Saint Louis Art Museum Egyptian Cat Hollywood Dorian Grey

THE Writer of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious title, The Cloak-and-dagger Life of Oscar Wilde (2005), by Neil McKenna. While Hattersley doesn't directly address the question of The Picture of Dorian Grey's primacy every bit a gay novel, he does venture that it was, "while cautious, implicitly homosexual"—at least for cognoscenti who knew what to look for.

         This obfuscation is what makes Dorian Gray'due south place in the gay canon so open to fence. The novel'south very coyness on the matter of same-sex desire, its non daring to name "the dearest," is what prevents it from beingness a shoo-in equally the offset gay novel in English. Wilde is not to blame, of form (and notwithstanding that a few of the near suggestive sentences were excised by his publisher): tardily Victorian society merely did not allow for a more explicit exploration of the beloved whose name could not be spoken, much less elevated to a central office in a novel. Thus Dorian'due south diplomacy are all with women, starting with the actress Sibyl Vane, for whom he professes his undying beloved—before it promptly dies; and on he moves to a serial of diplomacy of increasingly short elapsing with decreasingly respectable women.

         And however, at that place'southward something about Dorian. The way that his dazzler is openly admired by Basil and Lord Harry in chapter one, the voluptuous adjectives by which it is described, Dorian's longing to remain forever young—our gaydar is never long at residuum. Then at that place are all those vague references to corruption and sensualism and unspecified dark activities that eventually incur the condemnation of his sometime friends. (And what about those friends, whose arch conversations on art and manners, if non gay, are certainly high campsite?) The graphic symbol of Dorian may well take been as far "out" as any literary figure could be at the time, making Wilde's novel the gayest to engagement.

         A slightly longer version of the following first appeared in the Nov-December 2005 issue.                       — RS

OSCAR WILDE WAS PROBABLY the commencement major modern personality who was famous for being famous well before he produced any work of consequence aside from great conversation. He self-consciously personified "decadence" while still at Oxford, and before long after graduating had the honor of being satirized as the archetypal fop in Gilbert and Sullivan'due south operetta Patience. The play'southward huge popularity in the U.Southward. led impresario D'Oyly Carte to volume Wilde on a U.S. lecture tour that would testify wildly successful: Wilde acted the æsthete, dressed outrageously, struck languid poses for the photographers, and was especially popular with Western cowboys and miners. His success was assured by his first annotate to the American customs inspectors, widely reported by the New York press: "I have nada to declare but my genius."

Wilde published nothing major for most a decade afterwards this early triumph. By his late twenties he was famous on ii continents for little more than an attitude. He married a wo-homo but pursued boys, mostly of the lower classes, relentlessly and successfully; and kept himself in the public eye through speaking tours filled with quotable epigrams and provocative public appearances in London society. Then, starting in his mid-thirties, he produced one of the most startling bursts of inspiration in English literature since Keats composed his entire body of work in the six years before his death at age 25. From 1890 to 1895, Wilde published or produced The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, The Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as a large trunk of poems and reviews. Neil McKenna mines this work for analogies to Wilde'southward life and writes acutely about its relation to the contemporary political and social scene, but it is non his purpose to explore Wilde's considerable impact on Western literature and culture.

Wilde had suddenly inundated late-Victorian society with a highly visible body of homoerotic literature, and there was leap to be a reaction. Dorian Gray, while cautious, was implicitly homosexual, and the hugely successful plays contained coded references that were obvious to the initiated. His poetry and public comments were often more than explicit. He orchestrated startling and risky demonstrations, such equally posing his gay friends and acolytes at play openings ostentatiously dressed and sporting artificial dark-green carnations. Comments Neil McKenna in his recent [2005] The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: "Oscar lived in an age when the merely intellectual and historical justification for dear and sexual practice betwixt men was the tradition of Greek paiderastia. But the trouble with Greek dearest was its accent upon dear rather than sexual practice. Sex was a conditional, subsidiary part of honey. This was not enough for Oscar. He was interested in the shadow, non the song, in the body, not the soul, in animalism and sex activity, not love." McKenna shows that information technology was the pursuit and conquest of the beautiful youth—the "having" of him (in Wilde'due south phrase), non the dear and nurturing of him—that was fundamental to Wilde'south agenda, and this is what got him into serious trouble. While he did eventually autumn truly in dearest with Lord Alfred Douglas or "Bosie," their relationship was based less on common lovemaking than on a relentless pursuit of young boys, whom they oft traded off to each other or to other gay friends. As McKenna writes, "As they played out their drama of corking dear, both Oscar and Bosie were having as much sex every bit they could with boys and immature men."

When challenged about the homoerotic content of his work, Wilde had a ready answer: "It is only when we realize the influence of neo-Platonism on the Renaissance that nosotros tin empathise the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were wont, at this time, to address each other. There was a kind of mystic transference of the expressions of the physical world to a sphere that was spiritual." This was true of Plato's philosophy, partly true of Renaissance homosexuality, and non true at all about Wilde's actual do. As he said later, "I used to be totally reckless of young lives. … I used to accept up a male child, dear him 'passionately' so abound bored with him and take no notice of him. That is what I regret in my past life." His regret did not prevent him from taking up the same design once again and pursuing information technology to the terminate.

