Wilde Femininity

“Effeminacy” “Effeminacy” and “Femininity”: Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies

Alan Sinfield Lytton Strachey saw A Woman of No Importance revived by Beerbohm Tree in 1907:

Mr Tree is a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests--a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, sees his Lordship and recognises him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was--the handsome young man. She appeals to Lord Tree not to bugger his own son. He replies that that's an additional reason for doing it (oh! he's a very wicked Lord!). ... The audience was of  course charmed.

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If the play had been read generally in this way, it could not have been performed on the West End stage, in 1907 or initially in 1893.

Effeminate Men

Silences, deconstruction has taught us, are significant; it might seem that this point has been well taken among commentators on Wilde, for any silence is likely to be read as a deafening roar about homosexuality. Now, Lytton Strachey's interpretation of  A   A Woman of No Importance seems all too inviting. Ian Small and Russell Jackson link Lord Illingworth with Sir Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray: both "instruct and educate a younger man, and become in the process

sinister and attractive figures of authority. This in its turn suggests one of the stereotypes of  2

homosexual relationships: the surrogate father." Today the "earnest," which it is so important to be, must be "homosexual." To Patricia Behrendt, "earnest" sounds like Urning, the term for boy-lovers proposed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s, and even more like the French variant, 3

uraniste; this is mooted also in Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Swimming-Pool Library. Timothy

d'Arch Smith's idea seems better: there may be an allusion to John Gambril Nicholson's book of  4

poems,  Love and Earnest (1892). But who would hear such an allusion? And for whom, in The  Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is it important to be a uraniste? No one. To the contrary, as

Chris White remarks, "'Ernest' is the name that the men must adopt in order to be acceptable to the women they wish to marry."

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Then there is Bunburying. Christopher Craft unearths seven respects in which  Earnest, as a text, "'goes Bunburying'--in which, that is, Wilde lifts to liminality his subcultural knowledge of  6

'the terrible pleasures of double life.'" One is engraved cigarette cases, in the play and in Wilde's liaisons; but, of course, Wilde himself did not know, when he wrote  Earnest, that cigarette cases would prove embarrassing at his trials. Craft is concerned more with intertextual instabilities than with material allusions to a homosexual subculture. Others claim more. Bunburying "was not only British slang for a male brothel, but is also a collection of signifiers that straightforwardly express their desire to bury in the bun," Joel Fineman asserts. Behrendt declares that Bunburying

"blatantly calls forth the image of a promiscuous sodomite and foreshadows the epithet 'somdomite' [sic] applied to Wilde" by Lord Queensberry (I don't understand the foreshadowing point). Linda Gertner Zatlin has another idea: that Bunbury was "the term for a homosexual 7

pickup." As far as I can discover, there is no historical ground for any of these assertions.  Bun does not mean "buttock" in Eric Partridge's  Dictionary of Slang, from the first edition (1937) to the eighth (1984). In John Farmer's dictionary of 1890 it means the  pudendum muliebre, which is what Partridge says (it's to do with squirrels and rabbits). The meaning "buttock" occurs in the 8

United States from around 1960, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. So the implication in Algernon's Bunburying is heterosexual. Even now, "buns" has no necessary connection with brothels, promiscuity, or pick-ups; such inferences seem to derive from narrow stereotypes of modern gay behaviour. Above all, if these meanings were current in Wilde's time--how could Wilde have got away with it? Even today, the plays are sufficiently ambiguous to pass, perhaps with some uneasiness, before boulevard audiences. We need to recover the initial perceptions of Wilde, and of his dandy characters--before the notoriety of the trials. It is a mistake to suppose that Wilde and his audiences "really" had a concept of gayness like our own, but kept it behind a mask; that it is lurking, therefore, beneath the text--as if it were a statue under a sheet, fully formed but waiting to be unveiled. The modern idea of the homosexual was in the process of getting constituted--largely, I argue elsewhere, through 9

the figure of Wilde himself. For us, it is hard to regard Wilde as other than the apogee of gay experience and expression, because that is the position we have accorded him in our cultures; the principal mid-twentieth-century stereotype was made in his image. For us, he is always already queer. But that is after the event--after the trials helped to produce a major shift in perceptions of  same-sex passion. Even in 1907, we must suppose, Strachey's reading of    A Woman of No  Importance was not widely available. To presume a twentieth-century homosexual identity in the

blind or hesitant approximations out of which it was (partly) fashioned is to miss, precisely, the points of

most interest.

The

interpretive

challenge is to recover

the

moment of 

indeterminacy--when Lord Illingworth, like Wilde, is on the brink of manifesting the homosexual. Before he knows that Gerald Arbuthnot is his son, Illingworth asks him to become his secretary. "I took a great fancy to young Arbuthnot the moment I met him," he says; "It is because 10

I like you so much that I want to have you with me," he tells him.

To be sure, such language

sound amorous to us. However, other characters find no impropriety. "It means a very brilliant future in store for you. Your dear mother will be delighted" ( WNI 16), Lady Hunstanton enthuses; in fact, she had thought of proposing it herself. "Lord Illingworth seems to have taken quite a fancy to him," Lady Caroline observes, without any evident sexual innuendo (WNI  15). For the audience, though not for the other characters, Illingworth acquires the alibi that Gerald is his son--the outcome of Illingworth's treacherous behaviour towards Mrs Arbuthnot (as she calls herself). This seems to afford a double distraction from any suspicion of homosexuality: Illingworth appears heterosexual enough to have conceived Gerald (we see him harassing another woman in the course of the play); and it seems only natural that he should be attached to his son.

