1 00:00:00,070 --> 00:00:03,930 OK, wild and sexuality, 2 00:00:03,930 --> 00:00:14,880 probably the most famous thing about Wild were the trials in 1895 and his conviction and sentencing to two years of hard labour. 3 00:00:14,880 --> 00:00:24,690 It dominated, as I said, criticism for decades. And it's also meant in some ways that the idea of wild as a homosexual writer 4 00:00:24,690 --> 00:00:29,850 has become a very strong sort of idea and concept in approaching wild workings. 5 00:00:29,850 --> 00:00:33,210 Now, one of the things that I want to start by doing is warning against this idea 6 00:00:33,210 --> 00:00:42,450 of wild as a homosexual is in many ways anachronistic in that before the 90s, 7 00:00:42,450 --> 00:00:48,420 there were in many ways not a sense of the idea of the homosexual as a type. 8 00:00:48,420 --> 00:00:59,070 In other words, there were homosexual acts, but there was not an idea of mannerisms and psychology and a pathology and behaviour and traits 9 00:00:59,070 --> 00:01:06,420 and all the rest of it by which the homosexuals could be identified or pathologies or understood, 10 00:01:06,420 --> 00:01:11,970 etc. Rather, those are much more fluid understanding in all sorts of ways, 11 00:01:11,970 --> 00:01:19,290 and that this idea of the homosexual in many ways is created in some ways retrospectively. 12 00:01:19,290 --> 00:01:24,960 So if you look at the work of Alan Shenfield and Ed Cohen, for example, great books, 13 00:01:24,960 --> 00:01:31,200 Allanson Fields of the Wild Century and Ed Koans, a talk on the Wild Side, both of them. 14 00:01:31,200 --> 00:01:32,680 Great title. 15 00:01:32,680 --> 00:01:40,650 You kind of want to think that in both of those books, what they partly do is look at how far at the end of the 19th century to the point where, 16 00:01:40,650 --> 00:01:46,320 as Fusco's written about in history, sexuality and all sorts of other writers have looked at since then. 17 00:01:46,320 --> 00:01:52,050 There's this tendency towards the creation of types and pathology I of individuals in all sorts of ways, 18 00:01:52,050 --> 00:01:57,750 and sort of pathology in psychology as well as behaviour in the 19th century. 19 00:01:57,750 --> 00:02:05,820 And that means towards the end of the 19th century, there starts to be a lot of interest in what are seen as, quote, abnormal types. 20 00:02:05,820 --> 00:02:12,330 And that actually, as well as the beginning of the early investigation into sexuality, 21 00:02:12,330 --> 00:02:15,090 are not unnoticed in investigating sexuality and all sorts of ways. 22 00:02:15,090 --> 00:02:21,600 But the work of people like have localism, craft ebbing and so on towards the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century. 23 00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:32,250 Now, whilst trials meant that and his conviction meant that, he became quite simply the most famous gay man in the 19th century. 24 00:02:32,250 --> 00:02:36,390 And what happened, Sanfield and Cohen have shown, 25 00:02:36,390 --> 00:02:45,150 is that in many ways his personal behaviour and traits then became what was seen as homosexual mannerisms and traits. 26 00:02:45,150 --> 00:02:52,410 So things like his deliberate effeminacy in some ways, the ways in which he sort of you know, 27 00:02:52,410 --> 00:03:02,760 he he didn't do utilitarian, hard working manliness in a kind of very traditional Victorian way. 28 00:03:02,760 --> 00:03:08,040 And a lot of the things that he did, the kind of extravagant dress, the extravagant speech, 29 00:03:08,040 --> 00:03:13,590 the emphasis on like button holes or lilac coloured gloves or whatever else. 30 00:03:13,590 --> 00:03:18,840 But those became retrospectively markers for homosexuality. 31 00:03:18,840 --> 00:03:24,900 And in this creation of the type in that way and the way which it remained at a type for a long time. 32 00:03:24,900 --> 00:03:31,770 So, for example, in the 1930s, Docker's slang for a gay man was an Oscar. 33 00:03:31,770 --> 00:03:41,550 So in that sense, it's hugely ironic that while having spent so much of his life and writing challenging the idea of Type's challenged in the 34 00:03:41,550 --> 00:03:51,060 idea of those kind of fixed judgements upon people himself gets made into this kind of this way of categorising people, 35 00:03:51,060 --> 00:04:00,030 of limiting them in some ways, though, arguably in other ways, of giving the gift of a kind of visibility, 36 00:04:00,030 --> 00:04:04,890 which, you know, being able to recognise yourself as well as to recognise other people. 37 00:04:04,890 --> 00:04:12,930 But in that sense, what you want to watch out for is interpreting markers of what at the time would have been seen as traits of, 38 00:04:12,930 --> 00:04:16,770 say, aestheticism or Scolinos and so on, 39 00:04:16,770 --> 00:04:28,020 as necessarily an unquestionably big markers of homosexuality, because there's a kind of anachronistic retrospective vision involved in that. 40 00:04:28,020 --> 00:04:35,220 Now, it's very important to recognise your sense, especially around Wild's trials and the decisions leading up to them and all the rest of it. 41 00:04:35,220 --> 00:04:44,250 And there's often a kind of temptation to see Wilde as having in some way sacrificed himself for deliberately martyred himself. 42 00:04:44,250 --> 00:04:49,950 Or there's a book by Melissa Knox called Oscar Wilde A Long and Lovely Suicide. 43 00:04:49,950 --> 00:04:59,460 It's it's a perfect example of what I would hate to advise you not to get involved in that kind of pre-emptive decision about what Wilde was doing. 44 00:04:59,460 --> 00:05:09,510 And one of. That works as a useful warning against this, against that kind of distorting hindsight is the case of Fannie and Stella. 45 00:05:09,510 --> 00:05:18,420 Now, Fannie and Stella were the sort of stage names, the popular names of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. 46 00:05:18,420 --> 00:05:26,190 And they were two young men who spent years dressing in women's clothing and picking up men around London. 47 00:05:26,190 --> 00:05:31,170 And the wonderfully wonderful there's a new MacKenna biography of the two of them that's, 48 00:05:31,170 --> 00:05:36,540 I think, hugely entertaining and funny and stellar were arrested, 49 00:05:36,540 --> 00:05:48,480 both of them by a rather overzealous policeman in 1870 and prosecuted for attempted sodomy and indecency in attempting to pick up men. 50 00:05:48,480 --> 00:05:58,000 And there were all sorts of assumptions operating that they were prostitutes, which there's absolutely no evidence they were in any shape or form and. 51 00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:05,230 They went to trial now to give you an example of a kind of to try and also the mind set you might have over this, 52 00:06:05,230 --> 00:06:14,980 I think a perfect example of giving it a different sense of the world in which it was operating is the rhetoric of their defence counsel. 53 00:06:14,980 --> 00:06:20,080 I don't need to give you the prosecution's address because the defence counsel, 54 00:06:20,080 --> 00:06:25,210 you can work out what the prosecution had said from the defence counsel. 55 00:06:25,210 --> 00:06:32,110 So a defence counsel called upon the jury in the following terms, my friend, the attorney general, 56 00:06:32,110 --> 00:06:36,700 in the course of his eloquent peroration, asked you to perform your high office. 57 00:06:36,700 --> 00:06:43,990 And no doubt he produced an effect upon you at the time, which is when he said he invited you to stop this plague. 58 00:06:43,990 --> 00:06:51,580 Gentlemen, I call upon you to perform a higher, a kinder and a more patriotic office. 59 00:06:51,580 --> 00:06:55,630 I call upon you to do something which will be of greater utility, 60 00:06:55,630 --> 00:07:06,450 and that is to pronounce by your verdict that they leibel the morality and character of this country who say that that plague exists. 61 00:07:06,450 --> 00:07:15,400 I trust your verdict will establish the moral atmosphere of England is not yet tainted with the impurities of continental cities, 62 00:07:15,400 --> 00:07:19,180 and that free as we are from our island position, 63 00:07:19,180 --> 00:07:26,620 we are insulated from the crimes to which you have had illusion made and you will pronounce by your verdict on this case at all events 64 00:07:26,620 --> 00:07:38,500 with regard to these facts that London is not cast with the sins of Sodom or Westminster are tainted with the vices of Gomorrah. 65 00:07:38,500 --> 00:07:48,220 So what's the defence counsel is doing? Is calling for not the jury not to find Fredrick Bolton guilty of attempted sodomy, 66 00:07:48,220 --> 00:07:52,240 but rather declared that they were English gentleman, they were English. 