THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 69
sonality on some imaginative plane.”
Like Wilde’s critical dialogues, “The
Decay of Lying” (1889) and “The True
Function and Value of Criticism” (1890),
“Mr. W.H.” constructs its argument
through adversarial exchanges, juxta-
positions that sharpen individuality.
The story takes the concept of the
pose—the trying on, in one’s sensual
or intellectual life, of a novel obses-
sion—and assesses its value as a tool of
self-development. The story’s interloc-
utors feverishly adopt a theory of the
homoerotic origins of Shakespeare’s
sonnets, then suddenly reject it. “Some-
thing had gone out of me, as it were,”
the narrator says, explaining his change
of heart. The intensity of his absorp-
tion seems to determine the brevity of
its duration: “Perhaps, by finding per-
fect expression for a passion, I had ex-
hausted the passion itself.” In “The Pic-
ture of Dorian Gray,” published in 1890
to appalled reviews, Wilde’s protago-
nist discovers that the search for new
ways of being and feeling in the world
entails an endless oscillation between
“ardor” and “indifference.”
It was the same “curious mixture” of
qualities that Wilde had described in a
letter several years earlier, writing to an
early object of his fascination, a teen-
ager named Harry Marillier. Wilde
began acting on his yearning for young
(and very young) men just when his life
seemed, for the first time, to be ap-
proaching conventionality. Married to
a beautiful bohemian, Constance Lloyd,
with one son and another on the way,
and considering, à la Matthew Arnold,
a sensible career as a school inspector,
he was seized by a desire that he later
described as “a madness”—a compul-
sion to seek out and exhaust the poten-
tial of new identities.
In his work, Wilde considered the
question of whether such duplicity added
to the sum of his personality or split it
in two. “There are certain temperaments
that marriage makes more complex,”
Lord Henry Wotton, the careless dandy
of “Dorian Gray,” muses. “They retain
their egotism, and add to it many other
egos. They are forced to have more than
one life.” When Dorian explores this
expansive way of being through a se-
ries of sensual preoccupations—per-
fume, jewelry, embroidery—Wilde’s sen-
tences are rich with their own sensory
texture, studded with allusions and em-
bedded in histories, as if their author,
too, were luxuriating in alternate worlds.
Reviewing “Dorian Gray,” the Pall Mall
Gazette snarled that, in Wilde’s render-
ing, corruption seemed “scintillant, iri-
descent, full of alluring effects.”
Yet the ethics of self-indulgence in
the novel aren’t so straightforward.
When Dorian, having discarded his
faithful lover, Sibyl Vane, wanders home
in the dawn light through Covent Gar-
den, Wilde’s imagery is still sensual,
but its shades are paler, and come with
signs of decay: the sky resembles a
“pearl...flushed with faint fire,” the
pillars of the portico are a “grey sun-
bleached” hue, “iris-necked” pigeons
hop around the market stalls, and
bunches of cherries contain “the cold-
ness of the moon.” All around Dorian,
ordinary people—drivers, carters, flower
boys, stallholders—are seen conduct-
ing their uncomplicated lives. If we’re
being asked to adjudicate between ways
of being, which way do we lean? The
Covent Garden portrait is deliberately
ambiguous: gleaming in the light, but
fading, too.
To those, like the Pall Mall Gazette
reviewer, who called “Dorian Gray”
“morbid”—depraved or unhealthy—
Wilde responded by redefining the
word. “What is morbidity but a mood
of emotion or a mode of thought that
one cannot express?” he asked in his
1891 essay “The Soul of Man UnderSocialism.” “The artist is never morbid.
He expresses everything.” Contradic-
tion was merely authentic self-expres-
sion, the mark of living fully and refus-
ing to deny oneself. During the early
eighteen-nineties, Wilde’s “everything”
included grand country-house parties
and glittering opening nights with the
aristocracy, but also assignations with
factory clerks and music-hall hopefuls.
In life, though he might be reckless—
barely hiding his relationship with LordAlfred Douglas or with the boys he en-
tertained at cafés and hotels—he was
obliged to keep these worlds as far apart
as possible. In art, he discovered, he
could not only release but unite them.
“The Importance of Being Earnest,”
first performed in 1895, was a break-
through, and the secret to its innovation
was in bringing opposites together. In
Wilde’s hands, the familiar double plot
and the theme of mistaken identity be-
came something new: duplicity was trans-
formed into a kind of displaced truth-
telling. Traditionally, comic dénouements
expose facts or identities that have been
obscured by characters’ deceptions. (This
was how Sheridan’s “School for Scan-
dal,” which partially inspired “Earnest,”
worked.) In Wilde’s farce, by contrast,
the final act reveals an unexpected cor-
respondence between the deceptions and
the facts. Jack has pretended to have a
brother when, in reality, he does have
one; he has pretended to be called Er-
nest when, in fact, Ernest is his name.
False—or supposedly false—poses come
to be seen as creative and necessary: they
both generate the plot and resolve it.T
he opening night of “Earnest,” on
Valentine’s Day, 1895, came very
close to being its last. Douglas’s romance
with Wilde had long been opposed by
his father, the irascible Marquess of
Queensberry. That evening, the Mar-
quess sought to gain entry to the the-
atre with an accomplice, who wielded
“a grotesque bouquet of vegetables” in
lieu of congratulatory flowers—a dra-
matic flourish that Wilde might have
admired if he hadn’t been its target. It
was the latest episode in what Sturgis
describes as a sustained “campaign of
harassment,” and Wilde hoped that it
might be sufficient grounds for prose-
cution. His lawyers discouraged him,
but opportunity presented itself again,
a fortnight later, when he found a card
from the Marquess, left out for him at
a London club, with his name and the
misspelled word “Somdomite” scrawled
across it. The following day, urged on
by Douglas, Wilde sued the Marquess
for libel. When the trial fell apart, the
tables turned, and criminal charges were
brought against Wilde himself.
The trial, perhaps inevitably, tends
to be read as the climactic scene in the
tragic drama of Wilde’s life. But it’s