Even so, the situation is strange and uneasy. Illingworth expostulates, to the outraged Mrs Arbuthnot: "if I were a perfect stranger, you would allow Gerald to go away with me, but as he is my own flesh and blood you won't. How utterly illogical you are!" (WNI  69). And yet, are her fears altogether illogical? For the more explicitly heterosexual Illingworth appears, the more he is a self-ish cad--having seduced and abandoned Mrs Arbuthnot; and hence the less likely, suddenly, to be drawn to his son by wholesome familial ties. Illingworth discovers "paternal feelings he never even suspected he had," says one recent reviewer; "[T]he basis of his change of heart is never dramatized," notes Kerry Powell.

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The more Illingworth claims the devotion of a father, the

more he may seem to manifest a strange excess of male-to-male attachment. Of course, Wilde was aware of the dangerous possibilities here--already Lord Queensberry was harassing him. Illingworth's amorousness is stronger in drafts of the play, and in some cancelled dialogue the knowing Mrs Allonby seems to have twigged something. "How you delight in disciples!" she teases; "What is their charm?" Illingworth replies: "It is always pleasant to have a slave to whisper in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal. But young Arbuthnot is not a disciple ... as yet. He is simply one of the most delightful young men I have ever met" ( WNI 272). When Lady Hunstanton reiterates how Illingworth has "taken such a fancy" to Gerald, Mrs Allonby comments: "Lord Illingworth would talk about nothing else but Mr Arbuthnot, the whole of yesterday afternoon. He looks on him as his most promising disciple. I believe he intends him to be an exact replica of himself, for the use of schools" ( WNI  281). Wilde deleted this more provocative dialogue. Still, the point is not that Illingworth is "really" homosexual. There is no "truth" of the play or its characters, to be discovered by peering round behind it at cancelled drafts. Cecil Graham, a dandy in   Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), is open to divergent readings. He becomes very appreciative of Mrs Erlynne: she "looked very handsome tonight", Graham says; he has become as Lord Darlington observes, "one of her admirers."

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Graham, here, could certainly be the

heterosexual philanderer. But he appears to have no personal attachments to women, and could equally (in the manner we might associate with some gay men today) be admiring the style with which the stigmatized Mrs Erlynne is managing her re-entry into Society (rather like Judy Garland making a come-back). Asked how long he could love a woman who didn't love him, Graham replies: "Oh, all my life!" ( LWF  66). This might indicate either boundless passionate devotion to women, or a preference for relations that never get anywhere. Simply, the representation labelled "Graham" allows two readings. The critical task is not to give priority to one of them, but to recognise an indeterminacy; one that is not to do with Graham's personal ambivalence as a character, but with the scope of the idea of the dandy in that culture. Wilde contrived a scenario that would pass on the Haymarket stage, while perhaps figuring his own preoccupations and suggesting such possibilities to a few informed observers. Working out the complex codes that enabled this double vision will tell us a good deal about Wilde and the sex-gender system of his time, and about how those phenomena have been circulating subsequently in our cultures. At the back of modern notions that Wilde and his dandy characters must, somehow, be homosexual is "effeminacy" (as with "the feminine," I use current constructs--recognising that

they are misogynist, and hoping to gain a purchase upon the oppression that they encode). "The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule," Illingworth declares, offering Gerald tips on buttonholes and how to knot a tie. "I have always been told that a man should not think too much about his clothes," Gerald replies--intrigued yet somewhat uneasy (WNI  75). The dandy is "exquisite"--not like "a man"--but this did not necessarily, before the Wilde trials, signal male homosexuality. Generally, Ellen Moers shows, the dandy was a heterosexual philanderer. In Edward Bulwer's Pelham (1828), for instance, he is said repeatedly to be effeminate in respect of his philandering

with women (after many flirtations and affairs, he settles to wedded bliss); he is not linked with same-sex practices.

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For the most part, Wilde's dandies are heterosexually passionate, and/or

philanderers. Lord Darlington in   Lady Windermere's Fan tries to persuade Lady Windermere to run away with him. Lord Augustus, in the same play, is especially effeminate. He has been married and divorced several times, and is infatuated with Mrs Erlynne despite evidence of her unreliability. He falls too easily for female charms; he is flabby; men insult him. "Tuppy," they call him, mocking his ram-ish proclivities. Even in   Dorian Gray, where the plot springs from the response of Wotton, the dandy, to the attractions of Dorian, Wotton's other involvements seem to be with women. He reflects with wonderment upon Basil Hallward's infatuation with Dorian--"He remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first 14

analyzed it?"

Hallward is the homosexual, if anyone is, but he is not a dandy; he is

earnest--moral and hard-working. According to Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, the dandy is positively sexy. "[O]nce a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive" ( IBE  65). The obvious "modern" reading is proposed by Behrendt: "[t]he attraction that the effeminate man would hold for Gwendolyn [sic] 15

would be his lack of sexual interest in her." Such a reading not only unravels the plot of  Earnest, it flies in the face of the "interest" shown in women by Darlington, Augustus, and Illingworth. Believing "Earnest" to mean "uraniste," Behrendt thinks Gwendolen is "attracted specifically to men of questionable sexual preferences" (176). Rather, "Earnest" means earnest. The effeminate dandy, despising responsible, middle-class domesticity and finding nothing better to do, spends his time flirting. He is dangerously attractive because he shows he is available. Dandy effeminacy signalled class, far more than sexuality. The newly dominant middle class   justified itself by claiming manly purity, purpose, and responsibility, and identified the leisure class, correspondingly, with effeminate idleness and immorality. In the face of this manoeuvre, there were two alternatives for the wealthy and those who sought to seem wealthy. One was to attempt to appear useful and good; the other was to repudiate middle-class authority by displaying conspicuous idleness, immorality, and effeminacy; in other words, by being a dandy. Wilde presents extreme versions of this strategy. Jack and Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest are thoroughly effeminate young men, and this includes their leisured idleness, their indifference to moral conventions, their exploitation of and romantic devotion to women, and suggestions of  diverse further profligacies. "It is awfully hard work doing nothing", Algernon complains;