67 00:07:52,240 --> 00:07:59,650 So it's unthinkable. They called upon the jury to say that, no, these things don't happen in this country. 68 00:07:59,650 --> 00:08:10,840 And some impeller funny and Stella sorry, Bolton and well, let off. 69 00:08:10,840 --> 00:08:15,490 They got off completely and got that important idea. 70 00:08:15,490 --> 00:08:21,820 The idea of the not wanting to know of the preference for invisibility, 71 00:08:21,820 --> 00:08:27,040 the actual dislike of the idea to trying to dig into people's personal lives and drag 72 00:08:27,040 --> 00:08:32,710 this stuff to the light and how far it tainted what people saw as the public sphere. 73 00:08:32,710 --> 00:08:37,870 And it's that impulse of which Wilde was very, very well aware. 74 00:08:37,870 --> 00:08:43,060 I can't remember who it was, Bolton or Parks, but one of them, when previously arrested, 75 00:08:43,060 --> 00:08:51,850 gave his name to the arresting officer as federal Graham Cecil Graham being anybody. 76 00:08:51,850 --> 00:08:57,070 Anybody got the name Sefl? Graham, yes. 77 00:08:57,070 --> 00:09:03,760 Or Graham and excellent. And Cecil Graham is one of the dandies in Lady with Sam. 78 00:09:03,760 --> 00:09:12,250 So Wild is absolutely aware of them. And he's playing a little thing about the thing with Wolf is how far he's playing inside games. 79 00:09:12,250 --> 00:09:17,710 For those in the know, there's absolutely a kind of language going on there. 80 00:09:17,710 --> 00:09:22,210 All sorts of coded references in there for those who wish to read it, 81 00:09:22,210 --> 00:09:27,160 for those who wish to know it, but those who do not wish to know it, absolutely no need to do so. 82 00:09:27,160 --> 00:09:35,470 And it's that thing throughout Wilde's writing that kind of instability have multiple meanings, multiple audiences playing around with genre. 83 00:09:35,470 --> 00:09:46,030 And this idea that also how far while exploiting this idea that if you can recognise it, you're guilty of knowing about it. 84 00:09:46,030 --> 00:09:51,070 So the desire not to know, but also that idea of how the invisible tax works. 85 00:09:51,070 --> 00:09:51,400 Now, 86 00:09:51,400 --> 00:10:02,500 another example for you to show it sort of warn against the dangers of hindsight and distortions turns to the back of the handout pictures this week. 87 00:10:02,500 --> 00:10:12,790 So fantastic picture on the left comes from Ellman's Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. 88 00:10:12,790 --> 00:10:19,540 It's in there titled As it is here, Wild in Costume as follow me. 89 00:10:19,540 --> 00:10:26,350 Now, when I first read Ellman's biography, I kind of got to the picture. I always look at the pictures first and anything I read. 90 00:10:26,350 --> 00:10:28,570 I'm sure you're much more mature than that. 91 00:10:28,570 --> 00:10:34,060 And there's this great picture of wild in the jewelled bra in the skirt being Siloam in a long flowing wig. 92 00:10:34,060 --> 00:10:38,800 And I thought there'll be a bit in the biography when you get to where he puts on the jewelled bra and the long flowing 93 00:10:38,800 --> 00:10:46,600 skirts and gets his photo taken the Salemi and there was no mention the whole way through that book of when this happened, 94 00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:56,080 what he was doing, all the rest of it. And it was about this picture was reproduced in all sorts of work on Wild until Merlin Harland, 95 00:10:56,080 --> 00:11:01,300 Wilde's grandson, found out that finally managed to trace who it really was. 96 00:11:01,300 --> 00:11:10,510 And it's actually a picture of a Hungarian opera singer called Constance Coslovich, and it was taken in around 1912. 97 00:11:10,510 --> 00:11:17,050 So it was found in an archive. This photo, which somebody said it does look a bit like, wow, really. 98 00:11:17,050 --> 00:11:23,010 I mean, if he was going to wander around putting on your bras and skirts, then I guess he might look a bit like that, but. 99 00:11:23,010 --> 00:11:28,590 It's a sign of the fact so it went into the album biography because it just there was no chance as 100 00:11:28,590 --> 00:11:33,420 that book went to press as Richard Ellman's Don't Mention Your Disease to check on the provenance. 101 00:11:33,420 --> 00:11:35,850 Nobody at that point knew otherwise. 102 00:11:35,850 --> 00:11:43,620 And what's really interesting is I will swear I know enough people who are still coming across that photo in works and world. 103 00:11:43,620 --> 00:11:52,200 And how far what you've got in that photo is, in a sense, it tells you all sorts of things about the concept of the homosexual. 104 00:11:52,200 --> 00:12:03,250 So Wild was attracted to other men. Ergo, he must have put on Joe bras and skirts and wigs and danced around a celebrity on a regular basis. 105 00:12:03,250 --> 00:12:13,690 Big hair. That's what I mean by it's not just hindsight, but it's also a distorting hindsight that how far there are notions of the homosexual. 106 00:12:13,690 --> 00:12:18,060 It's the kind of limiting type of presuppositions about individuals and their 107 00:12:18,060 --> 00:12:23,340 behaviour that are in many ways limiting and constricting in all sorts of ways. 108 00:12:23,340 --> 00:12:28,350 And certainly in many ways, I think influence readings of wild. 109 00:12:28,350 --> 00:12:37,830 The other picture there is a cartoon from Punch which shows model who in his corpulence and his hair and his attitude 110 00:12:37,830 --> 00:12:44,580 and everything else looks very recognisably as it was a caricature of world model and the choice of a profession. 111 00:12:44,580 --> 00:12:49,200 So model, says Mrs Brown, how consummately lovely your son is. 112 00:12:49,200 --> 00:12:53,370 Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown, a philistine from the country, says what? 113 00:12:53,370 --> 00:12:57,210 He's a nice, manly boy. If you mean that, Mr Moodle. 114 00:12:57,210 --> 00:13:01,260 He's just left school, you know, and wishes to be an artist model. 115 00:13:01,260 --> 00:13:08,320 Why should he be an artist, Mrs Brown? Well, he must be something mortal. 116 00:13:08,320 --> 00:13:16,110 Why should he be anything, why not let him remain forever content to exist beautifully? 117 00:13:16,110 --> 00:13:22,980 Mrs. Brown determines that at all events, her son shall not study art and immortal. 118 00:13:22,980 --> 00:13:32,520 Now, again, that inevitably read very, very clearly a cartoon about wild sexuality, about his interest in young men. 119 00:13:32,520 --> 00:13:37,140 And as the court case had it, his desire to corrupt young men. 120 00:13:37,140 --> 00:13:43,440 That cartoon by Joe DiMaria was published in 1851. 121 00:13:43,440 --> 00:13:48,150 Now, according to pretty much all the biographies of Wilde, 122 00:13:48,150 --> 00:13:57,590 it was around 1896 when he first had a relationship with Robbie Ross, that Wilde started being actively homosexual. 123 00:13:57,590 --> 00:14:00,950 That he had his first relationships with sexual relationships with men. 124 00:14:00,950 --> 00:14:08,600 There are some accounts that say Cook's work on Wilde suggests much, much earlier ones at school. 125 00:14:08,600 --> 00:14:20,150 But quite simply, there is no way in 1881 that Gerald marry or anybody at Punch or anybody else had a clue about wild sexuality. 126 00:14:20,150 --> 00:14:27,990 In that sense, it is not a cartoon about wild corrupting young men sexually. 127 00:14:27,990 --> 00:14:34,170 It is the cartoon about his undermining ideas of masculinity. 128 00:14:34,170 --> 00:14:42,420 It is an ad cartoon about ideas of that are not about necessarily social usefulness and 129 00:14:42,420 --> 00:14:47,160 manliness and all sorts of things connected with both aestheticism and wild and so on. 130 00:14:47,160 --> 00:14:52,750 But it's not what it seems to be. Its primary meaning is anachronistic. 131 00:14:52,750 --> 00:15:00,690 OK, could be prescient. Could have been that Joe DeMaria knew all sorts of things that we didn't know at that point, but the chances seem small. 132 00:15:00,690 --> 00:15:09,270 So those two, I think work is a very useful reminder in what you're saying when you're looking. 133 00:15:09,270 --> 00:15:17,820 Oh, how far is all that stuff that you get in Salaman, so on about how far it's the look of that project's onto what you're looking at now, 134 00:15:17,820 --> 00:15:29,250 together with this desire to while this sort of often unconscious typing of wild another way in which wild sexuality often kind of impinges, 135 00:15:29,250 --> 00:15:42,870 not colours, direct interpretations of his, what it's sometimes the desire to see Wild as a crusading gay rights writer that's inevitably problematic. 