The Clash of Aestheticism and Realism
in the Trials of Oscar Wilde
MA thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts in Literary Studies: Literature and Culture (English)
at the
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr Kristine Johanson Tünde Krisztina Ligetvári
10620524
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... 2
2. Background of the Trials ... 6
2.1 Aestheticism ... 6
2.2. Degeneration ... 13
2.3. Sexuality and Masculinity in the Victorian Era ... 17
2.4 Legislation ... 23
2.5 Realism ... 30
3. Culture Wars in the Trials ... 35
3.1 Art Predicting Life: Intentions ... 35
3.2 Analyzing the Libel Trial ... 41
3.3 Press and Scandal ... 53
4. Conclusion ... 60
1. Introduction
My thesis argues that the trials of Oscar Wilde could be seen as far more than just acts of recriminalizing male homosexuality: they can as well be regarded as a battleground of culture wars, or in other words, a clash between Aestheticism and Realism.1 Moreover, I am going to claim with this thesis that the Wilde trials should be examined from the perspective of Law and Literature studies, an interdisciplinary field that emphasizes the relationship between legal history and literary criticism. Even though the modern Law and Literature movement was founded only in the first decades of the twentieth century, this new scholarly field is not without precedent; Plato had already recognized the connection between law and literature. He based his instruction on the conviction that law and narrative originated simultaneously under the common denominator of art, more precisely, of rhetoric. The aim of modern Law and Literature studies is to return to Plato’s idea and to promote the concept of legal art. Law and Literature studies show, for example, through literary analysis of legal documents that legislation can be duly seen as a literary activity.
In his essay Law and Literature, Cardozo, the founding father of the discipline urges the acknowledgement of literature’s significance and claims that “law reaches its expression through literary forms.”2
Moreover, he argues that judicial opinion is actually literature, in which form
1
The chronicle of Oscar Wilde’s trials and fall is well known: on 18 February 1895 the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquis of Queensberry, furious over the relationship of his son and Oscar Wilde, left a libellous card at the Albemarle Club, charging Wilde with “posing” as a sodomite. Consequently, Wilde obtained a warrant for Queensberry’s arrest, and charged him with criminal libel. The case against Queensberry was soon dropped and he was acquitted on 5 April. On the following day Wilde was arrested and charged together with Alfred Taylor with offences of “gross indecency” under the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. On 26 April Wilde’s first criminal trial began but due to the jury’s inability to agree on a verdict, a second criminal trial was ordered. On 25 May, only four days after the beginning of the second criminal trial, Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to hard labour for two years.
2
Cardozo, Benjamin N. "Law and Literature." Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1931. 3-40. p. 34.
and substance unite.3 Cardozo mainly approached this new field by likening the language of law and literature and pointing out the use of literary devices as characteristic of legal systems. A more recent example of law and literature studies is James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination from 1973, in which he also demonstrates that law and literature are not as distant from each other as people would believe. Just like Cardozo, he argues that law is art, and he supports this argument with numerous literary examples. White’s original motive with his book was to help his law students “become literary and cultural critics and (…) learn to apply their talents of analysis to the discourse of the law.”4
He addresses law students as artists and states that law is a cultural competence: “an art of reading the special literature of the law and an art of speaking and writing – of making compositions of one’s own.”5
This and other works of Law and Literature studies generally cite examples from the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, or Robert Frost, just to mention a few. Surprisingly, the works and life of Oscar Wilde are only recently becoming the object of attention in this field.
However, the literary examples of the scholarship and the application of Law and Literature studies are diverse. The discipline itself can be divided into three major areas: law in literature, law and literature, and law as literature. The first one, law in literature is the leading branch, in the sense of it being the most studied area within the field, with titles such as William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The second branch, law and literature, can rather be seen as a comparative analytical tool connecting the disciplines. However, the focus of my thesis is rooted in the third area, law as literature, for it is the most complex but only recently studied branch of Law and Literature studies. It incorporates not only the analysis of legal issues and their
3 Cardozo,5. 4
White, James Boyd. The Legal Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. p. xi.
connection to literature, but also other implications, such as the effect of legal disputes on society.
In the light of this legal approach, my point of departure for the analysis of the Wilde trials as literary activity is Marco Wan’s article A Matter of Style: On Reading the Oscar Wilde
Trials as Literature from 2011.6 In this work, Wan interprets law as literature, the third branch of law and literature studies, and blurs the distinction between law and literature by considering the trials as a manifestation of the latter. He understands the trials as the embodiment of Wilde’s Aestheticism, mostly based on the libel trial in which Wilde’s literary contributions and his aesthetic philosophy were scrutinized.7 Furthermore, Wan points out that this destabilization of boundaries between art and life (exactly what law and literature studies propagate) is what Wilde’s artistic philosophy was based on.8
Even though Wan establishes the idea of a courtroom battle between the realist and the aesthetic conceptions of art, for the most part, he concentrates on aesthetic ideology as displayed in the trials, while only hinting at the prosecution’s realist approach. Moreover, he does this by almost completely discarding any historical, artistic, and social circumstances that informed not only the trials but the literary movements as well. Without fully examining the rich background of the trials, Wan’s intention of exploring an emerging culture battle can only lead to a thought-provoking departure point for further research. However, with the help of his article as the basis for my thesis, I aim to explore the extent to which law and literature can be connected in the Wilde trials. My approach regards the transcripts of the trials as pieces of literature, for these texts are very much reminiscent, on the one hand, of the aesthetic
6 Wan, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, besides working on nineteenth-century
literary trials in England and France, also teaches Law and Literature studies.
7 Wan, Marco. "A Matter of Style: On Reading the Oscar Wilde Trials as Literature." Oxford
Journal of Legal Studies 31.4 (2011): 709-726. p. 710.
philosophy of Wilde and on the other hand, of literary Realism as a conflicting movement to Wilde’s l’art pour l’art ideas.
To reach my conclusion, I aim to broaden the scope of my research to include other factors and reflections that also had significant roles in the trials. In the first chapter, I analyse the background of the trials with special emphasis on the perception of aesthetic and realist works of literature. To understand the social and cultural circumstances, I elaborate on the appearance of sexuality and degeneracy in the Victorian era. Firstly, this chapter claims that Aestheticism came to be associated with deviant sexuality and degeneracy which eventually led to Wilde’s conviction. Secondly, this part of my thesis connects the legal framework, under which Wilde was sentenced to prison, to the cultural changes of the late nineteenth century. In the second chapter, I exemplify how the issues mentioned in the first chapter contributed to the actual legal procedure. I will study Wilde’s The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist in more detail and identify how these essays contributed to the culture wars. After observing the tension between Aestheticism and Realism in these essays, I will turn to the libel trial and examine how the clash between the literary styles is embodied in its transcript. More precisely, I will show how not only Wilde personally, but Aestheticism and all its affiliates were attacked in court. Finally, I will summarise the findings of this thesis in the light of nineteenth-century press and the mechanics of scandal.
