most complicated of the arts. There are hardly six people in a

century who can master it. Sin has its technique, just as painting has its

technique. Sin has its harmonies and its dissonances, as music has its

harmonies and its dissonances. The amateur sinner, the mere bungler

whom we meet with, alas! so frequently, is perpetually introducing

consecutive fifths and octaves into his music, perpetually bringing wrong Ruthnum 76

colour notes into his painting. His sins are daubs or pot boilers, not

masterpieces that will defy the insidious action of time. To commit a

perfect sin is to be great, Reggie, just as to produce a perfect picture, or to

compose a perfect symphony, is to be great… But the world can no more

understand the beauty of sin, than it can understand the preface to ‘The

Egoist, or the simplicity of ‘Sordello.’ Sin puzzles it; and all that puzzles

the world frightens the world; for the world is a child, without a child's

charm, or a child's innocent blue eyes. How exquisitely coloured these

strawberries are, yet if Sargent painted them he would idealise them,

would give to them a beauty such as Nature never yet gave to anything. So

it is with the artist in sinning. He improves upon the sins that Nature has

put, as it were, ready to his hand. He idealises, he invents, he develops. No

trouble is too great for him to take, no day is too long for him to work in.

The still and black-robed night hours find him toiling to perfect his sin; the

weary white dawn, looking into his weary white face through the

shimmering window panes, is greeted by a smile that leaps from sleepless

eyes. The passion of the creator is upon him. (Hichens, Green Carnation

17)

Hichens, a popular writer creating a text for popular consumption, here illustrates a key anxiety that is directly related to the fracturing of boundaries between artworks, and the redefinition of art as something outside of a traditional frame.

The link Amarinth’s speech draws between the public’s misunderstanding of sin and its misunderstanding of art (“The preface of ‘The Egoist,’” the “simplicity of Ruthnum 77

Sordello”) is telling—the world’s “innocence” means that certain artworks and certain sins remain obscure. Wilde’s prosecutor, Edward Carson, professed to be glad that he was not an artist when he heard Wilde’s defense of a homoerotically charged letter—Hichens’s Amarinth suggests that the connection Carson draws between the sin of male same-sex desire and artworks is, indeed, viable. The infectious capacity of Decadence is evident in Reggie’s rapt attention, and in the shared artistic capacity for sin that Esmé is celebrating. If sin can be an art, so can conversation: it is clear in the text that Esmé’s greatest artistic expression comes in the form of his verbal expression.

“The profession of a conversationalist is so delightful,” said Mrs. Windsor,

“I wonder more people don’t follow it. You are too generous, Esmé; you

took it up out of pure love for the thing.

“The true artist will always be an amateur, said Lord Reggie dreamily…”

(Hichens, Green Carnation 30)

In this verbal art, Esmé’s sins are distilled—a strategy that Hichens repeats and ghosts in “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” composed in the aftermath of the trials. The “sin” that Amarinth discusses is never mentioned explicitly, but it is clearly aligned with the corrupting influence that he holds over Lord Reggie, an influence which Reggie’s heterosexual love interest fears will be passed on to her own son. Homosexuality is hidden amid all the trappings of Decadence, hovering just beyond the reach of the story, until the Wilde trials forced a reading onto the text that would dominate its cultural life thereafter. Hichens’s re-visitation of the themes in The Green Carnation takes place within Foster’s “shadow of traumatic Ruthnum 78 history… (and) significant art,” presenting a ghostly version of male same-sex anxiety and its relationship to Decadent ideals in a genre story that consistently works to obscure its subject matter. Hichens’s own familiarity with Decadent circles and the allegations of homosexuality that he contended with (from Rupert

Croft-Crooke, among others) are obscured by his suggestive satire; the “sin” is concealed in the figure of Wilde and his conversational flights, and Hichens’s exploration of anxiety about male same-sex desire is exposed and hidden through his satirical approach. Just as normalizing figures (such as Reggie’s love interest) ultimately reject the representatives of deviance that they encounter, the satirical element of the narrative ensures that Hichens remains separate from that which he is lampooning.

“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” conceals its artwork as well as its characters conceal their anxieties. The titular Professor Guildea is a scientific researcher and speaker who is known for his skepticism and lack of human attachments. He comes into contact with one Father Murchison (‘Both men were celibates”), and makes an unprecedented invitation to the man to come and dine with him. “Perhaps the transparent sincerity of this devotee, full of common sense, attracted him” (Hichens, “Guildea” 37). Guildea secretly watches

Murchison perform a sermon, and the two men subsequently meet for dinner, falling easily into casual conversation: “They were intimate already” (37). Their central topic is Guildea’s professed lack of sympathy or affection for his fellow man, a lack that is belied by his increasing intimacy with the Father. Guildea speaks of his “hatred” of affection, while Murchison categorizes his own “special Ruthnum 79 sentiment” toward Guildea as pity. They continue to spend time conversing together for a year-and-a-half, at which point the supernatural irruption in the story occurs. The revelation of the ghost is preceded by Guildea’s first display of nervousness, and an odd question he poses to the Father:

"D'you think I'm an attractive man?"

Father Murchison jumped. Such a question coming from such a man astounded him.

"Bless me!" he ejaculated. "What makes you ask? Do you mean attractive

to the opposite sex?" "That's what I don't know," said the Professor

gloomily, and staring again into the fire. "That's what I don't know."

The Father grew more astonished. "Don't know!" he exclaimed.

And he laid down his pipe.

"Let's say — d'you think I'm attractive, that there's anything about me

which might draw a — a human being, or an animal, irresistibly to me?"

"Whether you desired it or not?"

"Exactly — or — no, let us say definitely — if I did not desire it."