136 00:15:42,870 --> 00:15:51,930 You have to remember that Wild First prosecution was brought against Queensberry in challenging in prosecuting him for libel, 137 00:15:51,930 --> 00:15:59,580 for describing him as posing some tonight. So he was very much not out in any sense in that way. 138 00:15:59,580 --> 00:16:07,260 And I think probably his lowest ebb, the point when Wild's defences were low, when he was most desperate, 139 00:16:07,260 --> 00:16:15,270 was in prison, when he wrote to the home secretary and he wrote to the home secretary begging to be let out of prison. 140 00:16:15,270 --> 00:16:22,260 And he wrote in the following terms, the petition of the above named prisoner humbly show us that if he does not attempt 141 00:16:22,260 --> 00:16:27,690 to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty. 142 00:16:27,690 --> 00:16:35,460 But to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science, 143 00:16:35,460 --> 00:16:39,360 but by modern legislation, notably in France, Austria and Italy, 144 00:16:39,360 --> 00:16:46,170 where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed on the grounds that they are diseases to be cured by a physician rather than 145 00:16:46,170 --> 00:16:55,740 crimes to be punished by a judge in the works of eminent men of science such as Lombroso and no to take to take merely two instances after many. 146 00:16:55,740 --> 00:17:03,780 This is especially assisted on with reference to the intimate connexion between the madness and the literary and artistic temperament. 147 00:17:03,780 --> 00:17:07,920 Professor NORDO and his book On the Essence, published in 1894, 148 00:17:07,920 --> 00:17:15,360 having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law. 149 00:17:15,360 --> 00:17:20,400 Now, what Wilde was suffering, I think, is an indication of how deeply Wilde was suffering in prison, 150 00:17:20,400 --> 00:17:28,380 that he was willing to speak of himself and his own instincts and his own character in those terms and to, 151 00:17:28,380 --> 00:17:37,740 in effect, validate the kind of thinking and the kind of prejudice and the kind of barbarity that he himself had been subject to. 152 00:17:37,740 --> 00:17:46,350 It's his very, very lowest ebb. And significantly, the home secretary refused his petition and importantly, in De Profundis, 153 00:17:46,350 --> 00:17:52,590 in every version, be it the shortened version or the full manuscript version, the one published in 1985. 154 00:17:52,590 --> 00:18:02,460 In all of those versions, quite specifically, Wild rejects the laws under which he was condemned as wrong and unjust laws. 155 00:18:02,460 --> 00:18:06,370 But what's useful? So both that shows how far at his lowest ebb. 156 00:18:06,370 --> 00:18:10,530 I'm not characterising his beliefs or his behaviour and so on by that. 157 00:18:10,530 --> 00:18:15,720 But what it does show the difference between the enormous difference between the way he's speaking, 158 00:18:15,720 --> 00:18:25,080 then the language and the assumptions he's working on in on then and how he writes otherwise how when he is himself 159 00:18:25,080 --> 00:18:32,250 and in command of himself and has power over himself or what he writes as he at that point did not have in prison, 160 00:18:32,250 --> 00:18:38,460 that then he writes in an incredibly different way than he does not buy into this kind of typing. 161 00:18:38,460 --> 00:18:44,430 He does not buy into these kind of judgements. And his languages are not terribly different from this. 162 00:18:44,430 --> 00:18:51,720 So I think this is useful to give you a sense that this is a point of him using the validated language and thinking of the time. 163 00:18:51,720 --> 00:18:57,450 And at this moment, at his lowest ebb, he buys into it in desperation to get out of prison. 164 00:18:57,450 --> 00:19:02,730 Elsewhere, he can found it utterly and undermines its very principles. 165 00:19:02,730 --> 00:19:06,990 So if we're looking for wild and gay rights, 166 00:19:06,990 --> 00:19:17,280 then probably the most famous declaration he makes about same sex love and simultaneously a defence of same sex, 167 00:19:17,280 --> 00:19:20,730 friendship and homoeroticism in many ways. 168 00:19:20,730 --> 00:19:25,410 And the idea that same sex love, whatever, the kind of love that might be, 169 00:19:25,410 --> 00:19:35,460 not just as validated but actually as ennobling as an enormously important force in cultural history and artistic history and literary history, 170 00:19:35,460 --> 00:19:41,430 in a sense, very early point of trying to establish a chronology and alternate history. 171 00:19:41,430 --> 00:19:43,140 But nowadays, thank God, 172 00:19:43,140 --> 00:19:52,020 we can kind of begin to take for granted in that visibility and recognition and the pride in what so many writers and individuals have achieved. 173 00:19:52,020 --> 00:19:56,040 That moment, the probably most quotable bit comes from the trials. 174 00:19:56,040 --> 00:19:58,350 And I'll just give you this comes rather the me reading it. 175 00:19:58,350 --> 00:20:09,560 You can have Stephen Fry doing it is one of Truelove which fills the hearts of and go with mutual. 176 00:20:09,560 --> 00:20:19,180 And there is another I love that dare not speak its name. 177 00:20:19,180 --> 00:20:28,530 We'll have to explain to you. I think it's clear there's no question this one is certainly not, is it not perfect. 178 00:20:28,530 --> 00:20:34,400 But the love described relates to natural and unnatural love. 179 00:20:34,400 --> 00:20:53,880 No, no. Then what is the double speak tonight? 180 00:20:53,880 --> 00:21:06,180 The love that turned out to speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man, 181 00:21:06,180 --> 00:21:13,290 as there was between David and Jonathan, Claytor made the very basis of his philosophy. 182 00:21:13,290 --> 00:21:20,720 And such as you may find in the science of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. 183 00:21:20,720 --> 00:21:25,100 It is in this century misunderstood, 184 00:21:25,100 --> 00:21:36,430 so much misunderstood that it may be described as the light that would speak its name and on account of its own place where I am now. 185 00:21:36,430 --> 00:21:44,300 It is beautiful. It is fine. It is the noblest form of affection. 186 00:21:44,300 --> 00:21:48,870 There's nothing wrong with that. 187 00:21:48,870 --> 00:22:02,580 Intellectual and it repeatedly exists between an elder in the government and the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, 188 00:22:02,580 --> 00:22:07,800 hope, the glamour of life before him as it should be. 189 00:22:07,800 --> 00:22:29,220 So the world does not understand. The world looks at it and sometimes puts in the period before it. 190 00:22:29,220 --> 00:22:38,010 There you go, that's there and it's characteristically, again, it's a statement in which all sorts of things still remain ambiguous. 191 00:22:38,010 --> 00:22:45,930 So the degree of sexuality involved in there, quite apart from friendship, what love means there is left indeterminate. 192 00:22:45,930 --> 00:22:53,070 But what's absolutely clear is that same sex relationships are being celebrated and celebrated with 193 00:22:53,070 --> 00:22:58,020 an enormously important tradition that goes all the way back to Plato through classical literature, 194 00:22:58,020 --> 00:23:03,990 renaissance art and so on. And it was in many ways, it's kind of important moment, I think, 195 00:23:03,990 --> 00:23:13,200 in all sorts of ways now for wild writings about homosexuality and in that sense, the overt in that way. 196 00:23:13,200 --> 00:23:20,790 And I think the lack of openness is really important. And what I want to offer a ways of reading around while treatment of ideas of sexuality and 197 00:23:20,790 --> 00:23:28,080 homosexuality and same sex love without necessarily trying to dive into them for single readings, 198 00:23:28,080 --> 00:23:36,510 for the idea of a single hidden text which dominates others, but rather the way in which Wilde is constantly destabilising. 199 00:23:36,510 --> 00:23:44,430 So, for example, the portrait of Mr. W.H, one of his generally collectors, one of his short stories, interestingly, 200 00:23:44,430 --> 00:23:53,820 rather than within his criticism and from Mr. W.H, is a wonderfully convoluted tale in which the narrator meets up with his friend Erskin. 201 00:23:53,820 --> 00:24:03,480 And his friend Erskin tells him how his friend Cyril Graham has recently come up with this theory that Shakespeare's sonnets, a huge number, 202 00:24:03,480 --> 00:24:08,970 Shakespeare's sonnets, were addressed to Mr W.H, Mr W.H being his fairy, 203 00:24:08,970 --> 00:24:17,100 a boy actor, a boy actor in Shakespeare Company, and that that trigrams theory. 204 00:24:17,100 --> 00:24:27,150 So Graham is, incidentally, a hugely attractive, a very beautiful young undergraduate who is always at school and university, 205 00:24:27,150 --> 00:24:36,630 played the girl's parts and played women's parts so much better than women can play them far more attractive, far more women far more convincing. 206 00:24:36,630 --> 00:24:40,680 And several Graham the beautiful Silver Graham has come up with his theory about the sonnets. 207 00:24:40,680 --> 00:24:46,920 And a huge amount of the short story consists of close readings of different sonnets 208 00:24:46,920 --> 00:24:53,100 for what is basically become a kind of central idea within criticism on the sonnets, 209 00:24:53,100 --> 00:24:54,660 an absolute given, 210 00:24:54,660 --> 00:25:01,740 which is there a certain number of to the Dark Lady and a huge number addressed to a young man and nowadays taken addressed to the young man, 211 00:25:01,740 --> 00:25:11,520 not simply in a kind of fatherly it's time you had children way, but rather in a kind of deeply homoerotic admiring of beauty. 212 00:25:11,520 --> 00:25:21,780 You know, the borderline between between sexual attraction, sexual love, consummated love, and something very, very blurred all the way through. 213 00:25:21,780 --> 00:25:29,430 And that's become an absolute Shakespeare scholarship. And Wilde is one of the very, very first to write about that. 214 00:25:29,430 --> 00:25:33,150 But one of the interesting things is he's writing about it. 215 00:25:33,150 --> 00:25:42,810 So you have Cyril Graham comes forward with this theory about the sonnets and Cyril Graham because the skin is utterly unconvinced by this. 216 00:25:42,810 --> 00:25:47,040 He said you have no evidence that there ever was a boy actor called Will Hughes. 217 00:25:47,040 --> 00:25:48,570 So he found all sorts about Werlin, 218 00:25:48,570 --> 00:25:54,180 about Hughes and about acting and lots and lots and lots about this young man being attractive and all the rest of it. 219 00:25:54,180 --> 00:25:57,540 But you've had nothing, no evidence this person ever existed. 220 00:25:57,540 --> 00:26:03,720 So then Sarah produces a portrait of Will Hughes and says, there we go. 221 00:26:03,720 --> 00:26:12,540 I found the evidence. There's a portrait, but then it's Erskin then finds out that actually it was forged and I don't believe so. 222 00:26:12,540 --> 00:26:17,040 Your theory doesn't work. And so Graham commit suicide. 223 00:26:17,040 --> 00:26:22,020 Now, Erskin tells all this to the narrator and the narrator, having heard all about the forgery, all about theory, 224 00:26:22,020 --> 00:26:26,970 then get absolutely gripped by the theory and goes back into the sonnets and finds 225 00:26:26,970 --> 00:26:30,870 more and more and more textual evidence in the sonnets to support this theory. 226 00:26:30,870 --> 00:26:36,690 More and more close readings of individual sonnets and lines, finding things that support this idea. 227 00:26:36,690 --> 00:26:43,950 And then he writes to Erskin and says Several. Graham was right and his wife writes at great length, at which point, 228 00:26:43,950 --> 00:26:51,570 having written at great length and convert, convinced Erskin he then finds himself utterly unconvinced. 229 00:26:51,570 --> 00:26:57,300 He's going to passed on the conviction like a kind of disease or something that he is now free of. 230 00:26:57,300 --> 00:27:01,530 And it ends with Erskin saying, no, no, no. Now you've convinced me. 231 00:27:01,530 --> 00:27:05,430 And the right says no, it's all nonsense. I told you so nonsense. I believe that for a while. 232 00:27:05,430 --> 00:27:11,760 But I doubt and Erskine says I believe in it so much that like so Graham, I'm going to commit suicide over it. 233 00:27:11,760 --> 00:27:18,930 And he goes no. And rushes to Erskin and to find out that he's dead, he's arrived too late. 234 00:27:18,930 --> 00:27:23,730 But he then finds out actually he's dead of consumption, which he's been dying of over a really long period. 235 00:27:23,730 --> 00:27:28,640 So it wasn't a suicide at all. And then it ends with does the narrator now believe it to. 236 00:27:28,640 --> 00:27:36,920 Not so within the courtroom, Mr. W.H, there's a huge amount of close reading of the sonnets and looking at the homoeroticism, 237 00:27:36,920 --> 00:27:39,710 at the relation at the worship of male beauty at all, 238 00:27:39,710 --> 00:27:46,700 the kind of things which we absolutely take for granted about the Sonics now that so obviously they're but were not spoken about, 239 00:27:46,700 --> 00:27:55,670 at very least back at the time with his writing. But it's all framed within a story that is in arguing for or against that interpretation. 240 00:27:55,670 --> 00:27:57,470 Is it supporting it? Is it undermining? 241 00:27:57,470 --> 00:28:04,550 Utterly impossible to say what the framing narrative does and the framing of this kind of close reading in there 242 00:28:04,550 --> 00:28:10,730 is absolutely question what constitutes proof and what constitutes proof when it comes to literary criticism. 243 00:28:10,730 --> 00:28:19,640 So does the point when the portrait before it was shown to be a forgery, does extra textual evidence validate reading? 244 00:28:19,640 --> 00:28:24,580 Because the fact is the reading is there, the meanings of the words, the ways of understanding them. 245 00:28:24,580 --> 00:28:30,380 Do you need further evidence to support that? What is it that convinces or otherwise of a reading? 246 00:28:30,380 --> 00:28:35,930 What constitutes proof or meaning in a text which the story itself? 247 00:28:35,930 --> 00:28:40,940 And what does the story mean for us to understand about the sonnets is frankly 248 00:28:40,940 --> 00:28:45,260 called into so many layers of conviction and forgery and all the rest of it, 249 00:28:45,260 --> 00:28:51,650 that what's authentic, what's proven, what's true becomes utterly impossible to separate in there. 250 00:28:51,650 --> 00:28:56,870 And ultimately, you put it next to something like the writings of the artist and the idea that it's 251 00:28:56,870 --> 00:29:01,520 up to the reader to interpret things that it's very much about the reader projecting. 252 00:29:01,520 --> 00:29:10,070 Again, it also I asks questions about how far a reading should be authenticated or can be authenticated in relation to a historical moment. 253 00:29:10,070 --> 00:29:18,230 So whether we'll use existed or not, does that necessarily change what the fact that the sonnets could fit with that or if will doesn't exist, 254 00:29:18,230 --> 00:29:23,000 does it necessarily change the meanings, the echoes, the subtext, 255 00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:30,650 the emotions, the relationships that are being uncovered in the process of looking at those lines up, 256 00:29:30,650 --> 00:29:38,450 the sort of slipperiness that mutability, the complexity of poetry, which is echoed again in Wilde. 257 00:29:38,450 --> 00:29:41,540 It's one of the things Wilde was tried on in 1895. 258 00:29:41,540 --> 00:29:49,160 So at the trial of the Marquis of Queensbury for libel, Edward Carson Queensbridge Counsel Challenged World. 259 00:29:49,160 --> 00:29:56,930 I believe you have written an article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets was suggestive of unnatural vice and wild replies. 260 00:29:56,930 --> 00:30:00,890 On the contrary, I've written an article to show that they were not. 261 00:30:00,890 --> 00:30:07,670 I objected to such a perversion being put upon Shakespeare, which would seem to be wild, saying no. 262 00:30:07,670 --> 00:30:14,870 I wrote the article to show that only madman who had become obsessed with a theory and forged paintings could possibly believe this. 263 00:30:14,870 --> 00:30:18,710 But in another sense, given that Carson's question is what? 264 00:30:18,710 --> 00:30:24,350 You have written an article to show that Shakespeare's sonnets were suggestive of, quote, unnatural vice. 265 00:30:24,350 --> 00:30:35,000 If you take it in the portrait, this is advocating that theory is advocating that layer of meaning is anything but unnatural as anything but advice. 266 00:30:35,000 --> 00:30:41,000 So, again, there's a kind of another ambiguity folded in there in World's response and so on. 267 00:30:41,000 --> 00:30:49,620 Now, when it comes to the subject of wild and sexuality, the text, which most obviously springs to mind, is the picture Dorian Grey. 268 00:30:49,620 --> 00:30:55,580 And sure enough, it was it's now often read as kind of overtly homosexual text. 269 00:30:55,580 --> 00:31:04,910 But as I said last week, the furore over picture Dorian Grey was not necessarily about any ideas of sexual deviant, 270 00:31:04,910 --> 00:31:11,150 but rather a lot of it was about his style, the artificiality, theatricality and all the rest of it. 271 00:31:11,150 --> 00:31:19,460 Nonetheless, there were certainly reviews at the time which quite specifically concentrated on the text indecencies, 272 00:31:19,460 --> 00:31:23,510 the sexuality of it, as something which rendered it unhealthy. 273 00:31:23,510 --> 00:31:32,450 So, for example, the following review, which was printed in the Scots Observer in July 1890, why go grubbing in muck heaps? 274 00:31:32,450 --> 00:31:40,460 The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy minded men and honest women to those that have fallen or unnatural is great. 275 00:31:40,460 --> 00:31:45,350 Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten. 276 00:31:45,350 --> 00:31:51,020 And while the picture of Dorian Grey, which he contributes to Liping cuts, is ingenious, interesting, 277 00:31:51,020 --> 00:31:58,880 full of cleverness and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art for its interest is medicolegal. 278 00:31:58,880 --> 00:32:03,710 It is false to human nature, for its hero is a devil. It is false to morality, 279 00:32:03,710 --> 00:32:12,560 for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity. 280 00:32:12,560 --> 00:32:19,070 The story, which deals with matters only fitted for the criminal investigation department or a hearing in camera, 281 00:32:19,070 --> 00:32:28,370 is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr. Wilde has brains and art and style, but if he can write for none. 282 00:32:28,370 --> 00:32:34,700 Lord noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes the tailoring or some other decent trade, 283 00:32:34,700 --> 00:32:39,350 the better for his own reputation and the public morals. 284 00:32:39,350 --> 00:32:43,190 Now, just in case the point being made here was missed, 285 00:32:43,190 --> 00:32:50,810 this review of Dorian Grey was followed up by a letter which condemned Welles again in tones which highlighted homosexual implications. 286 00:32:50,810 --> 00:32:55,250 So the following letter was sent to the editor of Cox Observer asking, 287 00:32:55,250 --> 00:33:02,240 Does an artist break the march of his story with tedious dissertations upon jewels and wearisome catalogues of furniture? 288 00:33:02,240 --> 00:33:08,450 And does he not, when dealing with an avowedly delicate topic, refrain as Marlowe Refrains and Edward, 289 00:33:08,450 --> 00:33:16,430 the second from superfluous detail and exotic sentimentality Mr. Walsh has provided as proof that he lacks 290 00:33:16,430 --> 00:33:23,240 the tact and restraint to give us the artistic representation of a hero who is half Jack the Ripper, 291 00:33:23,240 --> 00:33:26,840 half Gaveston and the reception that has been recorded. 292 00:33:26,840 --> 00:33:33,110 His story must be peculiarly painful to him. Now, what's in the head? 293 00:33:33,110 --> 00:33:42,320 When I say the explicit, not this explicit, the specific references to homosexuality, but only for those in the know. 294 00:33:42,320 --> 00:33:47,630 So medicolegal with one of the terms very often used the idea that only doctors and the 295 00:33:47,630 --> 00:33:54,500 criminal investigation department go near any kind of anything but normative heterosexuality. 296 00:33:54,500 --> 00:34:00,980 Isn't that that reference there to none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys? 297 00:34:00,980 --> 00:34:05,840 That's a reference to the Cleveland Street scandal of a few years before, 298 00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:12,080 which again was about relationships between Telegraph boys and a certain number of noblemen who either prosecuted or ran. 299 00:34:12,080 --> 00:34:19,840 You know, that they basically ran from the boat train and fled to the continent so as not to be prosecuted and jailed again. 300 00:34:19,840 --> 00:34:26,420 Edward the second and Galveston Gaveston being one of Edward the second favourites, one of his lovers that in Marlos place. 301 00:34:26,420 --> 00:34:30,950 Well, if you look at Derek Jarman's brilliant film, it's made very, very explicit what their relationship is. 302 00:34:30,950 --> 00:34:35,330 But in that sense, they're those are the kind of codings. 303 00:34:35,330 --> 00:34:39,290 So even when a newspaper is condemning the work, 304 00:34:39,290 --> 00:34:45,950 it's doing so in terms that can be understood by those in the know but will be over the heads of those not in the know. 305 00:34:45,950 --> 00:34:51,470 So that idea of speaking multiple languages, the idea of speaking so again, the idea of the family, 306 00:34:51,470 --> 00:34:57,260 newspaper and family reading as something that's meant to be accessible to the whole family. 307 00:34:57,260 --> 00:35:04,640 So you only those who are already no longer innocent already have the knowledge, can therefore understand the coded meanings within it. 308 00:35:04,640 --> 00:35:12,290 It's that that's interesting. It's that kind of world that while in a sense operating within that's offering these kind of spaces for saying things, 309 00:35:12,290 --> 00:35:21,620 but not necessarily making them as old, meaning this idea that multiple meanings are there all the time within text at that point and on the subject. 310 00:35:21,620 --> 00:35:30,290 So what you've got there with this kind of condemnation, it's not just for the the subject matter, but for Wald's approach to it, 311 00:35:30,290 --> 00:35:37,340 importantly for the lack of condemnation for frivolity, ornamentation, theatricality, insincerity. 312 00:35:37,340 --> 00:35:45,620 Now, in that sense. So there's a lot of it is what failure and Dorian Grey to stand aside from the subject matter. 313 00:35:45,620 --> 00:35:52,760 So the subject matter, the idea that what you've got within Dorian Grey is a worshipping of Dorians, beauty of male beauty. 314 00:35:52,760 --> 00:35:55,340 You've got close network between men. 315 00:35:55,340 --> 00:36:04,490 You've got Dorian accused of suspected of ruining a huge number of young men, as well as a huge number of young women. 316 00:36:04,490 --> 00:36:11,030 But unquestionably, what you've got is a kind of homosexual content, possible content buried in there. 317 00:36:11,030 --> 00:36:16,460 What are the relationships between Basil Holmwood and Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian? 318 00:36:16,460 --> 00:36:20,870 What are the relationship between Dorian and the young men he ruins in that sense? 319 00:36:20,870 --> 00:36:26,390 For those who can read that kind of cotting or read that kind of implication within, it's there. 320 00:36:26,390 --> 00:36:34,220 But then remember, well, turning back on the critics with books saying the sins of Dorian are in the reader's mind. 321 00:36:34,220 --> 00:36:42,560 So it's very, very useful using that kind of idea that what do you remember back to the appeal by the defence counsel, Stanley and Stella. 322 00:36:42,560 --> 00:36:49,310 Let us not think that such things exist. So that kind of was absolutely playing with that kind of turn it back upon the audience. 323 00:36:49,310 --> 00:36:54,530 What you think of is what you see is what's in you in that sense. 324 00:36:54,530 --> 00:37:02,960 Now, the letter got that question of how far it's legible, how far the relationships and sexuality and so on is legible. 325 00:37:02,960 --> 00:37:03,830 In the text. 326 00:37:03,830 --> 00:37:16,100 The earlier Lippincott version was distinctly more explicit, so wild in the process of writing and extending it for publication as a standalone novel. 327 00:37:16,100 --> 00:37:21,710 He added in huge passages, a description of the stuff on jewels and carpets and all the rest of it in Chapter 11 and so on. 328 00:37:21,710 --> 00:37:27,650 But he also cut out large sections of Basils declared feelings for Dorian Grey. 329 00:37:27,650 --> 00:37:35,780 So. You get the following, I've given you excerpts from Long Passage, a couple of page passages in the original Lippincott version. 330 00:37:35,780 --> 00:37:40,640 Let us sit down, Dorian, said Horwood, looking pale and pained. Let us sit down. 331 00:37:40,640 --> 00:37:45,500 I will sit in the shadow and you shall sit in the sunlight. Our lives are like that. 332 00:37:45,500 --> 00:37:47,360 Just answer me one question. 333 00:37:47,360 --> 00:37:54,450 Have you noticed in the picture something that you did not like, something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you? 334 00:37:54,450 --> 00:37:59,780 Suddenly I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say. 335 00:37:59,780 --> 00:38:06,350 It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. 336 00:38:06,350 --> 00:38:11,300 Somehow I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. 