2. Background of the Trials
2.1 Aestheticism
The trials of Oscar Wilde instigated what we may call “culture wars” between Aestheticism and Realism. The prosecution9 took the standpoint of linking literary ideas to criminal allegations against Wilde, and as a result, Wilde was mostly cross-examined on questions of literary theory. Moreover, the prosecution reinforced the view that criminal behaviour could be clearly linked to the Aesthetic movement and considered it its mission to end the moral decay that the artistic ideology allegedly engendered. This would not have been possible if by the time of Wilde’s trials, the public opinion regarding Aestheticism had not changed. It was a process that started well before the trials but peaked with Wilde’s conviction. To understand how culture wars culminated in a court case, it is necessary to examine, firstly, how Aestheticism came to be associated with decay and secondly, how social and scientific advancements made it possible to associate artistic movements with criminality using the framework of Realism.
Aesthetic ideas first began to be expressed at the end of the eighteenth century. However, as an explicit embodiment of Aesthetic ideology in art, James Eli Adams traces the origin of the movement back to the rise of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and later on to the prolongation of their practices to “the world of interior decoration.”10
This early stage of Aestheticism emphasised the significance of affluent taste, which also left its mark on the evolution of the movement as a literary style. The following stage in the evolution of the Aesthetic Movement is what proved to be the most prominent one: the embodiment of aesthetic
9 More precisely, in the libel trial, it was the defence that attacked Wilde just as the prosecution did later in the two
criminal trials. However, Queensberry’s defence in the libel trial clearly prosecuted Wilde above any attempts to prove Queensberry’s innocence. See more on p. 41-2.
ideology in the field of literature. The Aesthetic Movement incorporated a wide array of phenomena, all concerned with the perception of beauty and the role of form in shaping beauty. Aestheticism, Allison Pease explains, initially symbolized upward mobility, and was meant to be a mode to educate the taste of advancing members of the middle class.11 As opposed to its initial tendency of turning outward, Aestheticism in the nineteenth century rejected proximity with the public sphere and became solely concerned with the individual and the private sphere. The movement came to be seen, according to Pease, as a reaction against middle-class conformity and oppressive moralism among others.12 Aestheticism in English literature emerged in the intertwined web of rapid social changes, questioning of religion, declining national power, and quasi-scientific theories of mainly biological decline in the Victorian era. In this controversial environment, Aestheticism acquired a more radicalized form, asserting that art was not to give any social, political, or moral guidance. Karl Beckson explains that the negative feelings towards Aestheticism arose in the late nineteenth century, when Victorian audiences, who expected art to be spiritually and morally inspiring, upon not receiving such guidance, started to disapprove of the movement for its attitude towards traditional art.13
The principal figure of the movement who shaped late 19th century Aestheticism, Walter Pater, despite of opposing didactic art, acknowledged the moral effect that it could possibly evoke. However, as Beckson points out, his moral aesthetic was generally neglected by those who were engaged in the movement.14 And Pater’s works certainly established a dangerous ground as he, (although not intentionally,) diminished traditional moral obligations that used to restrict art mostly by claiming free choice of subject matter.
11 Pease, Allison. "Aestheticism and Aesthetic Theory." Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 96-118. p. 97.
12 Pease, 98. 13
Beckson, Karl. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press, 1998. p. 2.
J. B. Bullen argues that Aestheticism’s history was marked throughout by philosophical and cultural oppositions. Bullen situates Walter Pater’s Conclusion to The Renaissance; Studies
in Art and Poetry (1873) as a precursor of the culture wars which would later culminate in the
trials of Oscar Wilde. Bullen traces the origins of the Conclusion back to 1868, when it was published anonymously as part of a review of William Morris’s poetry, whose works generally dealt with the sphere of conventional male homosocial desire.15 Morris had frequently been associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, just as the disciples of Aestheticism would be, which connection is also important in understanding Pater’s concern with the medieval as well as with the bodily desire. In Pater’s works, what was appreciated and seen, on the one hand, as a new wave of aesthetic art, was on the other hand often much criticized for its hedonism, self-cult, and as the realist George Eliot argued, “false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life.”16
There is much resemblance between the careers of Pater and Wilde, who both became celebrities while their works came to be targets of criticism in the press as well as within the universities and in public. In the case of Pater’s Conclusion, Richard Dellamora argues that the Bishop of Oxford targeted the effect of The Renaissance’s teaching on the young (especially at the universities) in his criticism, which would later on be repeatedly cited as an objection to Aestheticism.17 After the publication of the book, others gave more concrete voices to their protest for example, John Wordsworth condemned Pater both for giving his name to the book’s teachings and for asserting the notion that “no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment.”18
15
Bullen, J. B.. "Pater, Mill, Mansel and the Context of the Conclusion to The Renaissance." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21.1 (1999): 1-15. p. 2.
16 Bullen, 1.
17 Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1990. p. 158.
Moreover, judging Pater as a provocative writer was partly a result of his original
Conclusion’s contribution to the Mill-Mansel debate, which Bullen claims to have been a widely
spread controversy by the time of The Renaissance’s publication in 1873.19 Pater took the side of John Stuart Mill against J. H. Mansel in the philosophical debate that developed around God’s place in art, human morality, and consciousness. Bullen argues that Pater involved Aestheticism in the extant controversy because while Mill and Mansel were both arguing about God’s relevance in art, Pater simply substituted God with aesthetic experience in his contribution.20 By this, Pater moved the whole debate to another level, not that of metaphysics but that of aesthetic art. Moreover, in the light of the Mill-Mansel controversy, Pater’s The Renaissance distanced him further from his contemporaries and the “Christian tradition of Oxford,” as Bullen points out, by glorifying the “intenser forms of aesthetic pleasure.”21
Studying Pater’s The Renaissance, Roger Kimball claims “a direct line of descent” to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.22
He is absolutely right in pointing out the artistic similarities of the two authors through their works of art that both caused enormous scandals after their publications. The scandal in Pater’s case emerged, on the one hand, due to his fascination with themes distant from traditional literature and, on the other hand, because of his aesthetic paganism as formulated in the Conclusion of The Renaissance. Objections to his Conclusion, forced Pater to omit it from the second edition of The Renaissance in 1877, and could only republish it in the third one, while also adding the cautionary note that “it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall” in the fourth edition. However, upon dropping the much criticized passage from The Renaissance, Pater did actually compensate for
19 Bullen, 6. 20 Bullen, 8. 21
Bullen, 8.
the loss by adding Marius the Epicurean, a story celebrating love between a Roman pair of friends and attacking “ecclesiastical timeservers.”23
Pater’s Conclusion and the amendment to
The Renaissance already presaged a suspicion of same-sex desire, which at the end of the century
doomed his devotee, Oscar Wilde’s fate.