(Hichens, “Guildea” 46)

Hichens avoids discussing the desire between the two men by incarnating that desire in a mutually created work—a ghost, a spirit of “affection” that haunts

Guildea to an early grave. The entrance of the spirit into Guildea’s house is narrated, but never explained, and certainly never directly related to the developing intimacy between the two men. The existence of the spirit is confirmed by Guildea’s pet parrot, which produces an imitation of the movements Ruthnum 80 and voice of this “idiot” incarnation of blind love, a repulsive display of need and affection that seems inhuman to both Guildea and Murchison. The priest eventually arrives at an explanation for the spirit’s persistent haunting of the maddened Guildea: “You hate affection… You had, you desired to have, no love for anything. Nor did you desire to receive any love from anything. Perhaps this is a punishment” (79). When Guildea inevitably succumbs to the horror of the haunting (his death is deemed a “failure of the heart” by the doctor who attends him, receiving a sad agreement from the Father) Murchison remains unable to recognize his potential role in creating the spirit that killed his friend. The fear of the physical fulfillment of male sexual love emerges in this outcome—Guildea’s increasing attachment to Murchison takes on a supernatural form, because it cannot find physical expression. While male same-sex desire must be acknowledged after the Wilde trials, even in a ghostly form, confirming the possibility of that desire becoming an act between men remains impossible for

Murchison and Guildea, who suspend their desire in the form of the fatal spirit.

The creative power of speech is subtly stressed at the outset of the tale: both men are public speakers, and each comes to his initial respect of the other through listening to a public speech. Despite the difference in setting and character, this comes near to the “professional” caliber of speaking that Esmé

Amarinth (and, by direct association, Wilde) is credited as possessing. In The

Green Carnation, Amarinth’s speech is linked to both the creation of art and the creation of sin—sin which is communicated through conversation, itself a coding of corrupt relations between men. In “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” this Ruthnum 81 coded linkage is replicated: it is through the intimate conversational intercourse of these two creative speakers that the spirit comes into being. Rather than having any malicious intent, the spirit only wishes to love Guildea and to be loved in return, a proposition that Guildea is unable to accept. This reveals the narrative to be one that takes place in a ghostly version of Eve Sedgwick’s realm of homosocial desire4: through a collaborative creative act, the love between two men is incarnated as a spirit. The battle with this spirit displaces the intimacy and sense of connectedness between the two men before it can exceed the boundaries of their conversational intimacy. As male same-sex anxiety renders a transgression of these boundaries impossible, the fearfulness of the act is shifted into the creation of a work: the ghost of male same-sex relations, invisibly manifest as a haunting spirit of idiot affection. The anxiety-spurring desire is brought into being, as though it demands exposure and delimitation. While the creative act manages to replace the sexual culmination of a relationship between men, its manifestation is also fearful, and fatal—the interrelationships between the idea of art as threat and the fear of homosexuality coalesce into a single fear, in a manner which has much to do with society’s unification of these concepts in the

4 Homosocial desire, which Sedgwick delineates through the “erotic triangle” topos that she traces through 18th and 19th century literature in her book Between Men, hypothesizes “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted” (Sedgwick 1-2). Sedgwick demonstrates that love rivalries between men and cuckoldry-focused sexual acts displace the desire between two males by directing it toward a woman; however, as in a text such as Wycherly’s The Country Wife, the “routing of homosocial desire through women is clearly presented as compulsory” (49). A similar “routing of desire,” toward the homosexual end of the continuum Sedgwick describes, is the role of the haunted artwork in Guildea and other ghost stories. Ruthnum 82 person of Oscar Wilde. “Guildea” remains a ceaselessly anthologized landmark of the ghost story genre.

Unlike Hichens, who produced only one tale of this caliber, E.F. Benson had a prodigious output of excellent ghost stories in the supernatural vein, producing over fifty tales in a period beginning in the early twentieth century.

Benson’s career as a writer had started in the midst of the Decadent era, with the

1893 publication of Dodo, a novel about a controversial and likeable young woman’s rise to prominence in society. This novel is relatively free of indications of an interest in the ideas of the aesthetes, but Benson himself was approaching the Wilde circle in ways that would emerge in his writing, both before and after the trials. Lord Alfred Douglas counted him as a friend in his memoirs, and

Benson was in attendance at the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan in the company of Max Beerbohm and Reggie Turner. All three men wore green carnations, a confirmed signifier of “Decadent leanings,” a phrase which would soon acquire sinister overtones (Palmer and Lloyd, 32). After the Wilde trials,

Benson abandoned his dealings with Wilde’s associates, and also strayed from the world of homosexual practice, which he’d been engaged in since his schooldays and time at Cambridge. These activities potentially reached a height during

Benson’s trip up the Nile with travelling companions Alfred Douglas, Robert

Hichens, and Reggie Turner. Rupert Croft-Crooke was one of many to imply that such Eastern trips were “made for reasons the reverse of cultural” (Palmer and

Lloyd 32). While Croft-Crooke’s suggestion has the tone of a malicious implication, it is undoubtedly true that a form of what is now called “sex tourism” Ruthnum 83 of the male same-sex variety was in full practice in the Egypt of this era. In a letter written to his friend Louis Bouilhet from Cairo, Gustave Flaubert narrated the attitudes toward this type of desire in the “Orient”:

Here it is quite accepted. One admits one’s sodomy, and it is spoken of at

table in the hotel. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody

teases you and you end up confessing. Traveling as we are for educational

purposes, and charged with a mission by the government, we have

considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation. (Flaubert 84)

Knowledge of these attitudes in England was enough to raise eyebrows when a group of supposed Decadents embarked upon a trip through Egypt, even before the trials; after the trials, Benson distanced himself from risks of this variety, both in life and in writing.