"However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind" ( IBE  46). The women's demand that their beaux be "earnest" is a characteristically frivolous reworking of  prevailing middle-class mores; a further mark of the excessive leisure-class frivolity of all the principals. Effeminacy came to function as a broad signal of aristocracy during the eighteenth century. Eve Sedgwick writes of "the feminisation of the aristocracy as a whole," whereby "the abstract image of the entire class, came to be seen as ethereal, decorative, and otiose in relation to the 16

vigorous and productive values of the middle class."

The impact of this is evident in Michael

Rey's study of police records of men accused of same-sex practices in Paris from around 1800:

to people of the lower class, a noble--powdered, pomaded, refined--was both elegant and effeminate; but that bothered no one as long as the mode of attire remained faithful to the specific superior social condition which its wearer represented. If  someone lower on the social scale assumed this costume ... not only did he betray his social condition, but in addition, his effeminacy, by losing its accepted association with 17

elegance and the upper class, became an indication of the wearer's real effeminacy.

I don't agree that what was revealed was "real effeminacy": rather, it was another cultural mode. However, this does not spoil the relevance of Rey's observation. The aristocrat was expected to be effeminate, so same-sex passion was not foregrounded by his manner; with lower-class young men, it was otherwise. The Wildean dandy, therefore--so far from looking like a homosexual--was distinctively exonerated from such suspicions. Because of his class identification, or aspiration, he above all need not be read as identified with same-sex practices. At the same time, however, the dissolute aristocrat might indulge in any kind of debauchery; so while same-sex passion was not ruled in, neither was it ruled out. Hence the texts afford some basis for knowing interpretations such as Strachey's, and for the readings of modern criticism. The subsequent, and partly consequent, Wildean image of the male homosexual has made such readings inevitable--though still dependent upon intricate and insecure nuances, and still scarcely audible for conservative audiences. Lord Goring, in   An Ideal Husband (1895), has been regarded as a candidate for 18

homosexuality; Behrendt credits him with a "passionate attachment" to Sir Robert Chiltern.

For

most of the play Goring flirts honourably with Mabel Chiltern, but that does not affect the case either way. Indeed, she is generally the initiator, and Goring is preoccupied with the troubles of his friend, Sir Robert. However, Goring's apparent disinclination could, very likely, be the off-hand, dandy way of undertaking a romantic courtship; he was once in love with Mrs Cheveley. Reluctance to marry is not distinctively suspicious to Goring's father, Lord Caversham; in fact, it is quite understandable: "Damme, sir, it is your duty to get married," he says; "You can't be always living for pleasure. Every man of position is married nowadays. Bachelors are not fashionable any 19

more. They are a damaged lot. Too much is known about them." Once more, the text licenses the

modern assumption that a bachelor is probably, or "really," gay; but it is able to do this because that inference was scarcely there for Wilde's initial audience. Sexuality will not come properly into focus in   An Ideal Husband because the play is not interested in it. Goring's dandyism makes fuller sense if we observe its embeddedness in the prevailing alignment of effeminacy and class. Mabel Chiltern is teasing when she denies that he leads an idle life; "How can you say such a thing? Why, he rides in the Row at ten o'clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?" ( IH  136). Goring appears not just idle, but conspicuously so; he almost, as Miss Chiltern suggests, works at it. Caversham's wish for him to marry involves an entire repudiation of this dandy programme: "You must get a wife, sir. Look where your friend Robert Chiltern has got by probity, hard work, and a sensible marriage with a good woman" ( IH  217). Goring, too, might become useful and good--Sir Robert is an idealistic and energetic government minister who, though not from an old family, has established himself by affirming, with his wife's specific support, middle-class earnestness. According to the Times critic, Chiltern was played by Lewis Waller "in his manliest 20

and most robust style."

Chiltern's vulnerability to blackmail (because of a fraud) derives from the contemporary alignment of class and earnestness, as Mrs Cheveley points out: "In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity" ( IH 161). Mrs Cheveley has a point. "Prior to the 1830s," Frank  Mort observes, "personal morality had not been seen as necessary for political eminence." This pattern was challenged "both by organised evangelical pressure groups and by the structural shift in the overall balance of power in favour of the middle-classes."

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Manliness remains at issue

when Chiltern attempts to justify his dishonesty. "[T]here are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk  everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not--there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage" ( IH  181). Thus Chiltern reworks manliness, niftily abandoning the earnest, middle-class version for a heroic, Nietzschean mode. Nonetheless, there is authority in Goring's statement that Chiltern has merely become involved in a "loathsome commercial transaction of a loathsome commercial age" ( IH  237). Indeed, Goring, though a dandy, proves both principled and effective--his interventions save the Chilterns from disgrace. The standard expectations of the dandy and the earnest gentleman are reversed. In fact, the manly man figures more strongly in  An Ideal Husband than elsewhere in Wilde's plays. Generally, dandy values are allowed to hold the stage. There are no military officers (Jack's father in  Earnest  was a general, but he is long absent; Lady Bracknell, his sister-in-law, cannot recall his first name). Other men are doormats. Sir J ohn in A Woman of No Importance is cossetted and pursued by his wife; Lord Bracknell is so dispensable that he commonly dines upstairs to make the numbers right at dinner. Not that he is busy with manly affairs--he is entirely

