Abstract
In Sodom on the Thames, an exploration of late-Victorian male same-sex love through its legal manifestations leading up to the Wilde trials, Morris B. Kaplan dedicates considerable space to the homoerotic coterie surrounding William Johnson Cory, author of the foundational Uranian poetry text, Ionica (1858, revised 1891). As William Johnson, he had been one of the leading masters at Eton from 1845 to 1872, when he resigned under a cloud of scandal and adopted a new surname. Among his pupils was Reginald Brett, an aristocrat who was to attain immense political influence in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Brett allows Kaplan to trace Johnson’s influence because Brett preserved a lifelong correspondence with a group of friends centering largely on the twin themes of remembrances of Johnson and amorous adventures with boys. In 1892 Brett wrote to a fellow old boy about ‘Teddie’, a fifteen-year-old Etonian for whom Brett had developed considerable affection. I will use Kaplan’s description of the relationship:
[Brett] entertains the youth at home with his wife and family; Teddie visits with the approval of his parents and of the Eton authorities. [Brett’s] love for Teddie has important paternal and pedagogical aspects, but it is also intensely erotic. The sentiments and practices of love between them are not easily translated into contemporary terms.2
‘You must believe in Willy Hughes. I almost do myself.’
(Wilde in conversation with Helena Sickert)1
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Notes
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 297.
Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 154.
See Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 4–11, for background on Johnson Cory’s foundational status for the Uranian poetry movement. Brett succeeded his father as Viscount Esher in 1889 and became a confidant of Edward VII and a great influence on British military politics leading up to the First World War.
See Alan Sinfield The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. vii, 156.
Horst Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: Its Composition, Publication, and Reception (Braunschweig: Technische Universität CaroloWilhelmina zu Braunschweig Seminar für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), p. 25.
For more on the dissolution of the Bodley Head partnership see James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 266–79.
Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 171–6
Ian Small, ‘Wilde’s Texts, Contexts, and “The Portrait of Mr W. H.”’, Oscar Wilde in Context, ed. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 374–83, for the importance of seeing ‘Mr W. H.’ as a text with multiple versions that hail from various stages in Wilde’s writing career: to make my position explicit, I see ‘Mr W. H.’ as the primary repository of many of Wilde’s ideas about male–male love as these ideas developed, and I am thus most interested in the posthumous version of the story as the representation of his most fully developed conceptualization.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 31–101 (p. 41). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. As the Oxford Complete Works of Oscar Wilde edition of Wilde’s short fiction is not published at the time of this writing, and as Robert Ross’s 1908 Edition prints only the earlier, shorter text, there is still no commonly accepted standard edition of the longer ‘Mr W. H.’ I have thus chosen to use Linda Dowling’s 2001 Penguin edition, which I checked against the manuscript of the longer version housed in the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. This manuscript consists of a copy of the shorter version as printed in Blackwood’s with Wilde’s handwritten additions either as marginalia or as interspersed sheets of paper.
The tracts were entitled A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891); Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), pp. 203–4 contends that Wilde must have read them but offers no material evidence.
Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (New York: Hyperion, 2000), pp. 14–17.
For the significance of Jowett to the Oxford study of classical culture generally and Plato specifically, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially pp. 64–77. Jowett’s Clarendon edition of the dialogues was published in four volumes in 1871, just a few years prior to Wilde’s arrival at Magdalen College.
Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 116–17.
Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988) offers a fascinating relationship with the spectre of Wilde from the perspective of a self-identified gay male Londoner in the mid 1980s. Much of the text involves the negotiations involved in determining whether Wilde is the very basis of an accepted definition of gay or whether his historical and cultural distance disqualifies him from bearing the signifier.
William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 213.
Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 51.
Perceiving a fallen art world and an unregenerate public, Wilde had two alternatives: he could respond cynically or idealistically. He chose both alternatives and developed two distinct styles to represent them’, Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 19.
For a fascinating alternative answer to this conundrum, see Rachel Ablow, ‘Reading and Re-reading: Wilde, Newman, and the Fiction of Belief’, Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 190–211
Bruce Bashford, Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), pp. 21–7 presents what is for me a less convincing explanation in which Wilde constructs the story in such a way that the characters only find the evidence for the existence of Willie Hughes to be compelling when they already believe in the theory. Bashford connects this idea of inspiration preceding evidence to Wilde’s putative distaste for the damage it does to the humanistic ideal of holistic subjectivity.
The quotation is drawn from John Addington Symonds, The Fine Arts, vol. 3 of The Renaissance in Italy (New York: Henry Holt, 1888). The complete sentence is ‘He alone, in that age of sensuality and animalism, pierced through the form of flesh and sought the divine idea it imprisoned’ (p. 518).
John Addington Symonds, Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings, ed. John Lauritsen (New York: Pagan Press, 1983), p. 18.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 87.
See Joseph Bristow, ‘“A Complex Multiform Creature”: Wilde’s Sexual Identities’, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 195–218 which goes into detail on the subject of Wilde’s refusal of sexological pathologies.
Ellis and Symonds’s Sexual Inversion was published in German in 1896 and in English the following year. The English version, which had Symonds’s name and contributions removed at the insistence of his family, was legally suppressed as obscene. Good recent accounts of this publication history can be found in Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860– 1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 54–8
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 140–52; for Symonds’ reservations about the term ‘inversion’, see Brady (p. 191).
Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 45.
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aeshethicism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) offers an extremely perceptive tracing of the history of the use of the feminine figure in nineteenth-century British aestheticism in which ‘masculinity, feminized, can be loaded with secret depths’ (p. 7), which is certainly part of the use of effeminacy in ‘Mr W. H.’ Psomiades’ explicit concern with Wilde, however, is limited to Dorian Gray and Salome, which she reads as parodic versions of a fallen aestheticism.
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Campbell, J. (2015). Sexual Gnosticism: Male Procreation and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’. In: Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, and Male Desire. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137550644_2
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