Benson made a direct attempt at a story of the haunted artwork in 1895 with The Judgment Books, which was published during Wilde’s ordeal. The book is essentially a morally “corrected” retread of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book that Benson knew almost “by heart” (Palmer and Lloyd 32). Painter Frank Norris is determined to paint a self-portrait that exposes his true self, a work that will prove his theory of portraiture: “the essence of portrait-painting: (is) not to present a man as he was at a particular moment, in one particular part, with the emblem of one particular pursuit by him—an artist with his canvas, a sculptor with his clay— but the whole man, his Jekyll and his Hyde together in one picture” (Benson,

Judgment Books 11). The deliberate reference to Jekyll & Hyde, made when a far more obvious reference pervades the plot and content of the novel, is a transparent Ruthnum 84 attempt to deflect the accusations that a Wildean text would face. As the novel continues, Norris is compelled to send his wife, Margery, away while he works on the portrait, because she has made him promise never to reveal to her the secret corruption of his past. When he attempted to do so during their courtship, his reasoning emerged in spectral language: “if ghosts were to rise between them, it was less startling if she knew what ghosts to expect” (Benson, Judgment Books

10). The exact nature of Norris’s corruption is not revealed (just as Dorian’s remains obscure) and in the end, Norris’s fears are realized: the painting is evil, full of his past corruption. Without Margery’s good influence nearby, he too begins to succumb to the corruptions of his past, without ever enacting them. His

“crimes” are clear in the painting, and in the “ghosts” which accompany its creation: the solution is proposed by the returned Margery, who hands him a dagger. Unlike Dorian, Norris does not collapse into death after destroying his portrait with the blade; rather, he is cleansed, re-confirmed in his rejection of his past corruption and comfortably embraced again in his heterosexual relationship.

The Judgment Books falls comfortably into the grouping of texts I have explored thus far, but it is almost too close to Dorian to make an argument for the

Wildean influence useful. I use it, instead, as a linking text, one that illuminates the hidden content of Benson’s fifty-odd ghost stories, all of which were much closer to the popular expectations of a gripping supernatural tale than they were to the serious exploration of the soul of an artist that Benson embarked upon with his narrative of Frank Norris. The stories were published individually in popular monthlies such as “Hutchinson’s Magazine,” and collected in best-selling Ruthnum 85 volumes that were the most notable element of Benson’s career when he was alive. I will deal with one Benson tale in particular, but I stress that in Benson’s case, the striking element of his work in the context of this argument is the existence of a large volume of ghost stories in a career that had not shown direct leanings toward the ghostly before the Wilde trials. Benson was present when

M.R. James read his first two ghost stories at Cambridge on October 28, 1893

(Dalby xiii), but his own out-and-out ghost stories were not composed until years later, after the Wilde trials. The Judgment Books is a borderline work, one in which the supernatural is used metaphorically. This metaphorical strategy disappears in Benson’s post-1895 ghost stories; his ghosts are ghosts, not stand- ins for what Frank Norris called “crimes.”

When the monstrousness in a Benson ghost story is not traditionally supernatural, science or pseudo-science provides an explanation. An entertaining example of this is “The Horror-Horn,” a work that falls into one of Hurley’s alternate categories of evolution-inspired horror, dealing with a Yeti-like race of human ancestors that lust for flesh—in every sense—on frozen Swiss mountains.

“Young men had also been raped by them, to be mated with the females of the tribe” (Benson, “Horror-Horn” 206). The climax of the story, when the protagonist is confronted by a female of the species, adds a repulsion-laden element of sexual anxiety to the text.

…and leaning against the trunk of it was one of the denizens of the

Horror-Horn, and it was a woman. She was enveloped in a thick growth of

hair grey and tufted, and from her head it streamed down over her Ruthnum 86

shoulders and her bosom, from which hung withered and pendulous

breasts… A fathomless bestiality modelled the slavering mouth and the

narrow eyes; I looked into the abyss itself and knew that out of that abyss

on the edge of which I leaned the generations of men had climbed. What if

that ledge crumbled in front of me and pitched me headlong into its

nethermost depths?...” (Benson, “Horror-Horn” 211)

Anxiety over male same-sex desire manifests in a ciphered form in Benson’s ghost stories: a repulsive presentation of heterosexual relations pervades many of his tales, while the comfort provided by homosocial conditions provides the backdrop over which the horrors of heterosexual sex are made manifest. The impossibility of homosocial relations reaching a sexual conclusion leads Benson to these specters of heterosexual terror. Male same-sex anxiety is, again, hidden and revealed at the same time, as fears over the successful consummation of a male bond are displaced into a horror of heterosexual relations. In the wake of the

Wilde trials, these popular stories show Benson dissipating the “queer” associations reflected in his Decadent-associated works such as The Judgment

Books, and in his own associations with Decadent figures, through a supernatural treatment of sexual anxieties that normalizes and de-sexualizes fraught relationships between male characters.

This strategy is employed in Benson’s 1912 tale “The Room in the

Tower,” which makes use of the connection between male same-sex desire, the supernatural, and the language of portraiture to render tensions that were present in The Judgment Books in the guise of a popular horror story dealing with Ruthnum 87 homosocial bonds. “The Room in the Tower” is the most effective and frequently anthologized Benson tale, in which a young man’s haunting memories of an ill- natured school friend (a character whose poor reputation, which is never explained, is reminiscent of the expelled Miles’s in The Turn of the Screw) emerge in the form of a dream which grows with him from adolescence: he is invited to this school friend’s house, and invited to be a guest in the “room in the tower,” which is occupied by the portrait of an evil-looking woman, presumably the mother of his old school acquaintance. Of course, the dream eventually comes true in an altered form, as a close friend invites the narrator to visit his country estate. He is invited to occupy the room in the tower, which features the portrait.