domesticated, Gwendolen says: "Outside the family circle, Papa, I am glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man" ( IBE  36, 65). There is no equivalent of the pugnacious Lord Queensberry. Even Herod, in Salomé, is all too ready to give away half his kingdom for an infatuation. The uncertain balance of moral authority between Chiltern and Goring shows manly earnestness under contest from effeminate idleness. This is not resolved in the play--to the perplexity of critics. William Archer supposed that Wilde meant to show that Chiltern's old peccadillo should not incapacitate him for public life, but inadvertently indicated the opposite. Small and Jackson find it "difficult to believe in the new life which awaits these characters," and particularly in the future of the Chilterns' marriage.

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However, such indeterminacies are too

persistent to be mere blunders. Consider  Lady Windermere's Fan, where the happy-family ending depends on Lady Windermere remaining ignorant of the identity of her mother and Lord Windermere unaware that his wife meant to leave him. It is indeed disconcerting to suppose that our rulers are like Sir Robert, and his marriage certainly looks less promising than that of Goring and Mabel; Wilde allows dandy values to outweigh earnestness. Powell argues that it is a mistake to expect these plays to conclude tidily, in the manner of a contemporary problem play. He sees, rather, "an unresolved struggle between the author's own fragmented personality--socialist and socialite, husband and homosexual, father and feminist, 23

Paterian and puritan."

I would add that the stresses and indeterminacies in Wilde's life and

writings were not his alone. They manifest the ideological faultlines, in class, gender, and sexuality, that fractured his culture.

Feminine Women

Mrs Cheveley is said to have complained that Society is made up of dowdies and dandies. Lord Goring quips: "She is quite right, too. The men are all dowdies and the women are all dandies, aren't they?" ( IH 152). Goring accepts the idea of the dowdy woman, but chivalrously (he no doubt thinks) reapplies it to men: they are dull, plain, and domesticated, whereas Society women--such as Mrs Cheveley herself--display dandified leisure-class frivolity. In so far as he caps Mrs Cheveley's remark, Goring contrives to rise above his own analysis: he proves himself a dandy rather than a dowdy. In fact neither is right. In Wilde's version of Society, male and female characters, equally, may be dowdily earnest (Lord Bracknell, Miss Worsley), and either may display dandy attributes. Mabel Chiltern keeps pace with Lord Goring's banter; when it comes to a marriage proposal it is he who asks her to "be serious" ( IH 251). Illingworth and Mrs Allonby spar on even terms (one of  her aphorisms is shared with Wotton in   Dorian Gray: "The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming").

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Mrs Erlynne in  Lady Windermere's Fan gets her way by playing

along the male dandies. This is feminine power. Many leisure-class men in fact worked hard, in civil affairs or running their estates. But Society women were expected to be conspicuously idle and frivolous. "The reason for the more extreme insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the men of the same pecuniary

and social grade," Veblen argues in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is that such women constitute "a vicarious leisure class." The uselessness of the leisure-class female made her an ornament for the male upon whom she depended. "Riding, dancing, flirting and dressing up--in short, entertaining and being entertained--all occupations which imply the consumption and not the production of commodities and services, were the very substance of her life before marriage and a large and important part of it after marriage," Beatrice Webb recalls.

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To live thus was

regarded as feminine; and the dandy was effeminate because of his skills and pleasure in his women's arena. Young and unmarried men might leave cards and call, Leonore Davidoff observes, but "they were rather pitied for having to do so as it was considered very much a part of a wife's or 26

daughter's duty."

The dandy is good at entertaining and being entertained by women; he enjoys

activities that were coded "feminine"--trivia, chit-chat, flirting, gossip, scandal. The social round was not without utility, however. As Davidoff shows, leisure-class women 27

were "arbiters of social acceptance or rejection." Lord Windermere can give Mrs Erlynne money, but only Lady Windermere can get her readmitted to Society. Windermere tells his wife: "She has been to several houses--not to houses where you would go, I admit, but still to houses where women who are in what is called Society nowadays do go. That does not content her. She wants you to receive her once" ( LWF  24). Windermere can invite Mrs Erlynne to a dance at their house only at the cost of his first row with his wife, and it remains open to Lady Windermere to destroy the whole effect by cutting her unwanted guest. The policing of Society was effected crucially through marriage--a distinct responsibility of  the leisure-class woman. The management of class boundaries through marriage, C. Wright Mills says, served "to keep a propertied class intact and unscattered; by monopoly of sons and daughters, anchoring the class in the legalities of blood lines."

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This was a delicate matter, because merely

arranged marriages were no longer acceptable; the young people's opportunities, affections, and interests had to be carefully manipulated if an outcome satisfactory to the requirements of property was to be obtained. This was achieved through the feminine regime of calling, tea, dinners, and balls. Lady Berwick in   Lady Windermere's Fan, like Lady Bracknell, accomplishes it without reference to her husband. In Walter Bagehot's view, an "order of nobility" prevented "the rule of wealth"; it would be more precise to say that Society arranged an accommodation between birth and wealth, deciding when, and through what face-saving mechanisms, money made in business was to be allowed to 29

count alongside family and breeding.

For although there were a few noble families at the core,

the many commercial and industrial peerages from about 1886 and the arrival of monied South Africans, Europeans, Jewish, and U.S. people made Society's edges, as Geoffrey Best observes, "permanently blurred by the jostling of the thousands who were trying to get in with the hundreds who were trying not to be pushed out."