337 00:38:11,300 --> 00:38:19,730 Perhaps, as Harry said, really grown person is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. 338 00:38:19,730 --> 00:38:25,730 Well, from the moment I met you, your personality has had the most extraordinary influence over me. 339 00:38:25,730 --> 00:38:30,290 I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. 340 00:38:30,290 --> 00:38:35,270 I was jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. 341 00:38:35,270 --> 00:38:38,450 I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you. 342 00:38:38,450 --> 00:38:43,100 You were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish. 343 00:38:43,100 --> 00:38:47,900 Still, of course, I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. 344 00:38:47,900 --> 00:38:51,950 You would have not have understood it. I did not understand it myself. 345 00:38:51,950 --> 00:38:57,080 One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. 346 00:38:57,080 --> 00:39:04,010 It is my masterpiece. But as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. 347 00:39:04,010 --> 00:39:10,100 I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt Dorrian, that I had told too much. 348 00:39:10,100 --> 00:39:16,070 Then it was. I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. 349 00:39:16,070 --> 00:39:22,610 So what you got there that that more? Is it an explicit declaration that more suggestive to use a very well. 350 00:39:22,610 --> 00:39:29,030 The term passages are very much toned down in the second published version, 351 00:39:29,030 --> 00:39:35,420 at the same time as the unevenness of tone, that slipperiness that changeability that mutability. 352 00:39:35,420 --> 00:39:39,260 All the complexity of the novel is actually, if anything, played up in the second version. 353 00:39:39,260 --> 00:39:46,580 So there's no sense in which Wilde is doing anything in any way to distance the novel from the homoeroticism. 354 00:39:46,580 --> 00:39:53,000 That's absolutely central to its atmosphere, that kind of worship of Doreen's beauty, but carries on all the way through it. 355 00:39:53,000 --> 00:40:01,910 It's also worth noting that if Hollywood is the most openly, the most apparently homosexual character in the book, 356 00:40:01,910 --> 00:40:07,130 the most apparently pulled into relationships and feelings towards a young man. 357 00:40:07,130 --> 00:40:11,450 He's also the closest the novel has to a moral touchstone. 358 00:40:11,450 --> 00:40:16,160 He's the only character in the novel who is in any sense really morally conventional 359 00:40:16,160 --> 00:40:22,640 and has a kind of strong moral standards and a sort of voice within the novel. 360 00:40:22,640 --> 00:40:27,020 So he's the one who tries to get going to repent and try to get him to pray and all the rest of it. 361 00:40:27,020 --> 00:40:32,390 And he's the one who has a distinct kind of inner integrity in a way that pretty much none of the other characters do. 362 00:40:32,390 --> 00:40:39,620 So in that sense, the novel is doing nothing but distancing itself from Battle Hollywood as a character and his feelings. 363 00:40:39,620 --> 00:40:47,030 In that sense, it doesn't set up any kind of moral binaries around that topic in any sense at all. 364 00:40:47,030 --> 00:40:53,330 But it's also what's important, I think, within the novel is this idea of blurring of boundaries and complexity of judgement. 365 00:40:53,330 --> 00:41:02,300 So it's there in the hole, the idea of doubles within that that whole idea of what's the relation between 366 00:41:02,300 --> 00:41:08,000 Dorian and his portrait of the dividing line between reader and text being blurred, 367 00:41:08,000 --> 00:41:14,300 the dividing line between what's known and unknown now in criticism of Dorian Grey, 368 00:41:14,300 --> 00:41:20,270 one of the text was regularly used by reviewers as a healthy contrast to Dorian Grey. 369 00:41:20,270 --> 00:41:28,740 Almost useless kind of stick to beat Dorian Grey. Why couldn't it be more like was Robert Louis Stevenson's, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 370 00:41:28,740 --> 00:41:33,230 There are a whole load of reviews that say it's not like Jekyll and Hyde. 371 00:41:33,230 --> 00:41:41,180 Now, interestingly, Jekyll and Hyde, very like Dorian Grey, has a very intimate circle of male friends within it. 372 00:41:41,180 --> 00:41:49,780 It's all there's a kind of tight circle of men who are spending that they are all sort of complete company for each other, 373 00:41:49,780 --> 00:41:59,480 but also importantly in Jekyll and Hyde, as Jekyll's friends become worried about this friendship he seems to have with this young man, 374 00:41:59,480 --> 00:42:07,760 Hyde, who's coming and going from his house always notably as one critic, as pointed out by the dark back passage of that, 375 00:42:07,760 --> 00:42:16,370 Hyde is this young man who has some kind of hold over Jekyll, and they're clearly worried that it's a kind of blackmailing hold. 376 00:42:16,370 --> 00:42:21,500 In other words, that one of the unspoken things that they're concerned about is the idea that this loathsome 377 00:42:21,500 --> 00:42:27,930 Mr. Hyde has got some kind of sexual relationship and blackmail relationship with Jekyll. 378 00:42:27,930 --> 00:42:35,190 One of those textual possibilities in there now, importantly, by contrast with how one has to read Dorian Grey, 379 00:42:35,190 --> 00:42:40,320 which is it's very, very hard to read Dorian Grey keeping Dorian himself at a distance, 380 00:42:40,320 --> 00:42:44,520 saying condemning him all the way through a sense in which the whole narrative invites you into 381 00:42:44,520 --> 00:42:48,450 sympathy with him and certainly invites you into you don't you're not offered another point of view. 382 00:42:48,450 --> 00:42:58,140 But Dorian said most of that novel. There's also the fact that Dorian looks beautiful constantly, that whole thing of Silvanus brother, you know, 383 00:42:58,140 --> 00:43:02,820 kind of cornering him and then seeing him as so beautiful that he cannot think 384 00:43:02,820 --> 00:43:08,310 that this young man is possibly looking to young Panopto committed those crimes. 385 00:43:08,310 --> 00:43:16,650 Now, by contrast, in Jekyll and Hyde, there's an absolutely unceasing revulsion to a tide the whole time, 386 00:43:16,650 --> 00:43:22,560 the idea that he's monstrous, even when he can't even identify what the markers of monstrosity are. 387 00:43:22,560 --> 00:43:30,870 So, for example, this is Jekyll's friends. Autism's first reaction to hide Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish. 388 00:43:30,870 --> 00:43:35,610 He gave an impression of deformity even without any nameable malformation. 389 00:43:35,610 --> 00:43:42,180 He had a displeasing smile. He had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness. 390 00:43:42,180 --> 00:43:47,550 And he spoke with a husky whispering and somewhat broken voice. All of these were points against him. 391 00:43:47,550 --> 00:43:56,040 But not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Otterson regarded him. 392 00:43:56,040 --> 00:44:00,870 There must be something else, said the perplexed gentleman. There is something more. 393 00:44:00,870 --> 00:44:05,490 If I could find a name for it. God bless me. The man seemed to be human. 394 00:44:05,490 --> 00:44:08,040 Something troglodytic, shall we say. 395 00:44:08,040 --> 00:44:16,440 Oh, can it be the old story of Dr. Fell, or is it the mere radiance of a fowl soul that thus transpires through an transfigures its clay continent? 396 00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:26,970 The last, I think four. Oh my poor old Harry Jekyll. If ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend. 397 00:44:26,970 --> 00:44:32,820 Compare that sentence signature upon the face that unnameable revulsion, disgust, loathing, 398 00:44:32,820 --> 00:44:37,860 fear compared that with all the descriptions of Dorian Grey and all the responses to Dorian. 399 00:44:37,860 --> 00:44:45,510 And that sense that gives you an idea of that's the kind of way in which wild is complicating so many of those kind of Gothic ideas and narratives. 400 00:44:45,510 --> 00:44:52,050 And that idea of double and above all, he's undermining categories, he's blurring boundaries. 401 00:44:52,050 --> 00:44:57,060 And again, he's blurring genders as well. And importantly, that's what Wall does in his writing. 402 00:44:57,060 --> 00:45:03,810 He blurs boundaries. He challenges judgements between moral and immoral, appearance and reality, life and art. 403 00:45:03,810 --> 00:45:10,500 And that I think it's an enormously important thing. That's a methodology he uses throughout his work. 404 00:45:10,500 --> 00:45:15,600 And that, I think, is really important when you're approaching Walt's treatment of sexuality because, 405 00:45:15,600 --> 00:45:21,900 well, treatment of sexuality is not about some kind of single homosexual gay meaning buried in there. 