The picture is signed “Julia Stone by Julia Stone,” and when it is moved, the frame proves to be full of blood. Stone is a vampiric revenant who appears in the narrator’s bedroom after nightfall. The narrator flees to his companion’s dressing room to tell the tale. This conclusion significantly evokes John Fletcher’s

“haunted closet,” in a trend that was to recur in many ghost stories of this period, by Benson and others. The meeting of men in private quarters by night is facilitated by the incursion of ghostly terrors; other examples of this can be found in Perceval Landon’s “Thurnley Abbey” and M.R. James’s “Number 13.” The narrator’s tower-room encounter with penetrative female sexuality is a subtle displacement, indeed a defusing, of the anxieties around the far more fraught encounter between two men in a nighttime bedchamber. Once again, an anxiety- spurring desire between men is both acknowledged (by placing the men in intimate proximity and suggestively alluding to a distaste for female sexuality) Ruthnum 88 and banished: the sexualized supernatural incursion that brings the men safely

“together” is exorcised by morning. This normalizing of relations between men does not serve to entirely dispel or disarm anxieties around male same-sex desire, but it does serve to “ghost” them, to acknowledge their presence against a spectral background that is far more threatening. Exposure of male same-sex desire and the immediate placement of limitations of this desire is clear in the connection between the two nocturnal meetings; in this case, the supernatural serves to confirm a disgust with heterosexual relations while pushing a homosocial bond to the utmost limit without allowing for sexual contact. While the haunted artworks in Henry James and in The Judgment Books arrested male same-sex anxiety within the frame of the haunted artwork, this later Benson ghost story constructs a haunted artwork that serves to incarnate dread in a manner that distracts from the prominent male same-sex tensions that exist in the story: while the clearest focus of anxiety should be between the two men locked into a private chamber, Benson locates horror in the painting’s threatening revenant. The ghost story effectively

“closets” the male characters through the use of a haunted artwork, allowing the fraught male same-sex bond to exist while banishing any potential “horror” that the fulfillment of this bond could elicit. In this story, the haunted artwork serves to separate an obviously fraught scene of male same-sex desire (the bedroom meeting) from another element of the Wildean queer: the Decadence-associated idea of art as threat. Instead of using the painting as a locus of male same-sex desire, Benson uses it to separate elements that had been bound together in the recent definition of the homosexual. Ruthnum 89

Benson’s career as a writer of ghost stories owes as much to his conscious borrowings from M.R. James as it does to the adaption of his works to the new, post-trials climate of literary Britain. Any survey of the British ghost story after the fin de siècle, no matter how cursory, must explore the place and influence of

“the other James.” Anthologist Richard Dalby has called James’s initial 1904 collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, “the single most important book in the twentieth-century history of the supernatural” (309), and H.P Lovecraft noted that the scholarly James had “developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples” (Lovecraft 101), an inference which proved true. As the title of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary suggests, M.R. James wrote tales which engage in a hearkening back, in a looking through the recent past toward a distant past that is then brought into haunting collision with the present. Even given this tendency to focus his works on the past, M.R. James remained a writer of his moment: the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle aftermath is as present in his works as in those of his contemporaries.

While Hichens and Benson had direct dealings with the Decadent circle,

M.R. James could not have remained more distant—the manner and particular method by which many his stories reflect the strategies of concealment and exposure that I have been discussing speaks to the influential reach of the Wildean in this genre. James was a serious medieval scholar whose career progressed through the ranks at King’s College, leaving him ensconced at Cambridge while the undergraduates who would populate the Decadent ranks passed on to careers in literary London. After his election as a Fellow of King’s in 1887, James Ruthnum 90 became Dean, Tutor, and Provost at King’s, and eventually won the position of

Vice Chancellor of Cambridge. He finished his career as the provost of Eton, the site of his own schoolboy days. Recalling these days in a memoir entitled Eton and King’s, James alludes to a moment that would prove to be crucial to his career:

Twice I heard Ruskin, and twice Mr. Gladstone: Ruskin first on the English

Lakes (at least that name occurred in the title) when he took occasion to

deliver a tremendous denunciation of Gustave Dore: again, later, on the

Bible of Amiens… This was illuminating. For the first time I learnt what

might be read, and in what spirit, in the imagery of a great church: and what

the thirteenth century had to say to the nineteenth (James, Eton and King’s

55).

This linkage between artistic representation and a reaching forward from the past would prove central to James’s efforts as a writer, and to his academic pursuits.

These pursuits included acquisitions for the Fitzwilliam Museum, his edition of an

Apocryphal New Testament, and publications such as The Apocalypse in Art, a survey of renderings of the Apocalypse in medieval manuscripts and stained glass. His ghost stories, embarked upon as a hobby, would bear similar motifs: what the thirteenth century had to send to the nineteenth (and twentieth) in the tales of M.R. James was, most often, terror: terror which frequently arrived in the form of an artwork.

The intrusions of ancient horrors in the oddly old-fashioned modern world of James’s almost exclusively male-populated works often come in the form of Ruthnum 91 haunted artworks: curtains woven from the patterned hair of a notoriously corrupt man in “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,” the architectural alterations in the ancient church of “An Episode of Cathedral History,” the sinister, stolen pages from occult texts in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.” But such displacements in time do not rule out reading James’s haunted artworks in a post-Wilde-trials context.

While the ancient provenance of the objects forms a haunting background, the actively terrifying quality of each artwork is its realized potential to, as Foster would say, “live on.” The union of these anxiety-laden artworks with the sexualized panic that results from the hauntings links James, the least Decadent- related and the most influential of the ghost story writers in this era, directly to the

Wildean pattern that I have been describing. At this crucial moment in the development of the ghost story, it was no more possible to sever the haunted artwork from its Wildean baggage of male same-sex anxiety and traumatic history than it was for society to perceive Wilde’s acts as being separate from his person.

As in Benson’s work, James’s tales use the supernatural and circumstances around the supernatural to manifest sexual anxieties, in order to perform a complicated analysis of the various factors that constitute sexual anxieties. The supernatural artworks in James bring male-same sex anxiety into a spectral existence that can be dealt with apart from the tensions that arise between his male characters.

The sex-related fears in James’s tales lie near the surface, even if they seem to emerge in the most incongruous of settings. Michael Chabon describes this Ruthnum 92 effect in an essay written as an introduction to a James collection, in which he pays special attention to the story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”:

…when at last we encounter the Horror, there is something its

manifestation, its physical attributes, its habits, that puts the reader in mind,

however reluctantly, of sex. I say reluctantly because the cool, fleshy, pink,

protuberant, furred, toothed, or mouthed apparitions one finds in M.R.