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"There were no fixed caste barriers; there seemed to be,

in fact, no recognised types of exclusiveness based on birth or breeding, on personal riches or on personal charm; there was no fastidiousness about manners or morals or intellectual gifts," Webb says; the implicit test of membership was "the possession of some form of power over other  31

 people."

Lady Windermere imagines that her moral preoccupations can influence Society, but the

play discloses an intricate shuffle of money, status, and talent. Mrs Erlynne almost makes it back; she fails because she is moral, not because she is immoral. Society was organized not to maintain a fence around an established order, but to handle a chronic instability. The ideology purveyed in the new popular press was that everyone in Society was, at once, noble, rich, and amusing--until found out. The actuality, as Wilde's comedies suggest, was continual improvisation and compromise. It was not a matter of deciding who was authentically upper-class, but of negotiating a partly permeable system. Miss Worsley in   A Woman of No  Importance and Mr Hopper in Lady Windermere's Fan are desirable because they are rich; they are

mocked as outsiders (American and Australian with trade connections), but the mockery is part of  the process whereby they are being accommodated. Being amusing was not as effective as being rich, but might get one a long way. "Talent, brain and beauty could, with the right patronage, rise quite high"--to the point, Best says, where Society seemed accessible to "every kind of attractive or plausible 'outsider' (e.g. Disraeli, Millais, Taine and Bagehot)."

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If charm, sophistication, and fluency could help one into Society, Wilde makes it even more important in policing the boundaries--negotiating the categories, the hierarchies. That is what the witty cross-talk of the feminine woman is often doing--for instance over degrees of familiarity with a spade ( IBE  67). Mrs Allonby is a bit too adventurous for some of her acquaintance. "Remarkable type, Mrs Allonby," Lady Caroline avers. "She lets her clever tongue run away with her sometimes," Lady Hunstanton responds, picking up the critical implication but damping it a little. "Is that the only thing," Lady Caroline wonders, "Mrs Allonby allows to run away with her?" (meaning a man). This goes a bit too far for Lady Hunstanton--who, after all, has invited Mrs Allonby to her house: "I hope so, Caroline, I am sure" (WNI  29). Lady Hunstanton does not altogether discount the exotic possibility, but Mrs Allonby is allowed to pass. "There seemed in fact to be a sort of invisible stock exchange in constant communication with the leading hostesses in London and in the country; the stock being social reputations and the reason for appreciation or 33

depreciation being worldly success or failure however obtained," Webb reports.

The frivolous and knowing stance of the dandified, feminine woman was nearly as much of  an affront to middle-class ideas of womanliness as the effeminate dandy was to ideas of manliness. Good women were supposed to be innocent. "[T]he public world of work was dirty, brutal and often immoral," Philippa Levine says, "while the home, t he domain of the woman, signified peace and purity. The sexual articulation of that polarity had an irresistible logic: man's sexuality was active, often violent and certainly dominant, a mirror of his public involvements, while that of  woman was circumscribed by the demands of purity."

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Feminists and reformers often accepted the earnest model of woman. They used the idea of  female purity as a way of campaigning against male exploitation, especially by upper-class men and in prostitution. They also insisted on work; many, Martha Vicinus says, "saw work as the key 35

to the single woman's liberation."

This is the stance of Lady Chiltern in  An Ideal Husband. She

serves on committees where they consider "Factory Acts, Female Inspectors, the Eight Hours' Bill, the Parliamentary Franchise," and loves her husband because she believes he has "brought into the political life of our time a nobler atmosphere, a finer attitude towards life, a freer air of purer aims

and higher ideals" ( IH 188, 174). However, Lady Chiltern's earnestness is questioned, and not just by the bad Mrs Cheveley. Lady Basildon and Mrs Marchmont are sardonic about her attempts to inculcate "some serious purpose in life," and Mabel Chiltern rejects the thought of marrying a man like Sir Robert ( IH  134, 196). So Wilde's women construct a contest parallel to the effeminate/manly dichotomy displayed by the men: the feminine, leisure-class woman stands together with the male dandy against middle-class earnestness. In   A Woman of No Importance purity is asserted by Mrs Arbuthnot, the earnest American, Hester Worsley, and the MP, Mr Kelvil. The latter complains that Illingworth "regards woman simply as a toy," whereas she is "the intellectual helpmeet of man in public as in private life. Without her we should forget the true ideals" (WNI 30). However, Kelvil has packed his own wife and eight children off to the seaside while he pursues his career; and although Mrs Arbuthnot wins out against the unpleasant Illingworth, it is at the cost of appearing narrow and obsessive. Meanwhile, feminine, dandified values are maintained by the leisured women. Mrs Allonby leads them in an after-dinner assault on marriage, domesticity, and the manly man. "[H]appy marriages," Lady Caroline observes, are getting "remarkably rare." "Except among the middle classes, I have been told," Lady Stutfield reports (disavowing first-hand knowledge); "I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men." Mrs Allonby elaborates: "they are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not." She dismisses the very notion of an ideal husband: "There couldn't be such a thing. The institution is wrong." Her husband--Ernest--is no dandy: he has "a very strong chin, a square chin," but is "absolutely uninteresting," with "no conversation at all"--though he talks all the time. Miss Worsley is appalled. On her definition of natural womanly purity, the entire conversation should have been impossible: "I couldn't believe that any women could really hold such views" ( WNI  42-50). Wilde's awareness of and readiness to respond to earnest feminist ideas and attitudes is displayed in his editing of  The Woman's World  (1887-89), where he supplemented trivia, fashion, and gossip with thoughtful and improving topics. There, he undermined the stereotypical idea that women cannot handle serious matters. The plays deploy an opposite strategy; as Laurel Brake puts it, "It is just these qualities rejected as unsuitable for women--a taste for triviality, dress, gossip, and pleasures such as music--which are valorised in Wilde's own writing." The alternatives derive from the polarity described by Jonathan Dollimore--between "the natural, the sincere, and the authentic" in the manner of André Gide, and the anti-essentialism that we more often associate with Wilde.