Pater’s early attempt of eliminating moral questions from art was adopted by Wilde, whose essays collected in the Intentions added much insult to the fervent culture wars. During his university career, for example, Wilde’s personality, although seen as unusual, had not caused any outrage; he had simply been seen as the “poster boy” of Aestheticism. However, with the antagonism increasing against the followers of the Aesthetic movement, Wilde’s attitude and appearance also came to be seen as more of a deliberate joke inflicted upon the public. “As the first flush of novelty passed, and the movement became increasingly visible and far-reaching in its influence,” Adams explains, “parody gave way to the more barbed attacks.”24
Among such attacks was a general suspicion against aesthetic art, especially literature, as unmanly and symptomatic of cultural decline.
Decadence, both as a radical branch of Aestheticism and as a social signifier, also came to be increasingly associated with the negative, destructive extreme of aesthetic ideology, and as a result, became the primary target in the culture wars. Beckson clarifies that the term “decadent” with a lower-case “d” so freely used in Victorian England, has already for some centuries referred to deviance from the artistic and moral standards.25 Decadence was the defining word for earlier declining civilizations, which notion foreshadowed a dark future, taken the preoccupation
23 Dellamora, 159. 24
Adams, 343.
with moral, cultural, and economical fall.26 According to Adams, the fears were understandable because Britain was “the greatest empire since Rome,” the latter being the “archetype of decline.”27
Walter Pater was already seen as a forerunner of Decadence in England, which, growing out of aesthetic philosophy, culminated in Oscar Wilde’s manners and works. Victorians were increasingly occupied with Decadence, mostly reflected in their insistence on labelling things as “deviant.” Adams points out that “’the decadent’ thus became a tag encompassing styles, characters, states of mind, and historical figures, typically linking literary innovation with varieties of sexual dissidence.”28
For some, this radical form of Aestheticism, labelled as decadence, was appealing as it represented a resistance against the traditional values and higher-class respectability, but for others, it was only a signifier of deviance or what is more, an example of what Freud called “a return to the repressed.”29 With the publication of The Picture of Dorian
Gray, Wilde irreversibly crossed the fine line between Aestheticism and Decadence, making his
art “more dangerous than ever.”30
This thesis’s concern with Aestheticism and Decadence is not accidental in the light of the legal procedures against Oscar Wilde who, along with Walter Pater, was Aestheticism’s most significant articulator.31 In the second chapter, I will establish the connection between Aestheticism and the legal procedures against Wilde by examining the prosecution’s anti-Aesthetic views both in the courtroom and as reflected in the press. Despite the fact that Wilde
26 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “decadence,” meaning the process of falling away or
declining, was first mentioned in 1550 in The Complaynt of Scotland and was then regularly used to denote a deteriorated condition. The term was first applied to decline in art in 1857, in Anna Brownell Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna.
OED Online. Oxford University Press, May 2014. Web. 29 May 2014. <http://www.oed.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/view/Entry/47973/>.
27 Adams, 377. 28
Adams, 380.
29 Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. The Project Gutenberg.
The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922. p. 74. Web. 26 May 2014. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35877/35877-h/35877-h.htm/>.
30
Adams, 329.
was considered “the poster boy for the Aesthetic Movement,”32
critical and historical studies of his career and life all point out that he was seen more as a celebrity than as a poet or playwright: he was “more a social lion and provocateur than a writer” because until the late 1880s his only works worth mentioning were reviews.33 However, his critical works gained more recognition: in 1889 The Portrait of Mr. W. H. was published, in which Wilde studied the erotic background behind William Shakespeare’s sonnets; this work was followed by four even more acknowledged and widely discussed publications in 1891. First his critical essay The Soul of Man Under
Socialism appeared, in which Wilde already put great emphasis on individualism; then four of his
articles were complied in the Intentions. Adams, among many others, recognises Intentions as “the most enduring critical volume of the last two decades of the century.”34
The collection includes The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, which both discuss the relation between great art and criticism in a witty dialogue form. These two articles would later be the pieces around which the war between Aestheticism and Realism unfolded during Wilde’s trials. As Wan writes, Wilde’s Aestheticism represented an apparent reaction to the supremacy of Realism in England.35 It is interesting, even if not completely surprising given his scandalous celebrity status, that Wilde’s literary career would really start to prosper at the same time that he published his most controversial literary pieces. Still in 1891, Wilde’s third published work Salomé also brought him success in the theatre; his fame would multiply until his final fall, the trials only four years later. In the next chapter of this thesis, I will elaborate more on the The Decay of Lying and
The Critic as Artist, as well as on the reception of The Picture of Dorian Gray which also
appeared in 1891 for the first time in book form in the light of the trials of Oscar Wilde.
32 Blankenship, Rebekah M. "Art for Art’s Sake: Art as Sexual Disease in the Trials of Oscar Wilde." Colonial
Academic Alliance Undergraduate Research Journal 3 (2012): 1-27. p. 12.
33 Adams, 408. 34
Adams, 408.
2.2. Degeneration
After associating it with “the decadent,” the next step in forming hostility towards Aestheticism was the idea of mental degeneracy that Max Nordau famously linked to members of the Aesthetic movement. Originally published in 1892, Nordau’s Degeneration (Entartung) is an example of social, medical, and literary criticism that harshly condemns the fin de siècle in Europe, especially Aestheticism and its practitioners. He discusses the question of art and morality, and moves this debate from the level of decadence to the level of degeneracy, focusing more on the psychological aspect. Nordau also links the sociological phenomenon of degeneracy to the most highly developed cultures and argues that degeneration is rooted in exhaustion, a characteristic of developed civilization. For the same reason, he continues, it is no wonder that degenerates in high numbers first appeared in England, for England was one of the most developed countries.36 Nordau includes a list of degenerates, explicitly naming the Pre-Raphaelite artists (the forerunners of the Aesthetic Movement), before reaching “the Aesthetes,” and among many others, a detailed criticism of Oscar Wilde. Degeneracy, according to Nordau, is “a morbid deviation from an original type,” which he likens to madness and sterility as a result of degeneracy in biological terms.37 Hans-Peter Söder and Johannes Hendrikus Burgers both argue that Nordau’s greatest achievement with Degeneration was the uniqueness of combining subjective artistic and “objective” scientific categories through diverse sources of Europe’s fin de siècle art.38
36
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. (anonymous) from 2nd German ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1895. p. 75.