James are so loathsome and in part because James keeps his stories

studiously free—swept clean—not merely of references to sexual behaviour

but of all the hot-and-heavy metaphor and overt Freudian metaphor with

which supernatural fiction is so often encumbered… But the fact remains

that “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is a story about a man

pursued into the darkness of a strange bedroom, and all of the terror is

ultimately generated by a vision of a horribly disordered bed.” (Chabon

130)

Anxious encounters with males precede the bedsheet-phantom that confronts

Parkins, the tale’s protagonist, emerging primarily in his discomfort at being chambered with other men. The horror in “Oh, Whistle” is spurred by an ancient whistle which, when blown, summons the dark creature that haunts Parkins.

James dwells on the particularly image-based creative power the whistle is invested with: “It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain” (James, “Oh, Whistle” 132).

These pictures persist in the character’s waking dreams, which eventually manifest as a phantom. In another instance of the closeting of two males which a Ruthnum 93 supernatural incursion can bring about, the climactic strike of the malevolent spirit is interrupted by one Colonel Wilson, who dispels the haunting with his presence: “Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed for the rest of the night” (James, “Oh,

Whistle” 149). The lone, bachelor protagonists of James stories, often engaged in walking-tours in search of relics or merely leisure, confront certain male same-sex anxieties through their battles with the supernatural: the anxieties are made manifest, then banished. “Oh, Whistle” opens with Professor Parkins fending off a colleague who jokingly invites himself along on Parkins’s excursion:

‘Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing it, Parkins?’ said a

bluff person opposite. ‘Look here, I shall come down and occupy it for bit;

it’ll be company for you.’

The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous manner.’

(James, “Oh, Whistle” 122)

Before the tale ends, that extra bed is occupied by a ghost which incarnates all of

Parkins’s anxieties and summarily exorcises the horrifying elements of the idea of proximity to another man through its own unknowable loathsomeness: by dint of being abnormal, the ghost normalizes Colonel Wilson’s occupancy of the other bed for the rest of the night. Parkins’s previous strict faith in the non-existence of the supernatural is banished, however. At the beginning of the story, Parkins holds that “any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred” (James, Ruthnum 94

“Oh, Whistle” 123). As the tale ends, Parkins has faced an incarnation of his anxieties and must acknowledge that “such things” (the supernaturally-charged manifestation of male same-sex desire) do exist—and he is glad for the presence of the Colonel, and later that of his irritating colleague, Rogers, in his bed- chamber. The banishment of the anxiety does not suggest that the fruition of male same sex desire can come to pass—but it does suggest that what is made manifest can then be done away with, in this case by flinging the whistle into the sea and by burning the bedsheets. Male same-sex desire is ghosted and exorcised in those

James tales which feature it most prominently, revealing what must be acknowledged in order to be banished.

The “‘reverse’ discourse” that Foucault speaks of is present here; while the use of the supernatural as a haunting manifestation of the anxieties surrounding male same-sex desire in the wake of the Wilde trials functions to banish these desires or to reveal their “unnaturalness,” the fact that these desires are given presence became a means by which homosexuality “began to speak on its own behalf” (Foucault 101). The fact that the presence of this manifestation of homosexuality is spectral need not imply that the presence is unreal; indeed, the narratives and the reactions of the characters in the ghost stories of James,

Benson, and Hichens are dictated by the spectral—what could be more fundamental or “real” in the ghost story than the ghost? Gestures toward banishing the hauntings in these stories are only partially successful; as the “type” of the homosexual registered as a cultural reality that would not go away, the way in which homosexuality began to speak for itself through the ghost story was a Ruthnum 95 suggestion that male same-sex desire was indeed real, but did not adhere to the conditions and descriptions set out in the definition that emerged from Wilde’s trials.

I began this chapter with an epigraph from E.M. Forster, whose first sequence of supernatural stories were collected and released in 1911 as The

Celestial Omnibus. His description of the fantastic (a category which certainly encompasses the ghost story) as a category that is best kept free of the pryings of a critical apparatus almost suggests that his own supernatural work has something to hide—a suggestion I would feel presumptuous in making were it not confirmed by Forster himself in a grudging admission. Forster’s early stories fit comfortably alongside the selections I have made from lesser-known and more strictly genre- related writers. Just as Henry James found himself drawn to the ghostly genre to address certain anxieties, the beginnings of Forster’s literary career show him dealing with issues of male same-sex desire that would arise in his later fiction, but in the form of supernatural tales. Christopher Lane suggests that there is a certain evasion present in much of Foster’s fiction, of the homosocial sort that prevents relationships between two men from reaching an erotic conclusion. This evasive mechanism is at work in Forster’s “The Story of a Panic,” described by the author in his introduction to Collected Short Stories as “the first story I ever wrote” (Forster, Collected Short Stories 5): an odd, seemingly fanciful and unrealistic beginning for the soon-to-be doyen of a particular brand of Edwardian realism. The beginnings of the homosocial thread that Lane follows through

Forster’s work are present in this very first story: Ruthnum 96

Some of Forster’s readers hinted at the time of this potential evasion.

Indeed, he was ‘horrified’ and ‘disgust(ed)’ to learn from a ‘chirruping’

Maynard Keynes that Charles Sayle, a librarian at Cambridge, was busy

spreading his own version of the story: ‘Buggered’ – or, as Forster puts it,

‘B by a waiter at the Hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat’. More

intriguing still is Forster’s admission, in the 1920’s, that although he wrote

the story ‘with no thought of sex for [for the characters, for] no thought of

sex was in my mind’, he’d come around to seeing that ‘in a stupid and

unprofitable way [Sayle] was right and that this was the cause of my

indignation. (Lane 106)

I will attempt to be less stupid and more profitable than Sayle, whose comically indelicate reading of Forster’s tale nevertheless indicates that the male same-sex anxiety that I am retroactively reading into these tales was by no means invisible to contemporary audiences.

