AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Oscar wilde gay book7/31/2023 ![]() Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.Ī little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. That said, the author Henry James, who was in the audience that night, remembers Wilde himself-the “unspeakable one,” he called him-striding out for his curtain call wearing a carnation in “metallic blue.” The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. ![]() If any large group-including the actor playing Cecil Graham-wore green carnations at the Lady Windermere’s Fan premiere on February 20, nobody in the press commented upon it. ![]() It’s unclear how much of Robertson’s story is true. But that is just what nobody will guess.” Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?” ![]() Then they will look round the house and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”-a new and inexplicable fashion statement. “I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. A character in the play, Cecil Graham-an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself-was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who-as he never tired of telling the press-put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too). Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. D'Annunzio's turn toward fascist politics is not accidental in this respect: the literary phenomenon of "fascist modernism" appears to hew very closely to the fear of the cultural ascendancy of the dandy, often read in such texts as a subcultural homosexual male, who must be both experienced and extinguished.In London in 1892, everybody-or, at least, everybody who was anybody-was talking about one thing: green carnations. Dorian Gray as a text then launches a kind of "homosexual panic" on the part of subsequent writers in "decadent modernism," notably Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose Il Piacere attempts to re-valorize the ephebe as the bearer of canon-and must now do so as an avowedly heterosexual male, but in the context of the danger of the dandy: the Wilde figure as "Humphrey Heathfield" must be introduced in order to have been experienced, even if only in disgust. The latter association, read by other commentators particularly in the final pages as punishment for narcissism, hedonism, or homosexual activity, is here glossed as an accusation against Victorian injunctions against same sex sexual activity constitutive of homosexual identity: the marks of disease accrue in the sphere of cultural representation, which then mark and mar the individual body. This article treats Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as culturally antagonistic but also as culturally conservative: Dorian's liminal position as a male who knows-who has experienced sexual contact with other males-is linked in the text both to a position of cultural/epistemological superiority (the "Greek" sexual act constructed as index of canonical mastery, back to Greek texts and artwork) and to a position of disease and dis-figurement.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |