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UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 83
somehow managed to establish an individual practice for signifying the
homoerotic because his accomplishment did not fall within the parameters of the
existing discourse. The problem for the court was the same one faced by Wilde.
Though he had found a way to collapse subject and object, desiring and desired,
spectator and poser, there was as yet no cultural sign of homosexuality that could
be appropriated to the surfaces of his body. Such a sign needed not only the
concept of the homosexual-as-type, but a defined system of extrasexual
signifying practices with which to perform the type.
The ambiguity of Wilde’s self-representation would have maintained itself if
not for Queensberry’s possession of the details of Wilde’s sexual activities. Not
only did that evidence bring about the State’s prosecution of Wilde but,
motivated by the fear of just such a reprisal, Wilde had conceded that he was
indeed posing as a sodomite. Where before the State could only suspect him of
subversive signifying, it now had, by Wilde’s own admission, the confirmation
so eagerly and frustratingly sought during the first trial. It had not only a
signifying code for The Homosexual delivered readymade, but a code that
boggled the imagination in its attention to detail. Since 1883, Wilde’s
experiments to produce an embodied homoeroticism had yielded a sophisticated
and ambitiously far-ranging system of signifying practices that included dress,
speech, gesture, and even a mode of text production. This was his contribution to
the State’s establishment of the homosexual social identity, a contribution that
cannot be underestimated because it both initiated and completed his juridical
inscription into discourse. In constructing Wilde as The Homosexual in the
second and third trials, the State depended as much on Wilde as it did on the
literature of sexology.
Wilde’s homoerotic signifying, like the Delsarte practices it was based upon,
had for its goal the completion of a two-part operation. One part was the
construction of a sign consisting of an object surface that signified the interiority
of a physically detached subject. The other part was the collapse of signifier and
signified meant to produce the appropriation of the sign to a single surface. As
Wilde experimented with this technique for the purpose of constructing a unified
subjectivity that could dispense with the shared sodomitical subject position, he
had experienced recurrent and paradoxical failure. In “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,”
the collapse of signified and signifier, of desiring and desired, onto a single
surface caused the disappearance of the object. In the attempt to solve this
problem in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he experienced the disappearance of the
subject. Though he was successful both times in achieving the collapse of
subject and object, there was as yet no homosexual sign that could be
appropriated and displayed on the surfaces of a single body. Instead, the sign
appropriation had to be read through existing representational practices, resulting
only in a transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity. But why, exactly,
was this reinscription transgressive? What rules of behavior were being broken?
What conventions of gender were being subverted? Could the dandy’s
effeminate gestural displacement, by itself, constitute a threat to the status quo,