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70 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP Though Delsarte agreed with the goals of the art for art’s sake crowd, he thought that their aestheticism was an empty promise until it could be embodied through specific technique. Wilde, who fancied himself the leading aesthete of his day, must have had an enlightening experience with Mackaye upon learning that— according to Delsarte—he was nothing but a rank amateur who lacked the craft necessary to fulfill his aesthetic agenda, for it was only a matter of weeks after his departure from Mackaye and America that he dropped his aesthetic pose and adopted Balzac’s version of dandyism. The relationship of Balzac to Delsarte was certainly recognized by the Delsartists themselves. Mackaye’s student Genevieve Stebbins pointed out that Balzac had formulated identical ideas just a decade before Delsarte appeared on the scene (1899:13). The major difference between the two systems was in the delineation of signifying codes. Delsarte, who based his theories upon the notion of the trinity, restrictively theorized all phenomena in terms of the number three. Thus he identified three signifying codes—speech, gesture, and posture. Balzac, on the other hand, had an additional fourth code—costume—which, when added to the Delsarte trinitarian system, offered Wilde the opportunity to continue his notorious self-promotion (Gagnier 78). Whereas Delsarte offered a technique for turning oneself into a living work of art, it was a private and meditative practice. By adopting Balzacian dandyism, Wilde could explore this process while simultaneously advertising the attempts by publicly signifying his progress through costume display. The real value of the Delsarte practices for Wilde was that exteriority, while it could reflect an already posited interiority, could also help create a completely new interiority, a new self, and a new identity. Reading from Genevieve Stebbins’s notes, sign appropriation resulted in “placing before us the signification of exterior[ity]… enabl[ing] us to outwardly express that which is… within” (1888:11). In other words, both the signifier and the signified were located on the surfaces of the body, and interiority existed only as a potential that required an exterior display in order to be activated and read (Stebbins 1902:26– 27). This was, in effect, a recognition of the constructedness of social identity. Wilde’s early experiments with dandyism from 1883 to 1885 can be read, then, as an exploration of identity formulation through a signifying practice that was identifiably Delsartean. Wilde’s attempt to formulate a homosexual social identity through dandyism during the first years after his return from America was a project doomed to failure, though. His Delsartean dandy was a masturbatory fantasy that had not taken into account how homosexuality was figured in Victorian culture. There was as yet no cultural conception of a homosexual social identity, only of sodomy, a recognition of a specific sexual activity in which men could engage, but which did not yet grant a discrete social identity to the performers. Because homosexuality was conceptually organized around a partnered act, its desire could only be conceived as relational, publicly expressed in a shared subject position. Without an already established discourse of homosexual social identity
to invoke a corresponding “body,” that is, without a unified cultural sign of homosexuality to display on the surfaces, Wilde’s dandyism was read only as a transgressive reinscription of the bourgeois male. The most he could accomplish was to appear as Not-Masculine, as Other to appropriate male behavior. By appropriating the signs of the bourgeois male, even the dandy’s effeminacy was read simply as a disinterest in sex, not even as homoerotic. As Regenia Gagnier put it, Wilde succeeded only in effecting a “crisis of the male” (51), and still lacked the language with which to think a homosexual identity. If he was to institute the signification of a new identity based on the Delsarte method of the appropriation of the sign, he needed first to construct a sign of homoerotic desire that could be appropriated to the surfaces of his body. Because the conceptualization of homosexuality was dependent on interaction with another, this could only be realized by inscribing the object of desire, that is, by establishing his own identity on the surfaces of the body of the sexual partner. Beginning in 1886, one can trace the development of Wilde’s efforts to formulate (at least on paper) a strategy capable of constructing a sign of identity by objectifying homoerotic desire and situating it on the surfaces of the body of the sexual partner conceived as an art object. Constructing a sign by fixing, stabilizing, and giving permanence to desire was a necessary first step in order to prepare for the appropriation of the sign that would render him as a living work of art while simultaneously bestowing a homosexual identity. The way in which this was accomplished was through a concept of “posing,” which in the Delsarte system represented the highest form of art because it collapsed the distinctions between subject and object (Stebbins 1902:444–461). By setting up the partner as posed object and himself as subject, Wilde was attempting to establish a sign whose appropriation would play out both the desiring and the desired on the surfaces of his own body thus freeing him from dependence on the relational sodomitical identity capable of expressing homoeroticism only. If successful, Wilde would be able to produce a homosexual social identity that could exist independently of engaged sexual acts. At the time though, Wilde had no idea of what the outcome of his experiments would be. Rather, it was an exploration of the unknown in search of an identity that could signify his growing awareness of difference. THE PROFESSOR OF POSING UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 71 Many critics have seen Wilde’s 1889 short story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” as his first articulation of homosexuality (W. Cohen 1989:219). But by working with the concept of “posing,” I suggest that Wilde’s textual homoerotics can be found emerging at an earlier date. In “The Relation of Dress to Art,” a review of James Whistler from 1886, Wilde identifies the locus for his future endeavors and begins to formulate the strategy which underwrites “Mr. W.H.”: the signifying pose. While the dandy was viewed as the exemplar of the Decadence (Moers 287–314), Wilde, in this review, seems to have resituated his own
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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First published 1994 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of plates vi List of
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11 Richard Halverson as Lady Enid a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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2 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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1 PERFORMING “AKIMBO” Queer pri
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Page 54 and 55: Plate 1 Joan Jett Blakk, “The May
Page 56 and 57: Plate 3 Prince Rupert, from a broad
Page 58 and 59: Plate 5 Actor Robert Wilks, from Co
Page 60 and 61: Plate 7 Antinous and Dancing Master
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Page 130 and 131: 112 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION pieces th
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120 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION great tra
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122 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION In her pr
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124 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Dynes emp
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126 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Case, Sue
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Plate 9 Claire Moed as Sir Oliver S
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Plate 11 Richard Halverson as Lady
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Plate 14 Liberace in long cape with
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Plate 16 Liberace was Count Dracula
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 15
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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