Literature in the Dock: The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2012

In the spring of 1895, Anglo-Irish author Oscar Wilde initiated a libel suit against John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, who had left a note at Wilde's club accusing the playwright of "posing as a somdomite [sic]." 1 Wilde lost his case when Queensberry provided ample evidence of Wilde's traffic with male prostitutesevidence that forced the Director of Public Prosecutions to bring criminal charges against Wilde for "gross indecency." Wilde was tried twice on these charges: the first trial ended in a hung jury; in the second he was found guilty and received the maximum sentence of two years' hard labour (see esp. Foldy; Holland; also Ellmann; Hyde; Taylor and Gee). Wilde's fame as an author and wit, the stature of the marquess, and the salacious nature of the testimony led to a frenzy of public interest in the case: countless newspaper articles, cartoons, broadsheets, extra editions, and even poems were published to keep up with the British public's appetite for information about the trials (Cohen 126-209). Once Wilde was convicted, the coverage all but dried up, and his name disappeared from the headlines almost as quickly as it had been erased from the marquees of London's West End, where his celebrated society plays suddenly proved unmarketable. Alan Sinfield and Ed Cohen have both argued that newspaper coverage of the Wilde scandal was responsible for a watershed moment in the history of homosexuality. For Sinfield, "our stereotypical notion of male homosexuality derives from Wilde, and our ideas about him" (vii)ideas that we can trace back to 1895, when "the queer image may be observed at its point of emergence in press reports of the trials" (123; emphasis added). In this, Sinfield is echoing Cohen, who argues that what was on trial was the very personality of Wilde: in the libel suit, the jury was not asked to consider whether or not Wilde had committed sodomitical acts, but rather whether he was the type of person who might be inclined to commit or seen as likely to commit such acts. In other words, Cohen argues, we can see the trial as evidence of Michel Foucault's famous 1 I am most grateful to the University of South Carolina for supporting the archival research for this article through its Research Opportunity Program. My thanks, too, to the staff of the Zeitungsabteilung der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Westhafen, Berlin, and to Scott Spector for pointing me to the Berliner Gerichts-Zeitung coverage.

The Review of English Studies, 2017

Wilde's three trials in 1895 served, in effect, as an obscenity prosecution of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1). Though the novel was not formally charged with obscenity, Dorian Gray's first reviewers suggested that it was obscene, and the book was not reprinted in Britain for nearly two decades after Wilde's trials. The novel's relation to Wilde's trials thus raises a number of questions about the use of fiction as legal evidence and about the ways in which a criminal prosecution might be taken to reveal the meaning of the defendant's writings. This article discusses the late Victorian campaign against obscene literature and the victims of that campaign; the reviews of the original version of Dorian Gray (in Lippincott's Magazine, 1890); the oblique manner in which the innuendo about its obscenity functioned during Wilde's three trials (1895); Wilde's own ironic engagement, at several key points in the novel, with the conception of influence at work in the legal test governing the evaluation of obscenity (R. v. Hicklin, 1868); the relation of the painting itself, and of the notorious French novel that Dorian borrows from Lord Henry, to that conception of influence; and Wilde's reenactment of his ironic perspective at the narrative level.

Yale Journal of Law the Humanities, 2013

My thesis question will investigate the reception of sexuality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Kate O’Brien’s novel As Music and Splendour (1936). The predominant objective of this thesis is to highlight the response towards sexuality when Wilde and O'Brien's work was published and how this influenced their subsequent writing. The most important reasoning for the selection of these authors is that they have not been compared closely. Both writers published their work when the concept of sexuality was rigidly oppressed, thereby creating a common denominator to illuminate their corresponding battle as homosexuals. I plan to use Queer Theory as my theoretical platform for the chosen texts, primarily using Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler’s work. A chapter regarding the cultural context and constraints of the time will be dedicated both to Wilde and O’Brien. Chapter One delineates the social context of the Late Victorian period and will focus on the potency of Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Extracts were used against Wilde as evidence in the 1895 Queensbury trials where he was charged for sodomy. Secondly, I will focus on the censorship of Kate O'Brien's work, such as Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) which will examine the governing of The Catholic Church which notably impacted sexual liberty. A close analysis of identities in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and O’Brien’s texts As Music and Splendour will be the concluding chapter. Butler’s theory on gender performativity will be employed to portray the intricacy of the character’s identities. It is suggestive from the oppressive force of Irish society during that time when Wilde and O'Brien wrote that their characters endure pressure to conceal aspects of their sexual identity in order to avoid the harsh consequences that may be imposed. Furthermore, my thesis will portray aspects of the constraints inflicted on the characters due to their sexuality.

