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Oscar Wilde and the British Ghost Story Naben Ruthnum Department Ruthnum 1 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 Ruthnum 3 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. Ruthnum 5 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. Ruthnum 6 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.
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