Oscar Wilde's Life among the Deathworks

. . . [Wilde] intruded deeply into a struggle of son against father—Bosie Douglas against the Marquess of Queensberry—without realizing what it was about. More important, Wilde may have been led into the fatal step of prosecuting Queensberry for slander (the Marquess was naive enough at first to accuse Wilde merely of posing as a homosexual with his son) by his own sense of guilt. —Philip Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity

By all rights, I should have only good things to say about Philip Rieff, but in "The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet," it's enough my turf that I feel okay about calling him out on something.

It's not that it's wrong to call Queenberry naive for accusing Wilde of merely posing as a sodomite, more that it's insufficiently interesting. Consider this letter, sent from Queensberry to Douglas in the months before the trial:

Your intimacy with this man Wilde must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship, as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him on sight.

"To pose as a thing is as bad as to be it?" A very Wildean sentiment—certainly not something an unsophisticated naif would say. Thinking of Queensberry as Wilde's foil rather than as a mere philistine is a perspective that has its limits, but I've found profit in doing so.