36

A key feminist victory was the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, which

enabled women to continue to own property after marriage. Mrs Allonby claims not to need such reforms. Turning the phrase around, she declares: "All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. But we don't belong to anyone" (WNI 42). In the plays, Wilde undermines the earnest woman, and empowers the correlate of the effeminate man--the boldly feminine woman.

The Importance of Impotence

Effeminacy and femininity do not sound like progressive representations; they sound like exploitative patriarchal stereotypes. However, the reformers' endorsement of earnest middle-class purity, also, was not entirely progressive; as Levine observes, "Feminists took hold of the position to which they were limited by Victorian ideology and inverted its precepts." By definition, it is difficult to achieve progressive aims from such a compromised starting point. "In conforming to these precepts, however subversively, feminists were aligning themselves, in one sense, with 37

values associated with the middle classes."

The earnest rhetoric of purity led campaigners into

demands for state regulation; and, as tends to happen, whatever the initial intentions of the reformers, the new laws bore upon the victims rather than the powerful. Miss Worsley, in that vein, wants fallen women punished along with men, and the children as well ( WNI  88-89). Like Lady Windermere, she learns to reconsider her values. The purity lobby scarcely touched the upper-class men with whom it had begun; it produced instead the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which increased penalties for brothel-keeping, raised the age of consent for girls to sixteen, and criminalised male homosexual acts in private. We should not be surprised at this outcome. The reformers deployed the ideology of purity because it is hard to conceive dissidence without some grounding in the current framework of  language and representation. They "drew on the only vocabulary able to bear the moral and intellectual weight of their challenge," Frank Mort argues; "religious language not only provided a link between different political constituencies, it offered a set of concepts, a rhetoric of resistance and a strength of moral certainty powerful enough to take on the weight of the medical and political establishment. Even more importantly, it supplied many mid-Victorian feminists with a 38

critical perspective on existing social relations."

It was the same, I suggest, for Wilde with

leisure-class effeminacy and femininity: though at an ideological price, they afforded some critical purchase upon dominant attitudes, and upon some of the less attractive stances of the reformers. The dandy and the feminine woman were figures around which issues of class, culture, and sexuality might be contested. They offered the opportunity, and the risk, that dissident strategies often admit: they disturb certain orthodoxies at the expense of admitting other regressive implications. Deciding whether Wilde's games with gender are, in essence, progressive or reactionary is in my view not an appropriate project. His comedies have held the stage before basically conservative, boulevard audiences for a hundred years; they afford ample scope for indulgence in deference towards the upper classes. At the same time, successful plays are usually risky; they flirt, at least, with the danger that prevailing values might not be satisfactory, or might not prevail. In the face of such a production, some audience members will retreat into conformity, while others 39

will entertain more radical possibilities. It is a mistake to posit a unitary "audience response."

The resistance that Wilde's vision of feminine power has aroused is illuminating. It tends to replicate the ideology that it aspires to assess; the ideology that Wilde observed and redeployed. In the view of Patricia Behrendt, the representation of Mrs Allonby and the others is misogynist: these women are "tyrannizing, materialistic, and petty by nature."

40

I suppose that is broadly true;

but, also, it is how women tend to get regarded in our cultures when they do not confine themselves to domestic duties. Behrendt complains that "Lady Bracknell has usurped the traditionally masculine role of dominating the household and of granting permission for Gwendolyn [sic] to marry"--no wonder there is a "tendency to cast a man in her role" (177). Wilde's dandified women embody a threat that women might exercise power far beyond the purity and innocence that was allowed in middle-class ideology. Further, by claiming femininity they unsettle the idea that the good woman is the truly womanly one. Take Mrs Arbuthnot's handwriting. "She is one of the sweetest of women. Writes a beautiful hand, too, so large, so firm" (Lady Hunstanton). "A little lacking in femininity, Jane. Femininity is the quality I admire most in women" (Lady Caroline). "Oh! she is very feminine, Caroline, and so good too" (Lady Hunstanton; WNI  32). If femininity is womanly and hence naturally good, Mrs Arbuthnot is "very feminine."

But she asserts herself and her goodness in a middle-class way, and thereby becomes, like her writing, almost manly. "You should hear what the Archdeacon says of her. He regards her as his right hand in the parish," Lady Hunstanton adds (WNI 32). The common phrase, which we almost hear, is "right hand man." Mrs Cheveley says Lady Chiltern has large--manly--hands and sees in her handwriting "[t]he ten commandments in every stroke of the pen, and moral law all over the page" ( IH 236-37, 222). In fact, Society women might exercise political influence. "[I]f the secret political history of  the past forty years could be written," one commentator remarked in 1885, it would be found to depend upon "a judicious course of Whig hospitality during the months of autumn." Davidoff  comments: "[T]he filtering of personnel through the sieve of Society regulated access to political power, economic position and the accumulation of capital."

