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NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 47
meanings and influences throughout the brief text, it is also true that we cannot
avoid the fact that the text remakes these meanings, succinctly inverting the
received morality of the myth by turning the gazer into the gazed, the subject into
the object. The received moral of Narcissus typically is related to the dangers of
being attracted to oneself. The moral of “The Disciple,” on the other hand, seems
to relate to the dangers of assuming an ability to know who is attracted to what.
The overt embrace of inversion as a textual principle has been recognized as an
exemplary trait of Wilde’s writings. In “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the
Over-Educated,” for example, Wilde tells us that “Art is the only serious thing in
the world, and the artist is the only person who is never serious” (1989a: 1203).
In “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” we are told that “The
ages live in history through their anachronisms” (1894:434) This type of
inversion, in which dominant relations between certain terms become flippantly
overturned, seemed to signal something far greater than textual stylistics to
Victorian society. An editorial in the London Evening News written about the
announcement of Wilde’s sodomy conviction berates the writer’s ability to enact
it as a principle of social intercourse:
To him and such as him we owe the spread of moral degeneration amongst
young men with abilities sufficient to make them a credit to their country.
At the feet of Wilde they have learned to gain notoriety by blatant conceit,
by despising the emotions of healthy humanity and the achievements of
wholesome talent.
(qtd in Hyde 12)
What is clearly at stake here is the association between textual inversion and
sexual inversion, 3 the “new” invention of fin-de-siècle sexology that initiated the
construction of the modern “homosexual.” 4 Jonathan Dollimore has eloquently
summarized this associative pattern:
One of the many reasons why people were terrified by Wilde was because
of a perceived connection between his aesthetic transgression and his
sexual transgression. “Inversion” was being used increasingly to define a
specific kind of deviant sexuality inseparable from a deviant personality…
by the time of Wilde, homosexuality could be regarded as rooted in a
person’s identity and as pathologically pervading all aspects of his being.
As such the expression of homosexuality might be regarded as the more
intentionally insidious and subversive. Hence in part the animosity and
hysteria directed at Wilde during and after his trial.
(67)
“The Disciple” obviously participates in the prolonged program of inversion that
typifies Wilde’s canon, but it also reinforces the associations between textuality
and sexuality in a number of ways that further support and finesse Dollimore’s