37 Nordau, 16.
38 Söder, Hans-Peter. "Disease and Health as Contexts of Modernity: Max Nordau as a Critic of
Fin-de-SiècleModernism." German Studies Review 14.3 (1991): 473-487. p. 475.
Burgers, Johannes Hendrikus. "Max Nordau, Madison Grant, and Racialized Theories of Ideology." Journal of the History of Ideas 72.1 (2011): 119-140. p. 123.
Nordau’s main objection to Aestheticism is the immorality of the “degenerate art,” which he traces back primarily to individualism and an unbounded egoism.39 For example, he summarises Oscar Wilde’s eccentricities as a “sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an aesthetical instinct of small importance.”40 Through the example of Wilde’s personality, Nordau demonstrates the degeneracy of the Aesthetes, whose “love of the artificial, aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, and megalomanical contempt for men and exaggeration of the importance of art” are mainly targeted as symptoms of the degenerate mind.41
Max Nordau’s contribution to the culture wars and even the outcome of the Wilde trials becomes clear and indisputable if bearing in mind that the English translation of the
Degeneration was published in 1895, almost simultaneously with the conviction and
imprisonment of Wilde.42 Moreover, Söder claims that Degeneration did add “the extra weight to tilt the balance of public opinion” against Oscar Wilde and the Decadence movement during the 1895 trials.43 In his critical work, Nordau not only condemns Wilde for his eccentric personality, but also denounces the lack of morality in Wilde’s works (explicitly quoting a few aphorisms from the Intentions), thus decidedly likening him to a criminal. With respect to Wilde’s artistic contribution, Nordau concludes that “Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime.”44
Wilde’s idea of art being a higher form than ethics is refuted by Nordau who states that in questions of morality, sociality, and psychological health or disease, art should be regarded in the exact same light as anything else. “The artist who complacently represents what is
39 Nordau, 18. 40 Nordau, 318. 41
Nordau, 317.
42 The first translator of the English version of Degeneration is unknown but I am aware of the possibility that he
may have altered the original German text. However, Nordau’s main concepts that I discuss in this thesis are the same as those included in the original work.
43
Söder, 476.
reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it,” continues Nordau, and demands that immoral works be suppressed.45 By declaring literature “the offprint of a personality,” Nordau establishes the mindset, which equates the fiction of a literary work to the reality of its author’s psyche, based on exactly which Wilde was convicted in court.46
Rebekah M. Blankenship also connects Nordau’s Degeneration, as a part of European theories on Societal Degeneration, to the Oscar Wilde scandal. She contemplates how the English translation of Nordau’s work possibly impacted the public perception of the scandal. Just days before the first criminal trial, Blankenship points out, a part of Degeneration was published, which discussed Wilde’s “anti-social ego-mania,” visibly separating “the normal man” from the diseased individual.47 Söder also concludes that Nordau did infect the public mind with his allegation that the origins of sick and perverted topics in art were also sick and perverted.48 Furthermore, Blankenship argues that Victorians applied Nordau’s very effeminate description of the idleness of Wilde and the idea of degeneracy to homosexuality.49 The notion of degeneracy indisputably changed during Wilde’s trials as the symptoms depicted by Nordau, according to Blankenship, “came to be seen as the symptoms of sexual disease” in public as well as in the courtroom.50
According to Söder, between 1890 and 1900, Degeneration was one of Europe’s bestselling books, running through five editions in the first year of the English translation.51 Burgers notes that in the United States, the book also had an immediate and great financial 45 Nordau, 326. 46 Nordau, 336. 47 Blankenship, 18. 48 Söder, 475. 49 Blankenship, 18. 50 Blankenship, 25. 51 Söder, 474.
success with seven printings within the first year of publication.52 What is even more striking is that Nordau’s book proved to be so exceptionally successful, while critics generally wrote negative reviews of it.53 Of course, the simultaneity of the Wilde scandal and the attack on fin de siècle art in Nordau’s Degeneration could not go unanswered. Dellamora notes how thinkers in England and the United States reacted to what they recognised as a “threat to individual liberties and the development of countercultures.”54
Clearly, the scandal and trials of Oscar Wilde forced the aesthetic and decadent movements to take a defensive stand, which the English translation and wider distribution of Degeneration only intensified.55 The first one to react was George Bernard Shaw, who published A Degenerate’s View of Nordau on 27 July, 1895, which was later revised as The Sanity of Art. Shaw’s response defended artistic genius and critical thinking as opposed to Nordau’s biased personal attacks on authors. In June, 1896, Vernon Lee also published a review of Nordau’s Degeneration in the Fortnightly Review, in which she not only responded to the doctor’s critical work, but also challenged the ethics of the Labouchère amendment by arguing that society itself creates its own degenerates and criminals.56 In the era when not only same-sex desire but genius itself came to be seen as symptomatic of mental disease, artists and individuals such as Oscar Wilde or Vernon Lee were, according to Dellamora, “pushed towards the status of outlaws.”57
52 Burgers, 129.
53 In the United States, William Dean Howells and Charles Dana both disapproved of the offensive method and
vulgar style of Nordau’s work, while admitted that there may be a grain of truth in Nordau’s thesis. Burgers, 130.
54 Richard, Dellamora. "Productive Decadence: "The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought": Vernon Lee, Max
Nordau, and Oscar Wilde." New Literary History 35.4 (2004): 529-546. p. 530.
55 Dellamora, 532. 56
Dellamora, 533.