ELH, 2014

Culture, Society & Masculinities, 2012

To cite this paper please refer to the published version in Culture, Society & Masculinities 4(2). This paper examines the ways in which the concept of ‘pernicious influence’ was mobilized in late-Victorian periodical publications to reinforce a normative conception of masculinity through powerful discourses on the relationship between textual consumption and identity. Discussion of the threat posed by ‘penny dreadfuls’ drew not only on widely held assumptions regarding the criminalizing influence of popular fiction, exemplified by the case of Robert Coombes, but also made connections with the supposedly corrupting effeminacy of the ‘degenerate’ intellectual, with the trials of Oscar Wilde as the main focus. The paper goes on to explore Wilde’s engagement with the concept of influence across a wide range of his writings, in the course of which he developed an alternative critique of all influence as a perversion of self-realization. This relates in some respects to existing strands of critical debate relating to Wilde’s sexuality. However, the current essay seeks to frame Wilde’s contribution in terms of late-Victorian debates on the cultural significance of reading practices and in relation to Wilde’s own critique of influence, by means of which he contested many of the assumptions underpinning bourgeois conceptions of normative masculinity.

2020

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the author's only novel, was initially quite different in its early version. In fact, Oscar Wilde had to censor quite a bit of its contents prior to releasing it as a full novel. It was Wilde's effort to mask and erase some contents that were less acceptable for the Victorian public's eye, which is the homoeroticism contained within the pages of the early drafts of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The final result is a book that is canonically heterosexual, yet still somewhat contains subtle queer undertones here and there. To the Victorians, however, the book was passable enough-that is, before it was used as partial evidence against Wilde in his trial for his sexual orientation. There are two problems to configure in this thesis: the first one aims to unravel the basic figuration of the main characters in both editions of the novel and relate them to Oscar Wilde's life, and the second one, which answer serves as the ultimate conclusion to this thesis, aims to figure out how Wilde dealt with societal homophobia in the textual level in order to get the novel published. The study is conducted mainly with library research both in the form of physical and digital sources. The steps in conducting the study will be done by first utilizing Theory of Character & Characterization to unravel the figuration of the three main characters, continued by the use of Queer Theory to unravel the sheer queerness and homoeroticism contained within the two versions of the novel, and to relate the reasoning behind the novels' narrative choices in terms of the author's personal life, mainly the fact that he was a homosexual. The final result of the study concludes to two things: Firstly, Wilde created the three main characters with the intention to criticize the society of the Victorian Era (ex: Lord Henry's views, Dorian's effeminacy). Secondly, Wilde did consciously change the contents of the novel between the original and the censored, though even in the censored version he still managed to insert homoerotic elements implicitly. He added more heterosexual narrative to convince unsuspecting readers that the characters are heterosexual, yet at the same time he added homoerotic undertones in forms of symbolisms that can only be realized upon observation into the author's personal life.

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2007

ESReview. Spanish Journal of English Studies., 2024

The main aim of this essay is to assess the impact of Oscar Wilde’s trials on neo-Victorian representations of same-sex desire between men. Through the text, I argue that the consequences of Wilde’s imprisonment have become a haunting presence that still pervades how male sexual dissidence is represented in neo-Victorian novels. These works are therefore considered differently than those which portray sapphic relationships or other forms of non-heterosexual desires. Ultimately, I argue that a new trend within neo-Victorianism, in which fantasy elements are intertwined with queer desire among men, could offer a new way of portraying same-sex desire between men; this new portrayal could be more in compliance with the political, cultural, and social agenda of neo-Victorianism. Through a brief analysis of Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015) and a more in-depth exploration of Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light (2021), I conclude that fantasy may – if the writer wishes it – allow a portrayal of queer desire that overcomes many of the traumatising and haunting obstacles which resulted from Wilde’s plight.

Authorship 3:2 (Autumn 2014)

This essay introduces the concept of “authorialism” to characterise the critical orientation that sees literary works primarily as actions on the part of their authors rather than as linguistic objects, using the early reception of Oscar Wilde’s works as a case study. It is argued that authorialism was the dominant tendency in 1875-1900 Anglophone criticism, and that it has characterised assessments of Wilde’s works to this day. The method has the advantage of finding coherence in literary works, which is useful in assessing matters of value; the textual features of Wilde’s writings, however, resist authorialist readings by not featuring the expected coherence.