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68 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
Balzac’s aim…was to do for humanity what [naturalists] had done for
animal creation. As the naturalist studied lions and tigers, so [he] studied
men and women. …He was, in a word, a marvellous combination of
artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.
(1886a: 29).
Balzac’s method was articulated in his 1830 essay Traité de la vie élégante,
where he attempted a scientific approach to self-representation. “Scrutinizing the
signs transmitted by different kinds of character, profession, habits, and style of
life, he formulate[d] the ‘laws’ which govern…the body” (Stanton 154). Balzac
identified four signifying practices for an organized system of self-representation
—posture, gesture, costume, and speech—“by which every individual can be
decoded and classified” (Stanton 155). Through careful observation and reading
of bodily inscriptions, Balzac claimed that he could tell anyone exactly who (and
what) they were, based upon a belief in a direct correlation between interior
essence and exterior signification (Stanton 155). But more importantly, he
believed that these codes of signification, if subjected to a self-reflexive and
individual practice, would render one a living work of art (Stanton 155). The
logic behind this conception was both simple and radical: if a specific interiority
produced a single exterior signification, then the reverse would also be true—a
single exteriority would produce a corresponding interiority—permitting one to
compose the self as one composed a painting.
The relationship between Wilde’s dandyism and the writings of Balzac,
however, is indirect. I suggest that Wilde was drawn to Balzac’s theory of
dandyism because it had such uncanny resonance with another formal system of
signifying practices to which he was introduced just months before while in
America. This was the practice of Delsarte taught him by Steele Mackaye in the
fall of 1882 (Ellmann 1988:208). Indeed, Wilde was so moved by Mackaye—
they became close friends and collaborators—that he remained in the United
States several months longer than originally planned. And though it might be
claimed that Wilde remained in America solely as a means to career advancement
(Mackaye was to produce Wilde’s plays in the U.S.), the influence of Delsarte in
the formation of Wilde’s homoerotic strategies has never been taken into
account.
Delsarte, named after its founder François Delsarte, was initially a system of
voice training used by actors and public speakers in France from 1839 to 1871,
and introduced to America in the 1870s by Delsarte’s only American student,
Steele Mackaye. 2 Working intensively with Delsarte during the last years of the
French master’s life, Mackaye was as much a collaborator and a partner as he
was a student. With François Delsarte’s approval, Mackaye introduced physical
movement into the system, including a technical science of signifying gestures
and postures. The system of training which Mackaye brought back to America—
by this time it was more Mackaye’s than Delsarte’s—became a fashion craze in
America where it flourished into the early twentieth century under various gurus.