41

Women were confined to socialising,

but feminine power could be effective through that mechanism. "No man has any real success in this world unless he has got women to back him, and women rule society," Illingworth says (WNI  76); Mrs Cheveley and Lady Chiltern determine Sir Robert's career. To be sure, even the leisure-class woman was subordinated in late-nineteenth-century society. As we see in the plays, she may not go down to supper without getting a man to pay her attention ( IH 154-55). This perhaps did set witty, flirtatious interchange at a premium; and hence, in Wilde's version, the empowerment of the fluent, dandified woman. Political scenarios such as Wilde depicts did occur, but the pertinence of his representations of effeminacy and femininity does not depend on that, or even on people such as his characters actually existing. The woman on top is a perpetual anxiety in cultures, such as those we call "western," that cannot manage with, or without, powerful women. Of course, it is a joke when Lady Hunstanton remarks: "Dear Mr Cardew [presumably the prime minister], is ruining the country. I wonder Mrs Cardew allows him" ( WNI  26). But Wilde was evoking an anxious fantasy. This is plainer in the more exotic mode of Salomé. Iokanaan (like Hester Worsley) inveighs against and resists the immorality of the ruling elite, whereas Salomé (like Mrs Cheveley) depends upon feminine power. Herod offers Salomé half his kingdom if she will dance for him--the woman intrudes on male authority. But she doesn't want the kingdom, she wants destruction; and that is the male fantasy about feminine power. Initial reviewers, Jane Marcus points out, linked Salomé with Ibsen's strong female characters. The

subsequent move with such women, as the concept became current, was to label them "lesbian." The 1918 production of Salomé was subjected to such allegations. As Marcus observes, there was no justification in the text or the performance for this. "Nothing overt in the play indicates that Salomé was a lover of her own sex. She kills a man, therefore she must be a lesbian, runs the reasoning of the trial."

42

The same logic informs the film Basic Instinct.

The feminine woman, as Wilde represents her, together with the effeminate man, effects a disturbance of categories that reaches beyond the oppressive terms in which both are framed. According to Alan Bird, "the men are impotent triflers, the women domineering, powerful, ruthless, self-possessed and absolutely determined in their obsessive desires and loves, whether of  money, marriage, social standing, or a son."

43

That is right: conventionally good women are

undermined and, apart from the stand-off between Goring and Chiltern, the conventionally active man is written out. This is Wilde's challenge. Camille Paglia rehearses the Victorian debate about true womanly attributes. "Never for a moment are Gwendolen and Cecily persuasively 'female'. They are creatures of indeterminate sex who take up the mask of femininity to play a new and provocative role"; if the parts are played properly, "[l]anguage, personality, and behaviour should be so hard that the play becomes a spectacle of visionary coldness. The faces should be like glass, without gender or humanity."

44

Paglia imagines essential, transhistorical male and female principles, which she thinks ought to be aligned with masculine and feminine attributes as conventionally understood; anything else is a failure in humanity. Wilde's version of feminine power indeed effects an aggressive splitting apart of these violent hierarchies. Initial audiences, I have argued, were unlikely to hear homosexuality in Wilde's dandy characters, but the subsequent impetus of these plays is inseparable from the popular knowledge that their author is the most notorious homosexual of modern times. This tends to influence hostile accounts of their deployment of gender categories. The "hieratic purity" of  The Importance of    Being Earnest, Paglia says, "could best be appreciated if all the women's roles were taken by

female impersonators."

45

Wilde was unable to create authentic women characters, we are led to

infer; after all, Paglia remarks, gay men are dedicated to thwarting "nature's procreative compulsions." This is not an irrelevant perspective: Wilde was indeed undermining constructs that Paglia deems natural. She resists this by turning back the challenge: "of course nature has won, as she always does, by making disease the price of promiscuous sex" (14-15). So not only are gay men unable to write plays with "humanity," they get AIDS as well. Dandy effeminacy, I have argued, did not necessarily mean homosexuality in the nineteenth century, but sometimes it came close to it; the mid-twentieth-century stereotype was at the point of  forming. There is Graham's evasiveness, Goring's attachment to Chiltern, Hallward's love for Dorian, the Page's love for the young Syrian in Salomé. And there is Illingworth's excessive liking for Arbuthnot. "You have missed not having a father, I suppose, Gerald?" he asks, placing his hand on his shoulder (WNI 74). Leisure-class men did have intimate secretaries, and they didn't turn out to be sons. In 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas's twenty-five-year-old brother, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, was found dead from a gunshot wound. Drumlanrig was assistant private secretary to

Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Minister, and the Douglas family were convinced that his death was brought about by the pressures of a same-sex relationship with Rosebery.

46

"The world will know

him merely as my private secretary," Illingworth tells the hostile Mrs Arbuthnot, "but to me he will be something very near, and very dear" (WNI 66). Strachey's reading has a subversive plausibility--even, and perhaps especially, for those who detest such Wildean frivolity. According to the Evening News, the trials exposed Wilde as what he always had been: "a social pest, a centre of intellectual corruption ... who attacked all wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life."

47

Wilde's dandified characters may be artificial

constructs--subversive puns upon conventional gender categories; but he makes them persuasive. Frivolity, it appears, overcomes earnestness. That Wilde was astute in his sense of what would engage an audience's interest is shown by his success in the theatre. That orthodoxies are not easily overthrown is shown by the fact that he was tried, convicted, and sentenced.

Notes 1

Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (London, 1971), 357-58 n. 14.