2.3. Sexuality and Masculinity in the Victorian Era
The idea of sexuality emerged in the late nineteenth century as a result of pioneering psychological approaches. In the Victorian era, emphasis shifted from anatomical to psychological identification of sex. Arnold I. Davidson argues that the division of anatomical and psychiatric styles of reasoning in sciences led to the labelling of deviant sexuality, which was considered to be beyond the norm.58 Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, sexual identity had been inseparable from the anatomical sex, based on the internal and external genital organs. For example, the idea of possessing male sexual organs and being sexually attracted to other males had been unimaginable. As Davidson puts it, “anatomical sex exhausted one’s sexual identity,” there was no trespassing between conflicting anatomical and psychological sexuality.59
With the shift towards psychiatric views on sexuality, however, sexual identity came to be more characterised by rather abstract factors such as taste or psychic traits. However, the psychiatric style of reasoning also established a norm and anything that did not conform to that norm was labelled as symptomatic of deviance or disease. Davidson claims for instance that until the nineteenth century, homosexuality had not been a problem; for example, people in the ancient Rome were only judged by their actions and not by their preference for either males or females.60 Michael Mason concludes accordingly that until about 1880, evidence about homosexuality was remarkably meagre, indicating that as a social construct, it had been non-existent.61 No wonder that sexuality and perversion emerged hand in hand because bringing into being new categories regarding sexuality, also inevitably bring into being new kinds of people especially, according to
58 Davidson, Arnold I. "Sex and the Emergence Of Sexuality." Critical Inquiry 14.1 (1987): 16-48. p. 18. 59 Davidson, 22.
60
Davidson, 18.
Holly Furneaux, if those categories are predominantly social constructions.62 Davidson also claims that sexuality was believed to be the best representation of the human mind, the externalisation of the hidden parts of one’s personality, or the repressed in Freudian terms.63
Dellamora and Furnaux both place the first appearance of the word ‘homosexuality’ as a medical and social category around the 1880s and 1890s.64 Dellamora points out that while male homosocial elites existed, among others, at Oxford colleges during the 1860s and 1870s, self-identification and criticism of the accumulating homophobia were very rare. Noel Annan also argues that the fact that English educated classes grew up in a principally male society had a great impact on establishing a homosexual cult.65 Although many of the young students were involved in same-sex practices, they were expected to abandon their college lifestyle at a certain point and to return to the world that held, for instance, marriage for them.66 The new psychiatric approach to sexuality and the crisis of masculinity at the end of the nineteenth century concurrently resulted in an increasing urge to identify and isolate homosexuals. Dellamora claims that first male friendships within institutions and later homophobic mechanisms controlling such relationships ensured that bourgeois males would marry and procreate to maintain masculine dominance in the public sphere.67 This necessary homosexual bonding had been viewed as completely normal up to the point when some members of elite groups refused to abandon their male-male relationships in favour of marriage, which proved the system of male power preservation unsustainable.68 This refusal of abandoning homosocial bonds engendered a new
62 Furneaux, Holly. "Victorian Sexualities." Literature Compass 8.10 (2011): 767-775. p. 769. 63
Davidson, 47.
64 Dellamora (Masculine Desire), 167; Furneaux, 769.
65 Annan, Noel. "The Cult of Homosexuality in England 1850-1950." Biography 13.3 (1990): 189-202. p. 189. 66 Dellamora, 169; Annan, 197.
67
Dellamora, 195.
generation which, according to Annan, regarded homosexual relations as “the worst of all crimes.”69
As a result of new nineteenth-century views of sexuality, earlier anatomy-based sexual identity was replaced by identity-based sexuality. Blankenship identifies the point when the medical field’s focus came to disregard primary sexual features and determined sexuality as something “more firmly rooted in the mind,” as the birth of the pervert or sexual deviant.70
As a result of this change in the perception of sexuality, some formerly accepted sexual behaviour patterns came to be seen as acts deviating from the norm, or in some cases even as acts of criminal behaviour. Even though Blankenship claims that the abandoning of anatomy-based sexuality did not consequently lead to a new understanding of sexuality, Victorians still viewed gender roles as very much concrete attributes.71 Sexual deviance was thus very easily linked to any traces of gender inversion, such as in the case of effeminate dandies. Precisely because Victorians were not yet open to separately viewing physical appearance and personality as indicators of one’s sexuality and they clung to views of past gender deviance while trying to internalise new sexuality models, Blankenship argues that artists, but mostly followers of the aesthetic movement, were often suspects of sexual deviance.72 Oscar Wilde embodied this conflict between inner and outer sexual traits with his incontestable physical masculinity and very much effeminate personality. Moreover, as Blankenship states, Wilde symbolized both forms of Aestheticism, for which reason art was also drawn into the ongoing discussion of sexuality and deviance from the norm. She claims that on the one hand Wilde’s works embraced and
69
Besides punishing homosexual relationships in public schools by instant expulsion, students were also forbidden to speak to other boys outside of their age group or house.
Annan, 190.
70 Blankenship, 3. 71
Blankenship, 3.
intensified Walter Pater’s aesthetic philosophy, while on the other hand he built his own “pop culture brand around the materialism of his aesthetic pose.”73
In the age of imperialism, masculinity was not only of economical, but also of military and patriotic interests for England. Jonathan Cranfield argues that as a result of anxieties of the imperial decay, bodily degeneration, a growing industry, and the uncertain future of Victorian morals; the British male body as a symbol of the nation’s strength became the centre of a series of discussions.74 After the industrial revolution, both the labour market and the fixed state of social hierarchy were changing, which also affected traditional views of masculinity. The changes led both to a fascination with the muscular male body75 (perceived as manliness) and to the spread of dandyism. During the course of the nineteenth century, the “manliness” of primarily intellectual labour was questioned, as Adams argues, by the very same gender system that was, at the same time, responsible for maintaining male dominance.76 Male intellectual labour, generally carried out by artists, was often subject to debasing labels such as “unmanly” or “effeminate.”77 According to Cranfield, such “feminised cultural domains were commonly associated with physical and moral weakness.”78
The change in traditional masculinity was accompanied by a literary and cultural change as well as an alternating perception of sexuality. Although Adams argues that the term “effeminate” had initially no clear relation to homosexuality, he admits that the dichotomy of hetero- and homosexuality emerged in the late Victorian period.79 To fight
73 Blankenship, 5. 74
Cranfield, Jonathan. "Chivalric Machines: The Boer War, the Male Body, and the Grand Narrative in The Strand Magazine." Victorian Literature and Culture 40.2 (2012): 549-573. p. 550.
75 Eugen Sandow, a Prussian bodybuilder and the proponent of “physical culture” became widely popular with
British audiences during the 1880s. His work on promoting regular physical exercise and debates on the male body coincided with the discussions on Britain’s performance as an imperial power.
Cranfield, 551.
76 Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995. p. 1.
