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UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 69
By the time Wilde began his studies in 1882, Mackaye was one of the foremost
acting teachers in New York whose Delsarte school had dominated the craft for
several years prior.
Despite Mackaye’s impressive changes to the Delsarte system through the
addition of gesture and pose, it was, and would remain, based on François
Delsarte’s philosophy of art and life. It is this philosophy, combined with
Mackaye’s physical practice, that may have been responsible for Wilde’s turn to
Balzacian dandyism and his subsequent development of homoerotic
representational strategies.
Delsarte was a semiotician whose science, like Balzac’s, consisted of the
classification and decoding of bodily inscriptions based on observa-. tions of
human conduct in order to determine the causal correspondence between exterior
signification and essential interiority. Like Balzac, he believed that although the
relationship between exteriority and interiority was absolute, total, and universal,
it was also a relationship in which the two terms could act as either cause or
effect. In a radical break with the epistemology of bourgeois liberalism (which.
restricted interiority to cause and exteriority to exclusive effect), both Balzac and
Delsarte believed that a self-reflexive exterior signification could control and
produce interior states through composition of gesture, posture, and voice
(Stebbins 1899:12).
Delsarte taught that art-making involved the construction of an exterior
surface (the art object) that would signify the artist’s interiority. In other words,
the purpose of art was the display of the artist’s interiority (Stebbins 1902:26–
27). Accordingly, one could create true art through a studied composition of
exterior bodily signifying codes whose purpose, like a painting or sculpture, was
to communicate the artist’s inner state. In this way, one could—based upon a
self-aware semiotic manipulation—collapse the distinctions between subject and
object thus transforming oneself into a living work of art. Delsarte’s articulation
of this operation consisted of two parts. First, there was the construction of a sign
consisting of an exterior display (art object) that signified a displaced interiority
(the artist). Second, composing oneself as a work of art was the result of “the
application, knowingly appropriated, of the sign to the thing,” that is, the
appropriation of the sign to the signifier accomplished by collapsing the signifier
and signified so that the entire sign could be played out on the surfaces (Stebbins
1902:65). The Delsarte system, then, was a systematic approach to body art
composition which provided the praxis for a theory shared in common with
Balzacian dandyism.
Wilde had just completed his American lecture tour during which he was
represented as a master aesthete, the apostle of the art for art’s sake movement.
Running headlong into Mackaye and the Delsarte system immediately following
the tour had an enormous impact upon him. For while Wilde preached
aestheticism and advocated turning one’s life into art, Delsarte offered a detailed
practice for accomplishing that very goal. In fact, Delsarte saw his system as
offering a praxis for the aesthetic movement (Stebbins 1902:34–35, 414–424).