2

Introduction to Oscar Wilde, Two Society Comedies: "A Woman of No Importance" and "An Ideal

 Husband," ed. Ian Small and Russell Jackson (London, 1983), xxv. 3

Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (London, 1991), 172-73; Alan

Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (London, 1988), 177. 4

Timothy d'Arch Smith,   Love in Earnest (London, 1970), xix. In 1894 Nicholson appeared

alongside Wilde and Douglas in the Chameleon, so the connection is not illfounded. 5

Chris White, "The Organization of Pleasure: British Homosexual and Lesbian Discourse

1869-1914", unpub. diss. (University of Nottingham, 1992), 289. 6

Christopher Craft, "Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest,"

 Representations, 31 (Summer, 1990), 19-46. 7

Joel Fineman, "The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest," October, 15

(1980), 89; Behrendt, 174; Linda Gertner Zatlin,  Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford, 1990), 151. 8

Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang (London, 1937); 8th edition, ed. Paul Beale (London, 1984);

John S. Farmer, Slang and Its Analogues (London, 1890); John Ayto and John Simpson, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (Oxford, 1992). See also William Green, "Oscar Wilde and

the Bunburys,"  Modern Drama, 21 (1978), 67-80; Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?: A Present    for Mr Oscar Wilde (London, 1988); Joseph Bristow, in Oscar Wilde, 'The Importance of Being  Earnest ' and Related Writings, ed. Joseph Bristow (London, 1992), 16-19; cited hereafter in the

text as " IBE." 9

See Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment  (London,

1994); Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York, 1993); Michael Hurley, "Homosexualities: Fiction, Reading and Moral Training," in Feminine, Masculine and Representation, ed. Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis (Sydney,

1990), 164; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,   Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial

 Desire (New York, 1985), 94, 216-17; Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of  "Decadence" in England after 1918 (London, 1977), 23-40; Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummel to  Beerbohm (London, 1960), 304. 10

Oscar Wilde,   A Woman of No Importance, in Wilde, Two Society Comedies, ed. Small and

Jackson, 23, 35; cited hereafter in the text as "WNI." 11

Pat Moorman, reviewing a Royal Shakespeare Company production, Brighton and Hove Leader,

March 26, 1992, 26; Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge, 1990), 71. 12

Oscar Wilde,   Lady Windermere's Fan, ed. Ian Small (London, 1980), 60; cited hereafter in the

text as " LWF." 13

Moers, 81, 172 et passim.

14

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford, 1981), 36; and see 101-2.

15

Behrendt, 176.

16

Sedgwick, 93; see also 174-76; and Frank Mort,   Dangerous Sexualities (London, 1987), part 3;

Regenia Gagnier,  Idylls of the Marketplace (Stanford, 1986), 67-90; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: A Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (London, 1970),

139; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd ed. (London, 1989), 110-11). 17

Michael Rey, "Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1850: The Police Archives," in

'Tis Nature's Fault, ed. R.P. Maccubbin (Cambridge, 1988), 189. 18

Behrendt, 163.

19

Oscar Wilde,  An Ideal Husband, in Wilde, Two Society Comedies, ed. Small and Jackson, 217;

cited hereafter in the text as " IH." 20

Quoted in Two Society Comedies, ed. Small and Jackson, 131.

21

Mort, 88.

22

Review of   An Ideal Husband (1895), in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson

(London, 1970), 174; Two Society Comedies, ed. Small and Jackson, xxxv. 23

Powell, 72; see 86-87.

24

WNI 84; Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 84.

25

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, with introduction by C. Wright Mills (New

York, 1953), 229; Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York, 1977), 47. 26

Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England  (Totawa, NJ,

1973), 44. A deleted line of  The Ideal Husband  said, by way of showing the sheepishness of a husband, "If I allowed him he would have tea with me at five every afternoon" (ed. Small and Jackson, 151). 27

Davidoff, 16.

28

C. Wright Mills, introduction to Veblen, xvi; see Webb, 48; Davidoff, 49.

29

Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, Collected Works, ed. Norman St John-Stevas, vol. 5

(London, 1974), 263; see Geoffrey Best,   Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75 (London, 1979), 251-68; Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London, 1991), 55-58.

30

Best, 262.

31

Webb, 49.

32

Best, 274-75.

33

Webb, 51.

34

Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850-1900 (Tallahassee, 1987), 130. See Mort,  Dangerous

Sexualities, 77-83; Nancy Armstrong, "The Rise of the Domestic Woman," in Nancy Armstrong

and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of  Sexuality (New York, 1987), 96-141. 35

Martha Vicinus,   Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920

(London, 1985), 24; see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London, 1990), chs.2, 3. 36

See Laurel Brake, "Gendered Space: The Woman's World, " Women, 2 (1991), 149-62; Jonathan

Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991), 14 and ch.1. 37

Levine, 133.

38

Mort, 89; and 116-30. See Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and 

Sexuality 1880-1930 (London, 1985); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Richard Dellamora,   Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, 1990), 199-205. 39

On such complications of interpretation, see Rita Felski, "The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine

in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch," PMLA, 106 (1991), 1094-1105; Alan Sinfield, "Private Lives/Public Theatre: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation,"  Representations, 36 (Fall 1991), 43-63; Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics--Queer   Reading (Philadelphia and London, 1994). 40

Behrendt, 152.

41

Davidoff, 17; T. H. Escott,  England: Its People, Polity and Pursuits, rev. ed. (1885), quoted in

Two Society Comedies, ed. Small and Jackson, xxxi. 42

Jane Marcus, Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus, 1988), 17.

43

Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (London, 1977), 128.

44

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New

Haven, 1990), 536, 535. 45

Paglia, 535.

46

Hyde, 166-67; Gagnier, 206.

47

Quoted in Mort, 113-14.

Source: Alan Sinfield, "'Effeminacy' and 'Femininity': Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies."  Modern Drama 37, no. 1 (spring 1994)