77 Adams, 2. 78
Cranfield, 561.
negative associations, Adams notes the efforts to elevate the writer to the state of a latter-day priest, and to legitimise his masculinity by identification with the gentleman.80 This latter response is intriguing for it can also be seen as the beginning of dandyism. Gentlemen were indisputably associated with masculinity and they formed the part of society whose prerogative it was even to be able to withdraw from economic productivity. Although the phenomenon of the dandy was drawn into the discussion of Victorian manliness, the term itself originates from the late eighteenth century. Beckson points out that dandyism in English literary discourse was first associated with George ‘Beau’ Brummell in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and only later came to be identified with the aesthetical philosophy of Oscar Wilde.81 While dandyism in Brummell’s case was a haughty demonstration of aristocratic superiority to bourgeois mediocrity in a declining society, in the later years of the nineteenth century, it became more closely linked to members of the middle class who strived to reach the stature of aristocracy. Wilde adopted some elements of Brummell’s dandyism but also radically transformed it. Besides the tradition of always producing the unexpected, Beckson claims, Wilde “took form, the basis of art, turned it into a philosophy of life in which aesthetics replaces ethics and introduced it into his plays cloaked with the elegance and wit of nineteenth-century dandyism.”82
In his works as well as in his trials, Wilde pronounced only aesthetic judgements when the audience expected moral ones. Not surprisingly, Beckson explains that by the 1890s, dandyism had become intermingled with Decadence as artifice in art and artifice in manner (or life) also came to be inseparable in the spectators’ eyes.83
Even though sexual nonconformity was not readily associated with dandyism, Adams observes how early-nineteenth-century children’s
80 Adams, 6. 81 Beckson, 59. 82 Beckson, 60. 83 Beckson, 60.
literature used the term “manly” to denote moral maturity in boys and girls alike.84
In the period when the crisis of masculinity was intensified in the questions of morality or ethics and sexuality, it was only a matter of time until flamboyant appearance and artificial style would become symptomatic of deviance. As Dellamora reveals, all these changes in social and artistic life paved the road to a cultural battle and the trials of Oscar Wilde, when he refers to Labouchère’s motive in introducing Article XI:
Yet as a wealthy aristocrat himself, he [Labouchere] was well placed to see the ‘aristocratic’ dandyism of men like Wilde for what it was, an affectation of difference on the part of men of whose middle-class origins, work, and earnings Labouchere was well aware. Wilde’s dandyism was a smear on aristocratic manliness just as were the deviant sexual practices of ‘Snob Queers like Roseberry [sic].’ (...) His vivid public presence in the same world in which aristocratic and upper-middle-class ‘queers’ circulated fed his ‘highly developed aversion to homosexuality’.85
Thus it seems evident from Labouchère’s motive that the increasingly public presence of homosexuality and a strong class-consciousness against the rising middle classes were the primary reasons behind a changing legislation, on which I will elaborate more in the next section of this thesis.
84
Adams, 8.
2.4 Legislation
The Victorian preoccupation with decline and the fear of its advance also had its effect on legislation. The era was very much characterised by an anxiety of gender inversion and sexuality, leading to the moralizing tendencies of society. In the 1860s, two major acts were introduced concerning sexuality; the Offences against the Person Act in 1861 established the age of consent at fourteen, while the introduction of the 1864 Contagious Diseases Acts was an effort to curb the spread of the venereal disease.86 According to the latter set of acts, prostitutes were subjected to compulsory medical examination and in case of contamination they were forcefully confined in hospital. However, their male clientele were unaffected by the act even though they were equally responsible for spreading the disease. This double standard and the increasing sexual offences urged the public to demand stricter legislation against sexual offenders, and also greater protection for women and children. The public opinion was only further heated by the The Pall
Mall Gazette’s 1885 publication of W. T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon article
on the sale of young girls into prostitution. These circumstances all led up to the introduction of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, also known as “An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes.” After four years of debating the introduction of the amendment, when it was finally passed, it raised the age of consent to sixteen and also increased the measure of punishment for sexual offences. However, the four years of debate over the amendment of the law indicates the negligence of the members of Parliament, foreshadowing a flawed legislation. According to Dellamora, the act also met resistance on the part of both working- and middle-class women because the laws seemed not so
86
Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Web. 26 May 2014. <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/43/>.
much to serve the protection of women and children but “as to enhance police power in working-class neighbourhoods.”87
On 7 August 1885, Article XI, also known as the Labouchère Amendment was introduced to the Criminal Law Amendment Act under very similar circumstances to the debates over the original amendment act. Beckson argues that “had the addition been introduced at any other time, it would probably have been ruled out of order,” suggesting the hasty procedure and disinterest due to the then imminent General Election.88 Henry Labouchère introduced the amendment that made virtually anything suspicious of homosexual activity illegal while this was, in fact, completely irrelevant to the original intent of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act.89 With this, Britain stood out as the only Western European country at the turn of the twentieth century that criminalized male homosexuality.90 It is still debated why Labouchère introduced the amendment because, public debate had not made any reference to male homosexuality so far. Beckson also mentions that until the summer of 1885, Labouchère showed no sign of concern in male homosexuality. Moreover, at the beginning of the decade, he even gave a favourable account of Oscar Wilde, which only slowly changed into animosity.91 His newspaper Truth was hostile to Wilde during and after his trials, indicating how much Labouchère’s impression has
87
Dellamora, 199.
88 Beckson, 177.
89 “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to
procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.”
Beckson, 170.
90
The Amendment Act penalizing male homosexuality had, however, its precedents in English judiciary practice. Between 1781 and 1828, a man could only be convicted of buggery if there was evidence for any physical act, which was rather avoided by the judges in court. In 1828, the Person Act abolished the need to prove the offence in such a way, but death penalty for buggery only came to be abolished in 1861, simultaneously with the reintroduction of the requirement to prove the case. In 1885, the Labourchère Amendment made virtually any acts of gross indecency subject to imprisonment without the requirement to prove the guilt as opposed to its predecessors, which gave rise to blackmailing practices in England.