406 00:45:21,900 --> 00:45:25,500 That becomes the true reading of the text. 407 00:45:25,500 --> 00:45:32,400 That kind of reading very often goes with this kind of distorting hindsight, the idea that we can now see exactly what he really meant. 408 00:45:32,400 --> 00:45:32,970 Actually, 409 00:45:32,970 --> 00:45:42,990 he always means multiple things and he's absolutely writing about sexuality and absolutely including homosexuality and that it's enormously important. 410 00:45:42,990 --> 00:45:46,560 But it's important to the fundamental way that Wilde writes and thinks. 411 00:45:46,560 --> 00:45:52,680 So the most fundamental thing I think my take on world is world belief in individuality, 412 00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:57,420 the right of the individual to be who and what they choose to be and who and 413 00:45:57,420 --> 00:46:01,410 what they choose to be moment to moment consistently is utterly overrated. 414 00:46:01,410 --> 00:46:06,120 You can change what you want to be second to second, and you are not to be confined by categories, 415 00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:11,160 by judgements, by other people's views, by ideas of consistency, any of that. 416 00:46:11,160 --> 00:46:19,290 And that becomes the most fundamental human right and what is more fundamental to individuality and identity and so on, the one sexuality. 417 00:46:19,290 --> 00:46:26,460 So in that sense, world is absolutely condemning, undermined and challenging, complicating, 418 00:46:26,460 --> 00:46:33,870 destroying the kind of grounds on which Taiping judgement, moral judgement, condemnation, all the rest of it happen. 419 00:46:33,870 --> 00:46:40,770 And that way that mutability and flexibility and changeability the complexity of the text 420 00:46:40,770 --> 00:46:45,450 is exactly what challenges that kind of way of thinking and those kind of categories. 421 00:46:45,450 --> 00:46:48,840 And in that sense, that resistance to try and challenge the judgement. 422 00:46:48,840 --> 00:46:54,600 It's there in all of his essays is there and criticism artists and decay of lying and soul of man and so on. 423 00:46:54,600 --> 00:47:02,700 It's there in although short stories I was talking about and I'm really importantly, if they're in all his plays, hugely, they're in his place. 424 00:47:02,700 --> 00:47:07,530 Wild. Right. And it's interesting, it's been noted there've been several reading of WorldSpace. 425 00:47:07,530 --> 00:47:14,190 Homosexuality is always good in lots of ways because somebody was plaisir about the idea of a secret, the dark crime, 426 00:47:14,190 --> 00:47:20,640 the dark secret, the unknown thing in the past that characters are trying to escape from a burial, not be condemned by. 427 00:47:20,640 --> 00:47:25,950 That's a kind of fundamental one of the fundamental structures he uses is what was hugely popular. 428 00:47:25,950 --> 00:47:32,450 It's kind of the most popular, dramatic. At the end of the 19th century, which was known as the Fallen Women Play Huge, 429 00:47:32,450 --> 00:47:38,120 is partly a reaction to increase in sort of the campaigning and so on for women's rights and the rise of, 430 00:47:38,120 --> 00:47:41,900 you know, kind of late 19th century, what became known as feminism and so on. 431 00:47:41,900 --> 00:47:46,160 And one way is to say, well, women who then move outside of men's control, 432 00:47:46,160 --> 00:47:52,040 then what happens to them is they then become sexually vulnerable and then they're gone before and they're ruined. 433 00:47:52,040 --> 00:47:55,190 And any woman who has had sex outside of marriage is used goods, 434 00:47:55,190 --> 00:48:01,520 but also somehow corrupt and devious and immoral and a kind of poison that has to be excluded from society. 435 00:48:01,520 --> 00:48:11,000 And there are a huge number of plays written on that topic that begin the probably most famous play in the 19th century on that would be to my thesis, 436 00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:15,330 Vladimer Cameleer. Well, but there are huge number that follow that. 437 00:48:15,330 --> 00:48:21,650 So pretty much all the plays by Henry Jones, by offering Pineiro by Sidney Grundy hadn't even heard of those names. 438 00:48:21,650 --> 00:48:26,690 But there are swathe of plays by playwrights, the end of the 19th century on this. 439 00:48:26,690 --> 00:48:29,150 Now there's a way in which this idea of the dark secret, 440 00:48:29,150 --> 00:48:35,060 the sexual secrets and so on can be read as about homosexuality is that one can read one for the other. 441 00:48:35,060 --> 00:48:39,500 And I think one of my favourite sort of versions of reading that is Litten straight cheek, 442 00:48:39,500 --> 00:48:45,410 who was one of the more sort of extravagant characters at the end of the 19th and 20th century. 443 00:48:45,410 --> 00:48:53,100 I love his summary of a woman no story in 1997 revival and described it in these terms. 444 00:48:53,100 --> 00:48:59,090 Mr Trick, that's Beerbohm Tree who was playing the Lord Illingworth in the play. 445 00:48:59,090 --> 00:49:07,130 Mr Tree is a wicked lord staying in a country house who has made up his mind to [INAUDIBLE] one of the guests, a handsome young man of 20. 446 00:49:07,130 --> 00:49:10,790 The handsome young man is delighted when his mother enters. 447 00:49:10,790 --> 00:49:17,810 She sees his lordship and recognises him as having populated with her twenty years before the result of which was a handsome young man. 448 00:49:17,810 --> 00:49:23,720 She appeals to lottery, not to [INAUDIBLE] his own son. He replies that it is an additional reason for doing it. 449 00:49:23,720 --> 00:49:27,620 Oh, he has a very wicked Lord, 450 00:49:27,620 --> 00:49:35,900 wonderful and straight inaccurate but wonderfully some sort of dark atmosphere that in many ways runs through weinerman importance. 451 00:49:35,900 --> 00:49:40,610 And it's there. Every kind of version of certainly every film version of wild, 452 00:49:40,610 --> 00:49:46,010 wild plays has to kind of negotiate with that as an assumption operating around it in a different way. 453 00:49:46,010 --> 00:49:54,500 So the the Parker Oliver Parker film of an ideal husband, which I think is rather wonderful in all sorts of ways, 454 00:49:54,500 --> 00:50:00,470 it opens with Rupert Everett playing Lord Ellingsworth and Rupert Everett being that actually out there. 455 00:50:00,470 --> 00:50:07,820 Pretty rare in Hollywood playing playing sorry, Lord Goring at the beginning, they have him naked in bed with a woman sort of just to go. 456 00:50:07,820 --> 00:50:12,580 Right, OK, I just got he's straight. OK, he's got it straight. 457 00:50:12,580 --> 00:50:18,650 Straight. Don't think of all that's going to exclude all that other text and then he brings it back in. 458 00:50:18,650 --> 00:50:21,710 So. So Robert Chilton is trying to bury, trying to forget, 459 00:50:21,710 --> 00:50:27,260 tried to buy his way out of a crime committed in his youth and the extent to which that crime committed his youth, 460 00:50:27,260 --> 00:50:34,190 which was a financial one of insider trading and selling secrets, the way in which that can also be read as a kind of sexual one. 461 00:50:34,190 --> 00:50:35,840 And the way it relates to that, 462 00:50:35,840 --> 00:50:42,800 those ideas brilliantly reintroduced in the film were just when his wife is trying to work out why he's giving in to these, 463 00:50:42,800 --> 00:50:49,970 what effectively blackmail demands and doing things that he's never done before in a kind of morally dubious way there at the opening 464 00:50:49,970 --> 00:50:57,170 night in the film of an ideal husband there at the opening night of the importance of being earnest and at the end of being honest, 465 00:50:57,170 --> 00:51:00,590 Wilde comes up in front of the curtains to make the curtain speech. 466 00:51:00,590 --> 00:51:07,880 They made it Lady Windermere's Fan. I'm technically anachronistic and the wife looks at Wild and looks at her husband. 467 00:51:07,880 --> 00:51:14,810 He looks at Waldenbooks. The husband says You haven't done something in your youth which you're ashamed of, which I don't know about because. 