The “goat” in Sayle’s malicious comment is in fact Pan, who appears to an effeminate young boy named Eustace in the woods of an Italian estate. “The Story of a Panic” is recounted by one of those who panicked, the stodgy, matter-of-fact narrator who presents a disgusted account of Eustace’s effeminacy at the outset of the tale, before accounting for the “career” that the boy was later to come into, “if career it can be called” (Forster, “Story of a Panic” 9). This intriguing reference to the boy’s future notoriety is picked up only once more, after the boy’s encounter with Pan: “I have often seen that particular smile since, both on the possessor’s face and on the photographs of him that are beginning to get into the illustrated Ruthnum 97 papers… we were all unused to this disquieting smile...” (Forster, “Story of a

Panic” 17). These passing but important allusions to Eustace’s public career are interesting in that they point to him as a public figure without actually indicating the work that placed him in the public eye: a strange omission from the narrative pen of this extremely work-and-propriety focused narrator. I suggest that the celebrity aura parallels the Wildean legend of association that overwhelmed the work of the man himself, a suggestion that is supported by the use of aestheticism and homosexuality in the story itself.

The collection of feminizing adjectives and verbs that Forster’s narrator gathers around Eustace evokes Henry James’s portrait of Gabriel Nash, as well as the countless satires of Wilde and the Decadents that had appeared in the preceding decade. “But Eustace was something besides: he was indescribably repellent” (Forster, “Story of a Panic” 9). The narrator describes Eustace as lazy, and is repulsed by the boy’s refusal to learn to swim, which “Every English boy” should be able to do: “he said he was afraid of the water! – a boy afraid!” (9)

While the boy’s aunts think him “delicate,” the narrator suspects that he lacks discipline.

The practice of art makes an early appearance in the narrative. One of the narrator’s two daughters, Janet, paints a poor watercolour of the Cathedral in the town they are stopping in, and the presence of Mr. Leyland, a “would-be artist,” soon introduces aesthetic concepts of art. When Rose, the narrator’s other daughter, declares that the view upon which the characters are looking out would be excellent matter for a picture, Leyland is quick to disagree. “‘Look, in the first Ruthnum 98 place,” he replied, ‘how intolerably straight against the sky is the line of the hill. It would need breaking up and diversifying. And where we are standing the whole thing is out of perspective. Besides, the whole thing is monotonous and crude”

(Forster, “Story of a Panic” 11). This is an unsubtle rephrasing of Vivian’s opening salvo in Wilde’s famous 1889 dialogue-essay, The Decay of Lying. “My own experience is 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 conditions… When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects” (Wilde, “Decay” 57). Soon after the aesthete’s miniature speech, Eustace blows a whistle that summons Pan and drives the assembled party away. The whistle, carved by Eustace, produces an unearthly music that leads to the boy’s encounter with the supernatural. He is transformed, a move that is heralded by his new enthusiasm for nature and his stated desire to see Gennaro, the Italian serving-boy who has recently started to serve at the local hotel.

The sexual evasiveness in Forster’s work is pressed to its limit in this story: not only do the supernatural dynamics of the tale prevent two young men from uniting erotically, the newly-categorized queer tendencies are separated between characters after having been carefully drawn out: it is the aesthete

Leyland who takes a knife to Eustace’s Pan-summoning flute, banishing the dangerously liberating male same-sex tendencies elicited by the flute’s art. Gone, also, is Eustace’s effeminacy, apparently exorcised by his transformation, which manifests as supernatural shorthand for his sexual desire for Gennaro. On his way Ruthnum 99 back to the hotel, Eustace “stepped out manfully, for the first time in his life…”

(Forster, “Story of a Panic” 19), replacing his effeminate gait with a stride that satisfies the rigid English narrator’s delineation of masculinity. This is quickly followed by an act that shocks the narrator and the traveling party—as they draw close to the hotel and the Italian boy appears, Eustace “leapt right up into his

(Gennaro’s) arms, and put his own arms around his neck” (21-22). Forster strictly sets apart Leyland’s “portion” of the Wildean image (the character’s reflection of aestheticism and Decadence) from Eustace’s exhibition of homosexual tendencies. By separating Eustace’s early effeminacy from his later exhibition of male same-sex desire (which is accompanied by a new, “manful” physical attitude) and from Leyland’s aesthete, Forster is actively separating the composite parts of the post-trials Wildean image of the homosexual; the supernatural allows

Forster to unsettle the homosexual by aligning it with Pan’s nature, in a realm outside of British society.

Gennaro’s familiarity with Eustace is infinitely disturbing to those around them, but Forster obscures the homosexual content through Eustace’s ecstatic embrace of nature, as embodied in the supernatural form of Pan. James Miracky points to the recurring presence and function of this god in Forster’s work:

Forster includes a Pan figure in several of his early stories and novels,

usually a member of the lower class who possesses a strong link to nature.

Pan is an intensely sexual power in Forster's fiction. The figure of Pan and

its ironic double function (in configuring both natural forces and

supposedly unnatural, homosexual ones) illustrate the queer confusion of Ruthnum 100

gender and sexuality that emerges in Forster's version of fantasy: Pan

serves paradoxically as a marker of manly qualities and a repository of

feminized homosexual desire. (Miracky 137)

Readers of Forster’s Maurice, the author’s realist release of the homosexual theme that was obscured in his supernatural tales (artistic release, that is—the novel was written in 1913 but remained in a drawer until its posthumous publication in 1971) will recognize this hyper-masculine, homosexual Pan in

Scudder, the lover with whom Maurice happily retreats to a pastoral homosexual life. But that figure was present in Gennaro, and even before Gennaro, in the hoof-prints that surround Eustace’s supine form after the “panic.” Forster uses