Senelick, Laurence. "Master Wood's Profession: Wilde and the Subculture of Homosexual Blackmail in the Victorian Theatre." Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 163-182. p. 167.
changed. This transition may be seen as a means simply to boost his own weekly publication. Dellamora argues that the introduction of an antihomosexual clause, although a risky action, could clearly benefit a paper specialised in exposing the lack of prosecuting sexual misdeeds, which may have been a significant part of Labouchère’s motivation behind the introduction of Article XI:
The law also shored up gentlemanly respectability by providing enhanced means for setting apart homosexuals from decent men. As a populist who resented the prevailing double standard in law enforcement, Labouchère was quite pleased at the discomfiture of highly placed homosexuals. This may be felt in the fact that on the very day on which he moved the amendment, Truth published an article exposing earlier government attempts to protect the identity of aristocratic clients or Mrs. Jeffries, the notorious keeper of a brothel of women. Later he claimed that Stead [editor of The Pall Mall Gazette] privately supplied him with material about male brothels in London.92
In addition to his newly found zeal for legal justice (or rather for profit), Labouchère distanced himself further from his initial sympathy for Oscar Wilde. Moreover, Beckson claims, he has become so radicalized in the question of male homosexuality that he even declared that two years of hard labour was an insufficient sentence.93
As indicated by the Truth’s exposing articles, precedents of sexual indecency were extant before the Wilde scandal. In the courtroom and the press during the trials of Wilde, two such instances were named, which both indicated the public and legal opinion of homosexual practices of their time. Generally, cases of male homosexuality prior to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, although extant, were not discussed openly. Part of the reason for this initial
92
Dellamora, 202.
discretion, as Katie Hindmarch-Watson points out, was the difficulty to procure sufficient evidence for a sodomy charge, without being served a libel charge in reply.94
The first occasion when prosecution tried to “identify sodomy as (...) represented in nonsexual activities like cross-dressing, public behaviour, and speech pattern” was the Boulton and Park trial in 1871 which “presaged the advent of homosexual identity discourse, as Michelle Liu Carriger argues.”95 On 28 April 1870, policemen arrested two ladies, Fanny and Stella, who visited the theatre, accompanying a gentleman, Hugh Alexander Mundell. Fanny soon turned out to be the 23-year-old law student Frederick William Park, while Stella proved to be the 22-year-old gentleman Ernest Boulton. As Carriger explains, the two were initially arrested for crimes of fashion and charged with “outraging public decency.”96
However, this initial charge was soon infused with the idea of sexual deviancy and cross-dressing came to be seen as a means “to incite others to commit the crime of buggery.”97 Boulton’s and Park’s lawyers insisted on the presence of “the theatrical in everyday life” and claimed that Boulton and Park were just young amateur actors “who had taken the pantomime too far.”98
Carriger argues that female impersonators, who had not been seen as particularly outrageous for they had been overall present in the higher society (for men usually played female roles in Victorian comedies), “were suddenly reclassified as such” by the arrest of Boulton and Park.99
Conjoining actors with prostitutes was not a new idea in the history of theatre, but the Boulton and Park trial was the very first example of linking art and non-normative sexuality in court. However, the case was finally dismissed and Boulton and Park were acquitted mainly because the urge to prove that Victorian morals were still intact,
94 Hindmarch-Watson, Katie. "Male Prostitution and the London GPO: Telegraph Boys’ “Immorality” from
Nationalization to the Cleveland Street Scandal." The Journal of British Studies 51.03 (2012): 594-617. p. 605.
95
Carriger, Michelle Liu. "“The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park”: A Victorian Sex Scandal and the Theatre Defense." TDR/The Drama Review 57.4 (2013): 135-156. p. 138.
96 Carriger, 136. 97 Carriger, 143. 98
Carriger, 136.
was stronger than the will to prosecute potential dangers to that morality. Both the Attorney General and Park’s defending counsel, as guards of Victorian morality, asked for the dismissal of charges. The former pleaded “stop this plague, which, if allowed to spread without check or hindrance, might lead to serious contamination of the public morals,” while the latter asked the jury “to perform a nobler and better function (...) to declare by their verdict that no such plague existed; that England was happily free from it, and was not yet tainted by its foul infection.”100 Carriger argues that the acquittal of Boulton and Park shows how underdeveloped concepts of homosexuality were in 1871 as the verdict seems to be rather a refusal to comprehend the unspeakable.101
The first criminal instance when the police actually charged and convicted men for the “nameless offence” in England was the Cleveland Street (or West End) Scandal in 1889. The scandal centred on the homosexual affairs of aristocrats and telegraph messengers at 19 Cleveland Street. Hindmarch-Watson argues that the shockingly open rent boy practice was not a singular instance but only the “most public display of a long-standing problem.”102
Investigation records suggest that telegraph messenger prostitution was commonplace in London, which may be justified by Hindmarch-Watson’s observation on the advantages of rent boys in the sex trade. She claims that telegraph boys offered discreet, anonymous encounters because as messengers, their presence at any hour of the day or night in every part of the city was not exceptional.103 However, just four years after the introduction of the Labouchère amendment, the scandal broke out and this time the jury had to act on the law. The standpoint of the prosecution bore an uncanny resemblance to earlier concerns of corrupting youth on the occasion of Pater’s
100 Carriger, 154. 101 Carriger, 154. 102 Hindmarch-Watson, 596. 103 Hindmarch-Watson, 603.
Renaissance, which would later be a crucial point in the trials of Oscar Wilde as well.
Hindmarch-Watson explains how the telegraph boys were defended in court by attacking gentlemen who initiated sexual encounters with them: “their actions and desires were not their own but the product of a more powerful subject’s imaginings, and therefore testament to what had been done to them, not what they had done themselves.”104
By emphasising the corruption of young, defenceless boys, the conviction of one of their older higher-class partners was inevitable.
What was different between these precedents and Wilde’s case, Laura I. Appleman argues, was that the latter was one of the earliest examples of the intersection of the different fields of law, narrative, and sexual orientation; also establishing a continuing interrelation among these.105 Although non-normative sexuality had been the subject of some other trials prior to 1895, it was the court cases of Oscar Wilde that were really explicitly informed by sexual identity politics. As Appleman points out, the three trials of Wilde were the first public displays of “deviant” sexual identity.106
These were also among the first legal instances when the view of sexuality as an act shifted to viewing sexuality as a persona, disregarding the multitude of cultural, legal, and literary factors in the background, or in other words, “reducing the modalities of gay multiplicity down to a single act.”107 The trials completely conflated Wilde’s literary work with his personal life, fiction with reality. The prosecution, mostly in the initial libel trial and the first criminal trial, read Wilde’s written works as evidence of his immoral, indecent personality. Moreover, besides these textual pieces of evidence, the prosecution used contested evidence, such as the testimony of blackmailers and male prostitutes. However, the focal point of the trials was to prove Wilde’s negative influence on young gentlemen, as so often witnessed in earlier
104 Hindmarch-Watson, 599.
105 Appleman, Laura I. "Oscar Wilde's Long Tail: Framing Sexual Identity in the Law." Maryland Law Review 70.4
(2011): 985-1043. p. 998.
