Abstract
In February of 1892 Wilde asked a number of his friends, including one of the actors, to wear a green carnation to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan. When one of the chosen coterie, Graham Robertson, asked about the meaning of the gesture, Wilde replied that it meant ‘nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess’.2 The green carnation would become a recurring symbol in both Wilde’s writing and his dress: he would wear one again at the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest two years later3 and would have Salome promise to reward the Young Syrian for allowing her to speak to Jokanaan by drop** ‘une petite fleur verte’ (CWOW5, p. 519).
‘I take it as a symbol. I cannot help it.’
(The Green Carnation, p. 138)1
‘For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.’
(‘The Critic as Artist’, CWOW4, p. 158)
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Notes
Robert Smythe Hichens, The Green Carnation, 1894 (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, nd), p. 138. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 365.
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 430. See also Karl Beckson, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation’, ELT 43.4 (2000), pp. 387–97. Beckson casts doubt on the facticity of Robertson’s account and points out how his story has become an element of the Wilde mythology that has grown in the telling. Nonetheless, Beckson does demonstrate that the green carnation became associated with Wilde and his circle by 1894 at the latest. It may not have been the French secret signifier of same-sex love that later sources would claim, but if it did not signify queer attraction before Wilde began to wear it, it certainly did after he began.
Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Felicia Ruff, ‘Transgressive Props; or Oscar Wilde’s E(a)rnest Signifier’, Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 315–39, which approaches the related question of sexual coding in Wilde’s texts through the cigarette case in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 276–7 offers the most complete account of Hichens’ initial meeting with Bosie in Egypt, including identifying Hichens as a Uranian. McKenna’s biography is quite willing to draw conclusions on sexual matters on little evidence, so I take Hichens’ sexual sympathy with Bosie and the other young men in Cairo as a possibility that would deepen the irony of his writing The Green Carnation rather than as a necessary fact. Murray also mentions the meeting, adding that Hichens had a satire of Aestheticism in mind prior to meeting Bosie, though offering no documentation of this
Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 53. Ellmann also identifies Hichens as a homosexual, perhaps based on an interpretation of one of Wilde’s telegrams to Ada Leverson referring to Hichens as ‘the doubting disciple who has written the false gospel’ (WCL, p. 615); see Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 425.
The aversion in Jeff Nunokawa, Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 71–89 that Dorian Gray is a novel that is not only about boredom but is itself boring rests at least in part, I think, on the dominance of the 1891 version, which Nunokawa cites exclusively. Nicholas Ruddick, ‘“The Peculiar Quality of My Genius”: Degeneration, Decadence, and Dorian Gray in 1890–91’, Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World, ed. Robert N. Keane (New York: AMS, 2003), pp. 125–37 makes the case for preferring the 1890 to the 1891 version. For the past ten years there has been, I believe, an increased sensitivity in Wilde scholarship to the differences in the two versions and a gradual acknowledgement of the earlier version’s distinguishing features, including reading the 1890 Dorian Gray in the context of the rest of the contents of the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s
Elizabeth Lorang, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray in Context: Intertextuality and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43.1 (2010), pp. 19–41.
This goes back to the first trial, at which Edward Carson cited the ‘seduction passage’ at length in his opening for the defense; see Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 259–60.
Frankel’s edition demonstrates that Wilde’s original version of this sentence was ‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend’; see Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 172. Moreover, Wilde’s editors also removed a complete sentence further in the paragraph: ‘There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion’ (p. 172). Frankel contends that the changes made for Lippincott’s were never approved by Wilde (p. 41); Guy and Small concur but stress that Wilde still used the Lippincott’s text as the basis for the 1891 volume
Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Cultural Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 233.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 63. The metaphor is also used in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ to illustrate the passivity of the ideal spectator of art: ‘The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play’ (CWOW4, p. 258).
John Addington Symonds, Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and other Writings, ed. John Lauritsen (New York: Pagan Press, 1983), p. 7.
This caveat leaves room for Jonathan Dollimore’s account of the anti-essentialist Wilde, as well as other work that sees Wilde as a forerunner of poststructuralist thought: see Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 25 and passim.
Oscar Wilde, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, The Works of Oscar Wilde Volume 4, 15 vols (Boston: C. T. Brainard, 1909), pp. 3–72; p. 18.
Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 9–10, 35–8, 79–108 also stresses the importance of signifier over signified in several of Wilde’s texts, as well as the emphasis on the signifier implied by the careful material production of these texts as books.
See Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), pp. 68–9.
For more on the Cleveland Street affair see Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 166–223
H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 144–53.
This coding process can be compared to Richard Dellamora’s description of Walter Pater’s writing in the 1860s: it ‘is discreetly coded so as to “miss” some of Pater’s listeners while reaching men sympathetic to expressions of desire between men’: see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 58.
These reviews are reprinted in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 219–20.
For a slightly different take on how Wilde’s apparent rejection of ethics hides a critique of the narrow ethics used to attack his novel, see Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’, Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 44–63. Julia Prewitt Brown also stresses the place of ethics in Wilde’s philosophy of art, claiming that Wilde offered a synthesis of the ethical and the aesthetic rather than a simple rejection of the ethical
Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), especially pp. 51–67. For Brown, in Wilde ‘art’s freedom from ethics is the basis of its usefulness to us as ethical beings’ (p. 75).
For a fascinating interpretation of how the addition of the self-consciously melodramatic James Vane subplot to the 1891 version reflects the controversies caused by the 1890 version, see Neil Hultgren, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Poetic Injustice in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 212–30.
Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, p. 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. I have chosen to use Merlin Holland’s recent version of the first trial; for a comparison of the various versions of the trial accounts (primarily H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde and Christopher Millard’s [as Stuart Mason] Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried), see Leslie J. Moran, ‘Transcripts and Truth: Writing the Trials of Oscar Wilde’, Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 234–58.
For the trials as a foundation for modern homosexual identity, see Sinfield, The Wilde Century and Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993).
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Campbell, J. (2015). Shades of Green and Gray: Dual Meanings in Wilde’s Novel. 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_3
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