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NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 61
homosexuality. For a full discussion of the vexed status of the term “inversion,” see
Halperin 15–18.
4 For extensive social and legal discussions of the relationship between the Wilde
trial and the development of contemporary gay politics, see Weeks 91–117, 171–
181, 265; Marshall; and Lumsden.
5 See also Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde,” for an examination of the ways in
which The Picture of Dorian Gray intersects with theories of sexual inversion in
order to produce a homosexual identity. On this point see also Regenia Gagnier
140.
6 My stress on a chronology based on “cultural currents” rather than direct textual
indebtedness is meant to indicate the extent to which both sexology and literature
channel dominant cultural motifs that very often find an origin much earlier. See
Dijkstra for a convincing documentation of the “reactionary” status of sexology.
Dijkstra concluded that “it is thus clear that the ‘discovery’ of narcissism and the
autoerotic mentality by the psychoanalytic community trailed behind the vogue for
the same subject on the part of artists and writers by quite a bit” (147, 144–155
passim).
7 Wayne Koestenbaum also notes a similar iconography of green that involves Wilde.
The fin-de-siècle Uranian poet Marc-André Raffalovich, it seems, marked all the
books in his library written by inverts with “bookplates of a green serpent—
suggesting not only a phallus, but Wilde’s green carnation” (46).
8 This moment in sexology seems to bear out what Eve Sedgwick means when she
says, “The question of how same-sex desire could be interpreted in terms of gender
was bitterly embattled almost from the beginnings of male homosexual taxonomy”
(134).
9 Anlehnungstypus, the German word translated by “anaclitic,” literally means
“leaning-up-against” (Freud 1914:69 n.13).
10 A complementary argument to this formulation can be found in Judith Butler.
Butler posits a stressed reading of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in
order to reach the deconstructive stance that “We might then rethink the very
notions of masculinity and femininity constructed here as rooted in unresolved
homosexual cathexes” (54, 35–78 passim). This is a theoretical inversion perfectly
appropriate to a discussion of sexual inversion.
11 All of the quotations here appear in the original 1905 edition of the Three Essays.
As such, they can be thought of as revealing an originary fluidity that becomes
increasingly subjugated as Freud adds to the essays in subsequent editions. The
evolution of the Three Essays seems to imitate the ultimate model of Freudian
development, in which polymorphous fluidity becomes masked and territorialized
by the cultural narrative of Oedipal reproduction.
12 Ibid. The second phase of infantile sexual development, following the oral but
preceding the genital, is the sadistic anal (1905:64).
13 For a further examination of this letter, as well as for a cogent political examination
and defense of Freud and homosexuality, see Fletcher.
14 While Ellis seems here to maintain narcissism as a purely nonanaclitic activity, in his
essay on auto-eroticism he too associates narcissism with femininity, which again
grounds the concept on an anaclitic base. For a discussion of the relationship
between auto-eroticism, narcissism, and femininity, see Dijkstra 119–159.