Pan as an invisible incarnation of male same-sex desire, but the comparatively playful tone of his supernatural stories moves his compositions into a slightly different sphere from the stories of Benson, Hichens, and the Jameses. The supernatural in Forster does provide a place of hiding and of showing: the invisible Pan is manifest in the visible changes in Eustace. While the bulk of the supernatural texts that I have treated so far use the supernatural to incarnate the manifold anxieties associated with male same-sex desire in order to exorcise or destroy these incarnated desires, or to deny the possibility of male same-sex desire being consummated, Forster uses his supernatural Pan strategies to create an avenue for an untroubled expression of homosexuality. Effeminacy and the aesthetic philosophy of art are banished to the sidelines of the tale and to

Eustace’s past: that which is real is supernatural in the tale, and that which is supernatural is rooted in the natural—an argument that perforce aligns itself with Ruthnum 101 a belief that homosexuality is both natural and manly. “The Story of a Panic” makes multiple gestures that confirm the linkage of Wilde to the supernatural and to male same-sex anxiety; Forster’s strategy is to untangle these linkages in order to manifest a form of homosexual desire that is not laden with fear and the stigma of recent, traumatic history. Forster’s public anxieties around homosexuality did not limit his production of art, but merely its form and what he chose to distribute.

Ruthnum 102

Conclusion

Wilde’s doubleness as an influence over the ghost story is inseparable from his own, inescapable doubleness: his writings and his own self were quickly subsumed by the celebrity Wilde, and soon by the infamous “Wilde” whose works and life became secondary to his status as a cultural representative of the homosexual man. The simultaneous existence of Dorian Gray and his portrait is an apt metaphor for the dual impact that Wilde would have upon the ghost story; he provided a prototypical template for a haunted artwork invested with male same-sex anxieties in Dorian, and he became an symbol of these anxieties and the grouping of elements that would be inextricably related to male homosexual desire. These elements—effeminacy, the fraught aesthetic and Decadent approach to art, the blurring of boundaries between art forms—would be supernaturally expressed in the genre-defining ghost stories of M.R. James, Henry James, Robert

Hichens, and E.F. Benson, among many others.

What is evident, perhaps most strikingly in the Forster story that I discussed at the close of Chapter Three, is the use of the haunted artwork to unpack the manifold elements associated with contemporary understandings of queer identity that the infamous trials located in the person of Wilde. These traits-

-which include effeminacy, a “decadent” mode of dress, and an interest in the creation and appreciation of art—were parceled out, by association with Wilde, in the haunted artwork. The texts discussed in my first two chapters—The Picture of

Dorian Gray, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H., The Tragic Muse, The Turn of the

Screw—use the haunted artwork to locate male same-sex anxiety, a strategy that Ruthnum 103 would be carried over into the use of the supernatural and artworks in ghost stories following the trials. Different authors, however, used the set of associations that had coalesced around Wilde and around the haunted artwork in different way: I have demonstrated E.F. Benson’s use of a supernatural element charged with a repulsion for heterosexual contact as a means to normalize relationships between men, relationships that would otherwise be fraught with male same-sex anxiety. This strategy that is also present in the work of M.R.

James. The use of the haunted artwork was laden with Wilde’s incarnation of queerness; the complicated separation of these queer elements, and their distribution across different areas of meaning within ghost stories, became a way to separate the association between the supposed traits of the homosexual with the act of sexual intercourse between men. This separation of associations was both a reaction against and a confirmation of the model of the male homosexual that had appeared; the idea that this new ‘type’ of male sexual actor was a reality was confirmed by the spectral manifestation of the anxieties around male same-sex desire, but the separation of associations suggested that any definition of this new type would prove dissatisfactory and incomplete. Beyond serving as a showcase for male same-sex anxiety, the ghost story genre became, in part, a venue for an exploration of what exactly constituted male homosexual identity. The stories of

Benson, Hichens, M.R. James, and Forster engage in a separation and re- distribution of the characteristics that had come to be perceived as queer, placing a dissolving pressure on the solidifying image of the male homosexual that had come into being after the Wilde trials. Whether they are taken separately or as an Ruthnum 104 aggregate, it cannot be said that these tales attempt a new definition of the male homosexual—but they do resist the definition that had so recently come into being. The new male sexual actor—the homosexual—emerges from the ghosting process to become a creation of the desire between two men, or fears related to this desire. While elements of Decadence and effeminacy are associatively spread across the tales of the Jameses, Benson, Forster and Hichens, the spectral incarnation itself is often set apart from these other elements of the homosexual type that entered the public consciousness after the Wilde trials, suggesting that this new male sexual actor was as indefinable as ghosts or desire itself.

Just as the picture of Mr. W.H. survives the investigations and deaths in

Wilde’s story to function as a symbol that an identity, ghostly and mutable as it might be, can emerge from a quest for what Alan Sinfield calls “an existing queer identity,” the use of supernatural artworks in post-trials ghost stories demonstrates that this identity does not have to be fixed. By pressing the Decadent-fueled tenuousness of boundaries between art forms, and by merging this tenuousness with anxieties over male same-sex desire in the form of supernatural manifestations, practitioners of the British ghost story were able to perform an investigation of fear, art, anxiety, and sexuality through entertaining pulp fiction.

The ghost story became an effective closet genre, a popular vehicle for interrogations of and confrontations with questions of male same-sex anxiety, and the related parcel of attributes that were associated with the Wildean queer image.

The majority of the authors whose works appear in this thesis are men who had their sexual orientations questioned during their lives, both in society and in Ruthnum 105 criticism. Henry James, Robert Hichens, E.F. Benson, E.M. Forster, and M.R.

