Wilde File (II)

Oscar Wilde's trial is called a landmark moment in gay history, but it only makes sense to call it that if the trial had some effect on England's perception of homosexuality; this is why The Oscar Wilde File is such an interesting collection. Having read it, I now know that, for the most part, the press took a hard line against Wilde's "unspeakable offenses":

Beyond an expression of deep regret that a brilliant career should have come to so terrible an end, we have two, and only two, comments to make upon the Wilde case. The first is that if this trial had not resulted in a conviction the law relating to such offences might as well have been erased from the Statute-Book. Judge and jury alike are to be congratulated upon the unflinching discharge of a grave responsibility.

Our second comment is that the lesson of the trial ought not to be lost upon the headmasters, and all others who are responsible for the morals, of public schools. It rests with them, more probably than with anybody else, to exorcise this pestilence.

I have found only two indications that the scandal surrounding homosexuality was beginning to diminish, neither of them unequivocal. The first, this letter to The Star (emphasis mine):

After some howls of execration, the expunging of an author's name from the public playbills, and other acts of Christian charity which have lately been witnessed, it may not be out of place to enter some kind of protest against this very hasty prejudgment of a case still pending. After all, in sexual errors, as in every thing else, the real offense lies, and must always lie, in the sacrificing of another person in any way, for the sake of one's own pleasure or profit; and judged by this standard--which though not always the legal standard is certainly the only true moral standard--the accused is possibly no worse than those who so freely condemn him. Certainly it is strange that a society which is continually and habitually sacrificing women to the pleasure of men, should be so eager to cast the first stone—except that it seems to be assumed that women are always man's lawful prey, and any appropriation or sacrifice of them for sex purposes quite pardonable and "natural." Yours, &c., Helvellyn.

Second, the famous court scene as described in The Daily Telegraph:

Witness: The Love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find int eh sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare—that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect, and dictates great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo and these two letters of mine, such as they are, and which is in this century misunderstood—so misunderstood taht on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest for of affection. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man when teh elder man has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life. That it should be so the world does not understand. It mocks at it, and sometimes puts one into the pillory for it.

At this stage there was loud applause in the gallery of the court, and the learned judge at once said, speaking very sterny, "I shall have this court cleared if there is the slightest manifestation of feeling."

Wilde's insistence on a Platonic homosexuality—noble, intellectual, and chaste—is taken up at greater length in the senior essay*, but let me emphasize that his reluctance to publicly endorse physical love between men is a big piece of the Wilde puzzle. On the one hand, it's the inevitable bummer of filtering your sexuality through Plato.** On the other hand, Plato's impossible standard of perfect chastity was, for men like Wilde, Pater, and Symonds, almost like Christ's impossible standard of perfect sanctity. Platonic eros, as inhumane as it was, pops up in Wilde's thought so often that you can't get rid of it without losing ideas better kept: that beauty is a kind of genius; that eros is the basis of education; that there are more outlets for eros than hetero marriage; that chastity is not the unthinkable catastrophe that people in this age believe it to be; and that we can believe in virtue while treating it unseriously (see comments here). Leigh asks, in the context of the Stephen Fry film, whether anyone would care that Wilde loved men if he hadn't been a genius; a better question might be whether Wilde would have been a genius if he hadn't loved men.

*The relevant paragraph: "Symonds, who credited Plato’s dialogues with his own Uranian awakening, took from Platonic philosophy not only its endorsement of erotic love between men but also the idea that love, in its highest form, transcends the physical. He called the identification of male love with sodomy a 'vulgar error.' Marc-André Raffalovich distinguished between unisexuals who engage in sodomy and those who are 'sensual without being debauched,' meaning those who did not. It was this distinction between the baseness of the carnal and the purity of the spiritual that allowed Wilde to think he might describe in glowing terms one man’s 'extravagant adoration' of another and yet deny that the reference was 'sodomitical.'”

**To anyone interested in how gay Oxonians used the study of ancient Greek as a kind of code, I highly recommend Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford.