Posing a Threat: Wilde, the Marquess, and the Portrayal of Degeneracy

Abstract

In 1875, Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady presented the elegant, emotional, wheel-chair riding character of Misserimus Dexter that was discussed in the previous chapter. It was only two years previous that Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance introduced to the British populace the philosophical basis for an aestheticist lifestyle defined by a similarly uncommon combination of emotionalism and inaction. And it would not be long after Pater’s and Collins’s publications that Victorian society would be graced by the presence of the dandy-aesthete — the most famous cultural persona to be defined by a union of inaction, refinement, and emotionalism. It is also in the dandy-aesthete that the aberrantly feminine was eventually categorized as an aspect of the homosexual. As the story of John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry makes apparent, however, in order to capture and categorize the sexual deviant, one had to see him first. While dandy-aesthetes had become almost as common as cartes de visite by the final decades of the century, their proclivities remained tantalizingly out of the picture. Queensberry’s battle with Wilde and the reification of the homosexual identity turned not on the dandy-aesthete’s artifice, but the cultural visualization of it as desire.