James have all been called latent or active homosexuals, both in the gossiping whispers of their time and in serious critical investigations of their work. This may seem to imply that the work I have conducted in service of tracking the

Wildean influence is skewed, as my “test cases” have all been potentially homosexual men. I do not mean to suggest that the ghost story became the exclusive province of the potentially queer male writer—the pattern of influence established in the particular works I looked can also be detected in much of the supernatural fiction of the same period, including the work of female writers such as Vernon Lee, whose tales in Wicked Voices utilize the potential of the haunted artwork to explore same-sex desire. While the sexuality of the male authors I have discussed may have been instrumental in each particular absorption and reproduction of the Wildean treatment of the haunted artwork, it had little effect on the most relevant consequence of their works, in light of this project: the stories written by these authors and their contemporaries had a formative impact upon the entire genre. Just as the horror texts that were influenced by the initial explosion of social debate around evolution would have a marked effect on the genre for years to come, Wilde’s particular mark on the ghostly genre can be traced through the fictions of Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane

Howard, Ramsey Campbell, and countless other writers who followed the cues of

M.R. James, Henry James, and other post-trials authors to create an important sub-genre of tales within the supernatural tradition.

Elizabeth Bowen mentions her debt to Forster’s supernatural tales in an Ruthnum 106 essay titled “A Passage to E.M. Forster.” “I look back on the Celestial Omnibus as an experience. Outside poetry, it was my first experience of originality—as such, unrepeatable” (Bowen 277). Part of this originality, for Bowen, is the “welding of the inexplicable and the banal” (274), a testament to the ghost story’s powerful ability to blend disparate categories into a powerful solution—one that may be easier to ingest whole than to separate into elements. Henry Jekyll is never able to recreate the original Hyde potion, owing perhaps to an impurity in one of the salts that he used for the first batch—this speaks to the ineffable qualities of both the ghost story and the haunted artwork. While authors such as Benson and Forster performed complicated realignments of the anxieties that were housed in the haunted artwork, these anxieties remained strictly fixed in the greater, framing haunted artwork: the ghost story itself, the body of ghost stories that became a genre influence. When Bowen took Forster’s cue in blending the banal with the fantastic in her ghost stories, notably “The Demon Lover,” she was not engaging in the renegotiation of male homosexual identity that I suggest Forster pursues in

“The Story of a Panic.” Nevertheless, Bowen’s connective linkage between the uncanny, traumatic history and sexual malaise bears a stain of influence that can be traced back to the Wilde-influenced authors in my corpus. The same can be said of Robert Aickman, whose certainty that both of his own parents were homosexual and that he himself could never be happy with one woman formed a set of anxieties that aligned itself with the concerns and strategies present in the fin-de-siècle British ghost story. Aickman’s important work as a mid-twentieth century anthologist and writer of what he called “strange stories”—notably the Ruthnum 107 tales “Ravissante” and “The Hospice”—helped to perpetuate and cement the link between the ghostly and male same-sex anxiety that had, by then, pervaded and characterized much of the genre.

“Ravissante,” in particular, deploys many of the strategies used by ghost story writers in the immediate wake of the Wilde trials. Structurally, the tale is framed in the same manner as The Turn of the Screw. A few introductory passages lead to a manuscript (which is to form the substance of the tale) being willed to the framing narrator, who vanishes from the story once the manuscript makes its appearance. This document was written by the protagonist, an artist, years before it was presented to the framing narrator. It deals with a traumatic event that influenced the man’s abandonment of painting and his sexual attitudes—as the manuscript begins, the artist confesses that he has “had very little to do with women” thus far, and that he “should want only the kind of woman who could not conceivably want me” (Aickman, “Ravissante” 8). This unfulfillable longing manifests a desire to prevent his abstract desire for a woman from being satisfied, and the manuscript quickly passes from these reflections to the painter’s description of his own output:

Not that I wish to suggest any kind of mediumistic element in my works. It

is simply that they contain a glory which is assuredly not in the painter, as

the few who know him will confirm. It is a commonplace that there is often

more than one soul in a single body. (Aickman, “Ravissante” 9)

This suggestion recalls the introductory passages, in which the framing narrator describes his own emotional and appreciative reaction to the painter’s work, and Ruthnum 108 the indifference of the painter’s wife. The painter includes the framing narrator as an executor of his will in order to oversee the potential donation of his paintings to a gallery. When the paintings are refused, the narrator takes and cherishes one, while the rest are burned by the painter’s wife. The narrator describes the artist as

“eager to welcome” him and “reluctant” to let him go, but “entirely unable to make a hole in the wall that presumably enclosed him, no matter how long he punched” (Aickman, “Ravissante” 3). Two “holes” do appear: the painter’s artwork is positioned as a site of connection between these two men, a site that is rife with the tensions of the unfulfillable desire that the painter alludes to in his manuscript. The second “hole” is, of course, the manuscript itself, itself a haunted artwork that recounts a sexually and supernaturally fraught visit to the widow of a

Belgian painter.

The widow proves to be sexually lascivious and free, and the painter’s repulsion at her behaviour manifests as a series of phantoms. The disgust with which heterosexual intercourse is presented normalizes the connection between the two men in the framing story, and the impossibility of the fulfillment of the painter’s desire for a “woman who could not conceivably” want him is depicted in a parade of empty, haunted dresses that the widow forces him to touch; as he flees the room, he notices that one of his own paintings adorns the wall. Benson, the two Jameses, and Hichens are all detectable in this story: the framed narrative presents the artist’s manuscript as an artwork in itself, a fact that is recalled by the artist’s recognition of his own painting on the wall of a strange home. The relations with women throughout the tale are strained, repulsive, or ghostly, while Ruthnum 109 stultified sexual desires and attempts at connection between men emerge in the form of haunted artworks, which both contain and reveal the artist’s latent passion. In this story and others, Aickman continually hearkens back to the connective strategies employed by ghost story writers in the wake of Oscar

Wilde’s trials. Ghost stories produced in Britain after 1895 consistently engaged with the newly incarnated idea of the male homosexual, using the attendant sexual anxieties in service of creating supernatural terrors. In the distant aftermath of the

Wilde trials, the Wildean queer image of the homosexual man persists, and the haunted artwork continues to contain a complex set of associations that the producers of these artworks—ghost story writers—regularly explore and shift, negotiating fear and anxieties in a pattern that continually demonstrates links to the work and figure of Oscar Wilde.

Ruthnum 110

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