106
Appleman, 987.
accusations of the same sort. According to Appleman, homosexuals in court were often seen as individuals whose main identity was an inverted nature, and who were often interpreted as “murderous victimizers of their young beloveds.”108
Using this strategy of cautioning against Oscar Wilde’s destructive influence on young men, as well as the public opinion directed by scandal, made it possible to convict Wilde for only posing as a somdomite.
2.5 Realism
After having examined Aestheticism in detail as well as the social, scientific, and legal changes that took place in the nineteenth century, in this part of my thesis, I will elaborate on Realism to be able to contrast the two artistic styles later in the light of the Wilde trials.
Realism has never been a unified movement with an explicit manifesto and for this reason there are various slightly differing views on what is considered to be Realism. Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz also point to the fact that “there has been no universally accepted set of principles governing the manner or content of so-called realistic works.”109 According to David Lodge, the specific instances to which Realism has been applied throughout the different periods vary to some extent: the term is used in the neutral descriptive sense as well as in the evaluative one.110 Just as there is a lack of concise definition for it, it is also hard to agree on when Realism exactly began. However, there is consensus that Realism did not emerge only in the nineteenth century, but it was an extant phenomenon throughout the history of literature, whose traces of elements can be found in a range of earlier literary pieces. Chris Baldick also claims that Realism, as far as its methods and attitudes are concerned, can be found in many literary pieces prior to the nineteenth century, ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer’s works to the writings of Daniel Defoe.111 What is more, Nancy Armstrong considers Realism to be “as old as Western culture itself.”112 Contrary to these observations, Realism is chiefly associated with the nineteenth-century works chronicling the lives of the middle and lower classes. Moreover, Realism cannot even be assuredly associated with a realist school even though Baldick argues that a self-consciously
109
Beckson, Karl, and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. 3rd ed. London: Deutsch, 1990. p. 225.
110 Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature.
London: Edward Arnold, 1977. p. 22.
111 Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. p. 282. 112
Nancy Armstrong. The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 329.
realist group announced itself in 1857 in France, but the term “Realism” rather refers to the general tradition than to this specific but hardly significant circle.113 Of course, all this uncertainty about linking Realism’s roots to a specific time period can be traced back to the lack of clarity as to what exactly qualifies as Realism. However, it was already a known phenomenon in the rest of Europe, when it finally converged on the English-speaking countries during the 1880s.114
Richard Lehan primarily traces the origins of literary Realism back to the appearance of the novel genre, displacing its predecessor, Romanticism.115 The Victorians’ response to industrialization and the social, political, and economical issues that it addressed in Europe could possibly be the realist movement. George J. Becker claims that in England, the first use of the word “Realism” appeared in the Westminster Review’s article on Balzac in 1853.116
However, what really set Realism into motion, according to Becker, was the 1859 publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species.117 Connecting Darwin’s work to the emergence of Realism is quite a widespread idea, which Lehan justifies by pointing out the connection between artistic trends and scientific changes and discoveries. He focuses primarily on Naturalism, a form of Realism, which added the biological and philosophical aspects to the movement and in this way connected literature and science. More specifically, the incorporation of Darwinian theories was a tool in grounding literary works in a factual context, closer to reality.118 Furthermore, Lehan exemplifies this connection by pointing out how naturalists, such as Zola, shared Max Nordau’s theory of
113 Baldick, 282.
114 Becker, George J. Ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
p. 15.
115 Lehan, Richard. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition. Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005. p. 34.
116 Becker, 7. 117
Becker, 8.
degeneration; they paid attention to the deviant aspects of life as they believed that this gives a more realistic quality to their writing.119
As indicated by the uncertainty regarding its origin and uniting features, literary Realism is clearly a problematic term. Its problematic nature stems from the fact that, as Armstrong points out, it is more difficult to grasp what Realism means in art than in, for example, philosophy or political science.120 By nature, literary authors are thus compelled to fail in achieving full reality as opposed to historians, economists, or journalists. As Armstrong notes, realist authors are paradoxically using figurative means to create the illusion of reality, while writing about fictional people and events.121 The realist writer, in theory, strives to record life as it is by letting the story tell itself as well as emphasizes the accuracy of details.122 Contrary to this, writers associated with Aestheticism distance themselves from the everyday life and, especially in Wilde’s case, rather value artificiality.
Despite the great differences between Aestheticism and Realism, their simultaneous presence on the literary scene allows for a comparison between them. Aestheticism and Realism co-existed in English literature in a transitional phase between two major literary styles, Romanticism and Modernism. John Sloan claims that it was exactly the new phenomenon of labelling literature into different sub-genres in the last two decades of the nineteenth century that contributed to the conflict between those genres.123 Even though Aestheticism and Realism emerged in the same social and artistic environment, the two movements represented two radically different aspects of viewing life and literature. While Aestheticism, as discussed earlier, reached back to the ideals of the antiquity with its preference for beauty and promoted 119 Lehan, 7. 120 Armstrong, 329. 121 Armstrong, 331. 122 Beckson, 225.
disengagement in the social sphere, Realism was much more impacted by the ongoing social changes and as a result wished to use literature to reflect and address those changes. Moreover, Realism was strongly driven by a moral inclination and therefore, George Levine argues, it is no wonder that the realist movement became so dominant in Victorian England, whose greatest virtue was truth-telling.124 Compared to such motivations, the decadent obscurity of Aestheticism was by definition in opposition to Realism.
As a result of the social and economical changes that occurred in England during the nineteenth century, realist novels primarily depicted what Armstrong calls the “social geography of the city.”125
By this, she means that “Realism portrays the city as an illegible terrain (...) in its capacity to trap individuals in dangerous positions and choreograph a predatory relationship among them,” which is exactly what happens in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray if interpreted from the realist perspective.126 Even though Levine dismisses the consequences of Rosalind Coward’s and John Ellis’s argument that Realism “treats language as though it stands for, is identical with, the real world” as pure speculations of poststructuralist theory, the trials of Oscar Wilde do prove the contrary.127 Especially in the libel trial, during Wilde’s cross-examination on his literary works, the language of his texts were clearly treated as reflecting reality and his literature was thus examined on the grounds of Realism.
Wilde turned his back on Realism, Philip Smith claims, partly because he recognised that seemingly accurate representation could be manipulated to advocate a single version of history and be used for political-social purposes. For this reason, Smith argues, he moved towards a form
124 Levine, George. A Concise Companion to Realism. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. p.
15.
125 Armstrong, 329. 126
Armstrong, 329.
