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AESTHETICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 67
Oscar Wilde’s American lecture tour of 1882 was a turning point in his life, one
that left him greatly changed (Ellmann 1988:210). Upon his return to England he
abandoned the knee breeches, lily, green tie, and velvet jacket that made him
famous as “The Great Aesthete” and “The Professor of Aesthetics” and, instead,
resurrected the cult of the dandy (which had been dead for several decades),
dedicating the effort to Balzac (Moers 295). 1 Wilde’s version of dandyism was
new. He was not the inheritor of a continuous tradition but was, rather, a
dandiacal send-up, an assemblage of dandy poses and sentiments long since
passed.
One major departure of Wilde’s dandyism from its Regency predecessor was
the addition of a homoerotic presence. Previous versions of dandyism often drew
suspicion from those who viewed the dandy’s sometime effeminacy as peculiar,
but these never possessed more than the most unclear and seemingly implausible
allusions to the love that dare not speak its name (Pierrot 136–137). Rather, the
dandies’ effeminacy was attributed to a disinterest in sex, not to an interest in
same-sex sexual activity (Moers 36–37). It was Wilde who transformed
dandyism into a vehicle for a homoerotic presence and a sexualized symbol of
the Decadence, marking his version as radically different from those of the past.
Yet the question remains, why did Wilde abandon his prophetic aestheticism
in favor of this dandy revival? In a recent essay, “Writing Gone Wilde,” Ed
Cohen argued that Wilde, up until his trials of 1895, was experimenting with
resistant strategies in his writing that could embody homoerotic desire. These
embodiments of desire consisted of transgressive reinscriptions of dominant
discourses acting in lieu of a representational praxis with which to render a
homosexual social identity at a time when the language for articulating such an
identity did not exist. I use Jonathan Dollimore’s term “transgressive
reinscription” to indicate a subversive, resistant, and destabilizing maneuver in
which “identification with, and desire for, may coexist with parodic subversion of”
(321). I suggest that Wilde’s enactment of the dandy was yet another instance of
this resistant strategy: there was something about the dandy that suggested a
venue for this project that was not available in his previous enactments of the
aesthete. Although breaking down the boundaries between art and life was his
rallying call as an aesthete, it was a call only. Aestheticism was a theory, but
dandyism, on the other hand, offered a praxis.
Wilde’s choice of a Balzacian dandyism is significant. Balzac himself was no
model practitioner: “The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest
looking mortals…ver beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face,
a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair. …[D]ressed in the worst
possible taste” he would often “roam the streets…in ragged, dirty disarray”
(Moers 129). It was certainly not Balzac’s practice of dandyism that attracted
Wilde. Rather, it was Balzac’s theory with its dazzlingly pseudoscientific
approach that intrigued him. As Wilde explained,