Not surprisingly, Bosie'southward mad simply shrewd father, the Marquis of Queensberry, disapproved of his son'southward passionate and public relationship with Oscar Wilde. Astonishingly, the Marquis simultaneously discovered that his older son and heir, Viscount Drumlanrig, was regularly being sodomized by Lord Rosebery, the sitting Prime number Minister of England. Before long after being promoted to the peerage past Rosebery, and patently learning that the Prime Government minister was receiving threatening letters from his father, Drumlanrig committed suicide in a staged fox-hunting accident. Queensberry traveled to Germany, where the Prime Minister was on vacation, and tried to draw him into a boxing match, but the local government hustled the Marquis out of town at the request of the British government. He then turned on Wilde, leaving a annotation at his club accusing him of "posing every bit a somdomite [sic]." Egged on by Bosie and the rest of his family, who hated Queensberry, Wilde sued for libel.

Immature Alfred Douglas was a master of the temper tantrum and had long since learned the he could get Oscar to do annihilation he wanted by making a scene and then vanishing. For a flow during his imprisonment, Oscar blamed Bosie bitterly for dragging him into the scandal that had destroyed him. This was an unfair brunt to place on a young homo whose hatred for his father was no surreptitious. Throughout this menses, Alfred Douglas behaved with ruthless selfishness and predation, even seducing the pubescent son of family friends while the scandals were unfolding. As Bosie explained to Oscar on a joint vacation when the latter was very sick, he couldn't take care of him because it would interfere with his pleasure.

Later a parade of hire boys and suborned friends testified against him, Wilde lost his case confronting Queensberry. As he knew would happen, he was immediately arrested and tried for "indecent acts." It'south clear that the government could have prosecuted him on the more serious charge of sodomy—Queensberry had rounded up plenty of evidence, downward to sheets stained with grease, semen, and excrement. McKenna makes the clearest example nonetheless that, faced with Queensberry's hold over the Prime Minister and other senior figures in the Liberal Party, the already shaky government decided to sacrifice Wilde but to endeavor to avoid sending him to jail for life. The British aristocracy was perfectly tolerant of public schoolhouse homosexuality, but there was a limit, and Wilde had clearly crossed it.

The bear witness confronting Wilde in the kickoff trial was overwhelming, and he damaged himself greatly when he flippantly told Queensberry's barrister that he had not kissed a detail boy because he was "very ugly." But he rallied when the barrister asked him to explicate a line in one of Bosie'southward poems nearly "The love that cartel not speak its name." Wilde said:

In this century it is such a slap-up amore of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very ground of his philosophy, and such equally you observe in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is equally pure as it is perfect. Information technology dictates and pervades neat works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo. … Information technology is in this century misunderstood, then much misunderstood that it may be described every bit "Love that cartel not speak its name," and on account of information technology I am placed where I am now. It is cute, it is fine, information technology is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural virtually it. Information technology is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elderberry and a younger homo, when the elder man has intellect and the younger homo has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That information technology should be the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

These were fine words, and partly true of Oscar'south feelings for Bosie. Many of the highest achievements of Western civilization were products of Plato's "Heavenly Eros." But perchance Wilde never understood that for Plato the boy led to the ideal, not the ideal to the boy. Probably as a result of this speech, the starting time trial resulted in a hung jury. Merely in the immediate second trial, Wilde was rapidly convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

In brusk order Queensberry died, Rosebery's government fell, and the former Prime Government minister retired permanently to Naples, where he lived out his life in a series of homosexual diplomacy. Wilde could have fled England several times during the trials and was repeatedly urged to do so, but, like Socrates—and possibly in direct fake—he chose to drinkable the hemlock.

Wilde suffered dreadfully from filth and mistreatment during his first yr in prison house. He attempted a reconciliation with his wife, promised to renounce his "diseased and debased passions," and engaged in so much masturbation that the prison chaplain feared for his sanity. He petitioned senior officials of the new Conservative government for leniency and treatment for "erotomania." They complied, appointed a new warden, and Wilde was provided with better conditions, books, and the ways to write. The result was De Profundis, a 50,000-word letter to Bosie that migrates from bitter allegation to a profession of undying platonic beloved. Unbeknownst to Wilde, the exiled Bosie labored ceaselessly to contact and help him.

Once released, Wilde was sent to French republic, where he wrote his last powerful work, The Carol of Reading Gaol, which detailed his suffering in prison house and proposed a new brotherhood with society's underdogs. He and Bosie resumed their intense but sporadic human relationship; Wilde spent about of his time in Paris drunk, pleading for money, and hiring "boulevardier" boys. Wilde'southward decision to risk conviction in courtroom did the emerging gay culture no adept in the brusque run. Napoleon had legalized homosexuality in France a century before, and early on gay liberationists in America, Britain, and Federal republic of germany had been making some inroads. The results of Wilde'south trial—and the lurid sexual practices they exposed—reversed the halting movement toward greater tolerance and made whatever progress on the legal front politically impossible.

The Pic of Dorian Greyness had prefigured all that and set the tone for gay literature for much of the following century. It is tempting to wonder whether in that location wasn't a way that someone of Wilde's genius and social standing could have managed this crisis so every bit to accelerate, rather than set back, gay and lesbian emancipation. On the other hand, equally the showtime public homosexual since Classical times, he gave the earth a way to be openly gay. He ancestral what would be chosen a "gay sensibility" or "military camp" to the wider culture. In an age rife with repressed form tensions and individual alienation, his genius was to know that nothing was healthier than laughing at hypocrisy. In his final days, he told his old friend George Ives: "I take no doubt we shall win, merely the route is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms." Here, equally in other matters, Wilde would bear witness to be prophetic.

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Source: https://glreview.org/article/how-gay-was-dorian-gray/

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