468 00:51:14,810 --> 00:51:18,560 Oh, you know, so it kind of in that sense, 469 00:51:18,560 --> 00:51:25,730 it kind of reintroduces the sex to a dark secret in that it just it kind of alludes to it and buries it again in that way. 470 00:51:25,730 --> 00:51:29,690 And that idea of the double life in that sense, it has obvious relevance, 471 00:51:29,690 --> 00:51:35,360 total clear relevance in the idea of how far wild at this point is leading a double life is. 472 00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:41,120 You know, there are all sorts of things he is and feels that his society will not accept and condemns. 473 00:51:41,120 --> 00:51:46,790 It doesn't mean, however, that what you have to do is read the place that's necessarily about that. 474 00:51:46,790 --> 00:51:48,260 They are inclusively, 475 00:51:48,260 --> 00:51:56,570 but not exclusively about that in the sense that the place of so much about sexuality and they are a challenge to sexual judgement. 476 00:51:56,570 --> 00:52:00,680 About four minutes left to make the case they'll do more on this next week. 477 00:52:00,680 --> 00:52:06,230 But essentially what you've got, say, later, Windermere's Fan, Mrs Allen, is the fall. 478 00:52:06,230 --> 00:52:11,750 A woman who has abandoned her daughter in the past is coming back trying to buy her way into society. 479 00:52:11,750 --> 00:52:17,300 And her daughter thinks that she's having an affair with her husband, with her son in law. 480 00:52:17,300 --> 00:52:25,400 It actually is and runs away. And this is all in sacrificing her own reputation in rescuing her daughter from social disgrace. 481 00:52:25,400 --> 00:52:27,720 And in that sense, it seems to be a play about the fact that. 482 00:52:27,720 --> 00:52:35,050 She looks like a bad woman, but actually she's also a good woman because she will rescue her daughter and she is not a Christian redemption. 483 00:52:35,050 --> 00:52:38,850 She's committed a sin of adultery and abandoning her daughter. 484 00:52:38,850 --> 00:52:45,870 But now she's come back and she sacrificed herself. So she is redeemed. That all sounds very, very morally conventional. 485 00:52:45,870 --> 00:52:49,170 What makes it, though? It's also asking for forgiveness for the fallen woman. 486 00:52:49,170 --> 00:52:55,770 There are still good things in her and all that. Actually, what I think is happening in the last act, that play is much more complex than that. 487 00:52:55,770 --> 00:52:58,830 So, Mrs. Arlynn, yes, she sacrifices herself for a daughter, 488 00:52:58,830 --> 00:53:04,440 but then she does not she will not be typed as a mother any more than she'll be typed as a bad woman. 489 00:53:04,440 --> 00:53:09,030 What she does. And she then turns around and rejects the role of mother as well. 490 00:53:09,030 --> 00:53:18,030 She rejects the simple world in which her realising her daughter has to live by illusions, has to believe in this dead good mother that never existed. 491 00:53:18,030 --> 00:53:22,710 And instead, the play at that point starts undermining judgement and catagories itself. 492 00:53:22,710 --> 00:53:27,210 So the complexity of who knows what and doesn't know what the play ends on a conflicted judgement. 493 00:53:27,210 --> 00:53:36,000 It ends on the wife, on the husband condemning his mother in law, who he thinks is simply an unredeemed fallen woman as a very clever woman. 494 00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:39,510 And his wife corrects him and says, no, she's a very good woman. 495 00:53:39,510 --> 00:53:44,160 But that very goodness is premised on the wife not actually knowing that she's her mother. 496 00:53:44,160 --> 00:53:52,290 So there's a whole thing. What is good and bad at this point? What does good mean according to whose judgement and that wonderful little moment where 497 00:53:52,290 --> 00:53:56,820 wild in that play takes on the form of the the woman play so you can do it in the fall. 498 00:53:56,820 --> 00:54:01,200 And woman play is it's about ejecting the fallen woman from society. 499 00:54:01,200 --> 00:54:05,730 It's about uncovering her dark past and condemning her for it. 500 00:54:05,730 --> 00:54:14,010 And very importantly, it must always contain a repentant scene. So in the second, Mrs. Tancred abide by Pineiro, 501 00:54:14,010 --> 00:54:17,970 this point where the fallen woman is confronted with her past and sure enough, she tries to fight it off. 502 00:54:17,970 --> 00:54:22,020 And then a minute later she lies, you know, sobbing hysterically on the ottoman. 503 00:54:22,020 --> 00:54:32,010 That's what all women do. They sob hysterically. They long the innocent past, and then they mostly shoot themselves or take poison or into convents. 504 00:54:32,010 --> 00:54:40,650 Mrs. Allen does none of that is she explicitly rejects repentance as out of date and doesn't go with modern dress. 505 00:54:40,650 --> 00:54:49,020 And she also this point when Lord Windemere, in a classic kind of form with the genre, is trying to prod her into repentance. 506 00:54:49,020 --> 00:54:57,990 And so he says to her, I wish that my wife would give you the photo that she keeps by her bed, a miniature she kisses every night. 507 00:54:57,990 --> 00:55:05,520 And it's a miniature of the mother that they do the mere thought she had of the mother who died young and pure. 508 00:55:05,520 --> 00:55:09,990 And Lord Lord Windemere says it's a miniature she kisses every night before she prays. 509 00:55:09,990 --> 00:55:15,540 It's the miniature of a young, innocent looking girl with beautiful dark hair. 510 00:55:15,540 --> 00:55:18,840 So he think, well, you sort of like this was the young. 511 00:55:18,840 --> 00:55:23,700 It's a moment in which she's clearly meant to go because I was in a different world. 512 00:55:23,700 --> 00:55:27,810 So I got my head now. But oh, so there's a kind of emphasis on that. 513 00:55:27,810 --> 00:55:32,430 And Mrs. Allen replies, without absolute poise. 514 00:55:32,430 --> 00:55:37,800 Oh, yes. I remember how long ago that seems it was done before I was married. 515 00:55:37,800 --> 00:55:45,270 Dark hair and an innocent expression. What the fashion and Windemere total school. 516 00:55:45,270 --> 00:55:49,050 No nuggets in there. And she's under she's undermining further the idea. 517 00:55:49,050 --> 00:55:54,450 How can you judge me then any more than you can judge me now? How do you know from a parents who are what I am? 518 00:55:54,450 --> 00:55:59,770 You've got types of good women and bad women here. They don't work. How do you know this is my natural hair colour? 519 00:55:59,770 --> 00:56:04,200 Now, in that sense, it's all about undermining those kind of roles. 520 00:56:04,200 --> 00:56:09,210 So in that sense, Lady Windermere's Fan, just like a woman unimportance after it, 521 00:56:09,210 --> 00:56:16,230 it looks at the ways in which those kind of judgements about sexuality are really about shoring up power within society. 522 00:56:16,230 --> 00:56:24,270 They're about shoring up money, they're about controlling people's behaviour, and they're incredibly crude and they destroy lives. 523 00:56:24,270 --> 00:56:26,640 That's what's so in a woman of no importance. 524 00:56:26,640 --> 00:56:37,410 You've got Mrs. Arbuthnot repenting her own fall from earlier on, but using that repentance to keep control of her son. 525 00:56:37,410 --> 00:56:41,040 So the play ends with the man who supposedly seduced her, 526 00:56:41,040 --> 00:56:47,130 so she offers this kind of narrative of herself as the young innocent girl who was tricked by Lord Illingworth. 527 00:56:47,130 --> 00:56:54,570 And the play moves in that sense from being supposedly it's the redemption of the fallen woman in the sense it becomes all the man's fault. 528 00:56:54,570 --> 00:57:01,920 But in another sense, read through law dealing with responses, and they're all absolutely coldly rational and indeed the and witty. 529 00:57:01,920 --> 00:57:09,150 And there's a conflict in the play there between the good characters to be tedious and the wicked characters who will have just the best lines. 530 00:57:09,150 --> 00:57:15,030 So, well, again, kind of confusing judgement in that sense. But importantly, Wilde wrote of that play, 531 00:57:15,030 --> 00:57:21,300 several plays have been written lately that deal with a monstrous injustice of the social code of morality at the present time. 532 00:57:21,300 --> 00:57:26,490 It is indeed a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women. 533 00:57:26,490 --> 00:57:32,130 I think there should be no law for anybody. And I'll leave you with that. 534 00:57:32,130 --> 00:57:37,140 I think there should be no law for anybody. I'm going to talk next week a bit more about the importance of being honest in the 535 00:57:37,140 --> 00:57:41,760 ways in which the kind of multiplicity of text works there and all sorts of ways. 536 00:57:41,760 --> 00:57:49,740 But next weeks about the plays and the importance, being honest and an ideal husband will be the main text for that. 537 00:57:49,740 --> 00:57:54,481 Thank you.